All About Evie

by Cathy Lamb

  Another scar is on his lip. That one was from riding his bike double with his brother Manuel. They crashed.

  A scar on his neck is from a skateboarding accident. He and Christof were skateboarding off a dirt cliff. He took a bullet in his leg in Iraq, and when he’s tired he limps a little. He has shrapnel embedded in his left forearm, so he’s had a tattoo painted over it with the name of their family’s farm Campos de Oro, Golden Fields, to turn “bullet fragments into something better.”

  He has had some posttraumatic stress issues, he’d told me, from the war. He walks late at night on the island to get rid of the memories he wants to get rid of. He lost his best friend in Iraq, which was devastating. He stopped drinking entirely five years ago because after he returned from Iraq he drank too much because of flashbacks and nightmares and general anxiety from the war. His family, a few war buddies, and three of his best friends intervened.

  “I was defensive, angry, told them all to go to hell. Except,” he said, “my mother. I would never tell my mother to go to hell. But they were right. I was drinking too much. So I stopped. And I finally started dealing with what I saw, what I did, what I was ordered to do, in combat in Iraq.”

  Marco smiled down at me, my hand on Virginia Alpaca, and that smile remelted the chocolate bars I’d accidentally eaten.

  “So, Evie,” he said. “I’ll get Virginia Alpaca all fixed up and she’ll feel better. Can you leave her overnight? I’ll keep an eye on her, make sure she’s eating well, and walking some. If you want to come back later tonight to check on her, that’s fine, too.”

  “Thanks, Marco.”

  “Sure. If you want dinner, let me know. I’ll barbeque steaks.” He smiled. He is too gorgeous.

  Oh, good Lord, Martha and Mary, and Mother of Jesus. The good Lord should not make men who look like Marco. It’s almost sinful, all this rampaging lust I feel. He’s like the apple in Eve’s garden. I want to bite him. Not hard, of course. A bite-kiss sort of thing. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can. I have, uh, I can’t have steaks. But I’ll come by and check on her.”

  I saw the disappointment in his eyes, like a flash, but he covered it up with another wide and friendly smile. “Sounds good. She’ll be ready tomorrow afternoon to head on home.”

  “Thanks, Marco.”

  “Anytime.”

  * * *

  I felt his eyes on me as I said goodbye to Virginia Alpaca, gave her a hug, and told her to be good.

  Bye, Marco. You are the best man I have ever met.

  When I climbed in my truck, my eyes caught my face in the rearview mirror. Oh, how embarrassing! I had chocolate in the corners of my mouth! I slapped my hands over my blushing face and dropped my face to my steering wheel. I accidentally hit the horn, and it blared through the property. I popped back up. More embarrassment! Marco waved at me. I waved back as if everything was perfectly fine. I turned on the truck, waved again, and pushed my foot on the accelerator, only for some reason I zipped backwards in reverse. I slammed on the brakes, put the truck in the right gear, drove forward, and pretended yet again that I hadn’t done anything ridiculous.

  I waved again. Marco waved back.

  Oh, woe is me, I am a lovesick fool.

  * * *

  I did not go back and check on Virginia Alpaca that night. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the courage, and I knew she would be fine with Marco. I was not fine, but she would be fine.

  That deep well of sadness overwhelmed me again. Hello, darkness. I will fight you off as I have fought you off a thousand times before. I wiped the tears off my cheeks and ate a chocolate bonbon.

  * * *

  I don’t go into the greenhouse often.

  Between my work at the bookstore and the work I do for my mother and aunts, helping them cut the outside flowers for their floral business, and taking care of all my animals, I don’t have a lot of time.

  But they are in the greenhouse often.

  More lately, it seems, even though most of the flowers they’re using at the shop are growing outside on our property, the colors a petal-filled rainbow floating on island wind. But they’re inviting friends over to see the greenhouse, too. They wander in and out, laughing and chatting.

  They must have some pretty new plants growing in there. Maybe new orchids?

  * * *

  I live in the “carriage house,” which is a short distance from my mother and aunts’ home. It was never a carriage house, but that’s what we call it because we like how it sounds. It used to be the groundskeeper’s cottage when my mother and aunts were young. It’s near our small beach, to the right of the greenhouse, and to the left of our red barn. I planted roses all around the perimeter, heavy on light purple, yellows, and reds. I also have a trellis over my front porch, where a pink climbing rose practically drips when it’s in bloom.

  It’s a light blue jewel that had been vacant for years when I moved in. There’s about 600 square feet, with a sleeping loft above the main area, accessible by stairs. There used to be a ladder there, but my animals can’t climb ladders, hence the stairs. The dogs and cats sleep with me, so that would be a problem.

  When I moved in seven years ago, after a van trip around the country to different national parks, and camping in the woods and at the beach, alone, I was broken. I don’t like the words “nervous breakdown.” It sounds old-fashioned. It sounds like once you have a breakdown, that’s it. You’re done. You’ve fallen apart. You’re broken permanently.

  I was hoping I wasn’t broken permanently, but I was a wreck, that is not in dispute. After college, where I majored in English and business because I like both, I went to work for a major book chain. I had worked for four years in the university’s bookstore while I was going to school, so I knew a lot about marketing, working with customers, and managing people. First I worked as a clerk at the chain, then assistant manager, then manager, and I was up in corporate in three years. I even wrote a column about books for them, which was in all of their newsletters, because of my book obsession.

  I lived in a studio in Seattle, a small space with a view of Puget Sound and the ferries, with Sundance. I’ve had Sundance since I was twenty. I was volunteering at an animal shelter and fell in love with that dog. He was missing a front leg because someone thought it would be a good idea to shoot it off. He could hardly lift his head, he was so beaten down. He was slow and scared and shook all the time. He was skinny and hobbling, his ribs sticking out.

  Sundance wanted to disappear at first. He would sit in a corner of the shelter curled up tight, whimpering. But slowly, he let me pet him. Then he let me hug him for small amounts of time, and finally he trusted me and we became best human/animal friends. I bought him a pink blankie and a stuffed green lizard, and he loved both of them.

  When I wasn’t at work, we were walking at the park, hiking, going on drives to the country, and camping. Each weekend I had to get out of town, away from the premonitions about people around me that would suddenly zing in.

  I was torn between being sane and trying to save people, warn people about something I saw in their future that was bad, and make decisions on whether I should try to save them and how to warn them. It was the usual chaos. As I often felt the need to warn strangers when I had a premonition about them, I had many people treat me as one would expect when a stranger walks up and warns you of an upcoming disaster: “Get away from me, you freak. Are you insane? That’s a horrible thing to say to my wife/father/brother.”

  I was also still dealing with a grief from years ago that was pulling me down, threatening to drown me, and horror, images set in sand and flames that I couldn’t get out of my mind. Alongside the grief was rage, too.

  One day, on a hike in the mountains, standing on a cliff and looking down, down, down into a valley, Sundance at my side, I had yet another urge to jump. To simply end the mental torture.

  That was not the first time I wanted to die by jumping. There were two other times in my life that I seriously wanted to die and could no l
onger handle what was going on in my own head. It was a hopeless, black, unending desperation. It happened once as a teenager, once in college when I was twenty-one, and at that moment.

  I thought about jumping off various things: Bridges. Buildings. A pier. A mountain. Why a death by jumping? I had no idea. The suicidal thoughts were stuck in my head, on a circle, repetitive and taunting. They scared me, they soothed me. I would rather be scared by thoughts of suicide than soothed by thoughts of suicide.

  That day, on the cliff, I felt soothed by it. I could leave all the stress and anger and grief and guilt behind.

  As if sensing what I was going to do, Sundance started pulling at the end of my shorts with his mouth. He growled and pulled and barked and growled, pulled, and barked. I looked down at that dog and thought, I cannot leave Sundance. It’ll break his heart. I stepped away from the edge.

  I walked into work at the corporate office of the chain bookstore the next day and quit. I bought an old but well-maintained VW van with a table in the back and a roof that poofed up so you could sleep in it. I sold everything except for my warm, comfortable clothes and all my camping and hiking gear and started driving. I mailed my book collection to Rose Bloom Cottage.

  Luckily, it was spring when I started. I went to national parks but hiked and backpacked away from the crowds. I went to quiet campgrounds. I went to the beach. Mountains. Rivers. Lakes. I slept in the van. I woke up when the sun rose, hiked and read books, and went to bed after staring at a campfire.

  I met Butch and Cassidy when they limped up to me at a campground by the Deschutes River in Oregon. They were in terrible shape. Starving. Hurt. Pathetic. They had been abused; there were marks and cuts all over their bodies, their frayed leather collars choking them. When I left the Deschutes River for the Wallowa Mountains, they happily climbed in the van with Sundance and me, their wounds healing, their diseases healing.

  Six months and three thousand miles later, when I was done camping, and could think again, and did not want to jump off cliffs, when the black fog of desperate depression lifted, I asked my mother and aunts if I could live in the carriage house.

  Of course they said yes, but my mother wanted me to live with them in Rose Bloom Cottage. “I’ve missed you. We can make hats together every night and read books and help your aunt Camellia make her lotions and potions in the basement and go on photography expeditions with Aunt Iris so she can take her odd but lovely flower photos. Do you think some of her flower photos look phallic? I do. Do you think some of her flowers look, well, vagina-like? I do.”

  My aunt Camellia said, “Let me first light vanilla candles inside the carriage house and pray and use a generous amount of lavender to invite eternal peace to come calling, then the home and I can welcome you with pure vibes,” and my aunt Iris said, “I’ll put wine in the fridge, don’t worry. And a bottle of scotch. Welcome home.”

  I lived in Rose Bloom Cottage for about a week, and mostly I slept on the new king-sized bed my aunts and mother bought me. It is amazing what sleep can do and what a lack of sleep can do, too. Then I asked if I could remodel the carriage house. Of course they said yes, that they would pay for it, but I refused to let them, and we had a fight, and I was stubborn and so were they, and I finally told them I would rent another home on one of the islands if they didn’t stop arguing, and they sulkily gave in.

  For three days I hauled dirt and rock at Mr. and Mrs. King’s house, an eighty-year-old couple, with their fifty-year-old son, Artie, who was a contractor. In exchange Artie came over and knocked down two walls in the carriage house, taking out the bedroom so I would have an open living space. He raised the ceiling and put up two wood beams with some buddies so the ceiling wouldn’t fall in.

  I watched Neil Somo’s mother for five days, who has dementia and likes to wander around town in her nightgown, while he went to Seattle on business. Neil, who knew how to install wood floors, worked with me to put wood floors in my house. Neil is independently wealthy but quirky. There I was, laying wood with a millionaire.

  In exchange for white kitchen cabinets, ten years old but not “modern enough” for a wealthy woman on the island, I checked on her six cats twice a day for two weeks while she went to Paris. After Artie ripped out the carriage house’s battered old brown cabinets, he and I hung up the white ones in my kitchen.

  I painted all the walls and ceiling white with one of those paint sprayers, except one wall in my family room, where I glued white wallpaper with elegant pink roses because I love my roses.

  I paid for new windows and two sets of sliding glass doors, one on either side of the house, so I can watch the sunset and the sunrise as the house is up on a slight hill. I ordered breezy white curtains with tiny light yellow roses.

  I ripped out the brown trim around the windows and used a miter saw to make wide white trim. From the wood of an old barn on a friend’s property, I made a full wall of shelves, floor to ceiling, for my slight obsession with books.

  I found a front door with a half-moon cutout in an antique shop on the island and painted it red. I found three hanging lights made with dripping crystals at Marv Leopold’s estate sale, the fashion mogul who had a vacation home here and died in his bedroom in a frilly pink dress and one of my mother’s purple flowered hats with blue jays.

  I painted the new stairs to the loft/my bedroom white and the floorboards upstairs white. I went for a jean material to block out the light at night through the two windows. I bought a white comforter with embroidered red and purple roses and a bunch of pillows by Ellie Kozlovsky with roses painted in all colors.

  My mother and aunts hunted around in their attic and gave me an antique library card cabinet that I put next to the front door. I piled more books on top, and below it. It had been used in the town’s library at one time, and the cards to locate books were still in it, so it was my kind of furniture piece.

  They also gave me a blue weathered antique wardrobe their mother owned. She liked to curl up in it, shut the door, and sing. I added shelves to it and used it in the kitchen as a pantry. They also gave me a pew from a church that collapsed from age outside of town. They remembered their mother sitting at that church and humming rock songs while the minister spoke. Their father had to take her outside if she refused to quit.

  I placed the pew against one wall in my kitchen nook and piled more books under it for storage. I painted sawhorses dark blue and put a butcher block counter over the top for a table. I bought two leather couches from an estate sale when ninety-four-year-old Colonel Ralph Kalama died. They had that cool used look to them. From the rafters over the leather couches I hung three model airplanes that my father had made as a kid, and nailed up two of his fishing poles on either side of the shelves for my books. I hung one large crystal from Aunt Camellia above each window and the sliding glass doors. I could not miss out on possibly receiving a hot sex life from those crystals.

  Aunt Iris found me two wine barrels—“Wine makes life sweet,” she said—which I used as side tables by the leather couches, and I used an old wooden sea chest of my grandfather’s for the coffee table. The chest opened up so I could pour more books in.

  My mother gave me her favorite light blue vase. “To remind you to always have fresh flowers, dear. Bring beauty to your life, as it will not always come to you on its own.” As soon as the roses bloomed each year, they were in that vase. Light purple. Pink and yellow. White. Burgundy. Bright red. That vase was never empty. Roses brought peace, hope, and color to my life like no other flower.

  I hung six amazing hats on one wall that my mother and aunts had made me, and I hung family photos in the short hallway to my bathroom. There were photos of my mom and aunts in hats, photos of my parents on their wedding day, holding Jules and me as babies, and me on top of my dad’s shoulders. I bought a white clawfoot tub from an estate sale and created a bathroom/spa.

  I saved up, then drove down to central Oregon to buy a commissioned collage by Grenadine Scotch Wild. It was a painting of Rose Bloom C
ottage. I’d sent her fabric from my mother and aunts’ dresses and she made tiny pillows out of them for the porch swing. I sent her one of my dad’s ties and she made a sheet on a clothes line with it. I sent her a charm in the shape of a motorcycle for Jules and she used it as a door knocker. She added an abundance of roses, using faux petals. That painting has the place of honor in my kitchen nook.

  I repainted the exterior of the carriage house a light blue, the shutters black, and the trim white.

  It was a cottage by the bay, the water lapping against our beach.

  When I finally got myself and my house together, and could eat and breathe normally, I opened my bookstore with money that I had saved for years, as I am a naturally frugal person. My motto: If something bad can happen, it will. Hence: Save your money.

  Not a fearless way to live, but there it is.

  I saw the rent for the building on Chrysanthemum Way and knew I could not pay it. I offered half. The owner took it. He lived on the mainland and wasn’t too concerned about money. I painted the inside; rolled up yellow rose wallpaper; bought boxes of books; and set up the shelves, café, and cash register. I brought fresh roses in regularly to sit next to the cash register and in my office. I was happy there. I am happy there.

  It’s not that I’m scared to leave the island again. I’m scared of what will become of my brain if I do. This is my place of calm. It’s my place of sanity. It’s my home.

  I am an Island Hermit, and I will probably leave this place as dust on the wind.

  It’s not a bad way to go.

  * * *

  “Greetings, Evie. Let’s have ’em.”

  “Hello, Mr. Jamon.” I brought out four books from behind the counter at the bookstore. “I’ve chosen them especially for you.” We were busy today. Every time I have a sale and give a free cup of peppermint or chamomile tea away when customers purchase a book, we’re busy. Today the cake was peppermint mocha lava, advertised in the window, so we were pretty full.