All About Evie

by Cathy Lamb

  “I defended myself because he was going to rape me. That’s why his pants were down around his ankles.”

  “I believe you, Betsy,” Coralee said gently. She’d seen it all in the few years she’d been here. She couldn’t wait to get out and go to law school. She’d seen sick, dangerous inmates, and she’d seen sick, dangerous guards. “This will never happen to you again. I’m sorry.”

  Betsy bent her head, leaned against the shelves, and passed out, her head a mass of pain. Coralee and two other guards caught her and brought her to the infirmary, where for once she had a kind nurse and a kind doctor. They let her stay two extra days to rest.

  She was not sent to isolation.

  * * *

  Duke was fired from the jail by his uncle. Duke about lost his mind, he was so mad. He shoved everything off of his uncle’s desk before he left. He would immediately tell his mother and she would give his uncle a piece of her mind! Wouldn’t she?

  Life was so stupid unfair. Betsy caused him to get fired. She teased him. Flirted with him. She wanted him, and he fell for it. He hated Coralee, too. He would get back at her. He knew where Coralee lived. Coralee thought she was better than him. She was a woman. They could never be better than him. He would pay her a visit. He had paid many women “visits” over the years, starting in high school, when they rejected him.

  He went to the doctor because of his still-swollen groin. The doctor said there might be “permanent damage.” The doctor, a woman, did not seem to believe Duke’s story about how a woman inmate “went wild” on him. His eyes burned for two days, turned red, and his vision blurred. His head pounded where Betsy had kicked him, and his gut was all bruised up. It even hurt to drink beer.

  He would get his revenge on Betsy if she ever got out of jail, he thought, getting super drunk that night, then passing out on the patio of his apartment.

  Three days later, after hitting the deer, crushed against his steering wheel and unable to move or feel his legs, he remembered what Betsy had said.

  Duke never walked again. He never attacked anyone again. He was alone and bitter the rest of his life.

  Chapter 27

  Tilly Kandinsky

  Portland, Oregon

  1975–1985

  Tilly, Johnny’s younger sister, stopped speaking on the night her father was killed. She had been a frightened, quiet child ever since her mother left, cowering from her raging father, but that night she completely shut down.

  Tilly hid behind the couch during Johnny’s argument with her father, but she saw everything, she heard everything. She saw the knife, she saw the blood, she saw her father collapse. When the police tried to talk to her, she moaned and rocked back and forth and cried. She could not explain what happened, her eyes staring into the air at a faraway place.

  She buried the trauma, the murder, the screaming, the gush of blood.

  Tilly was sent into the foster care system, where she was almost catatonic for the first year. Eventually, lost in the system, she had the usual and expected horrific things happen to her: Abuse. Neglect. No love or care. Shipped from one house to another, one school to another, where she disappeared to other people and to herself. A few of her teachers tried to help, tried to get her to talk, but she wouldn’t. Mostly, though, she was ignored. Dismissed. Case workers were in and out who barely remembered her name. In fact, at one stretch she didn’t see a case worker for almost two years.

  She was put into a mental health institution because she was fourteen and still hardly talking, so she must be crazy. The mental health institution did more to harm her than help. Tilly roomed with psychotic teens. Dangerous teens. Suicidal or homicidal teens. And some who were like her: traumatized. Many were from foster care. Some were poor. Others were middle class or from prominent and wealthy families.

  Tilly rarely saw a psychiatrist, and when she did, all he did was stare at her chest. Another one hardly looked at her and spent ten minutes with her filling out paperwork and calling her mother about a bad date she’d had the night before. The man was such a jerk, the psychiatrist whined to mommy. Didn’t even pay for dinner!

  Finally, at sixteen, she was moved to a new foster care home. She was the only child. The couple was in their sixties, patient, and wanted to help kids. It was the first time she felt love since her mother and Johnny.

  Tilly also saw a therapist named Kate. Kate was compassionate, smart, and experienced with working with traumatized kids. She tried to get Tilly to open up. Once a week Tilly went to her appointment, and they played cards together. Eventually Tilly said yes or no, then spoke in short sentences. With the kind steadiness of her new foster parents behind her, she started to talk more. She started to remember what happened that night, bits and pieces sliding in and out of her mind, one vision after another.

  Tilly remembered her father yelling at Johnny and Johnny yelling back. They were fighting about her mother, who had left when she was five years old. There was something else she was trying to remember. It nagged at her brain. It was right there, almost there, a whisper, a hidden secret . . . something happened that night before her mother left . . . what had she seen? What did she know? What was trying to come through from the prickly shadows of her scared and damaged mind? It had something to do with her mother . . . something Johnny said.

  Her therapist told her that her memory was coming back and not to push it but to embrace it. To be brave. Tilly tried not to push it, but whatever it was scared her, like a threatening monster of hate. The monster was trying to tell her things that made her shake. Not only about the night her father died, but about a night that happened two years before that.

  Tilly eventually realized that she needed to remember everything for Johnny. For Betsy.

  So she allowed her memories to crawl back in, inch by inch, so they wouldn’t kill her, which was one more brave thing that Tilly Kandinsky had to do in a life filled with fear and other utterly terrifying events.

  Chapter 28

  I entertained myself with daydreams of Marco and me. Why did I do that to myself? It hurt. It made me feel lonely and lost and hopeless.

  I did it anyhow. I daydreamed of us dating and in bed and taking care of all our animals and reading on his deck as the sun slid down into the ocean and being in bed together and hiking around the island and going to the cool lake and hugging through the night in bed.

  I daydreamed when I worked, and rode Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and chased the goats who escaped again, and tossed a ball to Sundance, Butch, and Cassidy. I daydreamed about Marco when I was with my mother and aunts at their house and we were making hats.

  “Are you all right, dear?” my mother asked when we were at Rose Bloom Cottage on a warm evening, the ocean frothing at the edge of our property, a greeting of sorts, the clouds puffy. We were making hats for a fund-raiser for the community center. My mother had piled her white hat high with faux roses in pink, white, and red. It was definitely a Dr. Seuss kind of hat. She had strung red buttons together and wrapped them around the roses like a ribbon. At the top of the pile of roses she had placed a tiny red, sequined hat. “A hat on a hat,” she’d told me, smiling.

  “I believe that something is off with your spirit,” Aunt Camellia said. Her hat was the widest hat she’d ever made. It was burgundy, floppy, netting over the front. There was a magical garden all over it, complete with daisies, irises, and tulips, a willow tree, a small barn, and a tiny light blue house. “I have re-created our garden.”

  “Everything going well with the bookstore?” Aunt Iris asked. Her hat was blue felt, and simple, until she glued silver sequins all over the brim, then attached a giant two-foot-long peacock she’d bought online. “For some reason, peacocks remind me of how important correct money management is.”

  “I’m fine.”

  They glanced at each other, worrying.

  “Don’t worry,” I told them.

  “It’s what I do best,” my mother said. “Worry about you.”

  “She’s quite talen
ted at worrying about you,” Aunt Camellia said. “As you know, dear. It’s in her genes, she cannot remove it. It’s part of who she is, as your mother.”

  “It’s going to cause you to get an ulcer, Poppy,” Aunt Iris said. “You have to stop.”

  “Mothers worry,” my mother said. “We can’t stop.”

  “I love you three,” I said. My hat was something you would see a woman wearing to the Kentucky Derby. Red. Enormous brim. I was adding twenty purple ribbons to the back that would hang down about three feet. To the front I pinned felt flowers in yellow and white, with pink centers.

  “I love you, too, darling daughter,” my mother said. “You and your sister and my sisters.”

  “I love you, too, my fairy sprite,” Aunt Camellia said, attaching a plastic butterfly that wiggled on a spring.

  “I’ve always loved you,” Aunt Iris said, pressing down on the sequins. “No need to get mushy about it.”

  It was a sweet moment.

  Until a cloud came over my mother’s face, dark as a thundering night.

  * * *

  After school one day, when I was fourteen years old, I had a premonition. I hadn’t told my friend Emily I had premonitions because my parents said I shouldn’t tell anyone on the island. Jules was sworn to secrecy, too. They did know that sometimes I took action with the premonitions in order to prevent them from happening, and they helped me sometimes, too, to save someone, but we all tried to work as quietly and as anonymously as possible.

  My father, being in the military, was especially helpful on our “reconnaissance missions,” or our “spy sorties,” or our “Victorious Adventures.” He named them so that I wouldn’t be so afraid of what I’d seen and would view helping people as an adventure, not a scary burden.

  I had a premonition about Emily’s mother, Patsy. I saw her with a man I didn’t recognize. He was tall with a reddish beard. In my premonition, they had a terrible fight and he shook her, then pushed her, and her head hit the wood floors in her kitchen with a bounce. The blood spilled into a dark puddle, and she died.

  The boyfriend stood over her, panting, furious, then scared. He started to shake her, calling her name, begging her to “Wake up, Patsy! Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Patsy!” He started to cry.

  I was petrified. Sure enough, Emily told me that her mother had started dating a man she didn’t like. I met the man, who had a reddish beard, and I didn’t like him, either. I told my parents my premonition, and I swear their faces went white.

  They invited Emily; Patsy; and the boyfriend, Gavin, over for dinner at Rose Bloom Cottage. After they left, my parents talked and I eavesdropped.

  “I can see it, Poppy,” my father said to my mother when they thought I was in my bedroom. “He’s controlling. He’s too intense. He watches Patsy all the time. In the military we get rid of that kind of guy.”

  “I didn’t like him at all,” my mother said. “There’s a simmering anger there. He’s so possessive and suspicious.”

  My parents sat down to decide what to do. Both of them soon told Patsy, gently, that they didn’t like Gavin, didn’t trust him, were concerned. She was offended and hurt and did not break up with him.

  So that strategy didn’t work.

  Then, when Patsy had a bruise on her face, my mother called the police chief, who arrested Gavin. But Patsy didn’t want to press charges, she said she fell against her car, and she let Gavin back in the house.

  So that didn’t work, either.

  My father went to talk to Gavin, who used to work in construction but now seemed to laze about their house, now and then doing odd jobs around the island. He told Gavin he knew he was beating Patsy and it had to stop. He told Gavin he would regret hurting Patsy. Gavin was scared of my father, who was tall and had a steely gaze, but it didn’t stop him.

  The bruises kept coming.

  My father bought Patsy a gun. They later learned that Gavin found it, though Patsy had hidden it in the back of her underwear drawer, which showed that Gavin was going through her things. Gavin was “hellfire furious at you,” she told my father, weeping. “He says he’s going to beat you up.”

  My father laughed.

  Finally, desperate, I told Patsy what I had seen for her future when I was at her house after school playing warrior princesses with Emily, even though my parents told me I should never tell anyone on the island about my premonitions.

  “Miss Patsy,” I said in a whisper, even though Gavin wasn’t home, “Gavin is going to kill you. You’re going to get in a fight and he’s going to push you hard and you’re going to crack your head open on your kitchen floor and die.”

  She looked alarmed, shocked, then she said, “Stop it, Evie. You’re like your parents. I get it. You don’t like Gavin. But I love him, he loves me. He’s got a temper, but he can be kind and he treats me like a princess. I can change him. Love can change him. He’ll change, you’ll see. He had a hard childhood.” She knitted her hands together. The hands that made such unique, colorful art. Her pottery sold right off the shelves at Island Pottery, my mother told me, “as soon as she can make it, it’s gone. Patsy has such talent.”

  “You aren’t a princess,” I whispered to Patsy, so scared. “He’s going to kill you unless you tell him to get out of your house, and then Emily is not going to have a mom.”

  “I can’t believe you’re talking like this, Evie. Like you can see the future when you can’t.”

  Patsy looked at me with fear, her eyes blinking rapidly. She didn’t believe what I was saying, for the most part, but inside she knew what I was saying could be true. It could happen. Gavin was violent. Patsy was young. She’d had Emily when she was nineteen, and she was still naively hopeful, blaming herself. “I provoke him. I make him angry. But we make up. He doesn’t hit me very hard and he’s always sorry. Plus, this”—she waved at the bruise on her face—“doesn’t happen often.”

  “It happens a lot, Mom,” Emily said. “He hits you and hurts you and you cry. You think I don’t hear you crying, but I do. It’s scary. He’s scary.” Emily burst into tears.

  Patsy opened and shut her mouth.

  “I hear it when you two are in your bedroom. I can hear you crying when he’s saying bad words to you. That’s why I pound on the door. To make him stop. I don’t like him, Mom. I don’t want him here.”

  Patsy was shocked, but defeated, too, and infinitely sad. Gavin was a master manipulator, and Patsy had been alone and lonely and vulnerable for a long time. Sometimes he could be endearing, engaging, charismatic, and sensitive. Gavin had money. He bought her new clothes. They were conservative clothes, high necked because he said he didn’t like Patsy “looking like a sexy, dumb hippy” in her island clothes, but Patsy wore them anyhow. She went from embroidered, flowing, modern clothes, with necklaces and tight jeans, to high-necked sweaters in gray and white.

  But she had a man! She had a boyfriend! Gavin would provide. He’d already told her that he would put Emily through college. She was not able to see the facts, though: The man hardly worked. How could he put anyone through college?

  “How do you know he’s going to kill her?” Emily asked me, her voice weak and scared. “How?”

  “Sometimes I can see the future.” I whispered the words, not wanting to tell my secret, but I had to tell them because Patsy was so nice and I didn’t want Emily to have no mother. “But don’t tell anyone. Please. It’s a secret.”

  “No one can see the future,” Patsy said, but her voice wavered. “Don’t lie, Evie. That’s wrong. I’m going to talk to your mother about this.”

  “Go ahead. She already knows. That’s why my parents keep trying to get you to break up with Gavin.” Her face went white. “Miss Patsy, he’s going to kill you. You have to break up with him. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You can come and live with us until the chief can get rid of him and get him off the island. My dad is in the army and he has guns.”

  But Patsy wasn’t ready to kick Gavin out. She loved him! He was always so so
rry after he lost his temper. He was getting better.

  “Leave him,” my father told her.

  “Leave him,” my mother told her. “Come and live with us. Let my husband handle Gavin.”

  I remembered what Patsy was wearing in my premonition when she was killed, and every day after school when she picked Emily up, I looked at her clothes. Nope. She wasn’t wearing the brown sweater, beige slacks, and a pumpkin scarf. I even told Emily, “When your mom is wearing the brown sweater and beige slacks and her scarf with pumpkins on it, bring her to our house. Hide her. That’s the day she’s going to get killed.”

  “Okay, Evie.” She took a deep breath. “I’m scared.”

  The school’s Halloween dance was coming up, and Emily and I and Jules and her friend Sunflower were going to be characters from The Wizard of Oz. My mom made our costumes. I was the wicked witch, Jules was the straw man, Sunflower was the good witch, and Emily was Dorothy.

  We were all so excited that when I saw Miss Patsy in the car waiting to pick up Emily after school, I forgot to check her clothes. So did Emily. Emily and I decided that she should come to my house right after school. Her mom said yes, and we ran off while Patsy drove off to her bloody death, her life spilling out of her on her kitchen floor.

  If I hadn’t been so excited about Halloween, I would have noticed what Patsy was wearing. I would have told my parents, and they would have helped me figure out what to do. Maybe they would have raced to get Patsy, or invented an errand, or my dad would have taken Gavin off for a beer or down to our boat.

  We could have prevented it.

  But I was young and having fun, and I forgot, and Emily, my best friend, and her mother, Miss Patsy, a beautiful young woman, who was trapped, paid the price.

  * * *

  “I’m coming over to the island soon!” Jules said. “I’m packing up all my wedding stuff in the truck. I’ve been painting motorcycles night and day because these orders keep coming in, and I’m almost done. Last night I painted a mermaid. The owner wanted her to have purple hair. So pretty. Anyhow, I’m going to take time off to relax before the wedding and the honeymoon because we’ll be in bed all the time, and I don’t want to be sleepy!”