“You’re not exactly an open book,” he said.
Touché.
“Okay, I’ll make a deal with you,” Phoebe said. “You start letting me in and I’ll do the same. Shit, I’ll even start.” Her mind went right to the possibility of her being pregnant, then she jerked it away, let it wander, grasping for something else, some big reveal that would help build a bridge between them because a pregnancy might only tear them apart.
“Okay,” she said, latching on to the next best thing. “You’re always asking about my mom, and the truth is, I haven’t exactly been all that honest. My mom was—well, she was kind of a drunk. Not a well-dressed, martini-drinking socialite kind of drunk, but a drooling, stinking, wake-up-in-your-own-puke kind of drunk. She was a terrible mother. She lied all the time, said horrible things to me, messed with my head. Once I graduated from high school, I got the hell out of there. Didn’t go back for anything. Not even the one time she asked me to. Right before she died. She begged me. Said all kinds of crazy shit, but I wouldn’t go.”
Sam was silent a minute.
“Your mom is perfect, Sam. I just look at her and know you came from someplace good. I was scared that if you knew the truth, if you actually knew the kind of person my mom was, the kind of person I was around her, you’d see me differently. I mean, we’re talking about a woman who was such a pathetic drunk that she drowned in her own bathtub with all her clothes on. Shit, they were even on inside out. She couldn’t even get that part right.”
Phoebe’s chin quivered. She shut her eyes tight, thinking about the details she’d left out: all the weird stuff her mother had in the tub with her—kitchen knives, a cast-iron frying pan, nail clippers, a box of bolts and washers. How the landlord had to break down the door when the water from the overflowing tub began dripping into the apartment below. He found her face-down in the tub, the drain plug in, shower running full blast.
Sam reached out to put his hand on her arm. “Phoebe, I’m so sorry.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want your sympathy or your pity. That’s why I don’t tell people this shit. It is what it is, Sam. Can’t change where you came from, right? Just got to make the best of where you are.”
Sam nodded. “I would never think of you differently,” he said. “No matter what you told me.”
What if I told him about the shadow man? Phoebe wondered. What would he think of me then?
“So now it’s your turn,” she said. “Tell me about that summer. About you and Evie.”
He nodded and looked forward again. “Everything changed after Lisa disappeared,” he said. “And before. That summer. My mom and Hazel had a big fight. Hazel was taking care of my dad. He’d had this . . . nervous breakdown, I guess, when we were all away in Cape Cod. Anyway, we got back and he’d overdosed. We called 911 and he got his stomach pumped and was okay. Sort of. He wasn’t talking or . . . acting normally, but he was alive.” Sam bit his lower lip and took in a breath before continuing. “When he got out of the hospital, we brought him home and Hazel was looking after him—she was a nurse, so it made sense. It’s not like she didn’t know he was at risk for suicide—I mean, he’d tried before, right? His medicine was supposed to be locked up. It was always locked up. But somehow, one night, just before Lisa disappeared, it wasn’t. And he found it and took everything there. He didn’t pull through. My mom blamed Hazel.”
“Did you?”
Phoebe had rarely talked about her mother, and Sam was the same way with his dad. Phoebe knew almost nothing about David Nazzaro, and the little bits she had gleaned came from Sam’s mother, not from Sam. She knew that Sam’s dad was a potter and that he’d struggled with bipolar disorder for years. She also knew that young Sam worshipped his dad and would spend hours in his workshop, just watching his father work, studying him really. “I would catch Sammy looking at his dad sometimes and think, ‘There he goes again, trying to solve the riddle of Dave,’ ” Phyllis had told her.
“Nah,” Sam said. “I didn’t see it that way. But we didn’t see much of Hazel and Evie after that. I guess I should have been sad, but I wasn’t really. Evie betrayed Lisa big time. She told people about the fairies. Shit, she even showed Lisa’s fairy book to all the neighborhood kids. I guess that was the last straw. Lisa stopped speaking to her. I used to think that if Evie hadn’t done that, then maybe Lisa wouldn’t have gone off to the woods that night. She and Lisa were so close. It was like she lost her biggest ally. And her dad had just taken a shitload of pills and it was pretty obvious he wasn’t going to survive. Who wouldn’t want to leave all that behind?
“You know what I used to think?” Sam asked, white-knuckling the steering wheel, digging into it with his thumbnails. “That Lisa had it easy. She got to be the one to disappear. She didn’t have to say good-bye to Dad or go to the funeral or deal with things after. She got to just slip away, and I was jealous. That’s totally fucked up, right?” He looked over at Phoebe, then quickly back at the road. She reached over and stroked his arm.
“No,” she said. “Not at all. I would have felt the exact same way.”
The address Hazel had given Sam was a basement apartment on Loomis Street, not far from the university. There was a teetering stack of pizza boxes outside the door that led down the stairs.
“This is the place?” Phoebe asked, thinking maybe they’d found a frat house. She remembered the tattoo on Elliot’s leg—not a Greek letter but the symbol of Teilo.
“Are you sure?” Sam had asked when she told him about the tattoo.
Phoebe nodded. “Positive.”
Whatever was going on, Evie and this guy Elliot were deeply involved.
“This is the place,” Sam said, ringing the bell.
They hadn’t discussed what they’d do when they found Evie, which suddenly seemed like bad planning. Shouldn’t they have rehearsed some lines? Decided on a good-cop bad-cop kind of interrogation technique to break her down, get her to tell them what the hell was going on?
They heard someone coming up the steps, then the curtain in the windowed door was pulled aside and a gaunt-faced woman with bruised-looking circles under her eyes glared out at them. Her shoulder-length dark hair was coming out of its loose ponytail, the bangs falling across her face.
“What do you want?” she shouted through the door. Her lips were so raw and chapped that they were bleeding.
“I’m looking for Evie,” Sam shouted back. “I’m her cousin, Sam.”
The woman squinted at them, chewed on a fingernail a minute, considering, then opened the door. She turned her back and headed down the poorly lit stairway before they could say anything more. Sam shrugged at Phoebe and they went in. At the bottom of the stairs, they followed the pale ghost of a woman through another door, which brought them into a living room.
The apartment they found themselves in was small and dark and smelled of mildew and body odor. There were a few narrow rectangular windows that would have given a street-level view, had you been able to look out. They were covered in heavy red cloth that had been stapled over.
The furniture was beat up, the rug stained and worn through in places. There was another stack of pizza boxes by the lower door. Along the ceiling of the living room ran a heavy white PVC drainpipe. Someone in an upstairs apartment flushed a toilet, and water ran through the pipe over their heads. Sam looked up nervously.
“I hope it never leaks,” he said.
The woman smiled and sat down in a threadbare upholstered chair. She was average height, underweight in a drug-addict or terminally-ill-person kind of way. She wore a tight-fitting white tank top that accentuated her protruding collarbones and a pair of ripped and faded jeans. Her feet were bare, the nails painted with sparkly blue polish. Around her neck was a chain that looked like something you’d get at a hardware store for pulling a light on with. Dangling from it was an old silver skeleton key.
She had the dark
est eyes Phoebe had ever seen.
“So is Evie around?” asked Sam.
The skinny woman laughed, gnawed on an already short fingernail, spit the piece she bit off out on the carpet. “Don’t you recognize your own cousin, Sammy?” she asked with a little wheeze. “Did you get a phone call too? Is that why you’re here?” Her voice was husky, deeper than Phoebe would have imagined.
Sam just stared at the woman in the chair, blinking like he’d just come out of a dark place into a light one.
“You’re Evie?” Phoebe asked.
“Who were you expecting?” she asked.
“Can you prove it?” Phoebe asked.
“Bee . . .” said Sam.
Evie laughed a wheezing laugh that launched her into a coughing fit. Once she recovered, she reached into her back pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, blowing smoke out at them. Then she reached back again into her other pocket and produced a small cloth wallet this time. She shuffled through some cards until she came to a Vermont driver’s license, which she handed over to Sam. “My name is Eve Katherine O’Toole. Mother’s name is Hazel. The last time I saw you, Sammy, you were wearing your favorite shirt: the Superman T-shirt. You’d been in it for days, but no one minded. I remember keeping my eyes on that big red S out the rear windshield of the car, watching it, and you, get smaller and smaller as my mother drove me away.” She studied her ragged nails, then took another drag of her cigarette.
“It’s her,” Sam said. “This is Evie.”
“Then who was the other Evie?” asked Phoebe, snapping back from her own memory of Sam in his Superman shirt staring down at her from his bedroom window.
“Other Evie?” asked the woman in the chair. “Jesus Christ, like one of us isn’t enough.”
“She knew things too,” Phoebe said. “She knew about the charm bracelet.”
“Lisa’s charm bracelet?” this new, skinny Evie asked. “What about it?”
“Do you remember where she got it?” Sam asked.
“Of course I remember.” Evie looked disgusted. “She got it for her birthday early that summer. Your mom gave it to her when we were all in Cape Cod for Memorial Day weekend. It had her name on it. Then the next day, we went to this little tourist shack along the waterfront and she picked out the second charm, a starfish. You and I bought eye patches and plastic swords and spent the rest of the trip sword fighting and looking for treasure to bury. We even had secret pirate names. Mine was Captain Evil—I can’t remember yours. Something Sammy or Sammy Something. You weren’t terribly creative.”
Sam looked at Phoebe, nodded, and shrugged. “It’s her.”
“Okay,” Phoebe said. “So if this is Evie, then who the hell was the other woman? And what about Elliot?”
“Elliot?” Evie asked, looking down to crush out her half-finished cigarette.
“Do you know an Elliot?” Sam asked.
“Jesus. I did. I used to date a guy named Elliot. We were kind of engaged.”
This was more like it, thought Phoebe. A clue. Elliot was Evie’s ex—that was how the impostor knew so much about the real Evie. The pieces were falling into place.
“Do you know where we can find him?” Phoebe asked, suddenly feeling like a clever cop on one of those late-night TV shows she seldom watched. She even reached into her pocket to pull out her notebook so she could jot down any leads. ELLIOT, she wrote.
Evie looked away. “You can’t. He’s dead.”
Now, on top of missing girls, fairies, and changelings, they had ghosts to contend with. DEAD? she wrote.
“You’re sure?” Sam asked.
“Yes, I’m fucking sure,” Evie said. “I was driving the car when we had the accident.”
They drank Mountain Dew—Evie had cases of the stuff—and ordered pizza while Evie told them about her own life in bits and pieces. As she spoke, Phoebe looked from Evie to Sam, seeing one resemblance after another: the dark hair with slight widow’s peak, the delicate nose—even their lips were similar. There was no doubt they were related.
Evie told them she’d been an art major in college and was about to have her first big show in a gallery when she and Elliot were in an accident coming back from dinner one night.
“It was late. Maybe I’d had a little too much to drink. Elliot definitely had—that’s why I was driving. This deer jumped out into the middle of the road, right in our path, this big old buck—rack of horns as wide as my car. I didn’t have time to stop. I swerved, just instinct, you know? We hit a tree.”
She bit at a fingernail, working the chewed-off piece around in her mouth for a few seconds before spitting it out. “The passenger side of the car was crushed. The front seat was pushed all the way to the back. I looked over and all I could see were his feet. He had these new black Frye biker boots. But they were all covered in blood and little fragments of glass. I remember thinking how pissed he’d be, his new boots all messed up like that. It’s funny the things you think of.”
Evie closed her eyes. “Funny,” she mumbled, pushing her thumbs into the upper part of her eye sockets and rubbing hard.
When she opened her eyes, they were red and wet, looking nearly as raw as her lips and cuticles.
“Then I looked out the busted windshield and there, right next to us, was the damn deer. Watching. Totally unhurt. He took off into the woods, his white tail flying out behind him like this big old flag.
“I never did have that art opening. I stopped painting after that. Wound up in the hospital a few times, lost our loft because I couldn’t keep up with the rent, blah blah. I moved into this little palace.”
Now, she explained, she lived on disability checks and only left the apartment once a week, when she took a cab (always the same driver, she said) to therapy appointments.
“Agoraphobia,” she told them with a raspy sigh. “You read about it and think it’s made up—how scary can stepping out your front door really be?—but then little by little, you become the pathetic person in the story and you have to pay some kid to take your trash out and buy your toilet paper.”
Phoebe nodded understandingly, overcome with pity. She tried to imagine Evie cleaned up, a few pounds on her. She was a natural beauty, really: dark eyes and red pouty lips.
“So you don’t draw, paint, anything now?” Phoebe asked.
Evie shook her head, played with the metal key on her necklace.
“You know,” Evie said, looking up at Sam. “This may sound strange, but I think my life turned out the way it did because of what I did all those years ago. That summer.”
“What do you mean?” asked Sam.
“I betrayed Teilo. The fairies were supposed to be our secret. I knew that. Christ, Lisa made us swear not to tell a soul. But I was the one who showed people the book. And then, a week later . . .”
She didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t need to.
A week later, Lisa was gone.
“You said something about a phone call?” Sam said.
Evie nodded. “About a week ago. I thought it was a little girl at first. She was talking so quietly, just a whisper.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said, ‘I’m back from the land of the fairies. I’ll be seeing you soon.’ Then she hung up.”
“Lisa,” Phoebe said.
“It just doesn’t seem possible,” Evie said. “But who would play a joke like that?”
Sam and Phoebe exchanged a glance.
“So now it’s your turn,” Evie said. “Tell me about this other Evie. Tell me what made you look me up after all these years.”
And so, over pepperoni pizza (Phoebe was feeling nauseous again, so she nibbled tentatively at the crust, claiming that she was too anxious to be hungry) and Mountain Dew, Sam and Phoebe told their story, beginning with the call last week from the woman claiming to be Sam’s cousin and endin
g with the knock on Evie’s basement apartment door an hour ago. Evie nodded, asked the occasional question, but mostly just listened until they were through.
“So they got the fairy book?” she asked.
“Yeah, and everything else we brought. Clothes, Phoebe’s purse, our digital camera, which had some pictures of this other Evie and Elliot on it—pretty much the only proof we had that they even existed.”
“But nothing was taken from your house?”
“Not that we noticed,” Sam said.
“He’s a tricky bastard, isn’t he?” Evie asked. Her face, Phoebe decided, was catlike. The high cheekbones, the pointed chin and large eyes.
Sam shuffled his feet, looked down at them.
“Who?” Phoebe asked.
“Teilo,” Evie said with a wheezy sigh. She shook another cigarette from her pack. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but I wouldn’t put anything past him. Be careful. That’s my only advice.”
Phoebe shook her head. “You’re not saying he’s a real person?”
Evie lit the cigarette, shook out the match with trembling fingers. “Real, yes. A person? No. He’s way more than that. With Teilo, the regular rules don’t apply. And nothing is as it seems. So far he’s just playing with you. But when he gets serious, you’ll know.”
CHAPTER 12
Lisa
JUNE 8, FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
“They crept silently back down to Reliance before breakfast the next morning. The yard and woods were wet with dew, soaking their shoes. Songbirds called out their good mornings from hidden perches high up in the treetops. Evie had spoken very little since she showed up at dinner the night before. She was still in her fatigue shorts and Harley shirt, but they were dry. When Lisa asked where she’d been all afternoon, Evie only shrugged and said, “Around.” They didn’t talk about what had happened down at the whirlpool. Lisa wanted to, thinking that maybe if she could somehow make a joke about it, then everything would be okay. But this felt too big for any stupid joke and the right words didn’t come. All she could think of to say was I’m so sorry, but she was sure that would just make everything worse. The best thing to do was pretend it hadn’t happened and never mention it again.
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