Her eyes began to water, and she wiped at them with the back of her hand. Goddamn it. She was not going to cry. Phoebe did not cry. Not in front of people.
Evie moved to stand next to her.
“I used to like to cook,” Evie told her. “Back when Elton and I . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Elton? Who the hell was Elton?
She must have been flustered, Phoebe told herself. Because surely, if he was the great love of her life, she wasn’t going to forget that his name was Elliot, not Elton, right?
“Sam and I both hate cooking,” Phoebe confessed. “We’d live on takeout if we could.”
“If you want to shop, I can definitely do the cooking. There aren’t any grocery stores that deliver up in Burlington, so I lived on whatever the pizza guy could bring—I’d be glad never to see another pizza box.”
“Deal,” Phoebe said.
Evie reached for the loaf of white bread on the counter (it was Phoebe’s—Sam only ate organic sprouted wheat bread). “May I?”
Phoebe nodded. Evie slathered a piece of bread with butter, then spooned sugar onto it. It was a treat Phoebe hadn’t had since she was a kid.
“Want one?” Evie asked with a mischievous smile.
“Absolutely.”
It was so good, they each had a second slice.
CHAPTER 18
Lisa
JUNE 9, FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
“Were you in the woods last night?” Lisa whispered to Da before breakfast the next morning. He was still on the couch in his ratty old pajamas. He just stared straight ahead, a little bit of spit leaking out of the corner of his down-turned mouth. He didn’t even seem to notice she was there.
“I found your Red Sox cap,” she said. Still nothing.
What exactly had Pinkie seen? A no-faced bogeyman with Da’s cap? It didn’t make any sense. She’d gone to Da’s studio in the garage and found the coveralls but no hat. The garage was unlocked, as always. Anyone could have come in and taken the hat. But why?
Was it possible that Da had gotten up himself and went shuffling off through the woods like a zombie?
Her mom and Aunt Hazel were in the kitchen having one of their whisper fights while Hazel made breakfast. Lisa heard only a few words: Too much. Remembers. Too far.
They’d been fighting like this for days now. The longer her dad stayed sick and silent with no sign of getting better, the tenser things became. Now she heard her mom questioning Hazel about the medications and if she was sure she was giving them right. Their whispers had escalated into near shouts.
“Would you rather hire a nurse? A stranger?” Hazel snapped.
Lisa’s mom mumbled something Lisa didn’t catch.
“Then let me do my job,” Hazel said.
After a minute, Lisa smelled something burning.
“Is something on fire?” Lisa yelled from the living room.
“Shit!” Hazel yelped. Then there was a banging and the sound of water running.
The chaos in the kitchen was interrupted by a loud rapping knock at the front door. Weird, Lisa thought—it was only a little after seven. Lisa’s mom came through the living room to answer it, looking frazzled and annoyed but taking a breath and smiling before opening the door. After a quick greeting, she went out onto the front porch, shutting the door behind her. Lisa got up and leaned around the edge of the couch so she could see out the window. Gerald and his mother were on the porch. Gerald had a cast on his arm. He stared down at his feet, said nothing. His mother was doing all the talking, her voice loud, her arms gesturing in tight little patterns as they cut through the air. Lisa knew Gerald’s dad had left them a few months ago and his mom worked full-time waitressing at Jenny’s Café, plus cooked and cleaned and made sure Pinkie got to her oboe lessons. Now she had to deal with the fact that some neighborhood kid had busted her son’s arm. Not just any kid, but Evie.
And what, if anything, had Pinkie told her about what she saw in the woods last night?
Gerald ran his foot along the peeling paint on the floorboards while his mother went on and on. She was a skinny woman with bleached-out hair and bad teeth. She had on her blue waitressing apron and clunky white shoes. Lisa watched her own mother nodding, arms folded tight over her belly. She didn’t seem to be saying much. At last they said their good-byes and Lisa’s mom came into the house, her face tight.
“Does anyone know where Evie is?” she asked.
“Sleeping. In my room.” Lisa answered.
Hazel came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “What’s she done now?” she asked.
“It seems there was some trouble in the woods yesterday. But don’t worry,” Lisa’s mom said. “I’ll take care of it. You just see to breakfast.”
“But I—” Hazel started to say, and Lisa’s mom flashed her a look that made her snap her jaw closed.
Lisa listened to her mother’s footsteps climb the stairs. A door opened, then closed. Her mother began to yell. It was hard to make out just what she was saying, but Lisa caught the gist of it: Evie had crossed the line. Lisa’s mom had never had much patience for Evie—she was quick to lose her temper with her and to chastise Hazel for letting Evie run wild the way she did.
Evie began to yell back, and then there was a crashing sound. Lisa headed for the stairs, thinking she’d do whatever she could to keep Evie from getting into any more trouble. Evie would listen to her. Lisa was on the first step when Hazel grabbed her shoulder.
“Better not,” Hazel said.
“Maybe you should go up. Just see if they’re okay?” Lisa’s voice sounded whiny and desperate. She wasn’t sure who she was more afraid for up there—her mother or Evie. She remembered the way Evie’s hand went for her knife when Gerald was down on the ground.
“Your mother has it under control, I’m sure,” Hazel said.
Lisa nodded, went back over to the couch.
Everything around her was all topsy-turvy. And there was Da in the center of it, looking peaceful and oblivious. Lisa wanted, more than anything else, to join him there.
“What’s it like where you are, Da?” Lisa asked. She gently put her head against his. His skin was hot and he smelled yeasty, like sourdough bread.
“Your father’s right here with us,” Aunt Hazel said. She had his pills in a little plastic cup in one hand, a glass of water in the other. Hazel looked tired. More disheveled than usual. And Lisa smelled the sweet, sickly scent of booze coming from her. What kind of person poured themselves a drink at seven in the morning?
“It doesn’t even seem like he can hear me.”
Hazel smiled. “Oh, he hears you. He knows everything that’s going on. Don’t you, Dave?” Then gently, carefully, she parted his lips, put the pills on his tongue, fed him a sip of water.
“Swallow now, Dave,” she said. “That’s it. Good boy.”
“Could he get up on his own? And go for a walk or something?”
Hazel shook her head. “No. But he’ll be able to soon, isn’t that right, Dave?”
The water dribbled down his chin, and one of the pills came with it. Hazel gently poked it back into his mouth.
Lisa stood up, turned away from the wrecked creature who only vaguely resembled her father.
And she stopped then, right there, closed her eyes, and made herself remember three things she loved about him: the way he talked in a bad Italian accent when he cooked spaghetti and meatballs every Friday night, the song about Lydia the tattooed lady he’d sing when he was shaving, the way he called her Beanpole.
“You keep growing like this, you’re gonna shoot straight up into the sky, Beanpole,” he’d told her, tousling her hair. “The clouds will sit on top of your head like dusty old wigs.”
“Maybe I’ll meet a giant up there,” she’d said.
“Are you kidding? You’re going to be the gi
ant!”
She’d laughed, called out “Fee Fi Fo Fum!,” sending Da running through the house, she chasing after him, making the floorboards shake with her heavy footsteps.
But already, it all felt made up. Invented somehow. Like something from a story that began Once upon a time.
She opened her eyes just in time to catch Evie charging down the stairs, across the hall, and into the kitchen. Her face was red, wet, and swollen-looking.
“Evie? Wait!”
“Leave me alone!” Evie snapped, heading out the side kitchen door and into the yard. Lisa stood at the sink, looking out the window above it, watching Evie run for the woods, for Reliance.
Lisa waited around most of the day, but Evie didn’t come back. Lisa went in and out of the house, paced around the yard, picked some strawberries in the garden that was choked with weeds, and ate them for lunch. The yard had turned into an overgrown field—cutting it had always been Da’s job. Sometimes Sammy would help, but he hadn’t been able to get the mower started.
“Where’s Evie at anyway?” Sammy asked when he caught Lisa playing solitaire at the kitchen table.
Lisa shrugged. Sam got a peanut butter sandwich and went back up to his room to do whatever it was he did up there—read, experiment with his chemistry set, watch his ant farm.
It was a little before suppertime when Lisa finally decided to go look for Evie. She headed across the tall grass of their backyard and into the woods, which seemed dark and cold. Every sound made her jump. Twigs cracked. Birds shrieked. Everything seemed to be warning her to leave. Run now. She heard a strange bird call, something unfamiliar and sad—a sound that went right to her belly and stayed there.
“Evie?” she called out.
This was silly. There was no need to be such a scaredy-cat. She took a deep breath and walked slowly, showing the woods she wasn’t afraid.
She wound her way down the hill toward the brook, but there were more sounds than just birds and running water. Voices. From up ahead. She stopped just before the brook, ducked behind a big sugar maple, heart pounding. On the other side of the brook, Evie was talking with Gerald. Not shouting or going for his throat but actually talking. Weird. Evie was shouldering her black knapsack, which looked full and heavy. Gerald’s arm was strapped up in a sling, the lower part wrapped in a thick plaster cast. His fingers jutted out from the end of the cast, swollen and purplish. He was nodding at whatever Evie was saying. Pinkie was standing off to the side like a little guard dog, with her lower jaw jutting out. She was picking at a bug bite on her hand, making it bleed.
“Why should we believe you?” Pinkie asked.
Evie mumbled something Lisa couldn’t catch. She took off her backpack, handed it over to Pinkie who unzipped it. Pinkie and Gerald peered inside.
“Just do what I said and you’ll see,” Evie said.
Gerald took the backpack, awkwardly sliding it onto his good shoulder with one hand.
Evie nodded at them, then walked away with a funny duck-footed swagger, her big work boots snapping twigs, crushing ferns and saplings. Lisa hid behind a tree, holding her breath while Evie crossed the brook and walked by, not five feet from where she stood.
Gerald and Pinkie watched her go, then they turned to go back into the woods, toward Reliance.
“I think she’s full of crap,” Gerald said. Lisa’s fingers clawed at the bark of the tree she was hiding behind. What was Evie doing with these two? “She’s just trying to make us look like idiots,” Gerald continued.
“But just think,” Pinkie said, her voice all soft and dreamy. “What if she’s right?”
CHAPTER 19
Phoebe
JUNE 11, PRESENT DAY
“Cognitive therapy for the agoraphobic patient?” Franny waved the page that had just come out of the printer. “What on earth is this for?”
Usually, when Phoebe used the computer and printer at work for personal stuff, it was to look up her horoscope or print some word scrambles to do on her lunch break. It was a habit she’d picked up from her mother (one of the few, thank God), who always said word puzzles kept the mind limber and that it was a proven fact that people who did them were less likely to get Alzheimer’s. Her ma could sit on the couch all day, TV tuned to talk shows and soap operas, tumbler of booze in one hand, a pencil in the other, as she worked her way through the puzzle books she’d picked up at the checkout line. It was the most constructive thing her ma ever did.
Phoebe wasn’t much of a reader, but she liked a good puzzle. There was something deeply satisfying about making sense of all the jumbled letters, turning them into a word or sentence you could actually read.
“I mean,” whispered Franny, leaning down so that their shoulders were touching, “shouldn’t you be researching baby names or something?” She gave Phoebe a conspiratorial smile, and Phoebe felt a split-second ache—a wish that her mother were here so she could share the news of her pregnancy, ask her advice on names. But then reality hit and Phoebe knew that even if her ma was alive, she was the last person on earth Phoebe would confide in or ask for bits of motherly wisdom.
This was, after all, the woman who went down to Florida on the back of some loser’s Harley when she was five months pregnant with Phoebe, cranked on amphetamines, shooting pool at roadside dives.
“It was the closest thing to a family I ever had,” her mother explained wistfully to Phoebe years later.
“Was he my father?” Phoebe asked.
Her mom laughed. “Al? No!”
“Then who was he? My father?”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed as she focused on some faraway object Phoebe couldn’t see. “Your father was just some drifter who dumped me as soon as he heard I was knocked up. Left without a trace.”
“But you must have known something about him? What was his name? Where was he from?”
Her ma shook her head. “His name’s not important. It’s not like you can go look him up. He wasn’t from anywhere, Bee. He moved from town to town picking fruit and tobacco, emptying trucks. He went where the work was or wherever there was a pretty lady to buy him a drink. He was a looker, that’s for sure. Handsome in an old-fashioned movie star way.” Her mother smiled, then shook her head. “Then I met Al. God closes one door, opens up another. Al and his biker friends, they took me right in. They called me Mama Bear. They gave me that tattoo I have on my chest. The little heart. It was for you. I wanted something with your name, but I didn’t know who you were yet, so I had them write the letter S. S for sweetheart.”
Phoebe had grown up thinking the botched and blurred tattoo was supposed to be the S for Superman.
“Weren’t you afraid of hepatitis? AIDS? And did you even wear a helmet on the motorcycle?” Phoebe asked.
Her mother laughed. “Sometimes, my little sweetheart, you’ve just gotta live. Feel the wind in your hair.”
Phoebe blinked at Franny and shook her head. “Sam’s cousin Evie,” she explained, putting away the little memo pad she’d been taking notes in. “She’s been staying with us this week.”
“And she’s agoraphobic?”
Phoebe nodded.
“No kidding? Is she on meds?”
“No. She’s tried them but says they just made her worse. The pills just gave her one more thing to be anxious about.”
“God, I kind of remember her from when we were kids. She’d come visit sometimes. Kind of a chunky kid. Bad asthma. People were mean to her. Real mean. It’s horrible, the things kids do to each other.” Franny shivered. “So what’s she like now?”
Phoebe thought for a few seconds. “Careful. Guarded. Hard to get to know, but I think she’s warming up to me. She seems less panicky around me anyway.”
Phoebe had written off to good old-fashioned anxiety the fact that Evie had gotten Elliot’s name wrong. Here was a woman with a true disorder in a totally unfamiliar environment—o
f course she’s going to misspeak. And since then, she’d called him Elliot several times, no hesitation.
With Sam working overtime at the tree service and Phoebe’s hours at the clinic cut back for summer, she’d spent a lot of time alone with Evie. She’d bought Evie some basic toiletries along with new pants and T-shirts from Walmart (another place of mass consumption that Phoebe adored and Sam didn’t approve of).
When they were together, Phoebe did most of the talking. Evie listened, smiling as if everything that came out of Phoebe’s mouth was vaguely amusing to her. And Evie was in love with the animals, especially the python, which she took out and draped around her neck daily. She even made little salads for the rats and hedgehog.
When she wasn’t fawning over the pets, Evie spent her days reading and cleaning the house. At night she cooked. Evie seemed to love the comfort foods Phoebe had grown up with and had stopped eating entirely when she got together with Sam. Phoebe bought Hamburger Helper, Kraft macaroni and cheese, white bread and bologna. One night they ate peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, giggling like girls. Sam rarely shared dinner with them—either coming home late or claiming he’d already eaten and wasn’t hungry. He did little to hide his revulsion of the new food in the house.
He’d pick up the boxes, reading the list of ingredients out loud. “Sodium tripolyphosphate, yellow five, yellow six, monosodium glutamate. Jesus, do you have any idea what this stuff is? What it does to your body? Those artificial colors cause cancer in lab rats, did you know that?”
“Good thing we’re not lab rats,” Phoebe shot back, diving into her dinner with relish.
Phoebe knew it shouldn’t bother her, that Sam was only concerned about her health, not trying to be a holier-than-thou food zealot, but the pregnancy hormones made it hard for her to keep her emotions in check.
When he was finished making some harsh judgment about their dinner, he’d head into the office to use the computer. He was spending hours alone online every night, creeping into bed at one or two in the morning. Phoebe would wake up startled and look at the clock on the bedside table, which also held a glass of water, pencils, memo pads, the strange little sack of horse teeth, and the word-puzzle books she’d do until she fell asleep.
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