The Unremembered Girl: A Novel

by Eliza Maxwell

  He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, hoping to see something different than an indignant woman casting blame at his feet.

  And he did see something different. He saw a woman, a friend, whose contempt was slowly draining away, replaced one drop at a time by something even worse. Pity.

  “You didn’t know,” Alice said quietly, bringing her hand to her chin, her fingers spanning across lips that had parted in surprise.

  There was a finality to those words, spoken in sympathy—a finality that left Henry feeling like the world had moved ten steps past where he was standing, and it wasn’t waiting for him to catch up.

  “You’re wrong,” he said.

  “Oh, Henry,” Alice said gently, shaking her head. “I’m a labor and delivery nurse. Honey, I’m not wrong. Maybe you’d better sit down.”

  He did as she said, his body moving of its own accord as his mind shifted into gear, struggling to catch up. Eve, in her ill-fitting hand-me-down dresses and oversized sweaters. Eve, squeamish at the sight of the meat laid out in Ms. Watson’s kitchen.

  He shook his head again, but once a thing is seen, it can’t be unseen so easily.

  Alice, too, was reaching an epiphany of her own.

  “Henry, how could you not—” Her words stopped midsentence and her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God,” she said quickly, gripping Henry’s arm. “You didn’t know because you and Eve aren’t . . . You haven’t . . .”

  Henry’s head dropped into his hands, which for Alice only confirmed her train of thought.

  “God, Henry, I’m sorry. When I realized she was expecting, I just assumed. Of course you haven’t. I should have realized. I’m so sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

  He waved away her concern. He had other things on his mind.

  “I should have known,” Alice babbled on. “She’s only been here, what? Four months? It would have had to have happened nearly immediately, and you’re not that kind of guy . . . I’m sorry, I’ll shut up. I’m just making things worse.”

  Henry raised his head and looked square into Alice’s face, her own so full of sympathy and helplessness.

  “What are we gonna do, Alice?”

  She opened her mouth, but no sound came out for a time.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I really don’t. But I do know one thing. The fact that you asked that question, instead of asking what is she gonna do, says a whole lot about what kind of man you are, Henry. Caroline would be proud of you.”

  Henry gave a short laugh. “Yeah, sure she would.”

  “She would,” Alice tried to reassure him. “You could still join the military, you know.”

  “I can’t, Alice,” he said.

  He didn’t tell her he’d been struggling with that very question for months. Even if he could convince Eve to marry him, he’d realized, she was hardly in a place where she could adjust to the ever-changing realities of being a military spouse. She could barely adjust to this life, which was about as removed from the rest of humanity as you could get.

  “That’s not going to work, Alice. Not in a million years. Eve can’t handle being a military wife. Hell, I couldn’t handle it! Because she’d have to marry me, you know. And what about basic training? What do I do? Leave her here with Livingston? That’s never gonna work.”

  Henry stood, pacing the room like an animal stuck in a cage. That was how he felt—caged.

  He ignored Alice’s careful study of his reactions. He didn’t care that she was seeing them raw as they washed over him. The hard fact was, he was losing a lifelong dream, one he’d held close when things had gotten bad. One he’d depended on as a shining light far off in the distance, drawing him toward a future away from here, a doorway to the rest of his life.

  And the hell of it was, that door had already started swinging closed, from the moment he’d pulled Eve from the river and breathed life back into her. His life. He simply hadn’t faced that yet.

  But the stark realities of Eve’s pregnancy slammed that door shut with a bang that echoed through every part of him.

  “You know,” Alice said, her voice tinged with a practicality that Henry wasn’t ready to appreciate. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Right now, we need to focus on Eve and the baby and making sure they get the care they need. After that, everything will work out. It always does.”

  “Does it, Alice? Does it really? Or is that something we say to make ourselves feel better?”

  The resignation in Henry’s voice was clear. Alice didn’t miss it.

  Neither did Eve, who was standing just outside the still-open front door. Henry’s harsh words rang inside of her, reverberating through all the cracks and dark corners.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Henry walked the path that his mother’s feet had walked before him so many times. Through the pines, deep into the darkness of the swamp beyond. He searched blindly for the serenity that Mama always seemed to find in this place, and after a time, a kind of calm acceptance did seem to settle around him.

  When he came to the old hunting shack hiding in the back of the woods, he stopped and stared. The seemingly abandoned shack was perched in the distance, rising from the fog like a watchful bird of prey.

  Henry didn’t admit to many people, hardly even to himself, that this place had featured prominently in most of his nightmares as a child. Del and Mari, sensing his weakness, as older siblings are so adept at doing, had filled his head with gruesome fireside stories about a cannibalistic swamp witch who wore the finger bones of children around her neck. At six years old, Henry had been a skeptical soul, but young enough that those seeds of terror had taken root in his imagination anyway.

  He wondered if the ground around the shack was still littered with the chicken bones that Del and Mari had planted there, setting the scene to wring the maximum amount of fear from their young stepbrother.

  It was Mari who lured him in, teasing him to come closer and closer.

  “Swamp witches sleep during the day, Henry,” Mari had whispered. “Come on, don’t be such a crybaby.”

  Even at twelve, Mari was full of mystery, and she held him in thrall then, just as she’d done since the twins and their father had come into his life.

  Del was easy, a boy like any other, content to treat Henry with the complacent disregard of an average older brother. As long as Henry did as Del said, and steered clear when Del didn’t want him around, they rocked along just fine.

  It was Mari who wove her spell on Henry, and she knew it. Mari wove a spell on them all, with her mercurial moods—achingly kind one moment, withdrawn, even cruel, the next.

  When Del had leapt from the trees he was hiding behind, decked out in rags, mud, and chicken bone jewelry, screaming like a banshee, Henry had wholeheartedly believed he was about to die. As this had been the twins’ ultimate goal all along, they were delirious with glee when Henry let out a shriek that harkened back to primitive times.

  What they hadn’t expected was Henry, face-to-face with imminent death, instinctively launching his skinny six-year-old self at Del, arms flailing and teeth gnashing in what he truly believed was a fight for his very existence.

  “Holy crap, Mari, help! Get him off me!” Del had cried, blocking Henry’s wild blows.

  But Mari was laughing too hard at the spectacle to be any use at all. Henry, adrenaline pumping through him, didn’t register that the befuddled voice coming from the swamp witch sounded strikingly like his brother’s.

  Del grabbed at him, struggling to keep Henry’s fists from landing, but Henry had forward momentum on his side, and the two boys tumbled backward in a tangle of limbs and elbows. They rolled down and down, straight into the waiting arms of the murky green marsh.

  Del came up sputtering, with muck sliding in chunks down his face and arms. He had one hand on Henry’s forehead, keeping him at arm’s length as he continued to thrash.

  Henry could remember the sound of Mari’s laughter so clearly, like manic bells ringing on the wi
nd.

  Later that day, Mama had sat the three of them down and told them the real story of the abandoned shack. The story of a man and his son and a hunting cabin. No one knew exactly what had been going through the boy’s head when he’d shot his father in his bed, then hanged himself from the beam in the front room. And no one ever would.

  Henry took a good look at the shack now, with its weathered piers and rotting siding. Some places hold on to death the way used fireworks hold on to the stench of gunpowder and flames.

  There was no sign of anyone there now. Not that he’d expected there to be. The people who came and went from this place might have been ghosts. Only Eve, and two bloody fingers left on his doorstep, gave any indication that the sounds that he could hear at night coming from this place weren’t just in his head.

  Henry found that he preferred the childhood terror of a witch that feasted on errant children to the adult terror of the truth. The witch was more straightforward, to his mind.

  Henry sighed.

  He’d come to terms with the loss of the army. He’d been coming around to that anyway, in his own time.

  It hadn’t been that hard to do once he’d compared it to the thought of parting from Eve.

  That. That would have been like cutting him in half.

  “She should see a doctor,” Alice had said before she’d left.

  “That worked out well last time,” Henry had replied.

  “This is different, Henry. So many things could go wrong.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Henry said.

  And he would. But first he had to get his mind right. The last thing he wanted was to show Eve the tug-of-war going on inside of him. He needed to be the strong one. He had no choice.

  So Henry had walked into the woods, searching for peace, and finally found it.

  The sky was growing dark when Henry stepped back out of the trees, and the house glowed warm in the distance. For a moment, he tried to see it as Eve must have seen it, when she was abandoned and alone in the woods. Scared. Hungry. It beckoned to him as it must have to her.

  He was thankful it was there for them both.

  When he reached the house, Henry’s steps echoed on the wooden boards of the porch, and the screen door creaked as he opened it, the same pattern of sounds that had welcomed him home since he was a boy.

  For once, he was mindful of what a gift home was.

  “Eve,” he called as he shut the front door behind him.

  There was no reply.

  He walked through the front room, peeked into the kitchen, then down the hallway.

  There was no sign of her.

  He looked in on his stepfather, another problem he still didn’t have an answer for, but when he found him sleeping soundly, as he’d expected, he shut the door and resolved to deal with that problem another day.

  “Eve,” he called again, checking the room that had once been Mari’s, the one Eve slept in, alone. It was empty.

  The feelings of contentment that had stirred in Henry on his walk home began to give way to the first creeping fingers of concern.

  He never should have left her here alone.

  With quicker steps than the ones that had brought him into the house, he left, heading for the shed. There was a light burning there—he could see it through the cracks under and around the doorway.

  He wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but it stalled in his chest. He needed to see her, put his eyes on her face, and know that she was okay before he could release that breath.

  “Eve,” he called, throwing open the door of the shed.

  What he found was destruction.

  Pieces of tubing and shards of glass jars littered the earth floor. The vast copper pots lay on their sides or upended on the ground. The stink of liquor and mash filled the air, overwhelming the small space, making his nostrils flare and bringing stinging tears to his eyes. His mother’s loom, and the piece that Eve had been working on, the one that she and Mama had started together, lay in pieces, like a wild animal had torn into it.

  “Eve!” Henry shouted. He turned his head from one direction to another, taking in so much devastation in such a small space.

  The men from the shack. They must have come back. Eve wasn’t here, they must have come back for her. He turned his back to the room, ready to rush into the woods and get her back, when the smallest movement caught his eye.

  There. In the corner, curled up in the smallest ball she could make of herself, was Eve.

  “Oh God, Eve, are you all right?” Henry asked, rushing to her side. “Look at me, Eve, are you okay?”

  She didn’t raise her head, but Henry could see her body shaking with sobs, and he could hear the choking sound coming from her as she tried to hold back the tears.

  He pulled her into his arms and placed one hand over her hair as her head leaned against his chest. She was shaking. He was shaking too.

  “I’m so sorry. I never should have left you here alone. I promise you, I won’t let them hurt you. I won’t leave you alone again. Not ever again.”

  If anything, Henry’s reassurances made her sob harder.

  “Eve, did they hurt you?” He dreaded asking the question, dreaded the answer even more. But when she shook her head no, he let out a pent-up breath. There was that, at least.

  “Eve,” Henry said. “Can you tell me what they looked like? How long ago they left, what direction they were going? Anything at all?”

  She shook her head harder, and the crying intensified.

  “It’s okay now. You’re safe. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “No, no, it’s not,” Eve moaned. “It’s ruined. It was so perfect, and now it’s broken and useless. It’ll never be all right.”

  “Oh, Eve, I’ll fix it. I can fix it. All of it,” he said.

  “Can you?” she asked, but the words were flat, hopeless, her distraught tears giving way to a chilling calm as she raised her head and looked at him with blank eyes.

  “Of course I can. I can fix anything,” he said, running his hand down her hair, trying to give her a smile she could believe in.

  “Can you fix me?” she asked.

  Henry tilted his head and looked at her expression more closely. Their eyes met, and as they held, he felt his chest begin to tighten. Those eyes, so rich and dark, held more than just fear of an intruder. They held much, much more than just the pain of a troubled past. They held a troubled right now.

  Henry leaned back mere inches, still with his arms loosely around her. Her gaze dropped to the hands curled in tight fists against her middle.

  Slowly, she unfurled her fingers and stared at her palms. Henry stared too. He couldn’t break his eyes away. Those hands, they were raw and ripped. Blood dripped down from the cuts in her palms, marring the dress that had once belonged to Mari. The blood dotted and stained the fabric, pulled taut over her belly, the pregnancy so obvious now that he knew to look for it.

  Henry’s arms dropped away from her.

  “You did this,” he said in a whisper.

  Eve raised her eyes again. She didn’t nod, only stared at him, waiting. Waiting to see what he would do now.

  Henry scrambled backward on the ground, pulling back from the devastating truth he saw in her face.

  His palm landed on a broken shard of glass, but he barely felt it. His attention was on the woman in front of him, kneeling in the midst of the destruction she’d brought down on both of their heads.

  He jumped to his feet, wiping his hands nervously on his jeans. He didn’t want to look around at the broken pieces of his life, not again. He didn’t want to see the loom that had belonged to his mother, the one he’d claimed would be so easily mended just a few moments before. He didn’t want to look at the broken, scattered parts of the still that had been handed down for generations on his father’s side.

  Henry hadn’t lied. He was good at fixing things. It was what he did.

  But this?

  This was too much for him.


  He turned away from Eve, desperate to get out of this shed with its overpowering scents and its troubles that he hadn’t asked for.

  In a daze, he wandered out the door, leaving it swinging free behind him.

  The night greeted him, not as an old friend, as the evening had earlier, but as a fool who was in over his head. The bullfrogs calling from the swamp, the mosquitoes buzzing in his ears, the cicadas singing—it all sounded like laughter to him. Laughter at his naive words, spoken with such a loose tongue.

  He could fix anything?

  He couldn’t fix this.

  Henry found himself at the door of his truck. His hand went to the handle, and the creak of the old hinges grated against his senses as he opened the door.

  The keys were hanging in the ignition, just like they usually were.

  He turned the key, and the truck rumbled to life. He looked down at the gas gauge. He had three-quarters of a tank. That would get him miles from here. Miles and miles.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Eve lay on the bed with the handmade quilt thrown over the top of it. Made by hand for someone else. Someone who deserved it, and the love that it had been given with.

  She ran her hand down the soft fabrics, worn thin with age and use, and wondered about the story behind them. So many stories, and just as many lives a person could lead. It came down to choices. Choices determined what shape those lives would have. Eve had come to understand that, just as she understood that, for a very long time, she’d had no choices to make.

  Once, a long time ago, the woman in whose house she’d existed had seen her husband throw some scraps from his dinner to the girl. He’d said words to her that sounded almost kind.

  Later, the woman had taken a strap to her.

  It wasn’t uncommon, but that time had been worse than ever before.

  She’d taken the blows, trying not to cry out at first, but when it didn’t stop, only growing more vicious, she eventually lost her well-practiced ability to swallow the noises that rose from her belly and threatened to escape her throat.