Year After Henry

by Cathie Pelletier

  Evie

  Ever since she was a child, Evie Cooper has seen the faces of those who have passed on to the other side. Mostly, she watches them filter by in a steady stream, like the line that inches forward at a movie theater. But every now and then, one of those restless souls will stop and turn to look at Evie. They lean forward, as if they’re staring into a mirror at their own reflections. Sometimes, they seem confused, as if their eyes are searching through a trunk for an item they’ve left behind. These are the special people. These are the faces of the dead that Evie Cooper can study well enough to draw. She makes part of her living expenses from spirit noses, and eyes, and mouths shaped like small bows. Evie Cooper makes dollars and cents from sketching angel hair.

  Until she was seven years old, Evie thought everyone saw the faces of the dead. It was not until Rosemary Ann that she learned the truth. Rosemary had come to her one afternoon when Evie was sitting in the backseat of her father’s car. He was driving and her mother sat in the passenger seat. Spring had just arrived in Temple City, Pennsylvania, and all the streets were lined with budding trees. Kids were wheeling about on bicycles and old men sat stiffly on park benches, talking up their pasts. Rosemary Ann must have loved spring, too, the way the hazelnut bushes cascade out over riverbanks, the nesting birds, the hazy clouds drifting across the sky. That’s probably why Rosemary Ann visited Evie in the springtime, in her father’s Kaiser Manhattan, with the automatic buttons and the plush green seats. But then, the faces of the dead often come to Evie when she’s driving. It’s as if speed can take her to them, can enable her to catch up to their vaporous heels. Rosemary Ann came to Evie while she and her parents were driving past the Temple City Movie Theater. The movie was The Alamo, starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett, a man who fought to his death in the famous Texan battle. There was a poster in the window of the actor, wearing a coonskin cap and holding a rifle over his shoulder. The movie had won the Academy Award because Davy Crockett had really wanted to live. Maybe Rosemary Ann wanted to live, too. Maybe that’s why Evie saw her sitting between her parents in the front seat, acting as if she were their only little girl, as if life were something you could put back on once you take it off. As if life might be an old coat.

  What Evie felt then was jealousy rising up in her like a hot liquid, bubbling to get out. Yes, it was jealousy that rescued Evie Cooper from her ignorance. Jealousy set her free, loosed the artist that was hiding in her soul. She sometimes wondered what she would have become in life had it not been for that afternoon, had it not been spring, with life bursting the seams on Temple City. It was such a beautiful day, with brownish dogs floating above the green grass in the park and vendors selling ice cream and newspapers. The sidewalk shops had spilled out into the streets, with sales on towels and dresses and woven baskets. What would have happened to Evie Cooper if they hadn’t driven past the theater on that glorious day? Would Rosemary Ann have bothered to come? “What is that little girl doing here?” Evie had asked. When her mother turned to look, Evie knew instantly this was something important. She could see it in her mother’s eyes. Even as a child, Evie relied heavily upon the human eye and what it speaks. What little girl? What little girl? What little girl? the eyes were asking. “There’s a little girl sitting between you and Daddy,” Evie said. “Right there.” And that’s when Rosemary Ann had turned around and looked at Evie. On the contrary, what are you doing here? That’s what Rosemary Ann’s eyes wanted to know. “Make her go away,” Evie said. “I don’t want her to sit there.”

  Evie’s mother said nothing for a time, but as the Kaiser turned the street at Crescent Drugstore, she leaned across the girl she couldn’t see and grabbed the steering wheel. “For Christ’s sake, Helen,” Evie’s father said. “Do you want to kill us all?” Angry, he pulled the Kaiser up to the curb in front of the drugstore. “This isn’t going to start again, is it?” But Evie’s mother wasn’t listening. Instead, she fumbled for her purse and then opened the door. “You can’t go in,” Evie said. Rosemary Ann had seemed about to follow, one small leg already out of the car. “I don’t want you with my mummy.” That was when Evie’s father swung around in his seat, his eyes glaring like black ice. “Stop it!” he said. “You don’t even realize what you’re doing.” Rosemary Ann, her long brown ringlets trickling down her back, had mimicked him. You don’t even realize what you’re doing. “Shut up!” Evie shouted. Jealousy was on fire inside her heart. Jealousy was eating her alive. “What did you say?” her father asked. And before Evie could explain, he slapped a hand across her mouth. She had never been slapped by anyone in her whole seven years of life. Her eyes filled with tears, but she was too embarrassed to cry, especially in front of such a pretty girl.

  And then Evie’s mother was back, a notepad in one hand, a pencil in the other. She didn’t even notice that Evie was on the verge of tears. And Evie wanted her to notice. Evie wanted her to say, Evelyn, my darling, this day, this invisible girl, this slap across your lovely mouth will not change your life at all. You will remain safe, always. You will never lose the gift of innocence. Evie wanted her mother to say these things because she could feel safety being wrenched away from her. She could feel it being taken from her possession, as though it were a doll, or a dress. She would soon know some things about life and death that most people never know. And that’s how quickly it happened. Her mother put the notepad on Evie’s lap. She fit the pencil into Evie’s trembling hand. “Draw her,” she whispered, her voice lit with pain and excitement. “Draw the little girl you see sitting between Daddy and me.”

  And that’s how Evie learned that not everyone can see the dead, and not everyone can draw a decent picture. But she could. She wasn’t a Leonardo da Vinci. Or a Rembrandt. But Evie Cooper learned over the years how to capture the true character of eyes, and lips, and noses. She learned to draw a curl so real it looked as if a comb had just passed through it. And maybe that’s why those souls who are restless and wandering seek her out. Her hand trembling that day, in the backseat of her parents’ car, Evie began to draw. First she sketched Rosemary Ann’s oval face and the tightly wound ringlets. She drew the bow-shaped mouth, the eyebrows that curved like thin rainbows over the dark eyes. She even drew the cross Rosemary Ann was wearing around her neck. Then Evie passed the notepad to her mother. Her father was staring out his window, the noise of spring floating through his side glass. He was staring at the life of Temple City, as it buzzed up and down the streets.

  Evie’s mother took the pad but didn’t look right away at what Evie had drawn. “Don’t do this to yourself,” Evie heard her father say. He was watching Mr. Hanley, the town cop, as he went from parking meter to parking meter. Don’t do this to yourself, Rosemary Ann mimicked, and then she giggled. Evie’s mother lifted the pad and peered down. She said nothing at first. Then, “I’d forgotten about Rosemary Ann’s necklace,” she whispered. And that’s how Evie came to know that the girl’s name was Rosemary Ann. Her mother let the pad rest on her lap, carefully, as though it were a masterpiece she held there. And in a way, it was. It was Evie Cooper’s first picture. Crude though it was, it was her first sketch of the faces of the dead that would come to follow her through life. Evie’s father started the car and they drove home. Just before they turned the corner of Henderson Street, Evie looked up to see that Rosemary Ann was gone.

  When Evie was sixteen, her mother showed her a large framed portrait that was still dusty from being kept in storage in the attic. It was of the little girl with the bow mouth, the girl Evie had drawn that day, the girl sitting with such confidence on the plush seat of the Kaiser. It was a portrait of Rosemary Ann Cooper. Her ringlets were tightly wound and framing the oval face. Her eyebrows were curved like thin rainbows over the dark eyes, which peered up at Evie in defiance, still mimicking. “She was your sister,” Evie’s mother said. “She died of a ruptured appendix, long before you were born. We put her between us in the car, Daddy and I. We were trying to get her to the hospital, but we
didn’t make it. It was on Main Street, in front of the movie theater.”

  After her parents died, Evie Cooper tried to leave the faces of the dead behind her. There was too much sadness in the eyes that appeared on her sketch pads, too much pain on the faces. So she moved from Pennsylvania to the bustle of New York City, hoping to find a certain peace. But the dead followed her. The dead aren’t bothered by distance, or road signs, or mountain ranges, or boundaries on maps. The dead pick up and travel. By the time Evie left the city and settled in Bixley, Maine, by the time she met Henry Munroe, she was making good money in tips at Murphy’s Tavern as a bartender. But she couldn’t live on that income alone. So, she eventually put a sign up on her front lawn: Evie Cooper, Spiritual Portraitist. By then, it seemed that she was finally settled down. She was getting her life in shape. She had even told Henry Munroe that their affair was over. It had been a mistake, and was moving on. And she had held to that decision.

  It had been twelve long months since the morning Evie heard the news, when Andy Southby stopped by the tavern and announced it to the regular customers, as if it were nothing more than the results of a ball game. Henry Munroe, dead of a heart attack. This is gonna kill Larry, that’s what Evie thought. And then, the sadness hit her, right in the solar plexus, that spot that picks up the dead so sharp and so fast. Evie assumed Henry would stay close by, turning up behind Larry’s shoulder every time his brother came into the bar. But in the twelve months that he’d been gone, Henry never once bothered to peer at Evie through the veil that separates Bixley, Maine, from the other side. Not once. And Evie Cooper knew why. Henry was still mad at her.

  2

  Jeanie stripped the bed in Chad’s room of its sheets, balled them up, and stuffed the wad down into the wooden hamper in the bathroom. She had given in when Henry’s mother called that morning and invited herself over for a late lunch. The excuse this time was that she wanted to borrow a book on dried flower arrangements. Didn’t Jeanie have such a book? Now Jeanie wished that she had lied. All that Frances wanted to talk about these days was Larry. Larry getting a divorce, Larry being fired from the high school, Larry spending too much time at Murphy’s Tavern, Larry not being a good mailman, as Henry had been. Jeanie was tempted now and then, in a fleeting moment, to tell Frances Munroe about those nights Henry himself had spent down at Murphy’s. And it wasn’t just to watch sports on TV and think a bit, as was the case with Larry. What would Frances say about her precious Henry if she knew about Evie Cooper?

  An hour before Frances was due to arrive, Jeanie searched her bedroom closet for the book How to Dry and Arrange Your Backyard Flowers. It was while digging past the boxes of Lisa’s and Chad’s school papers, years of them, that Jeanie accidentally stumbled upon the orange bonnet, Henry’s beloved knit hat. She still found things like that, a year later and in the strangest places, items she had forgotten were ever a part of Henry’s life. His old orange hunting bonnet. Jeanie held it up to her face, let the harsh wool scratch against her skin. And there it was, his smell, Henry’s Old Spice mixed with a splash of natural sweat. Henry Munroe, existing now in photographs in the family album, in an odor here and there, a shard of memory.

  It had been a long year, twelve god-awful months that she had had to be firm and steady for the children. First there was Lisa, the baby Jeanie had been carrying the day she and Henry stood before a Bixley judge and tied their lives together. This was just two days after their high school graduation, at a time when they were both still basking in that warm patina of peer idolatry. Henry was a star football player and Jeanie captain of the cheerleaders. How could that golden aura not follow them around forever? But he was eighteen and she was seventeen, and the sweet glow of high school victory began to fade shortly after the bills started arriving, even before Lisa did. Soon their friends found better places to party than in a tiny apartment where someone like Jeanie kept shushing everyone because a baby was sleeping in the other room. It was a fast lesson, that big bounce from one concept to another. Then, just when seven years of marriage rolled around, that risky time that old-timers claim comes with an itch to wander, Chad Henry Munroe had been born. And he had become his father’s own pride and joy, just as Lisa seemed to be Jeanie’s. Now Lisa, the baby who had compelled her parents to marry so young, was twenty-two years old and married herself. She was living down in Boston and expecting a baby of her own, what would be Jeanie’s first grandchild, a baby Henry would never know about, much less hold in his arms.

  It had been a long year, indeed, since that morning Jeanie awakened to find that Henry’s heart had finally given up, a long year. And yet she still couldn’t let go of Evie Cooper, or the fact that she had never confronted Henry about his mistress. A full year that held nights when Jeanie cried from the time she flicked out her bedside light until dawn pushed its way in through the window blinds. A damned year, and still there was anger in her heart, mixed in with the pain of loss.

  “Mom?” Chad’s voice from the kitchen, followed by the quick slam of a screen door. That boy could enter a room faster than any human should be capable of doing. Jeanie was always telling him to slow down, to take it easy, to chill, as the kids said. Truth is, she saw in her son the same nervous energy that had punctuated his father’s life. She had often told Henry that stress was his enemy, especially when it came hand in hand with his eating habits. But Henry didn’t listen. He loved those steaks on the barbecue grill every Sunday, those beers at Murphy’s Tavern, those big plates of nachos with every ball game he watched. He loved betting fifty bucks on a Red Sox game and then jumping from his chair and shouting over every home run, every strike out, every base walked on balls. Life’s too short to worry about stress and cholesterol, Jeanie, he used to tell her. She wondered if Henry changed his mind in those last seconds. Would he have traded the nachos for a few more years?

  “I’m in here, son,” Jeanie said. Chad was standing in the bedroom doorway before she had time to add, “Don’t forget to wipe your feet.” He was already Henry’s height, six feet tall and still growing. He looked at the orange wool bonnet.

  “Where’d you find it?” he asked.

  “In the closet,” said Jeanie. She offered it to him. “You want it, Chad?”

  He took it from her and looked down at it for a few seconds. Then he did what Jeanie had already done. He lifted it up to his nose and smelled the life still in it.

  “Yeah, sure, why not?” he said.

  He was gone before Jeanie could offer anything else, perhaps a few words of consolation. She wanted to touch his arm, maybe whisper to him, “It’s okay, son. I know. I did it too. You can smell him there, can’t you? It’s okay to hurt, Chad. It’s okay to ache like there’s no tomorrow.” It had been a long year and yet the boy still wasn’t letting his mother be privy to his grief. Jeanie heard the roar of Chad’s motorbike in the driveway. It had been Henry’s old bike that he had refurbished a few weeks before he died, a new paint job, a new motor, all as a reward for Chad’s finally getting his math grade up to a B. Jeanie hadn’t approved of this. The way she saw it, Chad should get good grades because it was the thing to do, a move toward his future. She looked out the window in time to see her son pull out of the drive on his bike. Despite what was already turning into a hot day, Chad was wearing his father’s orange bonnet.

  ...

  Frances Munroe was incapable of visiting without bringing some kind of food, mostly in the shape of casserole dishes, tuna and noodles, or a three-bean salad. Because of this, Jeanie had nicknamed her “The Welcome Wagon” and “Meals on Wheels.” In those first years of marriage, it had bothered her that Henry’s mother seemed to think the only way she could visit her son’s house was with food as an offering. But later, when Jeanie started working part-time at Fillmore’s Drugstore, she had come to appreciate the warm casseroles, and the meringue pies, and the rice and vegetable soups. There had even been times when Jeanie had invited Frances over for a cup of coffee, knowi
ng she’d bring the pastries to go with it. This meant that Jeanie wouldn’t have to worry about what dessert to make for Henry’s supper. If the Munroe men came from a long line of postal carriers, the maternal side of the family came from a long line of women who considered food a social tool.

  “It’s raisin squares,” said Frances, as Jeanie opened the front door and accepted the silver baking pan from her mother-in-law. “Only I used golden raisins instead of regular. And this macaroni casserole is for Chad.”

  Jeanie stepped back so Frances could come inside. She followed her into the kitchen and put the pan of squares down on the counter. Frances opened the refrigerator and found space on the upper rack for the casserole.

  “Just put it in for twenty minutes at three hundred and fifty degrees,” she said. “Warm it up nice. Chad will love it, and you won’t have to cook.”

  Jeanie smiled. How could she not? The last thing she felt like doing that warm afternoon, now that the orange bonnet had floated to the surface of her life, was cooking something for supper. Even when Chad did appear at the table, washed and hungry, the two of them barely spoke. Compared to the boisterous suppers the family had known when Henry was alive—talk of sports, fishing, hunting, race cars—Jeanie and Chad now ate almost silently, the clink clink of their forks replacing Henry’s vivacious conversations with his son. What did Jeanie know about hockey, trout lures, archery, or car engines? Nothing. Not a damn thing. It had become so apparent at suppertime that Henry was missing forever that she and Chad had slowly fallen away from eating together. That’s why Jeanie had been pestering Chad lately to bring some of the boys home for supper. She assumed he still kept up with his school friends. Assumed, for the truth was that she didn’t know much about him anymore. He had grown slowly away from her, and in her own pain over losing Henry, she was too worn out to go look for him. Now, Jeanie thought of her son as a boy standing on the back of a train as it’s leaving the station. And there she is, his mother, watching that train roll farther and farther down the track, watching that face she loves so dearly growing more and more indistinct. Disappearing.