What's Left of Her: a novella (The Betrayed Trilogy)

by Campisi, Mary

  “Lesbians?” The word stumbles out.

  “Yeah, lesbians.” Silence, then, “What do you think of that, Evelyn?”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Evie glances at the men on the stools, their broad backs hunched over their meals. She smiles then and turns to Peggy. “But if it keeps them away, let them think that. Let them think whatever they want.”

  “That’s exactly what I say.” Peggy lifts her water glass, pushes a chunk of streaked blonde hair from her forehead and salutes. “Hell yeah.”

  Chapter 9

  The headlights flicker past them like a long, blinking caterpillar against the night. Perched in the passenger seat of the semi, Evie can see into passing cars: men and women, teenagers, children sleeping in car seats, or huddled together, their silhouettes illuminated by the truck’s headlights. She tries to guess about the people as they whiz by; are the man and woman in the front seat husband and wife, husband and lover, brother and sister? And the infant in the car seat, is it the product of a long-awaited birth? An unwanted pregnancy? A prayer answered? A band-aid for an ailing marriage? Is the baby a boy or a girl? Does it have its mother’s eyes and its father’s nose?

  Does the mother ever think about getting in her car one day and driving out of the infant’s life, even though she loves the baby very much, loves the husband, and the dog, loves it all?

  Evie turns from the window. Rupe will be tearing apart the state trying to find her. She pictures him, scrubbed and brown, his muscles tight under a green Burnes Construction T-shirt as he combs the parking lots of Furmano’s, St. Michael’s, even Corville General Hospital, looking for her station wagon. Maybe he’ll stop off at the rectory, talk to Father Finnegan. Will he try Brenda? Will he actually do that?

  Quinn will help Annalise with her homework. Math is always a struggle for her but he’ll be able to show her. What are they working on now? Positive numbers? Next week is plotting on the number line.

  “Evelyn?”

  Annalise. Small. Fragile. What is she doing now? And then, What am I doing? What in God’s name am I doing?

  “Evelyn?”

  How many hours from home? Home. Where’s home?

  “Evelyn!”

  Evie jerks. “What?”

  “You’re ten million miles from here.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You okay?”

  “I guess. Just…I don’t know.”

  “You want to talk about it? I’m a pretty good listener.”

  Evie faces Peggy, props herself against the passenger door. The blackness of the cab reminds her of a confessional. The words fall out, tumble together in her need to speak them before they vanish in a jumble of confusion. “I left the house today to go to the grocery store, just like I’ve been doing every week for the past twenty years. It’s what I do, you know: big shopping on Fridays, little pick-ups on Mondays and Wednesdays. Rupe says we save more money that way. Today was exactly the same until I got to the last section. That’s where the magazines are.” She works her hands over her face, settles her fingers on the rumpled edge of her shirt and starts picking at it. “I always stop at the magazine section, just to look, not buy, but today I saw a Travel magazine with a picture of Niagara Falls on the front. And that was it. I left the cart, walked out of the store, and started driving. I drove until I ran out of gas and that’s when I started walking. Then you found me.”

  “What’s the big deal with Niagara Falls?”

  “My mother.” Her voice crumbles. All the dreams they shared. Broken, sad, empty dreams. You’ll be a wonderful painter, Evelyn. A famous painter. “I was eighteen. We were on our way to visit Niagara on the Lake when she died. Appendicitis, they said.”

  “Damn.”

  “I didn’t have any relatives, no place to go, so I stayed in the town where she died.” Her voice drifts. “Next thing I know, I’m thirty-eight with a husband, two kids, and a wood-paneled station wagon.”

  “So, you’re running away.”

  “No. Maybe. Am I? Maybe I’m running to something.”

  “Niagara on the Lake?”

  “My life, Peggy. Maybe I’m running to my life, my real life.” The truth spills out after so many years, it pushes through the pinhole of discovery and bursts into the open like a newly birthed baby.

  “And the husband, the kids,” Peggy says, “the dog you probably got, what about them? Is it just ‘adios amigos’?”

  “I’ll destroy them if I stay.”

  “Spoken from one who’s never been left behind.”

  “I have no choice.” She leans forward, dares the other woman to understand. “I have no choice. I’m falling apart, a day at a time. I have to figure things out.”

  “And then what? You’ll send them a note saying it’s been nice? My old man did that, it doesn’t work.”

  Evie says nothing.

  “They’ll hate you for leaving.”

  Evie closes her eyes, tries to block out the pain of Peggy’s words. “They’d have hated me more if I’d stayed.”

  ***

  She’s been on the road three days. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. Peggy needs to make her deliveries and Evie needs time to think, come up with a plan. Niagara on the Lake is where she’s headed but once she gets there, then what? There’s only seventy-six dollars and thirty-two cents left from the hundred-dollar bill Rupe gave her for groceries. Her money is shrinking, spent on a toothbrush, comb, gum, bag of peppermint patties, and meals, though she keeps the latter to $2.99 dinner specials.

  Peggy loans her a few oversized T-shirts and a jean jacket to fight off the early morning frosts. But soon, she’ll be down to no money and no plan.

  They are driving through Lansing, Michigan. It is drizzling and Evie’s throat is sore, her head’s pounding and she’s shivering. Peggy pulls into a diner with a banner advertising “Home-cooking.” She knows everyone on this route, even what the specials are. This one’s called Jack’s and the specialty is always meatloaf and mashed potatoes with canned green beans. Evie and Peggy slide into one of the gray and silver booths and order coffee.

  As she scans the menu, trying to decide if she wants to splurge on a side dish of “homemade” applesauce, the bell above the door jingles and a family of four enters: mother father, son, and daughter. Evie looks up and her eyes freeze on the boy. He’s in his mid-teens, tall, dark with wavy hair and silver-blue eyes, looking so much like Quinn that she almost runs to the pay phone and punches out the numbers for home.

  “Evelyn?”

  Oh, God, the pain. She clutches her chest, her throat, opens her mouth, gasps.

  “Evelyn?” The boy turns to his mother and smiles, a bright, wide smile that rips into her. “Evelyn!” She closes her eyes, tight, sucks in air, slowly, until the pain subsides and the image fades. When she opens them, the boy is gone. “What is it?”

  “The boy who just walked in reminds me of my son.” She focuses on Peggy, afraid the Quinn look-alike will pop up in front of her and bring back the memories.

  “I can take you home,” Peggy says quietly.

  “I miss them.”

  “We can leave now, drive straight through. It should put us back around 11:00 tomorrow night. Nobody has to know what really happened. You’ll just say you ran out of gas and a man picked you up and then he forced you to stay with him. Say that he didn’t touch you, and you don’t remember what he looked like or what kind of car he drove. If they keep at it, make something up. All they’ll care about is that you’re safe, right? They’ll want you back so you can all pick up right where you left off: car pools, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, real stuff, not Jack’s. Just like before.”

  Evie wavers. She misses her children. She misses Rupe.

  “Listen to me, Evelyn. I can help you if you’re ready. Do you hear me? But you have to be prepared to walk away and never look back. Your past life is gone, erased. If you start thinking about your daughter and how pretty her hair looked with the sun shining on it, you’re screwed. Trust me, I know. The only h
ope you have is moving forward, right now, that’s it.”

  My past is gone.

  “It’s your choice.”

  My past is gone.

  “You ready?”

  Evie’s head moves and she’s not sure if she’s nodded or not. Maybe she shook her head. Or maybe not.

  “Okay.” Peggy scratches her chin, tilts her blonde-streaked head and settles her gaze on Evie’s hair. “We’ll lose the hair first. Chop it real short and dye it. What color do you want to be? A redhead? A blonde?”

  Evie touches her hair, fingers a few strands. She must have nodded. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll need some clothes, too. You can’t look like you’re on the run. And an identity. We’ll have to take care of that, too.”

  “An identity?”

  Peggy’s thin lips pull into a slow smile. “You leave that to me. I know people.”

  “But whose identity would I be taking? Are these real people or fictitious ones?”

  “They’re dead ones.”

  “Dead?”

  Peggy shrugs. “Yeah, dead, so what? It’s not like they’re going to get pissed at you or something. Trust me.”

  This is no longer a simple need to evaporate into the landscape; this is now something else, something almost sinister.

  “What? Why are you shaking your head? You want to stay Evelyn whatever your last name is? Huh? You want someone to walk up to you two years from now, or maybe three, and say ‘Hey, aren’t you the woman from wherever? The one who disappeared?’ Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ve got no choice. Evelyn’s dead. Right now. Move forward.” Evie stares. Peggy laughs. “It’s easy. Trust me.”

  “This identity thing, how much does it cost?”

  “Two thousand.”

  “Two thousand dollars? I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “I didn’t think you would. That’s okay. You can pay me back.”

  “I don’t even have a job.”

  “You will. You’ll have a whole new world of second chances and all you have to do is say yes, starting now.”

  Chapter 10

  Quinn peers out of the tiny window in the attic, watching Annalise ride her bike up and down the street. She is the only one who moves through the day with some semblance of normalcy. Maybe because they’ve gone out of their way to embellish the story of the sick relative Evie’s with, the saintly deed she’s performing through her presence. Maybe Annalise is relaxed because the lying is so good, so real.

  The police found the station wagon a few hours away, unlocked and out of gas, Quinn’s baseball mitt stuffed under the back seat, three of Annalise’s Barbie dolls in the trunk.

  The keys still in the ignition.

  Where is she? What is she thinking?

  This is day five of the disappearance, day five of no sleep, of worrying that possibility is shaping itself into reality. Quinn has no one to give him hope or stories. His father wanders through the house, Evie’s favorite blue sweater wrapped around his left arm, touching everything she’s touched—pale pink lipstick, toothbrush, White Shoulders perfume, vacuum cleaner, potato peeler—around and around, picking up, putting down. Quinn caught him in the hamper last night, face pressed to one of her T-shirts.

  She has to come back. The certainty Quinn felt that first night dwindles with the hours, turns to desperate hope as time stretches with no word and then the car with the keys in the ignition shows up, leaving him cold, panicked. What if someone has taken her, harmed her, killed her? Visions of his mother’s body, bloody and dismembered, pound against his brain, awake and half-sleep, until they are always there, ready to pounce, ready, ready, ready, to fill his mind with horror.

  He hates this, hates it, hates it. He wants normal back. Quinn lets the curtain fall into place and turns away. This is where he comes to feel close to her. His father avoids it as though he thinks this part of her life inconsequential. But Quinn knows better; he’s seen her face as she strokes the canvas, colors and shapes taking life beneath her brush, exploding in bursts of energy and relief. He knows that feeling.

  She’s a brilliant artist and he wonders why she’s never done more with it. Why has she settled for afternoon watercolor lessons to bratty kids and a two-for-one raffle spot at St. Michael’s alongside his father’s snow removal service? Her gift is with oils; anybody with half a brain can see that, though most don’t, maybe because she keeps the oils hidden in the attic.

  Quinn works with oils, has from the time he was five. Watercolors are like being underwater with your eyes open, his mother tells him. You miss the sharpness, the life, the contrast. It’s all muted, toned down, dull. But she’s done watercolor, painted it, taught it, sold it, and yet she thinks it useless.

  He walks to the chest where she keeps her oil paintings and opens it. Oil is what she does for herself, he guesses, in the night or during the day when no one is home. Quinn lifts the first painting, a field of sunflowers, their yellow faces drooping forward under the weight of their heads. This is old man Cunningham’s property. He started planting sunflowers for the birds ten years ago after his wife died, and now he has a field of flowers and birds coming from three counties. The next picture is a winter scene: trees, houses, mail boxes clumped with snow. That could be any winter in Pennsylvania. There are three more winter landscapes and then one done in spring with tulips and daffodils. Quinn pulls them out and lays them on the hardwood floor.

  He stops when he comes to a painting that is a collection of colored bottles, iridescent pinks, purples, yellows, and blues in round, oblong, and pyramid shapes. The hues are brilliant. Where did she get the bottles? They are rimmed with an exquisite line of gold. He sets that painting aside and reaches for the next one. Again, this is something he’s never seen before: an oriental vase done in black, mauve, and red, with a dragon stretching across the front, mouth blowing gigantic flames. The next two are unfamiliar as well: a nightscape of high-rise buildings with a single yellow glow emanating from one of the windows. He stares at the blotch of yellow, tries to make sense of it, but it is too foreign.

  Has she been creating from memory, from when she lived in Philadelphia? He wants to know, wants to ask her why she’s kept the pictures hidden, what it all means. Quinn removes every canvas from the huge chest, twenty or more, until he reaches the bottom. Tucked under a black felt swatch are eight composition notebooks, numbered and dated. He opens the first and sees his own scribble in the upper corner: Chemistry—Quinn Burnes. The first half of the notebook contains the periodic table and equations. He flips through the pages until he finds his mother’s handwriting. There, alongside an equation for table salt is the sentence, I am suffocating in my own life and all that was once familiar to me is foreign, and it is the familiar that is killing me.

  He stares at this sentence until the words are a blur in his brain and the truth pierces his soul. She is gone, not kidnapped, or victim to nature, man, or circumstance, but removed of her own volition. How long has she planned the event—days, weeks, years? She’s left them, even ten-year-old Annalise.

  They are the victims, not his mother. It is them, Rupe, Quinn, Annalise. He forces himself to read every word of each notebook, every damn, painful word, as numbness seeps through his body and he discovers the truth about Evie Burnes, or is it Evelyn now as she likes to refer to herself? I’m not Evie. I’ve always hated that name.

  His hands shake as he closes the last notebook and stares at the black and white cover. Such an innocent vehicle to harbor truths that rip lives apart, destroy any memories that might have been good. He can’t tell his father. It will be better to let him believe she is trying to get home, will continue trying and will never stop as long as there is breath in her. That, Rupe Burnes can live with, but knowing his wife walked away from a life she didn’t want, that will kill him.

  Quinn scours the entire attic looking for other signs of her plan to bolt, but there are none. The rest of the room is neat, organ
ized, filled with watercolors and family photos: a perfect cover for the ultimate deception. The real truth is in the chest. Pandora’s Box. Quinn gathers the notebooks and the high-rise painting with the yellow ball of light, and stuffs them in a garbage bag. He hurries down the stairs, stops in the kitchen to grab a pack of matches.

  He is dumping the notebooks into the metal trash bin when his father calls his name. “Quinn? What are you doing?”

  Quinn throws a match into the trash bin. “Just burning some stuff from my room.”

  “You know we’re not supposed to burn until after 7:00.” His father moves closer, peers inside the bin. “Notebooks?” He scratches the back of his head. “Sure are a lot of them.”

  The match has gone out and Rupe is trying to get a closer look. Quinn strikes three more matches and throws them into the bin. “It’s nothing, Dad. Just stupid stuff.”

  “Must be pretty serious stupid stuff if you’re burning it.”

  Quinn shrugs. “I was writing a book, or trying to write one but it didn’t work.”

  “I’d like to read it.”

  “No! I mean, no. It’s really bad.”

  “You’re a good writer.” Rupe pauses, stares at the small orange flame that is burning the edge of a notebook. “You take after your mother.”

  Quinn says nothing.

  “That your picture, too?” He points to the high-rise, yellow-dot picture.

  “Yeah.” Quinn tries to push it behind him.

  “You burning that, too?”

  “Yeah. It’s no good.”

  “Let me see.”

  There is no choice but to inch it out for his father’s inspection. Rupe scratches his jaw, rubs his cheek and stares at the painting. “What’s the yellow dot?”

  “A light.”

  “Hmmm. Why the hell would anybody want to live in one of those when you can have this?” He spreads his arms wide, sucks in a deep breath. “I know why you’re doing this. It’s your mom, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” Quinn’s heart pounds so loud he is sure his father can hear it.