by T. Greenwood
“He doesn’t think . . . ?” I started softly, unable to say it, and fearing the worst. I didn’t know how to tell her about what he’d said, and how it felt when he looked at me. I felt like I’d given our secret away without speaking a single word. Ted’s suspicions were fine, were manageable, as long as they were based on his foolish assumptions. But if they were somehow grounded in the truth, in the reality of everything that was growing between us, then I knew we were no longer safe. Clearly, whatever had transpired between Eva and Ted last night was proof that we were at risk. It had been easy to dismiss his jealousy when it was based on his own vivid imagination, but if he were to actually have an inkling of what was going on between us, we were in serious danger.
“No, of course not,” she said, laughing. “It wouldn’t occur to him.”
“Why is that?” I asked, suddenly feeling defensive, as though this were somehow an insult to me: the idea that he would never dream that Eva had fallen in love with me.
“Because,” she said softly. “There’s no room in his brain for such thoughts. He’s too simple, and this is too complicated. And too beautiful,” she added. “Ted can only see the ugly things in life.”
“He can’t ever do this again,” I said firmly.“I swear, if he hurts you again, I’ll kill him.”
Ted had no control over Eva after he took off each morning. Unless he quit his job and stayed home to monitor her every move, he couldn’t keep her sequestered. He stopped riding with Frankie and took his own car to work, though, and he called to check in at all times of day. If he asked what she was doing and she told him she was doing laundry and watching the soaps, he’d ask her to recount the episode’s plot. If she said she was mending a pair of Johnny’s pants, torn when his pant leg got caught in his tire spokes, he’d demand to hear the sound of the electric sewing machine. When he began to grill the children about the days’ activities, Eva became paralyzed, terrified of being found out. He demanded the truth from Donna and Sally, from Johnny and even from Rose. There was no way we could leave the children with Theresa anymore, because Ted would threaten them all, even Rose, with the belt if they didn’t offer him exactly the proof that he needed.
And so we walked. As June bled into July, and our trip to Vermont (without Eva, without Eva) loomed, we met in the road at night and walked. I was terrified of leaving her alone with him, but powerless. We were leaving, and once again I had no say in the matter.
Though Eva had spent only two weeks at the cabin in Vermont with me the year before, the entire lake seemed haunted by her. Her absence was acute. Painful. As though she were dead instead of only distant. Her breath lingered in everything: in the mist that hovered over the lake in the morning, in the steam rising from my teakettle in the afternoon, in the smoke that rose up from the campfires we built at night.
I called her only three times that August, but I wrote her nearly every day. I knew that the mailman brought her mail at exactly one o’clock each afternoon, ensuring that she would be the only one to get the mail. It was risky; I knew this. If she forgot, if Ted stayed home “sick” one day, if the children got to the mailbox first. But there were so many things caught up inside of me, feelings that were swelling, and without Eva here, there was no release for them. I wasn’t sure how I could endure an entire month of this. I felt trapped. I felt like a prisoner in some sort of bucolic paradise. All the things I’d loved about being at the lake now felt stifling. Even the scent of grass was cloying. I was overwhelmed by my own nostalgia, embarrassed by it.
The only release I found was swimming. In the water, I could pretend that Eva was with me. That it was Eva that held me up, embraced me, instead of this still body of water. But as soon as I emerged from the lake, I felt her absence in the cold chill of my skin, in the sharp pebbles beneath my bare feet, in the hole she left in my chest.
I was alone without being alone. The girls were here, Theresa was here. But even with their voices and their presence, I felt like a solitary creature moving through a vast, empty expanse. The girls felt out of sorts without the Wilson girls as well, and I knew it made Theresa, who was trying so very hard, feel awful. As if she didn’t have enough to feel awful about as it was.
For most of the summer in Hollyville, Theresa had tried hard to keep her chin up. Being left at the altar, or quite nearly at the altar, had devastated but not destroyed her. Theresa, like Frankie, was surprisingly optimistic. I was amazed by her resilience, her hopefulness. Despite the fact that she was almost ten years younger than I was, there was something to be learned from her. Not that she didn’t have bad days, of course. There were days early in the summer when she hadn’t wanted to get out of bed (and once out of bed couldn’t get much more accomplished than making herself a bowl of cereal and plopping herself down on the couch with a stack of magazines for the rest of the day). But by July, she was rising early and putting on makeup, getting dressed, and making plans. She had talked about the apartment she and Lucy were going to share, how close it was to her favorite restaurant. But our trip to Vermont seemed to make her take a step backward, as though all that progress she’d made in mending her broken heart was for naught. At the lake, she seemed similarly haunted by all that she had lost. Somehow all this beauty and peace seemed like cruel reminders of what was gone. Joey said someday we’d get a little cabin by a lake, she lamented. Joey liked to fish. Joey could have swum all the way out to that island, I bet.
“Girls, why don’t you go show Theresa the blueberry patch,” I offered on one particularly solemn day. Every one of us had been moping around all morning. I missed Eva. The girls missed Eva’s girls. And Theresa missed Joe. It had been raining for a couple of days, which didn’t help matters, and we’d already put together every puzzle in the camp. The jigsawed lighthouses and English gardens covered all of the flat surfaces. I’d made cookies and cake, and we’d stuffed ourselves with both. We’d read all the books we’d brought and most of the ones on Gussy and Frank’s shelves. The idea of going to look for wild blueberries in the drizzle wasn’t very enticing, I knew, but I didn’t have much else left up my sleeve.
“Come on.” I tried again when greeted with nothing but pouts. “I’ll make a pie if we find enough.”
We all walked together along the dirt road that circled the lake. The girls put on their galoshes and stomped in the mud puddles. Theresa and I walked together behind them, Theresa dragging her feet like a little girl. All of us like some sort of sad funeral procession.
The old logging road near the boat access area had a chain strung across it, which, of course, made Francesca pause. “I think it’s private property,” she said.
“Do you see any ‘No Trespassing’ signs?” I asked, irritated. It was drizzling a bit harder now, and I could feel my hair responding with its willful curls. Usually, I fought them with orange juice cans and bobby pins, taming them out into something resembling a normal head of hair, but since we’d gotten to camp I’d stopped fighting the frizz. Without Eva here, I didn’t have anyone to impress.
Chessy shook her head and looked at her feet.
I lifted the chain so that everyone could scurry under, and we walked through the thickening foliage toward the spot where I knew we would find a field of blueberry bushes.
Eva and I had come here last summer.
And so there she was again: ghostly Eva in every drop of rain. The weak spittle had formed into distinct drops now, and the sky was swollen above us. When Eva and I had come, it had been raining too. We’d left the children at the camp, as we were able to do, during Rose’s nap. We had given Donna and Francesca instructions for what to do when she awoke. We told them they would each earn a dollar for their efforts as well as points toward their Babysitting badge. We also promised blueberry muffins when we returned. In the middle of this same field of wild blueberries, we had found a soft patch of grass and lay together. We undressed each other under the threatening sky, touched each other gingerly, then eagerly, even when the air rumbled with impatience, with promi
sed violence. And we held each other after, as the rain came, as it pounded down upon us, as it struck us. We had returned to the camp that afternoon, soaking wet and laughing. Holding a red bowl filled with tart blueberries. And we’d made muffins that tasted better than nearly anything I’d tasted in my whole life.
But today, Eva was only the puffs of breath that escaped our mouths. It was cold and wet, and when we finally got to the field, the girls threw up their hands, exasperated.
“They’re gone!” Mouse said, running through the bushes, which seemed to have been stripped bare. By bears, I was certain. Not a single berry clung to the stems. The entire patch had been pillaged.
“Oh, shoot,” Theresa said, dejected.
Francesca was looking behind us still, probably for the owner of the land and his shotgun.
“It’s okay,” I said, though it wasn’t. This was a mother’s job, I thought sometimes. Making things okay when they were not. “We’ll make a pie anyway,” I insisted.“I think I saw a can of cherries in Gussy’s cupboard. You like cherry pie, right, Mouse?”
Mouse scowled at me. She’d grown so much in the last year, she’d nearly outgrown her name. At eight, she was almost as tall as her sister, who was nearly ten now. Her legs had stretched out from pudgy little girl limbs to the long, thin legs of a much older child.
“I promise,” I said. Because this is what mothers do. “It’ll be delicious.”
“But it’s not the same,” Chessy chimed in, apparently having given up her paranoid fantasies of being arrested for trespassing.
“Nope,” I said. “But it will still be fine.”
But it was true; none of this was the same. We had been going to the lake since Mouse was a baby. But it was almost as if having Eva and her daughters there had somehow ruined it for us. Eva was in the steam that rose from the ceramic blackbird I put in the cherry pie. In the moonlight that shone on the water that night. In the crackle of the fire we had to build because the rain did not stop, and autumn was letting us know, here in this little corner of northeastern Vermont, that summer wouldn’t be around much longer. I’d never been so happy for fall’s arrival.
Eva kept every postcard. She showed me the collection later: every silly missive I scratched that summer. It was embarrassing seeing my longing on display like this: the inarticulate musings of someone so desperate and aching. Alone, each postcard was just a jigsaw piece, innocuous and elusive, but together they formed the picture of a woman so in love, of me, so in love, even the tips of my hair ached for Eva. I thought this would change as soon as I was able to see her again, able to be with her again, but I was wrong.
The letters Eva had sent back to me were equally fragmented. I imagined her writing them at night after Ted fell asleep, slipping them into the mailbox after he had gone to work. But while my words had been careless, meant only to relay how very much I missed her, Eva’s were crafted carefully, cautiously. Her handwriting was whispery, just shivers across the paper, and beyond the words there was something I recognized as fear. I knew she was terrified that Ted might find the letters, because her words just touched the surface. Her sentences skipped like stones across the lake. The depth of those waters never touched. It was too dangerous. I worried about the things the letters didn’t say.
We returned to Hollyville the Friday before Labor Day weekend, and as Frankie pulled the Studebaker into the driveway, it took every ounce of my willpower not to throw open the door and go running across the street to her. We had dropped Theresa off in the city, said our good-byes. The girls were sad to see her go, and even I was feeling melancholy. But as the Wilsons’ house came into sight, my mood lifted like a rocket, and I could barely contain myself. Neither could the girls.
“Ah, go ahead,” Frankie said as I offered to help unload the car. “Go say hello.”
Frankie, poor oblivious Frankie, thought I’d only missed my friend: the silly chitchat, the companionship. His stupid trust killed me sometimes, made me feel like a monster.
I should have known something was amiss when I saw that the window boxes were empty. In the summer Eva usually filled them with brightly colored annuals: petunias and pansies and geraniums. In the fall, she replaced them with autumn-colored mums: red and orange and gold. She said that otherwise she’d never be able to endure the endless hours spent in that kitchen; the flowers outside her window were the beauty she needed to make her domestic life endurable.
The girls followed behind me as I crossed the street, giggling and anxious. But while I was eager to see her, I also felt rage bubbling inside of me. If Ted had so much as touched her while we were gone, I didn’t know what I would do.
We stepped onto the porch, and I took several deep breaths and straightened my skirt before ringing the doorbell. Donna answered the Wilsons’ door and threw herself into Chessy’s arms. The two girls clung to each other. Sally was not far behind, and she simply grabbed Mouse’s hand and pulled her across the threshold. I could see Johnny in the living room, parked in front of the television, and Rose was strapped into her high chair, eating Cheerios.
“Where’s your mama?” I asked, forcing myself to smile when Donna and Chessy finally pulled away from each other.
Donna shrugged. “Upstairs, I think. She’s sick.”
“Sick?” I said. I thought first of Ted, of what he could possibly have done to her, but a little part of me hoped it was only because of my absence, that maybe she had missed me so much it had made her physically ill: that like some nineteenth-century heroine, she’d taken to bed, waiting for me to come back and revive her.
“May I go upstairs?” I asked Donna.
Donna nodded, and she and Chessy disappeared down the hall. “Hi, Johnny !” I said into the living room, and he nodded and waved without looking away from the TV.
The house was dark and musty. The bit of sun that streamed through the window at the top of the stairs illuminated a thick column of dust. The door to Ted and Eva’s bedroom was closed. My throat grew thick with fearful anticipation, with pointed longing, as I knocked gently on the door.
“Billie?” she asked, her voice swimming to me like something shimmering under water, like a minnow.
I opened the door slowly, feeling my muscles pulling my lips into a smile, the joy of finally being able to see her again causing a thousand involuntary responses in my body. She was curled up in an overstuffed chair by the window, in her slip. There were books all over the floor. Her hair was down, longer than it had been when we left. Her skin was pale, and her face, without makeup, was both beautiful and unfamiliar; her eyes somehow darker, her features more fragile.
I closed the door behind me and went to her. She stood up and tucked herself into my arms, like a child, I thought.
“What has he done to you?” I asked, furiously kissing the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her. Breathing her.
She shook her head, no, no. Nothing. Nothing. Thank God. I felt the tension I’d been carrying in my shoulders suddenly release. I pulled her away from me. Her entire body was shaking under my fingertips.
“I’m sick,” she said.
“I know, Donna told me. What can I get you? Some tea? Some toast? And why aren’t you in bed?” I scolded. But she resisted as I started to steer her toward her unmade bed.
“Billie,” she said, firmly. “While you were gone, I found something.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. But she was looking at me intently, her eyes fixed on me, on my own eyes.
“The doctor says I need to have my breasts removed. That there’s cancer.”
I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Here it was: the word, the single word that had been missing from all of those careful epistles. The sinking stone in that white lake.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, as if mere defiance and denial could make this untrue. “You need to get a second opinion.”
“I have. I’ve seen three doctors, and they all say it’s the only way. To get rid of the cancer before it can spre
ad.”
I sat down on the bed, my body so heavy my legs couldn’t support it anymore. But I knew that I couldn’t let on that I was terrified, that fear was blooming red, the missing mums blossoming in my chest, in my throat.
“Maybe they’re wrong,” I said.
She sat down next to me on the bed. She closed her eyes, tears escaping through her closed eyelids. She slipped the strap of her slip down over her shoulder, revealing her right breast. She reached for my hand and pulled it to her flesh. Her skin was hot in my hands, and I wondered if this is what cancer felt like, like a child’s feverish cheek. She guided my hand across her breast, searching, and then she stopped and pressed my fingers with hers.
It felt like one of the children’s marbles. And for a single, deluded moment, I pictured it, a marbled, amber cat’s-eye, somehow lost beneath her skin. Misplaced. That I needed only to pluck it from her, return it to the purple velvet Crown Royal bag where Johnny kept his marble collection.
Our fingers lingered there.
“It’s just the one?” I asked softly, trying to call up my rational, logical self. “If it’s just the one, then why are they operating on both sides?”
“It can spread,” she said. “But if they take both of them, then there is nowhere for it to go. It’s preventative, I guess.” She lowered her hand, but I left mine there, touching that searing skin. And then I pulled her in close to me, kissing her, trying so hard to comfort her. To make this okay.
“What does Ted say?” I asked, his name bitter in my mouth.
She shook her head. “He won’t talk about it. He doesn’t say a word. He’s drinking more, of course. One night he called the doctor, the first one I saw, and called him a butcher. Told him he wasn’t going to let him mutilate his wife.”
I laughed out loud, not because of the humor but because it was so ridiculously ironic. This man, this monster who had struck his own wife, calling a doctor, a healer, a butcher.