by T. Greenwood
We pulled apart quickly, carefully, and I went to Frankie, who had his arms wide open and waiting for me. I could smell beer on his breath when he kissed me, and I glanced toward the open door of the car, and sure enough, there were three empty cans on the driver’s side floor.
“I’ve missed you, Billie,” he said. “The house sure has been empty without you.”
I tried sometimes to imagine Frankie alone in that house. When I dreamed myself away from him, I couldn’t help but picture what we would leave behind. What would Frankie’s days be like without us? Would they be much different? I imagined him making his big breakfasts alone, sitting at the kitchen table and being able to read the newspaper without the children crawling over him, without me jabbering away in his ear. He would go off to work, as he always went off to work, and he would bring his junkyard, Dumpster treasures home without having my disapproval greeting him. He would settle in at night with his bottle of wine and his pork rinds, his McHale’s Navy on the TV. No one would turn away from him in his bed. No one would feign sleep instead of making love to him. Would his life really be worse without me? I was starting to think that we might be doing him a big favor. And Frankie was still young. Surely, he’d find a new girl: maybe a customer who came into the post office looking for an Eleanor Roosevelt stamp. Maybe he could find another project, another fixer-upper, someone more willing to be renovated.
I had made a pan of lasagna earlier in the day; it had been more of an effort to kill time, to busy my hands, than it had been to please Frankie. But nevertheless, it was Frankie’s favorite. He had given me his mother’s recipe when we were first married, and I had never deviated. As it heated up in the oven, he took the kids to the beach to swim, and Eva and I stayed behind to prepare the rest of supper, though there was little to do besides toss together a salad. And so we held each other. The feeling of her in my arms never ceased to ease my mind, my worries turning soft and malleable. It was easy to hope when she was holding me.
“Let me get you some tea or something?” I asked.
“Do you have a beer?”
Normally, Eva didn’t drink before nightfall, but this was vacation. I wasn’t going to make a stink about it. She had been stuck in the car with Frankie and the kids all day, after all.
“Let’s go sit out on the lawn,” she said.
Inside the safety of the camp, we could touch each other. We were free here, if only until the kids came back from swimming. I had no idea why she would want to relinquish this delicious freedom. My heart panged in my chest like a spoon in an empty stainless steel bowl.
“Okay,” I said, reaching for her hand, needing assurance that everything was okay. That nothing had changed while she was away. That she hadn’t changed her mind about us. I could feel myself perspiring, sweat rolling down my sides. “It is awfully hot in here.”
She smiled at me sadly, squeezed and then released my hand, and it felt as though the metal bowl had fallen to the floor. I could hear its clanging echo with every step as I followed her out the door to the yard.
I had already arranged our two chairs in the same spot on the lawn where we had sat together two years before. I had fussed over re-creating just about everything from that summer, which felt far away now.
She sat down in one chair, shielding her eyes from the sun and peering across the road and toward the lake where I could hear the sound of our children playing.
“You look good,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. “Healthy.” I nodded, wanting it to be true.
She studied my face, as if gauging my ability to handle what she was about to say. And then it came to me, in one horrific, clanging crash. Cancer. She was going to tell me they had found more cancer. I could feel my throat swelling in anticipation of the news. My whole body was trembling despite the oppressive heat. I reached for her arm.
“I’m pregnant,” Eva said softly, looking down at her hands.
“What?”
She nodded, tears slipping down her cheeks; she quickly whisked them away with the back of her hand and then jutted her chin forward.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
If Eva was pregnant, that meant that she and Ted had made love. That despite the scars and Ted’s aversion to them, despite his disgust, they had been intimate. That something in her had healed enough to let him inside her life again, inside her body again.
I shook my head, looked out at the lake so that I wouldn’t have to look at her. “When,” I said, the word slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“That night, the Fourth of July, after we were at your house. The night that he”—she was struggling to get the words out—“hurt me.”
I turned to look at her, willing her to lift her eyes to me. The night he had hit her? The night he had treated her like Johnny’s blow-up Bozo punching bag?
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the words. I didn’t want to picture myself inside that house, inside that madness, incapable of doing anything to help her.
“It was awful,” she said.
He had raped her. Like some masked man in an alleyway at night. He had taken Eva, my Eva, her incisions only barely healed, her body still wounded and tender, and forced himself into her. And worst of all was that he’d left this reminder behind. A baby. Oh, dear God, another baby.
“Eva,” I said. But I had no words to make this better. Nothing to make any of this better.
That night, Frankie, drunk on wine and desperate for my affections, grabbed at me, his clumsy hands squeezing and prodding and plying. His unshaven cheeks scratching my skin, his fingers demanding. Downstairs, Eva and the children slept. And under Frankie, I thought I might suffocate. That under the weight of him, I might as well be dead.
When he left the next morning, I refused to say good-bye. In my mind, he had become no different than Ted with his violence and need, his disregard, his selfish oblivion. As the children clung to him and pleaded with him to stay longer, I disappeared into the camp and busied myself so that I wouldn’t scream. As he drove down the road, waving ridiculously out the open window, and the kids ran after him, making clouds of dust in their wake, I held my breath. It was only after he was gone, after the smell of him had disappeared through the windows that I opened to release him, that I could finally let go of my anger.
The day was hot and sluggish. Because of her surgery, Eva did not want to swim. The children didn’t know what she had been through. She had prosthetics that she stuffed into her old bras, but a suit would have revealed the carefully constructed illusion. And so she sat alone at the shore and watched as I slipped into the cold embrace of the lake. I waved to her, splashing some water her way, but I wasn’t really feeling playful. I wasn’t feeling anything but a longing so deep it seemed to live inside my bones.
That night, outside the open window in the loft, the loons were keening. Eva stood in the darkness of the small room and slowly lifted her thin, cotton nightgown, revealing her body as a magician might, as if this were only a performance, as if I were only the audience to some terrifying sleight of hand. And so I sat on the edge of the bed captivated and horrified and watched, willing myself not to cry.
The fading bruises on the insides of her thighs were in the shape of Ted’s hands: inky silhouettes of his anger. The blue remains of his rage. These shadow hands traveled around her hips and waist, where still they gripped and demanded. They tugged and squeezed, they damaged. They took. Her buttocks were like bruised fruit. And around her neck, his hands had left the imprint of a noose.
These were new bruises.
“Why?” was all I could ask, though the question was as absurd as that which evoked it.
She shook her head.
She came to me then, not as a lover. Not in the way she had come to me and come to me these last two years. Not with the familiar combination of hunger and fear, but rather like a lost child.
“I can’t have this baby,” she said, shaking her head.
In my arms, she became smaller and smaller. Alice periscoping down until she was so small I worried she might just disappear.
Below us, the gunshot rumble of Mouse’s chest startled me. She had a cold, and I had rubbed menthol eucalyptus on her skin before she went to sleep. I could still smell it on my hands; it made my eyes burn.
Eva and I lay down together on the bed: the only bed we had ever been able to share in all this time. This blessed place with its worn sheets and shining moon, but tonight Ted lay with us. His fingerprints were everywhere. Her back was to me, and I pressed my body against hers until there was no space between us. I willed him away, but she winced each time I touched one of the places he had claimed.
I slowly, gently moved my hand to her stomach and cupped the soft, hot flesh I found there.
“This one will be ours,” I said.
“What?”
“This baby. It doesn’t belong to him. We made this. It belongs to us.”
She looked at me then for the first time since she arrived, really looked at me, and I saw something soften in her face. The tension that had been worrying lines into the space between her eyes. I could do this; I could make things better for her.
Mouse coughed again, and it sounded like thunder.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and extricated myself from the delicate web of arms and legs we had spun.
I slipped on my robe and went downstairs to Mouse. She was feverish, tossing and turning. “It’s okay, baby,” I said. “I’ll get some medicine.”
“What’s the matter, Mama?” Chessy asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.
“Shhh,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
After I had given Mouse some cough syrup and stroked her hair until her eyes closed, I returned to find Eva still awake. I slipped out of my robe, pressing my body against hers.
“Is she okay?” she whispered.
I nodded, and my lips found hers in the darkness. I had memorized them as I had memorized every part of her, so that when she was away from me I could summon her again. It was as though I knew even then that one day I would need this ability—to beckon her body from nothing but the impressions she left behind.
I felt as feverish, as delirious, as Mouse as I touched her. As I stroked her body with my fingertips, I was sick with both desire and fear, the bruises that patterned her skin like ink blotches reminding me with every touch of how dangerous all of this was. And her body responded with the same trembling combination of desire and terror.
Afterward, we lay naked and breathless and sweating on top of the sheets, both staring at the rafters above us. Listening as rain pattered against the roof like little feet.
We didn’t hear her until the door opened.
“Mama?” Chessy stood in the doorway, just a shadow.
We both froze, as though she wouldn’t be able to see us if we were still enough. But Eva quickly pulled a sheet across us both.
“Why don’t you have any clothes on?” Chessy asked.
“It was so hot,” I said. “We were just trying to cool off. You know how you and Mouse sometimes sleep in your panties when it’s hot?”
“But it’s raining,” Chessy said, putting her hand on her hip. “It’s not that hot.”
“It’s hotter upstairs. You know that,” I said, starting to feel less panicked and more irritated, though my heart still felt like a hot brick in my chest.
“Chessy,” Eva intoned; her voice was calm. “How would you like to take a hike up to the fire lookout tomorrow?”
Chessy loved hiking up Franklin Mountain to visit the fire warden, who lived in a cabin at the top of the mountain. He was so grateful for visitors, he kept an impressive reserve of candy for the children and allowed them to borrow his binoculars and climb to the top of the fire tower to enjoy the view.
“Okay,” she said, but she didn’t move.
“Why are you up?” I asked finally, hoping that whatever confusion or doubts she’d had about finding us naked would disappear if we just acted as though everything were normal.
“Mouse is really sick,” she said. “She wants you.”
Something about this made my heart clang with guilt.“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said. And then she was gone again.
Eva and I didn’t speak, as though not acknowledging what had just happened would somehow make it go away. I got up quietly; went downstairs and found the vaporizer, which I filled with water and more Vicks; and made sure the girls were asleep again before I went back upstairs where, remarkably, Eva had also fallen asleep.
But I couldn’t join them in their slumber. All night long, I shared Mouse’s fevered dreams: of Ted laying his hands on Eva again, of this baby growing (in spite of it all) inside her. And of Chessy, standing, scowling, in the doorway with her hands on her hips. Of what she’d seen and the fact that no matter how we explained it, no matter how oblivious she was, she wouldn’t ever forget.
We dreamed ourselves free.
Though now it was with a chair pressed up against the door, locked inside that room, a prison of our own making. Between those soft sheets, in the quiet cover of trees, in whispers and glances, we schemed and conspired. We allowed ourselves to think possible the impossible; like convicts, we carefully and meticulously plotted our escape.
Somehow, the urgency of this was heightened by Chessy finding us. As though it had happened to remind us that it was only a matter of time before we were found out. If not by one of the children, then by one of our husbands.
I knew I needed to talk to Gussy. Gussy would be instrumental in our plan, the only one capable of harboring us, we fugitives from our lives. But talking to Gussy would also mean confessing, sharing a secret I had kept hidden my entire life.
I love Eva. Three words, simple yet complicated enough to turn my life inside out.
I would tell Gussy and ask her to let us come back in the spring after the baby came. Then I would find work, maybe at the library in Quimby, or maybe in a doctor’s office in town. We would pay rent. We would grow a garden. We would save our money to buy a car, a house. The children would go to school in Quimby. Eva would make her art. And we would raise this baby together, this child made not from Ted’s rage but from our love. We would be a new kind of family.
I love Eva, I thought; each word by itself was a beautiful thing, but strung together they became dangerous. And every time I tried to imagine saying it aloud, I knew that nothing was as simple as it seemed. That we were children playing with matches, and it would only be a matter of time before everything caught on fire.
We had four days, four days before Frankie was due to come and get us, returning Eva to Ted, and me back to that other life. We needed to feign normalcy for a while longer. Eva and I would resume our lives in Hollyville, and then, once all of the pieces were in place, I would talk to Gussy, and we would make our escape.
After the children went to sleep that night, we walked hand in hand down to the water’s edge. There was a new moon, a thumbnail moon, and it was dark enough to conceal us.
“Come in with me,” I said. Eva had yet to go into the water, and I had seen the longing in her eyes each time the children and I went swimming.
I watched her silhouette as she undressed by the crabapple tree. And I wished that I could have a photograph of this: the branches like lace, her body bending over to remove her sandals. Her hair falling over one shoulder. That is something I would treasure, something I could keep. But those photographs didn’t (couldn’t) exist anywhere except in my imagination.
I went into the water and waited for her. She walked hesitantly into the lake, and then came to me. And we swam. Weightless, formless, fluid. As I touched all those damaged places, it felt like a new kind of baptism, the lake washing away all that pain.
Back at the camp, exhausted and naked, we pushed the chair under the doorknob again and slipped into bed. The rain came and beat down on the roof overhead, matching our breaths with its rhythmic pattern, and we fell into our res
pective dreams.
As the room began to fill with early morning light, I heard a loud bang, and in my delirium, I thought it was only thunder. I sat up, my heart thudding in my chest, and I looked to Eva, whose eyes had sprung open as well. It was a car door.
I stood up, frantically looking for my robe, as I heard the back door of the camp swing open followed by quick, heavy footsteps. I pulled back the curtains and saw the bright red Cadillac parked outside on the grass.
“Eva!” Ted bellowed.
Eva grabbed her nightgown from the floor and put it on quickly.
“Stay here,” I whispered.
“No,” she said. “He’ll kill you.”
But I didn’t care. In that moment, I would have done anything in the world to keep Ted away from her. I got out of bed and affixed my robe as I heard his heavy footsteps up the stairs. I went to the door and stared at the flimsy wooden chair. It had kept the children out, but as Ted’s fists pounded against the door, I knew it wouldn’t take much for its legs and rails and spindles to crumble. I’d been foolish to think it could keep us safe.
“Ted?” I said, trying not to tremble as I opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Where’s Eva?” he said. “She’s not here, is she?”
“Of course she’s here. We share this room. She’s still sleeping. Everyone is still sleeping.”
I could smell last night’s drink on his breath. Clearly he’d been out the night before and had, for whatever reason, gotten the bright idea to come check up on Eva. He must have driven straight from the bar, arriving with the dawn.
Eva came out of the room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Teddy? Is something wrong?”
Ted looked at Eva, astonished, as though he were seeing a ghost. He must have worked himself up into a tizzy, believing that I was somehow aiding and abetting his pregnant wife’s illicit love affair—that her visit to us in Vermont was somehow an elaborate conspiracy designed so that she could carry on with some other man. What a fool.