I get up and I walk and walk some more. My feet hurt. Revenge, revenge, revenge, why? I wish I could call Aunt Fay. She was a total badass, but she also loved her some Jesus. Turn the other cheek, kid, she’d say if she was walking with me, and then she’d pinch my butt and laugh. We’d drink some more, and I’d make her go dancing. I take off my heels when I reach the marble terrace of the Venetian. I made it. I half expect a sign that says, MIKE TYSON, THIS WAY, with an arrow, but there’s nothing. What am I even going to do to get even? I decide to comb through fake Venice floor by floor while I think. I go through a nightclub with a giant mural of a naked lady getting a massage (or else she’s about to get it on with her lovah), a champagne bar, a piano lounge with stalactite lights dripping from the ceiling, a sushi restaurant, and all the fancy shops. I go back to the nightclub, grab a drink, and watch the naked lady watching everyone dancing. I walk around a little more. My feet are pretty dirty by now, but I’m not putting those heels back on.
How am I going to find that room? How did I get here in the first place? I know. The front desk. Claire. I go search for the front desk. But how did I get here here? I got here here by not sleeping with Eamon even though he expected me to, even though everyone I would have known from a long time ago would have expected me to, too. Because I’m not the same. Everything spins and spins and spins and then, suddenly, the spinning stops. I’m Evie Austin Oden Austin, and I’m standing here barefoot in the middle of all this arched opulence, and there’s the front desk.
I wave at the guy working. I’m a little sad that he’s wearing a navy blazer and not a fake gondolier outfit. He asks if he can help me. “You know Claire at the Bellagio?” I don’t wait for him to answer. Of course, he knows Claire. “She was telling me about this press room where Mike Tyson is talking to reporters. Can you show me where that is?”
He cocks his head to the side. He looks a little bit like a pigeon. I can tell he’s deciding between being polite and professional and being real and fun. “What is on your head?” he asks.
I reach up and touch my hair. “That’s fake hair. It cost three dollars, and it looks awesome.”
He tilts his head again. “There’s nobody in the press room right now. It’s the middle of the night.”
Oh. Of course, it’s the middle of the night now. I’m suddenly tired, and not really all that drunk. I want to go home. I’m tired of bars, and I’m tired of Las Vegas, and I’m tired of the desert. My home could get obliterated by a hurricane at any moment, it’s true, but at least there’s real water there. There’s water everywhere at home, moving and rushing and sparkling and glimmering, and sometimes, on the sound, standing still in a shimmer of sunset, like a piece of silk I could run my hand over. Like I could wrap it around my shoulders and float up into the sky. And thinking of all that water reminds me that I really, really have to pee.
I ask the front-desk guy where the lobby bathroom is. When I’m all done and washing my hands, I look in the mirror. Oh my God. My hair looks like a long-haired Chihuahua climbed up there and passed out on my head. I rip off the fake hair and toss it in the trash. I slowly leave the Venetian, stopping to stare into the fake canals for a minute before heading back to the Bellagio. People scream and holler and bump and carry on. I snake my way around a cluster watching a fake pirate ship and walk up the Strip. I’m dizzy, but I don’t stop until I get to the fountains at the Bellagio. Those fountains are built on a fake lake in the middle of the desert. It should just be sand and rock, but it’s not. Instead, it’s dancing and swaying and soft pink-and-blue lights and the splish and spray of water shooting up and falling back into itself.
I call Charlotte. “I decided he can have his pigeons and his Kool-Aid. I’m not who I was anymore, either.”
“How do you feel?” Charlotte asks. She yawns.
I run my hand along the fountain’s fence. I grab on to a rail, lean back, and pretend I’m a showgirl on a stripper pole. “I feel very discombobulated.”
“Discombobulated is probably to be expected.”
The sky is starting to turn the faintest of pinks, and the fountains dance to something symphonic and classical. I don’t know what it is, but it makes me want to stop pretending to be a stripper and start pretending to be a ballerina. The water rushes up and hovers for a moment in midair, a tiny, crystallized instant of anti-gravity perfection before it falls back down into the lake. “Hatteras changes all the time, doesn’t it?” I ask. It’s true; it does. Hurricanes blow in new inlets. Houses wash out to sea. “And here, people just build lakes where there used to be sand. If they want Paris or Venice, they put it right up.” I start walking over to the veranda. Veranda is a lovely word. Veranda. “If I ever have a daughter, I’m naming her Veranda,” I say to Charlotte.
“When do you have to leave for the airport?”
Shit. I’d forgotten all about the airport. I take the phone away from my face and poke a button to check the time. “Not for another few hours.”
“What are you going to do next?”
“I don’t know.” What am I going to do? I sit down, close my eyes, and lean my head back against the cool marble of the veranda post. I can feel my blood pulsing through my ears, my face, behind my eyes. The music changes. Luck be a lady tonight. I don’t know what I’m going to do. All I know is that I’m Evie Austin Oden Austin, and I only have a few more hours before I can go home.
Thirteen
How to Stay, How to Go
— 2019 —
You realize now that bake sales are actually good-mom competitions. You didn’t realize this seven years ago; back then, when Emma Midgett asked you to donate baked goods to benefit your son’s preschool, you bought cheap Pillsbury cutouts and threw them in the oven at the last minute. Okay, you didn’t even buy Pillsbury, but the generic store brand, “Our Family.” What did you know? You placed them on the table piled with raspberry-filled lemon cupcakes, glazed orange poppy seed muffins, and something called caramel-pecan delights. Your fake-Pillsbury cutouts, not even iced, flatly declared your incompetence. You sat outside Starfish Academy on the side of Highway 12. It was 90 degrees, and the humidity hung like a curtain, the usual Banks breeze still and quiet. Lally Owens’s chocolate fudge peppermint brownies melted into their plastic bags. You’d just heard that your husband, Stephen, was having an affair. You wanted to melt, too.
Seven years later, you are wise. You sit in your son’s middle school parking lot, which is also the high school parking lot, and look across the street at Starfish Academy. You wonder how you ever could have been so stupid. For this sale, you’ve stayed up until three in the morning baking two dozen coconut-apricot macaroons. The Cape Hatteras School Festival of Fun writhes around you in a haze of color and heat and noise. You’re waiting for your boyfriend, Daniel, to bring you little placards to set up in front of the macaroons. You’ve been dating for a year now, and his face still astonishes you. A month ago you found out that Daniel was accepted to medical school in Wichita, Kansas, twenty-five hours away from home. He’s waitlisted at a school in Athens, Ohio, ten hours from home, and one in San Francisco, too many hours away to count. You went with him to visit the campus in Kansas. Neither of you have family in any of those places.
Two weeks ago, Daniel asked you and your son, Austin, to come with him. You and Daniel had been driving back down the island from Nags Head and had pulled over at Canadian Hole to watch the sunset. The Pamlico was slick calm, the sherbet colors of the setting sun blending from sky to water without a ripple.
“Stephen won’t be okay with Austin moving that far away,” you said.
“Probably not full-time,” Daniel said. Calm and rational, as always. “Would you guys consider splitting custody? Giving Austin summers here? Or maybe he could stay here for school and come to us for breaks and summers?”
When he said it like that, so logically, it sounded, if not easy, at least feasible. Doable. Possible. When he talked, it didn’t sound anything at all like how it felt in your body—how it mad
e your stomach tighten and your jaw clench.
You stared at a lone seagull gliding across the sound. “I’ve never been away from him for that long. I can’t understand how you think I can just leave him so easily.” This wasn’t fair of you to say, but you didn’t care.
“Can we please discuss this without the melodrama?” Daniel said. This wasn’t fair of him, and you didn’t answer.
Daniel said, “I didn’t say it would be easy, or that it wouldn’t be painful.” He shifted in his seat toward you, turning away from the sound. “What I’m saying is that we have to decide if we’re all moving toward a future together.”
You pictured yourself, Daniel, and Austin stepping onto an airplane together, Daniel lifting your luggage to the overhead bin. You pictured sending Austin onto an airplane, alone. “It’s just a lot.”
“We could be our own family,” he said. “I want that.”
You want it, too. You do. But you’re not sure how you can live in a flat, landlocked cornfield for eight years. You think you might suffocate. You’ve thought about it for two weeks. You’re supposed to give him your answer today.
Through the festival bustle, you pick out your son’s voice, a single thread in a quilt of noise, as he yells to his friends. Austin’s happier than you were at ten. When you were ten, you couldn’t wait to leave this island; you thought it was a desolate patch of sand that should’ve been obliterated in a hurricane long ago. You were not the popular kid. If your parents had said you were moving, you’d have been thrilled. But Austin loves it here, loves the wind and sand and waves, loves having his four grandparents and his aunts and uncles and cousins all within a fifteen-mile radius. And his father, your ex, just moved back last year. You watch as Austin navigates the crowd easily, his newly long legs sticking out from a pair of blue plaid shorts like a deer’s would, if deer wore blue plaid shorts. He waits in line at the dunking booth, lobbing a ball up and down in his hand, ready to sink his gym teacher. You know that to win the gold cup in a good-mom competition, you’d have to willingly and selflessly sacrifice your relationship with Daniel to stay where Austin is happy.
You close your eyes and absorb the sun, heat radiating into your marrow. You open them and watch the crowd, picking out everyone you know: Dr. Garcia and his daughter, Fiona, eating pink cotton candy; Emma Midgett and Lally Owens dressed up like clowns; your mother painting kids’ faces; two of Austin’s cousins on your ex’s side juggling inflatable bowling pins back and forth; two of your own cousins shouting that there are goldfish to win if you guess how many marbles are in a jar. Your fourth-grade teacher sells hot dogs; your childhood nemesis, Misty Garber, who to this day has puffed-up 1990s bangs, leans out of her makeshift booth to hand children sno-cones. You smile at Misty; she waves in return.
Three months ago, you, Emma, Lally, Misty, and the other members of the Hatteras Island Bridge Moms had joined hands on a frigidly windy day and walked across the new bridge connecting Hatteras to Bodie Island. Together, you’d met and lobbied for the replacement of the rickety old Bonner Bridge, which was thirty years past the age it should have been replaced. Every time you crossed it, you had an escape plan in mind in case it collapsed, had rehearsed how you’d turn to unbuckle Austin as the car plunged, then grab the umbrella with a sharp point you kept in the door pocket to break open a window underwater. You’d all written letters, campaigned, and even traveled to Raleigh to meet with state representatives to get that bridge built so your kids would be safe getting to the mainland. You’d done it together. That day on the new bridge, Emma’s cheeks pink from the cold, everyone’s hair wild with wind, you’d grinned at each other and chased your kids down the bright yellow center line of the tall, solid, beautiful new bridge. It was a special ceremony just for locals. There were speeches and cheering, and you, Emma, Lally, and Misty had passed a big thermos of hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps back and forth between you, the smooth liquid warming you from the inside out.
Today, you sit there in the sun, cocooned in your community, selling gingersnaps and thumbprint cookies to grocery store owners, librarians, park service rangers, all of whom you know by name. Your brother walks toward the table, his little girl, Lara, holding his hand. Nate grabs a macaroon and tosses five dollars at you, and Lara runs over to hug your legs. “Here’s your sunscreen,” Nate says, digging a tube out of his pocket. “Mom said you forgot it.”
You thank your brother, and he says his wife will be over soon to help with the bake sale table. Nate swings Lara up on his shoulders, and they join the crowd. You’re terrified of untwisting yourself from your family and your home. You imagine yourself dangling on the plains of Kansas, wafting in the wind, a lone strand, unconnected, Daniel the only person you know. You’re terrified Daniel will outgrow you, will become a doctor and want someone smarter and younger and prettier. You’re terrified to spend eight years of your life trapped in Kansas only to have Daniel leave. Only to have to leave him.
Before you left your ex-husband, you stayed. Seven years ago, at the Starfish Academy bake sale, you sat with your stomach roiling, plotting ways to leave that would hurt Stephen the most. Taking Austin in the middle of the night and slipping out, unheard, so Stephen awoke to an empty house. Stealing Stephen’s car and skidding out of the driveway, sand and gravel spinning beneath your tires. Or your favorite idea—waiting until Stephen’s birthday, then jumping out of a cake to tell him you were leaving. In this fantasy version, Stephen actually died from shock, and you didn’t have to deal with a divorce. You were so caught up in picturing Stephen’s dead face that you didn’t hear Austin, in real life, at the Starfish Academy bake sale, run over to you, crying. You didn’t notice him until he was right beside you, bleeding all over your shorts. It was his first nosebleed, and Austin cried and cried, waving his small hands in the air with a franticness you’d never seen. You couldn’t make the blood stop. He bled all over you, the stain on your shorts a dark burgundy, spreading into a shape resembling the state of Wisconsin.
You didn’t realize dogs could get nosebleeds until Walter stumbled over and bled on your kitchen floor last week. You picked him up, and he bled on your bare arm, ruby rivulets dripping to the linoleum. Daniel got a paper towel, and Walter bled into that. You held Walter on your lap as Daniel drove to the closest after-hours vet in Avon. The vet said Walter’s nosebleed was caused by a dental abscess. Walter got injected with antibiotics and prescribed pills for fourteen days, and you felt horribly guilty for not trying harder to brush his teeth. Walter peed on the vet and then, on the way home, peed on you. You and Daniel pulled into the Askins Creek BP station, and you went inside to get paper towels. As you mopped up the mess, Walter sneezed and started bleeding again. You and Daniel sat with Walter on the steps of the little gas station store, holding paper towels to his nose as he jerked his head back and forth trying to avoid you. Tourists stepped around you on their way in to buy gas, lighthouse shot glasses, and posters of the house from Nights in Rodanthe. Daniel placed his hand on your thigh, squeezed, and said, gently, “It might be time to think about putting Walter down.”
You reeled. “I’m not killing my dog,” you said, and held Walter to your chest where he bled on your white shirt, a stain shaped like Rhode Island that you couldn’t get out even though you treated it with hydrogen peroxide. You hated euphemisms for death, hated the phrase put down. You didn’t understand why Daniel wanted you to kill the last remaining link you had to your aunt, the person who helped raise you and understood you best of all. You couldn’t just kill Walter; couldn’t willingly sever that tie.
“I just think it’d be easier on you if you had some control over it,” Daniel said, taking Walter and blotting his grizzled, graying nose.
You thought of how Walter, back in his heyday, would’ve nipped the paper towel out of Daniel’s hand and shook it like he was trying to break its neck. He’s my family, you tried to explain. But you couldn’t get the words out right. All you could do was say again, “I can’t kill my dog.”<
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Seven years ago, back when Walter was a feisty biter, you’d sat on the floor of your parents’ living room with Austin, halfheartedly stacking brightly colored plastic blocks that Walter would then knock down, causing Austin to shriek with joy. Walter especially liked to bite your father, but he’d never bitten you or Austin, so you shot your dad an annoyed look when he suggested not letting Austin play with the dog. You’d stayed overnight at your parents’ inn after the bake sale and nosebleed day, after finding out about your husband’s affair. You told your dad you knew what you were doing, but even as you said it, you knew it was a lie. You didn’t know what you were doing at all. Your husband had just fucked another woman, and you still didn’t want to leave him and move home. You were hurt and angry, yes, but you were in love. You thought you could work it out. Somehow, an affair wasn’t a dealbreaker.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Evie,” your dad had said. He sat on a striped sofa and leaned forward toward you and Austin with his elbows on his knees. “Come home.”
You reminded your father that he took your mother back after her affair with Bob the lighthouse-mover. Your father looked at you with sad eyes.
“That was different,” was all he said.
“If by different you mean exactly the same.”
Your dad moved down to the floor. He stacked a blue plastic block on top of a yellow one. Austin added a red block, his movements precise. Your dad said, “It was different because we weren’t out to hurt one another. It just happened.”
You rolled your eyes. It just happened. “But you took her back.”
“I checked out first, Evie,” he said. “I admit that.”
Walter barked twice and ran around the room in a circle, then aimed his pointed Yorkie nose at the stack of blocks, crashing them to the floor in a hurricane of primary colors. Austin clapped and ran after Walter, then sat down and began stacking blocks again. Yellow. Red. Blue.
The Baddest Girl on the Planet Page 20