She has left no will, no instructions. She was thirty years old.
She hadn’t expected to die. It’s okay, Denny. I am up here. It doesn’t matter what you do to my body. It isn’t me. I am all the way up here.
I will not feel it if you burn me. I will not suffocate if you bury me.
Relief, not panic. This is what she feels now. To have the anxiety
of the moment—the fight for another breath—the anxiety of the
days, the weeks, the months, the years, taken from her as gently as
her mother would have removed a splinter from her hand. It is a
pleasant feeling.
She is relieved not to feel bitter, rigid, locked into her routine, as she did before she died. Scared. Worried she had trapped herself into a life that was not meant for her (teaching, academia, a hot office
with a flushed-face eighteen-year-old sitting across from her, trying to talk about Persona). So often she wanted to take her students by the shoulders and shout: Do you have any idea how hard I worked to
get where I am? And you sit across from me, smugly thinking one day
you’ll be more successful?
She dulled the feeling with exercise and an early bedtime, waking
at 6 a.m., walking Scout at Squire Point before she taught for the day.
The night before she died, she dreamed of a man she had never
slept with but wanted to—she dreamed he cut the wedding ring off
her finger, slipped it into his own hand. What overt symbolism! She
was no genius, and certainly not in sleep.
Leave me alone.
Denny’s last words to her. She had come out into the night air,
heavy with smoke from the fireworks, and found him fumbling in his
pockets for the key to his studio. Come to bed, please. Denny, come
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to bed. Softly, at first. So pathetic-sounding were her pleas that she began to shout it—come to bed, come to bed, come to bed—until
her voice sounded ridiculous to her, a caricature of an angry woman.
She wanted to go to sleep. Was it such a crime? Was it so awful to ask her husband to come to bed at a reasonable hour, even this night,
New Year’s Eve? She imagined a baby wailing in a crib somewhere in
the house, and Denny out in his studio, drinking. Denny, come to
bed right now. I need you to come to bed.
Leave me alone.
She should never have started teaching. She should have pursued
a career in film as some dogged man would, assured of his own genius.
So many doppelgängers. Daily calls from people all over the
country to the police station, claiming to have seen her, even long
after her body has been found.
One lazy afternoon, in a low-ceilinged room on the third floor of
an abandoned office building, a group of men discuss various con-
spiracy theories about her death. There are six of them and they sit in the dark so as not to draw attention to themselves. A few cigarettes
glow in the dimness. They are the same men who searched for her.
The same men who found the rifle in the snow.
“Oh, well, I don’t think the missing boy is an alien,” says one man,
much older than the others. “I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at that.”
“We’ll take a vote.”
“Why would he be an alien?” The old man shifts uncomfortably
in his seat, the cigarette smoke burning his eyes.
“Okay, then,” says a man in a bowler hat. “Hands up for the the-
ory of the child prostitution ring.”
No one tells her to do anything, but she knows that what she is meant to do is float. To stop dipping back down to the surface of the earth.
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To stop caring. To float. She feels she could float all the way to the edge of the universe, if she wanted to.
Her body decomposes, and it is the opposite of being born. No
hips open to accommodate the passing through of her head; instead,
it’s a narrowing, a narrowing of all feeling, and of light. Her body
disintegrates; she blinks and she is no longer there. A single fragment of bone remains for a very long time, then it, too, is reabsorbed.
It’s okay, Denny. I am up here. I am up here. We did the best we
could. We loved each other so deeply at first. Think of that. Think of how hard we laughed. She feels the absence of her own eyes and her
own tears, and the absence of her own mouth and her own voice, and
the absence of her own arms and the absence of the warmth of
another person’s arms around her.
Again, the sensation of being pulled upward, as if by puppet strings.
But there is no one working her. It is the pull of the exosphere, which she gives in to, letting herself float up like a helium balloon. So, this is death, she thinks. This is my heart breaking. This is me leaving you.
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C h a p t e r T w e n t y - F o u r
Evelina
It wasn’t only Lewis who moved in, of course. She said that Scout
could live with them for what she called a trial period. She wasn’t
sure why she kept it vague—perhaps so that if Denny changed his
mind there could be an out. Perhaps so he wouldn’t break her chil-
dren’s hearts. Perhaps so that it was clear to Lewis that it was a trial period for the two of them, too. Bring your stuff over. Put the rest in storage until we get a bigger place. Do you want me to redecorate? I want you to have a say. I want you to feel like this is your home, too.
It was the end of September, the sky full of twirling leaves. Lewis
had put an envelope of hundred-dollar bills on the table this morn-
ing— October Rent and Other Stuff, it said, in his careful cursive. She studied the R, the S, the flourishes of the two lower-case f ’s. She was often surprised by a person’s handwriting—disappointed in its slop-piness, in the way it seemed to belie intelligence. Leo’s, for instance.
Chicken scratch, less legible than Jesse’s. Hard to take seriously. He held a pen as if he were frightened of it. Each letter differed in size.
When their relationship started to fall apart, she found herself more and more hostile to Leo’s penmanship, believing it to be an outward
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manifestation of his brutishness, lack of sophistication. Lewis’s script, however, was elegant, feminine.
Scout lay under the kitchen table. Evelina crouched and petted
the dog’s head. The window was open and she could hear the surf.
Maybe later they’d go for a walk on the beach. Jesse and Lewis were
growing closer. She watched Jesse absorb Lewis’s goodness like a
sponge. Whatever nervousness she had felt about Vera was dissipat-
ing. It all seemed like some distant dream.
She couldn’t tell if she was healing Jesse by not talking about what
had happened, or damaging him further. And now this romance.
This lust she felt for Lewis. Was it at the expense of her son? She
knew that a truly good person would ask themselves that difficult
question. But she couldn’t
quite bring herself to.
She picked up her drawing pencil and started to sketch the dog.
She hadn’t drawn an animal before—only people, and clothing. Maybe
she should become a fashion designer. She had an eye for it, despite
growing up in a place where people wore rubber boots all year round.
“Oh,” said Evelina, rubbing her ankle furiously. “Oh for heaven’s
sake.” She pinched the flea between her fingers and carried it to the toilet. She added flea shampoo to her grocery list.
“Fleas,” she said when Lewis got home from his shift and the boys
were back from school. She pointed at Scout and then at her ankle, in a mock angry voice. There it was: they were playing house together.
Here she was, in the role of angry wife.
“Okay,” Lewis said, though he was obviously enjoying himself,
too. “We’ll give him a bath. Jesse can help.”
Evelina patted the dog’s head. “You stay off my bed now,” she
said, wagging her finger at Scout. All of them—they were laughing.
——
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Her bedroom was cool in the morning now that it was fall, and she
turned to face Lewis. His skin was smooth, no moles or pimples or
weird tufts of hair. He squeezed her upper arms as though he were
working icing out of a pastry bag. He was a decade younger than
she was. She felt ashamed of this but couldn’t say exactly why. She
wanted to be his age, she supposed. The young, innocent one. She liked older people. She liked being the baby. Well, nothing was perfect.
Choose happiness. Love didn’t have to be thrilling.
“You’re my baby,” she said to Lewis.
He fiddled with her pyjama top and, finding her skin, put his
hand on the small of her back. His face was heavy with sleep and he
closed his eyes. She could smell the beer on his breath from the night before. He’d only had two, even though he didn’t have to work today,
and she made a mental note of it: when Leo started drinking, he
didn’t stop until there was no more alcohol around for miles.
“What do you think about,” Evelina said after a time, “when you
drink?”
Lewis opened his eyes and stretched his arms above his head,
groaning a little. “I think,” he said. “I think about my life. I think about what Denny’s doing. He sleeps on the floor. I think about that.”
“How is he going to manage?” said Evelina. “I mean, financially.”
“He’ll be okay. His doctor thinks the arthritis will get better.” Lewis looked at her. “He also—well—he inherited a shit ton of money when
his parents died.”
“Must be nice,” she said. She thought of her own family suddenly,
how her parents had moved away to be with her sister. She felt so
alone in the world, even with Lewis right beside her and her sons
asleep in their bedroom on this lazy Saturday morning. “What else do
you think about?” she said.
“My father,” said Lewis.
“What was he like?”
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“I don’t know,” he said. “He was a really difficult person, Evelina.
I don’t know how to sum him up in a few words.”
“Do you ever think you’d like to do something else? I mean, for
work.”
“Like what?” asked Lewis.
“Something less upsetting.”
“Oh,” said Lewis. “You’re worried about me?”
She nodded. To some extent, she was. His stories about his job
haunted her, especially when they involved children. She worried
she was too absorbent, that his stories would get into her bones and
become her own.
He’d told her once that if a child committed a crime by age twelve,
he could help that child turn things around. He could have a huge
impact on that child’s life. But if that child was fifteen? Forget about it.
She had thought of Jesse, of course. He was eleven now, ten when
it had happened. Why was fifteen the cut-off for redemption? The
point of no return?
“I like my job,” he said to her now. “I have the constitution for it.
I believe in people. I believe people are good.”
“I don’t know if I do,” she said, and they looked at each other. “I
believe my sons are good. I believe you and I are good.”
Already she could feel Lewis’s desire to tell her he loved her. It
wasn’t that she didn’t want to hear it. He was lovely. Kind to Jesse.
Gentle. But also no-nonsense, like the night he’d sat Jesse down and
asked him matter-of-factly if the kids he hung around with were good
people, who did good things, who wanted good things for their lives.
The best intentions in the world, Lewis said, can be so easily under-
mined by the decisions of others. It seemed to her that Jesse had a
reverence for Lewis. She noticed he was better behaved, more polite,
sweeter, now that Lewis was around. And so much nicer to Dmitri. It
was good for both of her boys to have a man around whom they
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could trust. Lewis had come to her a few nights ago, smiling and
shaking his head, and told her that he was going to take Jesse to the drugstore the next day for some antifungal cream. “He’s got a wicked
case of jock itch, Evelina,” he said, “and he’s too embarrassed to tell you. He says he had it earlier this year and cured it with Listerine!
Listen, don’t tell him you know.” Leo, of course, would have swatted
the back of Jesse’s head. Get your filthy hands out of your pants.
She wanted to love Lewis, to let herself fall into his arms and let
him say what he wanted to say. What was stopping her? She hoped,
desperately, that she didn’t still have feelings for Leo. She hoped she wasn’t taking up drawing as a weird way to be more like Holly.
“Listen,” Lewis said. “I’m going to go check on Denny. I’ll take
Jesse. He can walk Scout around while I talk to him.”
“Okay,” she said, her pulse quickening. It made her nervous to
think about Jesse and Denny in the same room, but of course she
couldn’t tell Lewis that. She wished Lewis would stop seeing Denny.
He seemed like the last real threat to their happiness.
She listened to the sound of Lewis and Jesse getting ready. She
wished they would come in and kiss her goodbye.
“Back in an hour,” he said to her from the doorway.
“Okay,” said Evelina. “We’ll probably be down at the beach.
Dmitri’s been asking to go.”
“Don’t freeze out there,” he said, and then he was gone.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. She could choose happiness. She didn’t have to be alone. Still, wasn’t there something weak about attaching herself to another man so quickly? She hung her
head and watched her stupid tears land on her stupid thighs, then
finished her cry in the shower where she could ignore it, where she
could pretend it was water on her face. But she wasn’t sated, even
after she’d shampooed and conditioned her hair. She stepped out of
the shower and into her housecoat, then slipped into Jesse and
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Dmitri’s bedroom. She lay on Dmitri’s bed and smelled the sweet
smell of her still-sleeping boy. Jesse’s side of the bedroom was a disaster. He had balled his sheets in the night, kicked off the comforter, thrown his clothing on the floor and then stepped on it, so that it
looked as though it had been dropped from a great height. For some
reason two or three pennies were always on the floor. Evelina had
convinced herself that the boys were being haunted by a ghost, who
left them pennies like breadcrumbs. She scooped the pennies into
her hand, slid them into her pocket. She kicked Jesse’s clothing
toward the laundry hamper then dropped it inside. She did not feel
like doing laundry today, even though Jesse’s sheets were crusty with filth. If she could get him to stop blowing his nose on his pillowcase this year, she would feel victorious.
She shut the door to the boys’ bedroom and slipped back into her
own. She took out her photo album—the one with pictures of
her and Leo. The one from before the boys were born. She found
herself in a waking dream—reliving her past. She saw it play out in
front of her, her nineteen-year-old self walking the docks toward the fishing boats, asking to speak with the captain, asking if she could
be a cook. That’s how it worked back then—you hung around, talked
to people, said you were seaworthy, and got hired.
The sound of seagulls and the heavy clunk of a crab trap being
offloaded. The slosh of a bucketful of octopus parts. The stench. Men who’d eat the head right off a herring. Raw shrimp and roe. A seal
bobbing its head in the water, waiting for her to throw him a fish.
It wasn’t Leo she missed; it was her old self. That old, dangerous
self. Her old self could never keep such a secret. Could she really live with Lewis, when he was the only one who didn’t know what had
happened that day at the lake?
——
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An hour passed and still Lewis and Jesse had not returned from
Denny’s house. She felt a vague sense of panic, or fear, but told herself no harm could come to them. Maybe they had stopped at the park.
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