Reverend Thurston and his lies are no different. They will spread and leach into the daily lives of his parishioners, until one day they’ll burst out, fragmenting Suzie, her life, her world, and leaving too many scars.
“I told you he was a bastard.” Brenda pulls out a cigarette, lights it. She puffs hard three times, then blows out a long, thin line of smoke. “You should tell him to shove those pies up his self-righteous, hypocritical ass.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
Brenda takes another puff, lets out a tight laugh. “What do you think, Evie? What do you really think is going to happen to the good Reverend Thurston?”
“Well, I imagine the bishop will get involved—”
“Shit. The bishop’s not going to get involved. Nobody’s going to get involved because it’s already been taken care of, nice and neat, all wrapped up with a bow.”
Evie stares at her friend, waits. Brenda hates Corville, has talked about leaving since the first day Evie saw her twenty years ago, cashiering at Furmano’s. There is always a plan, a grand scheme to walk away from Corville, no, run, so fast that the town will worry some tragic event has befallen her. They’ll miss me when I’m gone, Evie. They’ll all miss me, especially that goddamn Les Burnes.
And there it is, there it always is, right in the middle of Brenda’s world. Les Burnes.
“Your father-in-law’s right at the head of it, him, along with Gus Gustofson, Patch McKinley, and Bud Webber. They fixed it good, just like they did with me.” She throws back her head, eyes Evie through half-closed lids. “The town will call her a whore, say she made up the whole thing to protect herself from her old man’s fist. And nobody’s gonna question it, well, at least not outright. But they’ll know. They always know, just like with me. The whole town knows it was Les Burnes’s baby I was carrying, ’course they never made a peep about it, with me being a minor and all.” Brenda straightens, flicks the ashes from her cigarette into the plastic orange ashtray. “That was a long time ago.” She shakes her head, squeezes her eyes shut, then blinks them open. “But they know, just like I bet they know he still sneaks out and comes to see me every now and again like he’s been doing for years. Does that make me a whore if I give in to the only man I ever loved?”
Evie dislikes Les Burnes, brother-in-law or not. Yes, he is handsome and some would say charming, but Evie sees past the forced smiles he flashes at all the women, beneath the layers of sugared compliments, to the man.
“Evie?”
“No, it doesn’t.” She leans over, rests a hand on Brenda’s arm. “But he’s married, with three little girls.”
Brenda laughs. “I know.” Two small words, strung together, filled with pain. “I know.” This time they are whispered, dragged out in grief. “It should have been me, Evie.” She shakes her head and tears fill her blue eyes. “Me.” Brenda clasps her hands to her full chest, the cigarette long forgotten in the ashtray. Her voice grows small, smaller still. “I never should have agreed to the abortion. I should have told old man Burnes I wouldn’t do it, that Les had to marry me. I should have done that.” Her eyes glaze over, bright and glittering with tears and too many memories. “He’d be my husband.” There is a long pause. “They’d be my children.” She sniffs, swipes at her eyes. “Instead, I get a botched-up uterus and a reputation. How’s that for a trade-off, huh?”
“Oh, Brenda—”
“I know, I know. Get over it, right? It happened twenty years ago. But I can’t.” She stretches her hands wide on the table, fingers splayed, long red nails pressing into the Formica. “He loves me. He does. But he won’t leave her, says he can’t do that to the children.”
“But he can string you along for twenty years with cheap jewelry and raunchy underwear?”
“He loves me.”
This is the conversation they have once a month, have had since the night Les and Wanda left for their honeymoon in the Poconos. Brenda has weathered it all; rationalized the marriage, Wanda was a Gustofson, it was strictly business, the babies, first one, it was duty, then two, Les and Brenda were on the outs, then three, it was a mistake. She’s stood by and suffered the new house they built on Tuttle Road, the one the whole town oohed and aahed over with its fancy front porch and white-picket fence. Year after year, Brenda drives by in whatever dilapidated car she can afford at the time while Wanda Burnes’s late-model vehicle sits in their three-car garage.
“It’s that bitch who’s causing all the problems.” The words slide out of Brenda’s mouth in a hiss.
“Wanda? Why? What happened?”
Brenda shrugs, her gaze fixed on her red nails. “Just a little blip, that’s all, no big deal.”
“How little?”
“Les said it’s over. Done.” She lets out a small laugh. “You know how many times he’s said that before? Huh? Dozens. More than that even.”
Evie keeps her voice low. “Why don’t you leave? Go away to your aunt’s in Pittsburgh, start fresh. You could, you know.”
“And then what? Transfer twenty years at Furmano’s and my weekend stint cutting hair at Peggy Lee’s Style Station to J.C. Penney’s?”
“It would be a start.”
“I can’t leave Betty.”
“Your mother is fine. She’d be in better health than you if she’d give up the vodka.”
“There’d be nobody to take her to her doctor.”
“She knows everybody in this town. Somebody would take her. I would if she needed me to.”
“No.” Brenda shakes her head. “She’d drive you crazy. Hell, she drives me crazy and she’s my own blood.”
“Brenda—”
“I can’t leave. I can’t.”
Damn Les Burnes. Damn him straight to hell.
“You’re lucky, you know that?” Brenda’s full lips turn up at the corners, sad, wistful. “You could’ve turned out like me, being pregnant and all, but Rupe married you, made you a Burnes. You’re one of them. You belong, don’t you see that? Don’t you see how lucky you are?”
This time it is Evie who forces a smile, her skin stretching to near breaking. She nods once and then again before she lets the words slip out. “Yes. I’m lucky.”
Chapter 5
Quinn wishes he could take back the last eight minutes of his life, rewind it quickly, reel by reel, to the part where he flies up the stairs and almost crashes into his parents’ bedroom door, almost witnesses their anger at one another. He’d been in such a hurry to get to the attic and grab his sketch pad that he didn’t hear their voices until he was a split second from the door. But he stopped, jerked back like a dog on a short leash the instant he recognized his father’s deep voice pouring through the walls.
It was then that he wanted to disappear, retrace his steps one by one, careful not to hit the squeaky step on his way down. He started to back away.
“She’s nothing but a liar, a no-good liar and a whore.” Rupe Burnes’s words shake with anger. Quinn pictures his red face turning darker, the veins in his thick neck bulging.
“She’s my friend.” This from his mother, quiet, firm.
“You’re done with her. Goddammit, I mean it, Evie.”
“I believe what she said.”
She is so calm. How can she be so calm when his father is so angry?
“Don’t even say a thing like that. It’s blasphemy. He’s a good man; we’ve known him for years.”
“And the Singletons? Haven’t you known Harry and Rita for years? Known Suzie since she was knee-high?”
That seems to stump Rupe but he recovers fast. “I don’t believe a word that bitch told you. She’s been lying for years, damn whore.”
“If she is, then your brother made her that way.”
The slap of flesh on flesh fills the air, so loud it bursts through the walls, reverberates from ceiling to floor. Evie has never hit her children, never raised a hand to either of them, and she certainly has never touched their father that way. Physical contact between his parents is confined t
o the bedroom, because other than a quick peck on the cheek or Rupe’s rough hand on Evie’s shoulder, there is no contact. Quinn prefers it this way, not wanting to think of his parents as anything other than a mother and father.
But this slap, the harshness of it, from his mother? It is hard to picture, which compounds the belief that he does not want to know what happens in their bedroom. Then his father speaks.
“Oh, God, forgive me, Evie. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Great animal sounds pouring out like a wounded bear. “I’d never hurt you. Never. Christ, I don’t know what came over me. Forgive me, Evie, forgive me.”
Over and over, the begging keeps on; Rupe’s tormented voice, ragged with misery and self-recrimination, pleads for absolution. Evie does not reply and it is this silence that marks the beginning of what Quinn will later think of as “the end.”
Quinn sneaks down the stairs and works his way out the back door, mindless of the dog and cat curled into one another, the perfect portrait he wanted to sketch minutes ago. He slumps against an oak tree, picking blades of grass and splitting them between his fingers, thinking of his mother, his father, and how he will have to face them at dinner, have to pretend he knows nothing, pretend normal, even if the side of his mother’s face is red and welted. Is it the left side? Or right, just below the mole? Quinn plays the sound over and over in his head, imagining the second Rupe’s hand connects to Evie’s soft skin, imagining the shock on his father’s face, the pain on his mother’s and then reverse, his father in pain, his mother shocked. Maybe she fell back a step, two steps, stumbled, though he heard no other sound, but maybe she had. Maybe there will be a bruise, bright blue and purple, seeping and spreading, shouting to the world that Rupe Burnes hit his wife.
But when she finally calls him to dinner, there is nothing more remarkable than a faint pink on her cheekbone—left side, which Quinn should have figured with his father being right-handed and all. It takes a good ten minutes before Quinn works up the nerve to look at either of his parents. He picks at the fried chicken leg on his plate, gnaws the meat on the bone. Annalise keeps the conversation going with her ridiculous chatter about Mrs. Pole’s cat, Sophie, who ended up in Mr. Landini’s garden and got tangled in his tomato cages, somehow. That story leads into the next one about Mrs. Swedenjim who hung her underwear, big white ones, on the clothesline in her backyard. Giggle, giggle.
No one else laughs. Rupe clears his throat, Evie says nothing and Quinn forces himself to look at them. Evie is chewing, mouth moving slowly up and down, a mindless rhythm, eyes fixed on her glass of water. The mark on her left cheek is faint, a splotch that could be attributed to a skin irritation, sleeping on a scratchy surface, even putting her makeup on wrong. Any one of these if you didn’t know the truth.
Rupe is the one who looks like he’s been beaten up. His head is bent like a dog that’s been kicked in the gut and left on the side of the road, eyes sunk in their sockets, hair sticking out, big shoulders slumped, jaw slack. Most nights, he is the one who laughs and teases Annalise as she blabs about one thing or another, but not tonight. Rupe picks at a lone chicken thigh, which in itself would attest to a problem since he usually piles three or four on his plate.
If only Quinn hadn’t heard, then he too could be lost in his own world, chomping down chicken and rice, his brain already past dinner, past the kitchen and the clatter of dishes and the silence of his parents, and out in the backyard, setting up canvas and paints as he waits for the sunset. If he hadn’t heard, he would be thinking of the heat of summer on his hands, beating into his fingers as he strokes the canvas with brilliant oranges and yellows, reddish pinks and magentas. He has a gift, his mother says, a natural gift, of color and sensation, a melding of the two that enables him to translate what he sees and feels onto canvas.
Perception, she calls it. He has perception, a sense of knowing before it happens, a feel that it will happen even before he knows what “it” is.
A gift that right now feels like a curse.
He doesn’t want to listen to the jumble of tiny sensations shooting from his eyes, his ears, his heart, his fingers, the sensations that transform themselves into warning signals, imminent prophecies that say, Nothing will ever be the same again.
He doesn’t want to listen to any of it, and so he closes his mouth and his mind, and tries to pretend nothing has happened.
***
She is here again, in the corner of the attic, quiet, alone, at peace. This is her real world now, the place she seeks out to live, to dream, to breathe, to suck in air that isn’t cloying with guilt and duty. The other, the moving through daily routines, chosen years ago, no, lifetimes ago, is nothing more than exercise, a warm-up for the real space of the night when she can slip out of bed and creep up the attic steps to her own world. There are more than just canvas and paints here: there is acceptance and solitude and freedom.
Evie moves to the tiny window, slides back the sheer curtain and peers outside into the black night. There is a universe of possibilities beyond this place, cities and buildings and people who travel alone, who sleep in the nude, who chant or pray to a different God, who do not eat fresh-baked bread with each meal, who do not expect their spouses to paint pictures for the church bazaar, who do not shun friends who tell the truth.
There is a world of possibilities out there and with each passing night, Evie wonders about it, imagines at first plunking herself into situations or circumstances, and then watching as though in a movie, as she maneuvers her way out or around or into an event. Lately, she’s been spending her nights captivated by these imaginings, each situation more compelling than the last, a vortex of sensation beckoning her forth, deeper, deeper. On these nights, the paint brushes lay dry and slack in their holders, the canvas empty, the paints unopened. The passion to pull her into another life is heavy and powerful and transforms itself into another medium: pen and paper.
It starts the night Rupe slaps her and forbids her to see Brenda again. The apologies go on and on for weeks, the sad, pathetic embraces, the awkward gifts of candy and carnations, the phone calls in the middle of the day. But Evie is different now, hollowed out somehow, and no amount of wooing or sweet words can bring the old Evie back. Rupe thinks she needs time and stays on his side of the bed most nights, offering an occasional hand on her thigh to gauge her interest or let her know his, and sometimes she accepts out of loneliness, or need, or pity, hard to tell which, and sometimes, she just turns away, shuts him out, shuts herself out, shuts the world out.
She finds one of Quinn’s old science notebooks tucked in a box in the corner of the attic and begins writing on the page next to his cramped symbols for the periodic table. The words come, flowing from anger over an unknown father, hate for a town that judges its own so harshly, love for a daughter’s sweet innocence, longing for a dead mother, desperation over a life that is suddenly unrecognizable. The emotions churn, pour themselves out on the pages, night after night until she’s filled the entire notebook and then another and yet another.
She keeps the notebooks hidden in the bottom of an old oak chest Rupe has given her for storing extra canvas and the drawing books she uses with beginner students. No one will find them there, not that she’s deliberately hiding them, but in a way she is. There’s too much truth in these notebooks, truth that can hurt those she loves, force them to question what she’s written. What is this? Rupe will ask, his blue eyes pained, disbelieving. And why did you say you sometimes feel you don’t belong in Corville? Why, Evie? You’re one of us, don’t you know that? You belong here, here with us. With me. Don’t you know that?
But Rupe is the one who doesn’t know.
Baking apple pies for the church bazaar, even if they sell the most raffle tickets, even more than Rupe’s ninety-day snow removal certificates, isn’t enough. Bleaching mud-crusted socks to snowy white and cooking a juicy pot roast that boasts no leftovers isn’t enough. Scrubbing toilets until the rust disappears, disinfecting wastebaskets, starching Rupe’s 100
percent cotton shirts until they are board-stiff, isn’t enough. None of it is. Not the plump Roma tomatoes that fill the vine, more plentiful than any of the neighbors, or the zinnias that burst with such color that most every passerby stops to comment. It isn’t enough anymore, probably never has been.
Evie can’t blame it on Rupe. He’s tried to make her happy, given her everything he thinks she wants. She fingers the heart-shaped pendant dangling from the silver chain around her neck. It is the gift he gave her on her thirty-eighth birthday. Quinn and Annalise’s initials are inscribed on one side, Rupe and Evie’s on the other. It is a proclamation of love, a public display of affection from a very private man. Evie feels an immense, abounding love for her husband as she recalls how he shouldered the teasing from his brothers, ignoring their jests about “old fools” and “love birds.”
And still, it isn’t enough.
The changes in her have nothing to do with Rupe. He is a wonderful man. It is her. Evie Elizabeth Burnes. She is the one who is ready to burst from the inside out. Spontaneous combustion; one day there will be a big, black hole in the front lawn and neighbors will say, Yep, that’s where Evie Burnes exploded, blew up like a space shuttle on takeoff.
Maybe she should talk to Doc McPherson, see if he thinks she might be going through the change. She won’t tell him about the combustion part, just the not sleeping and the restlessness. No, maybe just the not sleeping.
Wanda’s been taking pills since Sara Beth was born, says it helps relax her, not worry about cleaning up after the kids, the dogs, Les. But Evie knows it’s more than that. Wanda’s mother’s been doing the “cleaning up” twice a week for the past eight years. The pills have to do with Les almost leaving Wanda and moving in with Brenda three years ago. In the end, he scooted back to his wife and some said his old man is the one who orchestrated, or rather, demanded that by pulling tight on the family’s purse strings.
Maybe Evie just needs a little help getting over the rough spots, pushing past the disillusionment many women her age feel when they realize they aren’t going to do or be what they dreamed of at seventeen. Those idealistic hopes will never see light; never take hold anywhere, not even in their own imagination. Acknowledging this reality and accepting it aren’t the same. With acknowledgment comes other possibilities, to segue, massage, even manipulate facts to trick the mind. Yes, maybe, but—theories that permit the brain to continue to hope. But acceptance, that’s the killer, the final edict that declares defeat, engenders disappointment, and, inevitably, the ultimate demise.
What's Left of Her: a novella (The Betrayed Trilogy) Page 3
