Evvie Drake Starts Over(40)

Blood started to roar in her ears. She could feel her face flushing, all the way up to her hairline. She was hot, or maybe cold.

“She described to me how she was walking up to your car, and she saw this old blue suitcase with stickers on it.” He was trying to look Evvie in the eye, but she fixated on a spot a couple of feet in front of her toes. “She thought you packed it for the hospital. Because my mom doesn’t know that that suitcase was your mother’s. But I do.”

Andy knew this because one night, when they were having beers in her living room and Tim was working late, she’d told him all about Eileen Ashton, who had longed for Eveleth the city but not for Eveleth the daughter. Evvie had opened the hall closet and taken down the beat-up blue suitcase with the stickers that said PARIS and LONDON, stickers that her mother had bought in bookstores. She’d shown him that inside, she kept everything she had that Eileen had sent or left behind: her sunglasses, a cashmere scarf, some letters, a silver bracelet, three faded paperback novels. She’d tried to explain how much she’d missed her mom growing up, and how she sort of dreaded hearing from her now. Dreaded it, but couldn’t throw any of her things away.

   He went on. “So she doesn’t know that there’s not a chance that when you got that call from the ER, you took it down, and you emptied it out, and you packed it. My mom doesn’t know that there’s only one reason you would ever take that bag down out of the closet and put it in your car.” He paused. “But I do.”

“Andy.” Finally, she looked over at him.

“Were you leaving?” He waited. “Were you leaving him?” Again. “Were you leaving him that night? Evvie?”

Eveleth had spent the last seventeen months with a squib of dread strapped to her ribs, and now she knew what it felt like to have it explode inside her chest. She thought she might faint, might throw up, might cry, might even burst out laughing. But instead, she said, “I was leaving that night.”

“So you were packing the car,” he said.

“I had barely started,” she said, feeling like her own voice was coming from a recording, or like he’d pulled a string coming out of her back and the words weren’t hers, they were playing from a recorded loop. “But I wasn’t going to take very much.”

“And they called you.”

She nodded. And she told him. The car, the suitcase, the phone call, and the doctor with white hair who told her when she got there that her husband was already dead.

Andy had brought her home in his car that night—the same one that was parked in the driveway now with Rose’s sweater balled up on the backseat. Evvie had been shaking so hard that when they got to the house, he held her to his side to help her into the house, opening the door she hadn’t bothered to lock, taking her all the way up the narrow stairs, and laying her down on her bed, where she turned away from him onto her side and pulled her knees into her chest. Andy had turned on the little lamp on her bedside table, then went into her bathroom and ran cold water onto a washcloth. He had come out and sat next to her on the bed. “Okay,” he’d told her. “Here.” She’d turned and let him cool her down, like he did with the girls when they were sick. He had dug clothes out of a drawer and waited while she got dressed in the bathroom, and then they lay on her bed on top of the blankets, sleeping for a half-hour or an hour at a time, until it got light outside.

   He stayed at her house for thirteen days. Kell kept the girls and brought him clothes, and every day, someone would bring stew, bread, soup, casseroles. Andy would accept it all at the door and promise to give her their love. The school brought in substitutes for his classes. Evvie’s father called every day to hear again that she didn’t want him to come over, didn’t want to see anyone. Andy made Evvie take showers, he coaxed and prodded and bribed her to eat, and although he had a bed in her guest room, about half the nights he slept curled against her, because sometimes she could take Benadryl and doze off with an arm draped over her but not without one.

Tim’s parents took care of the funeral arrangements, and Andy brought Evvie. He had her charcoal gray wool dress cleaned, drove her to the church, and held her up again as she received mourners. Mourners who, like him, didn’t know she had been packing the car when the hospital called. Every five or ten minutes, he’d lean down by her ear and say, “You’re okay.” And whenever he did, a fresh jolt of pain went through her. She could have sworn that every time, her heart pumped acid straight to the tips of her fingers. This was the first time the words seemed to bounce around inside her skull: Monster, monster.

   He brought Evvie back home, and she went straight to bed. She mostly cried and slept and poked at bowls of soup and pieces of toast that he carried upstairs on a tray. After a while, he got her to watch a couple of movies with him—nothing too silly, nothing too sad, nothing with car accidents in it. “I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I’m so sorry, Ev. How can I help you?” And she’d pull the blankets back over her head. After a few days, she came downstairs to eat, and after a few more, they started talking about when she’d be ready to be by herself.

When he reemerged, she knew people asked about her everywhere he went, because he would pass her their best wishes. And she knew how they praised him even when he didn’t tell her, because she’d overheard it more than once: “You’re so good to her.” “She’s so lucky to have you.” “I don’t know what that girl would do without you, Andrew.” This still happened, from time to time, even with people who regularly saw Evvie herself. They wanted Andy to say how she really was. They wanted him to translate her reticence and explain her absences from places they expected her to be.