Seven Days in June(66)

Eva had writing to do, so Shane had to go. They’d been in the process of saying goodbye for almost a full hour.

“Well,” he said. “That was the highlight of my week. The second highlight.”

“Audre liked you.” Eva was trying to manage her giddiness. She felt as if she were going to explode all over Seventh Avenue.

“And y’all are just magical together,” he gushed. “She’s incredible.”

“Thank you,” said Eva, beaming. “Friend.”

“Anytime. Friend.”

She lightly knocked her shoulder against his. He knocked her back.

“Well,” he said, cracking his knuckles, “I’m gonna go. Let you finish hexing me in book fifteen.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” started Eva hesitantly. “I need your opinion. How would you feel if Sebastian were white?”

“That’s one hell of a hex.”

“No, I’m serious. Cursed is going to be a movie. Which is so exciting. But the director wants to make Sebastian and Gia white. You know, mainstream appeal.”

Shane couldn’t help but laugh. “Me? White? Nah, stop playing.”

“Believe me, it’s not a joke,” she said, tucking a few escaped tendrils back into her topknot.

Seeing her resigned expression, Shane knew she was serious. “You can’t green-light that. Come on. You’ve got too much integrity for that bullshit.”

“I really just need the movie to be made.” With a little shrug, she leaned against the front gate. “Besides, the characters are mythological. They can be any race.”

Shane stared at Eva for several beats, trying to discern if she believed what she was saying. Or if she was talking herself into it.

“You know you can’t do that,” he said, dismissing the idea.

“I need this movie. It’ll afford me a break, so I can do other things.”

“Your job as an artist, a Black artist, is to tell the truth.”

“My job as a single-mom artist is to make money,” she pointed out. “I already know the truth.”

“Hmm,” mumbled Shane, unconvinced. “It sounds like you’re trying to talk yourself into the idea of whitewashing your characters. You can’t really want that. Cursed is who you are.”

“It’s just a story,” she said, with quiet finality.

Shane leaned against the gate next to her and took her hand in his. “Can I ask you something? Did you really go to Paris with your mom? And Santa Fe?”

“It was partly true,” she said, comforted by the warmth of his skin. “My mom dated an art buyer once. Way back when she had fancy boyfriends. He flew her around to auctions. They visited those museums together. Just not with me.”

For a while, they stood there, silent. Holding hands. Lost in their own thoughts, they stroked each other’s palms. Twisted their fingers together. It was the most natural thing. Then Shane made his bare arm parallel with Eva’s—so his G and her S lined up.

“How,” she started, “do you explain this to people?”

“I don’t.”

“That simple, huh?” Eva was awed.

“It’s ours,” he said simply. “Sacred.”

“I wish it were that easy for me,” she said. “I had to invent an entire mythology to explain it. If S was about a fictional character, I could live with it.”

Shane nodded. “Is that like what you did with your mom? Rewriting her history for Audre’s sake?”

Eva squeezed his hand and let go.

“There’s more than what you see,” she said softly. “Between me and Audre. We’ve been through a lot.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She backed away from him, shoulders slumping a bit. “My head’s worse when it rains. An intense rainstorm can land me in the hospital for a week. When Audre was little, these episodes really rattled her—and eventually, she developed a rain phobia. One drop, and she’d lose it. During Hurricane Sandy, she shrieked till she burst all the capillaries in her face. She’d become too hysterical to leave the house. I had to take her out of kindergarten for a while.”

There’s no way to explain this guilt, thought Eva. Knowing that your child’s tormented, and it’s all your fault.

“I went to a million doctors. Desperate to get better, to be normal. For her. Some kook even put me on methadone, which is illegal now. I mean, it’s an opioid. I was zonked. Cece basically moved in with us for a year.”

“God, Eva.”

“The point is, I do a lot of mothering from the bed. Ordering dinner, checking homework, braiding her hair—all from the bed. Physically, I’m limited. But I can tell stories. Spin scary stuff into magic. Storms terrify my baby? I tell her she’s sensitive to rain ’cause she’s a weather fairy, like the impundulu in South African mythology. She’s got a sociopath for a grandma? In our house, she’s an eccentric feminist shero.”

Feigning confidence she didn’t feel, she turned to face Shane. The naked grief in his face eviscerated her.

“So yeah, I stretch the truth. But I’m weaving a world to protect her from the real one.” She shrugged slightly. “Maybe it’s not just for Audre. Maybe I tweak my memories of Lizette so I can sleep better at night. I can’t help it. I know better, but a part of me still worships her.”