Evergreen (29 page)

“I was having a little fun,” she said. “You don’t like to have fun, do you?”

“This isn’t my idea of fun,” Hux said, looking down at his thumb, which was already swollen. “Where’s your coat? Your gloves? Your hat?”

Naamah pointed to the bar.

Hux took off his coat and put it on her. He zipped it up to her chin. Then he put his hat on her, his gloves. He was starting to feel less and less heroic.

The two of them walked through the forest, back the way Hux had come. Even though he offered her his snowshoes, Naamah didn’t take them, and yet her boots hardly sank through the top layer of crusted snow. Many times along the way she offered to give Hux’s coat back, and even though he was freezing he kept saying no.

Just before they got to the cabin, where Gunther was scratching his bride’s name into Hux’s kitchen table with one of Hux’s preservation tools, Naamah stopped him.

“I’m sorry about your thumb,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Let’s just forget about it,” Hux said. “Gunther’s waiting for you. He loves you, and you agreed to love him.”

Naamah tilted her head like a little girl. “His breath smells like raw meat.”

“Then tell him to brush his teeth,” Hux said and pulled her forward.

27

Hux couldn’t get that little head tilt out of his mind and what it meant, at least what it meant to him: Naamah had been robbed of her childhood. It was probably foolish, but he thought if he could give it back to her in some small way she could be happy here in Evergreen. Maybe she wouldn’t go back to the Mosquito Net. The logging camp. The orphanage. Wherever else she’d been. Maybe she’d leave all of that behind.

On a sunny morning in late February, Hux drove to the general store. He walked up and down the aisles looking for something he remembered being fond of as a child. He settled on a box of sparklers until he was at the cash register and saw a pair of white ice skates sitting on the shelf above Earl’s head. The silver blades gleamed under the store’s yellow lights. The white leather beckoned. Hux couldn’t afford the skates, but Earl let him have them on consignment. Hux bought the sparklers outright. A packet of bubble gum, too.

When he got back to Evergreen, Hux cleared a patch of ice on the river. After that, he built four chairs out of snow like he
and Gunther used to do when they were kids and put a few sleeping bags on them for extra cushioning. Hux found his and Gunther’s old hockey skates in the mudroom and brought them down to the river with Naamah’s. He even brought a thermos of cocoa and a basket of homemade chocolate-chip cookies, which he was pretty proud of. He only burned them a little and only because he didn’t immediately figure out he needed to turn the baking sheet every few minutes on the woodstove.

That afternoon Hux herded everyone down to the river, including Phee and her cat, Liddy, who liked to go for rides and would even stick her head out a window if one was rolled down for her.

“What’s all this?” Gunther said.

“I thought we could teach Naamah how to skate,” Hux said, placing the skates in her hands. He couldn’t contain his excitement. He was up on his toes.

Naamah stared at the skates. “These are for me? They’re mine?”

“Careful,” Hux said when she touched one of the blades. “The metal part is sharp.”

“I don’t have any way of paying for these,” Naamah said.

“They’re a gift,” Hux said.

When Naamah realized Hux wasn’t going to take them back and he didn’t want anything for them either, she jumped a little. “There’s not even a tiny scuff on them. They smell so good, too. So clean.”

“That’s the leather and the polish,” Hux said.

Naamah kissed Hux’s cheek. “I love them. Thank you.”

“Let’s get them on her already!” Gunther said, nearly tackling her to the ground. He yanked Naamah’s boots off. “You’re going to love this.”

When Gunther got Naamah’s feet into the skates and double tied the laces so she wouldn’t trip over them, Naamah held one of her feet up to the sunlight, twisting and turning it admiringly. Before Gunther pulled her up from the snow and told her to hold on to his shoulders and he’d lead her around the ice until she got the hang of it, he mouthed
Thank you
to Hux as if Naamah’s happiness was so fragile two little words would shatter it.

Naamah wrapped her arms around Gunther so tightly his face got red. He didn’t tell her to ease up, though. He kissed each of her arms and kept walking her forward.

“That’s my girl,” he said whenever she screamed or laughed or cried out. Once Hux was sure Gunther jostled her a little to get her to hold on to him tighter.

While they walked and slid and wobbled on the ice, Hux helped Phee and Liddy into one of his snow chairs. “Do you know how to skate?”

“I used to,” she said. “Thirty or forty years ago.”

For Hux it had been at least six or seven years. Maybe more. When he and Gunther were young, they’d come out with their hockey skates when the hard work of clearing the snow became more enticing than watching wood in the stove burn down to ashes.

“I don’t know if it’s like a bike or not,” Phee said. “If you remember.”

She was petting Liddy, who hissed when Phee got too close to her face. Liddy hissed whenever Hux tried to touch her, which was why he’d given up trying to be friendly anymore. Once, she nuzzled against his pants, and he thought she’d turned nice, but then she clamped down on his ankle hard, and he had to shake her loose.

“You’re afraid of her, aren’t you?” Phee said.

“Actually I was thinking of how nice she’d look on my wall,” Hux said.

“Naamah, I mean,” Phee said, watching her on the ice.

“It’s like flying!” Naamah said when she found her footing. She eased her grip on Gunther and then let go of him altogether.

Naamah skated to the edge of Hux’s little rink and looked frustrated she had nowhere else to go until she figured out she could turn around and go back the way she came. She went back and forth like that, her hair soaring behind her.

“I keep holding my breath,” Phee said. “But she keeps not falling.”

“I’ve been holding mine, too,” Hux said.

After a while, Naamah skated over to them.

“Can we come back tomorrow?” she said, plunking down in one of Hux’s ice chairs. Her cheeks were flushed. Her hair wild. She was glowing from the inside out instead of the other way around. “And the day after that? And the day after that, too?”

“Sure,” Hux said.

Naamah looked at the cookies. “Can I have one?”

“You can have all of them if you want,” Hux said, pleased by her pleasure. Maybe his idea wasn’t so foolish after all.

“You better save one for me,” Gunther said. He was lacing up his old hockey skates, which were still sharp after all these years.

Liddy jumped from Phee’s lap to Naamah’s.

“Oh, Liddy, leave her alone,” Phee said.

“Your cat’s name is Liddy?” Naamah said, eating a cookie with one hand and petting her with the other. “I used to know someone with that name.” She was stroking Phee’s cat in all the places you weren’t supposed to, but instead of biting or
fleeing Liddy purred. “She would sing to me when I was little. Before she went back to Wisconsin.”

“What would she sing?” Phee said.

“Lullabies,” Naamah said. “She was a sister. A nun, I mean.”

Liddy climbed up the front of Naamah and licked her face.

“That means she likes you,” Phee said, which made Naamah smile.

“Why didn’t you ever have children?” Naamah said. “You would have been good at it. You’re so nice to everyone.”

“Naamah,”
Hux said. “Some things are private.”

“I did want children,” Phee said. “My body just wasn’t put together that way.”

“Why didn’t you adopt one?” Naamah said.

“Naamah,”
Hux said again.

Gunther was clearing snow off the ice, moving farther and farther down the river. At first, he’d look back, but after a while he just kept going. Hux wasn’t sure if he was clearing a longer and wider path for Naamah or for himself.

“My husband was a stubborn man,” Phee said, looking downriver after him.

“At Hopewell only babies ever got adopted,” Naamah said. “And only the ones that didn’t cry. Sister Cordelia said a lot of people pretended to be Christian, but when it came down to it they weren’t really interested in charity.”

Hux was lacing up his skates and getting ready to go downriver, too.

“I miss her sometimes,” Naamah said. “I know I’m not supposed to, but I do.”

“At least Naamah’s talking about it,” Hux said to Phee that night when he was driving her back to her cabin. “That has to be a good sign, right?”

The sky was still clear, and because of that the night air was even colder, but it was worth its chill because of how many stars were out. Hux’s father used to point out the constellations and teach Hux the stories behind their names. His mother was the one who said the names didn’t matter or even the shapes they made: crows and serpents and bears. Each little star mattered. Each little glimmer of light.

Hux pulled up to Phee’s cabin. His hand was already on the door handle so he could help her and Liddy up the steps of the porch and through the front door.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just going to tell you,” Phee said. “She’s pregnant, Hux. She’s already starting to show.”

“Naamah?” Hux said, letting his hand fall. His heart. “Did she tell you that?”

“I don’t think she knows,” Phee said.

28

Naamah did know. She’d known since before she went to the Mosquito Net, before she cleaned herself with bleach. Hux knew those events were connected, even more so now that a pregnancy underlay them, only he still didn’t know how. Whenever he thought he was starting to understand his sister, she’d surprise him like she did when she told him she’d already gone to a doctor in Yellow Falls, who took some of her blood away and gave her a booklet about pregnancy she kept under the mattress so Gunther wouldn’t see.

“You and Gunther haven’t talked about having kids?” Hux said.

They were sitting at Naamah’s table with cups of coffee, except Naamah wasn’t drinking hers because she couldn’t stomach the taste.

“We talk about being in the woods,” Naamah said. “Hunting. Trapping. Gunther wouldn’t ever love anything that got in the way of that.”

It was true: Gunther only liked people who could be left in the forest and find their way out again, and even some of those people he didn’t like.

“How do you feel about it?” Hux said.

“I don’t know,” Naamah said. She put her hands over her ears as if the conversation were suddenly too loud for her. What was she going to do with a screaming baby? Hux thought. A hungry baby? Sometimes Naamah went all day without remembering to eat.

“There are different kinds of doctors than the one you went to,” Hux said.

Naamah touched her cross. “I couldn’t do that.”

“Because of her?” Hux said, thinking of Sister Cordelia. Sometimes he wanted to rip that cross off Naamah’s neck. He wanted to see if it would set her free.

“Because of me,” Naamah said.

Naamah got up from the table and walked over to the couch where she made a nest out of old blankets, which she burrowed into as deeply as she could.

“I wonder what she’d say. I’m married at least. Not in a church, though.”

“She’s probably dead by now,” Hux said. He didn’t understand how Naamah could miss a person like that, even a little. “At least I hope she is.”

“I feel like I did something wrong,” Naamah said.

“You didn’t,” Hux said, but he couldn’t help thinking about the trapper at the Mosquito Net, the scent of bleach on her skin. How was she going to do this?

The light in the kitchen kept flickering.

“A girl at the logging camp went to one of those doctors you were talking about,” Naamah said. “She never came back from that appointment.”

“Maybe she decided to have the baby,” Hux said. “To change her life.”

“I like to think that, too,” Naamah said. She put a hand on her stomach and the other on her heart, as if she were trying to connect them.

Hux got up from the chair he was sitting in and burrowed into her couch nest with her. He didn’t know anything about babies or what they needed besides diapers and milk, but he knew about mothers. He knew about their deep well of love.