Evergreen (9 page)

“Oh, those,” Eveline said. “They’re just something I do to pass the time.”

“Where’s your husband, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Germany,” Eveline said. “His father’s sick.”

“I lost my father when I was a boy.”

“I’m sorry,” Eveline said.

“I only meant I know how hard it is.”

After they finished eating supper, Eveline cleared the plates and made a pot of coffee with the grounds Lulu had brought over. Even though Lulu had showed her how to make a proper pot, loose grounds always floated to the top of Eveline’s.

“You really don’t want me to sleep tonight, do you?” Cullen said.

“Would you prefer tea?” Eveline said, lifting up the mug she’d set down for him and moving to replace the coffee with herbal tea. “Juice?”

That’s when Cullen grabbed her wrist, which startled Eveline. She dropped the mug, which shattered when it hit the floor. Hux began to cry.

“I’d like some dessert,” Cullen said, pressing so hard she thought she’d faint.

Eveline knew then that something terrible was about to happen and that she was helpless to stop it. “There isn’t any,” she said.

“You’re the one who invited me in,” Cullen kept saying, while the cabin spun and Eveline put her free hand on the wall, on her drawings, as if she could stop time from moving forward. She was standing on the edge of danger and knew she was about to fall in.

“Put that child somewhere else if you don’t want him to see,” Cullen said.

See what?
Eveline thought, wondering if what was happening was real. How could it be? And yet it was.
Emil
, she thought or said or screamed.

There was nowhere to put Hux but outside on the front porch and Eveline did that when Cullen released her wrist, as if she was hovering above the ground, above herself, floating,
floating. Before Cullen forced her back into the hard lines of her body, she kissed Hux’s pink cheeks and put a blanket over him. Still, he cried.

“Please help me,” Eveline said to him, certain that going back into the cabin meant something terrible would happen and yet knowing she had to go there—a place that only moments before was pleasant, was home.

A plate of smoked trout still sat on the table. A lemon wedge.

“We were having dinner,” Eveline said, thinking of Annie Mae in her bedroom.

“That’s not what we’re doing now,” Cullen said.

“I could make a dessert. There’s jam in the cupboard. Raspberry.”

I can stop this
, Eveline thought.

“I’m only going to hurt you if you make me,” Cullen said, unbuckling his belt.

Before she could think of anything that would stop him, he pulled her inside.

“Why are you doing this?” Eveline said, crying because the cabin was spinning like a leaf on the river, crying because that’s what her son was doing on the porch, because she couldn’t go to him, because she couldn’t tell him
Everything’s going to be all right
.

“You can leave right now and I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “I won’t say a word.”

And then: “Lulu’s coming over soon. The woman with the coat.”

“Good,” Cullen said, all dimples. “I wouldn’t mind a visit with her, too.”

“Please,”
Eveline said, and as if the very word enraged him, the courtesy of it, Cullen pushed her down to the floor
and the only thing Eveline could do was pray that unconsciousness would take hold of her the same as it did when she gave birth to Hux, when all she remembered was that someone had saved her. Someone would save her.

“You’re the one who invited me in,” Cullen said, and pushed her legs apart.

Ma-ma
, she heard.

She heard the sound of wings beating at the front door.

“Look at me,” Cullen said, forcing her eyes open with his fingers.

Annie Mae. Drainage ditch. You’re the one who let him in
.

Eveline was tethered to him, her hair loose and wild around her face, her pale elbows pressed hard against the wood. She was tethered to those dark pupils, those rings of blue—

“Why are you doing this?” she cried.

“Because you’re good and dear and sweet,” Cullen said.

When Cullen took from Eveline what he wanted, he guided his belt back through the loops of his trousers. Eveline lay on the hard wood floor, unsure of whether she was alive or dead. She should have listened to her mother and father and gone back to Yellow Falls. She should have listened to her husband. The mere thought of Emil shamed her.

“I’ll give you a minute to collect yourself,” Cullen said. “You should fix your hair.”

“Are you going to leave?” Eveline said.

“Depends,” said Cullen, smiling as if he’d done nothing more than eat supper with her. “Are you going to give me a proper send-off?”

“I need to freshen up first,” Eveline said, shaking too much to stand up.

“I’ll wait for you on the porch,” Cullen said.

“My baby,” she said.

“His eyes are closed,” Cullen said at the door.

Eveline used a chair for support and pulled herself to her feet slowly because she couldn’t trust her legs. She didn’t know if Cullen was going to leave—if that was all he’d wanted—or if he’d decide he wanted something else from her. She picked up the brush and ran it through her hair, afraid to look at herself in the hand mirror. All her life, she’d never felt so deeply hated; it took hold of her sore limbs, it battered her heart.

For Meg, Love William
.

Canada seemed so far way, so clean and pure, in contrast to what she saw—terror, daisies—when she looked in the mirror.

“Don’t make me come in and get you,” Cullen said. He cooed to Hux, who made no noise in response.
Was Hux dead?
Twice was too many times to think so.

Cullen moved on to the red birdhouse and to Tuna, holding his finger out for her to perch on. When she didn’t come out, he held up a handful of sunflower seeds and clucked to her as if she were a chicken. “It’s all right, little bird. I won’t hurt you.”

Eveline walked to the door with Lulu’s gun in her hands. For a moment, the last moment of real thinking, she wondered if her heart was the thing in her hands. At the threshold, she raised the gun to the level of her shoulders.

“What do you think you’re doing, darling?” Cullen said.

“I’m saying goodbye,” Eveline said.

Cullen’s dimples appeared at the corners of his mouth, but boyishly as they did when he arrived at her door the first time. “A woman like you shouldn’t have a gun.”

“It’s not mine,” Eveline said.

Cullen stepped backward carefully until he was standing on the sandy ground in front of the porch. “Of course it isn’t. You’re too good for it.”

“I’ll shoot you,” Eveline said.

“No, you won’t,” Cullen said, stepping back even farther so that now he stood amid the milk thistle Emil didn’t have time to clear before he went away. “You’re going to let me go and raise that boy of yours and your husband’s going to come home from Germany.”

Eveline looked at Hux in the reed basket.

“You’re going to tell your husband how much you missed him,” Cullen said. “It’ll be a true shame, but you’ll forget all about me. You’ll grow old. You’ll get gray as a mule.”

“I’ll—” Eveline started.

“Jail’s no place for someone like you,” Cullen said. He was already at the edge of the forest, the place where shadows met shadows. “You don’t want a rope around your neck.”

A flash of steel bars. A broken neck. A headline in the
Gazette
.

“We were having dinner,” Eveline said, the scent of trout and lemon on her hands.

Cullen tipped his hat like a gentleman.

“It was delicious,” he said just before he disappeared.

9

Eveline didn’t know how much time passed between firing Lulu’s gun into the forest and Lulu running toward the cabin, calling,
Are you all right?
At some point, Eveline put the gun down and picked up Hux, who was crying like he used to when nothing would soothe him but her breast. Tuna came out of her red birdhouse, but she didn’t make a noise.

“I know I gave you the gun, but I didn’t expect you to use it,” Lulu said when she reached the milk thistle. “I thought you shot your toe off. Are you all right?”

“We were having dinner,” Eveline said, clinging to the porch railing, to Hux.

Tuna hopped onto the railing. She craned her neck strangely.

“I thought Hux only gummed things,” Lulu said.

“The surveyor,” Eveline said.

Lulu looked at her curiously. “Why would you invite him in? He’s the worst kind of person. I’d have put him six feet under if Reddy had let me.”

“His boat broke down,” Eveline said. “Only it didn’t.”

Lulu looked back at the forest, the river, the last of the day’s light.

Eveline dug her fingernails into the railing. “We were having dinner.”

“What did he do to you?” Lulu said.

All at once, as if she could see into Eveline’s heart, she came rushing through the milk thistle, up the porch steps.

“I knew something wasn’t right with him,” she said, unbuttoning her coat and wrapping it around Eveline’s shoulders. She lifted Hux out of Eveline’s arms. “Those dimples. I should have come sooner.”

Eveline rubbed her cheek against the soft, worn fur of Lulu’s coat. She didn’t know if she was breathing or not. “I thought he was Emil when he knocked.”

Lulu pressed her lips against Eveline’s forehead. “Where is he? I’ll kill him.”

“Emil likes rosy cheeks. Sundresses. I let him go.”

Hux kept touching his ears.

“Stop thinking,” Lulu said, looking at the thin streaks of blood drying on Eveline’s legs. “You can do that later.”

Lulu took Hux inside, prepared a bottle, and laid him down in his crib. After a few minutes she came back out with Eveline’s nightgown.

“Let’s get you out of those clothes,” she said to Eveline, loosening her grip on the porch railing and leading her to the back of the cabin to the shower.

She lifted Eveline’s dress over her head and placed her beneath the splash of cool water. Eveline locked up her thoughts as Lulu rubbed soap up and down the length of her body like Eveline’s mother did when she was a girl and Eveline used to catch soap bubbles on the ends of her fingers. Lulu washed
her from head to toe, but Eveline didn’t feel any cleaner at the shower’s end. Her body hurt where Cullen had touched her; her neck was red.

Lulu wrapped a towel around her and slipped the nightgown over her head.

“They’re so small,” she said, fumbling with the buttons at the back.

“They’re pearls,” Eveline said, as if she were sleepwalking. “Only they aren’t real.”

How was it possible that she’d worn this nightgown on her wedding night? That life could change so quickly on an evening in July? She wanted her mother and father, Hux, Emil. She wanted to go back to the afternoon and the porch steps, the scattering of sunflower seeds. To say,
No, you can’t have a blanket. No, you can’t come in
. Her hair was wet against her back. When she closed her eyes, she saw herself reflected in Cullen’s eyes.

Lulu went back inside to get Hux. When she came back out, she eyed her coonskin coat, which was draped over one of the rocking chairs.

“I’m going to bring the clothes you were wearing,” she said, bundling the daisy dress and Eveline’s underclothes in her free hand as if they were the offenders.

Eveline’s parents were right: who did she think she was living all alone in the wilderness? All she’d wanted to do was continue the life she and Emil had started, to make him—her—proud. She thought of the words
I’m sorry
, the fishing-line-and-bell contraption, how inadequate they were then and now.

“You’ll stay with us tonight,” Lulu said. “Every night if you want.”

When they reached the river’s edge, there was no sign of the government boat or the man who’d steered it upriver that
morning. The sun had set, and the stars, Orion’s Belt and the Milky Way, pulsed like hearts in the sky. To the south, lightning flashed.

Lulu positioned Eveline and Hux in the canoe and pushed it away from the shore.

Dear Emil
, Eveline wrote in her mind each time Lulu dipped the paddle into the water like a pen in a bottle of ink.

“We were having dinner,” she said.

“Breathe,” Lulu said from the stern of the canoe. “You’re turning blue.”

Eveline inhaled the cool night air, listening for something—what?—in the little waves that lapped against the side of the boat.

Eveline thought of that first trip down the river in her sundress. She thought of the lick of water on the cabin’s wood, the story it told then, the story it told now.

Between the branches overhead, the moon appeared, yellow and glaring.

“You’re underwater,” Lulu said. “Now come up for air.”

When they got across the river, they walked along the bank until they caught sight of the fishing line and the bell Lulu had rigged up. From there, they walked up the path to Lulu’s cabin. There was a fire going in the pit. A chair tipped on its side.

“Today is almost yesterday,” Lulu said, handing Eveline her bundled dress.