First You Try Everything (24 page)

Ben and Evvie

L
ater Ben lay down in the dark to join Evvie for a long sleep. Evvie was on her back, eyes closed, breathing shallowly, and when he said, “Ev?” a smile came to her lips. “You OK?” he said, and she didn't say anything. When Lauren called his cell phone, before he even got his hello out, she said, “Who's Val?”

“Who's Val?” he said. “I told you last week. I don't know a Val.”

“You have to remember. Your old friend Val. She has a thick midwestern accent?”

“I never knew a Val.”

“Think. You had to. She called you. I have a feeling—”

“I'm thinking. Hold on.”

He covered the phone and said to Evvie, “Did we know a Val?”

Evvie didn't respond.

“Why are you so determined to know?” he said to Lauren, sitting up.

“She was going to come visit you. She wanted to know your work schedule. She wanted to know exactly when you'd be at your office.”

“Val. Val.”

“Val,” Lauren said. “That's all she said. And she said it in this really, really strong midwestern accent. Like that woman in the movie
Fargo
.”

“Val,” he said, and got out of bed, and something inside of him began to stomp out a rising knowledge that for some reason Evvie had called Lauren and said she was Val. Evvie who'd always loved lapsing into that Fargo accent.

“Look, I'll think about it and call you when I remember.”

H
e put the cell phone down and sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness.

“So why'd you say you were Val?” he said. He didn't want this conversation. It was bad timing. They needed to recover before anything like this. But Lauren's voice had been penetrating. The voice of a detective.

He spoke more clearly. “Why'd you say you were
Val
?”

“Because I needed to do my homework.”

“What's that mean?”

“I needed to find out when you would be in the office. When you would be working.”

“Because?”

Evvie was out of bed now, pulling on her jeans.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm getting ready,” she said.

“Evvie?”

“I had to find out when you'd be in the office because I'd hired those guys, those kidnappers. I thought they were safe. They swore they'd never use guns. They said it was like some kind of performance theater. They were just a couple of guys who couldn't get jobs because they'd been to prison and nobody would hire ex-cons. So I thought I could give them some business and just see what happened because they seemed really safe and honest and just interested in
thee-ate-her
and stuff.”

“You're dead serious, aren't you? You thought you'd
give the ex-cons some business
.”

“I'm dead serious, Ben.” Evvie stood over in the corner. She had her arms crossed. “I just need to find my coat and then I'll exit.”

“You'll exit?” He turned and punched the wall. “You're not going anywhere!”

He walked over to her and stood a few feet away from her. He took one step forward. He thought he would shake her. He thought he would slap her. He thought he would knock her head against a wall. But he didn't want to touch her.

“What the fuck are you saying, Evvie?”

She didn't say a word.

“You're serious, you're telling me the serious goddamn truth, and I can't believe it! I know it's true but I can't
believe
it! I can't believe
anyone
would be so fucking stupid.”

“I can't either, Ben. I can't believe it, either!”

“Why, Evvie?”

“Why is a great question, Ben. I can't answer it. I—”

H
e walked out into the living room. He sat on the end of the couch, his head down in his hands, and began counting. If he sat there and counted and counted, maybe this all would be revealed as a dream, maybe the numbers would line up like ladder rungs and he could follow them out of this apartment, climb out of this conversation, and into another world of peace and quiet sanity. This could not really be happening. This was an Evvie nightmare. He'd had them before. He'd once had a dream where Evvie was crawling down a highway on hands and knees, traffic driving around her and people shouting out the window, and she'd just kept on crawling. This was like that nightmare, only worse, and so much longer. But it was quite possible that soon there would be an awakening, soon he would be in his bed sitting up and saying to himself,
That was the strangest dream of my life
. Only it wasn't.

It wasn't a dream, that was just a foolish hope and the hope was leaving him and Evvie was actually saying, as she slipped into her coat,
“I'm sorry and I'll be sorry forever and I'll find a way to make it up to you and I don't blame you if you want to kill me but I'm already dead and on my way so see ya.”

“Where do you think you're going?”

“Back home. To my room? Tessie's?”

“Is that right? That's what you think?”

“That's where I live.”

“No, you live in a nightmare of your own making, Evvie.”

“You could say that.”

“You don't understand, do you? You don't understand—”

“Obviously a person who is capable of hiring madmen to kidnap her husband understands very little. So—”

“I mean you don't understand that you can't just go home. You just can't stroll out of here and go home, Evvie!”

“You want me to stay?”

“I have to call the cops!”

“No, you don't! I'll go to jail, Ben! I can't go to jail!”

“Why can't you? You're a criminal!”

“Stop it!”

“Stop it?”

“I just went crazy, Ben! I told you, they lied to me! They said they would never use a gun, they said it was like theater, and I never would have hired them otherwise! They were totally convincing! Nice guys! No words could explain how convincing they were!”

“The whole idea of it is criminal, Evvie. Can't you see that? I don't even know who you are anymore. That you would think, ‘I'll just pay these strangers to fucking kidnap my husband and me.' It's not about how convincing anyone was! And how much did you pay them anyway? No, don't tell me. Don't tell me! You can tell everything to the cops. Because I don't want to know a goddamn thing.”

“You can't call the cops, Ben. I'll do anything. Please.”

“If I don't call, then I'm a criminal too! Did you stop to think of that?”

“You can put me away.”

“Put you away.”

“Take me to Western Psych. I'll commit myself or you can commit me. All we have to do is say I'm a danger to myself or others. Which I obviously am. I'll stay locked in there for months, Ben. Whatever you want. I'll take medication, I'll get therapy, I'll never even come near you again.”

“Just shut up.”

Ben paced in the same space where Evvie had been walking earlier. For a long time, he moved in silence. Evvie leaned back against the wall by the door, and waited.

H
e'd taken some time, but then they were in the car, headed to the hospital. Ruth sitting up straight in the backseat. “Do you mind if I get a few things first? From Tessie's?” With nothing left to lose, she could ask this. She could ask anything. She could be the person with a million requests, the most annoying of all people. It didn't matter.

He nodded. He pulled in front of Tessie's house and said he'd wait for her. “Don't take more than a minute.”

And when she got out of the car and walked up the path, he rolled the window down and called, “And don't even think about trying to escape!”

She stopped on the path and looked back at him. She hadn't considered such a thing. But now she did. What if she just walked into Tessie's house, climbed down the back fire escape, and started to run through the crowded backyards, hiding behind this trash can and that tree, under those steps, up on that porch. . . . What if she left as a fugitive for a whole different place where she could reinvent herself as someone strong and capable and solitary? This all flashed through her like a sneeze.

She turned and headed toward the house. Tessie came to the door of her apartment, stuck her face out halfway, and asked Evvie where she'd been.

“Oh, out and about.”

“Waltzing around like Pittsburgh's queen of Sheba?”

“Not exactly.”

“You look like a ghost.”

“Caught a chill.” Evvie headed up the steps.

Did they let dogs go to psychiatric hospitals if the patients were especially attached to them? Could she fake blindness and Ruth could be a Seeing Eye dog? After all, she was metaphorically as blind as a person could be. Her heart began to race. It beat so hard she was afraid it would burst out of her chest. She walked into her empty room and lay down on the bed, wondering if she was really having a heart attack. You could definitely have a heart attack at forty-two.

Ben would not believe her. But she couldn't move. She could not move off the bed or her heart would crash through the wall of her chest and land on the floor. Ben was probably out there thinking she was up to something. Thinking she was escaping. He would be furious. He would be thinking how he'd sic the cops and some hound dogs on her trail. But here she was, pinned to the bed, fighting to breathe.

S
he heard his footsteps coming up the steps. “Evvie?” and for that split second, because his voice was so familiar, because his footsteps had a sound as intimate as breath, it seemed that none of this year had ever happened, and he was returning from his long day to be with her. After this second was gone, there was only her heart, and her terror, and him at the door starting to say something, then falling silent when he saw her face. She saw her face in his, just as if his were made of mirror, and clenched her eyes shut against the image. “Ben, my heart. It's beating so fast.”

He didn't say anything. He stood there, taking his breaths, his eyes downcast, his mouth pulled in tightly.

“I might be having a heart attack.”

Still he didn't say a word.

“Evvie. I'm not coming to your rescue. It's not all right. Nothing will ever be all right again.”

“Ben?”

“Can you just gather what you need so we can go?”

“Soon. Just let me—”

“I don't like prolonging agony.”

Behind him, Diligence Chung appeared in her purple hat.

“Is she sick?” Diligence said, her face impassive and her voice high and gentle.

“Yes,” Ben said.

“I can sing,” Diligence said. “It maybe help her.” Diligence stood there and sang in her long skirt and her hat. Her pale, serious face filled Evvie with longing. Next life, I will be like Diligence.

“Woman across the hall with nice dog

Never ever giving up on Love!

For God is with woman and dog

Who never giving up on love!”

“Thank you, Diligence.”

Diligence scurried back down the hall.

The song had allowed Evvie to rise from her bed and stand up straight. Her heart was still threatening to explode, but she was capable of putting a hairbrush, some clothes, some lipstick, and a few books into a white plastic bag, and then, into an old brown suitcase, she packed up everything else.

Evvie

O
n a July evening, the day before Evvie's forty-seventh birthday, she stood under a red flowered umbrella in a playground. The rain poured down soft and steady and the children loved it, running and crying out to one another below the hot and hovering night sky. A nearly full moon was low and orange and surrounded by shreds of high purple clouds sailing off to the north in a high wind. Evvie watched the kids, and also the cars streaking by on the highway across from the playground. Tomorrow, for her birthday, she was headed to the ocean.

The playground itself was sprawling and featured a sliding-board dinosaur, several swing sets, climbing walls, cubbyholes, and a ground covered with green foam so that children could fall without getting hurt. She knew a few of the parents who were here tonight, talking under the green pavilion, but preferred the drumming of rain on the sturdy flowered umbrella. Her nephew Hugo, Cedric's son, was waving to her over on top of a jungle gym. She waved back, nodding and smiling her encouragement. And then someone else was waving.

S
he hadn't even talked to him in more than four years. But he was walking toward her, and following close behind, a small child, galloping, curly-headed, barefoot. Maybe two years old. A girl?

“Hi, Ben!” The words came up from her depths. And then her heart began a loud, steady drumming, the sort of drumming that sounds out at the beginning of a parade. She might have started marching in place, were she not frozen.

“Hey!” He stood there, a yard away, apparently stunned. The child hid behind his leg.

T
he last time she'd seen his face was four years ago when he'd shown up in the hospital one night for the visiting hour, just five days after she'd signed herself in. He'd brought her some dark chocolate and a loaf of French bread. They'd sat together—she on the side of the bed in a pale blue hospital gown and gray socks, he in his jeans and dark green sweater and wristwatch, seated on a straight chair far across the room, his arms folded tightly. The window by the bed framed the black night. The room sucked up all the words they tried to say to each other.

He'd leaned forward, elbows on knees, then pinched the bridge of his nose.

Then somehow, they'd started to laugh. Neither had said anything funny. Maybe they'd just looked at each other for a moment too long, and a sense of absurdity had overtaken them. But they'd laughed until their sides ached, both of them bending in half, laughed until Evvie had ended up sobbing. He'd stood up, walked over to the bed, held her hand, sat down next to her, waited for her to calm down, then rose and said he had to go, that he hoped she'd get out soon but not too soon, that he hoped she'd never do anything that crazy again, and please, please don't call him for a long, long time.

Of course she'd honored his request not to call. Would have honored it without his asking. And that same year, when she saw his back while waiting in line at Panera Bread, she rushed outside and started walking in the pouring rain across the busy parking lot over to Barnes & Noble.

Once, in the grocery store she dove into a frozen foods freezer while he wheeled his cart past, humming with an iPod on his head and a long list in his hand.

Another time she saw him and Lauren (in silver clogs) walking hand in hand down in the Strip District one sunny Saturday. They were headed toward her on the sidewalk, and she'd ducked into Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, where she'd taken an hour or so to buy some cheese and olives until the coast was clear.

Standing in the cold at a stoplight on Penn Avenue, she once saw him waiting in his car for the light to change. She almost cried out “Ben!” but instead bent down to tie her shoe for a long minute before he pulled away.

She was the antistalker, guarding the great distance between herself and the one she loved, keeping him safe from anything she might do or say, ever again.

And she had Ruth, sole custody. As it turned out, Lauren's dog was jealous of other animals. Once, early on, Ben had sent Ruth a box of bones in the mail, care of Evvie's mother.

“W
ow, so how have you been?”

“Good. This is Molly. Molly, this is Evvie.”

The child clung to his leg, but peeked up at Evvie, the eyes great dark pools reflecting the evening.

“Hi, Molly. Nice to meet you.”

“What are you doing here?” Ben looked around anxiously, as if hoping she was there with a child and not some crazy lone person haunting the place. Evvie wanted to explain to him all the ways she'd changed. All she'd seen and done. How she was nobody to fear, ever again. She was hardly the same person anymore, but how to convey that when his presence rendered her nearly speechless? “I'm here with Cedric's son. Hugo. He's over there with that blond kid.” She pointed.
I'm no longer who I was. I'm better. I'm sorry I couldn't have been better with you.
She felt like the Tin Man, moving her arm. The few words she managed to say felt heavy; she had to push them into the summer evening, which felt suddenly, impossibly, thick.

“I saw you one day with the guy—I think he's the guy who worked at the convenience—”

“Yeah. Ranjeev. He doesn't work there anymore.”

“Your significant other?”

“In a way. We take long walks together.”

“Long walks.”

“Yeah. He had to quit that job before I could finish that movie I tried to make. I'm working on something else.”

The small girl kept gazing up at Evvie. Evvie smiled down at her for a moment, waving.

“So what's your new—”

“My friend Gigi is manager of this cable station and hired me to do a film on a hospice.”

“Wow. Great.”

She wanted to tell him that Celia wanted her to travel to Poland with her next summer, that she'd long been saving up for it, that she'd helped organize an animal rights convention in Cleveland, that one day she'd maybe go to India with Ranjeev. Wanted to tell him about Ranjeev's cousin, a woman who built her own bicycles and was teaching Evvie how to do so, that she missed his mother, and that it hurt that he didn't know any of this, seemed utterly wrong that he didn't know anything about her life now.

“And how 'bout you?”

The child was in his arms. She was so beautiful and substantial, Evvie couldn't stop staring. She was the sort of child who stared back with calm interest, holding your gaze, stilling the world.

“Same company. Got promoted. It's OK, but I'm looking for something else. I'm doing some metal sculpture like I did in college. Sound sculpture. I wish—” He stopped himself.

She smiled at the little girl, and after a hesitation, the little girl smiled back. A little pirate smile. Evvie melted a little. “Wow, I'd love to see it. Maybe we could have coffee sometime and then go visit one of your sound sculptures.”

Ben didn't say anything.

“Or maybe not. Sorry. I—”

“Would be tough to explain that to Lauren, considering.”

“Yeah. Considering.”

“But it's not like you're not—”

“What?”

Ben lifted the child up high on his shoulders, her small hands clutching on to his hair. Behind her was the moon. Ben looked at Evvie. His face filled with a collision of feeling.

“Not like I'm not what?” she said, wincing up at the little girl now.

Evvie swallowed. Ben looked off to the side, then back at Evvie.

“So I better go,” he said, tugging on the small feet of the girl. “Say good-bye to Evvie, Molly. And wish her happy birthday. Her birthday's tomorrow.”

“Bye-bye. Happy Birthday!”

Evvie tried to say good-bye, but could only wave.

H
ugo was over by the swings, waiting for one to be empty. He was five, a durable little dark-eyed kid with a round face, curly gold hair like Cedric's, baggy green shorts, and sneakers with flashing lights. He watched Evvie walk up to him with his steady, curious gaze that often seemed to belong to someone older. “What's wrong?” he said, when she got closer, and she smiled down at him and said that nothing was wrong. He took her hand. His hand was sweaty and warm and always a surprise, the way it held to hers, the way it trusted. She was his favorite, the aunt who was paid to walk twenty-eight dogs a week and sometimes invited him to come along. He had memorized all the dogs' names and would be more than happy to chant them upon request.

Soon, there was one swing open. The rain had become mist. Hugo ran toward the swing, sat down, grabbed hold of the chains, and told Evvie, “Push me!” She walked over behind him, and started off with a steady push. “Higher!” She pushed him higher and higher until the chains twisted and buckled and he screamed with joy, his legs kicking the air. After a while he was singing a song about a red bird, something he'd known forever.

T
omorrow she would drive to the beach with Ranjeev, who liked most of all to take long walks, rain or shine.

Ranjeev liked silence.

You could learn from silence if you stayed quiet. It had so many qualities. One day it was the silence you might hear after an earthquake, while other days it surrounded you, curative and lit with blinding sun, like a warm blanket draped over you on a winter morning in your bed. Still other days, in the middle of silence, a distant siren sounded, as if someone light-years away was coming to retrieve the injured world, Ranjeev said. Do you hear it?

You had to learn to listen, and how to take it in—the silence, the siren. You had to breathe.

Silence could hold everything about you, no matter how strange, how wrong, how broken, and it wouldn't let you go.

If you listened to it long enough, day after day, year after year, the voices in your mind getting smaller and quieter, you might find moments where silence turns into God, Ranjeev had explained.

T
he swing beside Hugo emptied, and she walked over and took it. And she was here and nowhere else. Here in this playground on the swing beside Hugo, who was belting out a song, here in the darkness beneath an orange moon that was wet as fruit. What she carried, this love that wouldn't, couldn't die—sometimes it was pain that flashed in her heart like a diamond. She clung to the chains of the swing and started rising up into the sky.

“Sing!” said Hugo.