* * *
—
BUT I HAVE AVOIDED THE MOST IMPORTANT DETAIL of those early days. I knew that the girl was pregnant. Each morning around seven, she raced to the bathroom and slammed the door. Though she blasted the shower, it wasn’t enough to drown out the noise of her gagging and puking. After a half hour or so, she’d go back to bed, showing up in the kitchen hours later, sometimes looking fine, other times rather gray. I wanted to assist her however I could, but I was a fifty-year-old stranger and she a sixteen-year-old girl. To ask after her health, her body—how would it not feel like an intrusion?
On Wednesday, her fifth day with me, she wandered into the kitchen around ten particularly ashen. She refused the eggs I offered but, at my insistence, accepted a serving of oatmeal. I sat opposite her, reading the news. She hunched over her bowl, poking at the cereal as if it were a snake not quite dead. Her table manners struck me as inadequate, and she often failed to thank me, but I had larger concerns. I made a decision and lowered the paper. “I’m making an appointment for you with my doctor.”
Her head jerked up. “Why? I’m fine.”
“You may be fine, but you need to see a doctor.”
“Oh,” she said. She was at a loss for words, a condition rare for her. After a moment, she returned to digging at her breakfast, and I picked up the paper.
“How about this?” she said, taking a few more jabs at her food. “How about you make the appointment with an OB instead?”
Given all that has happened since, it’s hard to remember many details of those first days, but I remember that moment, because she glanced up to catch my expression, and while I can’t say what she found in mine, I was startled by hers. I expected the darting eyes of embarrassment, perhaps even shame, but I confronted a defiant chin, eyes narrowed, almost a jeer, as if she were saying, This is what you’re in for old man. You sure you’re up for this?
16
When Evangeline arrived six days back, she studied the man to discover how he worked. He was the key to the bed and the food and the warm running water. But when he offered those things without asking for anything in return, she decided to ignore him and get some rest.
She slept for most of the first three days. Because she could. Because it seemed a luxury of enormous proportions. She slept for the months of lying on that broken sofa bed, ear perpetually cocked, waiting for a door smashed in, the shattering of glass, for a man foul with booze or meth or pure entitlement to appear over her bed. She had waited for this intruder as if he were her fate. And she had waited for wilder things too, for a cougar to drag its kill to the roof, throw entrails over the edge, for a bear to rear up and shake the place to hell. Worst of all, she waited, despite knowing better, despite the daily pain of being proved wrong, for her mother to return.
So she slept through those first days in the man’s house, and when each afternoon she woke, she had to escape for a few hours. The place turned sinister in the dying light. The man would sit—for hours, it seemed—stiff-backed and silent in his office chair. Though he said he was Quaker and she guessed it had something do with that, the rigid stillness seemed ghoulish, like each evening he died and rigor mortis set in. Then too there was that chair jammed against the stairwell door, as if holding back dark realms. And who wouldn’t tire of the constant fumbling along dim halls and patting around blind corners for the light switches he kept turning off? If it hadn’t been for Rufus, she wouldn’t have lasted two days.
The dog could be a terror, she had no doubt of that. He would hurl himself yowling at the doors and windows if a deer so much as wandered through the yard. But with her, he was tender and familiar, as if he’d known and loved her all his life. When she lay down for a nap, he’d jump onto the bed, walk around her, and nudge her with his nose, kneading and poking at arms and legs, at her low back, as if she were a pillow or a blanket he could mold into a nest. She’d tell him to stop it, that she’d had plenty enough, thank you, and he’d study her awhile, then arrange his body carefully against hers, his back to her belly, so his legs wouldn’t kick her in his sleep.
At night, he lay at the foot of the bed, facing the door. The man had decided it was okay after all. And she felt safe with a dog like that at her feet. A being that could transmute in an instant to flying muscle and rightful rage, who’d die for her if there was ever a need. She was already certain of that.
One morning, she woke and found him lying on his side staring at her, their noses a few inches apart, his deer-shit breath wafting over her. Crying sounds rose from his throat, as if even this small distance between them was too painful to bear. He held her gaze for a long while, as if pressing into her mind, and when he was done, when he’d jumped off the bed, pushed open the door, and sauntered out, she got up and went to find the man.
She asked him if maybe they could keep lights on in the main areas at night, at least when they were up, and did they need the chair in the hall like that? He looked startled by her requests, said he’d reflect on it awhile, but came to her a few hours later and said he supposed more light in the evening would be all right and he would take the hall chair away; it had only ever been there to keep the door from blowing open and it never had, so he guessed he could. He just asked that she leave the door alone, that she not disturb the upstairs. He didn’t say why. He had yet to tell her his son was dead.
And so she stayed one day and then another, until the man, Isaac, who had clearly heard her puking in the mornings, broke the breakfast silence to insist she be seen by a doctor.
* * *
—
AND NOW THAT HAD HAPPENED. She had been examined and was dressed again, awaiting the doctor’s return. She distracted herself by deciding Dr. Taylor had come from old money. Who else would have those fine high cheekbones and porcelain skin, that tall, lean frame and aura of royal control? She’d probably grown up with polo ponies, houses around the world, a coming-out ball. Why such a woman would pick Port Furlong to set up her practice was another diversion to keep Evangeline’s mind off due dates and all that could mean.
The doctor entered, sat on the stool, and scooted close. “Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. Her face was not kind, but it promised an unsentimental practicality Evangeline preferred. “You’re pregnant. Six weeks, I’d guess.”
Six weeks. That was good. Excellent, in fact. It was what she had thought. It really was. But still, she almost laughed in happiness. She didn’t think it’d be nine weeks. She’d had that funny little period after the trip to Bremerton, so she was already pretty sure, but what a relief to have it ruled out. Six weeks back. A life could be arranged around a date like that.
The doctor had been talking when she was thinking all this, so Evangeline missed most of what she said, and now the doctor was asking her something. “So what’s your plan?”
“My plan?”
“Yes. Do you want to keep the baby?”
“You mean an abortion?”
“Yes. Or adoption.”
“No! Neither of those.” She hadn’t considered either option, and she saw now how strange that was, given her situation and the child’s possible fathers. But then her mother had had her at fourteen with no father around, and Evangeline was glad to be alive, despite all the crap that had happened.