* * *
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MY CLASSROOM SEEMED FOREIGN. Mike Fuentes had arranged the desks around the perimeter, left the center empty. Break dancing had made a recent comeback at the school, and I imagined students blaring music, spinning on their heads, Fuentes yelling in frustration. But as I settled at my desk, the center transformed, became a place where—like meetings for worship—its emptiness allowed insights to rise.
Apart from Daniel’s memorial, I hadn’t been to meeting since my son’s death. I understood the burden I presented. What do you say to the parent of a murdered child? How do you behave? People’s fear of hurting me caused them pain and confusion, and their suffering added to mine. I wanted to spare Friends my presence. Besides, what was left for me there? Certainly not Divine connection. God had reduced me to rubble, had stolen Katherine and my son. God, it seemed, had taken even the girl and the promise of her baby.
No, I would not be seeking that God, the one who even now taunted me with students who straggled in, who mocked me with a morning light that fell over the room like glowing rain, that lit the large veins of my hands, full and pulsing, as they rested on the desk. Not the God who delighted in this Divine torment, this nagging, insistent whisper: I have left you with nothing, but you are alive, alive, alive.
You are alive. You must come to grips with that.
18
When Evangeline left for that first day at Port Furlong High, she hadn’t decided to go. She hadn’t decided not to go either. Her feet started out the right way, but halfway there they detoured up a trail, wound her around the lake, and planted her on a viewpoint overlooking the school.
She shrugged off her pack and perched on a rock. She’d fled here dozens of times the past spring when she wanted to escape her mother. Back then, nearly everything about the woman nauseated Evangeline—her skin-peeling gaze, the writhing disgust of her lips, her jiggling flab in too-tight tees. Evangeline had sat in this very spot and chiseled all that disdain into a sharp stone she lodged beneath her heart, enjoying how it rubbed her raw and angry with each rhythmic beat. And now, if she could find its jagged edge, lean into its lacerating power, she might again believe in the joy of a motherless existence, she might be able to stand and move toward a new life. But the stone was gone. All that was left was a boggy tender spot, a deep and permanent bruise.
The bell rang below. Last-minute dashes were made. How strange that her legs refused to take her. She had begged to go to school, fought with her mother, threatened to register on her own. Viv said she knew what happened in parking lots during lunch hours and after school, said she wasn’t going to have “a whore for a daughter.” Viv would leave if it came down to that. Evangeline had obeyed, and what good had it done? Her mother took off anyway. As for having a whore for a daughter, perhaps her mother had created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The sun continued to rise in a cold, empty sky. Why was returning to school so hard? Her mother had moved every couple of years, and Evangeline had always managed to fit in before. Maybe it had to do with hiding these past months, cowering out of sight as if she were something obscene. But it was deeper than that, a sense of floundering, as if she’d lost the anchoring that a mother—no matter how lousy—provides, that allowed a girl to swim into new territory without worry of being washed out to sea.
She told herself she had the man, Isaac. He acted more like a mother than Viv ever had. He’d been plenty pissed when she snuck out those first nights. But even that third time, when he lectured her about the need for simple courtesy—whatever that meant—he assembled a plate of mashed potatoes and baked chicken. He shoved it at her as if angry, but when she dug in like the famished girl she was, she could see he was pleased.
And every morning he was in the kitchen with his fruit and oatmeal, or eggs and toast, his insistence she add extra layers of warmth, as if she were a delicate girl who needed care. She liked that, being thought of as delicate. Not that she was. Not that she wanted to be. Hell no. But to have someone worry about her, suspect she had been and could be hurt, to think it mattered . . . well, it felt like someone wrapping a coat around her shoulders when she hadn’t known she was cold.
Still, Isaac’s kindness was a mystery whose cost she couldn’t figure. If life had taught her anything, it was that nothing came for free. She refused to think of the two boys and the guilt she had buried, what it would mean if Isaac found out. But it lived in her, burrowed deep into her bones, so cold it nearly rattled her teeth.
Everything these days made her afraid: people who might have seen her, kids she didn’t yet know, classes and tests and projects she’d missed. The totality of time seemed a danger, whether the secrets of her past or the threats of the future. Mostly she was afraid of Isaac, of all she had recently received and that could now be lost.
It was seeing herself this way—as a quivering puddle of fear—that made her command herself to stand and get her ass to school, tell her body she would be in charge of it from then on. And finally her body obeyed, taking her down the hill, around the lake, through the parking lot, and right through the old building’s front doors.
To hell with being afraid. That would be her motto from now on.
19
At noon, I saw her. She disappeared into the lunchroom with her storm of red hair. A sudden bright sensation lit me. When I peered in, she was sitting alone at a corner table, and I fought an urge to introduce her around. Fortunately, a couple of the kinder girls, ones who rarely got invited to the dances, joined her.
“Checking on your girl?”
I twisted to find Peter at my side. “I suppose I was,” I said, catching my breath. “Wasn’t sure she was going to make it, honestly.”
“She almost didn’t. Carol said she showed up around ten.”
“Ten?”
“Pretty damned hard walking into a new school. Had to be all the harder once she delayed.” He scanned the lunchroom. “Where’s she sitting? I was out when she arrived.”
I pointed in her direction, but a group of kids blocked his view. Peter stepped a few feet into the room, making a point to glance first in the opposite direction, not wanting to single her out. He conveyed a kind intelligence in everything he did. He knew every student and every clique in the school, who composed the core of each group and who were the hangers-on. He could spot those rare students who blended across multiple cliques and those who struggled to land in any group for long.
Evangeline sat sideways to the door. When Peter saw her, his face spasmed as if stung. It was a small matter. I’d likely not thought more about it, but he was somber when he stepped out.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sure.” He cleared his throat. “Tell me, how exactly do you know this girl? Is she related to you?”
“No. Why? Do you know her? You seem . . . surprised.”
“I’ve seen her before.”
“When?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, what’d you say your connection is?”
“None, really. Rufus found her in the middle of the night. About a week ago. She was under that old plum tree. It was freezing out there.”
“She showed up at your place?” He sounded alarmed.