Now, in the damp, gray drizzle, she appeared hardly more than a child, her fierce, small frame lost in a black dress. She turned and saw me.
“Isaac!” An indictment, as if I’d planned this as a trap.
“It was good of you to come,” I said, aware of the chill in my tone.
Her expression flickered with fear, but she forced her features into a semblance of calm and lowered her gaze, a submissive posture I’d seen her use when her husband, Roy, was still alive. It pained me to have her use it on me.
Peter burst through the door just then, nearly hitting Lorrie. “Sorry,” he said, “I—”
“No!” Lorrie said, suddenly in motion, scrambling down the stairs, flapping a pale hand. “No. It’s fine. I was just leaving.” And even as Peter opened his mouth in protest, she hurried on toward the lot, that black dress billowing behind.
Peter watched until she reached her car, then turned to me. “That must have been bad.”
“I suppose it was.”
He wanted to advise me. I could see that. To say something like, “She’s not the enemy, Isaac. She’s suffered huge losses too.” But he didn’t. He let me be.
I took a deep breath. “I think your jacket is ruined.”
“Probably,” he said. “But if I had to pick someone to ruin my best suit jacket, it would be you.”
* * *
—
I loved Peter then. Perhaps I love him still.
4
Evangeline kept her eyes on the embankment at the side of the road, trying to locate a particular configuration of trees, the place she’d lost the boy’s small gift. Though just a silly token, it would prove she hadn’t imagined it. She’d had only the few nights with the boy, with Jonah, but he had loved her—or at least had longed for her in a way that could not be distinguished from love. And not just for her own real, warm body, but her . . . what? Her essence, she guessed. She would have said her soul if she believed in such things.
A long block from the trailer, she found the spot, sloughed off the pack and untied from it a rusty machete she’d borrowed from a neighbor’s shed. After working her way up the steep slope, she hacked at a thicket a minute or two, then stood back to assess her work. Barely a dent. Suddenly angry, she flung her arm back and whipped it forward with every ounce of her strength. The wood handle splintered in two and the blade sailed free, its razor edge impaling a sapling mere inches from her thigh. She shrugged—no point in worrying about near misses—and began tearing at the brambles bare-handed, thorns shredding her skin.
After clearing a narrow opening, she caught sight of something whitish strung along the roots and began digging blindly in the boggy earth. She thought she had it once, but the long, skinny thing writhed between her fingers and slithered away. Taking one last what-the-hell grab, she found—clutched in her hand—Jonah’s mud-encrusted bracelet. It was hardly more than a knotted piece of rope, but it had meant something to him and he had wanted her to have it. She scrambled down, tucked it into a zippered pocket of her pack, and started back out.
As she rounded a corner, the lights of town crept into view, strung along the shore below. When she’d arrived with her mother in the spring, Evangeline had thought the place was nothing more than a half dozen blocks of old buildings. But even from this modest elevation, you could see that it was much larger. Port Furlong fanned out for a few miles from a corner that jutted into the Sound, sprawled across multiple low-slung hills, surrounded a small lake. The Victorian settlers had savaged the dense firs, stripped the earth for their buildings and homes and family farms. Grand trees still stood in parks and along rural roads, but in town people had taken their place. “Ten thousand people. More in the summer,” her mother had said.
Now the whole of the town glittered, and Evangeline thought how this haunted old place woke each night, ghosts wandering the turrets and gables and widow’s walks of the Victorian homes. Even downtown, with its massive brick courthouse and post office, with its finials and balustrades and rows of high arched windows, seemed to bustle with the shadows of century-old business deals, with stiffly dressed couples floating through brick walls, seeking marriage licenses or letters from across the sea. And beyond all this was the Sound, where she could feel, as if tossing inside herself, the sailboats and tugs and ferries that pitched in the water’s black churn.
Homes glowed on the hill above the town. She imagined the dinners and homework and family conversations taking place in those lighted rooms and wondered if she would ever belong somewhere like that, in a house you could walk into day after day, knowing you were home, knowing you were wanted. No, she thought, she never would. Yet she touched her belly and whispered, “But you will, baby. You will.”
Evangeline spotted a dark stretch in the middle of those glinting lights. She had glimpsed the place only twice but remembered that it was on a couple of acres, surrounded by trees. The man, Isaac Balch, lived there alone. At least she thought he did. The papers said Daniel had no siblings, and that his mother now lived in Spokane. The place was huge, too huge for a single old man. It would have to have lots of empty rooms and at least one extra bed—not some broken-down sofa bed either, a real one with sheets and comforter, a fluffy pillow or two.
* * *
—
THE LAST TIME SHE’D SLEPT in a real bed had been nine months back. She’d shared it with her mother, Viv. They were living in south Seattle, in a one-bedroom apartment over a private nightclub next to an animal shelter. The nightly yowling of the dogs and the vibrating bass beat shimmied up the walls, set everything in Evangeline churning.
Then her mother’s boyfriend, Matt, moved in, and Evangeline was forced to sleep on the living-room couch. While her mother worked days at Safeway, Evangeline’s de facto bedroom became Matt’s personal lounge, where he waited for callbacks on auditions. Her only privacy was the bathroom, and even there she had to battle complaints at the door.
She was suspicious of Matt from the start. The guy was tall and blond and too good-looking for her mother. Not only was the guy movie-star handsome, he could act too. At least he’d mastered a way of looking at a girl as if utterly indifferent yet obsessed all the same.
He nauseated her, the way he stretched out on the sofa—the place she lay every night—scratching armpits and butt, critiquing the acting on afternoon soaps. Sometimes he wouldn’t move at all, turned reptilian, a lizard sunning on a rock, one lazy eye waiting for a passing fly.
One day, that eye landed on Evangeline and his tongue flicked out and rolled her in. He slipped a fingertip between her lips and whispered that he loved her. She would never have guessed that her body would go crazy the way it did. With his chest and thighs pressed against hers, she could forget the latest test she’d blown, the most recent scuffle with her mother. She became nothing more than skin and heat and a wildly beating heart.
An afternoon in early March, she was in that place of pure escape—straddling Matt on the couch, his hands on her hips, her young breast in his mouth—when Viv arrived home early. She had a migraine, which, in retrospect, Evangeline suspected was partially to blame for what happened next. Her mother grabbed a fistful of Evangeline’s flying hair, yanked her off Matt, and flung her to the floor, hissing, “You disgusting little slut.”