“It’s just a pizza place.”
“Still.”
She was so urgent I agreed.
When we walked in, she stood tall with a strange pride. She scanned the room in an obvious way, not like she wanted to see who was there but to see if anyone saw her. I wondered if this was about family, about proving she wasn’t alone.
When the pizza was set hot and crisp before us, Evangeline dug in greedily. I marveled that I’d survived the day without breaking down. I’d seen the ghost of my young son in those fluttering sails, but the pain was familiar, almost sweet. I’d been missing that little boy for years. When the kids abandoned the boat for other activities, the adults would see the empty deck and feel how those particular children were lost to the past. We mourned them even then but kept them alive by laughing and telling their stories:
“Remember when we couldn’t find Kristie, then found her napping in the jib on the bow?”
“And Daniel captaining the dinghy with Rufus as first mate? He had to fish that mutt out of the water more than once!”
I could picture my young Daniel so well, his joys and disappointments, his irritations and affections. But I’d lost sight of his inner life these last years. There’d be glimpses here and there. I knew he suffered. I knew that. A few months before he died, Daniel punched a hole in his room’s drywall after a fight with Sammy. He never said what had happened, but my nearly grown son let me take his hand in mine, dress its wounds. Afterward he helped me patch the damage in quiet submission. When we were done, he said, “Things kind of built up. I figured the wall could take it.” A hidden life under that surface beauty, a life with longings and losses, with passions that could explode.
When Evangeline and I got home, Rufus leaned against my leg, subdued. His muzzle and paws had gone gray since he’d jumped from the dinghy all those years ago. Of anyone living, it was Rufus who knew who Daniel had been these last years, Rufus who’d slept on his bed every night.
Evangeline thanked me for the “fun day,” said she was tired, and headed to her room. Rufus trotted after her. I was about to call him, wanting the dog to spend the night with me. He might dream of Daniel’s lost years and share the dreams with me. Just then, Evangeline reached down and patted Rufus’s head in a gesture of easy affection. With whom else could she share that kind of touch?
I smiled and sighed and let the dog go.
43
She’d thought eating at Watertown Pizza would feel like a victory, some reclaiming of what was hers. But when she walked in with Isaac that blustery December evening, the place was half empty, just a couple of families distracted by little kids.
They grabbed a cozy booth, and she enjoyed negotiating with Isaac over the toppings: mushrooms and spinach for him, salami and sausage for her. As they waited for their dinner, Isaac sought her advice on getting his students engaged. He listened intently as she spoke, leaning forward to hear over the screeching of kids, asking questions here and there. He wanted her ideas, and that surprised Evangeline. Being listened to was a lot better than being noticed at the door. And when the pizza arrived, everything about it was delicious and right.
What she hadn’t calculated was this: how the ordinary pleasantness of it would do her in, force her to realize how little of this she’d had in her life. The contrast between what she now knew was possible and what her life had been until this point drained every ounce of energy from her body. She could hardly walk by the time they got home.
Yet she struggled to fall asleep. Shadows snaked across the ceiling, twisting like those branches on a warm September evening. And even as she lay in Daniel’s house, she was back in those woods, Daniel luring her along with pizza like the silly, feral thing she was.
The trail had grown so narrow she thought they’d get caught in a thicket, but the woods opened and she could breathe again. Several trees had been cut down, replaced by a rattan love seat that rose from the ground like strange flora. Ferns and mosses crawled up rotting legs and spiraling vines laced its back, tearing away, dismantling it one tiny joint at a time. A striped seat cushion—filthy and sunken but otherwise intact—remained miraculously in place.
Daniel took the lantern and set it on a broad, low stump along with the pizza, then tossed the blanket over the dirty cushion. “You find furniture on the trails sometimes,” he said, “chairs, torn mattresses. Saw a big desk once. Most of the time, it’s just people dumping old junk, but this place seems different. Like someone set it up as a room.”
The lantern created a circle of light, cast the woods in darkness. The night’s warm breeze carried a trace of mint, and Evangeline had only to lift her eyes to see a sky full of stars and an almost-full moon. As they nestled on the love seat, a small animal moved through the underbrush nearby, a bird or a rat or maybe a coyote. Whatever it was, its territory was the darkness and the two of them were in the light.
“This is nice,” she said, because it was.
Without another word, she dove ravenously into the greasy slices. She managed to polish off half the large pizza. They’d both reached for the last piece at the same time, and he’d given it to her. “For a not very big girl, you sure can eat,” Daniel said. When Evangeline glanced up, she saw how his eyes, though focused on her, were seeing something else.
“Yup,” she said, and burped, loud and on purpose, hoping to reestablish herself. But he laughed, grabbed and kissed her as if swept up on impulse. Everything about it was false, and she pushed away.
He pressed closer, jamming her against the arm of the love seat, an arm so decayed she thought it might break, hoped it might, so they would tumble into the undergrowth and she could scramble away. Daniel cupped her cheek, an obvious lie of affection, and while he whispered she was beautiful, he took her hand and pulled it to his crotch.
She resisted, tugging against him. This went on a moment, both acting as if it weren’t—a ridiculous social nicety, like ignoring a wayward fart. He pulled harder, until she thought the skin on her wrist might tear, her thin bones might snap. She twisted her face away and managed to shove back.
“I see how it is,” she said, hoping he heard her bitterness.
“That you’re beautiful?” Even now, he tried to confuse her with false tenderness. She wondered if he knew what she was. Could you become something forever by doing it once? And what if that one time was only because the car door opened and the man looked safe enough, because every house you’d tried in the past week had been locked up tight, because you didn’t have the luxury of being a virgin, and besides, worse things had happened to you, because you stupidly thought it wouldn’t matter that much—because you were hungry, so terribly, terribly hungry? Did one time stain you forever? Did it bury itself under your skin, fester there, emit an odor that made you fair game?
It seemed it had, in her own mind if not his, because though Evangeline believed in negotiations up front rather than after the fact, she figured if he thought he was owed a hand job for the pizza, it wasn’t such a bad deal. But once his cock was out, she realized he wanted more, pressing her head down on it. When she resisted, he pushed with enough force that something popped in her neck, sent a sharp pain racing down her arm.