Later that night, I checked the door again. Though it resisted my pull, I carried in a dining-room chair and jammed it under the handle. I told myself there were rats on that second level, and I didn’t want them infesting my living space.
Roof rats had in fact rampaged when we first moved in. Katherine and I laid out poison and hauled away dozens of lifeless gray bodies. I still feel sick when I think of the carnage. But that was decades before. It was odd to be worrying about them now. Daniel had never complained of them, and I hadn’t heard a rodent up there in years.
It was just a feeling. A sense of something alive and lurking in the darkness overhead.
6
Evangeline found yet another notice on the trailer door, this one claiming the sheriff would be arriving in the morning. As she had little interest in meeting him, she stood outside on a damp October night, staring at what had been her home for the past seven months, the last place she had seen her mother. Its door was flung wide. Let the animals crawl in, she thought. Let them nest in the sofa bed, root around my mother’s old clothes. She blinked and breathed, gave herself one final minute, then turned away.
Hefting her overstuffed pack to her shoulder, she trudged out the drive. She’d just stepped onto the road when a car zoomed by. She swore at it. She wasn’t the only thing that could be hit in the dark. Fawns, all spindly legged innocence, grazed these narrow shoulders. Other creatures too. Only last week, a dozen cars backed up a midday street as a river otter and her three pups made a leisurely crossing. The wild was always attempting to reclaim what had been taken.
She headed toward town. Weeks had passed since the boys had been found. They would be buried by now, wouldn’t they? She hoped things had settled a little, hoped people were starting to think of other things. Of course, this wouldn’t be true for Isaac Balch. She knew that. Life would never settle for him. But what other choice was there? In the morning, she wouldn’t have so much as a reeking trailer for shelter.
The woods turned to pastures, and she passed one with sheep that bleated and scattered as if she were a wolf on the prowl. Then a house appeared, and another, and another, until they sat side by side with neat fenced yards and cars parked in front. If she stayed on this road another mile or so, she’d run into the park where she’d first met the boys.
* * *
—
BY THE TIME THE BOYS ARRIVED IN HER LIFE, she’d been on her own nearly two months. She would often flee to the park, wanting to escape her mother’s absence in the trailer. That particular evening, it was a little after six and she was sitting cross-legged on top of a picnic table staring out at the Sound. The table, set near a cliff, was hidden from the rest of the park by tall firs, and she figured she’d be left alone. The day had been in the mid-eighties—sweltering by Port Furlong standards—and she wore frayed shorts and a tank top that showed off lean, freckled limbs. Behind her, little kids squealed as if still on summer break, and before her, the waves glowed in tones of rose and gold.
She gazed out over the water toward dusky outlines of distant islands, to narrows and rapids and straits that funneled the Pacific Ocean to the beach below, and for a moment she forgot who she was. She imagined finding a way back to school, then to college and on to a career. An honest one. One with meaning. Maybe she would help sick people or argue cases for the disadvantaged. She would have a family. She would have love. Though she hadn’t the faintest idea how to build such a life, the Sound and the light and the distant views made everything feel possible.
She floated on that expanse for a minute or two. Then she shifted. A simple tilt of weight. The table embedded a splinter in her thigh, and the breeze turned to gust, kicked up the cliff, and slapped her, and the endless wonder of it all came slamming down to her empty stomach, empty pockets, empty heart. Her own mother had chosen drugs and sex and Jesus over Evangeline. In what possible world could she expect more?
She dove for a memory, one of the emergency rations she kept tucked away. She was eight and alone, wrapped in a blanket on a late-night couch, watching the shopping channel and waiting for her mother to appear. A few minutes before midnight, a key turned in the lock and her mom was home, finally home, tired from a long shift waitressing. Evangeline rushed to her, touched her huge purse, asking with her eyes if she could peek in. She never knew what she might find: sandwiches, fruit, a monster slab of bloody prime rib. This time it was cake, chocolate cake smashed from travel, with runny frosting that peeled off with the wrap. Evangeline had been hoping for that. But before she could dig in, her mother led her to the couch, wrapped her arms around her—nuzzling her neck, surrounding her in the dark-earth scents of sweat and cigarettes and grilled meat—and whispered, “I could just gobble you up.” And having her mother’s lips and breath on her like that was a thousand times better than cake.
Even now, Evangeline could feel her mother’s arms around her, how they’d created an oasis of safety, had turned a dark world bright with love. But dredging up this tired old scene was a mistake. It only reminded her of the deserted mobile home, of a mother who—no longer in love with her daughter—had decided to leave her behind.
She had no sense anyone was near until a voice said, “Want one?” She twisted to see two boys, the tall good-looking one offering her a beer. She took it and smiled as if at ease, reminding herself that this area of the park was secluded and the rising darkness added another layer of isolation. Even in a town where the local paper ran headlines like “Blueberries Stolen Off Patio Table,” shit could happen.
“I’m Daniel,” the one with the beer said. He had to be over six feet, with dark hair and eyes, features so strong and symmetrical and chiseled that he held no appeal for Evangeline. After her mom’s boyfriend Matt, she distrusted handsomeness of this magnitude.
The shorter boy, thin and pale, with brown hair that looked home-cut, stood with his hands jammed in the pockets of his baggy shorts. He glanced up, nodded a little and said, “Jonah.”
“Hey,” she said.
“You got a name?” Daniel said, and she disliked him more for this. She wasn’t about to give her real name, not in this hidden spot at the edge of a cliff, the waves breaking below. “Call me Red,” she said.
She climbed off the table and got her feet beneath her. Everything was fine, it was, but the ground seemed to be rolling, and though she had to be twenty feet from the edge, she worried she might fall. “It’s getting cold,” she said. “Think I’ll find someplace out of the breeze.”
The boys followed her, and as soon as the trees blocked the wind, as soon as there was no edge or distant islands, no broad night sky or crashing waves, they seemed like nothing more than high-school guys chatting up a girl, and Evangeline managed to relax. They found a bench that couldn’t be seen from the lot, in case the sheriff cruised through. The boys sat and Evangeline leaned against a scrubby pine, listening to them talk. Though, really, Daniel did all the talking.
They were starting their senior year. Daniel had plans—college and football, then maybe law school and possibly politics. The Senate sounded interesting. He talked on, never once asking Evangeline about herself. She didn’t mind. She preferred to hold back, to watch for a while. It never took long to figure out what made people tick, their vulnerabilities and flash points.