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.”
Evangeline made no great effort to sort out what happened after that. When she thought about it later, which she tried not to, the memory rose as random sounds and images: hysterical cries, threats of eviction, sharp kicks to her ass and thighs, neighbors banging, police at the door.
She remembered curling fetal, lying on the Dorito-infested carpet for what seemed like hours. Finally someone threw a towel over her and she managed to get to her feet, stumble to the bedroom, and slam the door.
As for Matt, he was kicked out into the night, a turn of events that set Evangeline sobbing for hours. Yet, as the only other option was her own eviction into the dark streets of low-rent Seattle, she was starting to get over Matt by the time she fell asleep.
The next morning, Viv had thrown everything they owned into garbage bags and loaded the old Subaru station wagon. They drove up I-5 in silence and pulled onto the Edmonds ferry under heavy clouds, a sea of whitecaps lashing the boat. Viv set the parking brake, muttering, “He shouldn’t have done that. That son of a bitch.”
Evangeline hated seeing her mother so defeated. “Mom, I—”
Her mother whipped toward her. “As for you, whatever you’ve got to say, tell it to Jesus. I’ve got nothing for you.” She then commenced praying with such speed and fury that Evangeline thought she might be speaking in tongues.
An hour drive from the other side, they arrived in Port Furlong, some kind of old-timey seaport, a place she concluded was the most desolate town that could be reached on a tank of gas. Her mother’s frantic cheer as she pointed out the sweeping Sound views, grand buildings, and historic homes only sank Evangeline further into despair.
After a few days in a grungy motel, her mother rented a rusting single-wide on the outskirts of town. Evangeline begged her mom to let her go to school. She’d been in high school in Seattle after all. But Viv refused, deciding to homeschool Evangeline in order to protect her from “the rampant sexual promiscuity that has infected the culture,” a quote drawn, no doubt, from one of Viv’s many church pamphlets. She also refused Evangeline TV for fear that “lascivious portrayals of teens” would mislead a young soul, as if her daughter were a fragile innocent and not the girl she’d discovered fucking her forty-year-old boyfriend. Evangeline considered pointing out this discrepancy but didn’t think it’d further her cause.
Homeschooling was fraught from the beginning, with Viv devising her own course of study based on her understanding of the Bible and elementary-school math. Only two weeks in, Viv landed a job in the deli of a local grocery, ending even minimal efforts at educating her daughter. Evangeline spent a wet, gray spring in the mobile home with a dripping kitchen faucet and mold stains appearing like religious apparitions on ceilings and walls. Shadows from the tall firs kept the place in dreary twilight even on the sunniest of days. At times, Evangeline didn’t bother to dress, just lay on the couch in her pajamas watching afternoon soaps, thankful the corrupting influence of television had become a moot point once there was money to pay for it.
ON THIS EARLY OCTOBER NIGHT, the dark firs whispering around her, she longed for those lonely wet days with working lights and running water, with food in the cupboard, days when she luxuriated in the daily petty grievances a teenage girl could harbor against her mother.
She stared a moment longer at the dark spot on the hill and turned around. As she trudged back to the trailer, she let herself imagine a new home. It might be Isaac Balch’s house. It might be somewhere else. If she had learned anything, it was that she could survive losing people. Life, she had discovered, could be managed without parents or friends. Without love of any type.
Sometimes, though, the coldness of her heart gave her chills.