Before the holidays, Evangeline rarely thought about Daniel’s old girlfriend, Samantha. They existed in vastly different realms. Sammy moved through the halls with her flashing blond hair, boys stopping in midstep as though tasered. When they crossed paths, Sammy’s eyes swept through Evangeline as if she wasn’t there. But when school started in January, the girl was staring at Evangeline every time she glanced up. Evangeline had thought her baby bump was well hidden, but apparently not, because it wasn’t her face Sammy was staring at.
The second week of January, as Evangeline carried her tray across the lunchroom, Sammy and her gaggle of friends stopped eating to stare disgustedly at her belly. Evangeline glared right back. They put on blank expressions and turned back to their food. But over the next week, the girls got bolder, muttering “fat cow” or mooing when they crossed paths. Jason Brewster, Sammy’s new boyfriend, rammed right into Evangeline during one of the rushes between classes, knocked her back a step. He smirked at her swollen middle and said, “Hope I didn’t hurt the killer’s baby.”
Evangeline asked Natalia, “Is he saying I’m the killer, like they blamed Rebekah? Or is he talking about the father?”
“I’m guessing he means the father,” Natalia said. “Amanda Bryant—you know, the one who wears those weird jumpsuits—she’s started telling everyone she saw you in the park the week before the murders.”
“And she’s only saying that now?”
Natalia took another bite of salad. “The pregnancy does add a new level of intrigue.”
“But wasn’t everyone looking for connections to the boys? If she saw me with Jonah—”
Natalia’s eyes shot up. “Who said anything about seeing you with Jonah?”
MASIE AND JILLIAN STARTED EATING AT ANOTHER TABLE, but Natalia stuck around. She had known about the pregnancy since right after Christmas. Evangeline had stayed overnight at her house. They’d ordered in pizza and watched The Princess Bride with Sophie, who kept laughing and shouting, “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!” and “Inconceivable!”
Later they were lying on their backs on Natalia’s big bed, talking the usual trash about kids at school. Natalia rolled onto her side, reached over, and placed her hand on Evangeline’s belly.
“Yeah. I’m pregnant all right,” Evangeline said.
Natalia scooted closer, laid her head where her hand had been.
“Hear anything?” Evangeline asked.
“Some gurgling. Do you think it could be the baby?”
“Could be. I feel it moving around in there sometimes.”
“Now?”
“Not now.”
Natalia flopped back, stared at the ceiling. “I know it probably sucks,” she said, “but it’s kind of awesome too, don’t you think?”
Then it was Evangeline’s turn to stare at the ceiling. “Yeah,” she said. “It sucks and it’s awesome. That pretty much sums it up.”
Natalia patted her own stomach as if she too might be pregnant. “What about the dad? What does he think?”
Evangeline turned to face her. “He doesn’t know, and he never will. And don’t go thinking I’m saying it was Jonah or Daniel, because I’m not.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. Just don’t ask me, all right?”
“But—”
“Don’t even.”
It took everything in Natalia to stop. Evangeline could see that. But she did. She managed to keep her mouth shut a few minutes before saying quietly, “Maybe you’ll tell me later?”
Evangeline laughed. “Yeah. Maybe someday I will.”
EACH TIME NATALIA SET HER TRAY BESIDE EVANGELINE’S, she’d lean over and whisper, “Don’t worry about dumbshits,” and Evangeline knew she was talking about not only Jillian and Masie and Sammy’s nasty clique but the entire world. When Natalia finally broke down and asked her straight out if it was true about her and the boys, Evangeline muttered, “It might as well be.”
Natalia brushed a lock of hair off Evangeline’s cheek. “Yeah, might as well be,” she said.
Evangeline knew she understood and loved her for leaving it at that.
ON THE THIRD TUESDAY IN JANUARY, Evangeline went to Natalia’s house after school to study for a chemistry test. When she arrived home at seven, the house was dark, and a chill gripped her spine. She half thought she’d find the place emptied out, another adult having left her behind. But when she flipped on the lights, she saw the note from Isaac. He was at his clearness committee. She’d forgotten about that.
Everything still felt a bit off, but she was home, and that word “home” was a miracle. The breakfast dishes sat on the counter. And for the first time, she didn’t mind that Isaac hadn’t bothered to soak his bowl, that cereal was glued to the sides, and she turned on the water to fill the sink.
As she set the last cup on a towel to drain, a floorboard popped upstairs. She thought she should be scared. But she wasn’t. This ancient place was always adjusting itself like an arthritic old lady. Even if the house did have ghosts, she figured they were nice enough. The way she saw it, the house loved her. It kept her fed and warm and cared for.
Did Isaac love her too? He was good to her. She gave him that. Better than good. But love? She didn’t think so. He wanted to. In the name of the Lord, as evidence of Divine Light, he wanted to. But he didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. He might have buried all his love with Daniel.
She started drying the dishes, and the house spoke again, louder this time, a full-on thud upstairs, heavy and muffled, like a sack of wet sand landing. She’d blame Rufus, but right then she heard the dog barking in the back field. Ah, so that’s what had been odd when she arrived home: Rufus hadn’t been there to greet her. Had he been out all day?
Another thud above. Isaac had asked her to leave that space alone, and she had obeyed. No matter how many times she’d gone to the stairwell door, she had never once opened it. But now the house was calling her, was being rather insistent in fact.
Evangeline crept to the door. Some kids at school said the second level was creepy and unfinished and asked if she ever heard Daniel up there. They were trying to freak her out. She hated when people did that. She hated even more that the tactic had worked. The reason she hadn’t opened the door wasn’t a lack of curiosity or even her promise to Isaac. The reason she hadn’t opened the door was that she had been afraid. What kind of way was that to live?
She stood a few seconds with her hand on the knob, then swung it open fast. Just an unfinished stairwell with rough-cut slats, scratched like someone had run up them wearing cleats.
“Anyone home? Isaac?”
The house, having drawn her attention, had gone silent. “Okay, house,” she said. “I’m coming up. That’s what you want, right?”
It didn’t answer, but the silence drew her up anyway, one slatted step at a time.
SHE STOOD AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS. A naked bulb swayed on a twisted cord, and somewhere in the dark rafters, wings beat and settled, a hard-edged cutting and folding of air. The frame of a bathroom stood before her, two-by-fours without walls, bare pipes rising from below. A shower, a flimsy one-piece plastic job with a mold-stained curtain, floated in that emptiness like an alien pod. To her right, someone had hacked a doorway through plasterboard. Her eyes jerked away—the sound had come from there. In this unfinished space, Daniel was fully alive, as if even now he might walk out of the darkness.
She’d often thought of Daniel since she’d moved in—how could she not?—though less and less over time. Sometimes she’d pick up his pictures and study them, wonder if her child would look like that, athletic and tall and good-looking. But each day the baby grew, it seemed more of its own making. She’d taken to thinking of the life inside her as an immaculate conception. Laughable or not, it felt simply true. Whatever the biological facts, none of the possible conception stories could be told in a way that didn’t take an innocent and impute another’s guilt.
Evangeline turned now, faced what she assumed was Daniel’s room. Something sharp jabbed her scalp and she slapped the spot, desperate to swat away whatever it was. A stinging insect? A protruding nail? But there was only her hair and a buried point of pain.
She tried to get her legs to return her below, but they refused. In the end, she headed to Daniel’s room willingly. She believed in facing fear when there was no other option. When she got to the doorway, a bitter cold hit. She stood, attempting to discern shapes in the darkness, and heard what sounded like moist breathing.
“Hello? Is anybody there?”
Movement on the bed, something heavy and dense, and she marveled at how whatever it was changed the air, compressed its shape into the room. She could almost see it through the pressure on her skin.
“Hello?” she said again, and this time she heard a rhythmic thumping.
“Rufus?”
The thumping picked up, and she laughed. “Rufus! You scared the shit out of me! Come on, now. Come on.”
But Rufus didn’t come. She hesitated. Her eyes hadn’t fully adjusted and some doubt remained. Why hadn’t the dog greeted her when she came up? Why was he choosing now to disobey? And how did he get up here anyway? She’d never seen the door below open, and it’d been closed when she went in search.
“Rufus! I mean it,” she said. “Come on. Right now!”
The thumping stopped, and she heard only panting. She bolstered her nerve and strode in, but as she reached toward the dark bulk on the bed, she heard a low growl. Not ferocious, only a warning. Still, she snapped her arm back. A dog like Rufus could tear a limb right off. He had never before growled at her, and she half wondered if maybe this wasn’t Rufus after all but a ghost dog paying a visit. She noticed a nightstand lamp and switched it on, producing a dim light through a brown shade.
It was Rufus all right, sitting on the bed, staring at her, the doubled reflection of the hall’s corded bulb swaying in his eyes. Evangeline stepped back, and he seemed suddenly apologetic. He dropped to his belly, pushed his hind legs straight back, and army-crawled forward to exaggerate the stretch. Then he rolled to exposed his naked belly, turned his head toward her, and whimpered, a look so endearing she went to him and stroked his chest.
“Why’d you do that, boy? Why’d you scare me like that?”
With her touch, he closed his eyes, and his lips curled as if in a smile. Evangeline sat on the bed. Even if the door below had somehow blown open earlier, even if a draft had closed it after the dog ventured up, hadn’t she heard Rufus barking in the back field?
Then she saw the curtain billowing. No wonder it was cold; the window was open. Rufus had probably hung his head out, bellowing his indignation at deer in the field or perhaps announcing his entrapment above. She rose, and Rufus snapped onto his side, staring expectantly. She closed the window and said, “Let’s go, okay, boy?”
The dog didn’t move. She would’ve grabbed his collar and guided him down, but that earlier growl made her hesitate. She sat next to him, getting a sense of the room. Though Rufus had mussed it, the bed had been neatly made. In fact, everything seemed arranged: a bouquet of dead flowers on the chest, college pamphlets on the desk, shirts hung on hooks on the far wall, track shoes and work boots lining a corner. Someone had tried to make it neat, as if hoping the occupant would return.
Rufus resumed his whimpering, and she stroked his muzzle, his eyes gentle now. The dog could hypnotize you with his gaze, make your muscles go limp, your eyelids droop. She yawned, and he flipped the other way, let her curl against his back.
When she’d slipped to that place between consciousness and dreams, another presence entered the room and sat on the bed. She tried to open her eyes, to see who it was, but her muscles refused her commands, as if her body had fallen asleep without bringing her mind along.
At some point, all of her must have fallen asleep, because she startled awake when Rufus leaped off the bed barking. He’d probably heard Isaac’s car come up the drive. She jumped up too, a bit dizzy, swept her hand over the bed to straighten it, then snuck downstairs.
Rufus had detained Isaac in an exuberant greeting. The man was kneeling, stroking the dog’s head. “Why so happy to see me, boy?” When he saw Evangeline, he frowned as if worried. “Tired?”
“A little groggy,” she said. “Guess I fell asleep.”
He stood and scanned the counters. No sign of food prep. “Rufus eat yet?”
She shook her head no.
“You eat?”
She shook her head again.
“It’s after nine. You really did fall asleep. Why don’t you feed Rufus. I’ll grill us turkey-cheese sandwiches.”
“You sure? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
“You’ve made dinner the last couple of nights.”
Isaac looked tired too, a gray weariness around his eyes, but there he was, already pulling out what he’d need. Evangeline wondered if she’d been wrong about him, wondered if love could look like that, like a tired old man searching through his refrigerator for meat and cheese.
AFTER A QUIET MEAL EATEN AND CLEARED, she lay on her bed, Rufus in his usual place at the foot. Everything felt different. She hadn’t imagined the other presence in the room. Daniel had been there. She had, for a brief time, been Daniel with his pumped-up power and sense of destiny. But these entitlements seemed forced, as if not quite believed. And rumbling beneath them, she’d felt insecurity and shame and a nagging loneliness. Some great sadness too, as if his heart had been broken. Yet she struggled to believe this could be true for Daniel, to believe that a boy like that—the whole world ripe for his picking—could have suffered too.
She examined the clues for the millionth time. Sammy claimed she had dumped Daniel right before the murder. And that night in the woods, he’d said, “You want me, you want me,” his eyes watery and strange. She tried to create a new version of that night, one that caused her less pain. But nothing worked. Even if he hadn’t meant to hurt her, he’d been blind and reckless and indifferent. He’d treated her as if she were nothing more than a prop in some story of his own.
Daniel had raped her. There. She allowed herself the word. She might not have been screaming, but she had not been confusing or vague. She was no longer going to tell herself she had been. Lying to herself hadn’t made her feel better. Though she’d been his victim, she had not been weak. And she was not a victim still. She’d been strong. She’d taken the control she could.
It was strange how admitting this, seeing it for what it was, didn’t make it harder to forgive Daniel. In fact, she felt an opening she hadn’t before. She’d been battling herself, forcing herself to forgive him without admitting what he’d done, afraid that if she dared acknowledge the truth, even to herself, she’d be lost forever in anger at the boy who might be the father of her child. But now she understood. You can see the crimes that people commit, see them in their clear brutality, and yet someday, somehow, forgive. It might be the only way. How is forgiveness of what is not acknowledged forgiveness at all?
But knowing this didn’t mean she’d actually done it. So she tried one last thing. She pictured Daniel as a little kid, the boy who’d lain on that bed for years, his arm thrown over a foul-smelling pit bull. She didn’t mind that boy so much. Tomorrow, she’d take another stab at it and imagine him a little older. She’d build him day by day. At some point, he’d be the boy who tunneled her into the woods. She couldn’t fix that, but by then he’d be other things too.
It was weird how desperately she wanted to forgive him and weirder still that she almost could. This wasn’t for Daniel’s benefit. What use could he make of it now? She had to save her own heart. It came down to that. She’d been feeding herself poison for years, annoyances and resentments, bitterness and rage. Before, if she killed off her heart, so what? It had been nothing more than a ticking menace that stabbed at her, wanting, wanting, always hungry and angry and lost.
But now, now, it had to be saved for the baby. The baby needed her heart. One way or another, doesn’t a mother’s heart always end up beating inside her children?
So she would work on forgiving Daniel, and then she would turn to forgiving herself. And hadn’t she already made progress? No longer taking blame for Daniel’s acts? Which left the myriad small crimes and self-indulgences she’d engaged in all her life.
Of course, she’d be left with her trip to Bremerton. If she could forgive herself for that, she might find true relief. But how was that possible? She would always see herself opening that car door and climbing in, knowing full well what was on the other side. Where was the latitude in that?
Evangeline closed her eyes, trying to blot out the memory. She had forgotten about Rufus when he began crawling up the bed. He stopped halfway and lay with his nose inches from her belly, staring at the mound that was the baby.
It was as if he were seeing into someone’s eyes.