I’m in the Happily Eveline After about seventy-five yards off Kress Beach on Moosehead Lake. The air is hot and breezy. It’s July, and a more splendid Maine summer day has perhaps never before been seen. The sky is a faded lapis blue, the temperature is in the high seventies, the lake glints like sapphire. Motorboats and party boats speed and drift around the far side of the inlet, but over here it’s just me in my rowboat. And I am happy. Happy and light. I’d been living with a crushing weight since I found out the complete truth about my mother, and it only went away after Max and Marc died.
What I still wonder about is how long Max and Marc watched. How long they stayed.
All I knew growing up was that she had hanged herself out on the Lupine Valley property. But then the notes appeared as I started renovating, as I started doing upkeep and landscaping and tree care on the land. Sometimes I found one-offs inside doorframes or pressed inside a book or under drawer liners, sometimes I found entire caches shoved into caboodles, plastic bags, walls, in little plastic sacks in the tree house wall, up in the gutters of our buildings in little plastic Easter eggs, or inside nooks and crannies of the snaking rock wall in our field. As I found more that talked about Lupine Valley, I explored there, too. And the more I searched, the more I found.
I wonder if my grandparents ever found any of them, and if they did, what they did with them. I wonder if Brady ever saw any of them or if she hid them so well, he never knew they existed. Brady Bouchard, the man who ran. He got married to a woman from Portland and gave full custody to my grandparents the year after Cindy died, leaving his father’s timber business. He lives in Brunswick with that same woman now. I only know a few things about Brady: he owns his own car detailing place, he has two kids—half-siblings of mine, I suppose—he’s a town councilman. But I don’t really know him at all. He gave me up way back then, and I did the same. My grandparents just told me they were mine, and I was theirs, and that’s all that mattered. They only told me about Brady later. I never cared to seek him out or meet him; he was too abstract for me. He never cared to seek me out and meet me. And that was that.
When I put enough of the notes together to figure out what, basically, had happened, it took me almost no time at all to find Max. The internet is wild like that. Max Durant. He was still an artist. He was still seeking approval and the spotlight. Everything I could cross-check, I cross-checked, and it all panned out. I made it my goal to get into the Boston Institute for the Visual Arts, where he taught, and I did. I crammed my final undergrad studies at UMaine, worked tirelessly to improve my craft, and applied. And it turned out I had the talent to get in. If I hadn’t, I simply would have spent time in Boston and found ways to cross paths with him. He did enough public appearances. I would have made it work no matter what, but having the inside track made everything much easier. Word was he had a thing for students.
In the May BIVA email newsletter, the feature story was about Max. And about how President Jordana A. Switzer, PhD, had arranged for Max’s painting Architecture of Radiance to be displayed in the Polk Room of the Boston Institute Gallery starting in the new academic year. As a tribute. The newsletter did not indicate if it would be in the Warhol spot or not. I remember just shaking my head, amazed and disappointed at Juniper’s unending capacity for weakness where Max is concerned.
But now that it is all done, now that Max is dead, and Marc is dead, and Coral is avenged, my sleep is easy and peaceful. I hardly think about Max and Marc anymore.
I still have scores more of Mom’s notes and drawings that were not used in my thesis. I got them back from Lance about two months after Max died, feeling it was safe to make the exchange by then. I think it’s important to keep that stuff. I think it’s important to remember some things. To remember what happened to my mother. To remember how one struggling woman tried so hard to get better. To remember how two men, one ambitious, one vengeful, abused her. To remember how I got here, and what I’ve done, even if the truth of her life and death exists only on these myriad disjointed, rough little scraps of paper.
Her Dark Things, though, might be displayed eventually. My mother might get her day in the sun after all. As for the rest of the notes and drawings, they are silent and buried far away in the basement, huddled under the forgotten ephemera of a woman long dead. But even so, they persist. The only remaining records of her agony, which I have no right to erase from this earth.
I look down at the knife in my hand, and I close it up as I sit under the glaring sun, skimming the weapon through the cold Moosehead water, the boat just drifting lazily and very slowly outward, farther. I should drop it in, let it go. Cast this last tangible part of Max off, this ill-fated thing that belonged to him, then passed to the police, then Juniper, now me. I look down at it, squeezing it tight and then draw my hand away from the water.
I can’t do it. It’s a good knife. Maybe the nicest knife I’ve ever owned. Max’s beautiful souvenir. I put it in my jeans pocket.
I take the boat in and drag it up onto the beach. I make my way up the path toward the commons, following the subtle tracks only someone familiar with the land would know. I emerge from the woods and into the openness of the abandoned arts camp. I do a loop around the commons, and as I do, I hear a quiet hum then rumble—an engine growing louder, and I know someone must be coming up the road. It’s a large, shiny, blue pickup truck. I hear Bob Dylan spilling out of the windows. I squint to see inside the glare-flaring windshield. Lance Peters gives me a smile and a wave from behind the wheel.
I wave and smile back, happy to see him smiling again. I’ve helped Lance mourn the loss of his uncle, with whom he’d always had a difficult and conflicted relationship. I’ve let him talk through with me countless times how the accident could have happened, who might have been out there, why in the world Uncle Marc would have been wearing those gloves. We also talk about how uncanny it is that his girlfriend back in the day had died the same way. Lance will whistle in exasperation and declare that there are more things in heaven and earth, etcetera, etcetera. And by the end of it we always settle on the simple fact that it could have been anyone. I hold his hands and look into his eyes, and I let him know: it could be anyone at all.
We’ve fallen back into things. Maybe even a proper relationship, you could say. We met in first grade, and there’s been nothing for it ever since, in one way or another. We’ve been bumping into each other and catching up since I got back here last May. A lunch here, a movie there, sex in his truck here and there and there. Then one night several months before Max died, we went to Thelma’s Landing, and we had some drinks, and some spigot inside me just opened to him. I ended up telling him what I had found out about my mom. I told him so much—almost everything. Everything about Max. And he didn’t get scared away when I dropped into conversation that I wouldn’t mind if Max Durant died.
He didn’t bat an eye.
And when I expressed that I wouldn’t mind doing it myself, he didn’t flinch. And when I said I had a plan, he said how can I help. We were in love by then, and he would have done anything for me. And I for him. But beyond feeling an allegiance to me because of our relationship, I could see that he understood that I had been mortally wronged and that all this was, all I really planned to do, was to set it right.
“Hey, there, Evie.” He smiles as he pushes the door of the truck closed behind him. Evie. Evie. Eveline. Audra was only a temporary, necessary measure. For Max. For the institute. I’m just Evie Dunn to Lance. Always have been. And he wants me to change my name back, officially. I probably will, despite the Dunn baggage. I created some of my own to carry. It’s who I am. Audra Colfax served her purpose.
“Hey, there, Lance.” I squint up at him.
“Thought you might want some muscle to start.” He flexes for me in his old Greenville Lakers soccer tee. Still fits. Still fills it out quite nicely.
“Would I ever.” We kiss, and he presses his hand tenderly to the side of my face.
We ride down to the clearing on his two ATVs with an ax, a chainsaw, a hatchet, some rope, some chain, and a few other things. We park at the edge of the clearing. We stand before the boulder. We stand before the birch. Lance puts his arm around my shoulders. We look at the birch in silence for a good long while. Maybe Lance thinks I’m praying. And in a way, he’s right. I think about my strong, wiry, blond little mom. I think of her extraordinary, tenacious, unsettling talent. Her drawings. Her notes. Her small body in this tree draped in her favorite yellow dress. I think of suave, lithe, bespectacled Max. I think of his easy charisma in the classroom, the sparks of greatness in his paintings. I think of the rage and ego in him. I think of how desperately he wanted to be admired. I think of lumbering, brutish Marcus—cunning and calculating. A killer of women; one an “accident,” one a “suicide.” His smugness all these years as he tried to socialize with me through Lance. I think of everything these men—the Ms—have taken from me. I think of Max hanging in his smart peacoat. I think of Marcus bleeding out, face down in the dirt.
I leave Lance’s gentle grasp and retrieve the ax from my ATV. I go to the birch and level a devastating hack into its papery-white side. I turn to look at Lance.
“It’s time for it to come down. And I want all of the roots up. All of them,” I tell him. I pull the ax from the tree. He nods and retrieves goggles, leather gloves, and the heavy-duty chain saw from his ATV. We are changing the history and the topography and the ecosystem of this land for the better. When he’s most of the way through and the tree tips, Lance pulls the saw and backs up, shouting for me to keep clear. The birch crashes down through the branches and leaves of a few other trees, smashing into low bushes and brambles as it hits the earth with an enormous, muted smack. It falls downslope toward the lake, like an arrow.
* * *
We’ve been at it for about four hours, chopping and sawing off the limbs of the tree bit by bit, then chopping and sawing and stacking those into piles and bundles, then setting to cutting logs and discs from the trunk.
Lance leaves to grab food for us, and I pause in the still air, the earth moist and radiating humidity. I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand. I mindlessly pull Max’s knife—my knife—from my pocket and flip it open and closed in one hand—snick-snick. I take a turn around the clearing, which seems so much bigger, so much brighter, so much lighter now. I look at the beautiful birch wood, a maddening proliferation. Now hundreds and hundreds of small, haunting birch trees. Mini gallows. I’m turning away from the black hole in the earth the tree once sat in when I see something. Something tucked into the space between the boulder and the freshly disturbed tangle of roots.
Snick-snick. Snick.
I turn back and squint, move myself closer to the hole. I get down on my hands and knees. There’s a small, sturdy, clear-plastic box, red—like a child’s jewelry box for a few bracelets or a collection of beads—pinging out of the blackness of the earth. The sudden red is a jolt, a cardinal flashing through trees, a fishing hook through the fingertip of a little girl.
Mom.
I stay looking at it for many good, long moments. I see that there is a folded piece of paper inside.
Jesus, Coral.
You are everywhere, Mom.
How many times have I found such a note of hers, folded and tucked, hidden in such a way over the past several years? All over the Dunn land? Inside my home? All over Lupine Valley? But it has been months since this has happened. It’s almost too much to bear, to see her whispering at me from this earth, curling her finger at me to come closer. To look, one more time.
I shiver in the mid-July heat. I pull it loose. I find the clasp. It feels sealed permanently shut at first, but then it gives, the top lid flying back, falling over on its hinge. I look at the folded piece of paper inside and consider not opening it. I run my thumb over the paper again and again, dirtying it, stuck in some subterranean trauma rhythm, and in the other hand, snick-snick.
I open it up.
A cardinal shock, a flash of violence.
I only realize that the blade has sliced into my clenched fist when crimson dots the paper, my vision.
* * *
I’ll tell Evie one day but Evie is so
small
is not her father
is not Evie’s father Evie doesn’t belong to him
is not of him
M
of course
Max Max Moss M Max Moss M
that devil in King City in that cabin
that devil put another devil in me in
that cabin in King City
made her a pretty little devil
too
the best thing he ever made
the best thing I ever made too even if she is
a
devil
like
him.
—March89. CD.