First You Try Everything (23 page)

Evvie throws herself around as if having a seizure.
She makes a horrible noise, and every part of her body is moving hysterically,
violently, and now Rocky Dracula retrieves his hand from her neck, and stands
over her saying, what the fuck, what the fuck is this, and she is hoping she
could be the human sacrifice of the day and then Ben could be free to find the
door, could somehow escape the Wolf and his gun, the Wolf who they hadn't heard
from in a while and who Evvie thought might even be sleeping. She feels
Dracula's foot on her back, the hard shoe pressing down, and it almost feels
good. “Stop it,” he orders.

And he doesn't shoot her. Just stays bent down
looking at the freak show that keeps getting worse and freakier before his eyes.
She pours every last desire into the seizure, rolling her eyes and managing to
make a low, groaning noise that Dracula does not care for at all, and he says
so.

It's too late when they finally hear the door slam.
When Evvie looks over, she hallucinates his silhouette against the night sky
there for one shocking second. She knows he is outside. Her tears fall hot and
fast. Her seizure is over. She keeps making sounds. Rocky stands straight up. He
fires toward the door, as if Ben might reappear.

“This wasn't supposed to happen, Starshine. What
the fuck were you
thinking
?”

He unties her. He untapes her. He screams at the
Wolf.

“He flew by me like lightning,” the Wolf
whines.

Rocky says he'd trusted her to understand the
operation. He'd
trusted
her. He takes off his mask.
Now he can't promise anything, he says.

Evvie sits there in the dark, unable to speak.

Ben

B
en had tried to wave down cars, and trucks, and nobody had stopped. It was dark, it was the middle of the night, and they could see he was out there without a car, and that meant trouble. He'd run for what felt like hours down a long, narrow secondary highway. He was in and out of breath, weeping, at one point screaming Evvie's name out loud over and over again as he walked, then growing deeply quiet, conserving whatever energy was left to him. After that long silence, he began to run against the image of her dead.

F
inally something like a neighborhood began to appear. When he approached a brick house on the end of a cul-de-sac, sensor lights came on, and by the time he got to the front porch and touched the door handle, a robotic manly voice came blaring out from the intercom.
YOU HAVE VIOLATED A PROTECTED PROPERTY. LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. THE POLICE HAVE BEEN CALLED. YOU HAVE VIOLATED A PROTECTED PROPERTY.
It kept on repeating itself as he moved to the next house.

Nobody answered in this house, or the next—even as he kicked the white aluminum door with all his might. He'd dreamed a version of this as a child—needing help, going from house to house, someone chasing him, nobody there to let him in. At the fourth house, he slammed down the brass knocker twenty times and pressed down hard on the doorbell so that it rang continuously and shouted,
“Someone has to help!”
until finally a voice on the intercom to the left of the mailbox said, “Who's down there?”

“I need your help! Please! My phone died!”

“What seems to be the issue?”

Ben was aware that someone was hanging out of the second-story window, looking down at him.

Ben looked up. “I need your help. Your phone. Some people— My wife is in serious danger.”

The woman ducked back inside, and seconds later, she opened the door with a gun in her hand, her body shapely in her nightgown. When she saw his face, and how Ben put his hands in the air, she lowered the gun. “Really, I promise I only want to use a phone. Nothing else.”

Behind her an older man appeared, rubbing his forehead, and asked her to put the gun back in the closet. Then said to Ben, “She's been through some things.”

The woman said, “Damn
right
I've been
through
some things.” But she put the gun down on the table and turned on a lamp while telling Ben to come in. In the light he saw her hard, drawn-on eyebrows. A woman who pilfered some happiness in a tanning salon, a woman who was now married to this older guy who must have rescued her from some circle of hell. The man, bald and sleepy faced in an undershirt and boxer shorts, handed Ben a cell phone, saying, “Sit down. We'll get you some water. You look like you're going to keel over.”

His wife had taken some steps back, and stood with arms crossed, looking at her husband with something like contempt.

Ben dialed 911 and asked for cops to come to where he was now so he could take them to the warehouse, so they could rescue Evvie—

“Where are you?” said the cop.

“Where am I?” he asked the woman, who still stood in the center of the room.

She hesitated. “You're a long way from anything out here.”

“What road? Exact address?”

“You're at 120 Ethan Allen Court in Meadow Wood Acres.”

H
e sat on the flowered couch, the draperies behind him holding back the last bruise of night, the woman in the kitchen, watching television, and the man somewhere else. They had given him buttered toast and water. They'd sat with him awhile, and he'd told them what he could—the story spilling out of him too quickly, so that his listeners held their eyes wide open, blinking, saying nothing, but looking at one another, then back to him, then back to one another. “Jesus,” the man finally said. Then they gave him privacy, maybe because he seemed a little crazy, his legs moving frantically like windshield wipers on high speed, and he sat there, biting his nails and thinking how he would thank them one day properly, how he and Evvie would drive out here together with some kind of surprise for them, maybe some money and flowers. If Evvie survived, he told himself (and he couldn't imagine a more urgent prayer), then they would circle back to one another without a doubt and live their lives transformed.

H
e'd
already
circled back. It had happened without his consent. Screaming her name to the sky had taken his heart and shoved it up against hers, and now there was only the one heart, the impossible beating heart of this one life, and here on the flowered couch, imagining her back in the warehouse, he wondered who he'd been that he'd ever managed to leave her. And wondered too if this was punishment—this whole night—for daring to abandon this person who was, he saw now, his life. She'd seen the worst of him, and those days returned: the year he'd spent almost six months in deep depression—Evvie washing his feet with a hot washcloth and rubbing oil into the soles, Evvie getting him to eat, one spoonful at a time, and playing deejay until finally, one night, he'd been able to hear music again—she'd played a beautiful grim song, “See How We Are,” by X, it was playing in his mind as if she'd walked into this room and placed the headphones on his ears, not a happy song, but it had somehow worked to heal him. . . . And then those days after she'd lost the baby—he'd never called it
the baby
until now—those days after she'd lost the baby he'd given her baths, shampoos, and she'd returned the favor, they were like each other's children, wrapped in big towels, their bedroom in the old apartment filled with fresh, cold air because Evvie liked to swing the windows wide open no matter the season, and she'd wanted to name the baby, and he'd said no, don't do that, and if you do, don't tell me, and she'd put her hand through his hair, soothing him, and saying nothing at all. She'd swallowed the name down, he imagined. He wanted to know what it was. As if it mattered.

Everything mattered. If they could lie in bed and hear “See How We Are” again, two people alive and alone together in their bed with a song, it was all he'd ever ask of life, and even the tedium, even the loneliness, even the despair would be recognized as the gifts they finally were.

In those first years when he'd lie awake at night with her, something old in him, something older than time and unreasonably, unspeakably hurt, some inexplicable isolation he'd never been free of, had been nearly soothed away by her as by nobody else. He'd allowed himself to fall into her strange, slow fairy tales, where the two of them were magnificently lost in the woods but finally taken care of by kindly giants and fairies with learning disabilities and hilarious cooks who spoke in riddles, everything in those fairy tales described meticulously, so that all these years later, though now he trembled and held his stomach tightly and felt cold all over, all these years later he could see the red and white shoelaces of the one giant's peach-colored shoes. And how he and Evvie, lost children who had stumbled into a new mountainous world, slept in a cradle in a tree-room, the window a space between the thick, green branches that hung down to make walls, and through that green window, snow falling on the peaks across from them, and it fell like music, Evvie said, little notes of endless music, can you hear it, and he could hear it, and then she said a fairy was peeking at them from behind a leaf, and he could see it.

A
nd she'd been there the day he'd been told by an old professor that his piano playing was technically fine but
lacked some essential, ineffable quality
, and he'd resisted Evvie's tirade against the professor—
Fuck that
fucker, Ben!
—until she'd done a wickedly accurate impression of the man and he'd ended up laughing then and now right here on this couch as he closed his eyes and there she was on Blackie the horse coming to get him, the long plastic mane flowing in the wind, he would like to ride with her on a horse of his own, but he has to go throw up now.

“Can I use your bathroom?” he called out. Too loudly. The man appeared in the doorway, ushered him toward a small bathroom, and before he could even think to turn on the light, he vomited into the white bowl. Then again. Flushed the toilet and then washed his mouth out. Stood up, found the light, and looked at himself for a long moment in the mirror.
Who are you? Really. Who are you?

T
wo cop cars showed up, four cops, an ambulance, and two paramedics, a fire engine with three or four firefighters.

Ben rode in one of the cars, leading the convoy, sirens blaring.

One of the cops said barely two words and drank a can of Red Bull, drumming his knees and bouncing his head. He looked out the window. The driving cop talked football like they were on their way to a game.

Before they'd left, Ben had blurted the whole story out in the driveway of the people's house. The cop shook his head and whistled after the story was over, then said, “We'll get 'em,” but then looked over at his partner with an odd smile, and for a moment Ben wondered if they thought he was making the whole thing up. Another nutcase. The people in the house had stood there at the doorway, watching this, and then, when the car pulled away, the woman had burst through the door and waved good-bye. Ben thought he would never forget that.

He directed the cops to the best of his ability, but his directions were undergirded by a sense of panic that really he had no idea where the warehouses were, that he may have turned left to get into the neighborhood and not right, but there was nothing to do but trust that eventually he would spot the road that led to Evvie. It was close to dawn, and the black night air gave rise to the bruise of morning, and Ben counted deer, six of them, a whole family, in the triangular field to the left. Their silence, their mysterious movements in the predawn cold: something to report to Evvie. And then it came to him that he would also need to tell Lauren—not about the deer, but about all of this, of course, and how strangely it was unfolding inside of him, and he saw himself across from her at one of her beautifully prepared tables. He reached his hand to touch her face, and remembered he loved her, remembered that nothing is simple, that he had things to sort out, that sorrow was coming. And yet Lauren, and Lauren's table, and Ramona, and their square house with the garden out back, all seemed small, almost miniature, almost devoid of meaning when held next to the idea that Evvie,
Evvie
, could be dead.

Evvie

S
he went
with Ben to his apartment, finally, at dusk. They sat together in the shelter of
their shock, in the darkness, holding hands, talking, and at one point, Ben
resting with his head against her chest after he'd told her he would never
underestimate what factory farmed animals had to go through again; being in that
dark warehouse, utterly powerless, sensing they were going to be killed, was a
terror he'd felt viscerally, like any animal would.

She stroked his head and listened to him
breathe.

“Yeah,” she said.

“It might take a long time to recover.”

“Yeah.”

A
fter
some time passed, he said he was going to Lauren's. He'd already called her on
the phone but didn't say much; he needed to see her. “I need to sort this out.
Will you be OK here?” His eyes held their confusion and love in equal measure.
“Maybe we should call someone to come be with you? Cedric or someone? I really
don't want to leave you without—”

“No, I'm fine. Please. Stay as long as you want.
I'll rest.”

He'd already wept in her arms and told her he was
sorry and that they'd be together again. They'd find a way. They'd already found
it! He'd already explained how their whole life had been returned to him. She'd
not been able to say much at all. He kissed her good-bye at the door, on the
mouth, and she felt this kiss try to turn into a promise of future kisses, but
she couldn't taste it. A new barrier, heavy as iron, was erecting itself in her
heart. As soon as he left, she got online and wrote to Celia.

I
DECIDED NOT TO
DO IT
. I
T'S TOO CRAZY
. A
ND WHO KNOWS WHO THESE KIDNAPPERS ARE IN REAL
LIFE
. T
HEY COULD BE INSANE
. T
HEY SAY NO GUNS, BUT WHY SHOULD I BELIEVE THAT
?
T
HE ONE GUY HAS BLUE EYES THAT SPIN
. T
HEY MAY NEVER STOP SPINNING
. I'
M NOT ABOUT TO FALL FOR HIS CHARM
! E
ASILY COULD BE SOME PSYCHO SOCIOPATH
. THE WORLD
BREEDS SOCIOPATHS.

I
F
B
EN WANTS TO COME BACK SOMEDAY
,
FINE
. B
UT
I'
M NOT GETTING INVOLVED IN ANYTHING CRAZY
. I
JUST WANT HIM TO BE HAPPY
. I
REALLY JUST WANT HIM TO HAVE A LONG, HAPPY LIFE
.
A
ND THAT'S IT
.

She sat and stared at the screen, then added,

O
THERWISE
,
NOT A LOT GOING ON HERE
. I
MIGHT ORDER SOME PIZZA
. A
ND
I'
M THINKING ABOUT A NEW CAREER—MAYBE
SOMETHING IN THE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY, SINCE SUPPOSEDLY THERE WILL BE TONS
OF JOBS
.

Again she sat back and looked at these words. She
had never seriously considered health care until the words came out of her
fingers, onto the keys, then onto the screen. But now she thought, that's
exactly what I'll do.

She signed off with,
YOU
MIGHT SAY WHY HEALTH
CARE, BUT IT JUST DAWNED ON ME,
CELIA, THAT WHAT I REALLY WANT TO DO IS QUIETLY HELP
PEOPLE IN CONCRETE WAYS.

T
he
sound of the warehouse door, when it finally had opened, was still inside her,
repeating itself, a reverberating screech shooting upward from her stomach, past
her heart, into her head, then into the atmosphere like a comet, and she knew
now how sound could leave a scar, because each time it repeated itself inside of
her, she felt a little different. Some people heard sound as color, and maybe
she was turning into one of those people, since the scar seemed to be
red-orange, and getting brighter with each repetition.

She walked a tightrope back and forth in Ben's
apartment tonight, Ruth staying close beside her, sweet Ruth, who looked at her
with the same old eyes of compassion, but also somehow asking a question of
Evvie that Evvie couldn't answer.
What is it, girl? What do
you want me to say? I know I don't deserve you, but I will someday. I
will.

T
he
cops had yelled, “Police!” and shone an enormous, blinding flashlight into the
darkness.

The flashlight had wandered all over the warehouse,
leaving no corner unchecked, bathing her finally with the cold miracle of light.
She'd been huddled in the corner, alone. She'd fallen asleep. She'd not been
raped.

Then she'd heard Ben. “Evvie?”

“You can come with me,” a cop said to Ben. They
approached her, single file.

And then Ben crouched down and held his hands out.
She took them and stood on wobbly legs. He took her in his arms.

She couldn't think of that reunion now. She might
never be able to tame it into memory, even if she lived to be a hundred.

S
he'd
had to go to the police station, and tell the story of the night.

It was not difficult to lie—or to refrain from
telling the whole truth—because the self who'd hired the men to show up in masks
at Ben's office was dead.

In the room with the tiny window, she knew she was
being watched as she told the story verbatim except for those details that would
have implicated her, or the person she used to be. She told the story with
restrained passion and tears and the bedraggled detective had patted her hand
and said he knew it was hard, but she was doing a fine job.

“H
i!”
She froze on the tightrope in a patch of evening sunlight, one leg held out to
the left, as if to keep herself from falling.

“Hi.”

“How was your visit?”

“I don't know. She's freaked out, of course. And I
haven't told her what my plans are yet. I did tell her I was with you right
now.”

“OK?” She hadn't meant it to be a question. Her
heart slammed in her chest as she bent down to embrace Ruth. She lined her head
next to Ruth's head. Diligence Chung had taken care of Ruth while they'd been
kidnapped. The dog smelled like the young woman's soap, or perfume, or
holiness.

“I want to be careful. I'm sure if I go slow—”

“The thing is, is, I'm on a tightrope. Ben.”

Evvie was walking again, arms outstretched like
wings. “Mr. Ben, my old friend. I'm on a very thin tightrope.”

“Come here, you're shaking. You can't stay on a
tightrope when you're shaking like that. You're just in shock.”

“Because everything inside me is broken and it's
absolutely my fault.” She kept walking the rope. Ruth, beside her, gazed up
anxiously. “You have no idea.”

He walked over and stood behind her. “You don't
need to have survivor's guilt. We survived. It's the best thing we—”

“I didn't survive.”

“Sure did. You're right here, Ev. Come on.”

He put his hands on her shoulders, and she stopped
walking. “You survived and you're the reason I survived,” he said. “I still
can't believe it.”

“I can't either.” She looked at the floor.

“Take a deep breath, Ev.”

But her breathing was shallow, more like a dog's
panting.

“Is it going to snow?” she said, but it came out
shrill. She knew she couldn't do what she most wanted to do, which was turn her
face into his chest and sob until she felt a kind of vanishing. Tears so
plentiful and fierce they would be in lieu of confession. What good would
confession do anyway? She could tell a priest and spare Ben the pain of knowing.
She'd caused enough pain for one lifetime. It was time to start to live their
lives again, and be happy.

They stood there for a while, his hands massaging
her shoulders. Tears, way back in her head, were trying to travel forward but
came up against a dam.

“I heard we're getting a storm,” Ben said. His
voice sounded like the old Ben. He had been returned to his old self, the one
that wasn't trying to run from her.

“Kick me out,” she said.

“Evvie, what are you talking about?”

“I want to sleep on the streets. I want to be out
there alone. I always have.”

He placed his hands on her upper arms and pressed
hard. “You're in deep shock.”

“No, that's wearing off.” Her voice was low and
steady. “Unfortunately.”

“Well, I'm in deep shock. And I'd like to stay here
for a while.”

“You should. You should stay here as long as you
like. But you should kick me out because I don't deserve to be in your
presence.”

“Is this what they did to you? Made you more of a
masochist than you ever were before? Is this what you're going to let those
motherfuckers do? You don't think that—”

“I met them on a bus. Way back in early spring. You
hadn't been gone long. They showed me this pamphlet.”

“Met who? Evvie, go lie down. You're delusional.
I'm tired. We need—”

“This pamphlet about how to get your lover to come
back, really.”

She spoke in a stage whisper, but the words scalded
her mouth and lips as they entered the air. It was like she'd jumped off a
bridge and the fall was taking a long, long time. Ben took her by the hand and
led her into the bedroom. “You don't need to make up a story. We're both in a
crazy state right now. All we need is a good sleep,” he said, and sat her on the
edge of the bed, and knelt down to take her shoes off, one at a time. He set
them by the door. Then was back to take off her socks. “Just get under the
covers and go to sleep. I'll be in soon.” He put his hand on her forehead, then
through her hair. Then turned her onto her stomach and rubbed her back. “I hate
that you had to go through that. All those hours not knowing whether you would
live or die.”

Evvie again felt the presence of tears, far back in
her head. She held her eyes wide open in the dark room. He felt her pulse. He
rubbed her back, but she couldn't feel anything.

“You should go spend the night with Lauren.”

“That wouldn't be right.”

“You could figure stuff out. You don't know how
things will—”

“I have to find the words to apologize to her. That
will take a while. I have to wait and figure it out. I don't have any—”

“I wish you'd go. You can't just—”

“Shhh. Evvie, your voice is really strange. Just
try to take some deep breaths. I'm really worried about you.”

H
e
stood up after a while, and left the room, leaving the door partway open, so
that Evvie could lie there taking in the hallway, the light, and occasionally
glimpse Ben, who kept coming to the door to check on her, wringing his hands, as
if she were his own fevered child.