She whirled on him. “That’s what you think of me, isn’t it?”
It was a childish thing to say, she knew, so without waiting for an answer she hurried down the drive, nearly tripping on the gravel in her haste to get to the car.
But he was right, she thought later, sitting in the parking lot. He was exactly right. I was out of my mind. Because she’d run out of the house, gotten in her car and turned on the engine. Then sat there in the driveway and thought, Even this car is too nice for me. And it wasn’t even that nice a car, not like Ray’s Saab with its real leather seats and racy engine; her car was a ten-year-old Oldsmobile Cutlass, a huge boat of a car that had belonged to Ray’s mother until she died. Evelyn got out of the Olds again and stood in the driveway, not knowing what to do next. She didn’t want to go back in the house. She wandered around to the dark backyard, breaking off bits of hedge and throwing them away. The house stood quietly over her, warm yellow light illuminating one upstairs window like a storybook drawing. The house was perfect too, and she was like some bad guest, moving through it and messing things up. She stooped down, picked up two of the rocks at the border of Ray’s herb garden. She wished she had learned to juggle one of those days back in her life before she knew him: she would have liked to see those rocks arc in rainbow-shaped trails in front of her face, would have liked to feel them falling, hard, into her palms with a little sting.
Idiot, idiot, idiot, she thought, the words in her brain a tune she could not get rid of, and then she found herself turning and throwing one of those round rocks as hard as she could toward the room with a light in it, as if that yellow glow were a target. There was a crash, a faint thud and then silence.
For a second she wasn’t even sure what had happened. The first thing she became aware of was that the punishing voice in her head had stopped. She took a deep breath; the air was soft, full of spring dampness. The silent backyard opened out around her, dark and full of peace.
And then she noticed there were spring peepers starting up again, and then Ray was calling her name from somewhere in the house. His voice sounded bland, mildly curious, as if he were wondering whether she’d accidentally dropped a dish. She looked up. In the big window on the second floor, the fancy curved one, there was a horrible jagged space.
She ran around to the front of the house with no clear idea besides getting away, jumped in the Olds and drove. Ray was probably still down in the kitchen, and perhaps he would interpret the sound of breaking glass as just some curious night noise. If he didn’t go upstairs before she got back with the milk, she could get him to bed without him discovering the broken window, and then after he fell asleep she’d assess the damage. Maybe she could even keep him out of the study over the weekend, maybe she could get the glass fixed Monday while he was at work and he’d never have to know.
Fine. But Evie Lynne, you threw a rock through your own window.
In the supermarket she bought a gallon of milk and paid for it without noticing. She got in the car and drove home again. When she passed the police car on Old Adams Road, it didn’t register. Not until she pulled into the driveway and saw the lights on all over the house and yard did she catch her breath, her chest squeezing into a fist as she ran inside. Only when she found Ray standing dumbly in the study with a cup of tea in his hand and dried blood on his face and blood-soaked gauze taped over his eyebrow did she realize: he’d been in the room. She might have killed him.
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
Ray was gesturing with his bloodstained hand at the rock on the carpet, the shattered window, the smashed lamp.
“The cops think it must have been some kids from town who threw it,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the desk.
Did he really believe this? Did he really think she hadn’t done it?
“That could have killed you,” she said. She was shaking. She went to him, glass gritty beneath her shoes. She touched his cheek. There was glass in his hair. She lifted free the tiny glinting slivers, and gently touched her husband’s head. There was a streak of dirt on her palm.
Ray didn’t notice. She kissed his cheeks, lifted his hands and kissed his fingers as if she were kissing the petals of flowers. He, too, was something fragile. She unbuttoned the buttons of his shirt and marveled at his chest, at how seamlessly and wonderfully something so easily broken as a body could be made. She kissed the curling hair across his ribcage; she kissed the circle of his navel. She loosened his belt and he sat very still and let her. She undid the button, the zipper, and opened his trousers so gently he felt the lightest touch of her fingers on him like breath. And instead of speaking, she took him in her mouth as if he were as delicate as a hummingbird’s egg, and the only place in the universe safe enough, soft enough, was inside her mouth on the bed of her tongue.
Afterwards she washed and bandaged his forehead, then retaped her own cut thumb. They left the glass shards on the floor and went to bed. Ray fell asleep at once. Evelyn lay awake, gazing at the bandage over Ray’s eyebrow. She thought of all the bandages she’d worn during her years with Joe. Bandages and dark glasses. She’d fought back at times, and once she gave him a black eye; the next morning Joe had examined his blue iris swimming in a pool of red, the skin beneath it dark purple, and said, “See? You’re no better than I am.”
“I would never hit you first,” she’d retorted, and been sure of it. For a while.
Now she curled her body against Ray’s sleeping one, tried to let the easy rhythm of his lungs enter her own shallow breaths, but when she finally fell asleep, it was with the ghost of Joe Cullen standing in the shadows beside the bed and laughing at her. Leaning over her, until she felt his hot breath on her face as he whispered in her ear that the question was not, Why tonight. The question was, Why wasn’t it sooner?
There were bad things inside her; things Ray knew nothing about. Evelyn slipped out of bed and stood at the window. It was a few hours before dawn, and somewhere along the Springtime Route the members of the Jones and Wallace Big Top and Sideshow were in motion. When the convoy of trailers and trucks pulled in to the next empty field on the outskirts of somewhere, they’d fall into their beds in the Airstreams or Winnebagos or truck cabs and sleep until it was time to drag themselves out for the matinee. Would they be in Virginia this week? North Carolina? Evelyn thought of what that woman from the boarding school, Liz Luce, had said: “Her folks have disappeared.” It happened—people could be there one minute and then gone the next. It had happened to Joe: one minute he was there, her big, violent, noisy, alive first husband, and then poof—like a sleight-of-hand, like a special effect, he was gone.
Now look at your new husband, sleeping there in the big bed, his arm curled around the empty space where you lay. That man with the bandage on his head where you hurt him—he loves you. Loves you, Evie Lynne. Oh, she was lucky, she knew it. She had gone from a drunk sword swallower who hit her to a successful architect who loved her. Gone from a man who drank himself blind and passed out behind the animal cages to a man who lay on the rug to listen to classical music. It was as miraculous as anything her sister Alice Marie could do on the high wire. At times it seemed a hoodwinking worthy of Barnum himself that Ray had made her his wife, but he had—tattoos and all. He loved her and he didn’t ask much. Tonight, he’d only wanted her to relax and have fun, and what had she done instead? Been sulky and furious and acted like a freak at his stupid party, and then thrown a rock at his head and nearly killed him. Oh, the ghost of Joe Cullen was having a field day with that one. The ghost of Joe Cullen was laughing so hard he was doubled over on the floor beside this queen size bed, his big voice booming through Evelyn’s heart as if her heart were a canyon. It made her feel cold.
In the circus, whenever something went wrong during a performance, only one rule applied: create a diversion. The band would start up, the five-piece orchestra playing “Stars and Stripes” too fast, and a clown honking a huge brass horn would ride out on a tiny bicycle so that no one would notice whatever had gone wrong—a tiger wandering around the perimeter of the tent, or a fire that started on a light whose gel had melted over the bulb and ignited.
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