“Hey, you all right?”
“Do me a favor,” she said as she slung her bag over her shoulder. “Make sure they get my address to mail me my check. I quit.”
“What? Why?”
“Because that waxy motherfucker asks me out nearly every day, and he just tried to change my shift. He’s always leering at me and brushing up against me and I can’t take it anymore.”
“You need to tell someone if he’s harassing you.”
“I’ll be sure to write a letter to management,” she snarled, needing to take a jab at herself in that moment for some unknown reason. “I am so sick and tired of being treated like a piece of flesh. Goddamn it! What does a girl have to do, not to be some sort of object in this world? People are writing about my personal business! Taking pictures of me at work! I just want to blend in! That’s all I’ve ever wanted! To blend the fuck in.”
Nick was suddenly at her side, ushering her away from the registers and into a quiet corner behind a juice display. “Hey, hey. Calm down.”
Her breath quaked and to her horror, drops of tears fell from her cheeks, blooming into dark, rosy puddles on her pink shirt. She only wanted a normal job with a normal boss and a normal life. Why could nothing ever be normal?
She’d gone from the gutters to an ivory tower to what she finally hoped was average, and now, because of her stubborn temper, she had nothing.
The heel of her palm scrubbed away her stupid tears and she shrugged off Nick’s touch. It was only meant to comfort, but at the moment she didn’t want the weight on her skin.
“Gerhard’s a jerk. I see the way he watches you. Seriously, Ev, you can complain to management.”
More attention she didn’t want.
Pulling herself together, she shifted and sniffled in a deep breath. “No. This isn’t where I want to be anyway. No offense. I just . . . I’ll figure it out.”
“But I like you working here,” he admitted. “We have fun.”
They did have fun. It was nothing tangible, but Nick made her laugh and helped speed along the hours. Something inside her told her this might be the end of their . . . friendship. The word settled in her head like a battleship trying to parallel park in a shoebox. He was her friend.
He didn’t want anything from her. Theirs was a mutual respect for silly jokes and meaningless chatter. She never had that before. With Parker, there had always been an underlying sense of struggle, a weight that siphoned away all those free opportunities to simply be.
Her relationship with Pearl was work. When had it become so much work to have a mother? Perhaps it had always been that way. No, there was a time when Evelyn was merely a child expected to sit and have her hair braided by her mother’s fingers and go to bed in her mother’s arms. Those days seemed lost, worlds away.
Then there was Lucian. He made her laugh. He made her smile. He made her do a lot of other things that were fun. Every other face from her existence paled in comparison to his. Her emotions calmed at the mere thought of him.
She grinned at Nick. “I really liked working with you too, Nick. Maybe in a few weeks we can get together and hang out. Grab lunch or something.”
Her friend smiled sadly. “That would be cool. I can introduce you to my new girlfriend and maybe you can bring your bazillionaire.”
She laughed. “Maybe.” Would her life ever be ordinary with a man like Lucian in it?
They hugged and said good-bye. She felt marginally guilty for leaving the cart of food for the others to put away, but she was done. Another job, another chapter in the life of Evelyn Scout Keats.
Chapter 14
“Hearts can never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.”
~The Wizard of Oz
There is something so contrived about winter. It’s long, and bits of warmth are stolen from fabrications of man. Evelyn always favored the warmer months, and on days like this she savored every replenishing kiss of sunlight as it heated through her clothes and hugged her in a way her skin desperately needed.
For once, her feet simply trotted over ground with no direction as to where she should go next. Sharp, white blades of sky blurred the tops of buildings as she wandered aimlessly through the streets of Folsom. It was barely noon and she had hours to spare before her lesson, before Lucian finished work, before . . . anything.
Her body sunk into a bench, its metal planks forcing her posture into a pose she had no energy to hold. This dogged existence of climbing from one ladder to the next was wearing out her limits. She ached to crawl out of her skin and be someone else for a day.
People steadily passed in cars and on foot. She watched in a clouded form of wonderment. Where were they going? What did they do? Was there a purpose to their day? It all appeared convoluted and arbitrary at the same time.
Feeling like she’d run a marathon a lifetime long, she welcomed this jumbled form of inertia. Maybe Lucian was right. Maybe she was burning herself out, trying to cram too much in. Outlasting all else was her desire to be on par with others. She was twenty-three years behind in the game, and her struggle to catch up was beating her down like an iron fist.
It wasn’t fair. None of it was. Her life was a peephole, a tiny snippet of skewed reality that flipped upside down in the blink of an eye. Lowering her lashes, she eased her head back, drawing warmth from the rays that warmed her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her mind traipsed over sporadic clips of her past, visiting some longer than others for no reason in particular, clinging to certain specific memories.
“Wait. He’s a big coward!” Evelyn recalled her outrage at having borne the entire length of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. “It’s all fake.” She shifted from her seat on the carpet of the library. Her back ached from lounging against the jagged bookcase display.
Parker folded the paperback over his thumb and frowned. “Well, it’s fiction, Scout.”
“Then why didn’t they make him real?”
“Because that’s not the way the story’s written.”
Her disappointment was a cramp in her heart. “He’s just a man.”
“It’s symbolic.”
Her lips twisted derisively. “Symbolic of what? How disappointing all their hard work to reach Oz is?”
“No. It’s a metaphor. All the pomp and fanfare, it’s all just glitz to disguise normal men. He’s just an ordinary man.”
“Exactly.”
Parker crossed his legs, tucking the book beneath his knee. The fabric was torn there much like she imagined the legs of the wilted scarecrow. Cynically, she said, “None of them even knew. The little dog figured it out.”
“Maybe they didn’t want to know. Maybe they wanted to hope there was something more out there, a man so powerful he had the ability to change their fate,” Parker argued.
“Maybe this book doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s a fairy tale. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
But she wanted it to, desperately. She wanted to join the band traveling along the yellow brick road and be taken away to a better place. “Fairy tales are supposed to be happy.”
“Maybe that’s what makes this such a popular story, that it isn’t wrapped up in unattainable perfection. It’s flawed because there is no real magic, but the magic of an ordinary man willing to tell the people they’re more than ordinary travelers. Do you want me to keep reading?”
“Why bother? They went all that way for some measly trinkets. I don’t get why they’re so happy.”
“Because they were seeking validation,” Parker said as if she were missing the whole point. Maybe she was. “Their struggles are representative of the journey every person makes. There’s confusion and mishaps and villains along the way, but in the end it’s up to each individual to get where they want to be. We don’t need wizards or magic. That’s the point of it all. We just have to try and we’ll even
tually get there in some form or another.”
Evelyn blinked through the blinding sun that bleached the darkness from the shade of her eyelids. She felt like Dorothy: lost, alone, meeting strange people along the way. When Parker finally finished the book, it had all been just a dream. Maybe that’s all they all were—dreams in the mind of some superior being.
Could you dream up something a little easier?
Sighing, she pushed herself off the bench and looked at the time on her phone. 12:47. She counted the cash in her pocket and decided to make use of her time until Jason came at three. Hailing a cab, she made up her mind to visit Pearl.
***
The halls to the rehab always smelled the same. Deodorized air shone over motes of dust that hovered in shards of light cutting through the white blinds at the reception desk where she signed in. The staff smiled at her, but otherwise ignored her presence as she made her way to her mother’s room.
She tapped her knuckles on the door, which eased open silently. Pearl was watching television and turned at Evelyn’s presence.
“Scout, what you doing here?”
She hadn’t realized how much balanced on the gamble of her mother’s recognition, but when her mother distinguished her as more than just a stranger, something broke inside of her and she started to cry.
“Oh, baby, what happened?” Her mom stood from the ugly mauve recliner and stepped close. When Pearl’s frail arms drew her in—physical contact—every bit of preservation fled and she sobbed into her mother’s meek form. She hadn’t felt her mother’s touch in years and she needed it so badly.
Tears erupted from Evelyn’s eyes as she drew in stuttering breaths. “I’m so lost, Momma.”
“Here. Sit.” She was drawn over to the bed and collapsed, her shoulders hunching forward in defeat. “What happen?”
The anomaly of her mother’s nurturing touch and sympathetic tone was her undoing. She wept like a child. She wept for all those times there simply wasn’t room for tears. She wept, because sometimes, no matter how old a person was, they simply needed a mother and today she had one.
Pearl waited quietly for her to explain herself. It was a novel form of patience displayed by her mother, and Evelyn wondered if this was the break she had asked for.
She was tired of pretending; pretending she could read and write, pretending the children’s books in her bag belonged to someone else. The unending marathon of her life had exhausted her and the finish line felt just as distant as ever.
And now she was back with Lucian, but not back to the way things had been. There had to be a happy medium, but she didn’t know if he could truly bend the way she needed and she feared losing him again.
All she ever wanted in life was to be normal. Was it even possible to be normal and in love with a billionaire? He was larger than life, and she valued the small things that most took for granted. She didn’t know where she belonged, and her heart was leading her down a very unpractical path she’d never traveled before.
Once her emotions were back under control, she blotted her eyes and looked at her mom. She looked well. In soft cotton pants and an ordinary cotton T-shirt, she looked nothing like the woman who raised her or stood by teaching her to raise herself.
Gaunt fingers, no longer stained with grime, brushed a strand of hair from her face. Muddy brown eyes, once so velvety tan, like chocolate, searched her face. “You okay now, baby?”
What could she say? Pearl’s standard of living was a version of poverty littered with squalor and accepted sacrifice that was never good enough for Evelyn. Pearl merely existed until it was time to clock out.
Evelyn had always been different. She’d wanted to run from the time she could walk. Her hunger had always been for something more than what was immediately available. Maybe she simply wanted too much.
“I’m so confused, Momma.”
“Confused ’bout what, baby?”
“Life.”
There would be no logical advice from her mother’s lips, but her presence of mind in that moment was worth more than any nostalgic diatribe of life’s do’s and don’ts. She shut her eyes and breathed.
“Life’s hard, Scout,” Pearl slowly said. She blinked at her mother’s unexpected comprehension. “I ’member back when I’s met your daddy. We had some good days. Once we even had a place to stay. It was real nice. Had a bed and toilet. We’s had that place ’til just before you came along.”
Her expression shuttered. That was the place her father was murdered. She didn’t know much about the man who created her, only bits of what she’d heard over the years. Pearl had been right next to him when he was shot point-blank to the head.
“He should’a been your real daddy. Not those men that came by. No. Not them.” Pearl’s head shook in slow denial and Evelyn frowned. “Them’s men was evil. They’s come and take everything we had. Took your daddy. Took our stuff. Even took me and left me near for dead.”
Evelyn’s lips parted as she tried to voice her question in the most delicate way possible. “Momma, did those men hurt you?”
Her mother’s stare became vacant, drifting off to blind moments of a past Evelyn hadn’t been present for. “Yes.”
Images flickered through Evelyn’s mind of her mother before life demolished her softness, before a life of drugs and prostitution eradicated all optimism for something better. She struggled to voice her question. There was violence and then there was defilement. “Did they hit you?”
“No. They’s come in shouting and shot your daddy. I was so shocked I cried and screamed. They just held me down and did what men do as I cried. Then they’s left me there to die. But I didn’t die. And then I’s had you.”
How had they gotten on this topic?
Her mother made a sound as if the memories caused her pain. “It was so hot that spring and as I lay there all I could smell was the blood. Smelled like copper pennies.”
Evelyn swallowed as something cold and unwelcome slithered through her insides. These details had always been coveted because they were mostly unknown, but now she wanted to erase them from her mind.
All Evelyn knew about her birth was that it happened in winter. How long were women pregnant for? Her father couldn’t have died in springtime. “Momma, what color eyes did Daddy have?”
“Brown like mine.”
Evelyn glanced at the mirror over the sink in the corner of the room and stared at her light blue eyes. Oh God. She’d never met her father, only held him as a memory of some piece of her she’d never know. But if what Pearl meant was that he had never truly been her father in any sense of the word—oh God—she felt robbed of everything and nothing at all.
“I have to go,” she wheezed.
Pearl turned, coming out of whatever trance she’d fallen into. “I’ll come with you.”
Evelyn stood and smiled sadly. “No, Momma. You have to stay here.”
All softness morphed into cold, hard angles as her mother glared. “No. I’m gonna come with you. We gonna go home. ’Nough of this place and pretendin’ to be people we ain’t.”
Evelyn shut her eyes and waited as Pearl, the mother who just held her the way she so desperately needed to be held, transformed into the selfish woman Evelyn knew too well. Her mom was sick. There were tests they could perform and specialists they could visit, but for what purpose? Beyond her physical ailments was an endless heap of mental issues. Labeling them solved nothing.
She slowly collected her bag as her mother argued. Her voice grew shrill with accusations, too cruel for Evelyn to listen to. As she backed out of the room, shutting away the raving woman on the other side, her mind shut off.
She walked the halls with no recollection of scenery or others passing by. It was all a blur until the moment she pressed the green button on her phone and heard Lucian’s voice on the other end.
“Evelyn?”
“Can you come pick me up?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Are you at work? Is everything all right?”
Thankfully she was out of tears. “I’m at Pearl’s.”
He didn’t ask how she’d gotten there or what had transpired in order for her to leave work early. He only said what she needed to hear. “I’ll be right there.”
Sliding the phone back into her bag, she realized she was outside once more. She walked to the curb and sat on the low lip of yellow-painted pavement and waited. The rehab was closer to Lucian’s estate than her apartment or the hotel. It would take him some time to drive there. As the minutes ticked by she thought of nothing beyond the ache in her back and the invisible weight on her shoulders.
Time passed in increments of devastated hope. The little bit she had in the world had just been cut down by half. The loss of those childhood imaginings, of a heroic father she lost before he ever got to hold her, were stripped down to nothing more than the remnants of a criminal act. She was the leftovers of the monsters who decimated the only home her mother had been able to lay claim to.
The insignificant pieces that amounted to her existence became the flesh and bones that held her together. And for the life of her, she couldn’t find the nerve to go on.
The slight pelting of drops barely registered as the sky gave way to spring showers. Her heated clothing grew damp and clung to her body, another weight to bear.
A delivery truck of some sort pulled into the lane separating her from the courtyard beyond the parked cars, as puddles pulled at her feet and darkened the hem of her gray pants. She wished she could simply wash herself away, float on to an easier place and forget these aches that added up to the sum of her.
The prattling engine of the truck came to life after the slide of a door. It grumbled as the driver pulled away from the curb and, as if the clouds parted to give way to the only spot of hope in her life, there stood Lucian before the sleek length of the black limo.
Separated by wet puddles upon pavement, the thread that tied him to her heart tugged as she met his gaze. There was no pity in those onyx eyes. Only clouded understanding that drew her in faster than gravity takes hold of a falling soul. Her knees flexed as she pressed her weight off the ground.