The house is quiet, not even a whisper of wind against the boarded-up window, the silence of the void, as if the world stopped breathing and I’m the last person on Earth. Again.
Damn, I wish there was someone I could talk to.
Ben and Dumbo are gone. All I have left are Sam, Megan, and Evan. Two are asleep in their room. The other (Other, ha! it’s really pitiful) is awake and on watch and is someone with whom the more I talk, the more crooked my head gets. For over a month now he’s been fading away. Here and then not here. Talking, then saying nothing. Mr. Spaceman staring off into space. Damn it, Evan, where have you gone? I think I know, but knowing why doesn’t help my feelings of Evanlessness.
And somehow neither does the smell of his aftershave lingering in the room. After Ben left, Evan shaved. He washed his hair and scrubbed a week’s worth of grime from his body. He even trimmed his nails and addressed his neglected cuticles. When he came into this room, he looked like the old Evan, the first Evan, the Evan I believed to be a fully human Evan.
I miss that Evan, the one who pulled me frozen from the ice pack and thawed me out and made me hamburgers and pretended to be something he wasn’t and hid the thing he was.
The calm, quiet, steady, reliable, strong Evan. Not this Other-Evan, the tortured, haunted, conflicted Evan who clips off his sentences as if he’s afraid he’ll say too much, the Evan who’s already gone, already up there, two hundred miles up with no way back down. Not their Evan. My Evan. The imperfectly perfect guy.
Why do we always get the Evan we deserve instead of the Evan we want?
22
I DON’T KNOW why I bother writing this. No one will ever read it—and if you do, Evan, I will murder you.
I suppose I could turn to Bear. It was always easy to talk to him. We had hours of conversation, good conversation, during those weeks when it was just me and him hiding in the woods. Bear’s an excellent listener. He never yawns or interrupts or walks away. Never disagrees, never plays games, never lies. I go where you go, always, that’s Bear’s jam.
Bear proves that true love doesn’t have to be complicated—or even reciprocated.
Evan, in case you’re reading this: I’m dumping you for a teddy bear.
Not that you and I were ever a couple.
I was never one of those girls who daydreamed about her wedding day or meeting the perfect guy or raising 3.2 kids in the ’burbs. When I thought about the future, it usually involved a big city and a career or living in a cabin somewhere leafy, like Vermont, writing books and taking long walks with a dog I’d name Pericles or some other random Greek name to show people how educated and cultured I was. Or maybe I’d be a doctor treating sick kids in Africa. Something meaningful. Something worthwhile that maybe somebody someday would notice and then give me a plaque or an award or name a street after me. Sullivan Avenue. Cassiopeia Way. Guys didn’t enter into my daydreams much.
In college, I was going to have sex. Not drunken sex or sex with the first guy who asked or sex just to say Hey, I had sex the way people try exotic food, like, Hey, I had fried grasshopper. It would be with someone I cared about. Love wasn’t necessary, but mutual respect and curiosity and tenderness would be nice. And he would also be someone I found attractive. Too much sex is wasted on people who aren’t. Why would you sleep with someone who didn’t turn you on? But people do. Or they used to. No, they probably still do.
Why am I thinking about sex?
Okay, that’s insincere. That’s a lie. Dear God, Cass, if you can’t be honest in your own private journal, where can you be? Instead of saying what’s true, you make inside jokes and sly references like one day a million years from now somebody will read this and embarrass the hell out of you.
Seriously.
At least when he showed up tonight, he knocked first. Evan always had an issue with boundaries. He rapped on the door, then entered in stages: head, shoulders, torso, legs. Stood there in the doorway for a minute: Is it okay? I noticed the change immediately: newly shaven, hair still wet, wearing a fresh pair of jeans and an Ohio State T-shirt. I can’t remember the last time—or really the first time—I saw Evan exercise his Second Amendment right to bare arms.
Evan Walker has biceps. It’s not important to mention this fact, as biceps are muscles most people have. I just thought I’d mention it.
I was kind of hoping for an aw-shucks look—I’d seen it often enough in the old farmhouse back in the day, when that was his go-to expression. Instead, I got the furrowed brow and the slightly downturned mouth and the dark, troubled eyes of a poet contemplating the void, which I guess he was—not a poet but a contemplator of the void.
I made a space for him on the bed. There was nowhere else to sit. Though we’d never done the deed, it felt like we were old lovers forced into an awkward post-split negotiation over who gets the silverware and how the souvenirs from all their trips together are going to be divvied up.
Then I smelled the Ralph Lauren aftershave.
I don’t know why Grace kept a stash of men’s grooming products. Maybe they belonged to the former owners of the house and she never bothered to get rid of them. Or maybe she had sex with her victims before chopping off their heads or ripping out their hearts or eating them alive like a black widow spider.
He’d nicked his chin shaving; there was a dab of white styptic stuff on the cut, a tiny mar in his otherwise otherworldly beautiful face. Which was a relief. Flawlessly beautiful people annoy the hell out of me.
“I checked on the kids,” he said, as if I’d asked if he’d checked on the kids.