Beating Heart (7 page)

T
he obituary gives Evan a cold chill. He thinks
, If that's her, she died not long after that picture was taken.

Evan remembers the name Royce from some of the other papers; now he shuffles through the pages, picking up letters and skimming through them, skipping parts that look uninteresting, looking for anything about this girl who died so young.

He rereads the bits about the visitor from Pennsylvania. Then, under the blare of the music, he scans more letters, looking for pieces that will pull the story together. He finds two passages that seem to mention a sudden death:

No other letters appear to touch on the subject. He digs through to find the photo of the girl. He finds himself inspecting her face. Her lips especially draw his attention: they are not quite smiling, full, and maybe, he thinks, even slightly parted. The more he looks at them, the more real her face seems, and after a while he finds himself trying to evaluate the lines of her body under her stiff white dress, trying to line them up with what he remembers of his dreams. He bends over the picture, so engrossed that it takes him a few moments to realize what a perv he is, getting hot over a dead girl.

Evan sets the photo down again. He decides, with no evidence, that Robert and Cora must have been
doing it
.

In Evan's dreams that night, everything is clearer. He can see the room around him—it's his room, only different, the walls dark with designs, the windows heavy with curtains and shutters. The bed is different, too—bigger, anchored by a heavy footboard and even heavier headboard. But the sheets are still white.

And the girl has a face. It's the one in the photo. His hands are in her hair. He pulls her under him for slow kisses, but she impatiently fumbles up her nightgown. Her legs are eager, wrapping around his, urging him on.

 

 

 

 

A
fterward, in his dream, they're lying together, her
fingers tracing patterns on his bare chest.

And then she's angry, hitting him, and he grabs her arm, he thinks he hears something outside, but she won't be quiet, she's still trying to hurt him, so he has to put his hand over her mouth to listen.

The creak of a footstep on the stairs. He goes rigid with silence, but she's trying to bite his hand, struggling, so he presses harder, letting his weight muffle her movements to small flutters, and he puts his lips by her ear, wanting to shush her but he doesn't dare speak, so he just lies unmoving, waiting in dread to see if someone is coming.

 

 

 

 

I
n the morning, Evan wakes up bleary-eyed. He
clearly remembers the now-usual sex dreams, but of the rest, all that has stayed with him is the feeling of nightmare, of a struggle to control, to contain, to keep something bottled up and hidden.

It's disturbing, the way feelings are starting to spill out of the dreams and over into waking moments—as if there's a pattern already in place and, through dreams, it's slowly wearing a groove into his mind.

When he sits up and moves to the edge of the bed, he sees that during the night, a few pieces of paper have fallen from his desk onto the floor. He picks them up. They're actually one piece of paper, a page of one of the letters, that somehow in its fall has come apart along the brittle folds.

It's the page about the beneficial effect of the darling daughter's death on Robert.

That's cold
, Evan thinks.
Just plain cold. Like her death has meaning only because of this guy's reaction to it.

This time when he puts the pieces back in the box, he decides he's not going to look at
any
of this anymore. It makes him uncomfortable, uneasy. It gives him nightmares, gives him weird ideas. It disturbs his sleep.

He carefully picks up all the letters and clippings, and sets them back into the box. He hesitates for a moment, his fingers on the cold metal of the lid, then shuts it and pushes the box aside. Evan is now determined: he's not going to think about the girl again.

Over the next few weeks he still has the dreams, but he tries to shove them down as soon as he wakes up. He's busy with other things anyway,
real
things: meeting friends for pickup games of football, for hockey in the school parking lot, for all-night video-game parties. He takes Libby to a movie once, sees Carrie a few times, runs a couple of errands for Mom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

E
van finds himself forgetting to call Carrie. It crosses
his mind, but always when he's already busy doing other stuff.

And then when he
does
remember to call her, instead of being glad to hear from him, she's mad at him for not calling sooner. He's starting to feel like she's always looking at the ways in which he comes up short as a boyfriend. Like he's an imperfect specimen that's got to be whacked and prodded into shape.

It makes him not want to call her at all.

But he does love her, of course he does. She's his girlfriend, isn't she? She's always there in the back of his mind—it's just that they've been together so long, she's so much a fact of his life, that he knows he can count on her always being there.
That's
why he doesn't actively think about her much. It's completely normal.

Isn't it?

 

“Evan,” Mom says, “I need to go run a couple of errands.
Will you watch Libby, please?”

Evan frowns. “I was thinking about going over to Carrie's.” He
was
thinking about it, for once. He has not had sex in a week and a half. He
needs
to see her.

“Can't you go after I get back? I'll be back within two hours, promise.”

“Can Carrie come over here?” Now that he thinks about it, he likes the idea of being able to do it in his room. On
his
bed.

Just like in the dreams.

“While I'm gone? You know that makes me uncomfortable.”

“Libby's going to be here. You know she'll stick to us like caffeine to coffee.”

“Can't it wait until I'm back?”

“What do you think, we're going to have wild sex all over the house with my little sister hanging around? Give me some credit, Mom.”

Mom says nothing, clearly wavering.

“If you're so worried about it, you can ask when you
get back. You can walk in and say, ‘Hey, Carrie, did you have wild sex with my son while I was gone?'”

“All right, all right. I trust you.”

“I'm not going to do anything I wouldn't do if you were here,” Evan says.
Except have wild sex all over the house
, he thinks as she walks out of the room.

So he calls Carrie up. She sounds glad to hear his voice—no complaints about how he should have called before now—and agrees to come over. All is set, except for one small thing.

He stands at the door of Libby's room. “Hey, Lib. Listen, Carrie's about to come over. Do you think you could leave us alone and not bug us?”

Libby has all her stuffed animals lined up on the bed. She stands in front of them with a notepad and pencil. “I dunno.” She makes some marks on the pad.

“Please?”

Libby tears the top paper off and places the page in front of the elephant. Then she turns to Evan. “I will if you play dolls with me again.”

“Okay.”

“Today?”

“Tomorrow.”

“All right. I'll leave you alone.” Libby starts scribbling on her pad again.

Satisfied, Evan goes downstairs to hang out in the TV room and wait. When the doorbell rings, he goes to answer it—and here comes Libby, pounding down the stairs to see who's coming to visit. “You're going to play in your room while Carrie's here, right?” he reminds her, heading for the door.

She slows, hesitating on the bottom step. “I guess.”

“You guess?” He stops, hand on the doorknob. “Come on, Libby. You said you'd leave us alone, remember? And I said I'd play with you tomorrow?”

“Ye-es,” Libby says slowly. “Do you promise?”

“Promise.”

“Cross your heart?”

“And hope to die,” Evan says, crossing his heart solemnly.

Libby turns to plod back up the stairs, and Evan opens the door. “Hi,” he says to Carrie. She looks terrific. She's smiling. She's wearing the necklace that he bought her for Christmas last year, the one he blew the
last of his savings on. Now that she's here, he's glad she came. “Want anything to drink?” he asks.

“You got anything diet?”

“Yeah, I think so. Let me go check.”

Carrie waits in the hall. When he comes back through the swinging door, she's wandered over to the stairs and is looking at one of the carved balusters that ends in a great swirl on the floor.

He hands her a can from the refrigerator. “See that spindle that's turned upside down? Mom said the guys who made the woodwork did that on purpose, as a sort of signature.”

“Huh. I didn't even notice. That's interesting.”

Evan watches her pop the top, take a sip. Her lips are full, pink, faintly glossy. “You're beautiful, you know that?”

She lowers the can, smiles. “If you keep saying stuff like that, maybe I won't be mad at you anymore.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Well, I haven't heard from you in a week.”

“I haven't heard from you, either. Are you saying the guy has to be the one who calls all the time?”

“No…”

“Okay, then. Come on, let's go upstairs.”

“Is your mom home?”

“Nope.”

“Libby?”

“Yup. I'm in my official capacity as babysitter.” Evan leads the way up to his room. They pass Libby, playing in her room with the door open. Evan peers at her as he shuts the door to
his
room.

“I see you've still got that box of letters,” Carrie says.

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever look through it?”

“Yeah. Most of that stuff is crap, but some of it is like a mystery. See, the lady who it all belonged to, she had a daughter. And this guy came to visit—see, his mom sent him because he was getting wild, like getting expelled from school. And I think when he got here, he and the daughter started getting it on, and then she died, and he was so freaked that he kind of settled down.”

“What makes you think they were getting it on?”

Evan flashes back to his dreams. “I dunno.”

“People didn't have sex outside of marriage back then, Evan.”

“How do you know?”

“They just didn't.”

She says it with certainty. Carrie's better in school than he is, and knows more about history and stuff like that. He doesn't like the way she said it, though, like he should have known that already.

He also doesn't want to get into an argument—a
discussion
—right now. “Okay. How about this? They were in love, and it broke his heart when she died, so he took a vow of celibacy and then followed her to the grave.”

“Much better.”

The knob turns with a click, and the door swings open. It's Libby. Evan is glad he's nowhere near Carrie. Still, she zeroes in on Carrie's Diet Coke can. “You're not supposed to have drinks up here,” she informs Evan.

“Carrie's company.”

“You're supposed to leave doors open when she comes over.”

“Okay, it's open,” he says evenly. “You can go now.”

But Libby plunks herself down cross-legged outside the open door.

“Libby.” Evan's getting irritated. “You promised you'd leave us alone.”

“I am leaving you alone. I just want to play right here.”

Evan goes out into the hall and pulls Libby out of sight of the doorway. “Listen,” he tells her. “If you go downstairs and watch a movie all the way to the end, I'll give you something.”

“What?”

“What do you want?”

“A dollar.”

Evan thinks about it. “I'll give you
five
dollars if you watch a whole movie
and
if you don't tell Mom.”

“You want me to tell Mom a lie?”

“No, no. I just don't want you to bring it up.”

“But what if she asks?”

“She won't.”

“But what if she does?”

“If she asks you whether Carrie and I were alone together with the door shut, you can tell her yes. You don't have to lie.”

“Will I still get the five dollars?”

“Yes. But only if
she's
the one who brings it up. If
you
bring it up, you get nothing. And I won't ever play dolls with you again. Got it?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay. I'll walk downstairs with you and help you put on a DVD. What do you want to watch?”

“Um.
Lion King
.”

“Be right back,” he calls to Carrie. And a few minutes later, when he walks in, she's sitting on the edge of his bed, looking at his football poster. “We have maybe an hour,” he tells her, pulling the door shut behind him. “But we'll have to be quiet, because I guarantee it won't take much to get her back up here.”

“Maybe we shouldn't.”

“Maybe we
should
.”

“Maybe you ought to say it again.”

“Say what again?”

“What you said downstairs.”

Evan sits down beside her and leans over to nuzzle her neck. “You're beautiful.”