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Evelyn let out a wry laugh, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen by her words, her story. I couldn’t believe how hard all of that must have been.
“When I was eleven, he started letting his friends do what they wanted to me. Usually, it was a matter of using me as a punching bag after a hard day. Sometimes, they stuck their hands down my pants, but never did more than cop a feel.”
I felt sick with anger. Grown men touching an eleven-year-old girl because her father didn’t give a crap? Beating the shit out of her because she was there? It was horrific. Evelyn was just speaking with the resigned intonation of someone who’d been through trauma and decided it was just a fact of life that their past was abnormal.
“There was this one guy though, Garth. He was nasty from the moment I met him. Sometimes my dad’s friends would play nice?—bring me a toy or some candy in exchange for me serving them drinks all night. Garth decided he’d make me obedient with scars.”
Evelyn looked at me and gently parted her hair to the left so I could see a long, pale scar left there. With her hair over it, you couldn’t even tell it was there.
“Broken chair leg,” she explained.
She showed me the tiny speckles under one breast, pale but almost unnoticeable until you knew they were there. They traced down one side of her abdomen, lacing with a few freckles like painful stardust.
“Embers from a trashcan fire,” she shrugged.
She opened her arms, and I traced the lines with my eyes of the thin scars that ran on the inside of her elbows.
“Cheese wire,” she said quietly.
I had to hold back a gag.
“Enough,” I said quietly, and she looked at me sharply.
“You wanted to know,” she said lowly.
This was a pivotal moment. If I didn’t let her continue, she would never trust that she could tell me things in the future. If I did let her though, I was concerned that I might have to fly out to Portland to kill some people.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “Go on.”
“So yeah, Garth kind of got creative. If he was really drunk or bored, it was just a belting. I don’t know where he came from, but he was young. Twenty-something. He was mean to the core though. Used to come to our house, beat the shit out of me, and then drink with my father. He made money running a hole-in-the-wall pet shop. Even that was a cover though for the drugs he was trafficking.”
“When I was twelve, I got my first job. It was under-the-table payment, cash in hand, but it was something. I just bussed tables at a cafe. I started saving to try and get out. My mother always wanted me to get out. By the time I was thirteen, I saved enough to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver. I even got to the airport and everything, bags packed, and freedom just in sight. I never got past the front desk. No one had told me I’d need a passport to fly internationally. I thought I’d just take the money and get on a bus, let it take me wherever, but apparently, I was suspicious. I was this really ratty teen, in shorts and a t-shirt in February, with nothing but an old backpack on my back and broken sneakers on my feet. Police came to get me, and they held me in custody until I told them where I lived. I gave in, eventually, and when they brought me home, my father acted like some sort of grateful parent. Then he took my money and used it to buy alcohol. That might have been the worst part because it set me back again.”
“When I was sixteen, I tried to run away again. This time, I was prepared. I’d had years of working multiple jobs. I’d accelerated through my classes and got my diploma. I had a fake ID, a passport, and a burner phone. I packed a backpack, got on a bus, and didn’t look back. I got all the way to Nevada and was on my way to Utah when Garth caught up to me. I don’t know how he found me, but he took me to a motel, locked me in the room with him, and threatened to kill me. I had sewn pieces of my mother’s jewelry and all my spare cash into a pair of men’s boxers I was wearing under my pants.”
Evelyn gave that same wry laugh again, and I stared at her.
“I found out that some people had done it to escape with valuables in World War II, and it seemed like a good idea. When I wouldn’t give him the jewelry to sell though, he got violent. He tried to kill me, Julian.”
Her voice broke with this, and my heart squeezed, but her position made it clear that she would not be open to me pulling her into me. Her eyes got suspiciously shiny, and her voice hoarser.
“He tried to choke me, and to save my life, I had to pretend I was dead. I had to lay there while he rooted through all my stuff. I had to lay there for hours while he wandered around, making calls and getting drunk. He kept drinking, and while he was in the bathroom, I took a chance and grabbed one of the baggies out of his coat pockets. I would be told later it was Rohypnol. I emptied the whole thing into his drink and then went back to being dead.”
Evelyn looked at me, and her next words struck cold into my heart.
“I killed him, Julian. I have killed a man.”
Chapter Fourteen
Evelyn
Iwaited for him to react, I waited for the knowledge that I was a murderer to sink in.
Julian got up and faced away from me for a moment. I waited for him to yell at me, to tell me to get out and never come back. I waited for him to call the police. He did none of these things. Julian turned back to me, his eyes on fire with what looked like pent up anger.
“I know he’s dead,” he said slowly, “But I still want to kill him for what he did to you.”
Julian got back on the bed and stroked my face.
