Black Chuck Page 17

  Instead of replying, he went out to the Buick, a large paper bag tucked under his arm. He dropped it on the passenger seat, pulling the door closed behind him, then dialed Evie’s number and put the phone to his ear.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he echoed. He cleared his throat. “Are you busy right now?”

  “Not really.” Her voice sounded heavy.

  “Could I maybe come see you?” he asked, tapping his thumb on the steering wheel, hoping for a yes. There was a long silence, and he pictured that dreamy, other-planet look in her eyes, like his words had to leave orbit just to reach her.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “I’m in the storehouse. Third floor.”

  He shivered at the thought of that awful hole in the wall. “’Kay, don’t move,” he said. “I’m coming to you.”

  It was not even a five-minute drive. He parked on the street and jumped the rickety fence, leaving the paper bag in the car. He came up under the hole in the storehouse wall and looked for her. She leaned out and smiled. He blinked and smiled back. He pulled the broken board from the ground-floor window and climbed in, taking the stairs two at a time to where she was.

  “Hey.” His voice bounced off the rotten walls.

  She sat cross-legged, leaning on the empty doorframe, looking like a rail rat, all scraped up and dirty, her clothes covered with grime. “Hi, Ré,” she said, hair falling away from her tipped-up face.

  “Why are you so damn close to that thing?” he said, jutting his chin at the gap in the wall. He crouched a few feet back from it. He wasn’t a fan of heights, but he’d been Shaun’s friend long enough to get used to them. She answered with a shrug. Maybe she was used to them too.

  He looked around at the filthy floors, empty bottles smashed everywhere, fist-sized holes in the walls. He didn’t like this place. It was dark. He hadn’t been near it since that night, since the arc light. He didn’t want to see the field below.

  “So,” he said, “remember when I asked if I could cook something at your place?”

  She smiled, and he could tell she was sort of laughing behind it, but he didn’t care. “Of course I remember,” she said.

  He jerked his thumb back the way he’d come. “It’s in my car,” he told her. “I was thinking I could drop it off at your house, then come cook it up tomorrow.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, now,” he said. “If that’s cool?”

  She nodded. “Okay.” She shrugged her backpack up onto her shoulder and scooted toward him. He grabbed her by the ankle as if she were throwing herself the other way, out the window. “Thanks for saving me,” she said sarcastically.

  “Sorry,” he said, letting go. They stood and went to the stairs, Ré casting a last, uneasy glance across the filthy room.

  They walked back through the field to his car, evening sunlight cutting low and golden across the grass, crickets leaping out of their path.

  “You shouldn’t climb the fence,” he told her.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the you-know-what,” he said. He didn’t want to say baby. He didn’t want to upset her.

  She cocked her head defiantly. “I climbed it to get in here, didn’t I?”

  He jutted his chin farther east, toward the Grains’ open front gate. “Just…will you walk down there and I’ll pick you up, please? I don’t want you getting hurt on my watch.”

  She rolled her eyes at him, but she agreed.

  27

  E

  Evie walked around the nose of the Buick and got in next to a large paper bag. In the closeness of the car, she noticed he was wearing cologne, some kind of warm tobacco that almost masked the car’s natural smell. She smiled to herself. And she didn’t say anything when he U-ied back the way he’d come, taking the long way to her house instead of going past Shaun’s.

  He acted relaxed, but he looked nervous, shy. His dark eyes sort of skittered over her but didn’t settle, and he tapped his thumb anxiously against the wheel. His silence made her nervous, binding her tongue. He glanced at her as he drove, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Then he said, “You coming to Alex’s tonight?”

  She looked at him. “Are you going?”

  He shrugged. “It’s my grad party. Plus he asked me to. I can’t really say no, can I?”

  “No, I guess not,” she said. But she was surprised. Sunny would be there, obviously. And was he still friends with Alex after everything? Those seemed like dangerous, complicated waters.

  “So are you asking me?” she said, after a pause.

  He laughed quietly, glancing at her again. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Well, then I can’t say no either.” She met his eye, and they both smiled. She felt the cabin pressure drop a little, as if he’d just been waiting for permission to land. He reached across the seat and took her fingers in his, squeezing lightly.

  She pictured them arriving together, like this. Pulling into Alex’s driveway hand in hand, all smiles and normal, like it used to be with Shaun, nobody even noticing how the furniture was rearranged. If only it could be that easy.

  “Ré,” she said, “what are we going to tell them? I mean, Sunny is gonna be mad, right?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He looked in all his mirrors first, and then he shook his head. “I want to say no, Ev. I want to tell you she’ll be cool, but she probably won’t be.” He went quiet again, thinking. Then he said, “Maybe it’s better if we don’t say anything for a little while.”

  She knew he was right, but she still looked at him sideways. How long had he been with Sunny behind everyone’s back? Did he really think he could keep Evie there too? But he was right, for now. For tonight anyway. It was safer, till the dust settled, not to say anything. And anyway, after tomorrow, after she told her mom, everything might change.

  She swallowed. “So is there something to hide—with us, I mean? Are we…?”

  He glanced at her, and she couldn’t finish. The words got stuck in his eyes. He bit his lip, then let go of her hand and pulled on the steering wheel, bumping the car to a gentle stop at the side of the road.

  He turned to face her, his arm draped over the wheel, little hairs catching sun like he was made of gold. “Ev,” he said, looking not at her, but down, between them, “I hope you don’t think that’s all I am—just a guy with a lot of bad secrets.” His eyes hid behind black lashes, keeping him safe, away. “I know I haven’t been real good for a long while. And I done stuff I’m not proud of.”

  His voice was so quiet, his face so serious, she didn’t know how to respond. Hadn’t they all done stuff they weren’t proud of?

  Then he looked up at her, lashes fluttering open unexpectedly. “But I really do want to be good now, if you’ll let me.”

  She flushed, embarrassed and a little confused. “I don’t think it’s up to me, Ré.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean—I want to be good to you. Like what you said yesterday, about if I asked for it?”

  His voice lifted at the end like a question, though it wasn’t one. She remembered her words in his bedroom, of course, clear as a bell. But even in his asking, he still couldn’t seem to get the question out. He still wasn’t really asking. “I meant what I said,” she told him, swallowing hard.

  He reached to take her hand again, his fingers warm and firm, threading between her own, making her heart skip. “I want that,” he said quietly. “I really do, Ev. But I don’t want you to just give it to me ’cause I asked. I want to earn it. To be good enough for it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  But she was still confused. Was he talking about Sunny? What could he possibly have done that was as bad as he seemed to think it was? Or that was in any way worse than the things she’d done? “So…for now,” she said, “we say nothing, because there is nothing to say?”

  His mouth quirked up at the corner, but she could see in his eyes how sincere he was. “It’s not nothing, Ev,” he said. “It’s so, so much.”


  She nodded, throat closing on all her words, heart racing. He was right. It wasn’t nothing. It was everything she’d never wanted to feel, and she wanted it more than anything.

  Despite all her desire to disappear, to not exist, not feel, not let anything get too close or too real, there was Ré, sitting sideways on the driver’s side of a shitty blue Buick, laying his heavy eyes on her and making her want it all.

  R

  Réal eyed the car in Evie’s drive as they pulled up outside her house. “Your mom’s still home?” he asked, trying to sound relaxed.

  Evie said, “She’ll leave for work soon.”

  “Does she ever get days off?”

  “Yeah, every two weeks she gets four days,” Evie told him. “But almost never on weekends.”

  “You don’t get to see her that much, huh?”

  Evie shrugged. “Not really.”

  “That sucks,” he replied, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Family was important to Réal. But then, maybe a family as big as his swallowed you up, made you care, even if you didn’t really want to. But if your whole family was just one other person you never saw, maybe it was easy not to care so much about them.

  “Come on,” she said, tilting her head. “She wants to meet you anyway.” When his eyes went round, she laughed and got out of the car.

  Ré didn’t know why, but he was nervous as hell. Maybe it was the ten pounds of bear meat under his arm—just the cure for cannibal demons, no big deal. He was actually pretty good with parents when he wasn’t worried about eating their daughters.

  A middle-aged woman stepped out of a room at the back of the small house. She wore light-green scrubs and a pair of running shoes, and she was pulling her long brown hair up into a high ponytail. “Hi, Evie,” she said, looking at him.

  “Mom, this is Réal.” Evie nodded over her shoulder at him. “The guy I told you about.”

  Câlisse. If he was nervous before those words, he was a catastrophe now. What, exactly, had she told her mother about him?

  He shifted the package under his arm and stuck out his hand. The woman smiled, taking it. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Hawley,” he said, as politely as he could. He didn’t even know where to look. He felt his cheeks flush red. Yeah, he was good with parents—you didn’t half raise four brothers without meeting a lot of moms—but this was different. This was a girl’s mom. He’d never done that before.

  Catching the hint of his accent, Evie’s mom said, “So you really are French, huh?” like she’d thought it was a hoax before he’d opened his mouth.

  His eyes flicked to Evie’s. “Ah…oui,” he said stupidly. And then, like a dancing dog, “Mais j’parle surtout l’anglais de toute façon” But he could see she was impressed, and it made him feel slightly less idiotic.

  “Ré’s grad party is tonight,” Evie told her mom. “He asked me to go, if that’s okay?”

  Mrs. Hawley stood back and looked him over. Ré stiffened nervously, wanting to clear his throat but afraid it would seem impolite.

  “Okay,” she said, poking a finger at him. “But don’t stay out all night. And no booze if you’re driving.”

  Ré was about to give her an answer she’d like when Evie rolled her eyes and said, “All right, Mom” and started pushing him through to the kitchen.

  He glanced at Mrs. Hawley and could almost see her daughter in the wry smile she wore. “I’m trusting you, Réal,” she said as he went by. “She’s the only one I’ve got, so be careful with her.”

  “I will,” he assured her. “I promise.”

  The kitchen was only big enough for the appliances and a small table, but it opened onto a dining room that was pretty and comfortable.

  “Can I leave this in here?” he asked, raising the bundle under his arm. She pointed at the fridge, nodding yes.

  He bent and put the package on a shelf. This is weird, he thought, pushing back the leftovers and half empty jars of mayonnaise. Nice weird. Like we’re married or something.

  He straightened from the fridge, not knowing where to look or what to touch. She stood at the sink, pouring a glass of water, and he couldn’t help but let his eyes fall down the backs of her legs. Their shape made his stomach tighten, made him want to stand closer.

  “All right, you guys.” Evie’s mom appeared in the kitchen doorway, keys in hand. Ré nearly jumped out of his skin at her voice. He turned, blushing, hiding his eyes. “Have fun at your party. Don’t burn anyone’s house down. Evie, can I have a little chat with you, alone?”

  Evie groaned and followed her mom to the front door. Ré just lifted his hand in a shy wave and pressed his lips into a smile. He heard their murmuring voices and imagined what they must be saying about him. Horny, pervert, sicko…When he heard the car pull out of the drive, he felt a small weight lift from his shoulders.

  Evie didn’t return to the kitchen. She went straight up the attic stairs without a word, and it took him several minutes to realize she wasn’t coming back. After a while he heard the upstairs shower running in the pipes above his head.

  “Ré?” Evie’s voice rose from a distance. “Are you all right?”

  Then her hand was on his shoulder, pulling him back from the dream.

  He sucked a breath, startled awake in an unfamiliar room. When his eyes found her, he relaxed. He put his hand down on hers, patting it like he was comforting her, not the other way around. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”

  He ran a palm over his face and felt a cold trail of drool. Jesus, he thought. Fucking embarrassing.

  She plunked down on the other end of the couch, folding her legs under herself and looking at him with worried eyes. “What language was that?”

  “Huh?” He blinked at her again.

  “You were yelling in some weird language.”

  He flushed, remembering the deer, the dream. He said, “It’s not weird. It’s Anishinaabemowin.”

  “Seriously?” she said. “You speak three languages?”

  He nodded. “I kind of suck at it, though. It’s not like it’s taught at school or anything. You gotta rely on family to keep it sharp, and we don’t see my mom’s side so much.”

  “It sounded pretty good to me,” she said, and he smiled.

  His heart had settled a little, the dream fading. He took another breath and told her, “My father’s side are all from Rivière des Outaouais. They mostly speak joual—that’s old-school Quebecois, not the French you learn at school. And my mom’s side all speak Anishinaabemowin, with only a little French. You should see our family get-togethers. They’re kinda nuts.”

  He shook his head, thinking of the chaos of two totally different languages, religions, cultures and traditions smashed together in one house, and the five wild, tough brothers it had made.

  “Know how they say ‘you’re talking gibberish’ in joual?” he asked. “T’parle Algonquin. ‘You’re speaking Algonquin.’ My mother’s language. How fucked is that, huh?” He shook his head again. “Talk about a culture clash.”

  They sat in silence for a while, cricket song rising from the empty field, sun almost down. “It’s peaceful here,” Ré finally said. “My place is so crazy.” He thought of his bedroom, his only sanctuary. Even that never got as quiet as this. It was way too easy to feel good here.

  And then she said, “My mom’s an ER nurse. She takes the worst shifts, the bloodiest ones, ’cause the pay is better. Drunk drivers. Bar fights. Beat-up wives.” Her eyes fell down to her hands. “That’s why she’s never here.”

  Ré pictured her here, night after night, all alone. He stayed put at his end of the couch, though he wanted pretty badly to slide over to hers, tell her, J’suis là. I am here.

  She shifted, stretching her leg out, and he flicked a look at her, worried she was moving to sit closer, but she was only reaching into her pocket.

  “What do you think this is?” she asked, opening her hand to show him a little silver ball. “I found it at the Grains.”


  He picked it up and rolled it between his finger and thumb. It was perfectly round. “It looks like a ball bearing,” he said. “Like, from a wheel.” He gave it back.

  “Like a skateboard wheel?” she asked, examining it.

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  He sat back, resting his elbow on the couch, his cheek on his fist, watching her while she wasn’t looking. Her wet hair had made shadows on her faded-soft plaid shirt, and her T-shirt just covered the rise of her little belly, poking out over her cut-off jeans. She looked cute, pregnant, but he’d never say that out loud.

  He closed his eyes, thinking of her dangerously as his girl, that baby as his own.

  Câlisse, it was easy to see…

  Her toes pressed into his leg, and he opened his eyes, saw her grinning at him.

  “Don’t fall asleep again,” she said. “I’ll get bored and ditch you.”

  He smiled drowsily. “Where would you go?”

  She looked out the front window, wiggled her fingers at the field. “Out there, somewhere,” she said.

  He looked down. Her toes looked like a little string of painted pearls pressed into his leg. His hand closed over them. “I’d just wait for you to come back,” he said.

  28

  E

  Alex’s house was nothing like she’d imagined it would be. Nothing like Shaun’s or even Sunny’s. “Holy shit,” she said, looking up through the cover of trees that hid it from the long driveway. “Is Alex rich?”

  Réal laughed under his breath. “You could call it that,” he said, ducking a little to look through the trees himself.

  The house was a twenty-minute drive from town, east of the lake on a twisting, climbing, countryside road you might never find if you didn’t already know your way.

  It was after dusk, the woods just dark shadows, but winking between the trunks of oak and silver maple and birch were yellow lights from a house that seemed to go on for a mile. As the Buick came around a bend, she saw a massive triangle of windows, like an alpine lodge, that looked in on a double-height living room. Eerie blue light flickered up the endless walls from a flat-screen TV as big as a dining room table.