Photo by Charl Folscher on Unsplash
It started in the study, unearthed from a wilting notebook brimming with gentle words written in a slanted hand. Bright blue ink, the color of a sky stretching over peach trees, curled itself into a written confession. The words read as such: It was over before it even began.
Evelyn Hardy was not a fool. She was captive only by the flushing feeling that there was something in life that she was missing, some revelation just out of her reach. While the girls she knew dolphin-dove into gossip, into the pages of glamour magazines to lament the circumference of their calves and waists, Evelyn was different; she was tethered to a sense of self-acceptance, to the geography of truth and fact.
She lived on the edge of the neighborhood, where anger and bitterness reclined limitlessly in a house that was slowly taking its last breaths. On the roof, shingles were sparse, the ones left mutating from a black color to a decomposing gray; the tumbledown fence that surrounded the property was missing pickets, no longer standing in a proud white ridge against the blackberry bushes; and the wraparound porch, once abounding with baskets of gardenias and daisies, was decrepit, its dirty planks rank with wood rot. The rooms were tenanted with silence. Evelyn’s bedroom was one of five, its floor cold as a cadaver when she walked on it. Sunshine didn’t fall in through the windows to blanket the woven rugs on the floor, the knobs on the doors—the shutters were always drawn. The green ivy plants that crept out of pots on the windowsill were shriveling, their leaves growing pallid in the shadows. Darkness covered everything, everyone, its hands strangling all furtive attempts to shine.
But in the study, grappling with the darkness, there was a glow: a marigold beam snaking underneath a door that was always closed, through the hole of a lock whose teeth were always clenched. In contrast to the rest of the house, there was sunlight in the study. Curiosity swallowed Evelyn whole. Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows. It happened in three parts—
“I’m going out,” Evelyn said to her father, “I’ll get you cigarettes.” She sat on the front porch, legs dangling over the edge of a stair, her shoes swinging precariously on her feet. She checked her watch—fifteen minutes, thirty, an hour. Then:
Her father spread onto the couch, fast asleep, a can of beer standing stock-still on his stomach, his ears drenched in sound of the news on television: There’s rain in the forecast today, Jim. More at six o’clock.
And the end—no, a beginning—birthed from the sound of a lock clicking open, of a hairpin falling onto the floor. She got up off her knees, took a deep breath, and opened the door.
In the study, sunshine was everywhere: falling onto the arms of a leather rollaway chair; cascading onto a desk choking on a thick layer of debris—stacks of manila envelopes, three fountain pens, and an open notebook, its sheets gently fluttering in the breeze from the open window. On every page it was written: It was over before it even began. Evelyn sat on the floor and traced the words back and forth with a prying finger. She thought—
Mornings, early and dark: Her father, a collapse of dirty laundry on a wooden kitchen stool, looking at a newspaper with eyes that didn’t move, stale liquor clogging his pores, the lines on his face sagging under the weight of indecision. Whiskey or tequila. Nasdaq or Dow. The white countertop is thick with grime; the copper pots hanging on a rafter above the window are tarnished and old. And in front of an ancient oven stands Evelyn, a guest of an empty chair’s attendance, herding graying eggs on an electric burner with a silver spatula. Sadness flooded her. The shadows enveloped them both. Her father’s voice carries over the sizzle of the frying pan—Vicky wouldn’t have let that bacon burn.
Vicky, her mother. Evelyn felt the fresh loss in two pieces. One, a softness, like diving into a warm laundry basket, enveloping your hands in the scent of lavender and the arms of sweaters that held you back when you needed comfort; and two, a physical abrasiveness that grates the rinds of your most outspread emotions, digesting them until you’re left with nothing but a burned image in your brain of a car driving away, of a car that left you with nothing but the ghost of a sentence on your ears: forgetting is the currency of growth.
Gone. After her mother left, a rhapsody was unstitched from her father’s tongue, born from a fresh whip of betrayal. It was explained to Evelyn baldly: “She just left. She doesn’t care about us anymore. She told me so.” Then he folded his newspaper and refilled his coffee mug indifferently. Her mother—gone in the night, evaporating like steam from a hissing kettle on a stove you forgot to clean. She didn’t believe it. Tears fall from your eyes when you’re honest, to dissolve into a whiskey stacked four fingers deep, into a cup clutched in a hand that shook with a loss you didn’t have room for. But her father’s face was dry when he told her, like a bedsheet left to bake in the sun, unmoving in the breeze. What had her mother told her? Lies can’t captain the ship. He was an oarsman left to row alone.
What remained of her father was something like a body left forgotten in the earth, an ethereal mixture of bone and teeth knotted together like an eclipse of soldiers waiting to strike. He was now a heart beating in a gradation of feeling, a strip of tenderness losing mass, He was change in a single part—a man loving without reproach transmuted into a man that didn’t dare to. He no longer laughed or smiled, and the bottles of bourbon on the kitchen sink multiplied each week. He was a drunk pagan looking for a liquid god, left wandering in a house of empty rooms. Nothing was left of him but empty armor, a hard shell of hostility.
From the day’s beginning to its end, he harbored on the couch, his thin frame haloed with the stench of rank beer and tobacco. In its presence, the smell sets Evelyn adrift in a memory of a man, brawn and brilliant, wide in laughter, playing poker with a daughter that was peeking at his cards—three aces, two fives, and a solitary queen keep them all in line. Her father, with all the pieces in the frame. He says to her at the stroke of a kitchen clock, “All sleepy chicks in the bed to roost.” He takes her hand.
Evelyn sat at the desk and crossed her ankles. This blue swirl of handwriting, she had seen it before; on elementary school permission slips, on forms at the doctor’s office, on grocery lists and recipe cards—her mother. Her warm hand had touched these pages, had dogmatized these letters into tiny huddles of meaning that Evelyn didn’t understand. She imagined her perched in this same chair, brow furrowed, deluging this notebook with the tips of pens, with her heart yawning in sentiment. It was a revelation, a catch of breath in the throat. The words then seemed to bleed off the paper into her palms, imbuing her hands with a rogue feeling: a tall stretch of loss given amnesty. She gripped the edges of the chair and felt her lungs slowly deflate. It was as if a pulse that had been beating inside her had finally reached her heart, diseasing its chambers with long, unforgiving fingers. They squeezed. She felt—
Flight: The light was artificial, casting down onto her bare arms like hikers on their first frontier; she watched her mother through a crack in the door. A suitcase hung lank from her mother’s arm; its heaviness made up of time traveled from beginnings to this irrevocable end. Veiled in simplicity, she said goodbye to her father and closed her bedroom door. Abandonment; desertion. To Evelyn they felt eternal, entering her from the outside, casting an ebbing net over a chapter of her life she had just begun. This conclusion encased her. She was now a twisting centipede frozen in amber, a moth with wings pinned deathlessly to a cork board—a growing life halted suddenly, a trickle of blood still fresh in its heart. Her mother knocked gently on her door.
“Hummingbird—"
“Mama.”
The light from the hallway fell in long panes on the floor of the room, marbling the thick shadows on the rug, the wooden drawers sewn to her dresser. Placing her suitcase next to the unmade bed, Evelyn’s mother sat cross-legged in front of her; she upturned her palms in invitation, and Evelyn took them in her own. She knew what was coming, but she didn’t want to hear her mother’s valediction; she wanted to be engulfed by her arms, by the width of love, to have them both wash over her like waves of an ocean, until she could smell the salt in the water and feel seashells underneath her bare feet. Her mother looked into her eyes and sighed.
“This isn’t a goodbye, baby girl.”
“Well, what is it?” Evelyn sniffed. “Why are you leaving me?” She hated the thin words. She wanted to inflate them with the bereavement she was feeling, with the loss. To Evelyn, the emotions felt massive, uncontained, like wild lighting expelled from Thor’s silver hammer, catching the tips of her fingers and burning her skin. She felt hot tears in her eyes.
“I should have never stayed,” her mother replied. Her ambiguity was like smoke from an adolescent fire, lighting up her withdrawn eyes and the wrinkles on her forehead.
“What does that mean?”
“One day you’ll understand.” She placed a hand on Evelyn’s cheek and stood up. “Take care of your father.”
“I feel like I don’t know him”—in mourning, in grief—"he doesn’t know me either.”
“You’re still so young, Evelyn,” her mother said, “there’s always time.”
“I don’t want time. I don’t want to forget you.”
She smiled and said it—her endgame: “Forgetting is the currency of growth.”
And with that, she picked up her suitcase, kissed the top of Evelyn’s head, and left the room, taking with her the final sentence of a story.
It was over—
On the bookshelf in the study, a volume sat askew, jutting out from the others like a heron’s outstretched leg. She took it in her hands and ran her fingers along the creased spine, feeling its cracks on her skin: a copy of Jane Eyre, worn and timed. She sat down at the desk and opened it. The pages were hot, crowned with sunlight; the words unfrozen and alive. Under the cover, a page was folded inwards, its triangular crease thumbed down by a forgetful hand. On this sheet a sentence was highlighted in a faded yellow marker, a paragraph enclaving a storm of old letters: Even for me life had its gleam of sunshine. Sunshine—the glow—animate only in this room, to shine on her father’s arms alone. Evelyn looked out of the window, at the foreign sun, at its beams that hungered for eye lashes to warm, that searched for wild plants to grow. Even for me…. She remembered—
The storm: Figs showered onto the ground, like stars shooting down from the gray heavens; tens of trees craned their limbs to the sky, their bark mullioned into slivers of earthy brown that felt rough underneath Evelyn’s fingers as she touched them, as she walked towards the blackberry bushes. A fence stood in front of her, like a white sandbank in the mouth of the orchard, splintering safety apart from chance. The risk was viable, alive inside her, its breath sour beneath her nose. Above her the sky was just beginning to peel apart its clouds, gently misting her hair and jacket with rain, the sound of distant thunder punctuating the silence around her. On the other side of the fence there was a brush, made up of swollen green shapes, of branches cross-hatched into untamed mazes of wood and leaf, into feral jumbles of thickets and thorns. The bushes to her seemed human, their fingers splayed apart as if someone had just held them. Evelyn opened the gate and waded into the plants, into the boscage, snagging her jeans on twigs and stickers. They scratched her hands, her arms, and she felt droplets of blood blooming on her skin; red cherries of strength seeping into the cuffs of her jacket. She wiped them on her pants and pushed wet ropes of hair from her eyes. A stick snapped underneath her foot. Then—
“Shh,” a voice said, gently floating on the breeze to where Evelyn stood.
“There’s no one around,” her mother’s voice replied.
Just visible beyond the trees were two bodies, entangled and alone in the shrubs: her mother and their neighbor, Henry, entwined into one another, like two bulbs in the same garden, their stalks leaning towards each other. Evelyn’s feet were rooted as she watched her mother’s mouth be swallowed by another’s, as she gazed at their hands searching, fingers contracting. Panic encased her, exerting her muscles without reprieve—running, running, running. In an instant, the atoms of her heart doubled in motion; the warden of her nerves slackened his grip; her insides erupted with adrenaline. She was a body, duplicated in shock, with all sense of security withdrawn. She gasped, air buffeting into her lungs, one draft after the other, inhaled into a throat constricted in confusion, in disbelief. Her mother’s eyes fluttered open to see Evelyn. Evelyn closed her own. And away from this place, inside her house, her father slept on the couch, alone and unaware.
Outside of the study the daytime is draining, its last breaths of sunshine fleeting. The teeth of the trees stand up like dark masts of an ageless ship, ingesting the sun, swallowing its rays, and coughing up a rich red sky, magnificent in its vastness, stretching languidly over the clouds.
On the other side of the door a blizzard of shadow awaits Evelyn, dark, like the wick of a candle just extinguished, its black smoke hungry for skin to consume. There were no answers in this room, no secrets revealed in the sun; the map had begun and ended here. It was just an old notebook, just a story read before. The disappointment struck her like a shower of meteors, their pebbles cracking fresh hope down the middle. Evelyn picked up the book to return it to its shelf but when she did a vagrant sheet fell from its pages. It was yellowed, folded twice, its writing old but unextinguished. She opened it and her mother’s handwriting looked up at her from the creases. She opened it: My Henry, we shall meet in the place where this is no darkness. -V. It was a simple affection, a line from George Orwell’s 1984, her mother’s favorite book.
Evelyn read the sheet twice, searching for herself inside it, but there was nothing there except a naked love for a different life, a heart beating inside a different body. The paper shook up and down in her hands, and she let it fall onto the desk. It was a broken promise, a grave that began to haunt Evelyn like a phantom limb—something both there and gone. An aftershock plunged over her, real in its newness, quaking up the back of an abandonment gone to seed. She wanted reassurance, full words spoken from her mother’s mouth, but she was alone in the sun’s crimson crest without a phone number to call. She looked out of the window, through the home’s only open eye, at the bare orchard and the skeletons of dandelions on the grass. She was about to close the notebook and return to the darkness when she saw it.
On the other side of the hedges, on Henry’s back porch, two bodies sat next to each other, their arms entangled, their hands clung together like a pair of young lovers, ripe underneath crowded baskets of red geraniums that hung from the rafters. It was her mother, barefoot, nestled next to Henry, her body soaked in the day’s last sunlight, her head thrown back in laughter. Evelyn’s insides opened in devastation, her lungs plump with dubiety, her stomach empty of contentment. She felt her chronicle end here, its chapters finished and unhappy. Her words had no margins to fill, no letters left to clump into conviction. She was an abandoned shoreline, her contours earnest and bleeding at the breadth. Her mother had left her for another man, another life, it was apparent now. She accepted this truth as her own. The sun outside had set. The shadows in the room encaged her. She closed her eyes and the solitary sentence clouded her brain. Her heart drummed inside her chest, each beat carrying with it a further sense of understanding. She closed the shutters of the window. She felt it now, in its entirety:
It was over before it even began.
Leanne Holtzner is a mysteriously undiscovered writer residing in Annapolis, MD. She writes next to an empty coffee mug, flanked by her sleeping cats, while the sunlight is steeping in the early morning.