Grandma’s been told they’re all away on holiday somewhere. I wouldn’t want her to be sick too.’
If the chauffeur said anything in reply then Evangeline missed it. His neck was getting hotter by the minute, though. She could fry eggs on that neck now, she thought, with all that grease there, too. You could see the grease in a line on his collar. She wanted to pull her photo of Lincoln out of her school bag to look at but she didn’t dare because she didn’t want to cry in front of him.
When they got home Grandma Klippel was outside waiting for them. At certain times it was hard to imagine how tough the old lady could be, and this was one of those times. With her linen skirt flapping about her knees and her skinny, saggy-fleshed arms hanging out of her cardigan sleeves, she looked almost frail. The light was going and her expression was hard to gauge. There was a smell of beach plum blossoms and Evangeline remembered it was nearly spring.
There were circles of dark skin around her grandmother’s eyes, as though she’d been rubbing, or reading without her glasses, or something.
‘Hello, dear. And how was school?’ she asked.
Evangeline looked back at the chauffeur. ‘Fine.’
Grandma Klippel smiled. ‘Do you know you are at the same school that my son went to? Darius was at that school for four years and he adored every minute of his time there. I used to wait for him to come home each afternoon just like I am standing here waiting for you. Isn’t that wonderful?’
She was the only person Evangeline knew who could smile without looking happy. She tried to smile back but the right look just wouldn’t come. When she started to shiver she pretended to her grandmother it was the wind making her cold, even though they both knew there wasn’t any more than a breeze blowing that afternoon.
She fell ill on that day; the fever lasted a week or more and she was off school for a month. When she got up again it was almost summer and her grandmother took her on a berry hunt just as though nothing had ever happened.
On her first day back at the school Evangeline got sent home early for fighting. She’d got angry over nothing much other than her unhappy life and she’d jumped on the girl with the most know-all face in the class for little more than the fact that the girl had a father and she did not. When she jumped the girl went down like a pile of old paper, instead of fighting back. So the car had been summoned to pick her up.
The chauffeur’s name was Cecil. It was a strange name and she didn’t know if she dared use it. He came from Manchester in England, which was why he talked so funny. He had a colour photo of his family in his glove compartment. She wondered if he missed them as much as she missed her own.
This time Cecil stopped the car. Not quickly, but just slowing down onto a verge as though stopping to point out some tern that dotted the sky overhead. The windows came down automatically and they both sat there a while, listening to the wind cutting through the dune grass. There was a rock nearby that was covered in creamy-white shells dropped by the gulls. Beyond the rock was a lonely-looking yellow sandbar that the tide was busy trying to cover up.
Evangeline’s nose caught the smell of fresh smoke and when she looked around Cecil was drawing on a weedy-looking roll-your-own.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and she shook her head, flattered by his manners. He had lowered the glass between them so that his voice didn’t sound so funny. It was nice, sitting there quietly. After a while Evangeline started to cry but he didn’t make a fuss, or try to stop her. He just let her cry until her eyes were empty of tears and then he took his own hankie down to the water and brought it back wet, so she could wash her face with it.
‘She might know, you know,’ he said, meaning Grandma Klippel. Evangeline shook her head.
‘If she knew she’d have said. She never lies, she told me so. She wouldn’t say anything unless she believed it. Why do people die?’
‘God knows.’ Cecil spat a fleck of tobacco. He was not a philosopher. Evangeline thought the answer was fair enough. She never asked the question that was really troubling her, though: why did they die without her? Why hadn’t she gone as well? Didn’t they want her with them? Thea, Darius, Lincoln and Patrick. All together. Without Evangeline. The thought came into her head that they had hated her. Why? Was it her school grades? Was it because she was so ugly? It just didn’t make sense unless you looked at it that way.
Maybe they did hate her, after all. She would never have considered doing anything without them.
‘Why don’t you take a run on the beach for a bit?’ Cecil asked. ‘Your grandmother’s not expecting you back yet. Get a bit of colour into your cheeks.’
She took Cecil’s advice, running wild till her legs ached, and the air did feel good. Then they drove back to the house.
‘We have whole baby chickens for supper, Evangeline, with herby gravy,’ her grandmother said. ‘Go and wash up, there’s a good girl.’ She was wearing a lilac-flowered dress and a matching duster coat, as though she’d been out. She never told lies. She would have said.
Nothing was spoken, then, and as Evangeline grew a little older the question ‘Why?’ hung constantly in her head, like a small bird on a perch in an empty cage, pecking away all the time. When she got a little wiser she asked Cecil how he knew and he said he’d just known, that was all, which seemed to her a stupid kind of an answer.
Then she thought about it properly and she started feeling better. If Cecil had ‘just known’ they were dead then maybe she knew that they just weren’t. Maybe you could sense these things and Cecil was wrong. She tried not to think about it too much. It had made her ill the first time and she didn’t want to be ill again.
It was as though a fog slowly settled around the whole affair and as time pushed an ever-widening space between herself and her parents she began to despair of ever finding out the truth.
And just as Evangeline grew older, so Grandma Klippel seemed to grow younger. She was not such an old lady, after all. When she had first come to the house Evangeline had thought her grandmother to be about ninety years old, but now she knew she was nearer fifty. Maybe Darius’s disappearance had made her younger because she spoke a lot about when he was a boy and acted half the time as though she were just a young mother again.
Shock over the deaths created some sort of malfunction between Evangeline and her grandmother. She needed the old lady’s sympathy and pity, but she knew she could never seek it because that would have meant giving away the secret that was so important to hide.
They lived in the same house, then, and her grandmother was kind, but that was all. Each of them was too empty inside to nurture any real affection. Grandma Klippel would not allow crying in public, though Evangeline heard her grief at night sometimes, when she was alone in her room. She wanted to please her grandmother. Most of all she wanted to please her parents, wherever they were. It was as though they were always there somewhere, watching and waiting; holding their breath until she did something they could be proud of at last. Darius and Thea: beautiful and talented. All of them, some place special, some place she couldn’t reach because she wasn’t special enough.
Evangeline felt like a ghost. She grew to realize that wishing she were with her family was the same as wishing she were dead too, but that was all she could think about. It was impossible not to imagine
