“Yeah, she is.” Lorraine smiled as though picturing the little girl. “So, is your boyfriend still around?”
She had to come up with answers to questions about Cory’s father, and she had to learn to keep her story straight. “No, we broke up when I was about six months’ pregnant.”
“Bastard,” Lorraine said. “What was his name?”
“Patrick.” She pulled the name out of the air, but it was a good one. Patrick sounded like a redhead.
Lorraine stopped cutting to look at her. “You’re seventeen, working as a waitress, and raising a baby on your own.” She shook her head. “Girl, you have my admiration,” she said. “I knew I was going to like you the moment you crashed into the restaurant.”
“I felt the same way when I saw you,” Eve said shyly.
“I’m taken, though, so don’t get any ideas.”
“What?”
Lorraine laughed. “Teasing you, Eve.” Under her breath, she said, “Bobbie—Shan’s mother—is my girlfriend.”
It still took Eve a moment to understand. Then her eyes flew open. “Oh!” she said. She’d known a couple of lesbians in North Carolina, but only as acquaintances. And she’d even met Bobbie, a conservative-looking accountant with a thick New England accent. She never would have guessed.
“I’m not gay,” she said. She thought she should make that clear.
“Like I couldn’t tell.” Lorraine laughed again, then grew serious. “I hope we can still be friends,” she said. “That it doesn’t make a difference.”
For the first time all evening, Eve saw something other than cocky abandon in Lorraine’s demeanor. There was a line between her eyebrows, too deep for someone only twenty. What was it like to realize you were different, that you liked girls better than boys? Did everyone have some burden they had to carry?
“Of course we can still be friends,” she said. She wanted that very much.
Cory was asleep when she got home, and Marian wanted to hear everything about her first night at work.
“You’ve got pink in your cheeks,” Marian said when Eve sat down on the sofa. “I think you had fun.”
“I did.” Eve smiled. “It’s not hard work. And one of the other evening waitresses, Lorraine, is a lot of fun. You know her, I guess.”
Marian set down the book she’d been reading. “Oh, sure. And Shan is Bobbie’s—her partner’s—daughter, did you know that?”
“She told me,” Eve said. She liked how easygoing Marian was about everything and everybody. “She said you saved her butt once.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Marian said. “She came out of the closet while she was in high school, and her parents made her life a living hell, so I let her live here.”
“That was nice of you,” she said, although she felt an unexpected twinge of sibling rivalry that Lorraine had also enjoyed Marian’s care and attention.
“So, it’s not hard, huh?” Marian asked. “Are the students a pain?”
“It was on the quiet side since it’s winter break, but I actually like being around students. I was planning to go to Caro…to college when everything happened.”
“Really? Majoring in what?”
“Social work.”
“You’d be a good social worker,” Marian said.
“Maybe someday.” She couldn’t see how she’d ever get to college now.
“You could go to school while you’re living here,” Marian said.
“I want to spend my nonworking time with Cory, though.”
“I understand. But you could get started. Take a class here, a class there. That’s pretty much the way Lorraine started out.”
Marian made it sound like a real possibility. Just one class. She could almost envision it. Except…how did you apply to college without a high-school transcript?
Two in the morning found Eve downstairs, heating water to warm Cory’s formula. Cory lay just below her breasts in the sling, making her “I’m going to cry any minute” whimpering sounds. Eve opened the cabinet beneath the sink to throw away a paper towel and noticed a newspaper in the garbage can. She’d gotten into the habit of reading the paper over breakfast, hunting for updates about the kidnapping, but Marian had told her the paperboy missed them that morning. Eve read the headline as she pulled the paper from the can, and knew she’d caught her landlady in a lie.
Gleason’s Girlfriend Commits Suicide
She read the article in confusion.
Timothy Gleason’s girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Jones, who led investigators to the Gleason brothers’ hideout in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was found dead of an overdose in her Chapel Hill apartment yesterday.
Elizabeth Jones? Who was that?
Jones’s roommate, Jeannie Parker, said that Jones had been distraught lately. “The cops were hounding her and she couldn’t take it anymore,” Parker said. “She didn’t want to be involved in that whole mess, anyway, and now she was getting dragged into it. Plus she missed Tim and was afraid she’d never see him again.” According to Parker, Jones had been stockpiling sedatives from several different doctors over the last week.
Eve suddenly realized that the photograph of a young woman on the right side of the page accompanied the article. She stared at the stick-straight blond hair and pouty lips, while the water boiled over on the stove.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eve left Cory in the bassinet, then walked upstairs and knocked on Marian’s bedroom door, the Richmond Times-Dispatch clutched in her hand. She heard a catch of breath, then the rustling of blankets. In a moment, Marian pulled open the door, wearing a robe, her glasses askew.
Eve waved the paper in front of her. “How could you keep this from me?” she asked.
“Oh,” Marian said, as she realized the reason for the intrusion. “I’m sorry, Eve.” She sounded tired. “I…I just wanted to spare you from it. But maybe it’s better that you found it after all.”
“Do you know something about this…situation?” Eve asked. “Are you keeping things from me? You’re in SCAPE. Do you know what—”
“Shh.” Marian touched her arm.
“What do you know?” Eve asked. Downstairs, Cory started to cry.
“I don’t know a thing, Eve. Honest, I don’t. I’ve told you. We all keep each other in the dark.”
Eve lowered the newspaper to her side, suddenly deflated. “I can’t handle the dark anymore,” she said. “I have to…I need someone to help me figure out what’s going on.” She pressed a hand to her temple and closed her eyes. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“Okay,” Marian said. “Let me get my slippers and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
They were both silent as Marian brewed tea and Eve fed Cory. She knew she had to wait for Marian to begin this conversation. Anything she said would come out in a jumble of emotion, and that was not going to help.
Marian poured tea for both of them, then took a seat across the table from her.
“You can talk to me about this,” she said, as if laying ground rules, “but I’m only allowing it because I want you to get it out of your system so you don’t talk to anyone else. All right?”
Eve nodded.
“I’m a little concerned, Eve,” she continued. “You’ve got to have a better handle on yourself than this. You can’t be so impulsive, coming upstairs and pounding on my door like that. I understand you’re upset and my door happens to be a safe one. Others won’t be.”
Eve felt chastened. How many times had she been told not to utter a word about what had happened? “I know,” she said. “But I—”
“Here’s what I know,” Marian said. “I received a call from a woman who didn’t give me her name. They never do. She knew some… some facts that let me know she was part of SCAPE. She told me a young girl and her new baby were living in Charleston—which I recognized was probably a lie, but that was immaterial—and they’d gotten caught up in a SCAPE activity they didn’t belong in and needed a place to go underground.
Could I help. I said yes. I didn’t ask questions. You don’t ask questions in this business.”
“You don’t know anything about Tim or this girl in the paper?” Eve nodded toward the newspaper on the table.
Marian shook her head. “I didn’t know anything at all about it until you reacted to that television piece the other day. If I’d been listening to that story about kidnapping the governor’s wife in order to get freedom for a death-row inmate…well, I would have thought SCAPE was involved in some way. Supporting the effort at the very least. But that was all.”
Cory had fallen asleep, and Eve sat her up on her lap to burp. “I’m so confused,” she said. “I know this girl. I mean, I know who she is. And nothing makes any sense.”
Marian hesitated. “Who is she?” she asked finally.
“Her name is Bets,” Eve said. “She waited on Tim and me in a restaurant once in…where we were living. It was obvious she knew him, but…not like that.” She shook her head, still trying to make sense of the article. “She didn’t act jealous of me or anything. Tim and I were even holding hands in the restaurant.”
Marian sipped her tea, listening in silence.
“I just don’t understand,” Eve said. “Was he seeing both of us at the same time? I mean, if she was his girlfriend when he disappeared and I was his girlfriend when he disappeared…I guess that’s the only explanation.”
“Maybe.” Marian’s tone gave away her doubt.
“Maybe she thought of herself as his girlfriend, but he didn’t,” Eve suggested. “Maybe it was all her big fantasy.”
Marian set her tea cup on the saucer. “How old was he, honey?” she asked.
“Twenty-two.” She winced at the realization that he was the same age as Bets.
“I think…he may have been using you,” Marian said. Eve could tell she was carefully picking her words. Just not carefully enough.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. Until that moment, she’d forgotten Genevieve’s warning about Tim being a “womanizer.”
“You’re only seventeen,” Marian said. “You’re a little…compared to a twenty-two-year old, anyway, you’re a little naive.”
“Only sixteen,” Eve said.
“You were sixteen when you met him?”
“I’m still sixteen.” Eve was suddenly angry, though whether it was at Marian or Tim or the world, she couldn’t be sure. “The real me is sixteen. Eve Bailey is seventeen.”
Marian sat back in her chair. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Did he know your age?”
Eve nodded.
“Well, Eve.” Marian let out a heavy sigh. “I realize that he’s Cory’s father and that he was someone special to you, but I have to say, I don’t like this man at all.”
“He was really good to me, though,” Eve argued. “He appreciated me. He loved me. One day I got five thousand dollars in the mail, and I’m sure he sent it.”
Marian’s eyes were wide behind her glasses. “Cash?” she asked.
Eve nodded. “He wanted me to be able to go to school.”
“Where’s the money now?”
“I had to leave it when…everything happened.”
“Why are you so sure he’s the person who sent it?”
“’Cause he was rich.”
Marian made a sound of disgust. “He bought you in every way possible, then,” she said.
Eve lifted Cory to her shoulder and stood up to slip her into the sling. “I just can’t believe that,” she said. She reached for her untouched cup and saucer to carry them to the sink.
“Sixteen,” Marian said to herself. “You’re not even a high-school graduate, then?”
“Yes, I’m a high-school graduate!” Eve washed the cup and placed it on the dish drainer. “I’m a high-school graduate with a B-plus average and thirteen-sixty on my SATs.” It was definitely the world she was angry at. She felt the fury boiling inside her as she turned around. “This doesn’t make sense!” she said. “Why would he go to so much trouble to use me for sex if he had—” she pointed to the newspaper “—her?”
“Sex isn’t the only thing people use each other for,” Marian said. “Maybe he could get you to do what he couldn’t get her to do when it came to the kidnapping.”
Eve glared at her. The words I hate you rose in her throat and were ready to explode, but she forced herself to swallow them. She didn’t hate Marian. She only hated what she was saying.
“I just don’t understand,” she said again. “I can’t believe he didn’t love me.”
“You deserve so much better than this, Eve,” Marian said. “I want you to start believing that for yourself.”
From inside the sling, Cory let out a cry.
“I think my voice is upsetting her,” Eve said, lifting the baby from the sling. She rocked Cory in her arms, “shhing” her as she kissed the top of her ear and stroked her back. She looked down at the tiny face, and Cory stared back with eyes that touched her soul. Eve bent her head to nuzzle the cheek of the baby she loved. The baby she’d stolen.
She wasn’t sure anymore what she deserved.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Summer 1978
Eve put on denim cutoffs and a white tank top, then checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her hair almost reached her shoulders now, and the humidity was making a dark frizzy mess out of it. She pulled it back, securing it with a long barrette at the nape of her neck.
She was only taking one class—Psychology 101—during the summer, but her financial-aid application had been approved and she would be able to take several more in the fall, with an eye to becoming a full-time psych major the following year. As it turned out, there was no school of social work at UVA, but she was not as devastated by that news as she would have predicted. Her confused feelings about Tim marred her desire to follow in his footsteps.
Marian had provided her with not only a transcript from a high school in Oregon, but SAT scores that rivaled those earned by CeeCee Wilkes. The documents appeared as if by magic one morning, much the way her birth certificate and driver’s license had appeared at Naomi’s. Eve asked no questions. She simply made copies of them and filled out her application for school.
She loved her class, reading far beyond what was required, devouring books on Freud and Jung and Erikson, and she’d completed the main textbook by the end of the second week. She read over breakfast in the morning and during her break at the diner and while she rocked Cory to sleep. She’d intended to be invisible in the classroom—she had no desire to stand out anywhere in her life—but she quickly became the professor’s clear favorite. Her classmates didn’t seem resentful in the least. Instead, they turned to her as a leader, asking her, “What was yesterday’s assignment?” or “What’s the difference between the sensorimotor stage and the pre-operational stage?”
She knew all about the sensorimotor stage, since she was witnessing it at home every day. Cory would try to grab the mobile hanging above the crib, and she delighted in turning the switch for the overhead light on and off, on and off. She could play a game of peekaboo for hours. On the down side, she was starting to show signs of separation anxiety, crying whenever Eve left for school or work. It was a normal stage of development, Eve knew from her studies, but she was awed by the knowledge that she’d become that huge and irreplaceable person in Cory’s life: her mother.
Downstairs, she found Marian in the kitchen making tuna salad, while the twins colored and Cory supervised everyone from her bouncy chair. Bobbie’s little girl, Shan, was in day camp for much of the summer, and Eve knew Marian was happy to have one less child to care for. The week before, she’d announced that she was retiring from the day-care business, although, she was quick to assure Eve, she would still watch Cory while Eve was in school.
“I want to take painting lessons,” Marian had said. “Maybe cello lessons. I’ve always had a yearning to play the cello, if these gnarled old fingers will let me.”
Eve lifted Cory out of the bouncy chair and s
pun her around, and the little girl squealed and giggled, the sound as light and tinkling as wind chimes.
“Do you want your lunch?” Eve asked her. She lowered Cory into her high chair. “What would you like? Peas? Carrots? Chicken?”
Cory grinned her toothless grin. She was a skinny little thing, though very long: ninetieth percentile, according to the pediatrician. “She’s a natural ectomorph,” he said when Eve asked if her low weight was a problem. “We should all be that lucky.”
Marian spread the tuna salad on white bread for the boys. “There’s mail for you on the table,” she said.
Eve picked up the small envelope. The only mail she ever received at Marian’s was from the university, but this looked more like a wedding invitation, the envelope thick and cream-colored. Her name and address were typewritten, but there was no return address, only an Oklahoma City postmark. A little unnerved, she opened the envelope and gasped.
Inside were three folded hundred-dollar bills and a small typed note. For the baby, it read.
She dropped the money as if it burned her, then looked at Marian. “Is this from you?” she asked.
Marian bent over to pick up the bills and set them on the table. “Of course not.” She looked at the note. “I’d just give you money. I wouldn’t mail it.”
Eve thought of the customers she’d met at the diner who knew she had a child, and of Lorraine, with whom she’d become good friends but who couldn’t possibly spare three hundred dollars. She thought of her psychology professor, who admired and encouraged her and who knew she had a baby to care for. But Oklahoma City?
And then she thought of the last time she’d received unexpected money in the mail.
Marian read her mind. “Cory’s father?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Eve sank into a chair, touching the money she’d imagined Tim had held in his own hands. She still looked for Tim in every white van she saw. When she was being honest with herself, she knew she was still waiting for him as well. She wanted to see him, to have him explain away the idea that Bets had been his girlfriend. She still talked to him in her mind as she waited for sleep, telling him what she was learning, knowing he’d be happy for her that she was finally in school. Sometimes she dreamed about him. They were good dreams—not like the nightmares about Genevieve that continued to jolt her awake in the middle of the night. Some days she could barely remember what he looked like. Other days, she found him in the face of every man she saw.