Vacations from Hell

Page 51

I push through the narrow part of the short tunnel, and then I’ve come out in the larger space where the colored moss glows against the cave walls like party lights. It takes me a moment before I see Evan, sitting on the damp sand at the base of the cave wall, his legs drawn up, his face in his hands.
“Evan.” I kneel next to him. “Evan, what’s wrong?”
He looks up, and I’m shocked. Even in the short amount of time between yesterday and this evening, his face seems to have fallen in on itself: he is sunken and gray, his eyes outlined by stark shadows. His shoulders look thin beneath the worn blue material of his T-shirt. Before, he seemed mechanical, deadened, like someone on a numbing drug. Now the drug has worn off and he’s shaking and desperate. It’s much worse somehow.
“Vi,” he whispers. “Something happened—I made her angry. I don’t even know what I did, but she told me to go away.”
“Mrs. Palmer? Is that who you mean?” I reach to touch him, slide my hand over his shoulder, squeeze hard. He barely seems to notice. “Evan, you shouldn’t be around her. She’s not a good person. She’s not…good for you.”
“I have to be around her,” he said. “When I’m not around her, I feel like I can’t breathe. Like I’m dying.” He picks fretfully at the sand. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Oh. That hurts. Like I’m just a little kid who can’t feel anything. I suck in my breath. “Do you love her?”
He gives a dry sort of cackle, not really a laugh at all. “Do you love water? Or food? Or do you just have to have it?” He leans his head back against the cave wall. “I think I’m dying, Violet.”
“We’ll get you home,” I say. “We’ll go home, and you’ll forget all about her.”
“I don’t want to forget,” he whispers. “When I’m with her, I see…everything. I see colors….”
“Evan.” My cheeks are wet with tears; I reach to touch his chin, to turn his face toward me. “Let me help you.”
“Help me?” he says, but it sounds more like, please help me, and he opens his eyes. I lean toward him, and our lips meet somewhere in the middle of all this darkness, and I remember kissing him at the wedding reception, when we were both a little drunk and giggling under the canopy of fake white flowers in the garden. That kiss tasted like champagne and lipstick, but now Evan tastes like sea and salt. His skin feels dry under my hands as I slide them over him. Even as he rolls on top of me and I hold him in my arms, he feels as light as driftwood, and when he cries out a name, the name is not my own.
I practically have to push Evan back up the path to the villa. When we get there, I see that my mother and Phillip are done eating: the table is abandoned, flies gathering thickly around a plate of fried plantains. I push Evan down on a lounger, where he sits limply, his head in his hands.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell him, though he barely seems to hear me.
I head inside through the double doors. I’m not sure what I’m thinking now—that if I beg my mother and Phillip, they’ll take us home on the next plane, cutting our vacation short? That they’ll take Evan to the hospital, anything to get him away, even if Damaris says it won’t make any difference?
Their bedroom door is shut; I stop in front of it, my hand up, about to knock. There are voices audible from the other side: Phillip shouting, my mother saying something, trying to calm him down, but it isn’t working. His voice rises even as hers spirals down into soft gasps. She’s crying. My hand is frozen in midmotion like a statue’s. My mother’s sobs roll softly under the door like the sound of the tide being sucked back out to sea, cut off suddenly by the sound of a slap, sudden as a gunshot. I hear her gasp, and suddenly everything is quiet.
“Carol…” Phillip says. I can’t tell if he sounds sorry or just tired. I am not sure I care. It will always be like this, I think, for the rest of my life, listening through a closed door as Phillip slowly destroys my mother, bleeding her soul dry as surely as Mrs. Palmer is bleeding Evan’s.
I step away from the door and the silence on the other side of it. In the living room Phillip’s golf clubs gleam in the leather bag that hangs from one of the hooks beside the front door. I grab a nine-iron and walk out onto the deck. Evan is lying on the lounger where I left him, his head on his crooked arm. He is so still I have to check the faint rise and fall of his chest to see that he’s still alive before I turn toward the path that leads down to the ocean.