Posted on December 1, 2007

Part 51

“Oh, there’s not a lot to tell,” she said.

“Like I–”

“I didn’t go to college,” Evajean said. “I wanted to, because I had an older brother and he didn’t, neither did my parents. First in the family would’ve been nice.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Things come up, you know? I was ready to, I’d done well in high school, and then my brother, Harley– Can you believe that name? Harley? My mother, she always said it sounded nice, that they wanted to give him a nice name, but I think, until she died, that she was sort of embarrassed by it. Like it made her look bad to have picked such a silly name. And my dad, well, he was one of those guys who lets the woman run things. A hold out for those days when the men brought home the bacon and the wife managed everything in the house, everything about the children.”

“Your brother…?”

“Oh, him. Yeah, Harley was in the army and he was over there in the gulf war. The first one. Drove a tank. And he got shot. It wasn’t that he was going to die, but it was pretty bad and they had to send him home. Mom and dad were getting old and with mom not working, it was tough with the bills. The army paid some of it, but they had to feed him and take care of him and it was too much for just my mom to handle. If Harley could’ve worked, he would’ve. He’d joined the army because he wanted to be, I guess, he’d call it ’self-sufficient.’ He wanted to support himself.”

“That’s tough,” Elliot said.

“Yeah. And so there wasn’t any way I could go away to college and leave them all like that. I got a job at a bank as a teller, and that’s where I met Henry. He was a teller, too. Started a month after I did. We’d get windows next to each other and we’d chat when things were slow. He was one of those guys you could tell were going to do something big someday. He was only at the bank while he figured out what that was.”

Evajean scratched the dog’s back. Hope stood up in her lap, wavered, and fell down, exhaling loud and long.

“Is that when you two…”

“Got together? Yeah, the chatting lead to dating and then we were living together. This was in California. And when we got married, we discussed moving, starting new somewhere else. Harley was doing better, he was working, and my father had retired. They were all doing fine off social security, so moving was a good idea. Henry had some family in Virginia, an aunt, and so that ended up being pretty much our top choice. We came out here, I got another bank job, and he started his internet stuff.”

“That’s random,” Elliot said.

“From bank to internet? Yeah, I suppose. But he’d been studying the stuff for a while and it was easy to find work in it. So that’s what we were doing when all this started. I was at the bank and he spent his time earning money from an office in he basement.” She shifted her leg out from underneath herself and settled into a new position on the floor. “It was good,” she said.

“It’s weird,” Elliot said.

“What is?”

“This. Your story, my story. They’re so normal. We’re normal people and we’ve done normal things. Nothing fancy and extravagant. So why us? Why are we still here?”

“That’s not what you’re really asking,” Evajean said.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s not what you’re asking. What you really want to know–and I mean, come on, Elliot, I want to know, too–what you want to know is why someone like me, how someone like me who’s so normal, so really boring, would end up doing what I did back there.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I just think– I just wonder why us? Why you? Is it random? We already talked about this, kind of, but it doesn’t feel random. And if it’s not random, wouldn’t you think it’d be people more, I don’t know, more exciting than us?”

“No,” she said. “No, I think it’d be someone exactly like us, because I don’t know what it is. I wasn’t there for what happened to me, you remember? I didn’t see it like you did. So when you say ‘it’ and you wonder it’s us, I really know how to answer that. Why does anything have to be different than it is?”

“It doesn’t–”

“Because, Elliot, there are crazies out there and we’re hiding here in the dark and I’m just glad it was us, because I got my dog, and I’m alive. That’s more than I can say for, well, for most other people.”

Elliot didn’t know why she was doing this. He’d just been talking and they’d had a conversation like this before. She’d seemed interested then. He couldn’t nail her down, couldn’t figure out what here angle was on all this. Of course, she was scared–he was, too–and that could explain a lot.

“I’m sorry,” he said, though, again, he didn’t quite know what he was sorry for.

“Do you think they can hear us?” she said. “Should we stop talking?”

“Okay,” he said. “I don’t think they can hear us, not through this, but, yeah, we should probably stop.”

And so they did, and for the next hour or two, Evajean pet Hope and Elliot let his mind trip through snapshots of better days, building montages of Callie and Clarine and what it was like to be simply happy. He needed to go to the bathroom and his stomach made noises a couple of times, but he buried that in these pictures from his past.

It was during memories from Callie’s forth birthday party–when his daughter had very nearly set her shirt on fire by reaching across the cake to grab a plastic Barbie standing in the frosting and he and Clarine had yelled and made sure she was okay and then laughed–when, from across the warehouse, the metal wall thumped and shuddered.

Hope barked and Evajean said, “Jesus!” Elliot jumped up and almost slipped on the smooth concrete. He stood there, not moving, barely breathing, and next to him Evajean whispered to the dog, calming it. Were they inside? Elliot wondered. Was that thump from inside the warehouse?

Then a sound came from the office. Elliot knew it and immediately imagined the scene that caused it. The crazies were dragging furniture across the floor.