The Gates of Evangeline Read online

In my twenties, I loved it. That was who I aspired to be. By thirty, I had perfected the wry smile, the raised eyebrow, the long and jaded sigh. I could argue about which bagel joint on the Upper West Side was best, pay eight dollars for half an avocado without batting an eye. I jogged through Central Park and thought I was communing with nature. The city wore on me, though. One day in a restaurant I saw my reflection and thought, I never smile. I smirk.

  I was only too ready to escape when I met Eric, my knight in shining argyle, my ticket out. We dated just five months before marrying. Three months later, I was pregnant. Stamford, Connecticut, isn’t as ritzy as Greenwich or Darien, but we found a cozy three-bedroom just a few miles from my grandmother’s assisted-living facility. Even after Eric left, I loved my home. I’d watch Keegan digging in the sandbox or splashing in his kiddie pool and my heart would rise up in my chest with happiness—until the morning’s long commute back into Manhattan.

  On this dreary Monday, I walk the dozen blocks from Grand Central, feeling too claustrophobic for the tightly packed bodies of the subway. Between hulking skyscrapers, I catch fragments of sky and swirling clouds. Hair whipping around my face, I fight my way through wind tunnels, kick away blowing trash. None of the other pedestrians look at me, and I wonder how many people I’ve passed, how many faces I’ve ignored over the years.

  I’m doing the best impression that I can of Charlie Before, but the whole sideswept–bangs–to–hide–the–grow-out thing isn’t working this morning and my trousers are a bit wrinkled from the month they spent dangling from a shower rod. Truth be told, I have my doubts about Sophisticate. After all that I’ve been through, can I really muster up any enthusiasm for a magazine that is, if I’m being honest, an upmarket, slightly less sex-obsessed version of Cosmo? We actually ran a “How Oral Sex Can Save Your Marriage” article in September’s issue.

  At work, only a few people mill about. It’s eight forty-five. I’m early, and deadline for the printer was last week, which tends to quell the chaos for a few days. Having spent most of my waking hours in this office the last decade, I’ve always appreciated the chic and modern décor, but this morning the white, windowless walls and glaring chrome remind me of a hospital. I head into the break room in search of a coffee jolt and discover Lauren, my editorial assistant, pouring yesterday’s sludge down the sink.

  “Charlie!” Her eyes are two wide circles of black eyeliner. “Didn’t know you were coming in today.”

  “I should be in the office full-time now.” I riffle through the cabinet for a clean filter. “You look cute. I like the haircut.”

  “Thanks . . .” Lauren sports a new choppy bob and a pair of Miu Miu heels that, given her salary, I can’t figure out how she affords. Once, we would have dished at length about the hair and shoes, but I seem to have lost my taste for superficial chitchat.

  “Did the photos ever come in for that piece on Tahitian weddings?” I ask.

  “Yeah, it’s done. Tina dealt with everything, don’t worry.” She watches as I measure out coffee grounds. “I guess you heard Longview Media is buying the mag.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine. So nothing pressing I need to handle?” I’m both relieved and disappointed.

  “Nah.” She pauses for a minute, thinking it over. “You did get a phone call on Friday, Isaac Somebody from Meyers Rowe. He said you know him.”

  “Meyers Rowe, the publishing house? Must be Isaac Cohen.” I’m not often in touch with my old editor from Cold Crimes magazine, but perhaps the true-crime division of Meyers Rowe has a book they want us to review. Isaac would never hesitate to call in a favor. “Well, thanks, Lauren. Sounds like you’ve got everything under control.” I flip on the coffeemaker, figuring our conversation is done, but Lauren hasn’t moved.

  She clears her throat. “It’s good to see you around. We’ve all been thinking about you.” She takes a step closer to me, and I’m afraid for a moment that she might hug me. “If you need anything . . .”

  “I’ll ask.”

  Deciding that I’m best left alone, Lauren makes a clumsy exit, but her sympathy hangs in the air like too much perfume. I feel my throat constricting, my eyes watering. I grope around for a cup. Coffee is the answer, I tell myself. Burning, acrid office coffee will get me through this day.

  • • •

  I SPEND THE MORNING sifting through e-mail, avoiding encounters with my coworkers. Though I leave the door to my office shut, a few people stop by to say hi. I keep things professional, remind them semipolitely of the work I have to catch up on. I immerse myself in query letters, correspondence with our various freelance writers, questions and complaints from our production editor. Somewhere in all the mess I see an e-mail from Isaac Cohen.

  Hi Charlotte,

  How are you faring amongst all the lipstick and designer handbags? Hope all is well. Just heard through the grapevine that Longview Media purchased your mag. Those assholes are brutal. They’ll cut the best and brightest if it saves them a dime, so watch your back. If things get ugly and you need an escape hatch, give me a call. I have a job you might be interested in.

  Take care,

  Isaac Cohen

  Senior Editor

  Meyers Rowe, True Crime Division

  A job offer. Unexpected, but well-timed. I feel a surge of gratitude toward Isaac for thinking of me. I haven’t seen him in years, but I remember him well from our days at Cold Crimes. He’s a few years older than I am. Lanky, hairy, incredibly strange, but an excellent editor. He didn’t seem like the type to assign stories about crimes; he looked like he’d be out there committing them. I wrote several pieces for him about individual cold cases. Although I found the work engaging, the magazine was small-scale, the pay low, with no hope of advancement. I’m not surprised that Isaac has continued working in the crime genre all this time—though Meyers Rowe is a major publishing house and a marked improvement from Cold Crimes—but I’m not sure I have the appropriate experience for a job in that division.

  Oh, what the hell, I tell myself. It’s an opportunity, even if it’s a long shot. A chance to get out of here.

  I find a phone number on the bottom of his e-mail signature and grab a pen to jot it down. Somehow in the process, I knock over my cup of pens and pencils. As I’m crawling around under the desk to retrieve them, I hear people in the doorway of my office.

  “It doesn’t look like she’s at her desk.”

  “Oh, well. I’ll just ask Tina.”

  I try to place the voices. One of them sounds like Lauren. I can’t identify the other. A normal person would stand up and address her visitors, but I don’t. I remain on my hands and knees, not moving.

  “I think Tina will be our go-to girl indefinitely.” Lauren’s voice, I’m sure now. She lowers it as she prepares to gossip. “When new management steps in, Charlie’s gone, you watch. Did you see her this morning?”

  “No, how’d she seem?”

  “Out of it. Poor thing.” The voices move closer and one of them drops something on my desk. “It’s weird,” Lauren continues, oblivious to the fact that I am just a few feet away. “You know how she is, all business, all the time. I thought she’d be pissed about Tina taking over, but I don’t think she’s even noticed.”

  “I don’t blame her. If something happened to my kid . . . what did Bianca say it was, a brain aneurysm?”

  “Yeah. Her son was at preschool, got a headache, and was gone before she even made it to the hospital.”

  “That’s crazy.” Their voices are moving farther away now. “My uncle had a brain aneurysm, but he’s, like, sixty. And it didn’t kill him. I didn’t think kids got those.”

  “They don’t. It’s like a one-in-a-million thing.”

  My head begins to swim. I stay under the desk for a long time, face pressed to my knees. I can’t work here anymore. Clinging to the familiar only highlights how much everything has changed. How much I h
ave changed.

  When I’ve calmed myself down, I call Isaac Cohen and schedule a meeting for Wednesday morning. Whatever job he has, I’ll take.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, IN BED, I try to numb my mind with television. This proves surprisingly difficult, since all the local stations are running an alert for a missing child. Nine-year-old Hannah Ramirez has been missing since three o’clock, when she left Bonner Elementary School. Distraught family members say that Hannah often made the ten-minute walk home alone and had been instructed never to talk to strangers. Authorities ask anyone with information about Hannah to call this toll-free number.

  I switch through three channels before I finally rid myself of Hannah’s smiling fourth-grade photo. Something bad has happened to her, and I don’t want to think about the treacherous world I live in. A world where a little girl vanishes one afternoon, and one must presume the worst. A world where blood spills into the brain of a little boy, and without warning, he dies.

  Your son suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage . . . incredibly rare in children . . . probably present from birth . . . not your fault, just very, very bad luck.

  I settle for game show reruns, hours of artificial smiles and encouraging applause, until I feel myself slipping away. Sleep, or something like it. I fight my fatigue at first, but really, it’s a pleasant sensation, better than the heaviness of pills. A nice, warm, floating feeling.

  Then it’s like waking, everything becoming sharper.

  Night. I’m standing by an old inground swimming pool. No one’s actually been swimming here in a while, from the look of it; the surface is covered in rotting leaves. Two diving boards, one short and one tall, extend over the fetid water. Across from the diving boards, a sagging house awaits repair. I hear a dripping sound from the shadows behind me, and my breath catches. I’m not alone.

  There’s a girl curled up in a broken lawn chair, watching me.

  Hi, she says.

  I don’t know this girl, but I’ve seen her face before, the long dark hair, crooked bangs, and liquid black eyes.

  Hannah?

  She nods. The dripping sound continues in steady rhythm.

  Everyone’s looking for you. They all think you’re missing.

  I know.

  I try to understand.

  Are you hiding?

  She shakes her head, and I see that she has small, heart-shaped earrings. A headband with a pink flower made of ribbon.

  I want to go home, she says, but I can’t.

  Is that your house?

  That’s Laci’s house. Hannah rises from the chair and joins me. Laci’s my friend from school. We’re in the same class.

  The dripping noise unnerves me. I glance back at the broken chair and see a puddle forming underneath, though it’s not raining. You went to see Laci after school?

  She was home sick. I was bringing her the homework, but nobody opened the door. So I went back here where you can see her room.

  It makes sense. I look at the upstairs windows of the house. In daylight, Hannah’s friend could see us plainly, if she bothered to look down.

  She was watching TV, Hannah says. I waved at her. To tell her about the homework.

  Did you give it to her?

  She shakes her head. It’s still in my bag. She points to the tall diving board. For the first time, I notice a child’s backpack at the bottom of the ladder. My skin begins to prickle.

  She didn’t see me, Hannah explains, so I climbed up on the high board to get taller.

  The dripping sound accelerates, as if echoing my heartbeat. I look down and find myself standing in water. Is it me? Am I the one dripping?

  Come on. She takes a few steps back toward the shadows, expecting me to follow.

  But something doesn’t feel right. My hair. There’s something in my hair. I touch my head, and a slimy trail of decomposing leaves trickles down.

  Hannah? The water at my feet is rising now, swelling to my knees, and I know that she’s doing this somehow, taking me someplace I don’t want to go. What’s happening? I demand. I want to leave. Make it stop.

  She reaches for my arm, drawing me in deeper, and her fingers melt like ice when they meet my skin.

  Shhh, she whispers. We’re going swimming.

  4.

  I sit up in bed, both sweating and freezing, hands gripping my blankets. For the first time since Keegan’s death, something has penetrated my grief: fear. I glance at the windows, the open door to my room, half expecting a face, a human-shaped shadow.

  It’s just a nightmare, I tell myself. A lot of people have them.

  But the fear remains, churning in my stomach, crawling up my skin. Hannah Ramirez, just nine years old, missing since yesterday afternoon. I can’t stop thinking about her, those icy fingers. Can’t stop thinking about her mother, lying awake all night, desperate to know where her child is. At least I knew. There was never any wondering.

  Maybe they found her, I tell myself. Maybe she’s okay.

  But something in me doesn’t believe that. Something in me believes in that pool.

  I move through the house, turning on light after light until my home is a model of wasteful energy consumption. What is wrong with me? What is happening to my brain? I’m seeing things I should not be seeing. Is it the pills? I stopped taking them days ago. Am I going through some bizarre form of withdrawal?

  I’m not going to work today, not like this. I dash off an e-mail to let my coworkers know that I’ll be out for a few more days, though in truth, I’m praying I never have to go back. Tomorrow I have my meeting with Isaac, a shot at something new. Today I will visit my grandmother.

  I find her in her high-backed chair, frowning at the television, a crossword puzzle in her lap. When I enter the living room, she snatches the remote and turns off the TV.

  “What are you watching?” I ask.

  “Just the news.”

  “So go ahead and watch it.”

  “No, no,” she says. “I want to visit with you. Nothing good happens on the news.” She gestures to her crossword. “A five-letter word for junction. What do you think?”

  This feels like a distraction, which only annoys me further. “Really, Grandma. You think I can’t handle the news?”

  She sighs. “Don’t get upset. It was a sad story, that’s all. A little girl. Not the sort of thing you need to be thinking about right now.”

  “You mean the Hannah Ramirez story.”

  “You already saw it, then.” She seems embarrassed by her attempt to protect me.

  “I saw it last night.”

  “Oh. Well, they found her this morning.” Her voice indicates the news is not good.

  My stomach knots up. “Found her in the pool,” I say, and it’s not even a question.

  “Poor girl.” She toys with her pencil. “At least it was an accident, not some sick person . . .”

  “It was a pool, right? Her friend’s pool?”

  She nods, and I feel dizzy. I sink down into the rocker, massaging my temples.

  My grandmother misinterprets my reaction as empathy. “I’m sorry you saw that story. I suppose we could both do without the news for a while.”

  I look up. This is not something I can keep to myself. “I didn’t see it on TV,” I tell her softly. “I dreamed it.”

  “Dreamed what?” She enters a word into her crossword, then checks off the clue.

  “About Hannah. Where they found her.”

  “You dreamed it last night?”

  “Yeah.”

  Grandma pencils in another word. “They didn’t find her until this morning.”

  “I know.”

  She pauses. Regards me closely. “Charlotte, you told me you don’t dream.”

  “I didn’t. But then I stopped taking sleeping pills.”

  “And you
dreamed about that missing girl? You dreamed she was in a pool?”

  I nod and watch her reaction.

  She stares at me for a long time, thinking. Splinters of light dance across her hands, and the daylight makes my words all the more ridiculous.

  “Just say it,” I tell her. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “No.” But she won’t look at me now. Her eyes are on the crossword, the rows of empty boxes.

  “It’s okay.” I bite my lip. “I saw a dead girl. Talking to me. That is crazy.”

  “No, honey, no. That’s not what I’m thinking.”

  “Then what?” My voice is rising. “This isn’t the first weird dream, Grandma. I had another one, too, something that came true, and it’s starting to scare me.”

  She raises her head. Sets her puzzle down on the coffee table. “I don’t think you’re crazy,” she says. “I think you’re like me.”

  • • •

  THE SUMMER BEFORE I began high school, my father drove his car into a tree. The coroner estimated that his blood alcohol level at the time of death was .22, about three times the legal limit. If he hadn’t died, he would’ve been in jail. That was when I went to live with my grandmother.

  I’d visited my father’s mother occasionally over the years, but I wasn’t particularly close to her when she decided to take me in. I liked her because she never asked me to talk about my feelings and because she was honest, something the adults in my life had never been. “James is dead because he was a drunk,” she told me. “We can love him, but we don’t have to forgive him.” Or, on the subject of my mother: “She was nineteen and stupid. I’m sorry you don’t have a mother, but I’m glad you don’t have her.”

  Sometimes her plainspoken words have hurt me, but they are always true. For twenty-four years, I’ve respected my grandmother for giving me the facts as she knows them, for setting aside unpleasant emotions and carrying on, for allowing me my privacy. I always thought I was the one with secrets. It never occurred to me that she had her own.

  I study my grandmother, her steely eyes and short, wavy hair. Though I’m green-eyed and much paler, our features are similar: oval face, sharp chin, high cheekbones. People say we look alike, and I suppose our personalities are similar, too. But that’s not what she means now when she says that I am like her.