Page 38 of Did You See Evie

They don’t even know the worst of what I’ve done. Only Nadia knows that.

Peering out the small window beside the door, I watch as Fields takes one final look at my house before entering her car. When she drives away, I lean against the frame and exhale, unable to ignore the pattering of my heartbeat.

“Who was that?” Connor asks, finally coming downstairs. His eyes are still puffy with sleep.

“A detective,” I say, my voice level. “She had a few more questions.”

Connor rubs his forehead, like he still can’t believe this is real. He steps into the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“Please.” I look out the window again, as though to make sure Fields is really gone. Nadia’s face flashes through my mind. I still can’t shake the feeling that she’s to blame for all this, that her reappearance in my life isn’t a mere coincidence. It’s like the moment she re-entered my life, she opened a door to my past that now refuses to shut.

You’re the one that opened a door, a small, pestering voice says inside.

I clinch my eyes shut, wishing it wasn’t true.

TWENTY

For a few years back then, things were pretty good.

At least, by my standards, which were low. I hadn’t known any other life than the one I’d been given. Had never had a life with two parents and warm meals in the evenings and fun excursions on the weekends. I was completely satisfied with having one parent who loved me, a parent who bought dinner off the dollar menu when he could afford it, and let me stay up as long as I wanted.

On the nights Dad didn’t work, he used to take me to the park. Those evening hours made up for anything else my week lacked, it seemed. We’d pass the ball back and forth, usually just the two of us. Occasionally, other neighbors would join in for a game of pick-up. I improved my ball handling skills, perfected my layup. Before long, I was zipping around the other players on the court, some of whom were twice my age.

“That’s my girl,” Dad would say, hooting and hollering with pride. His cheers filled me up inside, replaced whatever else was missing.

Then somehow, slowly, things began to change. Dad stopped catching the ball when I passed it to him, letting out embarrassed laughs instead. After about five minutes, he’d set up camp beneath the goal and remain sitting there the rest of the evening, sipping from a bottle in a brown paper bag. Eventually, he quit taking me to the park altogether.

I’m not sure how old I was when I realized that Dad was a drunk. For a while, naively, I simply thought he was tired. That he needed to sit after long hours on his feet at the factory, or that he needed the extra rest after fitful nights with no sleep. Maybe I wanted to think those things. The image of my father as my hero, my friend, remained in my mind, even when I was confronted with a different person.

His drunkenness didn’t bother me until the meanness set in.

Dad’s voice—once so kind and reassuring—took on a heavy tenor. He’d yell at me, the vibrato in his voice seeming to shake the house, shake my very soul. I can never remember what I did to unleash his anger. Drop a dish. Forget to take out the trash. One time, he shouted at me for breathing too loud.

His verbal anger soon morphed into something more tangible. Little shoves when I was in his way or kicks when he wanted me to leave the room. When he was close to blackout drunk, sometimes he’d hit me. Usually my arms or my chest, never my face. The physical abuse, in a strange way, became a white flag of sorts; he only got physical before he came close to passing out. After he did, I’d cover him with a blanket, hope the same process wouldn’t repeat the next day.

Sometimes my wish came true. Dad didn’t react that way every day, but when he did, that wrath seemed to grow and grow and grow, like the caterpillar in that children’s book he used to read to me when I was younger. When he wasn’t like this.

The problems at home only made me lean more into basketball. Coach Phillips and the girls on the team became my life source, and when I couldn’t be with them, I had Nadia. She was always with me during the in-between moments of Dad and basketball.

That’s why she was able to pick up on the abuse.

“What happened to your arm?” she asked me one day, as we were sitting on a bench outside the mall.

“Nothing,” I said, hurrying to pull down my sleeves.

“No use in hiding it,” she said. “I already saw the bruise.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s August and you’re wearing a hoodie,” she said, my habit of wearing concealing clothes clearly not working.

I stood, as though changing positions would somehow release the tension in my body, end this conversation. “It happened at practice.”

“No, it didn’t,” Nadia said, standing beside me, challenging me to speak. “I can practically see the fingermarks on your arm.”

“Let it go, Nadia,” I warned.

“He’s hurting you again.”

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