Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen Page A

laid him down in his crib. After a few minutes she came back out with Eveline’s nightgown.
    “Let’s get you out of those clothes,” she said to Eveline, loosening her grip on the porch railing and leading her to the back of the cabin to the shower.
    She lifted Eveline’s dress over her head and placed her beneath the splash of cool water. Eveline locked up her thoughts as Lulu rubbed soap up and down the length of her body like Eveline’s mother did when she was a girl and Eveline used to catch soap bubbles on the ends of her fingers. Lulu washedher from head to toe, but Eveline didn’t feel any cleaner at the shower’s end. Her body hurt where Cullen had touched her; her neck was red.
    Lulu wrapped a towel around her and slipped the nightgown over her head.
    “They’re so small,” she said, fumbling with the buttons at the back.
    “They’re pearls,” Eveline said, as if she were sleepwalking. “Only they aren’t real.”
    How was it possible that she’d worn this nightgown on her wedding night? That life could change so quickly on an evening in July? She wanted her mother and father, Hux, Emil. She wanted to go back to the afternoon and the porch steps, the scattering of sunflower seeds. To say, No, you can’t have a blanket. No, you can’t come in . Her hair was wet against her back. When she closed her eyes, she saw herself reflected in Cullen’s eyes.
    Lulu went back inside to get Hux. When she came back out, she eyed her coonskin coat, which was draped over one of the rocking chairs.
    “I’m going to bring the clothes you were wearing,” she said, bundling the daisy dress and Eveline’s underclothes in her free hand as if they were the offenders.
    Eveline’s parents were right: who did she think she was living all alone in the wilderness? All she’d wanted to do was continue the life she and Emil had started, to make him—her—proud. She thought of the words I’m sorry , the fishing-line-and-bell contraption, how inadequate they were then and now.
    “You’ll stay with us tonight,” Lulu said. “Every night if you want.”
    When they reached the river’s edge, there was no sign of the government boat or the man who’d steered it upriver thatmorning. The sun had set, and the stars, Orion’s Belt and the Milky Way, pulsed like hearts in the sky. To the south, lightning flashed.
    Lulu positioned Eveline and Hux in the canoe and pushed it away from the shore.
    Dear Emil , Eveline wrote in her mind each time Lulu dipped the paddle into the water like a pen in a bottle of ink.
    “We were having dinner,” she said.
    “Breathe,” Lulu said from the stern of the canoe. “You’re turning blue.”
    Eveline inhaled the cool night air, listening for something—what?—in the little waves that lapped against the side of the boat.
    Eveline thought of that first trip down the river in her sundress. She thought of the lick of water on the cabin’s wood, the story it told then, the story it told now.
    Between the branches overhead, the moon appeared, yellow and glaring.
    “You’re underwater,” Lulu said. “Now come up for air.”
    When they got across the river, they walked along the bank until they caught sight of the fishing line and the bell Lulu had rigged up. From there, they walked up the path to Lulu’s cabin. There was a fire going in the pit. A chair tipped on its side.
    “Today is almost yesterday,” Lulu said, handing Eveline her bundled dress.
    It was hard to believe the same thing that had happened to her had happened to Lulu, that a body could recover from that kind of disparaging, that kind of shame. Lulu walked around the fire, embraced Eveline, and backed away with Hux.
    “Now put it in the fire,” she said.
    Eveline stood with the dress in her hand, thinking of the morning Emil had lifted her out of the rowboat. He lovedthis dress—the daisies marching up and down the length of the fabric—of all that it stood for. What would he think of her now?
    Eveline tossed the