Hell and High Water

Chapter 2: Evelyn

“Flynn, Lee, I have the most extraordinary news!”

My gaze clicked from the strange, strange girl to my mother. “What is it?” I croaked, throat still inflamed from the day’s adventure. In response, Mom wrapped an arm around the stranger and smiled a new smile, a true one.

“My protégée.”

“Evelyn, dear,” my mother continued, addressing the girl, “These are my boys, Lee and Flynn.” Then, back to Lee and me: “This is Evelyn, Evelyn Farrow. A week after that New York conference, remember, I went to Boston? That’s when I found her. I wanted it to be a surprise!”

Damn surprise all right.

I stopped paying attention to my mother as she continued chattering and started to stare at the girl, though this was not meant in any way other than an analytical one, I swear to it. Urged by some inner, unsure need, I wanted to observe her, to know her before I ever had to speak with her, to read the autobiography she held in her manner and mien. That way, I would likely never have to say a word to her, among other benefits. My results: inconclusive, save for the fact that she was the queerest damn thing I had ever seen in my life.

She wasn’t beautiful, anyone’d tell anyone that. Not that she was ugly; anyone would know that too. That girl wasn’t ugly at all; that wasn’t it. She was too ethereal to be able to be considered ugly or otherwise, too unearthly, too foreign and strange and incomprehensible. Everything about her, from her dress to her face to her skin to the fey way she stood made her seem straight from an old English fairy book. And all of that, that whole impression, the entire strange feeling about her that settled in my stomach, was before I even looked her in the eye.

A strand of that industrial-smoke hair swung from one side of her face to the other, blown by a stuttering breeze from one of many open windows. Her eyes, they were the storm on the beach; looking into them was just like staring into that misty cloud up close, too close. It was almost as if I were on the sand, standing upright,  gazing at that storm, and a black, black bird flew across the sky, then back, and back, and back, north, then south, then north, south, hypnotized, like me, the horizon’s pendulum, keeping a steady pace.

Thunder bellowed outside and I jumped from my ideas, thoughts turning to the still-open windows.

As I had slowly drifted into whatever odd state of mind I had been in, the storm had finally crossed the sand and struck our small city.

Instantly, I went to the door and shut it firmly. Sliding the bolt into place, I shook my head to clear it, deeply confused at the image that my mind had just then concocted. I guess the shock of actually meeting someone, a rare occasion, must have scrambled me up a little.

I returned to my spot next to Lee without a word and hoped for some sort of instruction from Mother. Hopefully they’d go off to do some sort of business and I would be permitted to return to my novel.

Instead, she gave me a look- a very withering look. “Well, Flynn, why don’t you say hello to the poor girl? She’ll be staying with us, you know! Be polite!”

“Oh-” I started, abrupt and awkward, but just as suddenly, I stopped. “Evelyn” smiled, not quite looking at me, more like at-me-a-bit-to-the-left, and stepped forward. It wasn’t my hand she shook, but that of the air beside me, clasping nothing warmly in her hands. Mom instantly went to her side, a slightly timid-- and wasn’t that a first?-- slightly endeared smile coming to her lips. “No, no, dear,” she cooed, “To your right a bit, dear.”

The girl’s face went a bit blank, then adopted a more perplexed expression, brow furrowed. The storm-like grey gaze switched from the empty space to my bewildered personage, then back, and then to me, a pendulum again. Then, she smiled, and a silvery voice floated from her lips: “I’m sorry.”