Eva, Lost

 

Eva's House, Left,
South Lubec

Eva, Lost

  

I

 

Tied tight to my feet, my running away shoes were laced

hasty, one eye hole open and the tongue

slipping to loll toward my ankle.  I’d watched Eva

 

come out of her house and wait for me, or at least

I thought she was waiting for me, the way she stood

and looked my way with the sun in her face, her hand

 

a visor.  Later I’d come to know her secrets, her losses,

mainly her youngest daughter, still a new baby, shopped

off to be raised by strangers while she was away having

 

electricity jumped into her brain.  She had the kindest face

and the most vacant eyes.  Like she was able to split

herself in two, a bilocating saint.  She was there and

 

she wasn’t there.  She talked with a heavy tongue.  I have

cookies.  Would you like a cookie?  You look like you could

use a good cookie.  And for a moment I forgot I was

 

running away and walked to her, into her house, her re-

markably quiet and ghost-filled house.  They didn’t make me

afraid, maybe just, you know, alert.  How echoes are

 

fainter the farther they are away from their origins. 

The coming down of the ceramic cookie jar lid in the pantry.

Whispering. Yielding up its prize.  It was the first

 

store-bought cookie I remember ever eating.  Chocolate

chip.  What’s that brand?  Keebler?  Those little elves? 

We only ever saw commercials.   I thought I was the most

 

special kid on the road at that moment, a euphoria

of quickening happiness, the exact opposite

of where I’d started from an hour prior.  Was it only

 

an hour?  I don’t know.  How does a three-year old

measure time? Maybe with her stomach.  And the length

of light on the footrail of the bed.  The distance

 

between my house and Eva’s and the minutes it takes

to walk there, declaring I’m running away to my angry

mother, she saying Go on now, git. And I did just that. 

  

II

 

Maybe all insane asylums should be named St.

Anthony’s.  Where women walk the halls sifting

air through their fingers as if what they lost

 

will turn up there and they’ll finally be able to say

I’ve recovered.  When I was three, I made my mother mad

and she sent me to my room and said don’t you dare

 

come out.  I dared.  Half-way down the stairs,

my poop was having its own way, and then I remembered

and thumped back up to behind the door.

 

There was a little nook between the chimney

and the wall.  And a small box of clothes.  Old.  Musty.

A nest, perfect, for the little mice I heard at night.

 

I knew you were up to no good, you and your sisters

were always up to no good. She was half In

the bag, always reminiscing.  Somewhere in the house

 

there was a sober mother, even if she was simply

behind the picture frame.  And then what?  I’d coax

her, rub the feet of her memory.  I was a sucker

 

for a sad story, and the next part made me saddest

of all, not just because I was running away, not that

she didn’t come after me, not that she let me

 

walk down that long lane alone, but that this was where

she told me about Eva, and how they took her baby

away from her and drove her to the mad house buckled

 

in a straight jacket.  She’d bit herself in the convulsions.

When she leaned in to me to give me that cookie,

I noticed a little scar stretched against the middle

 

of her lower lip.  It looked like an extra frown above

the dimple in her chin.  I wanted to touch it.  Today,

I have one, but I can’t tell you how it got there. 

  

III

 

Now I wonder if some asylums might be called

St. Jude’s.  Not just charity hospitals for kids

with incurable cancers – cancers you can see

 

and treat.  But a St. Jude’s for the thrown away

and maybe they have a special doorway that

lets you go out into the arms of a mother

 

who wanted you. Like Eva, gentle and always

beside herself.  She’d given me a sweet

for each hand.  I ate them quietly as she watched

 

me quietly, waiting to return me.  Waiting

for the tide to come in and unmoor her

again.  She washed me top to bottom

 

before she let me go.  She was soft.  So soft.

And coming undone so slowly it was

unnoticeable, it was an untying of a shoe

 

loosening after running and running

for a long time.