Eve and Adam

– 36 –

She is not quite what I expected. Visually, yes. Visually I know that Evening is the very epitome of young, female beauty. I know this as surely as I know anything. I have been given this truth.

But she does not quite sound as I expected her to.

She does not act precisely as I expected her to act.

I’d learned that she was headstrong, difficult, naive, very smart, very talented, with all the potential in the world.

That phrase is in my head: all the potential in the world.

That girl has all the potential in the world. She could be anything. She can do anything she wants. Anything! But she is frittering her life away hanging out with that drug addict slut loser friend of hers.

Having now spoken with Evening, I agree that she is intelligent. I don’t know if she has all the potential in the world.

A thought occurs to me. “This person we are going to rescue. Is it your drug addict slut loser friend?”

We have been running down the pier toward the Embarcadero. Evening stops.

“What?” Her eyes narrow. “Where did you get that idea?” Before I can answer she interrupts with a slashing hand gesture. “Never mind. I can guess.”

We run some more. We reach a trolley just as it pulls to a stop. We leap aboard, then wait impatiently for several minutes while the driver gets out and inspects his vehicle.

“Don’t believe what my mother told you,” Evening says.

I feel a rush of terror. “Evening, all I really know is what your mother told me. If I were actually to stop believing everything she told me…”

We are sitting beside each other. Her thigh and shoulder are pressed against mine. She turns to me and I turn to her and this brings our faces very close together.

“I—” she says, and then her voice makes a croaking sound. Her eyelids lower, as if she’s sleepy. Slowly, slowly she’s moving closer.

Suddenly, her eyes widen. I see something like alarm in her gaze as she pulls away.

“I have to sit somewhere else,” she says in a rush.

“Why?”

“I just do, that’s all.”

She has not moved. “Where?”

“What?” Her eyes are at half-mast again. “Oh. Yes. This seat in front here.”

She gets up, but just then, the trolley lurches. To keep her from falling over into the aisle I put my right arm around her abdomen and then she slips down a little so that my arm slips up and then stops because it can’t go any farther.

The trolley accelerates away and centrifugal force—that’s a misconception, it’s actually momentum—pushes her back against me.

We are the only passengers.

She struggles a little to stand up, but her struggle is not very forceful, and she sits for a while even after the trolley has stopped decelerating.

“Oh my,” she says in a strained voice.

She repeats it, but with a long pause. Like this: “Oh……… my.” Then, sounding really as if she isn’t talking to me at all but to some other person entirely, she says, “Yes, getting up. Absolutely getting up and moving. Because, no. Wrong, that’s why. So. Getting up.”

With a sudden heave, an uncoordinated pushing off that I find strangely enjoyable, she stands up. She looks wobbly, although the trolley is moving with admirable smoothness.

Evening drops heavily into the seat in front of me. She blows out a long sigh and runs her fingers through her hair and says—again, as though she’s not really talking to me—“Okay. Okay. I can do this.”

I remember her mother’s words and say, “You can do anything you want.”

She answers, “Mrrgghh,” in a high, strained voice.

Twenty minutes later, we reach the hospital.