Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
Chapter 13
Pretty Sentimental
THE NEXT MORNING, THINGS WERE STILL UNBEARABLY AWKWARD BETWEEN EVAand Audre. Eva’s stomach was twisted in knots. It was less about the fight, really, and more about the way they’d spoken to each other. They never said purposefully hurtful things to each other. Other moms and daughters did. But not them.
In silence, Audre slipped out of the house with no breakfast.
Eva was destroyed—she really was. But she knew she had to get this done. The second Audre left, she threw on a short but casual tank dress, tousled her curls to hair-vlogger lusciousness, and speed-walked to the F train. In the three blocks to the subway, her tiny migraine escalated from dull to abusive (June humidity!) and threatened to puncture her fearlessness. She ducked into a bodega bathroom and shot herself in the thigh with her injectable painkiller. By the time she showed up in the West Village, she had a numb thigh, a woozy brain, and limp hair—but she remained focused. After grabbing two iced coffees at a beat-up Eighth Avenue café, she rushed through the labyrinthine cobblestone streets till she found the address.
Horatio Street oozed with designer charm and old New York splendor. Shaded by lush, overgrown trees, No. 81 was the second to last on the block, a nineteenth-century redbrick town house. It loomed one story taller than the rest, with a majestic stoop leading up to a dramatic cerulean-blue front door.
Eva climbed the majestic stoop of the town house, pausing at the top stair—breathing hard, her hands frozen, the iced coffees dripping onto her Adidas.
With no free hand to knock on the door, she gently kicked it with her foot. Nothing happened. She kicked it again. Still nothing. And then it opened.
Shane stood in the doorway, frustratingly broad-shouldered, bright-eyed, and exquisite—all rumpled white tee and gray joggers (pornographic)—his expression reading pure, unabashed shock.
“You’re here,” breathed Eva.
“You’re here,” he said on an exhale. “You came.”
Eva nodded. “I did.”
He thumbed his bottom lip, trying not to smile. “Why?”
“To bring you coffee,” she said, because she didn’t know how to tell him the truth. She thrust the cup into his hand.
“Thanks?” he said, confused. “Um. So. I went too hard with the texting. I’m sorry. It was the way you left. I was worried.”
“No need. I’m fine.” She caught her exceedingly nervous, fidgety reflection in the window. She didn’t look fine. She looked like she was on her fifth grande latte.
“Wanna come in?”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Oh.” Shane hesitated a beat before adding, “Want me to come out?”
Eva swayed a little, suddenly knocked off-kilter. Here she was, standing before him, in front of this big, beautiful old house, and she hadn’t fully worked out her opener.
“You owe me,” she blurted out.
“I owe you,” he repeated.
“Yeah.”
Shifting a tad, he thrust a hand in his pocket. “For the coffee?”
This was so hard. “No, I mean…look, I’m not here to talk about the past. But after the way we ended? Back then? You know you owe me.”
“Oh,” he exhaled, getting it. “Hell yes, I owe you.”
“I need a favor.”
“Anything.”
“Really?”
Nodding slowly, he caught her gaze. “What do you need?”
Focus.
“Will you teach English at my daughter’s…”
“Yes,” he interrupted.
“…school? I don’t know how long you’re staying. But the head of school is desperate for an English-lit teacher for next school year. It’s sort of an emergency.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you want to know why?”
With twinkly eyes, he said, “Tell me later.”
“Bold of you to assume there’ll be a later.”
“Bold of you to assume there won’t be.”
Eva’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “Excuse me?”
“A platonic later.” Shane gestured at her, with his coffee. “You’re saying the past is truly behind us, right?”
“Right.”
“So let’s start over. Be friends. You got somewhere to be?”
Frowning, she glanced at her watch. “Yeah. My life is…Well, it’s falling apart.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
She shook her head. “No. I better go.”
“Okay.” Shane’s expression gave away nothing. “Bye.”
Surprised, Eva let out an involuntary huff. “Bye?”
Leaning into the doorframe, Shane said, “You want me to convince you to play hooky? If you want to do it, do it. You’re grown.”
“Fine.” She cocked her head, sizing him up. “Are you still dangerous?”
He chuckled. “Are you?”
“I’m a mom. I write letters to principals, demanding energy-efficient classrooms.”
“And I was researching a silent Zen retreat five minutes before you showed up. We’re so boring now. What trouble could we get into?”
Biting his bottom lip, he raised his coffee cup toward her.
“One hour,” she said, clicking her cup against his. “Tops.”
She took in his satisfied, sure smile. She’d never been sturdy enough to withstand that.
First things first, Eva had to tell Bridget O’Brien the good news. As she quickly emailed Bridget, her fingers flying excitedly over her phone, a sense of exhilarated relief flooded her. Audre’s place at Cheshire Prep—and everything they’d worked for—was safe. Her baby’s academic career, saved! Thank God for Shane.
And then as quickly as it came, her relief began to dissolve into something else—the slowly dawning realization that Shane was staying. Shane, in her city. Infiltrating her world.
It was a small price to pay for Audre’s academic career. She wouldn’t stress about this now. Instead, all she felt was gratefulness.
The sun shone amber and hot, but there was a gorgeous breeze—a perfect day for aimless wandering. So when Shane suggested they walk along the High Line, she cautiously agreed. It’d be a chill outing for a couple of old…friends? Whatever they were, Shane and Eva hit the hidden stairwell up to the High Line, just behind the tourist-packed Whitney Museum. The elevated promenade connecting the West Village to Chelsea was filled with food carts, fountains, and shaded gardens overlooking the city. After a short walk, they found the mini-amphitheater fronted by a glass wall looking over Tenth Avenue.
Eva was a bundle of nerves, but she felt surprisingly calm in Shane’s presence. The sparse crowd on the steps radiated an infectious lazy-day calm: a nursing mom, a dog walker sunbathing with four Yorkies, an older couple sipping lemonade. Eva and Shane picked a spot and carefully launched into hesitant small talk. About the weather. Book sales. The second season of Atlanta.
Soon, after slipping into an easy silence, Eva dropped the circular chitchat and dove in.
“Soooo,” she started. “Eighty-One Horatio Street.”
“My address. What about it?” He shook his coffee, melting the ice.
“That was James Baldwin’s house.”
“As stated,” he noted, “by the plaque on the door.”
“No, I’m a Baldwin obsessive. I know he lived there, from 1958 to 1961.” She raised her brows pointedly. “He wrote Another Country in that house.”
“He did, didn’t he?”
Crossing her arms, Eva hit him with a squinty-eyed look. “That’s the novel you were reading on the bleachers. When we met.”
He folded his arms and met her eyes. “Poetic coincidence.”
“Shane.”
He beamed.
“You’re pretty sentimental, bruh,” she said.
“And you remembered it. So you are, too.” With his smile splitting his face, Shane leaned back on his forearms, crossing his legs in front of him. The sun bounced off the planes of his skin. She found him stupidly irresistible.
“If you have the opportunity to make a moment meaningful, why not take it?” he continued. “I could’ve stayed at a Ramada Inn with sad salesmen dying slowly of cliché and ennui. Or I could rent my favorite author’s house and hopefully get inspired to write. If not, I’d at least enjoy a week of full-circle symbolism.”
“How’s that working for you?”
“The full-circle symbolism? Well, we’re sitting on bleachers again, fifteen Junes later, so I’d say it’s going pretty well.”
They shared a quiet look. Eva turned away first.
“I meant the writing,” she emphasized.
“I can’t make words do what I want them to do anymore.” He sounded resigned.
Eva set her coffee down. “It’s like those cases where people suffer major head trauma, slip into a coma, and wake up speaking a different language. I’d imagine that’s what it’s like. Writing sober for the first time.”
“Yeah,” said Shane, mulling this over. Then he let out a small, mirthless chuckle. “It’s exactly like that. Like I woke up one day and didn’t know English. I’m trying to write in a language I no longer speak.” Then he said, “I can’t write sober. I haven’t said that out loud till now.”
Eva leaned back, and they were almost shoulder to shoulder. “Not that I ever watched any footage of you over the years”—she smiled at him—“but you never seemed messy drunk. Just sleepy.”
“God, is this about the NAACP Awards?”
“I’m just saying, you hid it well.”
“Acting sober is an art,” he explained. “The trick is to say very little and be very still. And if you do that too well, sleep inevitably happens.”
“I read somewhere,” started Eva, “that on movie sets, actors spin around in circles before shooting drunk scenes. So they’re dizzy and off-balance.”
“Smart,” he said, swirling the ice in his coffee again—a twinkly, soothing sound. “You know what extras in crowd scenes do to look like they’re mid-conversation? They repeat ‘peas and carrots’ over and over. But gesticulate, like they’re really saying shit.”
“Is that true?” She nudged him with her shoulder. “Act mad.”
Scrunching up his handsome features into a menacing scowl, he mouthed, Peas and carrots, peas and carrots. He looked like a furious golden retriever.
Eva burst out laughing.
“What’s funny?”
“Shane Hall, you’re not scary anymore.”
“I know. I put the ‘hug’ in ‘thug.’”
They both giggled, until they’d forgotten what was funny. Eventually, they lapsed into comfortable silence, enjoying the sun. When Shane’s phone dinged, he lazily glanced down and saw it was from Ty. A selfie of his round, smiling face next to a cute girl with braids, both holding ice-cream cones.
Today is perfect, he thought, damn near giddily. Everything’s perfect.
“I can’t get over how much lighter you are now,” said Eva, taking in his expression. “Can I ask you how you stopped? Was it AA?”
Shane thought about this, folding his straw wrapper into a tiny square.
“Nah, I hated AA. The endless sharing and group therapy. All to figure out why you drink. I’ve always known why, and it never stopped me. I got sober ’cause I wanted to. It was stop or die.” He turned to look at her. “I’m too narcissistic to die.”
“Huh. You sure therapy didn’t work?”
Shane was on the verge of a retort, and then he got distracted by the sun glinting off her bare arms. His eyes traveled across her skin—no longer scarred, but scattered with delicate black tattoos. A half-moon; the Louisiana state symbol; a feather; someone’s birth date etched into a dreamy, flower-strewn vine encircling her wrist. Her art was a beautiful distraction.
You’d never know what was underneath.
“How’d you stop, Genevieve?”
“Eva,” she said softly.
“I know,” he said after a pause. “It’s hard for me to say.”
“It’s okay,” she said, and it was. “After…us, I went to a mandatory psychiatric center, for self-harm.”
“Your mom sent you?”
“No, the police,” she said, offering no more information. “At the center, I found out that cutting was a reaction to feeling helpless. The only time I felt control.” She ran her hand up and down her left arm, as if protecting it from searing memories. “Before that I thought of it as a divine ritual. Mayans believed that at birth, the gods gift humans with blood—so you cut yourself to give it back. Like a spiritual cleansing.”
“You ever miss it?” asked Shane.
“Sometimes,” she admitted in a slight voice. “Usually in the shower. I miss the sting when the water hit my cuts. Pretty sick, huh?”
“Not to me,” he said, with no judgment at all. Eva sank into this energy, relaxing a bit, thankful for it.
“I don’t miss drinking,” he continued. “But I do miss having a crutch. At first, I’d look at sober people like, damn, y’all really out here feeling everything?”
“Yeah. I miss having a way to mute it all.”
“I miss vices.”
In silence, they sat shoulder to shoulder, inches apart, bodies mirroring each other—but not touching.
“You’re still wearing the ring,” he said.
She didn’t realize he’d been looking at her. Heart fluttering, Eva held up her hand, squinting at her old cameo ring in the sun. “It makes me feel protected—I don’t know why. Do you have anything like that? Like, a security blanket?”
“No.” Shane looked out into the street. “No, not anymore.”
Eva tucked a curl behind her ear, watching hipsters leave Artichoke Basille’s Pizza down on Tenth Avenue. And then, offering Shane a shy smile, she stood up, heading down the bleachers to the glass wall.
Standing there, she leaned forward until her forehead rested against the cool glass. The feeling was incredible, like she was suspended in the air, over the street below. Like the world stopped and started here. Her eyes fluttered shut, and she felt Shane stand next to her.
“I did this with Audre once,” she told him. “Feels like you’re floating, right? Close your eyes.”
They stood there for a beat, or two or three, before she glanced at Shane.
Shane’s eyes weren’t closed at all. He was drinking her in, his expression wide open and mesmerized. In the sun, his eyes shone paler than usual. Eva remembered this color, this gold-flecked honey. She remembered it all. How easy it was, falling into him. One minute she was fine; the next minute she was gone.
“Let’s go,” said Shane, breaking whatever spell they’d fallen under.
Eva blinked. “Where?”
“To find new vices. Undangerous ones.”
“Are they worth it,” asked Eva, “if they aren’t dangerous?”
“Don’t know.” And then, with boyish delight, he said, “Let’s find out.”
* * *
Shane and Eva found their first safe vice—an artisanal gelato stand on Little West Twelfth. And they went hard, ordering three-scoop cones before heading back out to the shadow-dappled, mazelike West Village streets.
Shane’s cone was brimming over with olive-oil ice cream, and Eva’s was cinnamon-cappuccino gelato. It was delicious. The whole afternoon was delicious—so much so that Shane was already nostalgic for it before it had even ended.
It was like the space-time continuum had hiccupped, and they’d never not known each other. They were light as air, giddy with their rekindled friendship. Shane wouldn’t dare tempt fate by asking for more than this. This moment was perfect enough. Just this. Just Eva. An Aphrodite in Adidas. His distractingly, dizzyingly sexy Eva, who had barely touched her gelato, because she’d spent the last seven blocks deconstructing the feminist subtext in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
Shane, not even a superhero guy, was instantly converted. Eva’s passion was contagious. Her laugh felt weightless. Her delivery was so…bossy. At one point, deep in discourse, she used her glasses as a headband, pulling back her hair—and Shane watched one spiral escape, bouncing onto her forehead. In agonizing slo-mo.
I’d risk it all for that single curl.
Shane was aware that he was going nuts. It was almost too much to walk, talk, and eat ice cream at the same time. Thankfully, Eva plopped down on a bench outside of a nineteenth century apothecary. As she finally dug into her melting gelato, he asked the question that had been on his mind since that morning.
“Subject change,” he said clunkily. “Why’d you say your life’s falling apart?”
After a dramatic groan, Eva explained Audre’s Snapchat scandal.
“…and Audre’s a dream. But she thinks she knows everything about the world. She’s desperate to be grown. It’s scary! Mothering her, I feel so lost sometimes. My only example is my mom, who was many things, but ‘mother’ wasn’t quite one of them.”
Before Shane could answer, he saw that across the street, on the corner, an olive-skinned twenty-something with a pink ponytail was gawking at them. She grinned, typed something into her phone, and then giggled. Thankfully, she wasn’t in Eva’s line of vision.
Motherfuck, he thought, ducking his head. The young fangirls were so wild. The kind with “Eight” inked on eight different body parts.
“You never really told me about your mom,” he said, facing away from the girl.
“Hmm.” Eva licked her gelato. “Let’s see. She was from a tiny town, Belle Fleur. Growing up, people called her Mandy, a nickname for Mantis. ’Cause she was born with her hands in a prayer, like a praying mantis. On the bayou,” she started in her mom’s Louisiana drawl, “your given name is just a suggestion.” She smiled. “Lizette suits her better.”
“Sounds fragile and tragic.”
“That’s my mom,” said Eva, nodding. “Anyway, she wasn’t trained for anything beyond winning pageants. She got all the way to Miss Universe in 1987 but was disqualified.”
“On some Vanessa Williams shit?” asked Shane.
“No, ’cause she couldn’t enter the swimsuit competition with a second-trimester bump.” She chuckled. “After I was born, we moved to LA, but she was too short to model, and her accent was too thick to act. Her saviors were rich men. She became a sort of…professional mistress. Which was lucrative, for a while. The homes, clothes, schools—all top-notch. You know, I don’t remember the inside of any apartments I lived in as a kid? Just the view from my bedroom windows. A man-made lake with marble mermaid fountain in Vegas. The back of a ritzy Persian restaurant in Chicago. In Atlanta, it was a cul-de-sac with a heavy stray-cat population, all of which I named after Wu-Tang members.”
“That’s a lot of cats.”
“After each break up, we’d move. By the time I was a teenager, the cities had gotten seedier, and the men she chose were nightmares. But she never saw trouble coming, you know? She was so childlike,” said Eva. “She slept all day, went out at night, and I was left on my own.” Eva paused, her brow low. “Lizette was a kook. But to be fair, her mom, my grandma Clotilde? Also a confirmed kook.”
“She was a professional mistress, too?”
“No, a murderess.”
“A…what?”
“Grandma Clotilde had ‘fits.’ Fainting spells, the blues, and…” She stopped abruptly.
“And what?”
“Violent headaches.”
Shane stared at her, unblinking.
“The town thought she was possessed. Especially since she’d get excruciating headaches after she drank the ‘blood of Christ’ every Sunday at mass. Of course, the blood of Christ was just cheap red wine, a classic migraine trigger. But no one knew this in the ’50s.” Eva laughed a little. “Everyone thought she was a—”
“A witch,” interrupted Shane, looking incredulous. “A witch with migraines.”
Eva’s dimple popped.
“One day my grandfather was singing in the shed, in this loud baritone. Legend has it, she was having a month-long spell and couldn’t bear the noise, so she went crazy and shot him. The sheriff was too scared of her to prosecute, but she was run out of town. She left Lizette with an aunt and started over in Shreveport. Oh! And she became an entrepreneur. Apparently, she made a mean jambalaya. She cashed in on the witch thing, selling her recipe at county fairs. CLO’S WITCH’S BREW: SPICES KISSED BY SATAN HISSELF. Her handcrafted labels show up on southern-aesthetic Pinterest boards. My mom told me all of this. She was one hell of a storyteller. It’s the only thing we have in common.”
Shane slumped back against the bench.
“This is your lineage? That’s some remarkably dark, fantastic shit!”
“It gets darker.” Eva had been holding on to these stories her entire life and was ecstatic to let them go. “When Clo was an infant, her mom, Delphine, took off in the dead of night. No warning, just fled to New Orleans and passed as a Sicilian. Changed Mercier to Micelli, became a showgirl, married the attorney general, had a “white” son, conquered 1930s society—and when her husband died a few years later, she inherited his house. A secretly Black woman owned the finest mansion in the very, very racist Garden District.”
“Imagine living with the fear of being found out,” said Shane.
“I guess she couldn’t. At forty, she drowned herself in the tub during her annual Christmas party, with a house full of New Orleans aristocrats. She wrote ‘Passant blanc’ on the tiles, in lipstick. Outed herself.” Eva shrugged vaguely. “The story was buried, apparently. I have white cousins who don’t know who they are. I found them on Facebook. They’re extremely white, too. Republican white.”
“You have Fauxtalian family members?”
Shane wanted more. As Eva talked, she transformed—her hands floating in the air, as if grabbing pieces of the story, her voice fluid, shape-shifting. Like she’d lived the stories herself.
Eva was all of these women.
“This is a book,” said Shane. “Please write it.”
“Right, and what would the title be? Unstable Mothers and Unattended Daughters?” Eva sounded like she’d thought about this. A lot. “Plus, I have to write book fifteen before I start anything else.”
“This is the book you brought up at the diner,” said Shane, remembering. “The one you said no one would read? You’re wrong! This is Black American history told through some fascinating matriarchal badasses.”
“Look, Audre doesn’t know about any of this. She thinks Lizette’s a hero. I’ve…tweaked history a bit, ’cause I want her to be proud of who she is,” insisted Eva. “I’ve never even been to Belle Fleur.”
“Go.” Abuzz with energy, Shane turned his whole body to face her. “Go.”
“Can’t.” Eva shook her head. “It’d require breaking myself open.”
“Why don’t you want to?”
“It’s a mess in there,” she said hollowly.
He wondered when the last time she’d fallen apart in front of someone was.
“But that’s the good stuff,” he insisted. “It’s you.”
“I can’t afford to fall apart,” she said.
Eva met his eyes then. And Shane saw that she looked starved. Something potent and protective hit him. He wanted to grab her and run. Which, historically speaking, probably wouldn’t end well.
“Shane,” she said quietly. “Why haven’t you said my name?”
Shane flinched, caught off guard. It was disorienting, being caught between what he felt then versus his feelings now. If Shane spoke her new name, then she stopped being a memory. She became tangible. And he’d have to confront what was real. Which was that Eva Mercy was unspooling him, as slowly and surely as if she’d tugged a thread.
Shane was here to come clean and go. Falling for her wasn’t the plan.
“I can’t say your new name.”
“Why?”
Hesitantly, he said, “I can’t afford to fall apart, either.”
Shane heard Eva’s tiny huff of breath and saw her lips part, but he never got to hear her answer—because there was the pink-ponytailed chick standing in front of them. Blocking the sun. Waving maniacally, as if she were a great distance away.
Jolted out of a big moment, they peered up at her with confused (Eva) and annoyed (Shane) expressions.
“Hiii!” she shouted. “I’m Charlii. With two i’s.”
“We all have two eyes,” Shane muttered.
“I saw that you guys had, like, an intense vibe? I thought you might need to relax, so I’m inviting you in! But hurry, we close at 3:00 p.m.”
“In where?” asked Eva.
“The Dream House. I’m the door girl.” Pink Ponytail gestured at a nondescript town house across the street. It had a black door with a sign reading THE DREAM HOUSE in white block letters. A Midtown-corporate woman in Ann Taylor separates stumbled out, yawning contentedly.
“Ohhh,” breathed Eva, facing Shane. “I read about this on Refinery29. It’s an art installation that’s like preschool naptime, but for adults. You drop by, meditate, sleep, chill. And then go back to work, refreshed.”
Shane was skeptical. Twenty years ago, he would’ve robbed every sleeping idiot in that house.
“Is napping around strangers safe?” asked Eva, damn near reading his mind.
“We have thorough rules,” insisted Pink Ponytail. “So, Dream House is a sound- and light-immersive experience. The rooms are dark except for soft lilac lights, and there’s incense and hypnotic music—but you’ll hear different tones whether you’re standing, sitting, or lying down,” she pitched. “Out here it’s chaos, global warming, Mike Pence. In there, it’s peace, art, freedom. It’s like a safe acid trip!”
A drugless high? Eva looked at Shane. Shane looked at Eva.
Ten minutes later, Shane and Eva were enveloped in a womb-like room, floating away.
By then, Charlii-with-Two-Eyes Sanchez had already uploaded her iPhone X pic of Shane and Eva onto the Cursed Facebook group—with a detailed description of the sighting. As backup events coordinator of the quite niche Latinx Bruja Association at Queens College, she was a massive fan of Eva’s girl-power witch—but as a lifelong New Yorker, she was far too cool to let Eva know.