Chapter 24

I am the last Fairy Queen. Evan was right about that. It wasn't something that I had planned on confirming, but you know what they say about plans. Evan hadn't planned on moving in with us right away either. “I still have over a month left on my lease. We don't need to hurry,” he'd said when I'd brought it up one evening at his place, then he told me, “I want to move in . . . more than anything, but it'll be a big adjustment for you and Sulamith. I'll start moving my things in over the next few weeks and spend a few nights so that Sulamith has some time to get used to the idea of me being there full time.”

He hadn't wanted to rush us, but it was Sulamith who forced the issue.

She had become friends with Sophie, the little girl across the street. I had a casual friendship with Sophie's mother Tammy, and I was comfortable with the situation, but as Sulamith was making her little three year old way in the world, she was figuring things out. I could see it happening right in front of my eyes. She was becoming very much her own little person, and one night about three days after her birthday, as we all sat around the table eating dinner, Sulamith, after having spent the afternoon with Sophie, looked up and said very seriously in her halting little three year old voice, “Mummy, did you know . . . that udder little girls daddies . . . stay wit dem, all de time?” She look a deep breath. “Why does Eban,”she had trouble with her Vs, “Hab to go away, ebry night? I don't want him to.”

It was like she was looking straight into my heart with her round dark eyes, and it was a beautiful heart-achy moment. Evan was sitting next to her and the look on his face was priceless. I don't think that he really knew up until that moment how much he meant to her, and he melted. I could see a little panic and worry over how to handle the situation there too, but I trusted Evan. From the very beginning he had made an enormous effort to get to know Sulamith and to connect with her, and not just because she was my daughter, but as a person in her own right. Even when she was only one year old. He would carry her high on his shoulder, take her to the park, build blocks with her on the floor. He bought us yearly memberships to the Vancouver Aquarium and he'd show up with his car on drizzly Sunday afternoons, just as I thought I would go crazy trapped inside with a two year old. He'd walk in the door, scoop Sulamith up in his arms, and say, “Hey Pilly Wiggin. Want to go see the fish?” Then he'd look over his shoulder at me and say, “Coming?”

And almost as soon as Evan figured she could sit still and listen he started reading to her. Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and Cecily Mary Barker (her fairy books not her religious works). Always beautiful first editions. Even when he took me out without her, he would show up at the house an hour in advance mostly just to play for a while. He was always very conscious of the fact that I was a mother and that I couldn't just run out the door because I was off work, so if he wanted to see me it meant including Sulamith, often gearing the activity towards her, and he ate dinner with us almost every night too. So really, it was no wonder, that when push came to shove, and Sulamith started to make sense of the world, in her little heart and mind, Evan was her father, and she was sitting there waiting for an answer. I left it up to him. He knew I wanted him to move in, and I was too choked up with happy/sad feelings to talk anyway. Sheila was grinning from ear to ear. He turned to Sulamith and asked her tentatively, “Do you want me to stay?”

She nodded very solemnly.

He turned to me, asking silently with his eyes.

I nodded too, a little less solemnly.

“Okay,” Evan said turning back to Sulamith, “I'll stay.” And he did.

Sulamith was so excited that as soon as we finished eating, she insisted Evan drive with her to his apartment and pack enough of his belongings to get by until the weekend and it couldn't have been more than a week before we had the bulk of his things, mostly just clothes, a fish tank, and books, (lots of books) moved to the house and settled into place.

That first night, after Sulamith had been put to bed and was fast asleep, and the house was quiet, I sat on the edge of the bed flipping through a seed catalogue in my nightgown. I marked my page and set it aside then picked up a novel instead and eased back onto the pillows. I read a page, but then set it aside as well and watched Evan's back as he sat at the desk by the window marking the last few papers in his stack. He sat up and put the pen in the pen cup and stretched, then rubbed his eyes. He turned and smiled a tired smile then stood and came over to the bed. He watched me watch him and sat at the foot of the bed, placed his hand on my foot. His touch was like a hot breeze, a current, a connection. Had we known it would be that way and had it scared us? Is that why our arms had never brushed in the movie theatres five years ago? Or were we scared that it wouldn't be like this?

“What's on your mind?” Evan asked me levelling me with his green eyed gaze.

“That day in the potting shed. Do you think of it often?”

Evan gave a gently bitter chuckle, “More often than is good for me. You?”

I shrugged, “For years I pushed it away because of how badly I wanted you when I imagined that things had been different. I wasn't sure if the feeling was real, or if it had only come about because it had been unbelievable to me, before that moment, that you could have those kinds of feelings for me . . . and then I believed that you didn't want to have them. I tried to kill the memory, to smother it, to push it into the darkest corner of my mind . . .” I hesitated, “If you had it to do over and you were standing in the potting shed right now, looking at me being naive and confused at you, what would you say?”

Evan looked down and away from my eyes, then back to my face. I waited for the answer.

“I had the words in my mind that day. At that very moment even, and I've spoken them over and over to you these last years, even when you were dead to me. I was going to say . . .” he looked away again then back into my eyes. He sighed, “I was going to say, 'Krista . . . I've fallen in love with you and I seem to have lost my head. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to surprise you like that.' What you said back to me in my imagination depended on a variety of things. How much I was hating myself, how drunk I was . . .” Evan pulled a face, “or how horny . . . Sometimes you slapped me. Sometimes you fell into my arms. Sometimes you kissed me.”

I felt momentarily guilty for bringing it up, but I had brought it up and the truth was that I'd had my own short lived fantasies before I'd decided that thinking about it was just going to hurt me more. “When I think back to that day . . . If you'd said that to me? I think I would have reached out to you,” I moved close enough to him to reach him with my hands. About the distance he had been from me that day. “When things are intense, when I'm overwhelmed, it's hard for me to speak. I think I would have reached out and touched you, like this,” and I reached out my hand and ran my fingertips from his cheekbone to his jaw then let my hand rest on his chest where his heart was beating. “Would that have been enough? Would that have told you that I was open to your love, even if I was naive and confused?” I looked at him with my hand on his heart as that hot feeling of tears welling bloomed in my eyes.

He placed his hand over mine. “It would have been more than enough,” he said to me and I collapsed into his arms. Much later, when we were still and the night was quiet and dark and the air that came through the window was something approaching cool, I asked Evan, “Did you keep all of those drunken love letters that you wrote to me but never sent?”

I looked up from where I was lying partially draped over him.

“Here. Move.” He sat up and rummaged around in the vintage steamer trunk that he'd used as a coffee table in his apartment. He passed me a thick stack of envelopes. “There are seventy-three.”

“Can I read them?”

“I wrote them for you. I want you to read them.”

I opened the first envelope and read, then the next, and the one after. Evan relaxed back and watched me, running a hand along the bare skin of my back every so often. After the fifteenth letter I looked up at Evan incredulous, “Evan, these aren't just love letters, they're poems. This is poetry. They're beautiful . . . I . . . I can't quite believe that you wrote them for me. I didn't know that you saw me that way.”

He smiled ruefully, “I do see you that way.” He looked away and made another face, the sort of face one makes in the throes of a self deprecating thought, but then he turned back to me, “Do you remember what I said about hoping to die with fewer regrets or at least knowing that I'd done what I could to make up for them?”

I nodded.

“I'm going to make up for my regrets, and I'm going to try to stop over-thinking things.” He passed me a small worn red velvet box. “I bought this just before you disappeared, the week that I'd decided to come home and try to talk to you. I've had it for years now but I haven't been impulsive enough to give it to you and just ask you to marry me, even though I've been sure for a long time now.”

“Evan . . . ?” I looked at him feeling weirdly insecure but strangely hopeful. “Are you proposing to me?”

“Yes. You're my best friend and we have more than enough chemistry to last a lifetime. I want you and I love you. When I'm with you and that little girl of yours I feel like we're a family, and I want that to be real. I'm going to stop doing what I think is right and start doing what I feel is right. I'm asking you to marry me.”

The ring box tumbled to the floor unheeded as I tumbled back into his arms.

Sometime in the wee hours, after hours more of making love and talking, I realized that I'd inadvertently done something . . . something that I didn't know that I could do, although when I thought it over I shouldn't have been that surprised. “Evan?”

“Mmm, Hmm,” he sighed content and sleepy.

“Would it be a big problem for you if I were pregnant?”

“I . . . told you. I had a vasectomy years ago I . . . that . . . shouldn't be . . .” he looked at me. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“I think that I might have magically overridden it. I'm . . . pretty sure that I'm pregnant.”

Evan gave me a look, a look that was pleased and content and just a little bit wry. He kissed the top of my head. “You're a fertility fairy, aren’t you?”

“Guilty as charged,” I gave a contented sigh and sank back into his arms.