Free Lost & Found by Brooke Davis Page B

conscious of the angle of their tilted heads, and he thought,
Have these women always been like this?
There was something about them that made him uneasy.
    And then Evie stood opposite him, looking at him so warmly from her plain, unremarkable face. He loved that plain, unremarkable face. The smattering of freckles, the uninteresting nose, the thin lips, the ordinary eyes. When quizzed about Evie’s appearance, Karl had trouble describing it. He knew the derogatory implications of the word
plain
, so instead he lied and said she was pretty.
    Women were funny, he knew. Not hilarious, but strange and unpredictable. They saw every possible implication of a word, like a prism refracting the light, making too many patterns on the wall. He had learned from an early age to say little and pretend he was slow. When you don’t say much, Karl discovered, women assume you’re deep and mysterious; they don’t, for whatever reason, assume you’re stupid.
    Her dress was a dull white, and there were no patterns on it, like the reams of paper he threaded through the typewriters, day in, day out. The wedding ring he gave her was customized, a plain silver band with an ampersand typewriter key attached to it in place of a stone. Later that night, as he removed her dress in the glow of moonlight and lay it on the bed as though it were her, he typed on the fabric,
I am so glad I met you, Evie
. But he didn’t type like he was warring with the fabric, orthrowing punches. He typed delicately, as if he were typing into liquid and trying not to make any splashes.
    And when he typed,
I am here, Evie
, across her collarbone, so softly he was barely touching her, she put her lips on his ear and whispered,
Me too.
love
    In their life together, Karl and Evie didn’t go anywhere, ever. They were each other’s foreign countries.
    Only unhappy people leave home
, Evie declared.
    And we don’t need to leave
, he said, typing on her forearm.
    Yes
, she said, resting her forehead on his chin.
We don’t need to leave.
    They lived such a small life. Trees and flowers and ocean and neighbors. They never scaled mountains, or braved rapids, or went on telly. They never ate strange animals in Asian countries. They never starved themselves or set themselves on fire for the greater good. They never delivered a rousing speech, sang in a musical, or fought in a boxing ring. Their names wouldn’t be in textbooks for children, their faces wouldn’t be on banknotes. They would not get their own statue. And when they died, their names would disappear like their last breath, a curiosity for cemetery-goers and nothing more.
    But they had loved. They grew plants, drank tea in theafternoon light, waved at neighbors. They watched
Sale of the Century
every night and, together, were reasonably accomplished at it. They exchanged Christmas gifts with their butcher, their fruiterer, and their baker. Karl gave an old typewriter to the young highly literate boy working at the newsagent. Evie made mittens for the girls working the morning shift at the supermarket. Karl was a guest in the local grade-six class, talking about the history of their town. Evie was a guest in the local year-seven class, demonstrating how to make a pavlova. Karl fiddled about in his shed. Evie fiddled about in the kitchen. They went for looping walks in the morning and evening, through local bush land, through the town, along the shoreline. Their life was a twenty-kilometer radius around their house.
death
    He remembers not being able to talk to her as she lay there at the mercy of machinery and starchy sheets. His words in the air, without hers, were horrifying. She was sleeping, she was always sleeping. She would open her eyes occasionally, but they reeled like a newborn’s.
    So he had stood up and pulled back the sheet that had been so tightly enclosed around her, as though someone wanted to trap her there, pin her to this bed like a specimen of the Almost Dead. He rested his hands on her arm,