File talk:The Eye in Evan's eyes.jpg

One afternoon, less than a month after Valerie’s third birthday, her father came to pick her up from her daycare centre, Lil Bundles. He took her down to the River Thames, and they got on a boat. They started sailing downstream, though the estuary to the sea. It was all so exciting and interesting she didn’t even think of home. He showed her a cabin that he said was her room now, and she slept easily, rocked to sleep by the motion of the boat.

The next evening after they ate dinner (“Shut up and eat these crisps. The fish will be ready soon.”) she stood at the rail and looked out into the water.

“Where’s Mama?”

“She died.”

“Oh.”

That was it. She never cried about it, she was too young to really understand what her father was telling her. Some of her friends at Lil Bundles had parents who had died, and they were fine. And she was happy on this boat with her father, so what was there to be sad about? Just a slightly disappointed and perplexed, “Oh,” that her mother was gone.

One day, all of a sudden, she realized something: Her name was Van, not Val. It just sounded sort of like Val when people with English accents said it, like her mum, or Rose at Lil Bundles. Her father with his Scottish brogue said it right: Van. Van, of course, was the lazy, short way of saying Evan, and eventually her dad stopped being so lazy about her name.

She called her father Da like she always had, but she ultimately learned his name was Ivan. Before he hadn’t know his name, when people asked he’s always said, “Dunno.” (Sometimes after that he’d gone on to tell whoever he was talking to her that name was Van, sometimes not.) She was very pleased her father had learned his name.

One day her dad put a plaque on the door of her cabin, with her full name on it: Evangeline. She asked him about it, and she asked what she thought Evan was short for. She tried to remember. Evanerie? No, Evangeline, remember? Oh yeah. Then he sat her down and taught her how to write her name. She got confused writing Evangeline, so he just taught her how to write Evan: E-V-A-N. She accused him of making it simple because he thought she was stupid, but she’d already gotten mixed up writing Evangeline, so he taught her how to write a different version of her full name: E-V-A-N, a finger’s width space, E-dot, another finger’s width space, M-double-circle-R-E.