The Memory Garden (20 page)

“I know you’re confused. I’m sorry, but I can’t wait for you to understand. I’ve waited long enough, and who knows, maybe this is the only chance I’ll get. I need to ask you to do this while you can still hear me.”

“Yes. I. Hear. You. Fine.”

“Well, you don’t need to shout, dear. I’m not deaf just… Tell them, okay? Tell them I was grateful they were there. They were a comfort to me. I don’t really like that ‘Did not the whole earth sicken when she died?’ I don’t want to be the cause of so much sorrow.”

Drunk people never make sense,
Bay thinks as she pushes against the damp ground to stand. “You’re not going to wander away or anything?”

“No, I can’t. I depart for brief periods of time, but I always end up back here. Wait, you aren’t leaving me? Don’t go. We can talk about other things. Happy things. You can tell me about happiness.”

Bay can’t explain her desperate need for escape, how the smell she has been insisting all day is not so bad has now become unbearable.
Maybe
I
am
angry
, she thinks as she pushes through the pampas grass, determined not to stop even at the sound of Stella’s drunken pleading.

Stepping into the yard scented pleasantly of citronella, Bay glances back to see if she is being followed, but while the grass rustles as though someone passes through, no one does. Bay decides she’ll sit on the porch and—what’s that thing her Nana says?—she’ll “gather her thoughts.” Yes, she just needs to gather her thoughts.

But there really is no place left. Even the porch is occupied. Nan sits with a stream of moonlit drool dripping down her chin. Mavis sleeps in the other rocker, her head back, her mouth open beneath the lavender hair oddly askew.

Bay decides to take a little walk. So what if it’s the middle of the night? It’s not like she lives someplace dangerous. As soon as her bare feet touch the warm pavement, she wonders why she’s never done this before. It’s such a pretty road, lined with tiger lilies and wild phlox bowed beneath the moon. She answers her own question by remembering all the stories she’s heard of kidnapped children then tells herself to calm down.
Nothing
happens
here.
Is that all there is to it, the lies her Nana told (if they were lies, that is), an attempt to keep Bay close?

Because
if
Nan
is
a
witch
, Bay thinks,
she’s a liar as well
.
Did
she
really
find
me
in
a
box? Was I really left on her doorstep? Or is there some other explanation, something sinister? What a ridiculous story, found in a shoe box on the porch!

Bay stops on the side of the stone-pitted road to inspect her foot. Tiny spots of blood blossom on her heel. She can still see her house. She can’t see her Nana or Mavis on the porch, but she thinks they are still there; they didn’t look like they were waking any time soon. She sees only a glimpse of the backyard, the candle jars flickering. She imagines Stella sleeping in that mysterious moonbeam, Howard and Thalia talking within that aura of light.

Who
am
I?
Bay turns away.
Where
am
I
going?

She walks on the grassy bank, pushing through the tiger lilies, parting the tall grass, safely out of the way when a car comes too fast around the curve, headlights briefly monstrous before it passes, leaving Bay once again in moonlight, and alone.

Nan wakes on the moonlit porch, thinking that Mavis’s appearance is a little frightening beneath the strange wig, her face ghostly pale, eyebrows archly drawn over lashless eyes, and just like that, Nan understands. How had she not seen it sooner? It steals her breath. Mavis is dying!

How
did
she
know, how did that young Mavis know we should celebrate our bodies while we can?

Nan closes her eyes and leans back against the rocker, remembering.

She was only supposed to be taking care of Fairy, the cat, but how could she resist the opportunity for a freedom they had all gotten used to that past summer? When she showed them Miss Winter’s book with those pictures of naked women, Eve and Ruthie covered their eyes, but Mavis said they needed to stop acting like bodies were embarrassing.

Perhaps it was the dandelion wine that made them wild, because it seemed one minute they were drinking out of the bottle and the next they were standing in Miss Winter’s parlor, almost naked, their skin brushed with light from the fireplace flames. When Mavis announced it was time, they dropped the towels. Eve, who had protested the plan most vehemently, was the last to do so, revealing her distended belly, lightly veined blue against pink skin, like a blossomed watercolor.

The flames crackled and wavered in the peculiar stillness that shrouded them, until Mavis spoke. “Are you pregnant?” she asked.

Eve picked up her clothes and walked out of the room. The three who remained, suddenly self-conscious, even Mavis, turned their backs to dress.

“I don’t understand,” Ruthie said, over and over again. “I thought she made him up. Didn’t she say there was no James?”

Mavis and Nan didn’t bother trying to explain the obvious. They spoke in hushed voices. Things could be done. This didn’t have to happen. They spoke in code, without ever saying exactly what they meant.

“Miss Winter,” Nan said. “It’s what she does.”

“Are you talking about witchcraft?” Ruthie whispered.

People said Grace Winter was a witch; something Nan’s father called preposterous, though Nan watched her own mother hang a rosary from the kitchen window facing their neighbor’s porch.

“Come,” Nan said. “I’ll show you.”

Miss Winter’s basement was not filled with tools, broken tables, terra-cotta pots, cobwebs, and clocks.
What
did
the
witches
do
here?
Nan wondered when she came to feed Fairy that first night, creeping around the house like a criminal. She went upstairs before she went down. Attics were the place for secrets, love letters, wedding dresses, feathered hats, and fur coats. She didn’t know anyone with anything important in the basement, but when she found the locked door, she immediately thought of the key Miss Winter removed from the ring. “Now this here one is for the front,” she’d said to Nan. “And this one for the back. This one you don’t got to worry about.” She frowned at the skeleton key even as she worked it off, waiting until Nan’s back was turned before dropping it into the desk drawer, which Nan spied quite by accident in the mirror, not really thinking much about it until her curious search led her to the locked room. It didn’t take long to find the key in the desk, which is where she returned it and found it again. She unlocked the basement door, turned on the light, and with a flourish of hand, like the magician when they were little girls, presented the room with all its surgical furnishings.

“What is this?” Ruthie asked, but a moan brings Nan back to the present, where Mavis frowns at Nan as though she were a source of indigestion.

“What are you looking at?”

“Your hair,” Nan says.

“What about it?”

“Crooked.”

Mavis grasps the lavender wig, and with a few tugs, makes an adjustment, though it still isn’t right. Nan mimes moving her own hair (which suddenly seems abundant) and, following this example, Mavis adjusts the wig to rest more realistically on her head.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Nan asks.

Mavis pats the slithery boa and picks at the drape of her leopard-print dress. She finally lifts her chin to face Nan, who observes the amazing matter of Mavis with tears in her eyes.

“Are you getting better?”

“Haven’t you noticed? I keep getting better all the time.”

How
strange
, Nan thinks,
to
feel
so
entirely
the
loss
of
a
friend
she
lost
a
long
time
ago. What a waste, what a terrible waste.
She starts to say this, but Mavis raises her hand, palm out. “Don’t. Pity buries me alive,” she says, turning away to stare into the dark.

***

It was Mavis, of all people, who insisted they take Eve to a “real” doctor instead of Grace Winter with her strange instruments in the frightening basement. But when they went there (and they all went with Eve, of course, “What’s this, girl’s day out?” the nurse said) it wasn’t a doctor’s office at all.

They took the train, which would have been exciting under other circumstances, watching their familiar world flip past the dirty glass, meadow to broken corn stalks, to dark trees reaching long branches, to dilapidated houses, to smoke-spewing factories, the landscape suddenly comprised of gray towers, metal, and people rushing past. The four of them, ejected in their Sunday best, wandered the terminal like summer flowers tossed in the wind, until Mavis, who acted like she knew what she was doing, led them down a frightening hallway, strangely empty, though populated with the feeling of being watched. Her confident retreat brought them to a giant room of beveled glass as beautiful as it was confusing. They found the exit; immediately hailing a taxi, which took them into a sorrowful neighborhood of dismal buildings, one with a plastic red carnation stuck oddly in the dirt by the front stairs, like a wound. Nan tried not to be superstitious about the chill that crawled up her spine when they opened the creaking door into a dark hall that smelled sour and salty.

The “office” was furnished with a desk, several uncomfortable straight-back chairs, one small table with an unlit lamp, and an ashtray filled with stubs of cigarettes shaped like tiny bones, some with red smears of lipstick. The three of them sat, waiting for Eve, who was taken behind a screen into what she later said was “just a kitchen.”

“It was dirty,” she said. “Maybe Nan was right.”

Mavis, Ruthie, and Nan never saw him, though they heard his voice, a low, scratchy sound like sandpaper. “Take it off. Why are you crying? You want this, don’t you?”

Nan, who had neglected to bring a book or knitting, searched for something to occupy her mind and remembered the afternoon she came upon Eve reaching for the honeysuckle her mother trained to trail around the door before she died. Eve was standing on bare tiptoes, reaching, when Mr. Leary stepped outside, and spoke softly to her bowed head, then brushed something from her face, though Eve’s hair was short and always neat. They both jumped when Nan called out. At the time she found it strange, but didn’t linger over the thought.

Mr. Leary turned away. Well, he wasn’t known as a demonstrative father. Eve looked, for just a moment, like a stranger, but the moment passed so quickly Nan thought it must have been a trick of the light, the terrible expression on Eve’s face replaced with that odd smile she had, her eyes perpetually sad, as if she were bifurcated.

In the dismal apartment meant to be Eve’s place of salvation, Nan shifted in the chair, still not sure why the memory made her so uncomfortable. Trying to find something happy to think about, she recalled that Halloween when Mr. Black sawed the lady in half. She smiled the whole time that bloodless blade severed her, and just like that, the way inspiration or divine knowing is said to arrive, Nan understood what happened to Eve. While Ruthie sat with folded hands and erect back, oblivious, and Mavis paged through her Isak Dinesen, Nan arched forward and vomited a splash of putrid yellow mush that splattered Ruthie’s white shoes.

With an exaggerated sigh, the nurse pushed back her chair to retrieve a bucket, sawdust, and a little broom, which she handed to Nan before disappearing behind the screen, returning later with a wan-looking Eve, dressed and clutching her purse.

Ruthie was the only one who talked on that long train ride home, though Nan didn’t listen to the words but stared out the window at the flat landscape, the brown grass, the dead flowers, the leafless branches raised to the gray sky, vaguely nauseated by the stench that rose from her collar while Eve read a book.

“You can come live with us,” Nan said. “I’m sure my parents won’t mind.”

Eve looked at Nan as if she had said something inscrutable. “Why would I do that?”

Nan opened her mouth but swallowed her words.

So it was decided. They wouldn’t speak of it. Later, when they left the train, Eve walked ahead, not hurrying, really, just brisk, leaving them behind as though they had done something she wanted no part of.

The car has passed Bay twice, the first, going too fast on the dangerous curve, the second, much slower. Bay supposes a stranger could easily get lost out here; it’s not a road that goes anywhere important, as far as she knows. East, it ends in town, where it inexplicably splits into two roads, neither of which bears its name. West, it winds past the sign for Wood Hollow, the subdivision Thalia’s mom drove through once, clicking her tongue at the dirt lots and oversized, mostly empty houses. “Like a ghost town with no ghosts,” she’d said, then shot Bay a look. What was that look? Now that Bay thinks of it, Mrs. Desarti is often shooting darted looks her way. Why? What does everyone else know about Bay’s life that she doesn’t? What did Thalia mean about a boy who died out here? Karl? Of course not, he’s not really a ghost. Yet everything is confused. What is true about Nan, for instance? Is she a witch? A liar? What is the secret of Bay’s life? She asks herself these questions several times, but the inquisition yields nothing.

Here it comes again, the headlights mark the car’s slow progress. Bay doesn’t know what makes her duck at its approach, but when the headlights blink off, she crouches lower than the tiger lily petals, her heart beating wildly. Not a lost driver, someone looking for the girl walking alone on the side of a dark road, how stupid has she been?

The car passes slowly, a red car with a missing fender, the driver a silhouette of a man hunched over the steering wheel. Bay doesn’t move a muscle. Though her feet itch, she does not move to scratch. She doesn’t turn her head either. She listens to the car purr away until it squeals around the curve.

What was she thinking to come out here like this at such a late hour? How can she possibly hope to discover the truth of her life by wandering around in the dark? She scratches her ankle. What if he comes back?

She doesn’t know how long she crouches there before she hears humming. Because Bay is a swimmer, or at least used to be one, she is able to hold her breath for a long time. One thing she learned the day after her birthday is that actually, she can hold her breath for a freakishly long time. Bay feels the held breath course through her like smoke. The humming grows louder. She holds so still she doesn’t even blink. The person humming is now directly in front of Bay, the white sneakers close enough to touch. She closes her eyes, like a little child, and for a moment thinks it works. Maybe there is magic, after all. Maybe she can be saved by held breath and hope. The humming stops. The only sound is the peepers down the road. Perhaps Bay imagined everything else; she used to imagine things a lot as a child—people in the garden, the scent of water, colored light around her Nana’s body. When two hands part the tall grass and tiger lilies, Bay gasps.

“Are you all right, honey?”

“Ruthie?” Bay stands, a sudden giant among the lilies. “What are you doing here?”

Ruthie, her bathrobe buttoned all the way to the lace collar, her hair in pin curls, looks up at the moon. “Well, I guess I had the same idea as you, dear. It’s such a lovely night, isn’t it? Why, I remember—”

“Quick. Hide.”

Ruthie gives up her attempt at squatting behind the wild flowers in favor of sitting with her legs splayed out in front of her, her sneakers white beacons in the dark.

The headlights brighten as the car approaches too fast, so fast Bay worries that rather than being kidnapped, they are in danger of being crushed, though the car holds the curve as it speeds past.

“Well,” says Ruthie, picking bits of weed and grass off her robe, “is this how you entertain yourself out here?”

Which makes Bay laugh. Ruthie laughs too, her stick-out teeth accentuating her horsey look.

“The same car keeps going by,” Bay says. “Once with his headlights off. I think he was looking for me.”

“Oh, my,” Ruthie says. “One can’t be too careful these days. He turned his headlights off? That does sound suspicious. Do you think it’s safe now?”

Bay listens carefully, noting a new, strange sound that takes a moment to identify as Ruthie’s breathing, slightly labored as if she had been running. “We can get up, but we should probably stick close to the side of the road.”

“Well, will you look at that? You just pop up like a sunflower, like it’s no effort at all.” Ruthie, struggling to stand, accepts Bay’s assistance. She is surprised by how big Ruthie’s hand is, how firm her grasp.

“What in the world is that?” Ruthie asks, peering into the woods.

“Oh, that’s just the old witch’s place.”

“What old witch?”

Bay can’t believe she called it that. “Nobody,” she says. “No one lives there. It’s just something people say.”

Ruthie leans forward to get a good look. “I wonder who the new witch is.”

“No one lives there. No one has lived there my whole life. It’s just a rundown cabin.”

Ruthie squints down at Bay. “Let’s have a look.”

Bay points to her bare feet. She can’t walk through the woods like this.

“You’re not wearing shoes? Why would you do such a thing?”

Bay would like to say that Ruthie isn’t exactly a model of practical dress herself, but doesn’t want to be rude.

Ruthie turns her back, palms braced above her slightly bent knees.

“Did you lose something?”

“Goodness, what do I have to lose? Hop on.”

“Hop on what?”

“My back, silly.”

Bay doesn’t say that Ruthie is too old, but that she herself is. “What if someone sees us?”

“Oh, who’s going to see us out here? I know you’re afraid you’re going to break the old lady’s back, but I’m stronger than I look.”

Bay shakes her head.

“Now listen to me. A person doesn’t get to be my age by making foolish choices. Well, actually, I’ve made plenty of foolish choices, but if I couldn’t carry you, I wouldn’t offer. You’re insulting me. Do you think I’m senile?”

“No, it’s just—”

“All right then. The only hiccup is that I can’t bend very far. Put your arms around my neck, not too tight, lean onto me, closer, Bay. Press more like I was a boy you think you are in love with. Now this is the tricky part, when I say, well what should I say? Obsidian! I’m going to stand, and you’re going to make a little jump to bring your legs up around my waist. Ready?”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Well, I should hope not. One. Two. Obsidian.”

Ruthie wavers, the tiger lilies tremble, the tall grass ripples, the moon glow shivers like water, but Bay holds tight, remembering the sensation of almost drowning, determined not to fall.

“Are you all right?”

“Just give me a minute, dear. I have to get my earrings.”

“Your earrings?”

“Bearings, I mean. All right, hiccup yourself a bit more. Yes, that’s it. Now, where is it? Oh, yes, there it is.”

“I’m not too heavy for you?”

“I should have made another course for dinner, that’s what I think. Put some fat on those bones of yours. You’re as light as a cupcake.”

Bay, her arms already around Ruthie’s neck, presses her face close, inhaling the clean scent of lemon. It’s weird to be fifteen and getting a piggyback ride, but now that she is no longer in danger of crashing to the ground and squashing Ruthie, Bay remembers how her Nana used to give rides like this when they came out here to look for fiddleheads. Back then, Bay had to be carried because her little feet got tangled in the weeds. “I think the forest wants to take you back,” her Nana would say.

“Are you having goose pimples? Did someone just walk on your grave? Isn’t it just the sweetest place? Can’t you just picture it with a little garden of daffodils? Deer won’t eat daffodils, you know, but they love tulips. And some rocking chairs and wind chimes?”

Bay looks past Ruthie’s bobby-pinned hair at the old cabin, the door dangling on a hinge, the crooked porch littered with stones, the windows, black hollows edged with glass like a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. Ruthie picks her way across the forest floor’s uncertain terrain, talking about decorating, a little picket fence, lace curtains, pottery. For just a moment, Bay pictures it that way, as though it’s been obvious all along, but a slivered glint catches her eye and breaks the spell. “Be careful of broken glass,” she says.

“You are an extraordinarily cautious child.”

“Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. I wish my son would have been more careful. You’re right to worry. Cut your foot out here, and you would turn into a fairy-tale character for sure, you know the one. Look at that stone chimney. Bay, do you think there’s a fireplace?”

“Oh, it has a big fireplace, but it’s falling apart.”

“Can’t you just imagine a nice bowl of stew cooked over the fire? And bread? Can’t you just smell it?”

Bay inhales the scent of dirt, skunk cabbage (a musky scent more pleasant than it sounds), grass, and—could it be?—she closes her eyes: the yeasty scent of fresh bread, quickly replaced by Ruthie’s lemon perfume.

“‘Whose woods these are I think I know,’” Ruthie says.

“You do?”

“Robert Frost. You’re familiar with the poem, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, my goodness, what kind of education are you getting? Isn’t it just the sweetest little cabin? A person could be really happy out here, I think.”

“Ruthie?”

“Yes?”

“How do you… I mean it seems like you know my Nana really well.”

“Is that a question, dear?”

“This is kind of hard to say. But I mean, like, do you think…is my Nana a witch?”

“What did you say? My hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

Bay leans close to Ruthie’s ear. “Is my Nana a witch?”

Ruthie’s body stiffens. “We’ll come back in daylight,” she says, turning toward the road, “when you are wearing proper shoes.”

Bay bites her lip. Should she not have asked? Apparently she should not have. The silence, which previously felt so companionable, now feels thorny. When they return to the side of the road, Bay slides carefully down Ruthie’s back, trying to think of something to say, something pleasant to restore the good feeling they’d shared all evening, but she can’t think what that would be. They walk down the road in silence, staying close to the bank in case they need to dive for cover. Bay stops to brush off the tiny stones that stick to the soles of her feet, but Ruthie continues walking, as though she doesn’t even care if Bay falls behind, vulnerable to kidnappers, or “turns into a fairy-tale character,” whatever that means.

Ruthie is humming. Bay has no idea what song it’s supposed to be; it barely sounds like music at all, more like a slightly melodic throat clearing. Bay realizes she’s hurrying to keep up with an old woman wearing sneakers and a robe, her hair in pin curls.
There’s more
than
one
reason
, Bay thinks,
to
hide
if
a
car
approaches
. She’ll never live it down if anyone from school sees her.

“Well, there’s nothing like a summer’s night walk,” Ruthie says. “Though obviously one must be aware of the usual dangers. It’s been ages since I’ve done anything like this! Where I live the streets are not nearly so pleasant. And my husband was overprotective.”

“Did he really try to poison you?”

“Oh my, yes. Why would anyone make up such a horrible story?”

“Well, like I said, I understand why you would want to kill him.”

Bay worries that Ruthie is having a heart attack or something, because she stops suddenly with her hands clutched over her chest. Before Bay can even remember what she learned in health class, Ruthie says, “Don’t,” in a terrible voice.

“Don’t what?”

Ruthie shakes her head, the glittering copper bobby pins like starlight in her hair. “Don’t ever understand the urge to kill.” Still clutching her hands over her heart, she leans down to look directly into Bay’s eyes. “No one should understand such a thing. You must do whatever it takes so you don’t understand, do you hear me?”

Bay finds herself momentarily caught in the stare of Ruthie’s small blue eyes, too close to her narrow nose.
Killer
eyes
, isn’t that what Stella called them?

“Yes,” Bay says. “I hear you, and I hear Stella. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing.” It’s a moment of rudeness she immediately regrets.

“I got over the urge for murder a long time ago. You never want to feel that way, Bay. It’s a terrible, terrible way to feel, and it will destroy you and ruin your life.” With an abrupt nod, Ruthie turns and continues on her way, leaving Bay at the side of the road.

Wait? What? Bay doesn’t know if she wants to catch up or run in the other direction. She watches Ruthie walking slowly up the road in her sneakers and bathrobe. Where else can Bay go? Nowhere can be safer than home. She pries a sharp stone out of her foot; it leaves a drop of blood shaped like a tear. When she looks up, Ruthie is standing by the side of the road, watching.
What
is
it
about
the
light
tonight?
Bay wonders. Ruthie, in her pink robe, moonlit pin curls, and bright white sneakers looks like she is glowing. Not sure what else to do, or where else to go, Bay walks toward her.