The Companion

by Katie Alender

  “Here we are,” Laura said, stopping just past the benches.

  Like I said, gardening was never my thing. If I spent time outside, it was playing tennis or lounging in the sun, blithely ignoring my mother’s dire warnings about skin cancer. I had no interest in getting my hands dirty and no use for a place that required so much labor to make it beautiful or interesting. I’d never seen a garden that intrigued me in any way.

  But this . . . this was different.

  It was huge, explosive with color and the scent of fragrant flowers, and the path wound away through a cluster of topiaries in the shapes of animals, like a secret walkway into another world. I wandered through arbors draped with delicate vines and down short straightaways lined with grasses that bent over into my path and brushed against my green pants. Every so often, a rosebush was placed like an elegant chaperone to the rest of the sprawling madness, and the roses were in full bloom, in shades ranging from pearlescent white to a red so velvety and deep it didn’t seem like my eyes were processing the whole color.

  “Do you like it?” Laura asked, a few feet behind me.

  I nodded, still looking ahead. A sprawling plant with enormous leaves draped over a huge area of ground, and under the leaves I saw the pale green baby pumpkins, each one tiny and perfect. Beyond those were three long rows of pepper plants in flawlessly straight lines.

  “The women in my family have always cared for the garden,” she said. “Every fall, we carry what we can into the greenhouse, and every spring we bring it all back out—well, most of it. Sometimes I don’t get to everything. You wouldn’t believe my collection of old bulbs! Of course, some species can’t be transplanted, but most of it will survive. And some of them are tough enough to face the winter without help.”

  “It must cost a fortune,” I said, and then I blushed and looked away, hoping she hadn’t heard.

  “Oh, it does, I suppose.” She didn’t sound bothered—by either my question or the idea of spending tons of money. “But it’s tradition.”

  I walked past a small colony of tomato plants in their little round cages and reached an empty area, two long planters’ worth of plain dirt. At the end of the rows was a stock of pots, empty buckets, stacks of bricks, and bags of soil and fertilizer.

  “Oh, that’s just storage,” Laura said.

  But beyond those, where the walkway curved, there was a gate made of ironwork in the shape of a man and woman, fig leaves tastefully placed, an apple in the woman’s hand and a snake wrapped around her ankle.

  I walked closer, inspecting the craftsmanship. It was handmade, and you could still see the marks of hammers on the iron pieces.

  “My great-grandmother designed that herself,” Laura said, unable to hide a note of pride in her voice.

  “It’s amazing,” I said, because there never was a safer adjective than amazing.

  “She was intensely preoccupied with the fall of man,” Laura said, as if that were a normal hobby, like, She loved to knit.

  “What’s behind it?” I asked. All I could see through the small holes in the gate was a wall of leaves, some kind of overgrown bush.

  “Oh, nothing,” Laura said. “The edge of the property.”

  I stared at it for a while. What a shame that something as incredible as that gate should be surrounded by bare dirt and chipped flowerpots.

  “Nothing grows back here,” Laura said, as if anticipating my question.

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Well, they were expelled from the garden.”

  I looked over at her, impressed that she had made a little joke, expecting to see a wry smile on her face. But she looked serious and—maybe I was imagining it—a little contemptuous.

  Sensing my eyes on her, she snapped back to serenity. “If you turn left, you’ll find the exotic tropical flowers . . . the showgirls of the place.”

  I did turn left, and was happy to find a jungle of vividly colored flowers in all shapes and sizes.

  Laura eventually left me to explore on my own, and when I found her again, she was kneeling on a foam pad in front of a bed of fluffy yellow-orange flowers on short stems, surrounded by delicate leaves.

  “I’m weeding the marigolds.” She held up a scraggly plant with its roots exposed, like a hunter showing off a dead animal. “Would you like to help?”

  She produced a second foam pad and a pair of purple gloves, and I knelt next to her.

  “Marigolds are hardy little helpers,” she said. “They’re not flashy, but they deter bugs. That’s why we plant them around the tomatoes. I’m rather fond of them—they don’t ask anything of you, they just bloom and stand guard. Anything else you find here is a weed.”

  “Like this?” I pointed to a flat plant that was a spreading web of oval leaves.

  “Yes. That’s purslane. Grab it around the stem, right next to the ground, and pull.”

  I did, but instead of pulling the roots out, I only managed to rip off the leafy top.

  Laura handed me a small shovel. “If that happens, you dig out the roots.”

  After the whole weed had been removed, Laura and I worked in silence, moving in opposite directions. I lost myself in the work—so simple, so methodical. It was a relief to do something that made sense, for a change. Something that wasn’t colored with eight kinds of nuance and ways I could mess up or say the wrong thing. Kill bad plant. Easy enough, right?

  And it was nice to be out in the light of day, where things were open and uncomplicated. The strange events of the past twenty-four hours were beginning to form a heavy ball of worry in my chest. The shock of Agatha’s existence, her immediate dislike of me (and of poor Blue Bunny), the technological isolation, Laura’s breakdown, my nosebleed, the mystery of Lily’s strange notations (whoever Lily was), the missing hours of my life, the wardrobe that made me feel like I was pretending to be somebody I’d never met before, the writing on my wall . . .

  Alone, any one of these things might have seemed like a little blip, a minor hiccup in my quest for peace and happiness.

  But together? One after another? It was kind of a lot.

  It just made me feel, in the pit of my stomach, that there was something about this place that was unwelcoming. That didn’t want me here. (Gee, Margot, was it the word GO graffitied on your wall, maybe? No, not just that. And not even as small as that.)

  This isn’t right, I thought. I shouldn’t be here.

  This time, no disembodied voice answered me. But that didn’t make me feel any better.

  For the moment, out in the fresh air with the sun warming my back, I could still kill bad plants.

  After a while, Laura wiped her brow with her sweaty arm, leaving a streak of dirt across her face. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were serene. Somehow her whole energy was calm, and it made me realize how tense she had been at every other point since my arrival.

  “We should get inside,” she said. “You can shower off before lunch and spend the afternoon relaxing instead of working. John will be appalled that I have you out here doing manual labor.”

  The idea of being cooped up again sounded horrible, but it wasn’t like I could insist on staying outside by myself.

  I helped Laura pack up the gardening tools and carry them over to a little shed tucked under the branches of two huge, gnarled trees. Sharing the shade with the workbench were a pair of small wicker chairs and a little side table.

  “Does Agatha come out here with you?” I asked.

  Laura shook her head. “I tried for a while, but she got too restless. It might be sensory overload, you know—the scents and colors, the way the light’s always changing. She does much better inside. It works out fine, since it gives her a chance to do her schoolwork.”

  Ah, yes. Agatha’s “schoolwork.” A misleading term for Agatha sitting at the small writing desk in the nursery, a blank notebook
in front of her and the audio version of a textbook droning on as she ignored it and looked out her favorite window.

  “Barrett helps me, sometimes—when he’s home. But he’s no good with the details; he’s more of a pack mule. Once I asked him to weed the herbs, and he killed every last one of my chives.” She shook her head. “He’s all boy . . . you’ll see when he gets back from Europe.”

  I was intrigued by the mention of Barrett. Aside from his photo and the fact that his bedroom was the door past the nursery, I knew nothing about him. Weirdly, as Laura talked about him, I felt a pinch of envy. And I found myself pondering his homecoming and hoping that, when he finally got here, he’d stay out of the garden.

  This can be our thing, I thought. Mine and Laura’s.

  “Well, I love it out here,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

  My reward was a genuine smile. “I come out here every day,” Laura said. “It’s so grounding to connect with the earth.”

  “Literally,” I said.

  “Oh, another joke!” Laura said, beaming. Then her expression turned shy and searching. “Margot, you’re welcome to join me anytime.”

  I knew I should play it cool—thank her and then make some excuse to decline the offer. Nobody likes a needy orphan.

  But then she rested her hand so gently on my arm. “Don’t say no,” she said. “I don’t need an answer—it’s an open invitation.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  MOM ALWAYS SAID a person can get used to anything, and I never thought about whether that was true until the days at Copeland Hall began to grind by. Time seemed to slow inside the great gray house. The hours between meals were long, barren stretches with little to do. The Suttons had no televisions—at least none purchased during the current century—and the Wi-Fi password was lost somewhere in John’s home office, which (from what I could see as I passed by the open door) was an endless sea of papers. Laura promised to call “the internet people” and get it for me, but I didn’t have a lot of hope that would happen anytime soon.

  As much as my brain itched to log on and scroll through the perfect lives of strangers, I had to admit that it was, in a way, a relief not to. Since the accident, I’d learned that the number of posts where people casually mentioned families/sisters/mothers/fathers was high enough to make me feel like I was having holes poked in me constantly. Going a couple of weeks without having to read about how someone’s dad is the BEST DAD EVER because he had fixed their sagging bookshelves would probably be good for me.

  So instead, I braved the library, and found that it was pretty easy to tell which books were the priceless first editions (steer clear) and which ones could be held and read without fear. There were novels, cookbooks, gardening books . . . nothing remotely current, but they passed the time.

  After a week, I felt almost at home. Agatha and I had achieved a wordless truce—at least, I assumed we had, since she hadn’t messed with me since that second day. Instead, she seemed to think of me as another piece of furniture that had, for some reason she didn’t care about, been dragged into the nursery.

  At first, I’d thought she was basically a zombie. But it didn’t take long to figure out that Agatha, while being completely different from whoever her old self had been, still had a shadow of a personality. She had likes—the window, orange juice, listening to music on my phone, even though the tiny speaker was terrible. She also had dislikes—blueberries, stuffed animals, and the way her mother clapped to get her attention. She was calm in the mornings and anxious at night. She always looked up when her father came into the room, and she enjoyed shoving things off the table near her chair by the window (as I learned when I set a completely full glass of water there for her on the third day and spent the next hour sweeping up shards).

  Was this a glimpse of her old personality or something completely new? I had no clue. But she definitely wasn’t the ghostly blank slate I had initially taken her for.

  One day, while Agatha sat in her chair and I read on the extra bed—“quality time”—I happened to glance up and see a bird land on the windowsill.

  “Look,” I said, setting my book down. “A bird.”

  The bird was scratching in the accumulated dust, and it didn’t notice as I came over and stood next to Agatha.

  Maybe this was what she was waiting for, every day, for hours on end. A little peek at wildlife.

  “See the bird?” I asked, bending down next to her. “Is that what you do when you’re sitting here, Agatha? Look at the birds?” Ideas began forming: maybe I could talk to Laura about installing a bird feeder, or one of those birdhouses that has a suction cup so it sticks directly onto the window.

  Then I looked at her eyes, and saw that the bird hadn’t even drawn her notice.

  “So what is it, then?” I asked. “What’s out there that you like so much?”

  Her eyes didn’t move, but to my infinite surprise, her lips did. They parted, and she made a soft sound—“Kah.”

  “What?” I asked, trying to stay calm. I didn’t want to spook her, but I was desperately eager to know what she was trying to say. This could be huge.

  “Kah,” she said, in one short puff. And then, apparently exhausted by the effort, she closed her eyes.

  I was thrilled by this development, but when I mentioned it to Laura that afternoon, she waved it off. After seeing my disappointed reaction, she softened.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can see that it means a lot to you, and that says a lot about who you are as a person, Margot. But the truth is that Agatha’s random utterances mean no more than a baby’s babbling.”

  “But it seemed like she was really trying to make this specific sound,” I said. “Maybe she was trying to speak.”

  And then there was the faintest change in Laura’s energy. “I doubt it,” she said flatly.

  That was my signal to drop the subject, so I did. Later, turning it over in my mind, I wondered if I had somehow offended Laura. Was she jealous? From what I’d seen, Agatha didn’t say anything at all to her mother.

  So I decided to stay quiet about it. No point making Laura dislike me.

  And anyway, it never came to anything. From time to time, I would ask Agatha what she was thinking about. And the answer, when she deigned to give one, was always the same: Kah.

  * * *

  I DEVELOPED A routine—or maybe it developed around me. Every day after breakfast, I put on my gardening clothes, helped settle Agatha in for her schoolwork—which meant turning to the next blank page in her notebook and writing the date and subject at the top—and then went down to work in the garden with Laura. I’d graduated from basic weeding to pruning dead leaves, checking and repairing the tiny rubber irrigation hoses, and removing bugs from the tomatoes.

  One day, as we worked in silence plucking pests and clearing dead leaves out of the pumpkin patch—for which we wore long sleeves and thick gloves, because it turns out every part of a pumpkin plant wants to scratch the bejeezus out of you—I looked up at Copeland Hall looming over us, its imposing wings extending in opposite directions.

  “This house is amazing,” I said. “Did your family build it?”

  It had taken me two weeks to summon the nerve to bring it up, because I was afraid any questions I asked would make it sound like I was asking how much everything was worth. The last thing I wanted was for the Suttons to think I cared about how much money they had. I did wonder a little, but not in a greedy way. Besides, it wasn’t like knowing how rich they were was a comfort. The priceless antiques and oil paintings only reminded me on a daily basis that I was a penniless orphan.

  “Yes,” she said, in an almost reverent tone. “My grandfather’s great-grandfather, Jerahmeel Copeland, built it for his family. He started the Eastern Central Railroad—it was one of the first to cross the Mississippi. He was a very powerful man—by the time he died, he owned buildings all over Ch
icago, New York, and San Francisco, as well as vast networks of train lines. Apparently he was scrupulously honest and a real stickler for the rules. Not a very fun guy to be around, according to family legends . . . but he sure knew how to build things.”

  “Is everything inside original?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “The house was built in 1858. Most of it was remodeled and modernized in the 1930s, and since then we’ve just replaced some upholstery and dealt with maintenance issues as they arise . . .”

  “Have you lived here your whole life?” I asked.

  She leaned back. “I moved away for college, which is where I met John. We got married and he went to law school in Chicago, so we had a place in the city. But things are so busy out there. The world just spins and spins, and we wanted to be a little more still. I always knew I’d come back, and then my father died—my mother had been dead since I was two—so we packed up and came home. Then Agatha came along, and Barrett was a surprise, only a year later.” She smiled sadly. “People say children keep you young, but lately I feel . . .” She shook her head. “It’s a lot of pressure. Emotional pressure. I feel like I have to carry on the family legacy all by myself.”

  “So you’re an only child?” I asked.

  Her eyes locked on mine. There was a heavy, sad pause. “Yes,” she said, but there was an unspoken story behind her answer.

  Something landed on my heart with a gentle thud. Maybe Laura understood me better than I thought. “Me too,” I said. “Well, now I am.”

  Her eyes were like tinted glass, her sadness a dark hole behind them. “Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”

  We went back to pulling bugs off the twisting vines and dropping them into a bucket of soapy water.

  “I was supposed to be a boy,” she said, almost an afterthought. “I’m the first woman to inherit the house. My father’s mother wept at my wedding when she realized there wouldn’t be a Copeland in Copeland Hall anymore.”