The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

She folded the poem into a box, which she then stored on the top shelf of her closet. If she had chosen to read it again, she might not have left.

  SHE DIDN’T SEE him all year after she went off to college. When she came home at term break, there was a snowstorm and the mountain roads were impassable. She sat in her room and looked into the garden they didn’t use anymore. She kept her hair pulled back. She wore glasses now. She felt desperate for him, and then just desperate, and then she felt nothing at all. Her mother and aunt still worried over her. Kate assured them she was fine. Her life was back on course. She decided not to see him. What good would it do? He belonged in one world, she in another.

  He came one night before she went back to school, even though the snow was deep. He stood outside and watched her through the window as she read a novel. She was beautiful and far away even though he was standing in her yard. He knew that coming into town was a mistake. That next spring he found the old bear, dead, in one of the caves. He slept beside the body. He dreamed the bear was his father. That was when he gave up being human. He gave her up as well.

  IN THE SUMMERS Kate went to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne and took a position as a counselor at an American camp for girls. In her senior year at Wellesley she became engaged to Henry Partridge, the young man she’d once ignored who was the cousin of a cousin once removed, hardly a cousin at all. After graduation Kate came home, to plan her wedding and to care for her mother, who was ill with cancer, bedridden, with only a little time left. Kate sat by her mother’s bedside and read to her in French. She gazed out the window. After that first year they spent apart, on the day before she went back to school, she’d seen the trail his boots had left in the snow. She’d known he’d come, then turned away.

  “We found bones in there,” her mother told her one night. She was delirious sometimes and Kate had to lean in close to hear. She was talking about the garden and about that time when Kate seemed so distant. “We thought that was why you were acting so peculiarly that summer when you were fifteen. We thought you were under a spell. Then I realized it was a man.”

  “There was no man,” Kate said.

  Later when she went out to sit on the porch with her aunt, she asked Hannah about the bones.

  “We stopped using the back garden after that.” It was true; the lower, newer garden where the soil wasn’t as rich or as red was now the plot of land they cultivated. Tomato plants had been set in a row, but after Kate’s mother fell ill, no one had bothered to weed and there were brambles everywhere.

  The wedding date was pushed up, to ensure that Kate’s mother would be able to attend. Kate had already bought her dress in Boston. It was June, but overcast. Kate had an argument with the pastor, who would not shorten the service to accommodate Kate’s ailing mother, who often needed to lie down. Kate was defiant and wouldn’t back down, and in the end the pastor agreed to a truncated ceremony.

  “If you’re getting married on your mother’s account, don’t,” Hannah said to her the week before the wedding. “All she wants is your happiness. She’s convinced there’s another man.”

  KATE WANTED TO see him before she was married. She found the place easily enough, as if she’d been there only the day before, even though it had been years. When she reached the clearing, she stopped and gazed at the house. She thought about the first time she’d gone inside. There were still stories about him in town. Every new group of elementary school children started the rumors up all over again. There was a monster in the woods they said, he’d eat you up, leaving only the bones. He was half ape, half bear, but he knew how to speak. And he knew tricks as well. He could call to you as if he was injured, then leap upon you. Mothers and fathers in Blackwell told their children that if they didn’t finish their dinners, the monster wouldn’t be very happy. They used him as a cautionary tale: That was what happened to bad boys and girls, they were banished to the woods.

  There was a flurry of panic when Lucy Jacob was murdered on Route 17. Kate had been away in France that semester and hadn’t heard the sad news until after she came home. Lucy had been riding her bike and someone had abducted her. She was missing all winter long until the snow melted. At last they found her with her neck broken out in the woods. She’d only been fourteen. People went out in search parties, but they found no evidence of the monster or of anything else. Things quieted down after the pastor gave a sermon in which he stated that monsters were men’s imaginings and that men had to take responsibility for the horror in the world. Be sure of one thing, he had told them. It was a man, not an imaginary being, who had taken Lucy from them.

  When she was almost at his door, Kate couldn’t bring herself to go farther. She didn’t know how to explain her long absence to Matthew, she didn’t understand it herself. She clearly didn’t understand anything, so she went away. It was not until she was home that night that she dared to speculate that perhaps if she had actually seen him, she would not have gone back to town. She might have been ready to give up the world that she knew. But even if she’d gone forward that afternoon, he hadn’t been there. He’d been at a lake miles away, up in the mountains. He’d caught several fish and spied some herons. When he returned, he found a long, red hair in the grass outside his door. He wrote a poem that night and went into town. He crept into the yard and left it inside the old garden. Kate found it there the next morning.

  If I met you now, I would tell you to

  beware of men who think they’re bears and bears who

  think they’re men.

  Here’s my advice:

  Run over the mountain.

  Run as far as you can.

  Your mistake was walking down the road where I was.

  My mistake was everything else.

  I want the words you hold in your hand, lamplight in ajar.

  We met here.

  But it could have been anywhere

  the next road on the map

  the one that curled around the mountain like smoke and

  disappeared.

  I walked you home and didn’t say much.

  You were the one who kissed me.

  Remember that, but remember I was the one who wanted it.

  Sometimes I think I forced you to kiss me with my wanting.

  I was no one. Nothing. A handyman, a jack of all trades

  Winner at none. But I was the one who fell in love with you.

  I never told you why I was there.

  My car had broken down.

  I left it in a ditch.

  The sunlight was blinding. I couldn’t even see you at first, only

  your outline against the trees.

  But it was enough.

  These are the things I would have said to you as I held you closer,

  As I told you to run,

  Making certain to speak in a language

  You didn’t understand.

  She went inside and folded the second poem into the box with the first. She moved a stack of sweaters in front of it, but it didn’t matter. She knew it was there.

  THE WEDDING WAS on a Sunday, at the Hightop Inn. The next week Kate’s mother died. Kate and Henry decided to stay on. They moved in with Aunt Hannah, who was undone by the loss of her beloved sister. Kate took a job at the high school, teaching French, and Henry joined a law firm in Lenox. Sometimes Kate felt that they rattled around the old house. Everything seemed empty. But she got used to it. People welcomed them to town and were glad to have Kate back among them. One night Kate and Henry met a group of their friends at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. They were nearly through with their meal when Kate spied Cal Jacob at the bar. He was a grown man now, one with a drinking problem. Although she hadn’t seen him for years, Kate went to say hello. She still thought of him as nine years old.

  “I’m so sorry about Lucy,” she said.

  There weren’t many murders in the county, certainly not in their town. For everyone who’d known Lucy Jacob, the loss still stung, but Cal was nonchalant.

  “Yeah. T
hanks.” Cal made it clear she should drop the topic. He didn’t talk about his sister. He was a man with a swagger, one who indulged in petty crime and thought the world owed him something. “Let me buy you a drink. Come on, sit down with us.”

  Cal was accompanied by some of his no-good friends from Albany, one of whom, a thin dark man with hooded eyes, looked Kate up and down.

  “Do you mind?” Kate said, offended by his indecent gaze. She felt undressed in some way.

  “I wouldn’t mind at all.” Cal’s friend snickered and all the men laughed. He grabbed her arm, which would later leave a mark on her creamy skin. “Let’s go out to the parking lot and do it right now.”

  Kate pulled away. “I just wanted to say hello,” she said. “Clearly a mistake.” She went back to her table, rattled. “What’s happened to Cal?” she asked.

  One of their friends, Leo Mott, was on the Blackwell police force. “He’s a bad apple,” Leo said. “His buddies are worse.”

  “I think it’s my fault,” Kate said to her husband as they walked home that night.

  “Your fault?” Henry laughed.

  “I was his camp counselor and he disappeared into the woods on my watch. I should have kept a closer eye on him.”

  “But he didn’t disappear. You found him,” Henry reminded her. He’d heard the story before, or at least that part of it.

  Kate and Henry held hands, but as they walked through town everything looked odd to Kate, the way things do in a dream, or in any place where you know you don’t belong.

  YEAR IN AND year out, Kate left baskets on Route 17. She went at least once a month. She packed warm sweaters, novels, notebooks, coffee, chocolates, packets of nails, wire. Items she thought he might need or desire. Her aunt Hannah went with her sometimes, for the exercise. She never questioned why they were taking a basket into the forest. Once Kate had said, “It’s for lost travelers.” Hannah didn’t ask for any further explanation. She was fairly certain it was for that man her sister had believed existed the summer when Kate seemed so changed.

  IT WAS AUGUST when it happened, the month when she’d first met him. She packed up tomatoes, lettuce, a copy of Great Expectations, a few issues of Life magazine. The air was amber, the way it was in late August. Kate and her aunt took their time. Hannah had changed since Kate’s mother had died; she didn’t often go out socially, and her one enjoyment was her walks with her niece. It was a perfect day. Cars passed by occasionally, but Kate and her aunt paid them no mind. One car pulled off to the side of the road into a scenic overlook. From there you could see all of the valley below. The town of Blackwell looked like a child’s toy.

  Kate and her aunt had gone past the overlook on the side of the road when a man came up behind them. He was running, slinking through the trees. He had the speed of a whirlwind. He hit Hannah so hard that she sank down immediately and rolled into the weeds. It happened so fast Kate didn’t understand. She hadn’t seen him yet. She wondered if there had been an earthquake or if her aunt had had a sudden heart attack. She dropped down to her knees to try to stop her aunt from drifting any farther downhill, and that was when he hit her, too. Once she was down, the stranger grabbed Kate by her hair and dragged her farther into the woods. She was on her stomach, trying to get away, clawing at the ground. There was blood running from her scalp, and she could feel its heat. He got on top of her, pushing her face into the dirt so she couldn’t move while he fucked her. He tore at her clothes so they were half off. He was strong and maddened. He told her he would kill her if she made a sound, so she did what he said, thinking he would let them live. She caught a glimpse of him. He seemed familiar but no one she knew. He was rough with her even when she promised she wouldn’t fight him. He wanted to hurt her. Then she remembered. Cal’s friend at the bar.

  She let her mind leave her body. She imagined she was walking through the woods. She was far away and soon it would be over. When he was done, he didn’t keep his word. She should have expected as much. He told her she was a whore who deserved to die. He hit her again with a rock, harder. She felt a flash of white-hot pain. She went under, then came back. She decided to pretend she was gone so he would think she was dead and leave them be.

  She thought he would go back to his car, make his getaway, but that was not his intention. He scrambled up to the ditch where Hannah was unconscious, limp and forsaken in the dirt. That was when Kate knew she couldn’t pretend to be dead. She pulled her clothes on and took up the bloody rock. She pounced on him while he was leaning over her aunt, talking to her even though she couldn’t hear, telling Hannah he was going to do to her what he’d done to Lucy and to Kate, but he would break her neck first so she’d continue to be quiet. Kate hit him hard. She could feel the strike through the bones of her arm. He jerked forward as if he was going to turn to her, so she hit him again. She kept hitting him. By the time she was finished he wasn’t moving anymore.

  Kate sat back on her heels and tried to catch her breath. Blood flecked the ground. It pooled beneath the leaves. She pulled herself together and scurried over to her aunt. She put her ear to Hannah’s back. She thought she could hear her aunt breathing, but she wasn’t sure. She took off. Inside something cut through her like glass. Kate ran across the road and up the hill. She felt as if she was broken and if she stopped for an instant she would fall into pieces.

  Matthew was there when she got to his house, stunned by her appearance. She didn’t have to say much for him to understand. He went with her back down the mountain, across the road. He knelt beside Hannah and took her pulse. He had a medical book and knew what he was supposed to do. He breathed into Hannah’s mouth and pushed on her chest. At last she took a gasping breath. He said he thought she had a concussion and maybe some broken bones. He lifted her in his arms and stood there on the side of the road.

  “What are you doing?” Kate asked.

  “I’ll carry her home. Then you’ll call the hospital. You’ll say someone broke in to your house and hurt you both. Then he ran away.”

  “I killed him,” Kate said, astonished by her own actions.

  “No,” Matthew told her. “He disappeared. He came into your house and you don’t know what happened to him. I’ll come back and get rid of him later.”

  The light was fading when they reached Blackwell. They went the back way, through the orchard. No one saw them. Kate had imagined being with Matthew in town a thousand times, bringing him home, but not like this. They hurried through the yard, up the porch, into the house. Kate was sobbing, but she didn’t know it. Matthew took Hannah into her bedroom. When he came back into the parlor, Kate told him he had to leave. People would think the wrong thing if they saw him. He said he would, but he didn’t make a move to go.

  Kate realized then that she felt so filthy she had to take a shower and change her clothes. She knew she wasn’t supposed to clean up before she called the police, but she couldn’t stand the stranger’s touch on her. She undressed in the kitchen, crying, and Matthew folded her ruined clothes into a paper bag. She stood in the shower and wept, her forehead against the tiles, hot water falling over her shoulders and her head.

  Matthew was sitting in a chair in the parlor when she came out wearing a blue dress, her long red hair wet. He knew he had to go, yet hadn’t.

  “I just wanted to know what it was like to sit here and wait for you,” he said.

  She sat in his lap and kissed him. She felt undone and crazy. The world was nothing like she’d imagined it would be. She would have left her life right then, traded it in completely, if he had asked her to. Instead, he went out the back door. He left town the way he’d come, through the orchard. There was barely any light by then, but some boys out playing baseball thought they spied a monster and they all took off, running for home.

  When he returned to the woods, he dragged the man’s body into the forest with him. He covered his tracks. He took the body to the bear’s cave and hid it beneath a heap of branches. The old bear’s skeleton was in there and Matthew kept
one of the bear’s teeth for luck. He could guess what people in town would think. He set fire to his shed that night. He packed up only the belongings he would need and watched the rest of it burn.

  He took the car that had been parked in the scenic overlook. It was a better specimen than the one he’d arrived in, with four new tires. Cal’s friend had left the keys in the ignition for a quick getaway. When Matthew opened the glove compartment, he found Lucy Jacob’s hair ribbon, a token her killer had kept. Before he left, he buried the ribbon in the woods. He didn’t drive through town on his way out of Blackwell. That would have been too much for him. Instead, he went north, toward New York State, where he supposed he’d come from. He avoided Albany, which meant nothing to him and had never been home, but some months later he did venture into a small town near Saratoga, where he went into the post office, ignoring the stares of the clerks behind the counter, and bought stamps for an envelope addressed to Blackwell.

  When the letter arrived, Kate didn’t open it until she was in the woods. She went off alone, as solitary as she had been ever since she’d met him. It was bear season, November, when the bears were most active, preparing for winter. After the incident on the road, a band of Blackwell teenagers found the charred remains of Matthew’s shed. They carted their findings down to the police station. There were some books, along with pots and pans, the remnants of clothes, pieces of what looked like a handcrafted table and chairs. People were stunned. There had indeed been a monster up on Hightop, although now he was clearly gone. Everyone assumed he was responsible for the attacks in the woods. Lucy Jacob’s parents were relieved they could have some sort of closure in the matter of their daughter’s death. Cal even accepted some cash from a journalist in exchange for telling his sister’s story. Kate ran into him once, in the AtoZ Market.