The Girl in the Garden

by Melanie Wallace

  Perhaps it’s time, he considers as he heads back to his car, to think of allowing himself to be spoken for: there is Meredith to consider, that intelligent, companionable woman—quite new to his life—who hasn’t pressed him to define their relationship or mentioned the future. He turns the engine over, switches on the headlights, drives on. He’ll tell Iris that the girl will suit. He’d found June quiet, self-contained, because either shy or uncertain or both. Her answers to his questions were simple. She’d hesitated before speaking, seemed to carefully weigh her words, even when telling him her name, Luke’s, her age, his. He’s a good baby, she stated, the only thing she volunteered. She had a Social Security card, her birth certificate, Luke’s birth certificate. She hadn’t finished school. Duncan’s question as to whether June was in any kind of trouble puzzled her; she’d furrowed her brow and looked at the baby on her lap quizzically before raising her eyes and meeting his, stating flatly: Well, there’s the fact that I’m in this predicament. At which Duncan had smiled, clarified that he was asking whether she might be in trouble with the law, whether she was, say, a runaway, whether anyone might be searching for her. Oh no, came her response, I’m clean with the law, and no one in the world is looking for me.

  He told her that she was welcome to stay in a cottage on Iris’s property—he did not mention that it had been Claire’s—and that the property was enclosed; that Iris, who lived in the house, might need help but Duncan couldn’t say how much or what kind, and that June wasn’t to bother Iris if Iris didn’t let her know one way or the other. In that case, she should simply keep to herself, and would she be able to do that. The girl looked concerned, and Duncan mistook the reason for her expression, telling June that no matter what, June would receive a stipend. Her look of consternation gave way to confusion, and Mabel interjected that Duncan meant an allowance. On which you’ll be able to live, Duncan added, which flummoxed the girl into stating that she didn’t want to take charity or be a burden, that it was her intention—at which point Duncan interceded by raising a hand. You have to understand, he told her, that Iris is a recluse.

  I don’t know what that means, June said.

  She lives alone, stays alone, and hasn’t left her property for many, many years, Duncan replied. She doesn’t have visitors, myself and Mabel excepted, and I see her only on those rare occasions when she needs to see me. Iris’s only request, in terms of your staying there until next spring, is that you keep to yourself unless she tells you differently and that you come and go as you wish without bothering her.

  But, why—

  Iris is doing this because she can, Mabel said. And she’ll have Duncan see to it that your only worry will be taking care of yourself and Luke.

  I won’t know how to thank her.

  Just leaving her be, Duncan told her, would be thanks enough.

  No, June didn’t have any questions to ask Duncan, and didn’t volunteer anything about herself. He tried his best to engage her, but the girl held herself close and who wouldn’t. He can’t imagine what she must be going through, having no more than a vague sense of where she’d ended up, somewhere alone in a state of which she had no knowledge except, probably, for the name she’d read crossing its line; at any rate, abandoned and penniless and with a child, at the mercy of strangers whose kindness—and Mabel was exceedingly kind—did not preclude, however, passing her on to yet another stranger. He didn’t have the impression that the girl even understood her luck; indeed, to the contrary, she seemed broken by never having had any luck whatsoever. And he could only imagine that she’d come up hard in a hard place, although she wouldn’t say with any specificity where that might have been, only quietly declaring she had nowhere and no one to go back to, and stating that without self-pity but with utter resignation.

  She was flummoxed by Duncan’s question as to what brought her to this part of the country. She looked so worried because of her own speechlessness that he realized she didn’t understand he was trying to make small talk, and he was about to wave off any answer she might have been considering, which he figured had to have amounted to the story of her entire life, when she—after visibly struggling with her emotions—finally took a deep breath and ventured: I just always wanted to see the ocean.

  June

  WHEN SHE FINALLY found Ward and he’d taken her to the rooming house, he told her: Look, I’ll see you through this and then you’ll have to go, I’ll take you anywhere you want, just name it. June was too stunned and too exhausted to reply, so he mistook her silence for indecision and said, There must be somewhere. And she still didn’t reply, not because she didn’t know the names of other places but because they meant nothing to her; she’d never been anywhere outside of where she’d grown up until now, or beyond where she was at that moment, sitting on the edge of the bed in Ward’s annex room almost two hundred miles from where she’d left. She was seven months gone but hadn’t known she was pregnant until the baby began moving around inside of her. That first pang so frightened her—she hadn’t suspected, her breasts hadn’t changed shape, her nipples hadn’t darkened, she’d always had erratic periods—that she almost dropped to her knees, instead caught herself as she sank down, pulled herself up to where she’d been standing in front of the sink, steadied herself. She ran water over the glasses and plates and began to soap them when it happened again. The small sound she made was like that of a wounded cat.

  It woke her mother. June heard her shift about on the couch, mutter under her breath. A clink of bottles, the flick of a lighter, the sound of a cigarette pack being crumpled. Fetid air turning acrid, and her mother’s eyes on her back as June cleared out the sink. She took her time, trying not to panic at the alien thumps inside of her. It was late morning, the wind up and so strong it seemed visible, the blow pushing at the small window above the sink and rattling the trailer’s siding, rippling the corrugated metal sheets that roofed Auntie’s now-empty chicken coop across the way, lifting and snapping the roofing that strained against the bricks and stones weighing it down. Electric wires strung from listing poles whined and sang. One of the rotting trailers that had cantilevered off its cinderblock foundations rocked and groaned. It had once housed a number of feral cats whose eyes always ran pus and whose broods always sickened and died, but that was long ago, when the swing set’s two swings still had seats instead of just chains holding nothing and dangling empty. That was when other people still lived in the trailer park that now sits isolate and rotting in an expanse of dented and desert-like land under empty skies. June barely remembers them. She doesn’t know how many years it’s been since the last of them, but for Auntie and her mother, left. Her mother never said how she came to be here or why she stayed on, and June never asked.

  Not that she remembers her mother ever actually being here for any length of time, except for the summer a group of hippies came chugging down the long dirt drive from the road in a van that coughed and sputtered and gave out in front of one of the abandoned trailers, where they then camped for a few months. Their circus ways, their acrobatic antics, the way they danced and chased one another around and tumbled in and out of that trailer, their laughter, their wildly bright clothes when they wore any at all, their unashamed nudity, their drugs and drink kept her mother close until they pulled out that van’s engine and, after a time, fixed it, then took her with them when they left. And that was the longest time June remembers her mother being gone. Why she came back, she never said. Never apologized for the going or evidenced surprise that June bothered to survive her absence. Never explained all those other times where she’d been or what she’d done on what she called her jaunts, never said where she got the black eye or split lip or wrist burns or jaw bruises, or where the men she sometimes brought back with her came from. Never inquired as to where June got the clothes on her back or if she brushed her teeth or who cut her hair or whether she’d bothered going to school or could read and write or count. Never said where the money came from for the booze and food and electricity, nev
er mentioned the money she’d leave behind on the counter beside the sink just about every time she took to wandering off.

  What’s up with you, her mother says.

  June wipes her hands, turns. If she’s gone pale with whatever is probing her insides, her mother, slouched to one side on the couch, thighs half covered by a tattered afghan, doesn’t notice or doesn’t say. Rat-nest hair, ruinous eye makeup. The cigarette now drops into an overflowing ashtray by her feet, next to three liquor bottles, two of which are empty and another half gone.

  Nothing, June answers. She walks over and picks up the ashtray, extinguishes the butt her mother dropped in. The smell of its burnt filter adds to the stench of the place emanating off the shag rug stained with spilled drinks and dust, the walls reeking of old varnish and damp and mold, the corners of the room stinking of bug spray, the uncovered pot of her mother’s rank boiled cabbage and ham bone on the stovetop. Bring that back here, her mother says, reaching for one of the bottles and narrowing her eyes. June dumps the contents of the ashtray in the garbage pail, returns it to the floor by her mother’s feet, picks up an empty bottle, barely avoids the kick that comes. Jesus, her mother says, stop it.

  Stop what.

  Stop fixing up things. This is my pigsty. Get outta my sight.

  June lets the wind slam the door shut behind her, stands with her arms folded over her belly and rocks with the blow’s ferocity, hair whipping at her face. Beyond Auntie’s place, beyond the long drive, infinite flatlands whose sienna-blond surface is undulate with windsands. Sometimes, in the distance, dun-colored mustangs plod from horizon to horizon with their noses to the ground and tails slack, coming from and going to god only knows where through the detritus left behind by an ice age that had sculpted the world as far as the eye could see into an interminable and inhospitable moraine as barren as the moon. Sometimes, carrion birds float on the wing. Today there is only the wind and the shifting sands of that endless land beneath an empty sky, and the curious spasms within her.

  Auntie, she says, entering the old woman’s place.

  I see she came dragging back under that slice of a moon, Auntie replies. How long you think she’ll stay.

  Well, she’s got half a bottle. At least that’s all I saw.

  Huh. You cold?

  It’s worse out there.

  I’m about to turn on the burners. Pull up a chair.

  And she sits by the woman she knows only as Auntie, who is not June’s or, to June’s knowledge, anyone’s aunt. The woman who, all these years, has taken her in. Has clothed and fed her and showed her how to clothe and feed herself—June learned how to sew and knit and cook before she could recall a time when she hadn’t known—and seen to it that she sometimes went to school and admonished her never to cry just because the other children and the teachers shunned her, never to cry at all, for coming from this place there wasn’t much more to expect than a shunning anyway, and not that that mattered. How old Auntie might be is a mystery to June, maybe to everyone in the town a mile-plus down the road, population 647, even to those two weathered old men who might or might not be Auntie’s relatives and who arrive every so often, bouncing down the drive in that high cab of an old flatbed truck with their cache of bundled rags and bagged charcoal and grain sacks chock full of who-knows-what tethered to the backside. Of the rags, Auntie always takes her pick; she hooks rugs with those rags she doesn’t use for sewing clothes, and she exchanges the rag rugs with the men for more rags, and sometimes even for cash. The cab doors stay open—folded horse blankets cover the seat springs—when they don’t spend the night, and the doors are closed when they do, which is whenever they bring along a grouse or hen or fresh road kill, whatever they manage, for Auntie to stew. Who they are to her, who she is to the town, no one but Auntie knows, but one of the traders has more than once asked for what he calls a healing, a laying on of the old woman’s hands.

  June pulls a chair over, sits with her knees almost touching Auntie’s. The old woman’s lined face, profiled to the stove, shades from chamois fawn to mahogany. Her thick gray hair is pulled tightly back from her forehead and braided with colored strings. The windows are plastered with faded newsprint, and the light within the trailer hues golden, the two burners atop the stove glowing red. Auntie studies June’s face with hooded eyes, eventually says: So you let her get your goat.

  It’s not that. It’s not her.

  So then.

  I’m thinking I might need a laying on of hands.

  Auntie cackles. Doesn’t that beat all, she finally remarks, coming from you. And at your age.

  June shrugs.

  You got cramps?

  Uh-uh.

  Well then, what.

  I don’t know. It’s like there’s something inside me, pushing out. Plopping around.

  Well then, stretch out on the floor on your back.

  And June does, feeling the draft coming up through the floor’s rotting underside, the cold on the small of her back and shoulders, the feel of Auntie’s warm papery hands soft upon her barely tumescent tummy between her bare, bony hips. June closes her eyes, drifts beneath the old woman’s quiet touch, those marvelous hands that had taught June how to sew and knit and crochet, those hands that might also, June reflects now while under their spell, have strange powers, stroke barren hens into laying, cure warts, staunch bloodflow, quell fevers; June drifting with her eyes closed as the old woman gazes at the girl’s taut flesh beneath the spread of her warped, thin fingers with those two unblinking different-colored hooded eyes, the one ice-blue and the other coal-black. I didn’t open my eyes for three days and nights after getting borned—as a child, June loved hearing Auntie recount this—and when I finally did, everyone who’d come from miles around to see the infant who wouldn’t open her eyes then saw me open them and saw too that spider that was sprawled across this one that’s dark. And they let it be, they did, ’cause they knew better back when, there’s reasons for things people have forgot about nowadays, so they let the spider be and after about a thousand babies run out of her, she just sank into my eye and gave me what they call in-sight, which always kept me from ever being caught up in anybody else’s web. Which a lot of people spin, mind you. Despite her closed eyes, June, still drifting, can feel Auntie’s gaze upon her, the blue eye unfaded by age, the pupil of the dark eye indistinguishable, can see without opening her own eyes the crisscross of wrinkles etched into the old woman’s cheeks, those deeper lines cutting from nostrils to mouth; and she breathes in Auntie’s scent—of lanolin, of the barren yellow earth drying after the rains, of sweat and smoke—given off by her skin, her scalp, her hair, her clothes. Enveloped by this redolence, June drifts beneath those hands, feels the old woman’s warm palms between the bones of her hips, feels her fingers lightly probing and pressing and massaging ever so gently and finally eliciting a response, summoning a flutter, then another, stronger.

  Ah, Auntie says, breathes deeply, says again: Ah.

  June looks into the old woman’s hooded, inscrutable, two-colored eyes.

  What is it, she whispers.

  Well, that, Auntie says, is a baby. And seeing the girl’s incomprehension, she repeats herself. When June doesn’t respond, she takes her hands from the girl’s belly and leans back into her heels, asks: Do you know who done you?

  Who—

  I’m doing the asking.

  Oh.

  Times some women don’t know. Some get drunk and don’t remember, and some get ravaged by strangers, some’s got more than one beau. I’m only asking because if you know who got you this way, you might start thinking on making your condition known to him.

  June stares up at her, incomprehension giving way to confusion, panic. But he said nothing would happen, she says, promised nothing could.

  Words don’t always count for much. Depends on who’s doing the speaking. Never mind the situation.

  And Auntie said June would birth in late winter, early spring. That she wouldn’t show for a while, that her mother wo
uldn’t notice now or even a month down the line. Hell, Auntie pronounced, that woman—she never refers to June’s mother by name—isn’t attached to her own shadow most of the time, and anyways, there she goes. How Auntie could see through the faded newspaper taped onto her windows utterly perplexed June, always had; and so June got up and opened the door quietly and went out, stood in the wind and watched her mother sally down the drive and turn on to the road, walk off solitary, become smalled by the immensity of the landscape. If only she would return with Bo: Bo was June’s only hope, for Ward was his friend, and he’d know where Ward could be found.

  Which June didn’t: she didn’t even know Ward’s last name. She’d waited for him to return on his own, although he’d never given any indication he would. He’d only ever come along with Bo that summer, sometimes in Bo’s pickup, sometimes following Bo in a beat-up Buick that was dented and scraped and always in need of one repair or another, and he and Bo had made themselves welcome with her mother—they always brought liquor and food, they came on Friday nights and stayed weekends—and it was Bo her mother favored to the extent of stopping her walkabouts and so ended up with, June always making herself scarce until Ward tired of being odd man out and began paying attention to her, taking her—and himself—out of Bo and her mother’s way.