Garden of Stones

by Sophie Littlefield

  Lucy dragged the bucket to the backyard one final time, drenching the parched soil around the roses before she went to the fence at the edge of the forest and sank to her knees, exhausted from the afternoon’s cleaning. Weeds and bits of dead grass poked her knees. She didn’t care. The pain was everywhere. It was in the pads of her fingers and the rough ends of her hair, the dry skin of her knees and heels and the soft flesh of her stomach. It was inside—where her organs were, the muscles and veins and fat.

  She shifted from her knees to her haunches. The buzzing of insects had swelled as the sun grew high in the sky. The sounds of the meal—conversations in the dining room, kitchen sounds, cars pulling into and out of the parking lot on the other side of the building—seemed safely distant. No one would search for her here. No one would search for her at all. She was neither expected nor wanted until morning, and if she didn’t return at all until then, she doubted anyone would care.

  After a while, Lucy allowed her eyes to flutter closed. She dozed, in between waking and sleep, listening to the night sounds. An insect buzzed near her ear. A rustling in the brush signaled some small animal startled into flight. Sister Jeanne had once given her a prayer card bearing a picture of Saint Francis, surrounded by small creatures—a doe, a pair of rabbits, ducks with ducklings. Lucy wished for animals to encircle her now, to beg with their dumb eyes for her caress, for her kind word. There had to be something in this world that needed her.

  Later, much later, the last of the cars pulled out of the parking lot. Sharon’s truck belched exhaust as it trundled into the road. Then the house was quiet. Afternoon faded to evening as Lucy dragged herself farther into the woods, sitting with her back against a tree. She was hungry, but the thought of meeting Garvey or Mrs. Sloat or even Leo in the hall was too much to bear. The light in the upstairs rooms went out. A little later, so did Garvey’s. The moon was three-quarters full but weak, its light thin and treacherous. Lucy picked her way with care across the backyard, avoiding by memory the biggest holes, the clothesline poles. Her keys were in her pocket, but the back door was unlocked. How quickly the house had adapted to her; she had become the one who locked up at night.

  To her room, sliding her feet along the waxed floor. Hands trailing the wall, like Mrs. Sloat. Silent; no one in the house would know she was there.

  Her door was open a few inches. Lucy wondered if Sharon had looked inside. She would not have found the loose board, the stash of money, but she might have been surprised at what Lucy had accomplished. It still smelled strongly of bleach. That was a comfort as Lucy shucked off her ruined dress and slipped her nightgown over her arms. Tomorrow she would wash the dress, the rags, even the nightgown, and she would bathe again. And again.

  Lucy fought the images that flickered at the edges of her mind—the smooth glass eye rolling in her palm, the anguish in Garvey’s eyes—but she was able to keep them away. No, as she breathed in. No, no, no, as she exhaled.

  * * *

  The next time Lucy went to Garvey’s room, to collect his laundry, the door was locked. When Lucy tried her key in the door, it wouldn’t budge. Garvey had lodged something—a dresser, a chair?—against the door.

  When Lucy reported back, Mrs. Sloat’s lips narrowed and she fumed for a moment before disappearing up the stairs. A moment later, she came back with Leo, puffy faced and sleepy looking—and holding a rifle.

  “Don’t worry, he’s not shooting anybody,” Mrs. Sloat smirked when Lucy gasped. “Only talking some sense into my brother.”

  Still, Lucy was relieved when half an hour passed with no shots being fired. Leo returned first and glared at his wife with disgust as he passed her in the kitchen. “Last time I do your dirty work,” he muttered. When Lucy tried the door again later, it was open—but the apartment was empty.

  Lucy got to work. After starting the laundry, she began dusting the tops of the shelves, the objects that Garvey couldn’t reach. It was almost lunchtime when she finished, and she was carefully arranging a tray of what looked like tiny bottles of paint when the door opened and Garvey rolled into the room.

  Lucy braced herself to be yelled at, but Garvey didn’t even look at her. His chair was dusty, and a few wisps of weeds were caught in the spokes. Had he really tried to take the thing out across the yard—into the woods? Lucy realized then just how trapped he really was: he couldn’t even go through the forest to the creek, or to the path that led to grazing land on the ranch across the street, as Lucy had on occasion when she wanted to be alone.

  The wheels tracked dirt across the floor Lucy had just swept, but she said nothing, holding her breath to see what Garvey would do. The last time she had stood in this room, he’d drawn a knife on her and practically chased her out.

  He pulled something from his pocket and laid it on the worktable: a plump gray-blue quail whose brown belly was streaked with white. Lucy had no idea if he’d shot it or trapped it or bought it or even found it dead in some sunlit vale, but as he prodded it gently with a finger, sliding its small, pretty body this way and that, she knew instinctively that he was figuring out where to make the first cut. After a few unhurried moments of consideration, with his left hand he picked up the curious knife with which he had threatened her, the one with the blade shaped like a beak.

  Lucy ventured closer, unable to resist. She peered over his shoulder at the bird. In the light from Garvey’s gooseneck work lamp, it looked almost alive—as though it had died only moments ago, as though its blood was still warm. Garvey smoothed its white-tipped feathers tenderly, caressing the delicate ruff at its throat, and Lucy felt the pulsing excitement of discovery, a ravenous curiosity about the gateway between life and death through which the tiny creature had passed.

  “Can I do it?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Can you do what?”

  “Cut it open.”

  Instead of answering, Garvey put the tip of the knife to the top of the breastbone, his hands steady. Slowly, surely, he drew down, and the bird’s flesh split. When he reached the end under the tail, he peeled the skin away tenderly, revealing its glistening pink innards. There was no blood, which surprised Lucy, and then it didn’t.

  “No. You can’t,” Garvey said. Then he set the split bird carefully on the table. “Not yet, anyway. You have a lot to learn first.”

  32

  Years later, when Lucy thought back over her time at Lone Pine, it was the months that followed that she thought of as the happiest of her life. She did her work each day, the smells of ammonia and bleach becoming as familiar to her as once was her mother’s perfume or her father’s pipe smoke. As spring was overtaken by summer, Mrs. Sloat divided her time between motel business and trips to Owens Lake several times a week. Sometimes she returned with fish; sometimes she didn’t. Twice, Lucy glimpsed Mr. Dang when she went into town on errands with Mrs. Sloat. Both times, he wore a necktie and a hat, despite the heat. Lucy had a hard time imagining him on a boat in his shirtsleeves, checking his lines and dipping his hand into a bucket of bait.

  Ruby and Hal ate their weekend meals with Lucy and took her for drives in their mother’s truck. They made her laugh with their clowning around. The stash of coins and the occasional bill grew in her secret hiding place, each addition bringing her closer to her dream of escape. And best of all was the time she spent with Garvey, learning and assisting at his bench after her work was done each day.

  As time passed, Lucy learned to relax around him, and his silence gave way to measured
conversation, and later to longer stories, from his boyhood adventures in the foothills and hunting camps, his college years, the football games and fraternity pranks. Hours could pass before Lucy noticed the sun sinking in the sky or her stomach growling in hunger.

  And the animals: Lucy watched Garvey study them before he took them apart and slowly, with tender and fastidious attention, put them back together. He coaxed emotions from them that they’d never experienced in life, using his scalpels and thread and forms and glues and paints to create poses and expressions that were somehow knowing and sly and mischievous. Garvey’s animals were not only livelier than their former selves, but transformed by his hands into nearly mythic beasts.

  Lucy watched Garvey when she was supposed to be studying the way he notched a jaw or slit the dry tissue of a nose. Tragedy had transformed her, but it seemed that Garvey was teaching her that her transformation was not yet complete. That like the limp, lifeless corpses that he began with, there was, buried inside her, the potential for wondrous and surprising things, things that only he could see.

  Their lessons slowly took on a new rhythm. Garvey would have the tools and supplies laid out when she arrived, but instead of beginning right away, they would talk for a while. Lucy told herself it was only a courtesy, nothing more. But there were days when talking took the entire afternoon, when they never got around to the animals at all. Or when, as he guided her hand along the knobby curve of a spine or the smooth-sanded surface of a base, his fingers lingered on hers.

  One warm June day, Mrs. Sloat came to the doorway, which Garvey had propped open to let air into the room. She was wearing a town dress and a slash of lipstick.

  “Lucy,” she snapped. “I need you to come pick up the drapes from the cleaners and help me hang them.”

  Mrs. Sloat liked to have company when she did errands. Often she sat in the car and had Lucy go into the store. She was shy about her limp, less steady than she was at home, where she’d navigated every hall and step a thousand times. Lucy had become accustomed to their trips to town; people no longer gaped and whispered as they once had. The clerks and stock boys even greeted her like a local.

  Lucy had no desire to stop what she was doing, but she knew Mrs. Sloat wouldn’t take no for an answer. She sighed and set down the tiny paintbrush she had been using to touch up the color along the gums of a pretty two-point buck shoulder mount.

  “She’s busy,” Garvey growled.

  There was a silence. Lucy glanced back and forth between Mrs. Sloat and Garvey, who didn’t bother to look up from the striped trout he was working on. Today’s painting lesson had filled the air with acrid fumes, and after a moment Mrs. Sloat sneezed twice in rapid succession.

  “Seems like you can’t tolerate the air in here,” Garvey said. “Maybe you ought to be on your way.”

  “Not without my employee,” Mrs. Sloat huffed.

  The change in Garvey was instant and breathtaking. He jammed his hand down on the wheel so fast that metal scraped on metal and the chair shuddered and turned. It was as though he meant to propel himself out of the chair. In that moment, Lucy wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d stood on his ruined legs and gone after his sister, and she must have felt it too, because she stepped back, nearly falling.

  “Whose employee? Whose fucking employee, Mary? It seems to me that you’ve been forgetting something important.”

  “I only said—”

  “Everything in this house, every inch of this land, every miserable dollar in the bank is mine.” He was bellowing, spittle flying from his mouth, his fists clenched.

  “Stop it, Garvey, the guests—”

  “Let them hear! Let them all hear! Let them shut this place down, I don’t care anymore.”

  “Watch what you’re saying,” Mrs. Sloat said, regaining her composure. “You can’t treat me this way. You can’t run this place without me. You can’t even go up the stairs.”

  Garvey opened his mouth in retort, but Mrs. Sloat was back in the fight, and she pulled herself up to her full height, towering above her brother.

  “Don’t forget, the money’s not really yours. It’s in your trust. You think if I walk in that bank and tell them my brother’s losing his mind, they won’t shut down your allowance like that?” Mrs. Sloat snapped her fingers for emphasis. “It’s all legal, Garvey. There’s not one damn thing you can do about it.”

  “But Lucy doesn’t—”

  “Do you really think she wants to be your assistant?—your protégé? I have news for you, oh brother of mine, she might not look like much, but on the inside she’s every bit as cagey and coldhearted as any other woman. She’s looking out for one person and one person only—herself.”

  Mrs. Sloat glared at Lucy, then walked out of the room. Garvey watched her go, and then rested his head in his hand.

  “God,” he said softly. “What a fucking mess.”

  Lucy sat frozen in her chair, unsure of what to do, embarrassed almost to tears by Mrs. Sloat’s insinuations. “It’s true, then?” she asked. “She could do that to you? She could take what’s rightfully yours?”

  “No, no, it’s—well, it’s complicated. My mother was trying to be fair to everyone, I guess. And instead she set it up so my sister and I can never escape each other.” He rubbed his face. “You should have seen her, when she went off to college—most beautiful girl around. Could have had anyone she wanted—”

  He stopped abruptly, and Lucy knew immediately that he thought he’d offended her. “No, no,” she whispered. “It’s all right.”

  “No. It’s not. Lucy... Look at me.”

  Her gaze traveled a slow path from her hands twisted in her lap up to Garvey’s face, full of anguish but still handsome, still perfect. What a pair they made; Garvey as good-looking as a movie star, stuck with a body that didn’t work—and Lucy, lithe and strong from her work, but doomed with a face that would always turn people away.

  “The things I said to you,” he said softly, “when you first came here. I was... I was horrible to you. I’m so sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s all right.” Lucy tried to blot out his apology with her words; she couldn’t bear for him to show himself to her this way.

  “It matters. Everything matters.” Garvey took a deep breath but didn’t look away. “You matter.”

  Lucy didn’t dare reply. Garvey’s eyes, moody-gray on a good day and nearly black when he was angry, were unreadable. He reached out a hand, his fingertips brushing her forehead so gently she could barely feel his touch.

  His fingers traveled down the outline of her scar, achingly slowly, as though he sought to know her through his touch. He was not repulsed by her ugliness, and Lucy’s breath caught in her throat as his fingers fluttered against her eyelashes, as his thumb found the corner of her mouth, and gently slid along her lips.

  Lucy closed her eyes and placed her hand over Garvey’s. She held it hard against her mouth, her lips pressed against his palm. She couldn’t bear to let go. It had been so long, so terribly long since she had touched anyone, since she had felt another human’s warmth.

  Garvey’s other hand touched her cheek—her good cheek, the smooth one, the perfect one—and then his fingers were in her hair, pulling her closer, and Lucy made a sound like a sigh that was really a plea, the desperate voice of her longing for the kiss she had never dared to imagine until just this second. Garvey’s lips on hers were tentative but hungry, and Lucy assured him with her touch, her arms around his neck.

/>   Her body was trembling when she pulled away from him. He looked stricken. “I—I’m sorry—”

  “No,” Lucy whispered. She put a finger to his lips to silence him, and went to the door, which Mrs. Sloat hadn’t closed all the way. She pushed it shut and turned the bolt, then came back to stand in front of Garvey’s chair, her knees touching his. When she lifted her dress up over her head and let it fall to the floor, her skin prickled in response and her blood surged with longing.

  “Lucy,” Garvey said. He was so close she could feel his breath through the thin cotton of her camisole. “What are you doing...?”

  She reached for one of his hands, and pressed it to her rib cage. His hand fit perfectly, wrapped around the curve of her waist. His fingers splayed across her skin, gentle and warm.

  “The other,” she whispered. “Please.”

  And he did. He lifted his other hand and placed it next to the first, encircling her waist with them. He let out a groan—of pleasure, pain, longing; Lucy had never heard a man make such a sound but discovered that she understood this new language perfectly.

  “Lucy. You know I’m— I can’t—and you’re—”

  “Shhh.” She let her eyelids drift down and concentrated on the place where her body met his. “Just...this. Just for now.”

  After that they didn’t speak.

  33

  San Francisco

  Friday, June 9, 1978

  Patty tried Jay’s office again.

  “I’m so sorry, Patty, I don’t know what to tell you.” If Jay’s secretary was getting exasperated, she didn’t show it.