The Memory Garden

by Mary Rickert

  “This is a revelation?”

  “I was thinking we should get together.”

  “Ruthie too?”

  “Yes,” Nan says.

  “Just like old times.”

  “Not really,” Nan says, remembering Eve lying in the bed of blood. “I hope not.”

  LILAC Lilacs are one of the most common trees in old cemeteries. The sweetly scented flowers are used to surround the dead when they lie in state, to mask the odor of decaying flesh.

  When Nan says they will be having guests, old friends staying overnight, Bay wonders what else she doesn’t know about her Nana. “Why?” Bay asks, but Nan never settles on an answer. She makes vague references to an anniversary of some kind, yet later acts like she doesn’t know what Bay is talking about. Another time Nan alludes to a ceremony, but when Bay presses for details, says that all the cleaning they’re doing in preparation for her friends’ arrival is a kind of ceremony in its own way. Bay has to focus on her Nana when she talks like this; she doesn’t like it when Bay rolls her eyes. Once, when Nan is half-asleep in the rocker on the porch, she mumbles something about blood. Not for the first time, Bay wonders what Nan dreams about.

  Now it’s happening to Bay. She hasn’t told her Nana or Thalia—she hasn’t told anyone—but ever since that day at the river, Bay’s been having nightmares. When she finally struggles to surface, she opens her eyes into another dream world: the shadowy figure of a woman standing at the foot of her bed.

  But that’s not all that bothers Bay these days. She worries about her Nana, suddenly weird about the phone, not letting Bay answer it, often allowing it to ring without answering it herself; or, one minute staring at Bay as though expecting her to morph into something frightening, and the next giving her big bear hugs. Thankfully, Nan does not bring up the subject of the caul again. Bay hates to think about it, born with that thing wrapped around her, like a caterpillar or some kind of insect, strange from the start.

  She has mostly stopped checking her Facebook page. It was always bad anyway; she’d regretted almost immediately begging her Nana to let her join, but ever since the day at the river, it’s gotten worse. Now they call her “the drowned girl,” “water bug,” and “witch.”

  “Well, ’cause, you know, witches can’t drown,” Thalia said.

  Bay has not told Thalia about the caul. Thalia is Bay’s only friend, and she doesn’t want to lose her. Thalia has been acting different lately, strangely distant, busy when Bay phones. Yet, when Thalia invites Bay to go to the river again, she holds the phone against her heart until she thinks enough time has passed to make it seem she really did ask before she says her Nana won’t let her go. They have a lot of work to do, preparing for the guests. Thalia actually believes Bay, which she finds strangely disturbing. Doesn’t Thalia notice how Bay has changed? I almost died, Bay thinks. Doesn’t anyone care?

  Nan has been so preoccupied lately that Bay hasn’t found the right time to discuss her plans for not returning to school. She’d like to have a solid idea of what she is going to do, but it’s been hard to figure one out. She’s made a few Internet searches, though that’s not easy, since she doesn’t have any privacy with the stupid computer in the kitchen. So far, all she’s found are places for troubled children and drug addicts. Bay does feel troubled, but she’s pretty sure that’s not what they are talking about.

  “If I started smoking crack or beat someone up, I’d have lots of options,” she mumbles.

  All this, combined with the days of cleaning, washing windows, dusting furniture, changing linens, and trimming loose strings off old towels is ruining Bay’s life. They usually have such nice summers: planting flowers, reading under the elm tree, eating tomato sandwiches, watching fireflies, and sleeping on the porch! Besides all the distraction and disappointment of having such sublime activities replaced with housework, there is the added factor of the boy in the forest. If things were normal, Bay would tell her Nana about him, but there never seems to be a good reason to bring it up, and after a while, Bay realizes she enjoys keeping the mystery to herself, a secret she shares with no one; a pleasant secret for once.

  The first time Bay saw him, she was gazing out her bedroom window at the unusual sky, that shade of light peculiar to some August evenings when time seems temporarily stuck, feeling like she might cry, though she couldn’t imagine why, when she became aware of an odd movement among the lilacs. She leaned closer, expecting to see a bird or squirrel causing the stir, but what she saw instead made her step back.

  Staring up at her from the midst of green was the pale face of a boy. Bay’s heart fluttered in a most alarming way; she wondered if it was an attack of some kind. She leaned closer to the screen, smelling the heavy scent of flowers, the grass, the aroma of citronella. Was this boy created out of her longing, the way she used to have imaginary friends when she was little? Did he really just smile, revealing dimples she could see even at this distance? Was a boy staring up at the house like this the beginning of something good, or something terrible?

  Bay ran to find her Nana, who was asleep in the parlor, a dust rag in her hand. By then, Bay thought maybe she’d imagined him; after all, she used to imagine seeing people all the time when she was little. Besides, her Nana looked so old that Bay decided not to disturb her. Instead, Bay went to peer out the kitchen window. Seeing no sign of him, she walked into the backyard where the strange light had already returned to ordinary dusk. She worked up all her courage to walk over to the lilacs. There was no sign of anyone having been there, no broken branches brushed aside by reckless hands, no footprints in the dirt. The only thing unusual was how the air smelled sweet, as though the lilacs were in bloom, when in fact, they were long dead.

  The next time Bay saw him was in the clear light of day. She was reaching into the basket at her feet for a sheet to hang on the line when she thought she spied him out of the corner of her eye, but as soon as she turned, he was gone.

  Bay began leaving sandwiches tucked among the shoes in the garden: tahini with orange marmalade, basil and tomato with vinegar dressing (she couldn’t risk the mayonnaise, which everyone knows becomes poisonous in the sun), goat cheese with a black-olive tapenade, cheddar and mustard on a seven-grain bun. At first Nan encouraged the kitchen experimentation, but after a while, she began complaining about all the missing Tupperware. He never took the sandwiches anyway; they were blue with mold when Bay retrieved them. Annoyed that he’d wasted all that food, she decided she couldn’t risk arousing her Nana’s curiosity by tossing them in the compost bin. Bay threw them into the forest instead, something she regrets now that the yard has begun to smell sour.

  After long hours of walnut-oil furniture polishing and vinegar-scented window washing, she is so miserable she thinks she almost could go back to the river, in spite of what awaits her there. Thalia doesn’t ask again, though, and Bay wonders if her Nana said something strange to her.

  Bay always thought a solitary nature was something she shared with Nan. Of course other adults have friends; Bay just can’t shake the feeling that it doesn’t really make sense that her Nana’s old friends, who Bay has never heard of before, are suddenly coming to visit.

  “Why?” she asks Nan, who is on her hands and knees, polishing floorboards in the dining room.

  “We haven’t seen each other in years. We thought now would be a good time.”

  Bay nods, pretending to understand, until she thinks maybe she really does. She can’t believe that she and Thalia would lose touch for sixty years, but if that did happen, well, of course they would want to get together again. Bay watches Nan in her brown dress and clogs, her gray hair in an untidy bun, the flesh on her arm shaking as she polishes.

  “Let me do that.”

  But Nan says she likes polishing wood. “You know what would be a big help? Why don’t you put together the menu?”

  Is Nan trying to get Bay excited about the idea of heali
ng with food? She frowns, trying to sort it all out. There’s a chance she is being manipulated; on the other hand, Bay really does enjoy planning menus.

  “What do they eat?”

  “Oh, everything,” Nan says, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Mavis loves spicy food: hot peppers, garlic, cayenne, and chocolate. She loves chocolate. She loves chocolate so much that she used to send it to herself in pretty boxes with a gift card, and lucky for her, it had no effect on her figure. She loves red wine too. Don’t worry. I have that taken care of. Ruthie, well, Ruthie has a hearty appetite. I don’t think there’s anything she doesn’t like to eat. Which reminds me, we better make sure to put her in the story bedroom. The bed in there is good and solid.”

  All of a sudden they are living in a house with titled bedrooms. The pink bedroom is Bay’s old room, and it isn’t pink at all, though the bedspread is. The story room has a bed, a small closet, and a desk, but it is mostly filled with Nan’s books, old-fashioned hard covers with gold-trimmed pages and watercolor illustrations, which Bay was given the task of dusting. It took longer than it probably should have. She managed to confine herself to a paragraph or two for the most part, until she lost a whole afternoon to Hans Christian Andersen. She’d forgotten how sad the stories were, how much love was lost.

  When the boy starts appearing in the garden, Bay wonders if he is the wonderful thing she’s been waiting for. Perhaps this is the beginning of a love story of her own, and if so, she wants it to be good. The boy keeps disappearing though, which makes a difficult start to any relationship. How can love grow with someone who doesn’t even want to be seen?

  Sprawled across her bed, Bay pages through the cookbooks, paper-clipping recipes. Mavis, the frightening-looking antique lady with the dyed black hair and bright red lips (Nan showed Bay the photo online), is due around nine the next morning. Ruthie, of the hearty appetite, will arrive just before lunch.

  “I bet she planned it that way,” Nan says. “Why don’t we eat on the porch?”

  Bay loves the idea and has already carried the card table up from the basement. She marks a page with a recipe for something called “chocolate lasagna” (there is a small amount of dark chocolate in the sauce), then pushes the stack of books aside. She stands to stretch, her fingers scraping the slanted ceiling as she walks to the window, inhaling the green scent of summer. All she has to do is get through the next day and a half with her Nana’s friends, then things can get back to normal. After making such a production out of all the cleaning and preparation, Bay thinks it’s strange that they’re not staying longer, but her Nana says it’s long enough.

  “We want to see each other again,” she says. “But there’s no reason to go hog wild.”

  Bay spends all her spare time in her bedroom, staring out the window; hoping to spy the boy again, she spends a great deal of time staring at the shoe garden instead. Many people love it, even slowing on the curvy road to take photographs, while others think the old shoes, aged by sun and weather, mud-splattered, breaking open at the toes with roots boring out of them like worms, are an eyesore. She wonders what her Nana’s friends will think.

  Tiny white flowers rise like clouds from above a purple heel, a man’s old work boot holds black-eyed Susans, an assortment of ladies’ boots compose the hollyhock and mallow garden (though the flowers are beginning to look a little sad), the hostas have blossomed their strange, stalky white and purple flowers, the leaves covering the shoes that contain them, and the boy’s feet are bare.

  Bay raises her hand. She doesn’t expect a response, not really—she’s not even sure he’s not just something leftover from her little-kid imagination—but after a moment, she sees a pale wave of light, like the reflection of sun on water, or a small bird taking flight, the boy, waving. Bay spins out of her room and down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door, which she lets slam shut behind her. “Sorry,” she calls. Her Nana hates it when she slams the door.

  It is a perfect summer day. The sky is cloudless blue, and the air is fresh, but the boy stands in the hostas as though rooted there, looking sorrowful.

  “So, it’s true,” he says at Bay’s approach.

  “What’s true?”

  He shrugs.

  An odd boy, Bay thinks, though she can’t figure what it is about him that makes her think so. His hair maybe, dirty blond, cut long at the front, parted on the side. He flicks his head like a sparrow at a birdbath, though it does little good; the hair continues to fall in his eyes, which are watery blue and small. The sprinkle of freckles across his face doesn’t make him look friendly, nor do his thin lips. Bay reconsiders. This, she thinks, is probably not a love story. “What’s your name?”

  He hesitates, as if doing some reconsidering himself, then shrugs. “Karl.”

  “So what’s up?” Bay asks, and when he only looks at her quizzically, “Are you a runaway or something?”

  “Don’t tell her I’m here.”

  “Who?”

  He juts his chin at the house. “The old lady. Or any of her friends.”

  “How do you know about them?”

  “Kind of common knowledge, ain’t it?”

  Bay supposes this is true. Nan hired a college boy to transport her guests from the airport. She paid Stan to come clean out the gutters, which turned out to be a massive undertaking, neglected for years. Stan said there were trees growing up there, which Bay thought an exaggeration until he started tossing down saplings. No wonder people think we’re so weird, Bay had thought, while her Nana had fretted about killing “the poor things.”

  Bay didn’t know why they needed to do all this work for guests staying a single night. When Thalia sleeps over, the only preparation they make is to be sure there is toilet paper in both bathrooms. Up until this summer, Bay considered dusting a winter activity, like shoveling. In spite of the little forest produced by the gutter cleaning, Bay thinks her Nana is overdoing it.

  “Hey! Hey, you!”

  Bay frowns at the boy. “What?”

  “You’re one of them thinking girls, ain’t you? I once knew a girl kinda like you.”

  Ever alert for information about anything that might be interpreted as familial reference, Bay’s heart lurches. “You did?”

  “She was always figuring stuff out. She couldn’t let things alone, you know? She thought everything was, like, a problem.”

  “I don’t think everything’s a problem.”

  “Sure you do. You think I’m a problem.”

  Bay shakes her head.

  “Yeah, you do. That’s why you been leaving those weird sandwiches all over the place.”

  “I thought maybe you were hungry,” Bay says, hurt by the unfavorable review.

  “Well, anyhow, that ain’t why I’ve been hanging around.”

  “Why are you?” Bay asks, thinking his answer will help her determine whether he is, in fact, a problem or not.

  He shakes his head, as though Bay has just said something ridiculous. “I need shoes.”

  Of course! How obvious! “Wait right here.” Bay is happy to have an excuse to leave. It gives her time to figure things out while she runs up the grassy slope to the house. What is it about Karl that makes her uncomfortable? Maybe he just seems strange because he’s standing barefoot in her yard, hiding in the hostas. Bay closes the screen door carefully behind her, relieved Nan isn’t in the kitchen.

  When Nan gets a donation of shoes, she brings them into the basement where she modifies them with fancy laces, polish, colored markers, ribbons, and paint. Over the years, many shoes have come and gone, but for some reason, the old pair of boy’s sneakers remains. Bay asked her Nana about them once, and she said they were “unsuitable,” whatever that means. Over the years, Bay has seen them shoved into an old flowerpot, in a box of old magazines, on the shelf above the work table, and at the foot of the stairs. Currently, they are wedge
d between two piles of clothes set aside for Goodwill. Bay saw them just that morning when she was looking for the card table.

  Or so she thought, because they are not there now. She spends quite a bit of time shoving things around, almost giving up, when she finds the sneakers neatly hanging from a peg behind the door. She wonders if they carry sentimental value that her Nana is reluctant to explain, but what could be sentimental about smelly old shoes?

  Bay tiptoes through the kitchen, not wanting to arouse her Nana’s curiosity. Though Bay has nothing to compare it to, she is certain Nan would not approve of her becoming friends with the runaway hiding in the forest.

  But he is gone. Bay searches for him in much the same way she looked for the shoes, thinking perhaps she had not left him among the hostas with their stalky flowers, but near the lilacs, devoid of blossoms, bushy with green leaves, a great place for hiding, though he isn’t there either.

  “You could wait five minutes,” she says, so annoyed she considers taking the sneakers back inside, but remembering the nettles in the forest, Bay sets the shoes on the ground, then catches herself waiting as though he might suddenly materialize in them like a ghost. The thought sends a shiver down her spine, even though Bay does not believe in ghosts, in spite of what her Nana, or Thalia, or anyone thinks. “After all,” Bay says, “wouldn’t I know if my own house was haunted?”

  She walks up the hill, opens the back door, and enters the kitchen, murmuring to herself about the stupid things people say, so absorbed in her monologue she doesn’t even notice that all the kitchen cupboards are open and her Nana is standing there, frowning.

  “Where have you been? We have to go to the store. I don’t know what recipes you’ve chosen. They’ll be here soon.”

  “Nana, no one’s coming until tomorrow. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Nan, her head slightly tilted, looks at Bay as though studying a problem, until she nods. “Yes, you’re right. What was I thinking? I’m lost in space, I guess! Why don’t we take the cookbooks out to the porch?”