by Mary Rickert
When the car pulls up, Nan thinks she can’t stop what she’s doing, even for a shoe donation, even to sneer at some teenager who’s come to call her names, but when she sees, out of the corner of her eye, the unexpected vehicle, her fingers hover above the dirt long enough for her to wonder why anyone would take the single local taxi all the way out here. It must be a mistake, she decides as she presses dirt around the astilbe, which just might not make it, poor thing.
At the sound of the car door opening, Nan peers through the bright sunlight at the emerging woman and gasps. Of all the impossible things, how can this be happening? She shakes her head as the name falls out of her mouth. “Eve?”
“Don’t be silly.” Kneeling in the midst of several planted shoes, Ruthie wipes her hands on her nightgown, a pink, lacy thing that exposes a surprising amount of bosom. She turns with a pleasant expression toward the stranger.
Eve’s hair was curly; this woman’s hair is straight, but cut short, just as Eve’s was, revealing Eve’s long neck and square jawline. Of course it is not Eve. Nan has seen Eve, and she has always been blurry, like an image under water, while this woman is sharply focused and alive. She watches the taxi as it pulls away, possibly reconsidering.
Trying to offer a reassuring countenance, Nan stands slowly, pushing against the memories that arrive with Eve’s look-alike, the young woman, for some reason unable to maintain her composure, her small mouth opening and closing as if chewing air.
It’s the boots, Nan thinks, though later she wonders what made her believe the three of them, gardening in their nightgowns, would have looked normal had she only been wearing clogs instead?
“Can I help you?” Nan is surprised to hear the tremble in her voice. Maybe it is Eve. Maybe the force of all of them together again has caused her to appear, Nan thinks, though she immediately rejects the notion as ridiculous. The fact that she believes in ghosts doesn’t mean she believes in nonsense.
The young woman raises her chin, which breaks the illusion. Eve was never the chin-raising sort. “Yes, my name is Stella Day? My grandmother suggested…she said Nan?” Her eyes scan past Nan and Mavis to linger on Ruthie, before finally returning to settle, with a disappointed cast, on Nan.
“She said you were friends with my great-aunt Eve? She thought you would be able to tell me about her. Eve, I mean. I’m writing a book. Trying to, at least. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a few things published. I’m not a complete beginner, though most of it has been frankly derivative. Doesn’t every female writer go through an Anaïs Nin period? Anyway, it’s kind of a family history/memoir thing, I think.”
She shuts her lips into a chiseled, false smile, and Nan is struck by the incongruity of this breathlessly chattering person, so different from the girl she resembles.
“I wouldn’t just drop in like this. Normally. But I was in the area. With my boyfriend. My ex-boyfriend. I mean he’s my ex-boyfriend now. Anyway, I thought, you know, why not? Why not just take a risk for once in my life? Why not just stop by and see if we could have a conversation? I wouldn’t normally do something like this, but I recently lost my job, and so, anyway, here I am.”
“How interesting,” Mavis says, rising to stand with such effort that for a second she appears near to toppling. “How very interesting to be named after a cookie.”
“Dora,” Ruthie hisses. “Stella Dora are the cookies. Her name is Stella—”
“Day. Stella Day. If this isn’t a good time—”
“What?” Mavis barks. “You going to wave down a taxi?”
“I have a phone, of course.”
Of course. Everyone does these days, though cell phones don’t work out here, much to Bay’s dismay, but that’s not really the point, is it? Goodness, it is very difficult to organize her thoughts with Eve’s doppelgänger standing on the front walk. Now? After all these years someone has finally come with questions? So confused is Nan, it takes several breaths before she is able to determine that the sensation of something uncoiling deep in her pelvis is the feeling of dread. After all, she smells the salt of this Stella’s lies. Does she really expect Nan to believe that her arrival, this weekend of all the weekends, is mere coincidence?
So deep in thought is she, Nan doesn’t even realize she is staring until the young woman shifts uncomfortably and once more does that thing with her eyes, casting about for better options.
“Is there a shoe store around here? Was there a tornado?”
“Just a little wind and rain,” Nan says, waving at the overturned shoes and flowers, sniffing against her own deception. “You brought luggage?”
“I was with my boyfriend? We were going somewhere? That’s why I have my bag. I don’t plan to stay. Or anything.”
“What’s the matter?” Mavis says. “Afraid we’re contagious?”
“I don’t want to impose.”
But of course you do, Nan thinks. “You say your grandmother told you to talk to me?”
“That’s right.”
“She would be Eve’s…”
“Eve’s brother, Daniel? He was my grandfather. Eve was my great-aunt. I never met her. She died before I was born. Well, you know that. All my life people told me how much I look like her. People said some strange things to me over the years. Anyway, Daniel Leary was my grandfather.”
“Daniel?” Nan shakes her head, trying to fathom the little boy with big ears, always hanging about and bothering them, an old man now.
“Danny?” Ruthie says, her voice trembling. “How is Danny?”
“He died before I was born. I never knew him. We Learys tend to die young.”
“That’s good,” Ruthie says, which is plainly strange, but she has been strange since her arrival and likely doesn’t mean to sound menacing.
“This isn’t a good time,” Nan says. “As you can see, I have visitors and—”
But Ruthie, in her black socks and dirty nightgown, completely oblivious to the effect of her appearance, walks across the grass with open arms. “Don’t be silly, Nan. It’s the perfect time! Stella? It’s Stella, isn’t it? I’m Ruthie. Now, isn’t it just, what is the word? Seren…serin…ser-something-or-other that you should arrive when we’ve gotten together for the first time in years?” Ruthie wraps her arm around Stella’s narrow shoulders. “Is this your luggage? I once had nice luggage, but you know how that goes. My son took it with him to Mexico, and that was that. I never saw my suitcase again.”
“Ruthie!”
Her arm still around the girl, Ruthie stops at the door and turns, her smile unbroken by Mavis’s sharp voice.
“Serendipity.”
“Yes!” Ruthie shouts, which startles everyone. “Oops, sorry. I haven’t done that in years. My husband hates it when I talk loud.” She turns to open the door. Stella quickly steps out of Ruthie’s grasp into the dark maw of the foyer.
“Ruthie!”
“What?”
“Remember?” Mavis hisses through clenched teeth. “Remember our promise?”
“Well, of course I remember,” Ruthie whispers hoarsely. “What do you take me for? A terrorist?” She leans into the door, almost closing it entirely. “I’m not going to talk about that, but there’s no reason we can’t talk about her. She was our friend, wasn’t she?”
Mavis stares, as though considering the point, which Nan finds shocking.
“Of course,” Nan says, and when Ruthie turns to look at her, she says it again. “Of course Eve was our friend.”
Ruthie nods abruptly before she steps inside. Nan, who only wants some relief from the scent of salt permeating the air, brings the flower she has been holding to her nose. For a moment it works, the salt replaced with the sweet smell, until she comes to her senses and realizes she is clutching a lily of the valley.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mavis asks.
Nan spins an awkward circle in the oversi
zed red boots. The garden is a disaster, shoes splattered in dirt and filled with damaged flowers, but as near as she can tell, no one has planted the dangerous lily.
Where did it come from anyway? She tosses the withered thing away and sinks carefully to the ground. Not for the first time in recent weeks, Nan recalls the old-fashioned hourglass Miss Winter kept in her house, but this time Nan pictures it with all the sand run out.
Life is what you remember, Nan thinks as she shoves dirt into the old sneaker. Who can remember everything? Well, no one, and that’s a blessing. Life is and always has been a composition, much like this garden; it will not be contained and cannot be determined.
She first noticed it years ago, when the shoe plants thrived long past the time for doing so. What about roots? she wondered. What about seasons? What about nutrients and rain and rot and decay? And yet, somewhere in all this mess the sneaker remains, as well as the old lady’s slipper, until this recent vandalism, the container for Grace Winter’s pennyroyal. It is impossible, of course, against the laws of nature. Everything here is. The elm tree, somehow surviving the disease that left main streets all over the Midwest blighted, thrives, as do the weeping apple trees she planted when she first bought the place. Things die, of course, but Nan has long observed that the passage between life and death is different here than anywhere else. This lily of the valley, for instance, its pretty May flower ringing on this August morn. Nan has no control over any of it. Life and death happen in a cycle she can’t anticipate, all out of order and uncertain, and it’s simply futile trying to figure it out.
Nan winces at the drumming of her headache as she plucks a sad sweet pea from the ground, so fragile, she’s afraid there’s no way for it to be saved, though she intends to try. She scoops dirt into a woman’s boot with a ridiculously narrow heel, pouring handfuls of soil littered with stones and broken flowers into the cavity until she is overcome by the intense feeling of being watched. It makes her bones cold, until she realizes it is only Mavis, her wild hair eclipsing the sun.
“What are you staring at?” Nan asks.
“I didn’t come here to exorcize your demons.”
Nan pats the dirt around the tender stem. “Whatever do you mean?”
“You don’t really expect me to believe that Eve’s relative showed up here today, of all days, by coincidence?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t invite her.”
Nan’s headache burrows into her forehead. She’s been getting them more and more lately. She worries it is something insidious, the sort of thing that kills old women, though she doesn’t dare feel sorry for herself, thinking of all the years she’s lived while Eve died at eighteen.
***
Not realizing she’d been holding her breath until she let it go, Nan inhaled as she stepped out of the cloying heat of Eve’s house into the gray light of that December morning, filling her lungs with cold air—the scent of snow freezing out the stench of blood. She stared at the streetlights, thinking how they looked like miniature moons gilding the flakes that floated to the cracked sidewalk, and dusted the old houses with a sugary glow, turning the dismal neighborhood into someplace almost beautiful, before she came to her senses.
Run, Nan thought. You will regret standing here the rest of your life, and she was running down the creaky steps, careful on the ice. “Everything is going to be all right,” she said over and over again, so innocent she still believed good thoughts made things so.
She ran all the way to Miss Winter’s house, its gingerbread trim caked with snow, the windows filled with caramel light.
Nan pressed on Miss Winter’s bell until she opened the door, her pleasant expression quickly replaced by one of horror, as though Nan explained everything, though she had been made mute by things too dreadful to say out loud.
They ran. Nan stumbled, but Miss Winter kept running, wearing no hat, gloves, or coat. When Nan caught up, she led the way to Eve’s house, which they entered without knocking, squinting in the pea-green light. Had the hallway to Eve’s room always been so narrow? Had the door to her bedroom always been so heavy? Had Ruthie and Mavis always looked like ghosts?
Snowflakes melted from Miss Winter’s hair and clothes onto Eve’s breathless body, a benediction of ice.
“What have you girls done?” she asked.
“Nothing,” says Nan, then, realizing that the purple-haired Mavis is looking at her strangely, adds, “is going to make our past go away, you know.”
“I’m not spending the last days of my life in prison,” Mavis says, “to make you feel better.”
“Prison? Who said anything about you going to prison? Oh! For Eve? Is that what you’re talking about? I hardly think that’s on the table.”
“You don’t know, do you, Nan?”
“It’s not like—”
“We committed a crime.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Is this why you invited us? For revenge?”
“Revenge?”
“I know you blame me,” Mavis says.
How could she possibly know that? Nan hasn’t talked to Mavis or corresponded with her in decades. Mavis has no way of knowing what Nan’s been feeling or thinking. “I haven’t, I—”
“Don’t lie.”
Nan squints up at Mavis, who, through some trick of the light, looks like one of those fake statues, a person painted as stone, until she turns her head, and her lavender hair emits a shower of tiny rainbows. Is Mavis’s hair still wet from last night’s downpour? How is that possible?
“What are you up to?” Mavis asks.
“Up to? Up to?” Nan ponders the question, even looking at the sky for a moment as though the answer might be floating overhead. “I’m not up to anything, Mavis. Anything sneaky, that is. I told you about Bay. You remember that, don’t you? I asked you to come so you could help with her.”
“Bay seems quite capable of taking care of herself.”
“I don’t want her to feel abandoned. The way Eve did.”
“Eve? We’re talking about Eve now?”
Nan worries Mavis’s mind has lost its edge. It is not the first time during this visit that she seems confused.
“Nan,” Mavis says. “Eve is dead.”
Nan presses a calendula into a dirty white shoe she doesn’t have time to clean. Can the plants survive lying on the ground with their roots exposed? Why is Mavis standing there as if there is nothing to do, no one to save? Then again, isn’t that what Mavis does in times of trouble—stand around giving orders?
“Don’t you remember, Nan? Don’t you remember Eve dying?”
“Of course I remember.” Nan can barely control the spit in her words. As though she would ever forget! As if it were just another mundane moment in all the forgotten hours of her life. She peers up at Mavis, who, haloed by the sun, looks blurry, like someone stuck between life and death. The thought makes Nan incredibly sad in the midst of her irritation. They waited too long for this reunion. It can never make up for all they lost. All this life lived that Eve never had. Gasping at the realization, Nan sits back on heels. “She did this.”
“Who? Who did what?”
“Eve. I don’t know why I didn’t realize sooner. Of course she would be upset. All of us together again, after all these years.”
“You think Eve vandalized your garden?”
Nan nods slowly. “Who else?” she asks.
“How about the hoodlum who called you a witch last night? How about his friends? How about Bay? She seems like an angry child.”
“Bay? You can’t be serious. Why would—”
“Do you actually believe the most rational explanation for this destruction is Eve?”
Nan wipes her face with the sleeve of her nightgown. It certainly has gotten hot quite suddenly. “Bay would never do something like this. Eve—”
“Is dead.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Nan shoves a plant, so damaged as to be unrecognizable, into the baby shoe, roughly pressing the dirt around it with shaking fingers. “Clearly, I’m talking about her ghost.”
“Her ghost? You don’t actually believe Eve’s floating around here with gossamer wings, do you?”
“Don’t be silly.” Nan rolls her eyes at Mavis. “You’re confusing ghosts with angels.”
Nan remembers the time Eve dressed as a fairy for Halloween. Funny, Eve was always dressing up as someone with wings: fairies, angels, butterflies. Though it makes sense, doesn’t it, that Eve was drawn toward creatures of flight? Oh, poor Eve!
While Mavis stands in her dirt-streaked nightgown, staring into space, Nan plants two more shoes, appreciating the silence until she is overcome by her duties as hostess. She can’t allow her guests to become catatonic, no matter how much she regrets their presence.
“Mavis?”
She turns her neck so slowly Nan almost expects to hear it creak. “You’ve seen her?”
“Who?”
“Eve?”
“Yes, of course. Well, sometimes. Occasionally. Mostly it’s a scent or an unpleasant taste, but yes, I have seen her.”
Mavis looks as though Nan were a ghost herself, a shocking presence among the flowers.
“What does she want? What does she say about death? Does she say anything about me?”
Isn’t it just like Mavis to make herself the topic of concern? “She doesn’t talk. Sometimes she sings. You know, ‘Happy Birthday,’ things like that. She never tells me what she wants. You remember how she was.” Nan pats dirt around a cosmos, trying to recall when the taste of ash arrived. She hopes it leaves soon. She doesn’t want the weekend ruined by the bitter flavor. “I don’t understand why you’re surprised.”
Mavis waves her hand, the way she does, as though what anyone says is just an annoyance. “Why would she appear to you? What’s so special about you?”
