The Memory Garden

by Mary Rickert

  “I thought he was fourteen, but it turns out he was two years older. He nodded and called me ma’am, like a man about to tip his hat. He was trying to use his best manners, I suspect, but right away I had that voice in my head that made me pretend with him. So I pretended he didn’t frighten me, though he did.

  “His car was in front of the house. A boy’s car, you know. A teenage boy’s car, parked on the side of the road squarely in front of the house. Anyway, I thought maybe he’d come for a remedy. I used to do that for a while, though I hadn’t recently, and even then it had been mostly girls.”

  “A remedy?” Ruthie asks.

  “Never mind,” Mavis says.

  “You know.” Nan shrugs, not sure that Ruthie will ever understand. “Herbs and such. For colds, and unwanted…things.”

  “Unwanted things? But what do herbs have to do with…oh…”

  Nan watches Ruthie’s blue eyes widen in the dim light. “Oh,” she says. “You mean babies?”

  “Fetuses,” Mavis snaps.

  Nan expects to see disapproval register on Ruthie’s face, but she tilts her head slightly and, after a moment, nods. “Of course,” she says softly. “That makes sense.”

  “I couldn’t fathom what he wanted, even as I sensed the danger. I was distracted by fear. One minute he was talking about his sister, and the next he was saying he’d come to take the baby. He had a right, he said.”

  Ruthie gasps. “Bay’s father?”

  “Her uncle.”

  “Dear God,” Mavis says.

  “He just sat right down in the porch rocker, as though we were friendly that way. He said his sister told him she left her baby here. I don’t know how that conversation came about. I like to think they were close. I like to believe she confided in him because he was good, and that the things he said to me were because he was overwhelmed. Just the way I like to believe I am a better person than I was to him, generally.”

  “Oh, you are a wonderful person,” Ruthie says. “Whatever would make you think otherwise?”

  Nan appreciates the comment, but who knows what Ruthie will think by the end of this conversation? Why, it might even be too much for Mavis.

  “She told him she spoke to me once when she dropped off a shoe donation. I am sorry to say I have no memory of that. While he was talking, all the time rocking and flicking that hair off his face and shrugging his shoulder the way he did, just one shoulder going up, like he couldn’t make the effort for both, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to fight it. Bay wasn’t really mine. No matter how much I loved her, and I love her a lot.”

  “Oh, we know you do,” Ruthie says.

  “Without a doubt,” adds Mavis.

  “My whole life I felt like I didn’t deserve happiness. You girls understand, don’t you?”

  Ruthie nods vigorously. Mavis clears her throat and then, with a quick gesture, pats Nan’s knee, one tap, like a bird on a hot wire. They understand. Of course they do.

  “I asked why he had shown up without his sister, and while his answer was circuitous, I came to comprehend she had not wanted him to interfere. Naturally, I wasn’t going to hand Bay over to some random stranger just because he said he had a right, but as he talked and rocked and twitched, shrugging his shoulder, as though it was all nothing more than cute circumstance, I knew I wouldn’t be able to put him off forever. Then I heard him say it. He couldn’t have said that! I asked him to repeat it.

  “He’d heard the rumors that Bay was some sort of ‘freak.’ He said”—Nan pauses, hardly able to formulate the words—“he had plans. A baby like her, a ‘freak,’ he said, could make money.

  “He must have seen how horrified I was, because he told me it could all be done over the Internet. ‘It’s not like I’m talking about selling her to the circus or nothing like that,’ he said, and actually laughed as if he was being funny.”

  “Not funny at all,” says Ruthie, closing her lips in a tight line of disapproval.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I sat there, staring at my yard filled with shoes and dying flowers, the autumn grass and those odd spears that stand after the tiger lilies die. I looked at my elm tree, the leaves just turning gold, and thought how I had imagined someday Bay would climb those branches and lie under them for shade. I looked at the purple aster, the late sunflower, the unfathomable rose, and the foxgloves. I looked at the foxgloves while I listened to Bay breathing peacefully, with no idea of what had come for her, and I thought how love is like a monster, you know?”

  “Yes I do,” Ruthie says, so emphatically that for a moment Nan and Mavis both study their friend before Nan continues.

  “I told him he looked thirsty, as if I could see such a thing in his freckled complexion.

  “‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I am.’

  “‘Just a minute,’ I told him. ‘Wait right here.’ I went inside and locked the door while he continued rocking like he thought he could take that chair into space. I think he was feeling proud of himself for conducting business the way he was. As far as I know he did not hear the lock turn or suspect I considered him an enemy. I did not want him to follow me inside my house, our home.

  “I walked right to the kitchen—straight to the glass of foxgloves on the windowsill there and plucked them out. I did take the time to fill a different glass with water for the innocent flowers, just so you know. The old foxglove water was warm, and also had pieces of plant matter floating in it. I picked them out the best I could. Then I dropped in a few ice cubes and stirred in some sugar, and I sliced a lemon too.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it, the things we do for love? What we did for Eve, what I did for Bay. Who knows? Who knows what his reason was? He never mentioned love, but who knows? People don’t always say. I don’t think he was evil. He was just a boy, really. In way over his head.

  “When I brought him the drink, he smiled as he reached for it. He smiled in a way that made me hold back. His eyes were rather narrow, which initially made me think he was shrewd, but they widened when he saw the lemon, and I could see the boy he was.

  “When his hand reached for that glass, I observed that he had thin, long fingers, sensitive, just like Bay.

  “I thrust the glass at him. He took it without appearing to notice the shift in my attitude. I had a feeling he was used to rough exchange, and not much experienced with gifts. Even one as simple as sugar water with a twist of lemon and a faintly odd flavor, vaguely flowered, which he apparently enjoyed. He drank it right up.

  “I sat down, rocking against any regret. I listened to the faint purr of Bay breathing while he talked. He told me how her mother used to drive up and down the road, trying to decide what to do. She’d heard how I helped girls, a long time ago. Eventually, she got the idea it would be a wonderful thing for a child to grow up in a big house with her own room, and a garden. She liked the shoe garden, especially. She was driving past when her water broke. She pulled over up the road a bit. She told her brother, and he told me that in spite of everything, she felt safe out here. She felt like this house provided protection. She’d been thinking about it all along, but until that night she wasn’t sure what she would do. She took it as a sign. She said, he told me, she said, ‘I know people say she’s a witch, like that’s a bad thing, but I think she’s good.’

  “He stopped talking and rocking all of a sudden. He just stopped. Like he’d seen a ghost. He was holding the empty glass and staring into space.

  “‘You all right?’ I asked.

  “‘Might have the flu,’ he said. ‘I guess I’ll take her now.’

  “That’s when I said that there was no way I would ever let him near my girl. I told him to get off the porch. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t think there was a need. He looked surprised for just a second, and then he looked like he was used to adults turning on him. I got up and went into the house.

  “Until t
hat evening, I thought I was somebody who had once, years ago, made a terrible choice. I thought it was an exception, not a personality trait. I couldn’t bear to look at that freckled face, turning pale right before my eyes. I went into the house and locked the door. I locked the back door too, just in case. I sure didn’t want him coming into the kitchen and making a big mess that would have been difficult to explain. It was only moments later when I heard the crash. I knew right away what it was.”

  “He broke in?” Ruthie asks.

  “No,” Nan says. “Later they said he’d taken the corner too fast and hit the tree. The car was a misshapen mass, smoke snaking out, the front door open. It looked like a spaceship crash-landed on the road. I prepared myself to see something horrible, but he was lying there with his head back, his mouth agape, his eyes open. He looked, for all the world, astonished. Only one trickle of blood, here.” Nan taps her forehead.

  “Oh,” Ruthie gasps. “Thank the stars he was all right.”

  Nan shakes her head. “They said he never knew what hit him, or what he hit. No one called for an autopsy. The cause of death was obvious. They said the impact was so hard his shoes flew off. One shoe did, and I didn’t find it until much later, but I took the other one right off his foot. I don’t know why. I can’t always explain myself. I guess I thought I would plant it, you know, as a memorial, but I never managed to do so.”

  “That’s understandable,” Ruthie says.

  Nan takes a deep breath. “It was quite the event. Covered at some length by the local paper, the way the death of someone young usually is. I saw her at the funeral, and I saw her a few times around town, afterward. She looked like Bay but with brown hair, a pretty girl who had sadness all around her like it was her own atmosphere. I hope never to see Bay so clouded like that. Anyway, they weren’t from here. They were the kind of family that moves around a lot, and they did just that about a year later. I never told anyone what I did, and I never said anything to her. She knew who I was. If she wanted to talk, she knew where to find me.”

  In the silence that follows her confession, Nan finds herself remembering her summer garden: the vivacious display of opened blossoms, the murmur of bees, the flutter of butterflies and birds, the cacophony of her haunted season.

  “Well, that certainly is a dramatic story,” Ruthie says, shaking her coppery head.

  I should be pleased, Nan thinks. I should be happy to be misunderstood, and she almost is before she is reminded of Mavis, clearing her throat.

  “You can’t be serious,” she rasps.

  “My goodness, of course she is,” Ruthie says. “Why would she make such a story up?”

  “You don’t believe you killed the boy, do you?”

  “What in the world makes you say a thing like that?” Ruthie asks. “You heard her. It was a car accident. You know how boys are, why my own—”

  “Really, Nan, you can be so dramatic.”

  “Me, dramatic?” Nan would almost find this funny in another circumstance, but to be so accused by Mavis, of all people!

  “You do have a bit of that streak in you,” Ruthie says. “I have noticed.”

  Nan is stunned by the confluence of emotions; the release of having confessed, the pleasure of not being understood by Ruthie, the shame of Mavis’s comprehension, the annoyance—the annoyance—of Mavis’s impervious attitude.

  “Foxgloves,” Nan says, “are poisonous.”

  “Poison?” Ruthie squeaks.

  Nan narrows her eyes at Ruthie. “You know that. You must know that. You made that entire flower feast without my help. I know Mavis is ignorant, but certainly you know about foxgloves.”

  “Well, yes but—”

  “You don’t need to insult me,” Mavis says.

  “Insult you?” Nan covers her mouth, surprised by the sudden arrival of tears.

  “Are you crying?” Ruthie asks. “Is she crying? Why are you crying?”

  “She thinks she murdered him,” Mavis says.

  “No. She’s shaking her head no. See. You always read people wrong,” Ruthie scolds Mavis. “Why are you crying, Nan? You can tell us.”

  “I did,” Nan says behind the muffling hand, which she removes for clarity. “I killed him. I gave him foxglove water, and he went into cardiac arrest, and I killed him. I did.”

  She isn’t sure what her two old friends are thinking, though neither turns away. Ruthie produces from some magic pocket a square of folded tissues, which Nan applies to her nose, while Mavis pokes at Nan’s back in a gesture she assumes is meant as a reassuring pat.

  “Now listen here,” Ruthie says. “You need to stop this. I do know a thing or two about poison, and there wouldn’t have been enough time for it to work. Even the Ebola virus takes a week.”

  “Well, I—”

  “And I don’t even know, I really don’t, if water would work in any case. I’ve heard of the flowers and leaves being dangerous, but the water?”

  “There wasn’t time,” Mavis says. “That’s the point. You had nothing to do with that boy’s death.”

  Nan remembers the look on his face when she ran to the car, feeling as if she had just swallowed a rose, thorns and all. He was dead already, but that look—that look of astonishment—she feels mirrored on her own face now. Is it possible? Could it be?

  “But don’t you understand?” Nan asks. “Does it even matter whether it worked or not? I meant to kill him. That’s the point.”

  “Well, we’d certainly all be criminals if we were condemned for our murderous thoughts,” Ruthie says.

  “But it wasn’t just a thought, I—”

  “What?” Mavis raises her arms in that gesture of supplication. “You destroyed the world? Is that it, Nan? Is everyone’s death your fault?”

  “I wanted him to die.”

  Ruthie snickers as she swats the air. “Oh, that’s nothing.”

  “Let it go, Nan,” Mavis says. “Quit blaming yourself for everything.”

  Nan opens her mouth, then snaps it shut. Is it possible they are right? Is it possible it wasn’t her fault?

  “Are we done?” Mavis asks. “I’m exhausted.”

  Imagine, Nan thinks, just imagine for now that it was only a horrible accident. She can’t believe how tired she feels. Imagine, she thinks as she lets her head rest on the pillow between Mavis already breathing deeply and Ruthie yawning a peppermint scent. Imagine.

  As Nan’s eyes close, she thinks of Sleeping Beauty, though she’s far past the age for that comparison. She remembers the description of everyone in the castle falling asleep, the entire household cast under a slumber spell, even a fly in the pantry. Perhaps that is why, at the border between awake and dreaming, she finds the boy leaning over to kiss her forehead with lips like ice. She opens her eyes but must still be sleeping, because he is dropping petals over her body; they drift slowly from his narrow fingers, like a flower snow.

  BAY Bay is a protection against witches, the devil, thunder, and lightning. The withering of a bay tree is a sign of death, but a healthy bay tree is a symbol of resurrection. Bay leaves placed under your pillow ensure pleasant dreams.

  Bay dreams all night of people she has never known and will never meet. They say words she won’t remember in the morning, present her with tokens she cannot keep. It sounds disturbing, but it isn’t. Karl drifts by, sullen; he pauses long enough to whisper in her ear. Bay, in her sleep, wipes at the mosquito buzzing there. She’ll remember the strange dream of Karl pouring words into her as though she were a cup, but she’ll never remember what he said. This will be all right upon waking, as it is in sleep. He treads softly in his bare feet, not letting the ground shake her awake, as if he cares. Stella appears as well. “Don’t forget to tell them,” she says, which Bay remembers, waking with the strange sensation that the words have been spoken and it was the voice that awoke her in the small clearing, her special pla
ce. But it’s one of those awakenings that is still a dream; for an old woman stands there, not Mavis or Ruthie or Nan, the other one; she disappears like a drop of water in the sun.

  Bay sits in the grass damp with dew, a few blades stuck to her face; she scratches her ear. One has to be careful of deer ticks, though she hasn’t been careful so far. She inspects her arms, her legs, her feet, picking off the squashed blades of grass, wondering if she has ruined Ruthie’s beautiful dress. Upon inspection, Bay is pleased that in one of life’s little miracles, the dress has survived the careless night undamaged.

  What is that smell, anyway? Bay can’t believe her solution for dealing with the stink most of the summer has been to basically ignore it. Her feet hurt when she walks across the weeds with their toothy leaves guarding the forest’s perimeter, but she doesn’t have to go far into the forbidden wood before she sees the deer carcass, mostly bones now, interlocked like a sculpture with bits of dangling pelt.

  Bay bites her lip and blinks, stepping away from the stench, backing right into the sharp point of a branch, which causes her to feel trapped in a fairy tale, the kind where trees attack, but that notion is quickly replaced by the scent of something sweet, which she investigates by simply turning around to discover the August-ripe apples, plump and red.

  How can summer be over so soon? She has not gone to the river often enough, she has not eaten enough s’mores, she has not gotten tired of sitting on the rocker, watching fireflies, she has not grown weary of the hot days and short nights.

  Bay feels sad at the thought of returning to school, but she’s made no other plans, and besides, she can’t abandon Thalia. Truth be told, she actually likes some of her classes. This year she’s taking a course in cake decorating (“We didn’t have classes like that when I was a girl,” her Nana said). She also likes other things about fall: wearing sweaters, making squash soup and apple pie. She even likes Halloween, though when she was young, Bay hated the way she woke the next morning to find her jack-o’-lantern smashed, the porch decorations torn. Now she enjoys thinking of ways to trick the tricksters, watching through dark windows as the smashed pumpkins explode with water, or how, when they bend to write mean words on the sidewalk, they discover their own names written in chalk. Sometimes she gets them wrong, but she likes to watch them run. She likes to watch them squeal away in the dark. She likes to make them afraid. It’s not very nice, but she puts up with them all year, and she deserves one night for revenge.