Shadow Garden

by Alexandra Burt

  A kayak leaning in the corner. Followed by a reaction, like a glow stick breaking, and I know that this is where I will find the answers I need. How I ended up with that thought I don’t know, it’s like one of those hallways in the house, first I’m lost in the dark, then I’ve arrived in the light. I open the kayak compartment and within it is a plastic bag covered in dust, dead bugs, and round silky spider eggs. I grab the bag and unfold it, reach inside. It’s full of pages ripped from one of those spiral notebooks. Penelope’s letters. The ones the therapist told her to write.

  A spear of light penetrates the window of the pool house. I must duck down, crouch between wall and kayak, or he’ll see me. I don’t know if my hip will cooperate, I dread the speed with which I have to move, but I must hide and do so quickly. I crouch down. A whimper escapes my mouth. The pain has another unpleasant side to it, there’s nausea, too. Searing agony radiates from hip to knee, leaving me wanting to roll up in a ball, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to get up. Light travels across the wall. Voices are calling out, hello hello hello, but maybe that’s my imagination. There are footsteps now, I’m not imagining those, and a light beam stabs through the dark. A shadow by the window. I get up, my body fits perfectly behind the kayak and I stand at attention like a soldier, arms by my side to keep me from being discovered. My brain is straining for any sound of approaching feet.

  “Security.” I hear a man’s voice outside, deep, dark, meant to intimidate. Not Edward, someone else. “Anyone there?”

  “I looked there, I told you already.” Edward’s voice.

  “Any broken doors?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Why did you even come? No one called you.”

  Edward is upset, he wanted to deal with this alone, didn’t want anyone to think there’s a prowler on the loose. I’m catching on to him.

  “I saw a flashlight. We’re required to check when something suspicious—”

  “That was me, we’ve been over this. Never mind. I’m fine. You can go.”

  “I’ll have to write a report.”

  “Write your report. But go. Everything’s all right.”

  “But you said—”

  “I’m allowed to walk around my own property with a flashlight, right? I thought there was someone in the pool house. Obviously there’s not. Thanks for checking but we’re done here.”

  Say it, Edward. Say it. My wife is here to hold me accountable.

  Without warning, I’m blinded by a beam. The sudden shift digs into my retina and I stand there, explosions of lights going off behind my lids. Everything goes dark. I’d give anything to step out into the light, to see Edward’s face. Vera pops into my head, the thought of when I tell Vera the story later, I’ll say I came upon him in the most unlikely of circumstances.

  I wait for a long time. When I dare look out the pool house window, I see light in the upstairs bedroom. The security guard has left, down the road brake lights flicker, then disappear.

  I have trouble focusing. Everything presents itself in shades of gray, like strokes from a charcoal stick. Except the pool, the pool is a shade of sapphire when I so clearly recall the tiles being sky blue. How long has it been since I lived here? Summer and fall went by at Shadow Garden but maybe it all blurred into one long stretch of time and there was another fall and another summer and somehow I have forgotten? Stung by a spindle, put to sleep. Was that a story I used to read to Pea or am I confused? How easily I assign Pea to the toddler, Penny to the child, and Penelope to the teenager, no longer sure if the names caused her to change or the change in her caused us to call her by different names. Everything is off—time, space, all of it.

  I walk toward the house. Marleen pops into my head. What will she do once she finds my bed empty? It’s still dark. I have plenty of time left. The house is a big rambling monstrosity and I will bunker down somewhere. Read the letters. Put it all together.

  There are things Edward doesn’t know. About Penelope. About this house. Like the fact that playrooms are perfect hiding places.

  24

  DONNA

  The longer I’ve been in the house, the bolder I’ve become. The door to the playroom creaks open. The sound travels through corridors that snake in each direction. I enter. The shadows are long on the wainscoted walls, the light fixture sits flush against the ceiling, and the Victorian prints give the room a touch of whimsy: fairies and frogs and dragonflies. Dolls in strollers are tucked under blankets, an art easel sits in the corner with pastel chalks still resting on its ledge.

  There’s a rather peculiar story about this room and how it came into existence, given the fact Penelope was too old for a playroom by the time we moved here. It was designed with something in mind, but you have to know that to get the entire picture.

  Hawthorne Court was on the Holiday Tour of Homes, an event created for charity with tickets and people being bussed from one architecturally significant home to another. It was Christmas and I had hired decorators who put up a tree in each room, and every fireplace was decked with fir garlands and red bows. I came up with the idea to spread out my pageant gown including the sash on the bed in the master bedroom as if I had just slipped off stage and out of the dress. The story of the house was as important as the people living in it, not just craftsmanship, landscaping, and design, but the essence of who we were.

  But still I wanted more. I had put so much time into staging the house but I felt the need to stand out from the crowd. After all, there were so many beautiful homes on the list. I fabricated what I dubbed memory boxes and an entire playroom decorated like a childhood wonderland. The boxes were trunks with mementoes grouped by age: Penelope’s first pair of shoes, her first dress, her footprint in clay, her first drawing, her first attempts at writing letters—all those things you hang on to and can’t bring yourself to throw out. At the eleventh hour I concocted a teenage box, a spur-of-the-moment thing—the home tour was years after the housewarming party, Penelope was barely fifteen then—and I purchased a prom dress with a matching dried-flower bouquet, and a pair of shoes. I even scuffed the heels to make them appear as if a happy girl had danced through the night in them. I explained to Penelope that it was a make-believe space of childhood and adolescence.

  Months of planning and preparation but Penelope found the idea disgusting. I included her journals of teenage angst poetry with bad spelling because I was committing to a theme, that’s what I told her. I also wanted to display childlike drawings but Penelope’s were disturbing to say the least. Back in Florida, I came across one of her doodles, a girl in black crayon strokes with disproportionate limbs and hair spreading around the head but it wasn’t hair at all—so Penny told me when I asked—but waves, dark sketchy waves came out of the head of what looked like an alien. Not like ocean waves but more like a surge, twisted, gushing away from her brain. I threw it out, not because the waves unsettled me but because her answers later did.

  How does the girl feel about what’s coming out of her head?

  Penny said in a childlike voice, she’s happy. She loves it.

  Perhaps that explains why I myself ended up drawing a generic house with a pitched roof and trees and a fence. But the stark reality consisted of childhood meltdowns so violent I had to physically restrain her. I’d strategically wrap my arms around her, holding her like a rag doll. Her rage caught me off guard and while I rocked her, smoothing her hair and kissing her forehead, I didn’t trust her, never sure if her movements were attempts to get away or struggles to get closer.

  “What’s wrong?” Edward would ask whenever he caught the tail end of those moments and he’d throw me an icy look.

  “She’s upset. I don’t know why,” I’d say, one incident blending into another, not sure which one had reduced us to a teary heap on the floor.

  Edward, the man who held the life of patients in his hands every day, the man whose noble intentions were to treat burn victims
and put mangled limbs back together, was at a loss. In his eyes I was to blame.

  * * *

  • • •

  There’s another story that needs telling. In the aftermath of the housewarming party, Edward insisted Penelope get help. Not weekly therapist sessions but a place removed from her familiar environment. I don’t recall the selection process, Edward handled all the details. It sounded like some sort of summer camp, with horses and goats and the kids having to clean stables and brush the horses and feed the farm animals, having responsibilities for meal planning and keeping rooms organized, basically an exercise in accountability.

  I couldn’t imagine Penelope being comfortable in such an environment, I frowned at the thought of horses, knew Penelope was deathly afraid of them. I questioned the strict policies in place—no visits, no packages, not even letters or phone calls—but Edward wasn’t hearing any of my objections.

  “How did you come up with sending her to a horse farm?” I asked him.

  “It’s not a horse farm.”

  “I don’t know about this, Edward, I just don’t know.”

  “Stop undermining everything, it will do her good. She will learn a lot there.”

  “Are we allowed to visit?”

  “No visits. Leave it up to the professionals, Donna. Don’t try to do this yourself. It’s out of our hands.”

  “I don’t see why a phone call or a Sunday afternoon visit would do any damage.”

  “Those are the rules, Donna.”

  “I can’t imagine her having a good time. She’s not very outdoorsy.”

  “It’ll challenge her.”

  “Horses, Edward. What good will come of that?”

  “Maybe that’s the point. To teach her. To become better at things she’s not good at,” he said. He paused and for a second I waited for him to tell me something significant as if he knew facts I wasn’t privy to.

  “She doesn’t like horses,” I interjected, “and she’ll fall behind on her schoolwork. Are they offering summer classes? You know how competitive her school is. She’ll pay the price.”

  “Let’s not talk about paying a price, Donna. We’ll go down the wrong path quickly, trust me.”

  There were moments I was taken aback by Edward’s comments. Why was it that all of a sudden Penelope deserved this kind of extreme attention? Did he know something I didn’t, was he aware of things that remained hidden from me? I attempted to find out and called the therapist at the camp. During one conversation, I inquired about Penelope’s progress. He told me she was making headway, writing letters to her victims.

  “Victims?” I gasped. “What do you mean by victims?”

  “Don’t think of it as a crime, it’s a breakthrough actually. It’s her way of making amends, acknowledging people she’s wronged. That’s huge progress.”

  It took him all of two weeks to sing a different tune.

  “Penelope isn’t thriving in this environment as we thought she would. It would be best if she continued therapy while at home. On an outpatient basis.”

  “You think?” I replied.

  “I will send a letter outlining her therapy and how she should continue on.”

  “A letter to who?”

  “A therapist of your choosing,” he added, his voice urgent as if he expected me to interject somehow.

  “Do you keep files on her?” I asked, worried about someone finding out more than I knew about my own daughter. “What’s in those letters?”

  “I can’t share that with you.”

  “She’s a minor and I make decisions on her behalf every day. Where she goes to school, the friends she has, her diet, her entire life. If I feel, at any given point, she’s putting herself in danger, I have to intervene. If there’s anything I need to know, I think you are required to tell me.”

  “I can’t tell you about our conversations in detail. Penelope requested that those remain private. If there was any concern, rest assured, you’d be included in the conversation. There’s nothing really that I can share. We have clear guidelines as to the confidentiality between minors and—”

  “I think we’ve said everything that needed to be said.” I hung up the phone.

  The insolence, the audacity of this therapist, I thought. And I’ll never forgive Edward for having put her in such incompetent hands. Horses, of all things. What was Edward thinking?

  * * *

  • • •

  Penelope returned home the following week. She had lost ten pounds and was pale but seemed upbeat and in good spirits.

  It soon became apparent she had begun to retreat into herself even more than before, and the private child void of grand gestures or public displays of affection was now completely aloof. If you didn’t demand to be let into her world, you’d remain an outsider. I felt grief for the girl she used to be, her—

  I stop myself. Penelope was never easy and happy, never without trouble. I grieve the daughter I never had, I understand that now.

  After she returned home from the clinic, I witnessed her hurriedly tucking something underneath a pillow or sliding a piece of paper inside a book when I entered the room. I felt compelled to act. One day, while she was in the shower, I checked every trite hiding place I could think of: beneath the mattress, between books on her shelf, in her nightstand, at the bottom of the clothes hamper, I even rifled through her underwear drawer. I found nothing.

  What else was I supposed to do, how else was I going to find out—park at her school and keep an eye on her during recess as she stood huddled in a corner? Should I follow her to the mall and hide behind clothing racks, eavesdropping on her phone calls? What good would that do?

  Pure luck intervened. Weeks after she returned from that dreaded horse farm, in the middle of the night, while I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water, Penelope made her way down the stairs in the dark, her feet in sandals, flip as her foot hit the bottom of her heel, flop as it hit the ground. I watched her slide open the glass doors leading onto the terrace. It was a chilly night, March, and unseasonably cold, and I instinctively wanted to call out to her, just a mother reminding her child to wear a coat in the cold. She marched across the lawn, her arms crossed in front of her body, clutching something to her chest. The cotton fabric hugging her body made it clear that she had lost even more weight than I had thought. She entered the pool house but reappeared within seconds. Less than a minute and she was back in her room and in her bed. Judging by the speed with which it all occurred, she couldn’t have spent much time concealing anything.

  What do you do when you imagine the worst, at the same time realizing that once you know you cannot unknow? And so I didn’t go out to the pool house that night and not the following day. It took me three days of wringing my hands, but then I could no longer resist. I began to root through that old and grimy place, shabby floor of glossy terracotta tile that made it impossible to walk on with heels, pool supplies stacked in every corner and Adirondack chairs with peeled paint covered in spider webs.

  I searched every corner, behind every piece of wood leaning against the wall, went through the dusty bin with deflated pool toys covered in dead bugs. Nothing. I bumped into a wooden structure hanging off the ceiling and it made a half turn just to pirouette back into its original position. It was that old wooden kayak. I had seen it before but never so much as wasted a thought on its peculiarity, no lakes were nearby and that was odd but maybe it was just decoration, a flea market find or a leftover from a previous owner. It had a Martha’s Vineyard kind of feel in an authentic and vintage way and it dangled on a rope tied to a metal peg, swayed like a bicycle hanging off a heavy-duty steel hook. There was a compartment with a handle. I held the kayak in place with one hand and with the other I pulled the handle. It popped open. That’s where I found a plastic bag folded over twice with papers inside.

  I knew immediately those were the letters s
he’d written, her victim reparations, those declarations of guilt. Was I prepared to read something I would never be able to unread? I popped the compartment door back into place, knowing once I crossed that line, I had no way of remaining oblivious. The kayak swayed and the hook dislodged from the ceiling. I turned away and covered my eyes. When I opened them again, the kayak had come to rest against the wall, the bulkhead facing the corner. I took it as a sign and left it at that. I dusted myself off and left the kayak untouched in the corner, allowed it to lean in place as if it held up the entire structure and without it, my world would cave in.

  25

  DONNA

  I listen to the house and there’s not a sound to be heard. Edward must have returned to the bedroom but I’m no longer worried. I don’t think he ever set foot in this room, given the disgust he had voiced when I staged it. Here I am in Penelope’s playroom with the bag of letters I refused myself all those years ago.

  I pull one of Penelope’s childhood quilts from the top shelf of the closet, two chenille pillows and a blanket from the linen locker behind the door. Musty waves of mothball clouds come at me and a tinge of anger bobs up—the neglect Edward has allowed—but I spread them out on the floor though the blanket is dirty and unkempt. I need to rest. Following Edward around this house has taken a toll on my hip. Remembering the pain earlier from the pool house, I dip down with my pelvis in an anterior tilt and carefully lower myself so as to not aggravate my injury. I lie down and look up at the ceiling.

  My final days here, before Edward took me to Shadow Garden, when tiredness came in both forms, physical and mental, are not days I care to revisit. All those weeks and months when I was up all night and felt like I was melting into the walls, every night a useless wrangle of conflicting thoughts, but that’s not what this feeling is. Something else is happening.

  As I’m about to discover my daughter in ways I might regret, finding things out about her that I didn’t know, it finally comes to pass, stark and final: there will be no going back. But that’s not all, is it? I will also find out things about myself, shortcomings I will have to face. Having gained distance from Shadow Garden, I see another me. A second identity, not apart from me but like a layer on top of the person I know myself to be. It’s a double-edged sword in a way, finding out truths about yourself.