Shadow Garden

by Alexandra Burt

  I brace myself and unfold the first letter.

  * * *

  • • •

  The letter is about the day of the party. It’s nothing like I remember it. The story was, her story was, that the boy left our property, and she didn’t know what happened because she wasn’t there. Heart in my mouth, I don’t have to look hard for the next memory: We encountered the boy after that night, years later at a gas station, in the backseat of his mother’s car. He stared at Penelope, a subtle tremor about him as if he was in a state of constant nodding. I mostly remember how untroubled Penelope’s face was after she spotted him. Neither of us mentioned him.

  I stop reading because I don’t want to know more. No, I’m lying to myself. I don’t want to read what I already know. If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras, is what they say.

  26

  PENELOPE

  All that rowdiness and how they’d been throwing toys and rocks into the pool and then there were the shards of glass. Leaving the property and going to the barn had happened quickly. Penelope was unable to hone in on what made her think of it at first, but after she had convinced Gabriel to go, had alluded to some sort of gratification—you’ll see—there wasn’t much more consideration or understanding of the reason. It was something to do, a spur of the moment.

  It took Gabriel and Penelope a while to walk to the neighboring property. The road turned into a field. A farmhouse appeared, with a small barn to the left. Penelope imagined horses huddled together like penguins in the cold.

  “Where are we going?” Gabriel asked and cut through the air with a stick like a sword chopping off the tops of the grass. He was sweaty from walking and his hair had parted, exposing a flat, pink area of skin on his temple.

  “You’ll see,” Penelope said.

  To the right, a few minutes’ walk, was a pond on their property behind a line of trees and the field was rugged with solid pieces of dirt and she wore sandals and the grass was high and bugs would bite at her and make her itch for days, and so she took Gabriel to the barn instead.

  “I want to know where you’re taking me.”

  “First you say it’s boring at my house and now you’re being a baby about having some fun.”

  “I’m not a—”

  Penelope began to regret having set the whole thing in motion. She prided herself on being convincing, had more often than not succeeded in making people do things they’d never consider doing, but here she was trying to talk some kid into getting into a little bit of trouble. And he was balking.

  “Are you in or not?”

  “How far is it?”

  “It’s not far.”

  “We can’t be gone too long.”

  “Will you stop complaining?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “How old are you? Five?”

  Boys didn’t like to be called pussies, even in a roundabout way. That usually shut them up.

  “Slide open the door,” she said and pointed at the barn.

  “What’s in there?”

  Penelope stepped past him and opened the barn door and everything came to life. Hooves pounded the ground, a dozen or so muscled creatures rocked back and forth in their stables, wondering what the late-night visit was all about. She had never imagined this place to be so dark, its corners so murky.

  Penelope’s imagination had already painted a somewhat threatening picture of horses but her mind hadn’t accounted for the crosswind rattling the metal roof, the tree branches grating like giant nails against the corrugated building. Every gust of wind a cold hand reaching for her. It smelled like in a zoo but there was also a scent of leather and hay, and then another layer, buried much deeper in the wood and the floor and the barn itself. A damp aroma of ammonia. Feral.

  The horses were huddled in the corner of their individual stalls. Penelope singled out the first one on the right and the hinges creaked as she pinned the lever to an iron hook on the wall. The horse, white with brown flecks, tossed back its head.

  This is just a game, she told herself. A game that doesn’t have a name.

  Gabriel gasped behind her as the horse in the stall jerked.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Penelope said more to herself than the horse or him. She unlatched the bottom part of the stable door.

  Gabriel was easily fooled by her words, but the horse not so much. Animals have a smartness about them, a primal intelligence, but to Penelope she was powerful by showing the horse how unafraid she was, she displayed strength by overcoming her fear, by exposing herself. But that wasn’t how things turned out.

  The horse turned its head toward them, the eyes rolled backward. She moved closer and the horse blew air through its nostrils. What happened next wasn’t planned or premeditated. She knew the meaning of that word: it meant specific intent to commit a crime for some period of time, however short, before the actual crime. It was more like getting to a fork in the road and turning the wrong way.

  Gabriel stepped past her into the stall. He spoke gently to the horse, with innocence he extended his hand to the base of its neck, down where it turned into the withers. Penelope hated how fearless he was, how undaunted by the animal.

  She stepped forward but the horse could tell she was terrified, regardless how confident she pretended to be. The horse knew that she was just an exposed quivering mass of nerves and twitching muscles.

  It was like a movie: the rafters moaned, spiderwebs touched her arms, something stirred by her feet. Penelope exploded into motion and stumbled out of the stall and slammed both doors shut, but that made everything worse. So much noise, hooves, and dull thumps against the walls and then a crack. She imagined the horse kicking the stall door, splitting the wood, breaking it open and pushing its way out and coming at her. Gabriel was in there, that realization came to her after, that the stall was small, barely enough room for the horse to move or a boy to find a safe spot. She screamed, stretched out her arms to open both doors and let Gabriel out, but they were out of her reach. Not one more step could she take toward this feral animal and the only thing that remained was the sound of hooves. Too late to do or say anything.

  Penelope ran home.

  Later, in her room, she picked little flecks of sawdust and wood chips off her shoes, and held the curly bits in the palm of her hand. As her mother questioned her about Gabriel, Penelope stole glances at the dollhouse, the one with the miniature ash bucket the size of a raisin and andirons shaped like cats, the tiny blow poke, and the fireplace where she had placed the coiled pieces of wood from the barn. She wanted them out in the open for her to see but for no one else to know.

  She didn’t remember falling asleep in the closet but that’s where she woke with a start when her mother called her name. Her sinuses were dry, it hurt to take a breath. An annoying pressure nagged on her bladder. Her heart raced.

  How upset her mother was, how she felt the party had been ruined. Her father knew what she had done that night, she couldn’t explain how she ended up with that conclusion, it was just a feeling. First, it was the way he stared at her, then how he stopped making eye contact.

  Her father sent her to a farm for therapy. There were horses. She didn’t have to handle them until her third week. She couldn’t even look at them. They had to take care of them, feed them, brush them, take them out to a pasture. Penelope learned that horses feel energy, though she knew that already. The horses bristled at her, didn’t want to be brushed or petted. She refused and raged until the doctors agreed to send her home. Another disappointment. She tended to disappoint.

  27

  DONNA

  Gabriel. I force myself to call him by his name. He had come up in conversations with Edward in the aftermath of the whole incident but the consensus had been that he wandered off to the neighboring property, entered the stables, was kicked by a horse, and broke three ribs. Suffered a blo
w to the head.

  There was a newspaper article calling his injuries horrific. Edward told me the details: there was a forehead torn open. A crushed skull. Weeks in the hospital and major surgery—metal plates were inserted into his skull—what’s the word, it won’t come to me—they removed his scalp, a saw made an incision and the brain lay bare to allow it to swell without putting pressure on itself. Craniotomy. That’s it. A craniotomy.

  Even then, I felt as if Edward had mentioned the medical particulars to me as a means of punishment, as if I could have done anything to prevent this. Did he know Penelope had left Gabriel inside the stall with a thousand pounds of ill-behaved stallion? Because of Penelope, Gabriel ended up with a broken skull, a scar on his forehead, and weeks of his parents wondering if he would ever be the same. He wasn’t the same. For one, he never told anyone about that night. Maybe he didn’t remember. Maybe he was afraid of Penelope.

  * * *

  • • •

  I place the pages on top of one another and fold them back together. Her confessions. What did she call it? I unfold them again: The following are my recollections as to what happened on the night in question. It’s hard to gauge it but there are ten maybe fifteen more. More recollections. More confessions.

  The next letter is different. For one, there are no complete sentences, it’s not neatly written like the first one. It strikes me as a note one takes in the middle of the night, in the dark, as not to forget a dream. The handwriting is different, too. Shaky. I read the words but at first I don’t comprehend them. They are disjointed and out of order but I catch on quickly, so quickly in fact that in hindsight I realize they’ve made sense all along.

  Penelope, when she was younger, spoke in riddles. I call them riddles but they were the attempts of a toddler to communicate. A color wasn’t a color but she assigned an object to it, banana meant yellow, like a placeholder, that sort of thing. I knew what the words meant. And I know what this next letter is. Not just part of a story, not something separate. It reveals her essence, how in her mind, wrong decisions demanded to be made. The letter is titled The Night from Hell.

  I allow it to play out, to unfold, like scenes in a movie.

  28

  PENELOPE

  In the cubicle next to Penelope, Jeanine Haney played jazz incessantly. Every time Penelope passed by the radio, that unsightly box of cheap chrome, she glared at Jeanine’s back in that dreadful cardigan. The way she occasionally peeked around the corner of the partition, with her narrow gray eyes, that stubby nose that might look cute on a kid but hideous on a grown woman.

  The jazz version of Porgy and Bess, over and over. Penelope didn’t know much about music, but it was an observation on her part that jazz was rather random, the musicians just got caught up in an arbitrary scale that they, for some inexplicable reason, couldn’t abandon. The notes gyrated in her brain, tore at her. Summertime, and the living is easy. The volume was low for the most part but she couldn’t tune it out. Though tempted to tell Jeanine to turn the radio off, Penelope didn’t dare because Jeanine was her sponsoring broker and Penelope couldn’t risk coming across as rude.

  The moment Jeanine was on the phone, Penelope shut down her computer, locked her desk, and left the building. It was Friday, the first of the month, and she realized the rent was due for the cubicle she had picked in the far corner of the first floor of the office building. She’d pay it online, later, but was worried she might forget. Maybe she should write it down, make a note of it.

  She had a lot of time invested in this real estate thing and it had been fun for a while. Even her father thought it was a good idea but Penelope had been having doubts. She didn’t mind floating from one career interest to another, was used to losing interest quickly, and had never seen it as failure on her part, but she couldn’t fathom being locked into this job for the rest of her life. Her parents helped her financially every time she asked, had just bought her a Jeep Grand Cherokee a couple of months ago, a reward for seeing something through, those were her mother’s words. “And you can’t show houses pulling up in a car older than a couple of years. No one will take you seriously.”

  Penelope should’ve known there were strings attached. Right after her mother handed her the car keys, an ultimatum was given: one month to move out and . . . there was no further clarification as to the consequences.

  She had been living with her parents, and their quarrels were tedious, draining, mostly unwarranted. Especially with her mother. That very morning they had gotten into an argument. As always, it started with something insignificant—burned toast or a careless dish left in the sink by Penelope—and every word Donna said was in turn a trigger to Penelope, that was a given, and before they knew it, it had gotten out of hand.

  “Don’t be such a bitch about everything,” Penelope said, and that was the exact word that escalated every single argument, as if it signaled they weren’t much better than some common women arguing in the streets. Penelope loved using words her mother considered crass.

  “Don’t take that tone with me. After everything I’ve done—”

  “I never asked you do to anything for me.”

  “I’m so done with this. Why don’t you just leave if I’m such a terrible mother?”

  “I’m leaving, trust me, no one wants to hear this bitching every day.”

  “Then leave or I—”

  “Or what?” Penelope had asked.

  “Find an apartment. Move out. For good this time.”

  Penelope knew that they’d never kick her out on the streets but she couldn’t be too sure now that she seemed stable, real estate license and all. She argued with her mother, had she not finished all required classes, had she not passed the final exams, had she not taken the licensing examination, had she not submitted her fingerprints on time? Penelope made it seem like she was juggling it all with newfound competence and a newly acquired sense of time management when in reality she had enrolled in an online course which was foolproof and even scheduled her tests and appointments for her. All she had to do was study and show up on time.

  The month was up in a few days and her mother was going to bring it up. That thought, that loop of her mother questioning her the moment she walked through the door—have you looked at apartments, have you sold a house yet, why is it only a cubicle and not an office?—the anticipation of another quarrel had begun hours ago, out of nowhere, like a lightning strike. It was followed by a hop and a skip inside her chest, her heart pounding. Everything drilled at her, the idle chatter, the ringing phones. That damn jazz music. Sometimes she was convinced she was having a heart attack, could really get caught up in that thought, which made her chest tighten.

  When Penelope was a child, her father had handed her his stethoscope and she had listened to her heart. It was the day she needed stitches in her hand from the broken window. The stethoscope was meant to be a distraction and so she listened to her heartbeat but it was frightening, how this thing—it’s just a muscle, her dad had told her—inside her body flailed about. The cadence, the power of it all, something she had no control over, thump ba-boom, ba-boom, thump ba-boom, ba-boom. Every time she thought about that sound, she bristled.

  In the wake of getting her real estate license, Penelope had experienced a surge of self-confidence and attempted to wean herself off her anxiety medication. Freeing herself had become more and more important lately, though she didn’t quite understand what that was all about. She had quit cold turkey as if she had to prove something to herself. The results were heart palpitations so powerful they felt like drums inside her chest, long strides at a quick pace, and before she knew what was happening, she had a full-blown panic attack. She went online and read that she was supposed to wean herself off the medication slowly, over days or even weeks. She had three pills left. She’d half one, quarter the rest. Ten days from today she’d be good to go, that’s what she told herself. This time it would wor
k. She’d begun taking anxiety pills years ago, but she had promised herself she would see it through, she wouldn’t waver, hell or high water. Start meditating, or yoga, or whatever it was they say helps with anxiety. Come tomorrow she’d be busy with appointments, open houses, and showings. Nothing to worry about.

  The exit appeared and Penelope took it absentmindedly. She wanted to close the blinds and draw the curtains, prepare a bath with those expensive bath salts she had taken from her mother’s bathroom, wanted to feel the suds, the warmth. Half a bottle of wine was the sweet spot, then a nap. The fantasy came to a grinding halt: she thought about her mother’s meddling, though she had to admit that it might just be concern on her part, yet it felt like she couldn’t even take a single breath on her own. One day at a time she could manage if she could avoid her mother. How she hated living at home, even for just a while now and then, but she couldn’t argue with the fact that nothing nagged at her, no bills, no rent, no responsibilities. Except the cubicle rent, something she kept repeating in her mind over and over, not wanting to forget.

  * * *

  • • •

  Penelope parked her car in the lot of a grocery store. The green pills rested in the palm of her hand, pale rectangles with grooves, easy to break apart. The thumping inside her chest reminded her of the hooves of a horse and that made her heart go even wilder. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, her brain wasn’t involved, more a reflex, going out with a bang, one more drink for the road, one last hurrah before a dry spell. She consoled herself; this was the last time, I will be free.