Shadow Garden

by Alexandra Burt

  Penelope was joining her life midstream but something clicked in place. There was only so much the rooms of her mind could hold and she had reached the limit: stuff propped up to the ceilings, all those lies she had told, all those sins sat stacked, tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, had come to seek her out, had sat in waiting all those years, getting ready to strike.

  When they moved into Hawthorne Court, after her father shook his head at the size of the house, her mother jokingly said we have to live somewhere.

  Penelope couldn’t live in her mind any longer.

  “Hear me out,” Penelope said to her mother then. “Hear me out.”

  40

  DONNA

  Like the corridors in this house winding endlessly around corners just to end up in front of a door, my mind has arrived at a haunting concept. Like a flower opening its petals in slow motion, one of those time-lapse videos, that’s what it feels like. Here it goes: Something shocking happens; the mind shoves it into some remote corner of the unconscious but then it bobs up to the surface as if the anchor holding it in place has detached itself. It breaks through the surface and floats. Like a corpse. But how authentic is it?

  More fragments have returned, and I want to believe I have a rich and detailed memory of that night. It’s over the top, it has a tinge of Victorian asylum horror flick to it all, but it feels real enough.

  * * *

  • • •

  It took us the better part of the night to get Penelope to talk. Not talk-talk, not a coherent stream of words, but a response. There wasn’t much she said, and that was the challenging part, but we went at it for hours. We tried, over and over. We didn’t know how to fix anything because we didn’t know what was broken.

  I felt like someone was pushing a pillow over my face.

  “Is she all right, Edward?” I whispered. “Is she really all right? She has no injuries?”

  Edward nodded. I was taken aback by his hands, the way they were clasped as if he’d been praying, fingers interlaced.

  “Are you certain she doesn’t have any injuries?”

  “None.”

  “She’ll be fine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we going to ask her what happened?”

  “If we do . . .” Edward said, letting his hands spring apart, but he never finished the sentence.

  I turned to Penelope.

  “It’s okay, Penny. It’s okay,” I kept repeating. “Tell us what happened. Just tell us. Who is the woman and what happened? We can’t make sense of it, you have to talk to us. Penny, please, talk to us.”

  Penelope stared off into the distance, her face cold and frozen. We tried for hours. In between she rested, closed her eyes and when her breath turned steady, Edward and I stepped outside the room. We stood in front of her door, where I cried, and Edward told me to pull it together. We whispered, hushed words of accidents and cars and police, and then we argued over what to do next and the conversation turned to lawyers.

  “What do we do? Oh my God, what do we do now?” I said, words escaping with every breath in huffs of fear and panic.

  “It was an accident. I don’t know what happened but it was an accident. We need to find out where it happened, maybe we can do something,” Edward said.

  “Do something?”

  “Yes, do something.”

  “What’s there to be done?” I asked.

  “Her phone,” Edward said, and his eyes lit up.

  “What?”

  “Her phone. Where is it? Did you see it? There might be . . . I don’t know . . . I’ll have to check, did she use, you know, maybe she used her GPS. OnStar, does she use OnStar?” He sounded incoherent, so unlike him, a torrent of thoughts, so unfamiliar in his usually steady voice. The rock had turned into a quivering mess. “I think I can look it up, see where she’s been. We have to find her phone. That’s it. We need her phone.”

  We heard Penelope through the door moaning in her sleep.

  “You go check. I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “Should I turn on the news?”

  “It’s the middle of the night. Nothing will be on the news.”

  “What if no one knows?”

  We said nothing after that.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had no recollection of falling asleep. I woke on the couch in the living room to a noise. A clatter of a chain, maybe the garage door? I couldn’t be sure. I remembered Edward had given me pills to calm down. He was nowhere to be seen. I rushed to Penelope’s room. She stirred. Helpless, like a child, her face so young and the shirt I put on her had sheep on it. Sheep. As I sat on the bed and swiped her still-wet hair off her forehead, I cried.

  “Pea, we need to talk. Can you talk to me?”

  The nickname from her childhood was supposed to soothe her. Never before had I attempted to con her into a false sense of safety, but there was a dead woman in my garage. She needed to understand what she had done. I can honestly say that there was no moral judgment, it was merely an assessment. See what you’ve done. Maybe that was what she needed to hear? Maybe she didn’t understand the implications, the consequences of her actions.

  “Pea, do you remember what happened? Tell me about the woman, tell me what happened?”

  Her eyes were empty.

  “That woman, the woman in the car, in the garage. Who is she?”

  No reaction.

  “Pea, I need you to talk to me. We can’t fix this if we don’t know what happened. I need to know where you were. I’m trying to help you. So is Dad. Dad is here for you, Penny, we are here for you. Please talk to me, please.”

  Penelope’s eyes opened. “Hear me out,” she said. She attempted to sit up and I folded a pillow behind her back. There was this moment when she took in a deep breath and then held it as if she refused to take another. She stuttered at first but then she caught her stride, her voice low with a trace of rasp and much more determination than her frail body suggested. “I did a horrible thing,” she said. Her eyes darted as if she saw this room for the first time. How did I end up here, her eyes seemed to say.

  “Tell me what you did. Tell me what happened.”

  “I want to turn myself in. Take me to the police.”

  I knew Penelope. I knew my daughter. There was no convincing her otherwise once she was determined to go through with something.

  “Tell me what happened, Pea,” I said.

  “I’m not telling anyone but the police.”

  “Tell me what happened,” I insisted.

  “You’re just going to mess it all up. Call the police.”

  “You know what, I think I know what we’re going to do. We’ll get you some paper. You write it down, okay? Write it all down. Remember, the therapist told you, once you write it down, it’ll be okay.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “However it works, Penny,” I said and watched her jerk as my voice went up an octave, “I don’t care. Get it off your chest. If that’s what you need, that’s what we’re going to do.” I rummaged through her desk, ripped open drawers. A notebook, a pen. “Here,” I said and pushed them hard against her chest. “Write it down. I’m begging you.”

  Penelope had closed her eyes as if she were resting before the inevitable downfall, preparing for a final blow.

  “I’ll get your father,” I said and shut the door behind me.

  In the hallway I stood and my heart was about to explode in my chest.

  “I want to go to the police,” Penelope screamed from her room.

  The faint sound from before, this time I was sure. Chains pulling the garage door. I waited for a final rattle of the door coming to rest on the metal beams but there was none. I looked out the hallway window, down the driveway. Red lights turned into white and the jeep appeared and looped around the driveway, toward Pres
ton Hallow Road.

  I thought about opening the window. I wanted to open it, call out to Edward, come back. We can’t fix this but we can do the right thing. In a vanishing second I reached for it, opened, then slammed it shut. We are in too deep, I thought. So deep we’ll never get out of it.

  In her room Penelope cried out with such force that I feared for her lucidity, no longer considered her sane, and I thought she won’t come back from this, this is the equivalent of the boy’s crushed skull, a life of existing in some half world of derangement.

  I couldn’t move, could only watch Edward drive off in Penelope’s car. And next to him in the seat was the faint outline of a body.

  * * *

  • • •

  I now know where I went wrong. The night I watched Penelope retrieve the key from the soil like a thief in the night. We found out later, she’d met up with friends on a hill a few miles down from our house. It was a cul-de-sac, undeveloped with half-paved roads and crooked streetlamps and large parcels of land with orange flags sticking out of the soil. Penelope and her friends broke into a house that was under construction. All the other teenagers with her were from other schools, we knew none of the parents.

  I drove to the house after, in the morning before the sun came up. There were empty beer cans propped up and an old office chair sat in the dirt. Someone had dumped an old grill with missing wheels. There were condoms strewn about the area, flattened in the road. I couldn’t enter the house because there was yellow tape tied to wooden poles sticking out of the ground, but there were shards of bottles with labels still intact—Captain Morgan with the picture of a pirate, KFC buckets, and cigarette butts—and the house was vandalized. I looked through a broken window; the damage they’d done boggled the mind.

  “Penny, I saw what you did,” I told her later. “What do you think is going to happen now?”

  “It wasn’t me, you know. I wasn’t even doing anything.”

  “How do you not know that was wrong? Penelope, tell me you knew better.”

  “Well, you raised me.”

  It was this teenager logic, and what could I say? Yes, I had raised her. Edward called the chief of police to withhold Penelope’s name but names weren’t mentioned at all because they were minors. I asked Edward about the yellow tape—Doesn’t that mean it’s a crime scene?—and he said there was blood. “Was someone hurt?” I asked and held my breath.

  “It wasn’t human blood,” Edward said, and I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

  Edward footed the entire bill to have the house fixed and he paid for paint and the labor to have the walls redone. He threw in free landscaping and the builder didn’t press charges. Police were instructed to do frequent drive-bys and cameras were put up.

  “She gets caught up in things, Donna,” Edward said. “Those kids she was with don’t exactly come from stellar homes. You just need to keep an eye on her, keep her busy.”

  I couldn’t imagine Penelope partaking in vandalism when she had spent most of her life in a house like the one she had helped destroy. Had she not lived in luxury, in a home that a flier on the Grand Tour of Homes called the elegance of past generations combined with modern updates? Why destroy what sheltered you, why so much anger?

  I found Penelope’s clothes from that night stuffed behind the washing machine. There was blood on her jeans, as if someone had wiped hands in a sideways motion over the thighs. I disposed of them. It haunted me and I turned it over in my mind for days. In my panic I wondered—and I’m ashamed to say it—but I went out back and counted the cats but there was no way to keep track of them, anything could have happened to the ones that went missing and I didn’t have an accurate count to begin with.

  I allowed myself to go there and then I closed that door. That, out of all moments, that was when I should have done something.

  * * *

  • • •

  Hear me out, Penelope said. Let me confess, she said. Let’s go to the police, she said.

  I knew what she was capable of. Birds of a feather, like calls to like. She’d done it this time. Though Edward had mentioned lawyers, we both knew no money in the world could fix this. It was beyond anything she had ever done.

  Hear me out. I want to go to the police.

  I needed a chair. A certain chair. If it was too short, it would just get pushed out of the way. In the library, below the window, sat a ladder-back chair, the thickness of the horizontal slats balancing out the height, one with its back higher than the doorknobs in the house. Carrying the chair upstairs, I hardly felt its weight.

  Penelope’s room was dark, her body a faint bundle underneath the covers. She must have calmed down, must have fallen asleep. Maybe that’s what she needed, some rest, a reset of her mind so she could get back to her senses. I tilted the chair back on its legs and secured it in place. If Penelope pushed from the inside, the pressure of the door would wedge it even deeper, making it impossible to open the door. That was the plan.

  I went downstairs and I waited.

  My phone vibrated.

  Wait for me it’s going to be okay we are safe

  What has become of us, I thought. We are not safe, we haven’t been safe for a while. And we’ll never be safe again. My life rushed before me, it felt like a dream in which Penelope was forever five years old as if that was the tipping point in this whole thing. What if I talk to her, make her understand? I imagined entering her room, draping a robe around her—it’s okay, Pea, everything will be okay, just listen to me, okay, just listen to me—one more try, I said to myself, one more try. What was done was done, there was no going back. I will get her to realize this was much bigger than her, bigger than the dead woman.

  I went back upstairs, forced the chair out from under the doorknob. Inside her room, I slid my hand upward over the duvet. “Penny, wake up,” I said but the duvet was soft and pliable. There was no body underneath those sheets.

  Penelope was gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  I don’t know this happened until I play it again in my mind. It’s almost a parlor trick but that’s exactly how it feels.

  I ran through the house. Through every room, opened every closet door. From basement to attic, I searched. No one can imagine how long it takes to search a home that size. All those floors, all those rooms, those closets, under every bed.

  The adrenaline that was going to make my heart explode. There was only one place left I hadn’t searched: the pool house.

  41

  EDWARD

  Just a deer,” Edward had told the officer. “It got trapped out back, dragging furniture around. Sorry for bothering you.” He couldn’t fathom how he had done it—the moment the police showed up, before he knew the extent of it all, the way he had played it off. That officer had been here, he had been close, and they had been so close to being found out. Edward had played it off, had done it so well, as if deceit was in his blood.

  * * *

  • • •

  Edward heard the crying and pleading and carrying on through the door. For hours Donna tried to talk sense into Penelope. He didn’t want to go in and add to it all, he was only going to make it worse.

  Outside the room, Edward and Donna argued. It bordered on a screaming match and he pulled her downstairs so Penelope wouldn’t hear them. He dissolved benzos in a cup of water and Donna gulped it down and before long she was out, her upper body leaning against a pillow on the couch.

  Somehow in that moment he gained courage. Resolve. That’s when it all began, the collusion. That’s when he made the decision to do what he did, for no other reason but to fix what had gone wrong and what was wrong was the dead body in their garage.

  He came to the conclusion that there was no OnStar in Penelope’s car but he found her phone. He dropped it twice as he skimmed over all those numbers and addresses and browser searches and it
took him a while to figure out she was at White Rock Lake Park right before she attempted to locate the nearest emergency room. And he kept telling himself you can still call the police. Somewhere down the road, at some moment in the future, a lawyer might argue: Did Mr. Pryor not call the police after he tended to his daughter? Did he not do the right thing? Imagine yourself in his shoes. He rendered aid and then he called the police.

  Stop it, he told himself. That’s a lie. His hands held a phone, he was capable of dialing the number. He just didn’t do it.

  * * *

  • • •

  While Donna was passed out on the couch, Edward entered Penelope’s room. The hardwood floor lay shiny and perfect in a herringbone pattern and he stared at that awful gaudy Victorian dollhouse she had loved more than the others, more than the garden cottage, more than the princess castle. The floor was sturdy and solid, yet Edward felt the ground underneath his feet give way.

  That dollhouse. Inside was a small and tidy world where everything was in order, eagerly arranged and consciously moved about, organized to perfection. The only world Penelope ever had control over. Why didn’t he catch on earlier? How everything had its rightful place in those houses, how she maintained order while her mind slipped. She was his. His DNA. Whatever happened to her happened to him, always had. As he raised his arms and folded his hands behind his neck, a small gasp left his lips. He began to cry. It felt good, like a release, like guilt was flowing out of him.

  Penelope was asleep, her breathing deep and peaceful. He stared at her, thought of many things, in rapid succession, tidbits of images, never long-drawn-out scenes, then his mind switched to a faint childhood memory. Ashes deter snails and slugs in gardens—his mother was an avid gardener—and after sprinkling ashes on a compost heap, he watched worms slink along his palm and up his fingers. What had become of that part of his life? His family didn’t see a need for three cars or ten bedrooms, they were pragmatic and salt-of-the-earth people who didn’t understand the concept of housekeepers and staff and had declined everything he had ever offered them: cruises and houses and vacations. This was a gloomy memory altogether, and he tried to stay in the moment, think about his next move, but the corners of his mind were not nearly sharp enough.