Shadow Garden

by Alexandra Burt

  Edward rushed to the edge of the stairs and looked down. The railing was intact, the spindles were in place—and why wouldn’t they be; this wasn’t a dilapidated back porch where people tumble over and fall to their deaths, this was a solid staircase—and he didn’t know what to make of that. Was there a logical explanation? There must be but he couldn’t think of one, he couldn’t explain it and he wasn’t going to try. He shut the door to Penelope’s room behind him.

  He never even thought about covering this up, had been in over his head when he found Penelope in the garage. There was nothing he could do to remedy this.

  He dialed 911.

  Q: 911. What’s your emergency?

  A: Yes, yes.

  Q: Sir, is this an emergency?

  A: Yes.

  Q: What’s the address of the emergency?

  A: The banister. They fell over the banister. Hurry up. 2011 Hawthorne Court.

  Q: What is your name? Explain to me what is going on. Who fell?

  A: Edward Pryor. My wife and daughter. They fell over the banister.

  Q: Are they breathing?

  A: My wife is. She’s breathing. I’m a doctor. Please hurry.

  Q: What about your daughter?

  A: She’s not breathing.

  Q: Can you perform CPR?

  A: I’m a doctor. My wife needs an ambulance. My daughter . . . there’s no need for CPR.

  Q: Sir? Please stay on the line. Are you there? Tell me what—

  A: Hurry.

  Q: Sir, please don’t hang—

  How was he going to explain this? And it dawned on him then that he didn’t know what to say about his whereabouts, his alibi. Such an ugly word. What would he say to the police about where he was when this happened? Don’t they play these recorded calls in court, ask the operator what they thought when they took the call, and if the person calling in the emergency sounded genuine? Normal on account of all the circumstances? Too calm? Too hysterical?

  Edward didn’t hear the ambulance coming. He didn’t know why but there must have been sirens, there always are. The sun was up and, so he imagined, the neighborhood was rubbernecking. The phone in his pocket didn’t vibrate. There were no calls, no voice mails, no texts. No one came over to check on them—they were friends but not that close.

  He knew the paramedics needed free rein of the scene but his body wouldn’t move. A pair of strong hands pulled Edward to the side. The medics wore black uniforms with neon stripes across their chests. They worked quickly, one pumped the manual ventilation bag and the other placed a central line in Donna’s forearm. She looked pale and limp.

  Three men in police uniforms. They didn’t ask many questions but when they did, the words just bounced right off him. All he said, and kept repeating over and over, was I don’t know and I found them this way and how did this happen.

  He caught sight of Penelope. Gloved hands placed her on top of white plastic that reminded him of Donna’s garment bags. She lay with arms stiff by her sides, head turned away from him. No one was rendering aid, no one was pumping her chest or administering fluids. White material bunched up by her sides. The blood drained from his face, and his forehead and cheeks and chin went slack as his pragmatic mind stumbled into reality; this was a body bag. One of the officers stepped in front of him and shielded his eyes from the unfolding scene but Edward knew that they were zipping up the plastic and placing his daughter’s body on a stretcher. Outside, an ambulance took off, hurriedly with aggressive speed.

  Edward stepped into an alcove and the foyer no longer was in his line of vision—detach detach detach—but something was knotted around his foot, attached to a bloody mess of leather. He yanked at it, flexed his calf muscle, but it didn’t budge. It wasn’t until he recognized the woman’s bloody tote bag, which he had dropped in the foyer earlier among the shards and blood, that he began to panic. His heart clenched like a fist in his chest. He bent down and slipped the strap off his foot. When he tried to straighten his body, pain set in. Pain so searing he remained hunched over. A tightening had been building up for the past hour or so but he had dismissed it. I’m having a panic attack, he thought, there’s nothing wrong with my heart.

  Edward watched the dead woman’s tote getting dragged across crystal shards and bloody beaded chains and shattered glass arms. The medics dragged their boots through it all, one tripped over a brass finial, then his foot got caught up in the tote but he kicked it loose.

  His breathing was rapid and shallow. He felt clammy. He wasn’t worried then, his lipid panels were perfect, he had just had a calcium scan. His lips must have turned blue or somehow he gave the medic reason to suspect a cardiac arrest because they put him onto a stretcher, moving slowly with all the blood and shards and glass on the floor.

  He passed his daughter’s body in the foyer. More pain in his chest. Ripping and searing, so strong he couldn’t bring a single thought to completion. How could . . . ? Why did this . . . ? Into an ambulance where the odors of chemicals numbed his nose, speeding off as the drip and metal parts of the stretcher rattled.

  Edward followed their commands. He opened his mouth when prompted and they sprayed nitroglycerine under his tongue. He took an aspirin, felt a prick in his forearm where the medic inserted a line. He wanted to cry, to lament what he had done, what they all had done, but all he could think of was how, if prompted, in answer to the question where were you when your wife and daughter fell, he’d say I had a heart attack.

  Something tore at him. The image of a heart enclosed in a sack of tough tissue, the pericardium, attached to the breastbone and the diaphragm. Why did it feel like it was being ripped from his chest?

  48

  EDWARD

  They stabilized Edward Pryor and the cardiologist confirmed his excellent health—any kind of cholesterol level or triglyceride value or any ratio thereof was in perfect range—and called it a stress heart attack.

  “This was a lot to deal with, Dr. Pryor, you have our sincerest condolences. Your wife’s recovering. You can see her as soon as she wakes up. Her hip was shattered but they were able to fix it. Brand-new part, top-of-the-line technology. It’ll last forever. The orthopedic surgeon will brief you on that. It’ll be a long recovery but she’ll be fine.”

  The doctor didn’t mention Penelope but for the condolence part. No one questioned him regarding that night. Not until the police showed up. A young man in a crisp suit appeared. A bulge on his right hip, under his jacket. A holstered weapon. Edward looked down at the detective’s polished shoes and chose his words carefully; a troubled young daughter, the overwhelming grief, he used words like gutted and beside ourselves.

  “Please don’t talk to my wife just yet, she’s in no condition,” he added, well aware of how this could go wrong right then and there. What if there was an officer at Donna’s bedside at this very moment questioning her?

  But the detective didn’t ask for details, it’s all just a formality, nothing criminal, he assured him. They could talk some other time, it was not necessary to get into it just now. Edward thanked him. And just like that the encounter was over.

  An hour later, they pushed his wheelchair into Donna’s room. Her lower body lay elevated, her hips propped up. There were tiny cuts on her cheeks and the palms of her hands which would heal in no time. When the door closed behind the nurse, he leaned in.

  “What happened while I was gone?” Edward asked quietly.

  There was this implication, while I was gone, that unspoken part of that day, while I drove the lifeless body of a woman away from our house. What did you do to Penelope?

  They looked at each other as long as either one of them could stand and then looked away.

  49

  DONNA

  After I was discharged from the hospital, I returned to Hawthorne Court and a cloak hung over me. That’s how I thought of it, a heavy cloak weighing me d
own, keeping me from moving. Aside from the hip injury, there was this fog. My mind was a black hole and it was difficult to make sense of anything. When I did get out of bed, those few steps from bed to bathroom and back, I’d pass by a mirror and wonder who that woman was.

  Edward cared for me. Clumsily he brought me food I didn’t eat, stacked books on the nightstand I wouldn’t so much as touch, opened windows to air out the bedroom. His facial expression was dead, not like a poker face but lifeless, his eyelids drooping, his face beginning to melt like wax. Unshaven and slouching, drunk with fatigue night after night, caring for me.

  My hip improved. I learned to sit up, then stand, then walk. Though the joint healed as expected, my limbs were no longer mine. They were too heavy for me, like I was straining against far more than gravity.

  “Donna, talk to me,” Edward said and held my hand, trying to pinpoint the cause for my behavior, trying to reason with it but always coming up short. His touch felt foreign to me. My mouth wouldn’t move though my thoughts tumbled.

  He went on and on.

  Tell me what happened that night?

  Try to remember, Donna.

  Tell me, please.

  I need to know what happened, please try to remember.

  Donna. Donna. Donna.

  It was like a game Edward played, all those demands, then he abandoned them just to repeat them the next day.

  I had no words for him. My thoughts were foggy, his questions forceful and tedious. The answers in my head were unassailable. What was I to do? I lay there and rolled my tongue over my teeth, one at a time. I tasted the gold cap on the top left molar, metallic, like a piece of iron candy in my mouth.

  As I learned to walk again, everything, including myself, was a puzzle I didn’t know how to solve.

  50

  EDWARD

  The longer Edward studied Donna, the more apparent it became that something wasn’t right. Unlike the house, which had been restored to its former glory—minus Penelope’s room, which remained unaltered behind the closed door—Donna’s nicks, cuts, and bruises had faded, her hip had healed, but she refused to speak.

  Donna ruminated in her room, only got up to go to the bathroom, and the woman who had always been so put together, who sat ramrod straight on the couch in heels to read a book, who had never missed a nail appointment or skipped a root touch-up, lay in bed and couldn’t be bothered to take a shower. There were moments it hit him that she was a mother who had lost a daughter, and he understood how she might be unable to shake that.

  The doctors were as flabbergasted as he was; other than the hip, Donna was physically unharmed. It seemed as if the biohazard company had cleaned the house and scrubbed the floors and cracks in the marble tile, that floor the only witness of what had happened that night, had taken her tongue.

  “Donna, tell me what happened while I was gone?” he’d ask her over and over. He couldn’t bring himself to be more specific. What was he supposed to say . . . while I was out disposing of a dead woman’s body?

  He gave her an account of that day, blow by blow, as if he could lead her to the truth by concentrating on the facts. He told her the minute details of the day leading up to a certain point but what he wanted to do was ask the hard questions. What happened in that room? Why were the windows nailed shut? Why were there holes in the walls? I was gone for two hours, what happened in those hours?

  And then he asked her, “Did you push Penelope?”

  Donna stared straight ahead.

  * * *

  • • •

  Edward did his best to convey to Donna the chaos in his mind. He didn’t just want answers; he needed answers. Did she not see his desperation, did she not realize how haggard he was, how he struggled to understand? All those questions rattling around in his head—What happened? What did you do?—and he’d take her hand in his and hold it tight as if he could draw the words out of her that way, like some sort of parlor trick.

  While Donna remained silent, trapped in her body, his days went on with full awareness of that night, and certain decisions he wasn’t equipped to make, he had to handle, like arrangements for Penelope’s body.

  * * *

  • • •

  As Edward entered the funeral home, he was shaking as if he was hooked up to an epinephrine drip. The interior was somber, with lots of potted flowers and sconces, and heavy with the sorrows of people who had passed through. In the foyer, above a vase filled with flowers smelling sickly sweet, he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror. His face appeared in his vision like a stranger’s, mere skin stretched over a shaky jaw. The funeral director, a pudgy man in a brown suit, was too young for this business, in Edward’s opinion. His handshake lasted too long, and the fact that he used the expression she was called home proved too much for him.

  “What do I do now?” Edward asked, his voice quivering as he leaned against a wall.

  “Have you decided on a burial or a cremation? Are you interested in a wake, a memorial service?”

  They’d never so much as discussed a place where they’d be buried as a couple, they hadn’t spoken about their mortality at all, never considered a family plot or a specific cemetery. The thought of a graveside disturbed him—wreaths and flowers and a funeral and people dressed in black, a headstone that said Beloved Daughter.

  Edward pointed at the rows of urns on glass shelves at the back wall.

  “Cremation,” Edward said and stepped closer. All those urns, some metal, some ceramic, some so removed from their purpose, vaselike, nothing but the lid giving their purpose away. Picking an urn was not a choice he wanted to make himself, yet he stood in front of the display and his eyes wandered back and forth as if he was watching a tennis match.

  “Take your time, Dr. Pryor.”

  “I am,” Edward said and wondered if the man was naturally compassionate or if he had learned empathy the same way Edward had unlearned it.

  “This is a very personal decision, Dr. Pryor. If it’s too difficult at this point, we can always use a simple metal container and you can pick a final urn at a later date.”

  “I don’t know much about these things. What happens with the urn after?”

  “That’s a personal decision also. You can have it deposited at a final resting place underground, you can arrange for a space at a columbarium, or you can scatter the ashes.”

  “What should I do?” Edward asked, more a question to himself than to the funeral director. “I don’t know which one to pick.”

  “If you don’t like any of the samples we have here, there’s a catalog I can get for you?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Edward said and pointed at an urn. “This one will do.”

  He had Penelope cremated, without fanfare, but couldn’t bring himself to pick up her ashes and so he had the urn delivered to the house by the crematorium staff. He thought about purchasing space at a columbarium big enough to hold three eight-by-eight-inch urns but didn’t want to make that decision without Donna weighing in. He still had moments when he wanted her input, but then realized he had picked the urn Donna would have hated the most, a crackled container with gaudy leaves as handles.

  51

  EDWARD

  Edward had picked out the urn and that very night he paced around the house, unable to come to terms with anything, unable to grieve. Something gnawed on him. He couldn’t verbalize it, but it brewed in the back of his head. Donna’s ability to shut it all out, to remain silent, to leave him in this misery. Donna faking some sort of condition was the only logical explanation. A more likely diagnosis he couldn’t imagine and so he went with that and pretended he believed her. But what about him? Was he just another casualty? And if Donna wasn’t talking, who could? And the cogs began to turn, the gears engaged, and an idea snapped into place. Rachel, the woman, though dead, had a lot to say.

  What Edward did next was ou
trageous, he had to admit that, but desperation was known to push logic aside and so he did what he had to do.

  It was a rookie move. He had had had to know how Penelope ended up with the woman in her jeep. He must must must understand, had never wanted anything as bad, as if he was just going to collapse to the ground if he didn’t get his way. His need to know was stronger than his need for self-preservation, he knew he was teetering off the edge, the only part of his body clinging to the cliffs were his fingertips, if that. This rookie move just added to his overall feeling of being found out sooner rather than later.

  He called Dr. Price, a man he had met decades ago on one of his rotations, and somehow they had ended up in the same city in the same social circles down the road and attended many of the same functions over the years.

  Edward dialed his number and held his breath. When Price answered, after a minute of pleasantries, he forced himself to get right to it.

  “Edward, I’ve known you for many years. With all due respect, may I ask why you are so interested in this case?” he had asked him and rightfully so.

  Edward had feared that question and hadn’t come up with a believable reason. A friend of my daughter’s might backfire, depending on the course the case was going to take. That his office had performed surgery on her was far-fetched. He almost didn’t care what Dr. Price thought of his request and that was a dangerous state of mind to be in.

  “Professional curiosity. It’s been a while since I attended one.” That wasn’t a lie and it might get him in the room with white subway tile and coolers for bodies like post office boxes.

  “Okay?” Dr. Price sucked in air, then sighed. “That doesn’t make it any clearer but be my guest.”