Shadow Garden

by Alexandra Burt

  “Mrs. Pryor—”

  “Breakfast,” I insist. “Really, Marleen, I didn’t fall, I’m fine, and it’s just a swollen ankle. Bring me a bag of peas or whatever it is people put on such a thing.”

  “You need to have someone look at your ankle. It doesn’t look good. Is it your hip? Is that why you fell?”

  “Tea and toast would be great.” I ignore her question and rip the duvet from her hand and cover myself.

  “I’ll make an appointment with the doctor right now. Have an X-ray, something might be broken.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  This entire exchange has me thinking about lies. And confessions. And that I must read Penelope’s letters again. I’m already confusing facts in my mind. I panic. Where did I leave them? I turn and there they are, on the side table. Crinkled and wet, smeared with blood from my brow.

  I get up and when I put weight on my ankle, I cringe. A sharp pain reminds me that I have done damage beyond just a sprain. I keep the foot suspended as I reach over to grab the letters. At first I don’t know what to do with them, but the best place to keep them is the bathroom, the only place Marleen won’t see me read them and question me. And I can keep an eye on them from my bed. It’s a miracle she didn’t see them just now.

  Footsteps sound and I shove them under my pillow. Marleen packs my ankle in ice and when she tells me to sit up so she can fluff the pillows, I panic. The bloody towel—I have brushed my hair over my brow but it’s only a matter of time until she notices the cut—is under my pillow. So are the letters.

  “Not right now, Marleen. I need some rest.”

  I lower my head on the pillow. That’s when she sees my brow. Of course she sees my brow.

  “You fell, didn’t you?”

  “I would like to take a shower after I eat.” I sit up and the ice pack tumbles to the ground. “And privacy. That’s all I need.”

  “Mrs. Pryor, if you fell while you were alone—”

  “Just for once in your life, live in the real world, Marleen. Do you think I’m blind? That I don’t know what’s going on? Who do you take me for?” My voice is sharp now, I’m done playing games. “I can walk. See.” I get out of bed and suck it up. I take a couple of steps and manage to contain the pain. When I feel as if the ankle is giving out on me, I put all my weight on the other foot. “I want breakfast after my shower. Run along.”

  Marleen turns and leaves the room. I limp back to the bed and grab the letters and the bloody towel. I sift through the drawers in the bathroom and find a small white plastic bag. I put the letters and the bloody towel in the bag, fold it in half, and stuff it under the bin liner.

  I step into the shower. I’m in shreds, body and mind. Unable to reach for the soap, I stand there, allowing the cold water to hit my face, washing the blood off my forehead. By the time the water turns warm, the day replays like a stack of photographs I’m flipping through.

  I hobble back to the bedroom, where I find breakfast sitting on the side table. While I eat, I eavesdrop. Marleen attempts to schedule appointments with various doctors over the phone. They are booked for today and tomorrow, but the day after there’s an opening with Dr. Jacobson.

  Famished, I am famished. I want to ask for more food but Marleen is already suspicious. She tinkers around the house, cabinets open and close, the pipes hum and I doze off. I don’t mean to, it just happens. When I open my eyes, Marleen is gone.

  Alone with myself, I can’t make head or tails of anything. I think about the therapist who told Penelope to write down what she couldn’t say out loud. I had debated with the therapist over the phone but his argument was you can’t go back on the written truth, it’s a confession you can hold yourself to.

  My very own motivations become less and less clear to me with every passing minute. Nothing short of a detailed account will do, something along the lines of Before I leave, I want to tell you . . . That day, I purge feverishly. I write it all down, everything. Page after page after page. I catch myself wanting to stop but I carry on. My hand shakes, but still I go on. Before I leave I want to tell you about my daughter, Penelope. I want to tell you about a boy named Gabriel. A woman named Rachel. A little girl with fork marks in her arm.

  Between my account and Penelope’s ramblings, I’ve come to a conclusion. I carry on through the next day and the next night. Once it’s been written down, I can’t revisit it, not because I don’t want to but because I have decided to hold myself to a higher standard.

  The second night, I add the pictures from the photo albums. They seem to paint a much clearer picture than words. It’s more so for myself than for anyone else. At the end of the third day, I stop. But there’s one more thing I need to write down.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had felt myself slipping for a while. It began slowly, when I no longer knew how to drive. Does one unlearn how to drive a car? I don’t know.

  Yes, I do. I do know.

  Like a flashcard, a memory pops up: I’m driving and the road is a tape measure about to snap back into its case. A moment of panic. Slowing to a crawl, cars honking and drivers gesturing, pulling over and gasping for air while the wipers went full speed and the lights flashed and the open door’s ding ding ding left me breathless, the edges of my vision ruffled as a passing car blew gravel at me and the world around me had a reddish hue.

  Forgetting to drive is not like forgetting to pleat a napkin into a rosebud fold. I felt a whir, I heard a roar, I didn’t know what to do with my feet, what pedal was which, how to get the car to move. Traffic zoomed by me at high speed, my heart beating out of my chest. Driving was like a game and its rules eluded me and in that moment of panic I didn’t recall what all the lights and buttons were for. How can that be? I asked myself. And what would come next? I fell apart and lashed out at the same time, said awful words to people who didn’t deserve it. Half the time I couldn’t follow a conversation but who would admit that? Those arguments with Penelope, I didn’t know what they were about. I couldn’t drive to a doctor if I had wanted to. Instead of an exit sign I saw a jumble of letters, my brain unable to make sense of the words. Then came the beginning of the end. That night in Penelope’s room, I was that person. That incarnation of Donna Pryor stopped at nothing.

  Before I leave I want to tell you . . .

  The wainscoting boards stored in Penelope’s closet. The hammer. The room.

  It’s confession time. These are my sins.

  First I nailed the window shut.

  “You’ll go to prison, Penny,” I screamed. “You know what that means, right?”

  She just stared at me with big eyes.

  Then I nailed the door shut. Two boards and it was done.

  “This is how it’ll be in prison,” I yelled at her. “You’ll have nowhere to go. Can’t get out. It’ll be all over then.”

  I looked like rage but I was all fear. I was afraid. So afraid. If she confessed, we’d have nothing. Poof. All gone. I wanted her to understand the implications of what we had done. It was no longer just her but all of us.

  “Look around you. See what you are about to do! You will put us all in prison, not just yourself. All of us.” I stripped her bed down to the mattress. “That’s what you’ll be sleeping on. A bare mattress.” With one finger I toppled every single book. “There’ll be none of this either. You’ll just sit around thinking about what you did.” I pointed at the dollhouse, the Victorian one. Her favorite. I flipped it over, the pieces came tumbling out.

  That’s when Penelope began to weep.

  “That’s all that’ll be left of all of us. An empty house,” I screamed, one word stumbling over the next, frantic, hysterical.

  I got worse from there. She fought me and I fought her. She fought for her freedom, I fought for her imprisonment.

  “You go to the police,” I screamed. “You go and tell them what you’ve
done. You might as well kill yourself. Why sit in a prison cell. Just end it now.”

  My rage came from a different place but I matched her just fine. I threw the planks I was unable to nail to the window at her feet, I drove the hammer so far into the walls that the room looked like a war zone speckled by shrapnel. The sharp and dangerous shards of my rage mottled the walls. I, a woman incapable of opening a jelly jar, had destroyed the entire room. That’s how strong that Donna Pryor was.

  I pushed open the door, and pointed toward the landing. “Why don’t we all just end it here,” I screamed and ran to the banister. My body didn’t know where it began and where it ended. It was all or nothing.

  Penelope reached for me, wrapped her arms around me. I clawed at her. I broke free—or so I thought—but my momentum had been too strong, too fierce, and as one we toppled over the banister. We were united for that moment in time, one body, hearts beating in our chests, and I have no way of knowing but I could swear that we both stopped breathing—shit shit shit we are falling falling falling—that’s when we looked at each other, saw each other, maybe for the first time. For once she understood how far I’d go to save her, how far she’d go to save me. To the end of the world. I never knew how long a single second could be. Penelope was so close, in my arms. There was a pop, a screech, somewhere at the edge of our world but I knew what it was. The chandelier broke our fall and then we landed on the floor in the foyer.

  I don’t remember anything after that.

  That’s what happened and that’s what I write down so I can’t go back and change it. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t falter. Knowing myself, I wouldn’t want that stain on me. I can’t ever take it back: I didn’t push her, she didn’t push me, it was just something that was inevitable. As if the universe had decided a long time ago that only in free fall we were able to cling to each other.

  That’s been kind of the whole story all along, hasn’t it?

  60

  PENELOPE

  Penelope had made her case in her mind. “Hear me out,” she said to her mother but her mother wouldn’t listen.

  She wanted to tell her mother that while she sat in the parking lot with the woman in the passenger seat, while she allowed the ambulance to pass by without so much as rolling down the window or flashing her lights, the woman, Rachel, seemed fine. And then she wasn’t. Penelope pulled on the lapel of the coat to shake the woman awake but she wouldn’t budge. The lining of the coat was a synthetic fabric that repelled fluids and the blood just ran from her mouth into her lap and once her lap filled, the puddle ran down on the floor mat.

  After she saw the magnitude of it all, Penelope tried to clean it up. She wanted her mother to know that she’d tried, that she took the woman’s scarf and wiped her face but there was no use, blood smeared all over the woman’s cheeks and neck. Even in that moment Penelope had trivial thoughts, how Rachel appeared ghastly as if she had applied a wrong shade of foundation or put on too much bronzer. And that synthetic fabric didn’t absorb anything and that she had somehow come to the end of a line. And the end of the line was the case she had made in her mind. If only her mother would listen.

  Later, in the shower, her mother scrubbed Penelope’s skin in circular motions, rubbed so hard it burned. By the time she lathered up the pouf sponge with soap for the third time, Penelope winced as the suds stung.

  Her mother scrubbed her so vigorously that her nightgown slipped off one of her shoulders and her bare breast was visible. Penelope stared at her mother’s breast. How she scoured Penelope’s skin as if there was a much deeper stain to be cleansed than the cherry-red rings under her nails. She made it her duty to return her to something sparkly and shiny.

  Penelope tried to help, lifted an arm so her mother could wash it, but she just pushed it down and when Penelope tried to extend a leg for her mother to scrub her foot, her mother pushed her thigh out of the way and dug her nails into her already inflamed skin. Eventually she gave up, allowed her mother to twist and turn her to her liking until she shut the water off and ripped a towel off the bar on the wall and dried her body.

  The entire time, her father stood turned at an angle from which he could supervise without staring. Penelope giggled. In her father’s eyes she must have looked hideous and sickening. She didn’t mean to, but this was a moment not unlike life itself: mother running the show, father standing by, idly wringing his hands. There was no eye contact between father and daughter. She thought she saw tears in his eyes but she couldn’t be sure with all that water coming at her from the rainfall can above, the body jets from three sides and the hand shower her mother kept dropping, spraying beyond the walls of this Calacatta marble prison.

  Penelope might have seemed like a rag doll without command of her limbs but her brain was working just fine. There were so many questions rattling around in her head. She wanted to ask her father what could I have done differently? But there was that look in his eyes. And she wanted to ask her mother do you still love me, even now? But none of that escaped her mouth, none of that her lips and tongue managed to verbalize.

  Every time Penelope’s thoughts raced, she told herself, slow down, and focus. She’d make her mother understand if she just listened.

  In the end it took everything she had in her, and she managed to whisper in her mother’s ear, “Do you think I’ll get better one day?”

  * * *

  • • •

  That chandelier. She could see if from her room, the very tip of it hanging from the ceiling. Those shiny crystals on the highest beam of the prettiest house on the most exclusive street, under a slate roof. Maybe that’s what her mother had fought all along, the fact that nothing was special about any of them and so she had to wrap everything up just right to make it all beautiful, to make them somehow worthy to live in this house, on this street, in this abundance. Otherwise, what would be the point of it all?

  Penelope allowed her parents to talk, and talk, and talk. Talk her out of turning herself in, talk her into going along with the cover-up, but then everything in her mind slowed. That’s a thing backed by science, she thought, that slow-motion feeling when individual seconds expand and brief flashes turn into decades lived, a film reel of transgressions with all terrors reimagined. That’s when Penelope got it.

  Do you think I’ll get better one day?

  Penelope finally had an answer. Yes, yes, she would get better, and that dawned on her when her body hit the ground with such force it propelled the life out of her and saved her mother’s in return.

  And when Penelope asked herself the million-dollar question, as she held on to her mother—how far do you go to atone for your sins?—for the first time she had an answer: down, down, down, all the way down.

  61

  DONNA

  I stuff my confession in with Penelope’s letters inside the plastic bag and tuck it all in the bottom of the garbage bin, underneath the liner. For both our acknowledgments to be in such close proximity gives me peace.

  I’m tired and I close my eyes. I don’t know how much time passes but one day, I hear Marleen’s square heels click on the marble floor, the front door closes, and I tell myself the ankle isn’t as bad as it was before. I’ve been taking my medication, lulling in and out for what seemed days on end. The anti-inflammatory medication and ice packs hopefully have done wonders.

  I get out of bed but I can hardly put any pressure on my ankle without gasping. In the bathroom I slip my hand underneath the liner. Nothing. Not the bloody towel, not the bag with the letters. I drop to my knees, rip out the liner, and turn the bin upside down. I shake it. I can hear my rapid breathing, the thumping of my heart. I make an attempt to get up but I can’t put any weight on my foot. I will need a cast and I won’t be able to go anywhere or do anything, and I know what happens when I’m forced to lie in bed all day every day. I know what happened last time, when I hurt my hip. I lost it. I utterly and completely lost it.
The memory of it knocks all other thoughts aside. Maybe I’m confused—it isn’t Wednesday, today isn’t garbage day at all—and maybe I put it under the liner in the kitchen? I’ve lost track of time. Maybe I’m mixing things up. I’ve been known to do that.

  I hop on my left leg into the kitchen, I reach for the bin, about to dump the coffee filters and eggshells and tea bags on the kitchen floor when I look at the calendar on the wall. Sunday is crossed out. Monday is crossed out. Tuesday, too. It’s Wednesday. I step on the pedal and the lid lifts up and it’s empty. All I can think of is to go and run after the garbage truck and maybe it’s not too late, it can’t be too late, it just can’t.

  Outside, to the right, where the dumpsters sit behind a brick wall, that’s where the letters are. Without them . . . I don’t finish the thought, no, finish it: without the letters I’ll make up another story and Penelope’s death will be in vain.

  I stagger toward the front door. I no longer feel my ankle, it seems fine, magically healed. I run toward the garbage truck, as much as you can call my staggering running. I fan my arms as if I’m attempting to paint a picture in the air. Swaying my arms like a dervish. I hear screams. They sound chilling.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later, they tell me what I did. Like a drunk after a night of binging, in the morning people tell me I stood in front of the garbage truck. I wasn’t moving, my hands were resting firmly on the truck’s forklift. Screaming. No one could tell me what I was screaming and I don’t know either since I don’t remember. The packer packed and the tailgate rose and the dumpster flipped into the compress box.

  I know none of those words but there is an official report of what I did. Marleen read it to me. No one would know those words but the truck operator. Lift bucket and blade slide and ejector push-out, inside and outside packer. Compressor box.