In the Garden of Discontent

by Lily White

  If I hadn’t been living this nightmare, I would have laughed at the irony. There I was, tied up and stolen, and she was worried about proper manners.

  The southern ran strong in this woman. Her family would be proud. I could picture her with a jug of sweet tea, the glass sweating against the temperature outside as she made the rounds refilling everybody’s cups, perfectly sized lemon slices sloshing around in the light brown liquid.

  She must have been from the Florida Panhandle or maybe Georgia. I couldn’t make an educated guess because I didn’t know where the hell I was.

  “Tea,” I answered. It sounded more like tppp with the gag in my mouth.

  Her face lit up, delicate hands clapping proudly like I was a toddler that just peed in the potty.

  “Just hold on one second and I’ll go grab us some. You stay right there and make yourself comfortable.”

  Sure, I thought, I’ll get right on that.

  She walked like she talked, light and graceful. Airy my sister, Lena, would have called her. A proper woman raised by proper people, unlike the three little girls raised in my house.

  Lena always believed she would grow up to be better. She practiced prim mannerisms in the mirror when she thought nobody was looking, would pinch her cheeks for that rosy glow. My eyes welled to think of her and I fought like hell not to remember how she was never given the chance to become what she wanted.

  And the man responsible for it lingered in the other room, our hearts beating in tandem like they always would. It destroyed me to remember who Noah once had been.

  “I’m back.”

  The woman breezed in carrying a tray with two glasses of iced tea minus the lemons. Maybe she wasn’t as proper as I thought.

  Setting them on a side table, she assessed the situation, her mouth pulling into a thin line when she observed the obvious problem.

  She chewed on the tip of a fingernail, pulled it from her mouth and tipped her head. Then she chuckled like the whole thing was just a silly misunderstanding.

  “I guess I didn’t think this through, did I?”

  No. You didn’t think this through. Not at all, in fact. Starting with letting a man abduct a woman to drag her to your home. But let’s go ahead and worry more about how a woman bound and gagged would drink your damn ice tea. Priorities and all that.

  “I should have brought a straw,” she said before running from the room again and returning with pink plastic tube she could chuck in one of the glasses.

  “There, now you can drink if I remove the gag. Can I do that, Ensley? Without you yelling?”

  I nodded. It was another lie.

  Fluttery hands with nervous fingers reached for my face, afraid that I would bite. It was the same way I always approached that damn orange cat my mom kept trapped in the shed. For the first time, I could identify with the mangy thing and understand why it had a habit of trying to rip my face off.

  Slowly she undid the knot at the back of my head, her ample chest too close to my face, shirt slipping down so I could see all she had to offer.

  The second she pulled it away, I stretched my jaw, ignoring the burning skin at the sides of my mouth and took a deep breath.

  “He killed my entire family, you bitch.” I was screaming, seeing little reason to tiptoe around the issue. “Slaughtered them. My father. My mother. My little sisters and little brother. Children. He killed children and he should be rotting in prison right now rather than sending in his girlfriend to offer his next victim iced tea. What the fuck is wrong with you-“

  My tirade stopped as soon as a large shadow came through the door, my heart hammering against my chest with the threat of bursting through my skin toward a man that looked nothing like the eighteen year old I remembered.

  His presence alone could steal my voice so easily.

  Even now...after everything.

  In front of me, the woman teared up, her hands shaking until the vibration crawled up her arms and rattled her delicate shoulders. She reached for the gag as if to put it back, but it was too late, my teeth snapping together when she shoved it at me.

  “Out of the room, Melinda.”

  I didn’t recognize his voice, not the deep thunder that rolled, but at the same time it was a memory stretching within my body, lush and languid, a ghost of a person that had never died, a nightmare that wouldn’t leave no matter how many times my eyes flicked open, the alarm ringing to drag me from sleep.

  Melinda fled the room as Noah stormed forward, my mouth opening on a scream that was muffled when he slammed a hand across my face and stared down at me with eyes so blue, they made me cry to look at them again.

  Give me your pain, Ensley, and I’ll carry it for you...

  Oh God. Not now. I refused to remember him that way.

  Memories churned and drowned in my family’s blood.

  “You’re gonna calm the fuck down, you hear me?”

  His fingers gripped my cheeks, palm locked on my chin so I couldn’t shake him away. It was punishing, his grip, final, like a period at the end of a sentence.

  “You and I,” he said waving his free hand between us, “have waited too damn long to talk.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Noah

  August 19, 1991

  A white polo shirt and khaki pants. Mom had laid them out for me, excited for my first day at a new school. I hated these clothes, but she’d looked happy, so I wore them anyway. She’d floated around me like a butterfly, tugging at this, straightening that. You would think she’d made the clothes herself for how proud she was.

  Backpack in hand, I’d left my house at eight to walk to the bus stop. There were a lot more kids in the neighborhood than I realized, but my eyes kept searching for one. I hadn’t seen her since the day she buried her cat, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t looked.

  Every day I glanced out the window in the mornings wondering if she’d be there. Later, I’d ride my bike or sit on the side of my house and play with whatever I could find. I’d make up excuses to be outside, would go back inside once it was dark, sweaty from the summer heat, and defeated.

  Maybe it had something to do with the yelling. There was a lot of it. I couldn’t hear what it was about, but she was always in trouble.

  I thought she had to come out for school. That’s normal. Kids have to go.

  She wasn’t there. I stood for ten minutes with six other kids, four girls and two boys. They watched me, curious about the new kid and one said hi before the big yellow bus pulled up.

  I let them climb on first, my eyes darting back down the road to see if she’d come running.

  She didn’t.

  When I got to school, I was directed to a classroom dressed in posters of cartoon school supplies and banners with encouraging messages. You can do it! Hang in there! We are a team! We’re ready to learn! And on and on. I wondered if the teacher really believed that enthusiastic crap, stern looking as she was.

  None of the kids were dressed like me. They stared, probably wondering why I wasn’t wearing jeans or shorts like them. I thought maybe their moms didn’t care as much as mine. It wasn’t as big a deal to their families. And that was fine until one blond boy came up to me and poked fun.

  My shirt was ruined within the first half hour, his nose busted and blood splattered over my chest. I’d popped him right under the banner that said in big, bold letters We Respect Each Other!

  I spent the next hour in the front office, shoulders hunched, my feet kicking back and forth beneath my chair waiting for the principal. I wasn’t as worried about what trouble I’d get in as I was how my mom would react to my ruined clothes. She’d been so proud.

  That’s when I saw her again.

  Ensley walked in to the office as sheepish as a beaten dog, the bottom of her pants dipped in mud and the strap of her backpack held together by safety pins. You could barely see her face behind long brown hair that didn’t look to be brushed, not that she glanced my direction anyway.

  Straight ahead, she shot to
the front desk, whispering to the lady when they asked her why she was late. The lady shook her head but smiled in a way that was more sad than happy.

  After scrawling a note on a pink pad of paper, she ripped it off to hand to Ensley and sent her on her way. I thought, maybe, she would look at me now before she left, but she didn’t. It was as she walked away that I saw a hole in her shirt near the collar and a bruise on her elbow that spread out like a spider web.

  I didn’t see her again, not until the bus ride home. She sat by herself the entire way, head bowed and hair hiding her face. The other girls would peek in her direction, a bunch of fluffy squirrels with their faces bobbing up before they chittered to each other. It wasn’t until we’d reached our stop that one of the girls spoke above a whisper.

  “Nice clothes, Ensley. Didn’t you wear that last year?”

  “And the year before,” another added.

  I hated both those girls immediately. Ensley ignored them. She shouldered her bag and walked quickly down the center aisle, not looking where she was going.

  A kid at the front stuck their foot out to catch hers and she went flying forward landing with a thud near the driver.

  He didn’t bother turning around, just rushed her up and off the bus because he had a schedule to keep. The kids bust out laughing, but I chased after her.

  “Hey.” My hand landed on her shoulder, and she spun on me with wide, violent eyes, her jaw locked together, teeth bared. I pulled my hand back afraid to lose it.

  “What do you want?”

  The question was spit out more as a word than a sentence, a snappy whatdoyouwant on half a breath. Not one to be scared of other people, I was questioning whether I should be frightened of this girl.

  “I haven’t seen you since the morning we buried your cat.”

  “Itwasn’tmine...” Another one word sentence spoken as she spun around to march toward our houses.

  Still, I wasn’t about to give up, not when I had so many questions. Why do you never play outside? Why’s your mom always yelling? Do you have a dad? How many brothers and sisters do you have? Why do you seem so angry?

  I ignored all of them.

  “You were late to school.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “I saw you in the front office.”

  “Your point?”

  It was worth losing a hand, I just didn’t know why. Grabbing her again, I spun her around to look at me.

  “Don’t you remember me?”

  Her eyes blinked from behind tangled brown hair, one beat and then two before she answered. “Yes.”

  “Why were you late to school?”

  Another blink, long this time like she was coming round from a deep sleep.

  “I missed the bus.”

  Ensley didn’t give me a second to respond before she turned to walk away. I couldn’t give up, though. Weeks of wondering will do that to you, transform a mild curiosity into the need to know.

  “How’d you miss it?”

  She stopped suddenly and I tripped over my own feet to keep from crashing into her.

  “I have chores in the morning. And I didn’t finish in time.” Her eyes met mine, a pretty grey of swirling smoke. The sun reflected in them and it looked like a forest fire, bright and raging.

  “Don’t you have chores?”

  Jamming my hands in my pockets, I kicked at the ground.

  “Sometimes. How’d you get to school? Did your mom drive you?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  I shrugged, not knowing what else to do. Beside us, a neighbor walked by with a big, white dog on a leash, his nails clicking against the ground in time with the squish of the woman’s sneakers on the concrete.

  She gave us a passing glance, her blond ponytail swinging with the motion. I smiled at the woman, but Ensley didn’t react to her, as if the woman hadn’t been there at all. Her and the dog both slowed like she would say something and that’s when Ensley turned to glare at her.

  The dog gave a small warning growl before the woman flinched and sped off.

  “I walked,” Ensley answered, her voice dragging my attention from the neighbor.

  My eyebrows shot up. “It’s six miles.”

  “There’s a shortcut through the woods,” she said spinning away from me to walk faster.

  I shouted at her back. “Is that why your pants are muddy?” It made sense with as much as it had been raining.

  “Leave me alone.”

  Her voice echoed down the street as she took off at a run. I didn’t chase after her, though, worried that I’d upset her.

  After she disappeared around a corner, I tugged the strap of my backpack higher and wondered about a girl who was allowed to walk by herself in the woods.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ENSLEY

  Present

  When I was a kid, there wasn’t much to do where I lived. My neighborhood was nestled in the armpit of Florida. It was a throwaway town you would miss if you blinked driving through it. A place so forgotten that most maps failed to list it. The failure made local news often, that mistake as they claimed. I always thought it was on purpose.

  Nobody wanted to remember a town with a population of roughly two thousand, not when there was a history of racial divides from the Jim Crow era and the slaughter of Native Americans before that in the Second Seminole War. There was a massacre in our county in 1923 in a rural area not too far away from my neighborhood that was a silent and shameful part of our history.

  It made me wonder if the land itself was tainted, if so much blood had been spilled that it infected the air we breathed, changing ordinary people into monsters.

  Highland Grove’s residents weren’t happy people, mostly stuck in their ways and untrusting of anything that wasn’t just like them. In truth, enough time had passed that newer residents wanted to move on from the violence, but an older generation remained stuck in their ways, a silver patch of good ole boys who eschewed change and rattled their canes at the thought of moving forward.

  It was a constant tug of war match, the slow crawl of a losing battle against gentrification. Either way, we somehow stayed stuck in place and mired in swampy waters, a small forgotten town crammed between the gulf coast and a larger college town, nothing more than a hiccup the students passed on their way to the beach.

  That’s not to say it wasn’t beautiful. No matter where you stood at any given time you were within spitting distance of state forests and clear blue springs with a near constant chorus of songbirds, frogs and cicadas. I’ve never been to a place where the open skies are silent, but I think it would feel lonely somehow.

  The only modern claim to fame the town had that I could remember was a girl who went missing when I was three. Her name was Eleanor Kasick, only thirteen years old when her body was found limp and violated several miles from where I lived.

  Obviously, I wasn’t old enough to remember from when it happened, but I learned of her because people never stopped talking. They didn’t catch the person who murdered her from what I heard, a passerby many believed. Still, I knew where her body was found and would often hike out there to sit on the large rock where her blood had been spilled.

  I think that was where the habit first formed, the fantasy, the place where my depressed adolescent brain took comfort in the idea of death. It would be so easy, the escape. No more taking care of kids and the constant yelling. No more wondering when my father would come home to visit.

  And if Eleanor had gone already in that exact spot, maybe I wouldn’t be so alone when it happened. She’d hold my hand, I told myself, and we’d run free.

  I guess that’s the thing with death when you haven’t experienced it. You can imagine it’s a peaceful transition, a simple floating away, at least until the moment you first face it.

  My family hadn’t died peacefully, not with the way they were found, but I still bought my gun. Even while knowing. Even without the ability to erase what I’d seen, a morbid and grotesque family picture f
rozen and framed in my head.

  I think it was after they died that the obsession began, those ten minutes I gave myself every day imagining my end.

  God, how I’d give everything I had to hold that gun right now. Especially while facing the man who was my undoing.

  Noah’s fingers were rough with calluses, I assumed from the years he’d spent in prison. Strong too, his fingers angrier than I remembered. So mean I knew they would leave bruises.

  He stared down at me with a face I didn’t recognize, like an older, harder person had stolen the eyes and lips of the boy I once knew and had sewn them in place as a disguise.

  Gone was the silky boy skin, and in its place was a deep golden tan from years beneath the sun, white lines like scars across his forehead and a dark stubble shading a jaw where a muscle jumped at the sight of me.

  His body had changed, broad shoulders impossibly wider, arms thick and defined with hard earned muscle, a chest that would feel like steel if I touched it.

  Noah smelled the same, though, and I wasn’t sure how that was possible. An earthy note beneath the clean scent of soap, a familiar wisp of the past with every breath I dragged in, teasing and attacking at the same time. I would have sworn his scent should change as the years went by, that it would assault me with the mercy of a wild boar, and not crook a finger, daring me to come closer.

  “I’m going to move my hand, Ensley, nice and slow, but only if you promise not to scream again.”

  It was almost certain I’d make the promise, but questionable whether I’d honor it. I nodded regardless, if for no other reason than to get his murderous hand away from my face.

  You try not to think of the truth in moments like these. That hand had held mine more times than I could remember. It had touched me in ways that made me scream. It had wiped my tears and planted flowers. And it had ripped my heart out with crushing fingers, had pulled triggers and gripped knives. It had destroyed me in an act of revenge that I’d neither wanted at the time nor recovered from since.

  And the worst part, the worst fucking part of it all, was that he’d left me alive, like some sick fuck you, a parting blow when Noah, of all people, knew how often I wished to die.