The Garden of Last Days

by Andre Dubus III

  It was hard to breathe under his weight. There was a deep burn between her legs. Would he kill her now the way thousands of women over thousands of years had been killed? And in a shuddering breath, as if from her own memory, she felt joined to them on all the dusty floorboards and alleyways of ancient cities, the damp blankets of ships at sea; in horse-drawn wagons and roadside ditches and empty box cars; in the backs of trucks and buses; in hay-strewn barns, dark basements, and dank tool sheds; on barroom tables and the cooling asphalt of a parking lot; in the mud of river bottoms, cornfields, and woods, and in beds in sunlit rooms like this one on a Thursday when she was alone and thinking about love—she was part of them all now, yet one more in this sisterhood none of them had sought.

  It seemed odd that he was being so quiet, so still. He’d softened and she could hardly feel him inside her and she wanted his weight off her chest and knew she was a fool for wanting that much. But his breathing had steadied. She could hear the breath through his nose and half-opened mouth, could feel the slow rise and fall of his chest against her. How familiar this all was now, to slide out from under a drunk who’d be out till he came to and would he even remember? And if only she remembered, did it really happen?

  She was afraid to try and push him off her. She grabbed the edge of the mattress and pulled till she was halfway free. His head was on the pillow now, his face turned toward hers, his breath bad, and she hated him, this passed-out piece of trash who took her for himself as if she went with the suite and clay courts and beach. She pulled harder and wiggled her legs and hips till he was off her, belly down, his tennis shorts around his sunburned ankles. She avoided looking at the rest of him. She slid off the bed and stood, his seed running out of her and down the inside of her thigh, and she yanked a towel from her cleaning cart and wiped it off her as if it were gasoline near a flame. She pushed the towel between her legs, wiped hard, and dropped it back into the cart.

  The sun was in her eyes. She shielded them with her hand and found her underwear under the window. He was snoring, his rear big and pale. She stepped into her torn panties one shoe at a time, then let her skirt fall back over her knees. His arm hung off the bed, his gold watch glinting in the sunlight. Her underwear was loose on her. She still burned and knew she would for days and what if he came to right now?

  The kitchenette drawer slid out too loudly as she reached in and gripped one of the pearl-handled steak knives. It was heavy and cool. She was thirsty but afraid to turn on the faucet. An inch of leather was sticking out the back pocket of his shorts and her heart had slowed and she almost felt calm as she stepped over and with two fingers pulled out his wallet. It was thick and worn. She opened it. Under her blade was a picture of him smiling into the DMV camera. Her fingers were trembling. Ward Dunn Jr. He was ten years younger than she was and lived in Louisville, Kentucky.

  Ward Dunn Jr.

  She reached in and took out all the bills—hundreds, twenties, fifties. She pushed the money into her apron and fought the feeling rising up in her throat that this now made her a whore who’d asked for it.

  Ward Dunn Jr. was still snoring. She’d like to stab him in the neck. The head. The face. But what would happen now? Just go to the manager and tell him? Would he believe her? Would the police? But even if they did, she’d lose her job, and how could she stay here anyway? How could she ever come back to this place where Ward Dunn Jr. might be?

  There were business cards with his name on them, two telephone numbers under the etching of a horse. Ward Dunn Jr. was a horse breeder. A racer of horses. The Kentucky Derby and money in the bluegrass hills. She’d heard of these things and now hated him even more. She felt sick again, but her fear had lifted and she pulled out the photos behind his driver’s license. Black-and-white baby pictures, four of them, then one of a younger, fitter Ward Dunn Jr. in a tuxedo, his arm around a short blonde in an ivory wedding dress.

  Virginia dropped the photo into her apron pocket. She pulled out Ward Dunn Jr.’s license and one of his business cards, took them too. She looked back at him once more, the knife handle pulsing in her hand, and that’s when she saw the mole on his rear, the one she described much later.

  She’d been smoking and driving for hours: south, east, north, then south again; She stopped and bought a Coke and a carton of Tareytons, and later, when her Chevrolet ran out of gas outside Myakka City, she pulled into a Texaco station and asked a skinny boy with grease under his chin to fill it up. She handed him one of Ward Dunn Jr.’s twenties. She was still in her cleaning uniform, the black skirt and white blouse and white shoes, though she’d untied her apron full of money and carried it rolled under her arm, and even though she burned where he’d been, she couldn’t get out from under this feeling that she was fleeing a terrible crime she’d committed.

  In the ladies’ room, she washed her hands. She ran the water hot, wet a paper towel, raised her skirt, and scrubbed the inside of both thighs. She folded it into a small dripping square, then pressed it between her legs. Dabbing and wiping, she wanted to push it all the way inside her and scrape off the walls of her own flesh.

  She washed her hands again. She dried them. She reached into her purse, found her lipstick, and put some color into her lips: burgundy red. Her fingers trembled. Her eyes looked tired and old to her, the whites flecked with too many capillaries.

  She left the bathroom with her purse and apron full of Ward Dunn Jr.’s money. The boy was cleaning her windshield and maybe he’d even checked the oil. She felt momentarily cared for, and she sat behind the wheel and smoked a cigarette and waited for him to finish. She watched him work the squeegee, watched him wipe off the rubber blade onto his jeans after each stroke; it made her think of swords, blood dripping from the blades before they were wiped clean. And penises. Were they wiped clean, too? Would Ward Dunn Jr. come to, remember, then clean her dried blood off himself?

  The boy dropped the squeegee into the pail. He buffed the glass with a dry rag, working his hand in quick circles. It was hard to watch and she blew smoke out her open window and looked past the pumps to a dense stand of mangroves, the sky above a fading tangerine. Near the road was a phone booth. It leaned to the left.

  The boy finished his work. He walked around to her window and handed her change. Bills and some coins. His fingertips grazed her palm, and she jerked her hand away, a quarter falling to her lap.

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  She said nothing. Started the car and put it in gear and drove across the lot to the telephone booth. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, unrolled her apron on the seat, and pulled out Ward Dunn Jr.’s driver’s license, his wedding photo, and his business card. She reached into her purse for her reading glasses. The quarter was still in her lap.

  The booth’s door wouldn’t slide all the way closed. Sweetheart initials and dates were carved into the side of the telephone, and a phone book hung from a cord against the glass. She laid the wedding picture on the metal shelf and stared at Ward Dunn Jr.’s wife, her face and eyes and hair, and she read her telephone number to the long-distance operator and told her it was a collect call from Ward. It was urgent.

  “Honey, is that you?”

  Honey. Ward Dunn Jr.’s wife had a high voice and a heavy Kentucky accent. Virginia could hear children in the background. Fighting or playing, she couldn’t tell which. And there was music. A radio or record player. They sounded happy. They sounded like a happy family. Still, she should know. She must know.

  “Ward?”

  “No.” Virginia tried to swallow. “No. No, I’m the woman your husband raped today in his room in Florida, and don’t hang up, Mrs. Dunn, because I’m telling you God’s honest truth and I can tell you he has a mole on the right cheek of his rear end and I’m sorry, but—”

  There was a click and a dial tone. Cars passed by on the road. Virginia hung the phone into its cradle and wiped her eyes; she hadn’t meant to hurt his wife like that, just him. But it would have to start with her, wouldn’t it?

&
nbsp; What now? She couldn’t imagine driving north back to Samoset to her quiet apartment in the new complex. Some nights she’d walk out to the lighted pool and swim. Go back inside, heat up some soup. Smoke a cigarette and read a magazine. But that had all changed—even if she drove home right now she wouldn’t be the same Virginia in that pool or on her couch or in her kitchen. She was a new Virginia, a dirtier, weaker, stronger but less able Virginia who was already trying to put a bad afternoon behind her; that’s all it was, wasn’t it? A bad afternoon she was going to have to forget?

  So leave Ward Dunn Jr.’s wedding photo in that booth. Leave his business card, too. But keep his money. Buy yourself dinner somewhere you could never afford before. No, there’ll be people there. Men and women she might have to talk to and smile at, so go home. Put your dirty money in the dirty bank and try to put this day at your back and never think of it again.

  Virginia lit up. Six and a half minutes had passed. She was getting better, though she needed to get to ten minutes, then twenty. Why not shoot for one hour? Only fifteen or sixteen a day? That should give her a few more years. Surely, the sweet Lord would allow her that. Was it too much to want her grandson to know her enough to remember her? She already loved him so, and even though she wasn’t fond of baby Cole’s mother, she was relieved he’d gotten more of his looks from her side of the family and not Ward Dunn Jr.’s.

  Her poor son. She placed her smoking cigarette in the ashtray, closed her eyes, and offered her first prayer of the day for Alan, may he find strength and the light to guide him back to his family, even with that Deena, may he get Cole back real soon, and may You watch over him, dear Lord, as he works into the rising sun this morning, operating that heavy equipment, and repairing that pipeline out there on Lido Key.

  THE COFFEE WAS weak but hot and Lonnie sipped it and finished his eggs. She’d fried him three in butter, laying them down with two slices of toast on a flower-bordered plate. She rinsed her pan in the sink, then set it in the dishwasher and wiped down the counter, and he scraped the yoke with his fork and ate quietly but quickly; he didn’t want Spring coming back to find him so comfortable when she was suffering. And her landlady, whose name he still didn’t know, kept asking him questions he couldn’t answer: Where was Franny? How could someone have left her alone? Where could April have gone looking anyway?

  “She should be here in case they call. Damnit, she should be here.” She finished her wine, then pushed the rubber stopper back into the bottle. “Are you seeing one another?”

  He shook his head, swallowed the last of his toast. “No, ma’am.”

  She ran the water in the faucet, caught some on her fingers, and dabbed at her neck and throat. “She could be hiding, couldn’t she? Couldn’t she have become frightened and hidden someplace?”

  He nodded, though he knew the girls had searched the club as well as anyone could. Then the deputies. “Thank you for the eggs.”

  “You get enough?” She took his plate and fork.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve been rude; my name is Jean.”

  He watched her rinse his plate and fork and put them into the dishwasher. The sky outside her kitchen window had some gray in it. The sun would be following soon and he had a vision of the little girl’s body lying bloody in the weeds out back of the Puma. He shook his head and drained his coffee and wanted to get back out there and do what he could, whatever that was, he didn’t know.

  “Do you have a picture of her girl? I’m ’fraid I don’t even know what she looks like.”

  She studied him a moment. She seemed relieved, like he’d just passed some sort of test. “Please.”

  He followed her down the hall to a room made for a child. She turned on the bedside lamp, and the shade gave off a pale blue light through the swimming figure of a mermaid, her red hair flowing past her tail. The bed was small and covered with a quilt. There were three or four pillows in the shapes of the moon and stars. On the walls were posters of characters from a kids’ TV show he didn’t know, and one of a child’s hand and outstretched arm against the blue sky.

  She handed him a framed photograph. He stepped over to the lamp and held it low under the light. The woman began to weep behind him. There she was in the picture smiling into the sun with the girl sitting on her lap. She had sun-streaked curly hair and a round face and didn’t look much like Spring except in how her chin was raised proud.

  “She’s a cute kid.”

  Jean took a breath and sniffled and held out her hand for the picture he gave her. She placed it on the bureau and turned it toward the door.

  Lonnie stepped into the hallway; the photograph and the room felt like a shrine and he had a bad feeling, like he was suddenly someplace deeply private and he had no business being here at all. None whatsoever.

  But the eggs and coffee had revived him and he couldn’t go home without seeing April at least once. Can you keep an eye on her? Her breath against his ear, her warm shoulder under his hand. And again he told himself there’d been no time to do it, that it was Tina’s job after all, but where else to go now but back to the club? The inside was bright and the smoke had cleared and Louis sat at the Amazon with Tina. Most of the cops seemed to be standing around doing nothing. The one who’d interviewed Lonnie let him in, and he walked up behind the bar.

  Louis raised his head. “Get a drink.”

  Lonnie thanked him and reached into the beer chest for a Heineken, though he no longer wanted one.

  “Your little friend Spring came back too. Even after they told her to fuckin’ stay home.”

  “C’mon, Lou.” Tina’s hand was on his forearm, and she squeezed it softly. “Did you go to her house, Lonnie?” Her voice was tired and contrite. Under the house lights her blond hair was too blond.

  “Is she here?”

  “They sent her packing, Lonnie Boy.”

  “Lou, that’s enough.” Tina reached for her cigarettes. Lonnie sipped his beer and looked past the empty stage into the kitchen. Somebody had pinned the curtains back and propped open the doors. Outside, bright lights on tripods shined onto April’s car, and a woman in gloves kneeled in the front seat dusting powder over the steering wheel and dash. She held up a square of cardboard, a piece of string hanging off it. She aimed a blue light at it and stared.

  “Spring see them doing this?”

  “No,” Tina said, “but the sergeant thinks they’ll find this person if he’s in the system. He did say that.” Tina lit a cigarette and drew in deeply, her eyes on something straight ahead but far away.

  “Somebody should tell her,” Lonnie said. “She should know that.”

  Louis raised his rum and Coke. Then he looked at Lonnie over the rim of his glass as if he’d just said something for the first time, something he didn’t quite catch.

  THERE WAS THE darkened industrial park, high weeds along both sides of the road, bits of broken glass glittering, but nothing. There was nothing, and it was hard to breathe and she’d driven back to the club where the tall one stopped her at the door and told her to go home and wait. Wait.

  The deputy who followed her was younger than the others. She didn’t like how he stood in her doorway now and kept glancing at her half-buttoned blouse, her bare legs and feet.

  “You’re gonna stay put, right?”

  His tone was half-reprimanding, half-gentle. She didn’t like either. She nodded, watched him leave, thought of Franny’s backpack still downstairs with Jean. She wanted it here with her, Franny’s things. And she felt the money there just outside her thoughts of Franny, a sickening heat flashing across her face.

  Again the images came.

  Franny’s legs spread open. A man’s hands. Her terrified face. Oh God, God no. No, think of anything else. Anything else. Couldn’t it be a woman? That crime in Nebraska, wasn’t it? Nebraska? And this young pregnant woman dead in her own laundry room, a bullet in her brain, her baby cut out of her womb and it only took a day for them to find her a town over, brought
home by a lady who told her husband she’d had her baby, an obese woman who could’ve been pregnant or not, and her husband believed her, the woman who’d killed a mother and stolen her child.

  All those childless bitches at the club, the way they tried to fawn over Franny when she’d carried her in tonight. How April had kept moving, giving them her back because she didn’t trust any of them, didn’t even like them, because she wasn’t really one of them. Could it be one of them? Not for money but just to hurt her?

  Well please let it be that then. Let it be China, who everybody knew gave blow jobs in cars in the lot and pocketed every penny, or let it be Cowgirl Sadie and the Oxy shine in her eyes, or even VIP Wendy, who’d sell her own family for a shot at the Champagne. Please let it be one of those bitches because none of them would hurt Franny—April knew this; none of them were that cold or hated her that much.

  Footsteps on the outside stairs. She heard it through the screen door and could see the night lifting, the sky breaking open to a band of coral above Jean’s walled garden and the rooftops of the houses on the next street, the tall palms and acacia trees.

  She rushed to the door. Lonnie stood under her porch light, squinting at her. His shoulders were hunched slightly in his Puma Club T-shirt, and there were two Dunkin’ Donuts coffees in his hands.

  She let him in. Her arms were shaking.

  “I just missed you at the club.”

  She nodded. Her hand wiped at a tear, pressing it into her skin. He handed her a coffee. The Styrofoam cup was hot against her palm. She thanked him and invited him in and reached by him and turned on the overhead light of the kitchen. There were the dishes in the sink from yesterday’s lunch, the bowl she’d made the tuna fish in for their sandwiches for the beach, the plastic pitcher she’d emptied into a thermos.