by Chloe Turner
But you persist. I think again. My daughter is in town, visiting a friend, will not return for several hours yet to fuss over me with rugs and biscuits and old women’s things. My son flies in tomorrow when we’ll pick him up from the airport to make our annual pilgrimage to his father’s grave. But today, today is for you, at last. So I say yes when you ask again. And we wrap my cast in carrier bags, splayed with promises of value and saved pennies and being there for you, laughing at the silliness of it. And I hobble to the harbour wall, where you help me down the steps to the boat, tidier than yours used to be.
We take a trip around the harbour first, while I find my sea legs again. But you’re not yet done, and nor am I. Round to that hidden passage through the rocks, where now a young seal—a perfect sheen to its slick head—bobs about at the foot of the cliff. It swims only feet from where you slow the engine and let us drift through the gap in the rocks, through that tunnel of slipped stone. And then we are in, under shale and cliff, and the spring sunshine is tucked away. Mussels cluster between the layers of shale, and the tiny peeping cups of barnacles fit in amongst them.
You let the engine idle in the dark, as you did back then. I can’t bend to trail my hand in the water, but I can reach across for yours. I hold it tight, thinking about a life lived apart. And when your paper lips touch mine again, I think of all that I’ve loved and lost. As a run of waves tips and dips the boat in its swell, you put a hand to steady the tiller, and I wonder what might have been and whether there is anything left for us now.
The House with Three Stories That Might Be Five
Joe and I had planned to come here for our honeymoon, when I had imagined walking under The Queen’s Ring with my hand in his, wearing the nine-carat band he’d surprised me with at the Montana State Fair. Back then, I’d assumed we’d grow old together, that one day I’d be tucking some old, red-plaid quilt around his knees, reminiscing about these gardens, asking, Do you remember the acid green parrot that chattered at the entrance? The Stairway to the Sky, which led you up and then left you, teetering on the edge of the blue? What about the pool where the children were swimming, their warm brown bodies twisting in the spring-fed cold? We’d be staring out over a yard to a chopped-ice lake beyond, yellowed teeth chattering on the back steps, loose-haired dogs slopped around our ankles. A long way from here, from Las Pozas and the sculptures crowding out from the jungle in this Mexican garden, teasing you with their twisted forms.
We wouldn’t grow old and crinkled together, and that’s not our yesterday to remember. Our hard-won honeymoon fund ended up in the Church coffers—a loan at first, somehow never repaid. Daniel Windslake could have eased the pocket money from the clammy palm of a toddler. Even that cheap piece of Jewelry World tat, with its tiny solitaire sparkle, found its way across Daniel’s palm, via the revolving door of the pawnshop. Still, what I’d give to be there, tucking that quilt round Joe’s knee. Instead, I have made my own twisted path, so I must walk it. Even up to the top, where I had walked at Las Pozas this morning, up to where the steps vanish into the jungle air.
‘How did you find the gardens, Sally-Ann?’ Cathy asks me that night at dinner, out on the bunkhouse terrace. It’s cramped for the five of us, hemmed in by dwarf palms and terracotta walls, but the sunset’s just visible over the palm thatch, and there’s a hummingbird hovering around the splashy red blooms of a planter of autumn sage. Cathy’s a college tutor from Brooklyn, not long out of college herself. I had planned to keep to myself on this tour, but since she folded herself into the seat beside me that first day the bus left Tampico, we’ve got on well enough. Though there is something sad about her, a drooping wilt to her tall frame as if her roots might be too shallow.
Her whole body has paused to wait for my response now,
a grilled cob held just out of reach of buttered lips, pale crumbs of Cotija cheese slipping between the rows of hot, plump corns.
The garden of a poet playing God? It felt a little close to home, after everything, I want to say. I have seen enough of men who think their power knows no bounds. But even since I’d left Joe, haven’t I always wanted to go to Las Pozas, to see the streams tumbling down the slopes amid all that concrete strangeness? I’ve taken risks, emerging from my enforced solitude, joining this party to make the trip. Crazy risks. But it was worth it.
‘It was very special,’ I say, if only to make Cathy bite into that dripping cob.
Joe had known nothing of Edward James, of course, eccentric English poet with an eye for the fantastical. Hell, Joe probably couldn’t even spell surrealism. But I’d married him for his heart, not his sparks. And today I ended up there without him, in Edward James’s Garden of Eden, walking under The Queen’s Ring on my lonesome. My ring finger bare, even the tan line long gone from below my knuckle. Is it worth now being safe, if I am always going to be alone?
‘Lengua taco, Sally-Ann? You have to try it.’ Heather’s serviette sits untouched on her side-plate, in defiance of the stream of grease that runs from the corner of her mouth and through the funnel of her pocketed chin. ‘I thought it’d be a mouthful of rubber bands, but actually it’s a real treat.’
‘No, thank you. I don’t like tongue.’
In fact, we used to eat it often, Joe and I. Not brine-pickled like Mom used to make—greying slabs with a shocking splurge of yellow mustard across them—but braised in a tomato sauce, with carrots bobbing at the top. On the hob till nightfall, when the meat was melting into the gravy. Cheap and simple, when Joe was still a roofer, and I was just starting out as a lowly administrator at the Church, which seemed like a lucky break when I still had college bills to pay. Innocent as a baby back then, I was. No idea of the Church’s power, the iron strength of the Gentle Family.
But there is something about Heather, this earnest soil scientist on the vacation of a lifetime, bossy in her mission to share the joy, which draws me to lie. And it comes easy these days, now that I’ve told so many. Daniel Windslake: this, like so many of my sins, sits at your door.
‘Well, you’ll have some, Roger, won’t you? I saw a woman selling these at a stand on the way up the hill. In goes the filling, pit, pat, toss it on the griddle. Made it look a doddle. And lovely to see such enterprise everywhere we go.’
Roger’s sitting at the far end of the table. Free of his floppy sun hat for once, the pink seam of his tan line segments his cheeks and snares the peeling bulb of his nose. ‘I’ll give it a go, Heather. You know me. Try anything once.’
‘I can rely on you, Roger. A man with an adventurous palate.’
‘I don’t know about that, Heather. But my Rosie always used to say I’d eat a donkey’s bollocks laced with arsenic if someone told me it was tasty.’
‘Oh, Roger! You are a card. I bet your Rosie had to keep you on a tight leash.’
‘She did, Heather. That she did. And I blummin’ loved it!’ Heather blushes, pink tickling the grey above her bulbous forehead.
‘I’ll take that, shall I, Heather?’ Peter reaches over from the far side of the table and snatches the rapidly tipping plate from her hand. ‘We don’t want to lose the rest of the tacos while you flirt with Dodgy Rog here.’
‘I wasn’t…’ Heather blushes deeper, the sweep of rose reaching that mole, with its single hair, which crouches on the side of her neck.
‘I know, Heather. Forgive me. I was teasing. I take you as a woman of rather more refined taste.’ Peter tucks the loose ends of his paisley scarf away into his shirt so that the silk doesn’t stray into the salsa-topped tacos. The flash of skin between the buttons is hairless and waxy pale.
Heather strokes her serviette, looking for reassurance. Oily fingermarks streak dark across the blood-red tissue. Her eyes keep flicking towards the hummingbird as it lingers around the scarlet trumpets of the sage.
‘I know fellow composers who would snap you right up, Heather. I’d snap you up myself, but my tastes lie elsewhere, if you know my meaning.’
‘Oh gosh, Peter. I won’t tell a soul.
You can rely on me,’ Heather whispers, stage volume, clearly delighted to be entrusted with such secrets. Her cheeks flush with this shiny bead of knowledge in her dull, soil world.
But Peter’s declaration comes as no surprise—I’ve seen the way he looks at Carlos, our carefree driver with wide brown eyes and a deep scar that dances around the crease of his eye socket. Peter’s always first to pick out Carlos’s sombrero above the other heads in a crowd, to follow the tight crack of his jeans up the concrete steps of the jungle garden. ‘I know I can trust you, Heather. We Brits must stick together.’
It’s a coach trip, Peter—you’ll probably muddle through alone. But she’s lapping it up, Roger too. Peter’s slippery as an eel: all things for all people. I need to keep my eye on him.
Cathy is still waiting. I’ve not given her enough yet.
‘I’ve seen pictures of the garden before, of course, but they can’t quite convey the way the shapes leap out at you from the forest. The sheer size of it all. A temple to surrealism dropped into the forest like something alien.’ I need to stop. Shouldn’t have started. But I was an art history major at Carroll College many years ago. There is something in the haunting desolation of the place—stray sunlight winking through a concrete philodendron, the sheer hubris of such a folly. And I’ve waited so long.
‘You sound like you know a thing or two about art?’
See? You’d think I’d have learned to keep my mouth shut by now.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Seen a few documentaries, is all. Can I pass you something, Cathy? These meatballs are real good.’
Cathy needs to eat, that’s for sure. Her clavicles are sticking through that Dodgers T-shirt like chicken wings. Scrawny ones at that, like the ones we used to pick up from the shack outside Polson. Barely a scrap of meat on them, but the sauce was so good, you’d suck them anyway. With her blue-veined skin, Cathy looks like she hasn’t eaten meat for years.
‘I’ll try the guacamole. My stomach’s not so strong. I have to take care with it.’
‘You'll be all right with the guacamole, Cathy. Full of lime juice. Keeps the bugs away.’
That’s what Mom always said, anyhow. I swear, she’d have washed us in lime juice given half a chance. It should be me taking care of her now—she was weak as a baby bird the last time I saw her. There wasn’t even time to say goodbye. Now here I am, eating street food with this strange huddle on a hillside in Mexico, and is she even alive? Daniel Windslake: you have sinned.
‘Where you from, Sally-Ann? Sometimes you have the look of someone on the run.’
She’s smart, Cathy. I need to watch her too.
‘You talking about these clothes? Sure, I can see why you’d think so.’
They’d given me a bag when they dropped me off at the border. Those agents might be good at some stuff, but shopping isn’t their forte—looked like a blind man had been let loose in a ten-dollar mall. Some of the dresses are so static, my hair’s up like a startled bobcat before I’ve taken a step. One spark from that grill and I’d go up like the burning bush. Oh, the Church would love that. A fitting end for the whistle-blower, chargrilled by her FBI-crafted disguise.
‘Oh no, I didn’t mean…’
‘S'okay. I had to pack in a hurry. I only got the details for the tour last minute. Found the brochure down the side of an old tram seat in Tampico, and I was here two days later. Everything needed laundering, and there was no time—you know what it’s like.’
‘Oh sure, sorry. It wasn’t your clothes. You just seem on edge. Is everything okay back home?’
How would I know? I haven’t seen my husband in five years. Five years tomorrow. He could be at the bottom of Hell Creek for all I know, or romancing that pretty waitress from Old Town Grill in Wolf Point. I don’t say it. Of course, I’m hoping he’s just sitting on that doorstep, waiting for me to drive up the valley and through that ranch gate like I’ve never been away, with Mom hollering from the back bedroom that she’d never doubted I’d come home.
‘I hope so,’ I say. There’s a bright green flash of coriander between Cathy’s uneven teeth, and I try not to catch my eye on it.
Laughter bursts from the other end of the table, a great splurge of it. Roger is comparing Peter’s manicured nails with his own work-ragged claws. Heather’s smiling grimly, the chipped remnants of her vacation-treat manicure tucked right into her palms.
‘I haven’t been home in a long time.’ What am I saying? Stick to the script, you dumb woman. And yet, being here, the urge to see Joe is so strong, it’s almost unbearable. I could call. He could catch a plane. We could walk those steps together at last. Surely they wouldn’t be hunting me still, after all this time?
The FBI got most of them the day I ratted them out. Most, but not all, and therein lies the problem. We knew only too well that their poisoned web spread far and wide. The SWAT team caught the Upper Council—but only those who were in town—at their weekly Confessional. Highlight of the week for the superiors of the Gentle Family, watching some poor wretch spilling out all the petty rules he’s broken since Sunday, getting thrashed with a horsewhip (and five hundred dollars down) for his trouble.
And Daniel Windslake, of course, was using the time in the way he preferred: giving some special tuition to the confessor’s daughter, upstairs in the inner sanctum. Fifteen years old, the officer told me. Barely graduated middle school, just how he liked them. He’d not got all her clothes off yet, so that was something. He was probably in the midst of his speech about gratitude, letting her stroke his gun collection, perhaps, when the guys in black burst in through the fire exit.
Cathy is staring at me now, waiting for more, cob still hanging mid-air. The Cotija has all melted away, a creamy slick amidst the cooling char and yellow.
‘It’s not good to be alone,’ she says, when it’s clear I’m not going to offer anything else. ‘I should know. I’ve been alone so long, sometimes I wonder if my reflection might leave me.’
She sinks her incisors into the corns, making buttered juice spurt. I expect her to smile, but she doesn’t. I’ve met all kinds of loneliness, being on the run this long.
*
The jungle is full of birds now, and the light is different from yesterday, cushioned by a mist that still hangs greedily around the treetops. Once wasn’t enough: the garden’s pulled me back. By now, the others will be at breakfast at the Xilitla bunkhouse, out on that terrace again; Roger tipping down huevos rancheros like he’s run a marathon since his last meal, not slumped eight hours in a dead-springed bed.
The gates of Las Pozas are only just opening, so I should have the run of the place awhile before the first dazzled tourists wander in. I’m over The Fleur-de-Lys Bridge—concrete grainy with verdant moss—and halfway down to the waterfalls before the sunlight starts to break through. It plays around the steps and arches of The Gate of St Peter and St Paul.
I pick my way through to look down over the pools, but they’re empty today, only the splash of white from the falls breaking the still green. Too early for the local boys. They’ll be here once school’s out. I sit for a while on a bench instead, blue-dyed concrete splattered with orange lichen. There’s an empty birdcage on a sawn-off column right in front of me, door sagging open on the hinges, and huge palms all around, flat leaves as big as tablecloths. Tiny, shocking pink flowers stud the forest floor. The birds have quietened since I came close, but one, with this two-note call like a question, just keeps on singing.
They’ll be wondering where I am by now. Roger will have finished his breakfast eggs, sunk his grainy coffee, and grown sick of Peter’s barbs about his table manners. Cathy will be tapping thin fingers on a glass of passion fruit juice, wanting to get on to the next attraction: the waterfalls of Tamasopo, or Sótano de las Golondrinas. Even Heather will be tiring of the hypnotic, buzzing wings of that hummingbird, ready to get on and see more. But I won’t be joining them. I have unfinished business here. There is more for me to see.
I retrace my steps and th
en walk around the loop, past The Bathtub Shaped Like an Eye, past a stand of fluid buttresses that hold up nothing at all, and past a gaggle of schoolgirls on the steps of The House of the Flamingos, lounging against the columns as if they need the support. More folk appear as I get closer to the entrance, bemused by their first taste of the garden. I back away, not ready to share it yet, all the way back for one last look at the dizzying steps of The House with Three Stories That Might Be Five.
And then, from nowhere, there he is. On the central platform, looking out over the forest. Joe. My Joe, in a sandy coloured linen coat I don’t recognise, creased around the hem as if he’s driven through the night.
‘Come and see,’ he calls. Sound travels strangely in this place, so his voice is clear across the space, and for a moment I think he’s talking to me. ‘Come and see,’ he says again, turning his head this time. ‘That’s The Temple of the Ducks, right down there. I thought we’d paddle there later when the sun’s warmed up.’
And then she walks out from the shadow of the staircase. Painfully young, even now, five years on. Her hair is braided like the schoolgirl she almost still is. He has his hand at her waist now, and she protests, laughing, at his kiss. He looks happy, younger even, than the night I had to leave.
They start to walk up the exposed steps, concrete planks curling round the monolithic core. I watch him lead, then turn to reassure her, as they climb up towards the sky. I don’t have to be any closer to see the tenderness in his eyes. The Gentle Family take with one hand, but they give with the other, and they must know that this is the most poisoned gift they could have given me. He and she climb together, leaving me alone all over again. Up to the top, where the steps vanish into the jungle air.
Breaking the Glass-Blower’s Heart
The door closes behind the family, softly, as if the fingers of the person on the other side have lingered on the handle. Then Camila is alone, on her knees amongst the shards of the shattered vase. A bare patch in the dust upon the mantel’s leaden-grey marble hints at the vessel’s usual position: given pride of place, with its sloping shoulders and its pinched waist. A heart, a glass-blower’s heart. Now, some small splinter of glass hunkers under Camila’s right shin, threatening to break the skin, as she leans forward to pluck the fragments, one by one, from the reluctant fibres of the rug.
