The Memory Garden (22 page)

She pushes open her bedroom door, mumbling, a bad habit, bad enough for her, but she’s noticed Bay has acquired it as well, which can’t be good. She pulls the dresser drawer open; it groans, sticking the way it does. She should have done this weeks ago. She should have had the courage. She finds the narrow box beneath the underwear, slips, bras, and socks, pulling it through the flutter of silk and cotton, the narrow box, once used, years ago, for handkerchiefs embroidered with posies. The light through the bedroom window makes Nan feel like she’s in a dream, though she’s sure she’s not sleeping. She sits on the bed, the box in her lap. Her hands shake as she lifts the lid and sets it to the side. Why has she resisted doing this before? She pulls the pink tissue apart and for just a moment, Nan feels the excitement of opening a present; there it is, the caul, looking like one of the fake webs people put up for Halloween. Nan holds it between finger and thumb at either end, hoping it will lend some of its magic to her, but all she sees is the other side of her room, the image blurry, as though already just a memory.

The future, with all its nasty implications, is as easy to destroy as lace. Who needs a silly ceremony?
Rip
it
apart
, she tells her trembling hands,
and
Bay
will
no
longer
see
ghosts
. Well, she might see them, but it would be the way Nan sees them, vague and distant. Tear it apart, and Bay will no longer have a natural affinity for healing. But didn’t she specifically say she had no interest in medicine? Hadn’t she said something about wanting to be a chef? Tear it apart, and Bay can be whatever she wants to be. She will no longer predict the weather, but there’s much worse in life than having to carry an umbrella when it doesn’t rain, or getting wet when it does. Tear it, and Bay will no longer seem so strange to other kids her age. Tear it, and she will no longer be safe from drowning, but the girl swims like a fish anyway.
Rip
it
, Nan tells her hands,
and
Bay
can
have
the
normal
life
she’s always wanted.

Nan feels the tear roll down her cheek.
I
don’t want her to hate me,
she thinks.
I
don’t
want
her
to
know.

***

Mavis, Howard, Stella, and Thalia form a small circle on the grass, talking about what, Bay has no idea. She’s restless and tired, out of sorts around all these people. Her heart feels weird. When she wanders away from the little group, they don’t seem to notice. If they do, they certainly aren’t bothering her about it, which on the one hand she appreciates, while on the other, she resents; why is she so easily forgotten?

What is it about this night, she wonders, weaving toward the shoe flowers and away from them, meandering the way Nicholas does, that makes her feel like everything matters so much, as though her life teeters in some kind of balance? Maybe it’s just that she’s not used to having so many people around. It’s been fun, sort of, but also weirdly exhausting. She’s glad everyone’s leaving in the morning. What is happening? Is this what growing older feels like?

Bay presses her palms against her chest and confirms what she already knows, the strange feeling there, like a butterfly beating its wings, trapped, but seeking flight. Without thinking about it, she has wandered to her secret place. She lies down, first on her back, staring at the moon and then rolls to her side, closing her weary eyes.

“Nan, are you awake?”

“Ruthie?”

“Oh, good.”

When Ruthie enters the room, looking quite bright-eyed, Nan tries to hide the caul, but her quick gesture only attracts attention.

“What on earth is that?”

“Oh, just some old fabric I was thinking of using in a quilt,” Nan says.

Ruthie, her expression pinched as the pin curls tight around her head, watches Nan carefully return the caul to its pink nest. “I’ve had such a nice time,” Ruthie says. “I can’t believe I have to leave tomorrow.” She sits beside Nan on the edge of the bed. “I was thinking, why didn’t we do this sooner? Of course I know the answer, but why didn’t we try? Thank you, Nan, for bringing us together.”

Nan, who loves a compliment as much as anyone, refuses to be lulled into a pleasant feeling by Ruthie’s false ways. After all, didn’t she just say…something to Bay? Come to think of it, Nan realizes, she never did determine what exactly Ruthie said, but whatever it was, it prompted Bay to ask about witches. It alarmed her, and that’s the point.

“Nan, why are you looking at me this way? Are you all right?”

Well,
you
aren’t the only one who can wear a sweet mask.
“You worked so hard. I hope you aren’t exhausted.”

Ruthie shakes her head. “Oh, stuffy nonsense. I enjoyed myself immensely. I didn’t realize until this weekend how lonely I’ve been.”

Nan thought she’d grown out of the need for companionship decades ago, but she agrees it has been nice to be with friends again. She doesn’t say how worn out she feels. After all, Ruthie is the one who did all the work while Nan took a ridiculously long nap and had a bubble bath.

“I have a confession,” Ruthie says.

Nan has to hold back the urge to scold. If this is an apology, she hopes she can be gracious about it. Bay was upset, but certainly she’s heard this sort of witch business from people far more threatening than Ruthie.

“Here we are, with the weekend over, and I still haven’t said what I came to say.” Ruthie stares straight ahead, her profile sharp, toothy, surprisingly stern. She takes a deep breath, the air suddenly flooded with the scent of mint toothpaste. “We should have listened to you. We should have taken her to Miss Winter, and not that horrible doctor. All through my entire life, when I remember that conversation we had, I always try to change it. I agreed with you, you know, but I was afraid to say so. No. Wait. I want to say this now. I was supposed to be her best friend. I was supposed to protect her. Not just do whatever Mavis said.”

“You were trying to do the right thing. We all were. Even Mavis.”

“Well, yes, but that’s not why I agreed. I agreed with Mavis because she was, well, Mavis, and you know how it was back then. How I was too. I did whatever Mavis said to do. But that’s not what I want to tell you. I came to say you were right. You were right that we should have consulted Grace Winter in the first place, and you were right again when we should have gotten help much, much sooner. Obviously.”

Nan has believed, for a long time, that nothing could free her criminal heart, so she is surprised by the feelings in her chest, a fluttering she hopes is less symptomatic of biological problems than of forgiveness.

“You know,” says Ruthie, “I worried that you might be bringing us here to…oh, I don’t know, scold us, chastise us? I suffer from poster stress disorder, that’s what it’s called. Ever since my husband poisoned me, I’ve been afraid of the damage people do.”

“You have?”

“Oh my goodness, yes. Of course he was a bastard—”

“Ruthie!”

“Well, he was, that’s the simple truth. I married a bad man, Nan, and I stayed married to him for a long time. There are many reasons for this, it turns out, but at least part of it was I figured I deserved the bad things that happened to me. I really felt—”

“Nan, are you in here?” Mavis doesn’t wait for a response; she comes in like an invasion, with her noisy bracelets and her boa shedding tiny orange feathers. “Oh. Ruthie. I thought you were in bed.”

“Isn’t this fun,” Ruthie says. “Come. Sit.”

Mavis frowns at Nan. “What about—” she starts, but stops, darting quick eyes at Ruthie.

“Oh, sit,” Nan says. “There’s time enough for everything.”

“Easy for you to say,” Mavis grumbles.

They sit, perched on the edge of the bed in uncomfortable silence until Nan suggests they scoot back, which they do with a great deal of effort, the tiny orange feathers wisping around them.
As
though
we
are
in
here
plucking
baby
chicks
, Nan thinks.

“What’s in the box?” Mavis asks.

Nan taps the lid. “This? Just some material.”

“Material?” Mavis, who is so close Nan can smell the burnt scent of the cancer (she blames the busyness of the last couple of days for not having noticed sooner) looks skeptical.

Ruthie leans across Nan to speak. “We were talking about Eve. I was just saying how I always thought it would have made a difference if we’d taken her to Miss Winter, if we’d gotten help sooner.”

Nan, pressed between Mavis and Ruthie, holds still, trying not to let her body betray her distress. How bitterly will this weekend, their friendship, and their lives end?

“Yes,” Mavis sighs. “But what’s the point?”

“What’s the point?” Nan asks.

“The unchosen path is always perfect, isn’t it?”

Nan shudders.

“Are you cold?”

When she turns to face Ruthie, Nan almost gasps. She should be used to it by now, but every time it’s a shock. Where are the girls they’d been? What happened to them? How has time turned like this, not a spool, but a sharp stone, a piece of glass, nothing that can be unraveled or rewound?

Yet, it’s wonderful, isn’t it, to be here now, pressing shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip with these old friends? All the wasted hours! So much unshared and unknown!

“Think of girls today,” Mavis says. “Basil and Tammy down there, and Sonya.”

Nan glances at Ruthie, but this is too somber a subject to fall into giggling at Mavis’s trouble with names.

“Generations of girls,” she continues, “who will never know.”

“Never know what?” Ruthie asks.

“The terror of choice,” Mavis says. “The terror of getting it wrong.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Nan says. “Girls today still have to choose. They still suffer consequences. Bay’s mother had to make a choice. I had to choose as well, after Bay’s arrival. I had to make a very difficult choice that I’ve never told anyone about.” Nan stops abruptly. It is a tremendous word burp, but haven’t they been good at keeping each other’s secrets? In spite of everything else, haven’t they been good at that?

“You know you can tell us anything,” Ruthie says.

“Yes. We’ll be dead soon.”

Was Mavis trying to be funny? Nan can’t even summon a polite grin of support. What is she doing? Is she really going to confess now? After all these years?

Mavis and Ruthie wait expectantly, their eyes tired but kind. In all the wide world, who else would Nan ever share this secret with, but them?

“If you don’t want to tell,” Ruthie starts, but Nan shakes her head.

“I’m not sure where to begin.”

“What about with Bay’s arrival?”

“It was one of those mornings,” Nan says. “Those misty summer mornings, when you might expect to find a rainbow in the garden, not a baby on the porch. But there she was. In a shoe box, if you can imagine. Do you know, for a while I considered naming her Adidas?” Nan shakes her head. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Adidas?” Ruthie asks. “Isn’t that a boy’s name?”

“Well, I don’t really know.” Nan tries to recall what made her reject the preposterous moniker all those years ago. “I don’t think that occurred to me. I just remember being certain she should be named after a shoe. I rejected several choices before—”

“As charming as this is,” Mavis says. “I suspect you’ve gone off track already.”

Cutting her eyes at Mavis, Nan leans toward Ruthie. “Why, do you know at one point I tried so many shoe names on the child I considered calling her Cinderella?”

Nan leans back, a smug smile on her face, as Ruthie chortles. Even Mavis, Nan notices, can’t suppress a grin. “Well, I eventually moved away from shoes into herbs and made the obvious choice. Bay. The baby I thought I’d never have. We needed each other, and I do believe we loved each other immediately. I know it doesn’t always work like that, but it worked that way with us, and then…and then…”

“Her mother came back?” Ruthie offers.

“What? No.” Nan shakes her head. “Not really.”

“Not really?” Mavis asks. “What does that mean?”

“It means she didn’t really come back,” Ruthie says, turning to Nan as Mavis rolls her eyes. “Go on.”

“We had the rest of July, all of August, and much of September. I was happy. I was the happiest I’d ever been, I think. I think I really was. I was also exhausted, of course. Well, you understand. You both had children. Imagine a newborn! At my age.”

“I shudder at the thought,” Mavis says, and Ruthie nods vigorously.

“I was just stepping out onto the porch with my cup of tea, planning to sit in the rocker and watch fall’s arrival. I had already put Bay down upstairs and set the baby monitor out there. Well, you know how it is with babies. It takes twenty tasks to do one thing. I was worn out, and there he was, walking up to the house. I thought he was about fourteen.”

“Who? Who?” Ruthie asks. “Did I miss something?”

“Just listen,” Mavis says. “She hasn’t gotten to that part yet.”

It is a moment of reprieve, Nan thinks, an opportunity to take it back, make something up entirely, but even as she considers more lies, she continues with the truth.

“I thought he was fourteen, but it turns out he was two years older. He nodded and called me ma’am, like a man about to tip his hat. He was trying to use his best manners, I suspect, but right away I had that voice in my head that made me pretend with him. So I pretended he didn’t frighten me, though he did.

“His car was in front of the house. A boy’s car, you know. A teenage boy’s car, parked on the side of the road squarely in front of the house. Anyway, I thought maybe he’d come for a remedy. I used to do that for a while, though I hadn’t recently, and even then it had been mostly girls.”

“A remedy?” Ruthie asks.

“Never mind,” Mavis says.

“You know.” Nan shrugs, not sure that Ruthie will ever understand. “Herbs and such. For colds, and unwanted…things.”

“Unwanted things? But what do herbs have to do with…oh…”

Nan watches Ruthie’s blue eyes widen in the dim light. “Oh,” she says. “You mean babies?”

“Fetuses,” Mavis snaps.

Nan expects to see disapproval register on Ruthie’s face, but she tilts her head slightly and, after a moment, nods. “Of course,” she says softly. “That makes sense.”

“I couldn’t fathom what he wanted, even as I sensed the danger. I was distracted by fear. One minute he was talking about his sister, and the next he was saying he’d come to take the baby. He had a right, he said.”

Ruthie gasps. “Bay’s father?”

“Her uncle.”

“Dear God,” Mavis says.

“He just sat right down in the porch rocker, as though we were friendly that way. He said his sister told him she left her baby here. I don’t know how that conversation came about. I like to think they were close. I like to believe she confided in him because he was good, and that the things he said to me were because he was overwhelmed. Just the way I like to believe I am a better person than I was to him, generally.”

“Oh, you are a wonderful person,” Ruthie says. “Whatever would make you think otherwise?”

Nan appreciates the comment, but who knows what Ruthie will think by the end of this conversation? Why, it might even be too much for Mavis.

“She told him she spoke to me once when she dropped off a shoe donation. I am sorry to say I have no memory of that. While he was talking, all the time rocking and flicking that hair off his face and shrugging his shoulder the way he did, just one shoulder going up, like he couldn’t make the effort for both, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to fight it. Bay wasn’t really mine. No matter how much I loved her, and I love her a lot.”

“Oh, we know you do,” Ruthie says.

“Without a doubt,” adds Mavis.

“My whole life I felt like I didn’t deserve happiness. You girls understand, don’t you?”

Ruthie nods vigorously. Mavis clears her throat and then, with a quick gesture, pats Nan’s knee, one tap, like a bird on a hot wire. They understand. Of course they do.

“I asked why he had shown up without his sister, and while his answer was circuitous, I came to comprehend she had not wanted him to interfere. Naturally, I wasn’t going to hand Bay over to some random stranger just because he said he had a right, but as he talked and rocked and twitched, shrugging his shoulder, as though it was all nothing more than cute circumstance, I knew I wouldn’t be able to put him off forever. Then I heard him say it. He couldn’t have said that! I asked him to repeat it.

“He’d heard the rumors that Bay was some sort of ‘freak.’ He said”—Nan pauses, hardly able to formulate the words—“he had plans. A baby like her, a ‘freak,’ he said, could make money.

“He must have seen how horrified I was, because he told me it could all be done over the Internet. ‘It’s not like I’m talking about selling her to the circus or nothing like that,’ he said, and actually laughed as if he was being funny.”

“Not funny at all,” says Ruthie, closing her lips in a tight line of disapproval.

“I didn’t know what to do. I sat there, staring at my yard filled with shoes and dying flowers, the autumn grass and those odd spears that stand after the tiger lilies die. I looked at my elm tree, the leaves just turning gold, and thought how I had imagined someday Bay would climb those branches and lie under them for shade. I looked at the purple aster, the late sunflower, the unfathomable rose, and the foxgloves. I looked at the foxgloves while I listened to Bay breathing peacefully, with no idea of what had come for her, and I thought how love is like a monster, you know?”