The Girl in the Garden Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1974

  Mabel

  Duncan

  June

  Iris

  Oldman

  1977

  Sam

  June

  Iris

  Mabel

  Oldman

  Duncan

  June

  Iris

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Melanie Wallace

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wallace, Melanie, date.

  Title: The girl in the garden / Melanie Wallace.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015043036 (print) | LCCN 2016002054 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544784666 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544784208 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Unmarried mothers—Fiction. | Mothers and sons—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | New England—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/ Literary. | FICTION/ General. | FICTION/ War & Military.

  Classification: LCC PS 3573. A42684 G57 2016 (print) | LCC PS 3573. A42684 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043036

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph © Vaida Abdul/Arcangel

  eISBN 978-0-544-78420-8

  v1.1216

  For Peter

  1974

  Mabel

  MABEL KNEW BEFORE the girl came to speak with her what she’d say: that the man who hadn’t so much as posed as the girl’s husband hadn’t returned and wasn’t going to. She—Mabel—had surmised—no, she later told Iris over the phone, correcting herself, not surmised but known—from the moment she first saw them that he’d already washed his hands of her. For when he got out of the car he disregarded the girl, left her to open the passenger-side door and manage to get to her feet, stand, with that sleeping infant in her arms. He didn’t even glance behind him to check on her, just walked toward the office porch and left her to trail him.

  Midweek, afternoon, off-season. The autumn air was damp, still, the sky undulate with silken cirrus under which Mabel had been hanging sheets on the lines between the office and the last of the cabins. Two of those were occupied, four yet to be cleaned and shuttered, three still ready for any comers. Any, Mabel told herself, but she was nothing if not discerning about whom to rent to and whom to turn away, she’d had years of trial and error; and if the girl hadn’t had that baby in her arms despite not looking much older than a child herself, Mabel would have said Sorry, I’m closing up for the season. But there she was, trailing him as though shy of him as Mabel approached, wiping her hands on the bleach-stained smock she was wearing over her sweater and jeans. Good day, she greeted them, which made the girl stop and examine the ground at her feet as he responded by giving a nod in the direction of the office and saying, I take it that vacancy sign is good.

  He followed Mabel in, the screendoor closing behind him so that the girl had to let herself through it. She didn’t stand next to him but behind and off to one side, head bent over her child. Mabel took in her stooped posture, the bluish half-moons under her eyes, the flush that rose to her cheeks when he told Mabel that he expected she might lower the price of a cabin if they stayed a while. How long’s a while? Mabel asked. Ten days, he replied, which made the girl look sharply at him, then glance away quickly and hunch even lower over the cache in her arms, Mabel catching in the girl’s expression what she thought might be consternation or dismay—or, she later considered, fear, as if the girl thought he had eyes in the back of his head and would be able to see her consternation or dismay or fear, shielding herself from what Mabel already realized the girl could not. At that instant, she—Mabel—knew she would not, for the girl’s sake, refuse them a cabin or a lower price, and so gave them both.

  He reached into a front pocket and peeled off from a roll of bills the cash he placed on the counter, the girl now watching slantwise and in amazement because, Mabel figured, she hadn’t known he’d had that roll on him or hadn’t ever seen that much money, or both. Mabel said the keys would be to the cabin called Spindrift—each cabin had a wooden sign with its name carved into it, hanging above the doorframe—and added that it was the furthermost from the road and the quietest, so nothing should disturb them there. He sleeps good, the girl murmured then, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and looking at the man beseechingly as if, Mabel later told Iris, giving him the chance to admit the infant not only existed but wasn’t any bother. He turned and glared speechlessly at the girl for a moment, returned to glare at Mabel, his eyes as bloodshot and dry and glassy as Mabel’s husband’s used to be after driving the rig with Jimmy Devine, hauling loads around the country for weeks on coffee and bennies and willful stubbornness and the occasional catnap taken in the bunk he and Devine had built into the cab to allow one of them to sleep while the other was behind the wheel. Mabel took in that glare and watched him work at blinking it away. She recognized exhaustion when she saw it, and she knew by those eyes, by the way his unwashed clothes hung on him and the way he smelled, that he’d been driving day and night, night and day, and that he’d simply given out on her doorstep. My luck were the words that went through Mabel’s mind just then: it was only happenstance that they’d ended up at the cabins, that he’d come to the point of needing a good deal of rest before he could get behind the wheel of that dusty, dented old Buick and face a round of endless driving once again. It went without saying, to Mabel’s way of thinking, that when the time came and he was ready, he aimed to drive off alone.

  So, we’re square, he said, nodding at the cash on the counter, putting his hand out for the keys. We are, Mabel returned, but I’ll need some ID for my records and your receipt. I don’t need—he began to protest, but Mabel cut him off with: It’s the way I do business, on the level. He eyed the bills she hadn’t touched, and Mabel told Iris later that if he hadn’t looked like he’d fall over from exhaustion any minute, he would probably have just scooped up what he’d put down and told her to go to hell. Instead, he turned on his heel and pushed past the girl, letting the screendoor slam behind him. That woke the infant, the girl saying Oh I’m sorry as the baby burst into whine and cry, then slipping away, letting the door shut gently behind her and standing on the porch rocking and cooing at the infant, her thinness so silhouetted by the screendoor through which Mabel gazed that she found it distressing. As disturbing was the way the man spoke to her when he approached, then watched her do as he said and waited for her to make her way over to the Buick and slide herself in.

  The license he handed Mabel was from a Far West state. He was at least three inches taller than the height stated on it, and his eyes weren’t hazel. Mabel wrote the name on the license into her registration book and filled out a receipt, telling him as she did what he needed to know. That the stove was electric. That the refrigerator was on. That there was a new showerhead, extra blankets in the closet. Not to use the towels for the beach. That they were responsible for making up the cabin—if they chose to make it up at all. On their fifth day, she’d bring them fresh towels and sheets and collect the used ones. The television got two channels clearly, a few more if you played around with the rabbit ears. The public telephone was located on the outside of the offi
ce to their right. Roland was the night manager, the office closed at 11 P.M.; she, Mabel, reopened it at eight in the morning. There were directions in the cabin to nearby grocery shopping and beachgoing. And she knew he wasn’t even half listening, standing there in a lank way and breaking out in a filmy sweat, vacantly watching her handle that license. When she handed it back to him with a receipt and the keys, she asked if he wanted a crib. Crib? he repeated. For the baby, she said. Nah, came his response.

  Well, if you change your mind—

  I won’t, he told her. And left abruptly, again letting the screendoor slam, the violence in his stride so visible that the girl hurriedly swung her legs—she’d been sitting with the passenger door open, her feet resting on the ground—into the car and shut the door before he could reach her. For he wasn’t the type, Mabel knew, to open or hold or close a door for that girl, and that wasn’t because he’d gone with no or too little sleep while putting towns, cities, counties, states, most likely an entire continent between where they began from and where Mabel was standing. Knew, too, that he wouldn’t come back into the office to ask for anything, and certainly not that crib, which was something the girl and infant had most likely so far done without anyway. And knew, too, that he’d keep that girl cowed on a tight rein, because nothing was going to change, at least not on his watch during this stopover: and even if he didn’t consider himself as being on watch, this was the way Mabel saw it.

  And maybe she was right and maybe she was wrong, Roland chided her, standing with one foot crossed over the other and leaning an elbow on the office counter, having listened to Mabel recount their arrival that afternoon and her premonitions. The scent of low tide, beached seaweed, salt damp, exuded from his clothes, his skin; that Roland wore the aroma of the shores he walked, rain or shine, snow or sleet, every afternoon before arriving punctually at five—as he had for two years, more now, since a few weeks after her husband’s funeral—never failed to impress her. Arriving just—as Roland put it in the beginning—because he was around, not asking Mabel whether she needed or wanted help and at times ignoring her altogether if she stayed on in the office rather than retreating upstairs to the apartment she couldn’t bear because Paul was in the ground and would never return, would never again need her or their home or those shirts, pants, jeans, sweaters, jackets, caps that were still in his closet, his underclothes and socks still in the left-hand dresser drawers, his razorblades and shaving soap and aftershave in the medicine cabinet: all she had left of him. Between Paul’s summer funeral and the November day she hung out the closed for the season sign, she grew accustomed to Roland’s imperturbable constancy, although what had actually brought him around she never questioned—she was too numb—and he never mentioned. Though they’d never before been friends, they were locals and so not strangers to each other; he’d been two years behind her, had disappeared to state college the year Mabel married Paul, and four years later had returned with a degree and taken a position teaching in the high school they’d graduated from. Just helping out, Roland eventually announced, coming by daily and not acting as though nothing had happened but not asking questions, never insinuating that she should talk about losing Paul, about her grief. And he wasn’t chary of her. He remained at ease and self-contained and, by the following season after Mabel opened, took over the care of those issues that sometimes arose in the night, chasing off raccoons that hankered to tip over garbage cans, quieting cabin dwellers partying too loudly, determining whether drunken kids who could barely stand never mind drive should be escorted into a cabin. He became the lifeline that saved Mabel during the most desolate winter of her life, between closing and opening the year she lost Paul, Roland continuing to pass by often and for no reason at all but for the fact, he reminded her, that her place was a natural stopover on his way between beachcombing and the night.

  Roland’s chiding did not rankle her, for Mabel knew she was right. She trusted what Paul had always said was her sixth sense, and she’d looked this stranger straight in those eyes whose color did not match that recorded on the license he’d proffered and in them recognized a wariness that could not mask his dishonesty or wiles, never mind his resentment of having been hamstrung by a girl and baby. She’d looked at him hard and intuited what he was capable of, could imagine him grim with glee because someone had defied him to swing into a hairpin turn at an insane speed or because he’d just walked into a bar and seen his mark or because he’d come across a lone female stuck with a flat in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere, and, in changing her tire, got caught up in the thrall of having coolly reckoned her gullibility, his possibilities. Mabel caught more than a glimpse of the person behind those eyes, saw through a man who might do anything with a calculated lassitude and cold equanimity, certainly without shame, if he thought he could get away with it or had no other way out. And Mabel knew, she told Roland then (and later told Iris over the phone), that that girl and infant would have been at what little mercy that man had left, and that by renting them a cabin she had already given him the way out he was seeking. If she hadn’t, he’d have found other lodging, and the result would be the same.

  Nothing persuaded Mabel to reconsider her opinion, not Roland’s chiding, and not the fact that during the following days the man didn’t disappear. But Mabel’s sense of what was to come wasn’t dispelled by what she witnessed, for by the way the girl acted it was obvious to Mabel that she feared what Mabel already knew, that he was just biding his time. There was the way the girl placed a small, frayed baby blanket on the ground in front of the cabin each morning and played with the baby, the man eventually coming to stand in the open doorway and gazing off, never approaching or joining her, the girl receiving neither nod nor grunt in response to anything she said to him, instead being met with a malicious silence and withering gaze while he studied her and that infant as if trying to figure whether they were animal or mineral or vegetable before then looking off, indifferent to her again, not giving a damn for the answer. The way she always trailed him with the infant in her arms, whether to the car—always letting herself in on the passenger side as he revved the Buick’s engine—or to the shore on foot, passing the office with her holding the baby and carrying a bag over her shoulder, him leading the way empty-handed and without a backward glance. The way she was downright afraid to speak with Mabel when she encountered her at the clothesline one morning, the girl—without the infant—having draped over a line the diapers and baby clothes she must have washed and rinsed by hand. Upon Mabel’s approach, she threw a furtive glance in the direction of the cabin to check that he wasn’t standing in that doorway, watching and weighing what the two of them might say. Mabel told Roland that even if she’d been blind she wouldn’t have misunderstood the girl’s fear: she wasn’t to speak to Mabel or to anyone, and no matter how bad things were for the girl Mabel figured they’d worsen if she persisted in striking up a conversation. Which she didn’t. Instead, she told the girl quietly as she passed her by, There are clothespins in that hanging bag, just help yourself, and went toward the far end of the clothesline to hang the wash she was carrying. Mabel kept her distance and her back to her as the girl pinned the garments, heard her say her thanks quietly, sensed her move off in the direction of the cabin, and found herself peering from the corner of her eye to check whether he’d opened the door and seen that Mabel and the girl had come across each other.

  He hadn’t. But Mabel was right: he didn’t want the girl to have anything to do with Mabel. For on the morning she approached the girl sitting on the ground by the infant she’d placed on that frayed baby blanket in front of the cabin, Mabel carrying a change of sheets and towels, the girl called out for him before Mabel got close. When he stepped out from the cabin, he said something that sent the girl to scooping up the infant and going back inside, him not acknowledging either her or the baby, just stonily eyeing Mabel’s approach and then saying something over his shoulder that made the girl reappear, holding the sheets and towels they
’d used. She passed him and met Mabel halfway, the look on her face beseeching Mabel to let the exchange take place with nothing more than a nod. As the girl retreated, Mabel called out to him, Everything fine? but he only cocked his head to the side in response.

  And that was that: Mabel didn’t have any reason to approach them again, just took note of them doing what they did every day, him standing framed in the cabin doorway apart from the girl and infant, watching the horizon with an expressionless disregard, the girl always close on his heels with the baby in her arms and letting herself into the car, them driving off and returning, them walking past the office and crossing the road to the dunes and beach with him in the lead and the girl carrying both the baby and bag. Until the morning he drove off alone, coming down the long drive slowly enough for the girl to walk alongside the Buick with her fingers on the handle of his door, him looking straight ahead until they reached the road’s edge, where he stopped the car for a moment, the girl bending toward his open window until something he said made her straighten and take a step back. And then the car turned onto the road, and she watched it disappear, then stood there rocking the child for a long time before returning to the cabin. From whence she reappeared with the baby in the late afternoon and walked back to the road, watching in the direction he’d gone and from which she must have expected him to reappear, standing there as long as she could without losing hope and then crossing the road, heading to where they’d always walked in single file and now bereft of him to follow. By the time she returned from the beach, the dunes, and made her way back to the cabin, Roland was in the office. Mabel nodded in the girl’s direction and pronounced, So it’s happened: he’s gone for good, just before the Buick pulled in. Now eat your words, Roland told her.