The Girl in the Garden Read online

  The man drove down the drive the next morning, the girl again walking alongside the car and again being left behind. This time he didn’t return, and late that afternoon Roland and Mabel watched the girl stand on the edge of the road by the drive until the dusk deepened with day’s end. She walked by them in the gloom, Roland raising a hand to Mabel to stop her from going to the girl. If she needs anything, he said, she’ll come by. But she didn’t, not that evening and not the next day or the day after that, instead just played with the baby in front of the cabin during the mornings and from time to time stood waiting at the roadside, and late each afternoon carried the baby across to the dunes and the shore, Roland still assuring Mabel that it was only a matter of time before the man returned, dumbfounding Mabel with his matter-of-fact refusal to break faith with what Mabel considered to be his illusions regarding human nature. Mabel didn’t argue, just waited out the time it took for the girl to come to the only conclusion she could draw. That came three days after the girl and the man who’d abandoned her had overstayed their ten days. The girl came in through the office door with the baby toward late afternoon, before Roland arrived, to tell Mabel what she later recounted to Iris she’d known from the start. Ma’am, the girl said with as much dignity and composure as she could muster, he hasn’t returned and isn’t likely to.

  It’s just as well, Mabel told her. Then watched as the girl collapsed into a chair and bent over her baby and wept—for the first time in many years—into her hands.

  She said her name was June. As though, it struck Mabel, she’d never had or no longer had a last name or a need for one. She told me she had forty-seven dollars and change on her, Mabel recounted to Iris later over the phone, and I wasn’t about to send her on her way with that, not that she had anywhere to go. Nor was Mabel about to discuss the girl’s future, as her present was disastrous enough, the thought of it almost intolerable. The girl took a long while to cry herself out, and Mabel left her to do so alone, leaving the office and walking to where the girl used to stand at the edge of the road. The season was losing its warmth, the air already tasted of deep autumn, and Mabel stood there until Roland’s VW Beetle came into view and she flagged him down. He didn’t pull into the drive, just braked and idled the car and waited for her to cross the road, rolled down the window and upon seeing her expression said Oh no, to which she replied Oh yes. All right, then, he told her, I’ll be back. Mabel nodded, suddenly aware that Roland knew that she would see the girl through, even if she hadn’t fully considered the complications. And then he was gone, the VW’s odd clacking purr still audible after the car was out of sight, Mabel listening until hearing nothing, seeing nothing but the empty road, and thinking I’m now standing in her shoes, what if Roland never returns, then perishing the thought but not quickly enough; she’d already felt that anvil of anguish lodge in her chest—abandonment has its own valence—and then she was telling herself I’m being ridiculous, crazy, ridiculously crazy and walking back to the office through the paltry, thin light that promised nothing more than a leaden dusk.

  The girl was still in the chair. Mabel didn’t try to comfort her because she didn’t have the words; she’d never known what it was to have a broken heart at that age and like this, but she knew a great deal about loss and knew that the sorrow it spawns is impervious to consolation, allows no solace; Mabel had seen those thin shoulders heave, those thin hands wipe at the tears, and she’d heard that end-of-the-world sobbing and realized that the child—I actually saw her as a child then, Mabel later told Iris, I was suddenly terrified she might be no more than thirteen—had just come up against the hard irrefutable fact that he was gone. Mabel couldn’t imagine what the girl had been through during those last few days, alone and wanting desperately to believe in him, clinging to the empty hope that he’d return, before finally losing the will to wait, believe, hope, which loss had most likely happened two minutes before the girl walked into Mabel’s office and fell apart. At any rate, they stayed like that, the girl sitting crouched over her infant and crying until she finally fell into the silence Mabel refused to sunder, until Roland returned and, after leaving two bags of groceries at the door of the cabin that was now solely the girl’s, came into the office and said hello and leaned against the counter, hooking his elbows behind him and resting them on its surface, telling the girl that he’d just dropped off some things and that she should let him know if there was anything else she or the baby might need, how beautiful the way the baby just slept on, what’s his name? And through those glazed, cried-out eyes, the girl stared at Roland with the exhausted incredulity of someone falling endlessly through space, then finally found her tongue and managed: Luke, his name’s Luke. Well, Roland said, we’ll see to it that Luke is properly set up. And with that, he went into the back of the office and returned with a folding crib and mattress and passed through its silence, let himself out, headed back to the girl’s cabin. He’ll set it up, Mabel said, and June swallowed hard, shook her head slowly. I can’t stay here, she said, I can’t even pay you what I already owe. And Mabel realized the girl had crossed a line with that solitary I, that the reality of being on her own had sunk in.

  Forget that, came Mabel’s rejoinder.

  But the girl forgot nothing; she came into the office early the next morning with the infant on her hip and looking as though she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep or any sleep at all, for despite the fact that her face shined from having been scrubbed, her eyes were swollen, and those blue half-circles beneath them had darkened. She’d pulled her wet hair back into a braid and wore a shirt that was twice too large for her thin frame; his, Mabel realized, realized too that he would have left behind what he wasn’t wearing when he drove off as if that could have assured June—which it hadn’t—that he’d return. At any rate the girl, in that ridiculously huge shirt, placed forty-seven dollars and change on the counter and said: Take this, and please let me work off what else I owe.

  Mabel told her to keep the money, then told her what needed doing.

  So, Mabel recounted to Iris, June stayed on. Doing more than what little Mabel could think to ask of her—at this time of year she didn’t need help, she was able to cope with having a cabin or two rented out during the week and a few more on weekends—with a seriousness of purpose and with an inner reserve that, Mabel came to conclude, sprang from a combination of embarrassment, a well-guarded and self-protective sense of privacy, and a rather fierce determination to set things right by staying as busy as possible so as not to think. She swept and dusted and aired out the unused cabins daily, washed down refrigerator interiors and windows, scrubbed stovetops, set blankets outside to air, helped Mabel with the washing, hanging, folding of sheets and towels. She never spoke about the man who had deserted her, did not speak of her predicament or her past and, at least in Mabel’s presence, never again broke down over the hand fate had dealt her. But Mabel would glimpse her carrying the infant and passing by at the break of day, cutting through the autumnal morning fog that rose like an exhalation from the warm ground, wisping phantasmagorical shapes in her wake as she and the infant moved as one being, solitary and silent, to disappear beyond the road and the dunes, returning only after the sun and breeze dispersed the miasma, revealed again the earth. June’s diurnal predawn passage reminded Mabel of how she too, for months after Paul’s death, had solemnly trespassed the threshold of each day and walked through the dunes, along the shore, staring at the water’s immense and often indistinguishable horizon, given the half-light, the mist, wondering how she might survive her bereavement, that eternity of emptiness that had settled within her and stretched before her, and never finding a clue, just coming back answerless and slipping into the office before it was time to open, then getting through the daylight hours doing by rote what needed to be done and spending the nights curled in a chair, unable to sleep, unwilling to dream, incapable of feeling anything because grief so drained her, numbed her, hollowed her out, that she saw herself as no more than a shell whose on
ce-living internal flesh was now desiccate. Mabel wonders how June survives the nights. Whether she finds the loneliness unbearable, whether she even manages to sleep: Mabel doesn’t ask, June never mentions. But watching the girl drift each morning through the mist and return with the sun, Mabel reminds herself that at least she, Mabel, has had a life, married the man she loved and was loved in return, lived with him where she grew up, in this house among these cabins, except for those times—which could stretch into weeks, into months—he wasn’t with her because of driving with Jimmy Devine.

  The call of the road: Mabel never knew why it meant what it did to Paul. Babe, he’d tell her, think of the money, it covers us for wintering in Florida from January through mud season: think of that. But he didn’t live for the winters they spent in Florida: hitting the highways with Devine had something to do with money but certainly less about their being snowbirds a few months each year than about the fact that Paul loved the going, the wildness of what he called roving, the stopovers for showers at truck depots, the characters sitting at as well as waiting upon diner counters, the way hookers worked their way from cab to cab in off-highway rest stops lightyears distant from any city or town, the way the plains seemed endless, the way storms could blow apart trailer homes being hauled or rain down hailstones the size of golf balls, the way lightning could erupt from the earth and reach into the sky as well as vice versa, the way he and Devine sometimes left the highway and took secondary routes and stopped anywhere they pleased if the landscape, or a hamlet that didn’t deserve so much as a dot on the map, happened to awe them; the way there was always someone, mostly kids and sometimes runaways, hitching a ride, needing to go in any direction anyone who would pick them up happened to be traveling in. The call of the road: Mabel didn’t mind sharing Paul with that, and she worked through the summers with him gone much of the time, waited up nights in the hope that he and Devine might pull over someplace that had a phone booth, waited up to hear the operator’s voice saying Collect call for anybody from Paul, will you accept the charges and then hearing his voice, listening to him describe where they were, where they’d been, the time they were making, the trouble with the rig, the weather, someone they’d picked up, what they’d be hauling next and to where: anything, Paul could tell her anything and nothing, just listening to him breathe was enough.

  Would be even now.

  And if June felt the same about the man who hadn’t so much as posed as her husband and was now gone for good? If she did? How could she not? But no, Mabel insisted to herself, the girl simply couldn’t, she was too young, they couldn’t have been together—if they’d ever been—an iota of the twenty-seven years Mabel had had with Paul. And, too, there’s the fact that the man who left June wasn’t dead, that June hadn’t had to make her peace with his demise; not that Mabel has made her peace with Paul’s death, but she’s come to feel an unaccountable, inexplicable familiarity with the notion of her own. She constantly considered killing herself after his funeral, every night for months she placed her bare feet in Paul’s loafers to feel the shape of his feet, the imprint of his weight, recall the way he looked in the casket and try to feel the nothingness he’d become, indeed join him, so that every friend and acquaintance who made up the mourners at his funeral could no longer bother her with their casseroles and pies, cakes and homecooked meals she couldn’t possibly eat, their heartfelt concern and pity. But she didn’t die, couldn’t kill herself, couldn’t bear friends or pity, and stood in his shoes at night and wept and finally told their friends and acquaintances that she couldn’t eat what they brought, didn’t want company, that she needed time alone; if she couldn’t be with her husband, she didn’t want to be with anyone who would mention his name. Even now, she spurns proffered advice and resists any hint—from those friends who forgave Mabel her misery and came back into her life—of getting on in terms of finding someone else; Mabel has sworn there will be no starting over, she does not want to love or be loved by anyone but the man she has buried. June, Mabel thinks, cannot possibly feel what Mabel has: the girl can’t have known that kind of love, maybe hasn’t even ever been happy, and the man who’s deserted her hasn’t died, she hasn’t had to see him dead or bury him: he’s simply gone. So, Mabel reckons, no matter how crushed June is or how hard the going will surely be, she has the resiliency of youth and its forgiving forgetfulness on her side. More important, Roland quietly observed one evening, is that June has Luke to anchor her.

  Mabel disagreed. Anchors weigh, she reminded him.

  And moor, came his reply.

  I’m not sure she sees it that way.

  What she sees is an infant she loves. Who needs and loves her in return. That’s a given, a constant that won’t change anytime soon.

  If she didn’t have that baby—

  She’d be lost.

  She already is.

  No, Roland said, she isn’t. She’s here with us.

  And he’d said that with us so naturally, without emphasis and without hesitation, that Mabel later reflected, for the first time, that Roland considered her a part of his life, that his steadfast presence was as much about being a part of her life—as much as Mabel would allow—as it was about being himself. And maybe Roland had anchored her; not that she’d ever put it in so many words, but there he was with that waft of ocean wilderness about him, again settling in for the evening and never mentioning his feelings, never asking anything of her, never seeming to mind whether she remained in the office or removed herself and went upstairs to stand in Paul’s shoes or drop into the chair she still curled up in most nights. If she stayed in the office, he’d sometimes talk—Roland, easy with her silences, could hold a one-way conversation—about what he’d discovered or seen or done if he thought she’d be interested or just needed to hear him, anyone, speak about something other than the cabins, the rentals, the weather. He took in but never commented on how, in those first months following the massive heart attack that stilled Paul’s life, felled him instantly, the lines around Mabel’s eyes and mouth had deepened, evidenced her sorrow, the tragedy of her loss. He hadn’t dwelled on her bereavement or coddled her, just came and went and returned again, and she’d come to expect the sound of the VW pulling in or pulling out and to count on Roland’s undemanding constancy without even knowing it, without knowing that he counted on her presence as well. When she put off closing the cabins the autumn after Paul died, Roland never asked when she intended to shutter them; he never mentioned the future, seemed oblivious of it, although of course he wasn’t. Mabel has never been able to intuit the meaning of Roland’s steadfastness because she has been and sometimes still feels herself to be so numb, distraught, lost, that to this day she doesn’t know when she first noticed that Roland had rearranged what knickknacks, magazines, maps she had in the office and made room for the books he brought in on shore plants, crustaceans, marine mammals, waterfowl and migratory birds, seaweed, tides, meteorology, the constellations, edible wild plants, as well as the novels and collections of short stories he taught and those he might consider teaching at some time in the future. When she finally noticed—long after she’d given the cold shoulder to everyone but the strangers who stayed in the cabins—she repeatedly told him that he shouldn’t have inconvenienced himself, didn’t have to come by, drop in, hang around. I know that, he repeatedly countered.

  June stayed shy of him. Perhaps, Mabel considered, would of men for some time to come; then again, June also stayed shy of Mabel, perhaps considering herself a burden but determined to be nothing of the sort, at any rate politely—always politely—refusing both Mabel’s and Roland’s offers to drive her into town when and if she needed anything, instead going on her own every few days, carrying Luke and that bag she’d used for the beach and walking the mile-and-a-half each way, returning with the child in her arms and the bag bumping up against her packed with what she’d bought out of that forty-seven dollars and change she’d been left with, and later the weekly pocket money—Mabel’s words—Mabel insis
ted June take for the work she did. June politely objected to accepting money from Mabel, pointing out—also politely—that she couldn’t, hadn’t, paid for the cabin, but Mabel pshawed her: June wasn’t keeping Mabel from renting out the cabin at this time of year, no one was banging on the office doors for a place to stay. Besides, Mabel informed her gently, you and Luke are going to need warm clothes for what’s coming: winter’s around the corner.

  And of course June had noticed—who wouldn’t have; the days were shorter, frost sometimes crusted the ground at night, the only fog now appeared at sea. The ocean’s hue had gone from gray to cobalt, the sun no longer dried and bleached the sands beneath the hightide lines, and the bonewhite dunes of summer were blonder now, the shadows spilling beneath their crests a dull russet. The green of the conifers had deepened and lost luster; the birch and maple trees, sumacs and scrub oaks, willows and ailanthus had turned colors that would not be seen again until their buds bloomed in spring. June one day asked Mabel the names of those trees that had lost most of their leaves, which made Mabel realize June had never experienced the Northeast before, and because Mabel had no idea where the girl was from, she—without prying—took that opportunity to ask. June paused before coming up with a perfectly oblique answer. From a nowhere place, June told her, adding: You wouldn’t know it.

  A nowhere place, Roland later mused, doesn’t strike me as somewhere she can return.

  He didn’t ask Mabel when she would close for the season, didn’t ask her intentions, but knew the day was fast approaching when June and Luke would have to leave that unheated cabin. He waited for Mabel to mention the inevitable, but she didn’t, despite the bite of the winds, the shifting shape of the dunes and shoreline, the heavy swells of low, rolling cloudcover keeping the sun at bay. The vacancy sign remained and the cabins went empty, and Mabel did not tell Roland what he already knew: that she could not bring herself to take June and Luke into her home, shelter the two through the winter, because even after two years she couldn’t live with anyone but the man she’d buried, couldn’t make room for or stand the nightly presence of anyone in the upstairs apartment but Paul, never mind a girl she barely knew and a baby she was growing fond of who would only remind her of what she and Paul had always wanted but never had. And maybe, Roland considered, she judged herself harshly for not taking them in, but he knew she was not ready to allow herself the privilege of being needed, never mind loved again—even by a girl or a child—without feeling, no, knowing, that this would eat away at her loss, consume her mourning, disallow her to constantly think of and remember Paul, whose scent and voice had been lost to her, and whose face and body were now terrifyingly indistinct to her. Mabel wasn’t ready to betray the one constant she stubbornly clung to: her past.