Garden Spells

by Sarah Addison Allen

  Every two or three months, David would fly to L.A. to check in person how the restaurant he’d bought into was running. He always stayed to party with his partners, old college buddies from his UCLA days. He’d come home happy, still a little buzzed, and that would last until he wanted sex and she wouldn’t compare with the girls he’d been with in L.A. She used to be like those girls, long ago. And dangerous men had been her specialty, just as she always imagined it had been for her mother—one of the many reasons she left Bascom with nothing but a backpack and a few photos of her mother as a traveling companion.

  “I’m ready,” Bay whispered as she walked into the hallway where Sydney was pacing.

  Sydney went to her knees and hugged her daughter. She was five already, old enough to realize what was going on in her house. Sydney tried to keep David from having any sort of influence on Bay, and by unspoken agreement he didn’t hurt Bay as long as Sydney did what he said. But it was a terrible example Sydney was setting. Bascom, for all its faults, was safe, and going back to a place she despised was worth Bay finally knowing what security felt like.

  Sydney pulled back before she started crying again. “Come on, honey.”

  She used to be good at leaving. She used to do it all the time before she met David. Now the fear of it was making it hard to breathe.

  When she first left North Carolina, Sydney had gone straight to New York, where she could blend and no one thought she was strange, where the name Waverley meant nothing. She moved in with some actors, who used her to perfect their Southern accents while she worked on getting rid of hers. After a year she went to Chicago with a man who stole cars for a living, a good living. When he was caught, she took his money and moved to San Francisco and lived on it for another year. She changed her name then, so he wouldn’t find her, and she became Cindy Watkins, the name of one of her old friends from New York. After the money was gone, she went to Vegas and served drinks. The girl she’d traveled from Vegas to Seattle with had a friend who worked at a restaurant called David’s on the Bay, and she got jobs for them both.

  Sydney had been wildly attracted to David, the owner. He wasn’t handsome, but he was powerful and she liked that. Powerful men were thrilling, until the point that they turned frightening, and that was when she always left. She became so good at touching fire and not getting burned. Things with David started to get scary about six months after she started seeing him. He would bruise her sometimes, tie her up in bed and tell her how much he loved her. Then he started following her to the grocery store and to friends’ houses. She made plans to leave him, to steal some money from his restaurant and go to Mexico with a girl she’d met at the Laundromat, but then she found out she was pregnant.

  Bay arrived seven months later, named by David after his restaurant. The first year of Bay’s life, Sydney resented the quiet baby for everything that had gone wrong. David disgusted her now, frightened her well beyond the limit she thought there was to being scared. And he sensed it and hit her more. This hadn’t been part of her plan. She didn’t want a family. She’d never counted on staying with any of the men she met. Now she had to stay because of Bay.

  One day everything changed. They were still living in the apartment she and David had shared before moving to the town house. Bay was barely a year old, and she was playing quietly with the clean laundry in the basket on the floor, draping washcloths on her head and towels over her legs. Suddenly Sydney saw herself, playing alone while her mother wrung her hands and paced the floor at the Waverley house in Bascom, before her mother left again without a word. A powerful feeling surged through her, and her skin prickled and she let out a deep breath that came out like frost. That was the moment she let go of trying to be her mother. Her mother had tried to be a decent person, but she had never been a good mother. She had left her daughters with no explanation, and she never came back. Sydney was going to be a good mother, and good mothers protected their children. It had taken her a year, but she finally realized that she didn’t have to stay because she had Bay. She could take Bay with her.

  She’d been so good at running in the past that she’d been lulled into a false sense of security, because no one had ever come after her. She actually made it through beauty school before walking out of the salon in Boise where she’d gotten her first job and finding David in the parking lot. Before she noticed him standing there by his car, she remembered turning her face into the wind and smelling lavender and thinking she hadn’t smelled that since Bascom. The scent seemed to be coming from the salon itself, as if trying to get her to follow it back in.

  But then she saw David and he dragged her to his car. She was surprised but didn’t struggle, because she didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of her new friends in the salon. David drove off and parked behind a fast-food restaurant, where he hit her with his fists so many times she lost consciousness, and she woke up while he was fucking her in the backseat. He rented a motel room afterward and let her clean up, telling her how it was all her fault as she spit a tooth into the bathroom sink. They later went to pick up Bay at daycare, where David had discovered Bay was enrolled and was how he found them. He was charming and the teachers believed him when he said Sydney had been in a car accident.

  Back in Seattle, his anger would come on so suddenly. Bay would be in the next room and Sydney would be making her a peanut butter sandwich, or she’d be in the shower, and suddenly David would appear and hit her in the stomach or pin her against the counter and rip down her shorts, then he’d pound into her, telling her she would never leave him again.

  For the past two years, ever since he’d dragged her back from Boise, Sydney would walk into a room and smell roses, or she would wake up and taste honeysuckle in the air. The scents always seemed to be coming from a window or a doorway, a way out.

  It was only one night while watching Bay sleep, crying quietly and wondering how she was going to keep her child safe when they were in danger if they stayed and in danger if they left, that it suddenly made sense.

  She’d been smelling home.

  They had to go home.

  She and Bay walked silently downstairs in the predawn dark. Susan next door could see both the front and back doors, so they went to the window in the living room that overlooked the small strip of side yard that Susan couldn’t see. Sydney had earlier popped out the screen, so all she had to do was quietly open the window and lower Bay out first. Next she tossed down her tote bag, another suitcase she’d packed, and Bay’s small backpack, which she’d let Bay pack on her own, full of secret things that brought her comfort. Sydney crawled out and led Bay through the hydrangea bushes and into the parking lot by their house. Greta from the park said she was going to leave the Subaru in front of the 100 block of town houses one street over. She was going to put the keys above the visor. No insurance and a dead tag, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it would get them away.

  It was drizzling as she and Bay jogged along the sidewalk, skirting the shine of the streetlights.

  Sydney’s bangs were dripping into her eyes when they finally stopped at the 100 block of town houses. Her eyes darted around. Where was it? She left Bay and ran up and down the parking lot. There was only one Subaru, but it was too nice to be worth only three hundred dollars. It was locked too, and there were papers and an Eddie Bauer coffee mug inside. It belonged to someone else.

  She ran around the parking lot again. She checked one street over, just to be sure.

  It wasn’t there.

  She ran back to Bay, out of breath, appalled that her panic made her leave her daughter even for a minute. She was getting sloppy, and she couldn’t do that. Not now. She sat on the curb between a Honda and a Ford truck and buried her face in her hands. All that courage wasted. How could she take Bay back, back to the way things were? Sydney couldn’t, wouldn’t, be Cindy Watkins anymore.

  Bay came to sit close beside her, and Sydney wrapped an arm around her.

  “It will be okay, Mommy.”

>   “I know it will. Let’s just sit here for a minute, okay? Let Mommy figure out what to do.”

  At four in the morning, the parking lot was quiet, which was why Sydney jerked her head up when she heard a car approaching. She scooted Bay over as close to the pickup as possible to avoid detection. What if it was Susan? What if she’d told David?

  The lights from the car slowly approached, as if searching for something. Sydney shielded Bay and closed her eyes, as if that would help.

  The car stopped.

  A car door slammed.

  “Cindy?”

  She looked up to see Greta, a short blond woman who always wore cowboy boots and two large turquoise rings.

  “Oh, God,” Sydney whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” Greta said, kneeling in front of her. “I’m so sorry. I tried parking here, but the guy living over there caught me and told me he was calling a tow truck. I’ve been driving by every half hour, waiting for you.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It’s okay.” Greta pulled Sydney to her feet and led her and Bay to a Subaru wagon with plastic over a broken window on the passenger side and rust spots from fender to fender. “Be safe. Go as far as you can.”

  “Thank you.”

  Greta nodded and got into the passenger seat of the Jeep that had followed her into the parking lot.

  “See, Mommy?” Bay said. “I knew it was going to be okay.”

  “Me too,” Sydney lied.

  The morning after Anna Chapel’s party, Claire went to the garden for a basket of mint. She was going to start on the food for the Amateur Botanists Association’s annual luncheon in Hickory on Friday. Being botanists, they liked the idea of edible flowers. Being a bunch of rich eccentric old ladies, they paid well and could give a lot of referrals. It was a coup to get the job, but it was a big job, and she was going to have to buck it up and hire someone local to help her serve.

  The garden was gated by heavy metal fencing, like a gothic cemetery, and the honeysuckle clinging to it was almost two feet thick in some places, completely closing in the place. Even the gate door was covered with honeysuckle vines, and the keyhole was a secret pocket only a few could find.

  When she entered, she noticed it right away.

  There, in the cluster of Queen Anne’s lace, tiny leaves of ivy were sprouting.

  Ivy in the garden.

  Overnight.

  The garden was saying that something was trying to get in, something that was pretty and looked harmless but would take over everything if given the chance.

  She quickly pulled the ivy out and dug deep for the roots. But then she spied a hairy vine of it sneaking up a lilac bush, and she crawled over to it.

  In her haste, she hadn’t closed the garden gate behind her, and a half hour later she jerked her head around in surprise when she heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel pathway that snaked around the flowers.

  It was Tyler, carrying a cardboard milk box and looking around as if he’d entered someplace enchanted. Everything bloomed here at once, even at a time of year when it wasn’t supposed to. He stopped suddenly when his eyes found Claire on her knees, digging up the roots of the ivy under the lilac bush. He gave her a look like he was trying to make her out in the dark.

  “It’s Tyler Hughes,” he said, as if she wouldn’t recognize him, “from next door.”

  She nodded. “I remember.”

  He walked over to her. “Apples,” he said, crouching beside her and putting the box on the ground. “They fell over the fence. There are at least a dozen here. I didn’t know if you used them for your catering, so I thought I’d bring them over. I tried your door, but no one answered.”

  Claire scooted the box away from him as subtly as possible. “I don’t use them. But thank you. You don’t like apples?”

  He shook his head. “Just occasionally. I can’t figure out for the life of me how they got in my yard. The tree is too far away.”

  He didn’t mention a vision, which relieved her. He must not have eaten one. “Must have been the wind,” she said.

  “You know, the trees on campus don’t have mature apples on them at this time of year.”

  “This tree blooms in the winter and produces apples all spring and summer.”

  Tyler stood and stared at the tree. “Impressive.”

  Claire looked over her shoulder at it. The tree was situated toward the back of the lot. It wasn’t very tall, but it grew long and sideways. Its limbs stretched out like a dancer’s arms and the apples grew at the very ends, as if holding the fruit in its palms. It was a beautiful old tree, the gray bark wrinkled and molting in places. The only grass in the garden was around the tree, stretching about ten feet beyond the reach of its branches, giving the old tree its room.

  Claire didn’t know why, but every once in a while the tree would actually throw apples, as if bored. When she was young, her bedroom window looked out over the garden. She would sleep with her window open in the summers, and sometimes she would wake in the morning to find one or two apples on the floor.

  Claire gave the tree a stern look. Occasionally that worked, making it behave. “It’s just a tree,” she said, and turned back to the lilac bush. She resumed pulling at the roots of the ivy.

  Tyler put his hands in his pockets and watched her work. She’d been working alone in the garden for so many years that she realized she missed having someone there. It reminded her of gardening with her grandmother. It was never meant to be a solitary job. “So, have you lived in Bascom long?” Tyler finally asked.

  “Almost all my life.”

  “Almost?”

  “My family is from here. My mother was born here. She left but moved back when I was six. I’ve been here ever since.”

  “So you are from here.”

  Claire froze. How could he do that? How could he do that with just five little words? He just said to her the very thing she’d always wanted to hear. He was getting in without even knowing how he did it. He was the ivy, wasn’t he? She very slowly turned her head and looked up at him, his lanky body, his awkward features, his beautiful brown eyes. “Yes,” she said breathlessly.

  “So, who are your guests?” he asked.

  It took a moment for the words to penetrate. “I don’t have any guests.”

  “As I was coming around the front of the house, someone pulled up to the curb with a car full of boxes and bags. I thought they were moving in.”

  “That’s strange.” Claire stood and took off her gloves. She turned and walked out of the garden, making sure Tyler was following her. She didn’t trust the tree alone with him, even if he didn’t eat apples.

  She walked along the driveway curving beside the house, but then she came to a sudden stop beside the tulip tree in the front yard. Tyler came up behind her, close, and put his hands on her arms, as if aware that her legs had turned boneless.

  More ivy.

  There was a little girl, about five years old, running around the yard with her arms stretched wide like an airplane. A woman was leaning against an old Subaru wagon parked on the street, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, watching the little girl. She looked small, frail, with unwashed light-brown hair and deep circles under her eyes. She seemed to be holding herself to keep from trembling.

  Claire wondered absently if this was how her grandmother felt when her daughter came home after years away, when pregnant Lorelei showed up on her doorstep with a six-year-old clinging to her leg. This relief, this anger, this sadness, this panic.

  Finally making her legs move, she crossed the yard, leaving Tyler behind.

  “Sydney?”

  Sydney pushed herself away from the car quickly, startled. Her eyes went all over Claire before she smiled. That insecure woman with her arms wrapped around her was gone, replaced by the old Sydney, the one who always looked down her nose at her family name, never realizing what a gift it was to have been born here. “Hi, Claire.”

  Claire stopped on the sidewalk, a few feet away fro
m her. She could be a ghost, or maybe someone who looked incredibly like Sydney. The Sydney Claire knew would never let her hair look like that. She wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a T-shirt with food stains on it. She used to be so meticulous, so put together. She always tried so hard not to look like a Waverley. “Where have you been?”

  “Everywhere.” Sydney smiled that spectacular smile of hers, and suddenly it didn’t matter what her hair or clothes looked like. Yes, this was Sydney.

  The little girl from the yard ran up to Sydney and stood close to her. Sydney put her arm around her. “This is my daughter, Bay.”

  Claire looked at the child and managed to smile. She had dark hair, as dark as Claire’s, but Sydney’s blue eyes. “Hello, Bay.”

  “And this is…?” Sydney asked suggestively.

  “Tyler Hughes,” he said, extending a hand past Claire. She hadn’t realized he’d come up behind her again, and she gave a start. “I live over there, next door.”

  Sydney shook Tyler’s hand and nodded. “The old Sanderson place. It looks good. It wasn’t blue the last time I saw it. Just a hideous moldy white.”

  “I can’t take credit for it. I bought it like that.”

  “I’m Sydney Waverley, Claire’s sister.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’ll just be going. Claire, if you need me for anything…” He squeezed Claire’s shoulder, then left. She was confused. She didn’t want him to go. Yet of course he couldn’t stay. But now she was alone with Sydney and her quiet daughter, and she had no idea what to do.

  Sydney wagged her eyebrows. “He’s hot.”

  “Waverley,” Claire said.

  “What?”

  “You said your last name was Waverley.”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “I thought you hated the name.”

  Sydney shrugged noncommitally.

  “What about Bay?”

  “Her name is Waverley too. Go play some more, honey,” Sydney said, and Bay ran back to the yard. “I can’t believe how great the house looks. New paint, new windows, new roof. I never imagined it could look so good.”