The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” Sonia said. “But they won’t find her with us.”

  When Mary glanced over to the wagons, the young man with the dog was staring at her.

  “That’s my brother,” Sonia told her. “He can help you.”

  His name was Yaron, and his dog could find anything and anyone. All the collie needed was a scrap of the missing person’s clothing. Once the dog picked up a scent there was no stopping him.

  “Should we tell them?” Mary nodded to the men from town.

  “Would they believe us?” Sonia shrugged.

  They decided to search on their own. Sonia left the children with another woman and accompanied Mary and Yaron through the field with the dog, whose name was Birdie. The collie was sable and cream colored with flowing hair and a long sensitive nose. He and his owner looked alike, except that Yaron’s hair was dark. They both seemed standoffish, as though they had other things on their mind. Yaron had his chin lifted, as if expecting to be engaged in a fight at any time. No one spoke as they walked along, the dog trotting before them. Mary was shivering so badly she’d begun to shake. The snowy June, the dark sky, the outsiders beside her—all of it made her feel disoriented, even though they had soon enough reached town, and then her street, and then the house where she had lived her whole life long. Every lamp was glowing and the Museum loomed hugely. For some reason Mary was embarrassed in front of Sonia and Yaron to have been granted so much. She wanted to say, None of it means anything to me. Only the people inside matter. Instead she asked if those were Birdie’s puppies in the box in the settlement.

  Sonia and Yaron exchanged an amused look. Yaron looked a little less cross. He said something to his sister that Mary didn’t understand.

  “He said he hopes so,” Sonia told Mary. “Since Birdie is the only male dog in the camp.”

  They left the collie in the yard, stomped the snow from their boots, then went inside. Rebecca Starr and Mary’s sister Olive were in the parlor, by the fire. When they heard footsteps, they leapt up.

  “Where is she?” Rebecca said.

  “They haven’t found her yet,” Mary told her mother. “But this man’s dog can find her.”

  When the dog’s talent was explained, Olive ran for one of Amy’s dresses.

  “Do you have the cards?” Rebecca asked her housemaid. She’d become obsessed with knowing the future, and she begged for another reading.

  Sonia looked at her brother, who shook his head and said, “Na.” Sonia laid out the cards for Rebecca. She was a mother herself and understood the need for a glimmer of hope. She turned over the first card. The Queen of Hearts.

  “Your daughter,” Sonia said.

  She turned over another. The Queen of Diamonds. Sonia stopped.

  “And that one?” Rebecca wanted to know.

  Sonia paused. “Your other daughter,” she told Rebecca.

  They all turned to Mary.

  “That means I’ll find her,” Mary said.

  Olive had returned with Amy’s best dress, blue muslin with ribbon smocking. Mary took it and nodded to Yaron and they turned to go.

  “Kaj dajas?” Sonia called to her brother, but he didn’t bother to call back an answer and Sonia didn’t need one. She knew they were going to try to find the little girl; she wouldn’t have expected less, even though it would probably be wiser for the travelers to pack up and leave before they were blamed for whatever happened. Mary and Yaron went through the kitchen, outside to where the dog was waiting. Yaron got on one knee and let the dog smell the dress. The dog did so, then barked excitedly.

  “He has her scent,” Yaron said. “It’s a good sign.”

  Birdie went through the yard and they followed the dog across the green, past the old Brady house, the first one built in Blackwell when the town was settled, where young Tom Partridge lived now. It looked different in the night, like a house she’d never been to before. They went round the yard, into the rear garden, the one that was never planted, for it had once been a burying ground. The dog stopped. Yaron knelt down again. He dug through the snow. The soil was red here, and there were climbing roses, frozen, buried inside a tall drift. Yaron accidentally pricked himself on some thorns and his blood dripped into the snow. Mary felt her heart leap. She wanted to move forward. Instead she backed away. The dog barked again, and Yaron scooped more snow. There was a scrap of fabric. Mary came to kneel beside him. She was trembling, but she forced herself to be steady. Yaron glanced at her, then quickly looked away.

  “Oh,” Mary breathed. It was Amy’s poppet doll that they had sewn together only weeks ago. Amy was never without it. Mary sat back on her heels as though she’d been struck. The dog was headed toward the far end of the property.

  Yaron stood and reached out his hand to Mary. She suddenly felt too young to be where she was, in the red garden on a cold, black night with a man she didn’t know. Freckles of snow were still falling. Later the wind would be fierce, but for now everything was silent. They could hear the dog trotting through the drifts.

  “I don’t know,” Mary said softly. She wasn’t sure what she meant by her own remark. Did she mean she didn’t know if she could go on or where they should look? Or did she mean that she didn’t know what to think or feel?

  “You don’t have to,” Yaron assured her. “The dog knows. All we have to do is follow.”

  Mary took Yaron’s hand, and he helped her to her feet.

  “Where are you from?” she asked as they trudged through the snow.

  “We came here from Virginia. We’ll go west when we leave.”

  The drifts were even taller here, so Yaron kept Mary’s hand in his to help her navigate the snow. His touch was so hot it was burning. They had come to the oldest apple tree in Blackwell. It was the only tree that had bloomed this season, despite the weather.

  “Amy liked to play here,” Mary said. Then she fell quiet. She didn’t like the way she was talking, as if she already knew something it was impossible to know.

  Yaron reached to snap a frozen branch from the apple tree and put it in his jacket pocket. “For my horse,” he said. “I’ll plant it where we go next.”

  The dog ran back to them and bumped against Yaron’s legs. Yaron reached to pet Birdie, but the collie was already running ahead. They followed him for a long way, past the marshy acreage no one bothered with since it was of no use for pastureland or farming. Usually it was possible to hear the Eel River rushing at this time of year, but in the storm much of the river had been covered with a thin crust of ice. Tonight it was quiet.

  Mary drew closer to Yaron. He was twenty-two or -three, a man of the world, whereas Mary had never been as far as Lenox. She’d never been outside of Blackwell, except for the times when her father had taken her on expeditions to Hightop Mountain, to look for insects and ferns and the scat of wild creatures that would reveal their diet. She felt like a stranger in a strange land, one of the people the pastor spoke of in his sermons, someone who had wandered very far from home.

  The dog was padding back and forth along the riverbank, yelping. Then he stood in one place. Mary went to follow, but Yaron stopped her.

  “Let me go,” he said.

  Mary, who was unafraid of the dark, found she was now frightened. She watched Yaron lope over to his dog. He knelt down to pet the collie, speaking to him softly. Mary wanted to know what he was saying, she wanted to kneel there beside him. Yaron got up and threw a look behind him that troubled her. Then he plunged into the river.

  It shocked her to see him disappear beneath the ice. Mary made a gasping noise even though she wasn’t the one who’d gone under. She felt that her heart had stopped. The dog raced back and forth on the bank, barking, beside himself at the disappearance of his master. Mary stood there for a second, then she raced to the river. Everything was going fast, the way clouds flew past in a storm, the way snow fell in a blizzard. Yaron was gone, with broken ice flowing in a circle in the place where he had dived in.

  Mary stood a
t the edge of the river, her boots wet. She went deeper still, up to her knees. The water froze her to her bones. She could feel herself sinking into the mud. Through the ice she thought she saw an enormous blue fish. It was like the fish in a dream, the sort you can never catch. Then there was a shadow and the ice broke. Yaron surfaced holding the fish, which was her sister, dripping with water, blue in his arms.

  They stood together in the shallows of the river, the little girl’s sopping body between them, their breath hot and fast while Mary sobbed and Yaron did his best to comfort her. The dog was quiet now, down on his haunches, his eyes never leaving the child he’d been sent to find. Amy’s clothes were frozen stiff, and she was heavy as a block of ice. They laid her down on the riverbank. Mary covered her sister’s body with her own and breathed into the little girl’s tiny cold mouth. She’d read that it was sometimes possible to bring the dead back by doing so. But it did no good.

  “They’ll think I did it because I found her,” Yaron said.

  “No.” The snow was oddly bright. Amy looked like a fallen star, shining beside them.

  Yaron shook his head. His dark hair was wet. “They always think that.”

  The clothes he wore were frozen now, too, and there was snow in his hair. Mary thought about the way she’d felt when he’d disappeared into the river. She recalled the look on his face before he dove in. She felt something inside her that was unexpected as Yaron leaned to tenderly close her sister’s eyes.

  In the morning the search party found the child on the bank of the Eel River, the blue dress covering her. The snow had hardened overnight, and it made a crunching noise beneath their boots. Ernest Starr had to be restrained. He was in a state of grief so immense he vowed he would never let his daughter go. He claimed he would find a way to preserve Amy’s body in salt or brandy and she would be with him still, but Rebecca wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted her child be taken to the burying ground outside of town, with the service held under the one tree that had managed to bloom in that cold season, the one people called the Tree of Life, which was true enough, for its fruit kept people in town from starving during the coming winter’s famine. Rebecca Starr demanded that the coffin be opened so she could take off her child’s boots and Amy could walk into the kingdom of heaven in her bare feet. No one was about to deny Rebecca anything. They let her do as she pleased. She had lost two daughters in a single day, for Mary had disappeared. No one dared question Rebecca when she kept the horse traders’ pup that had been left on her doorstep. She walked with the collie every day, along the river and through the meadow, where there were still ruts in the earth the following summer when the weather was warm once more and the sky was at last cloudless and clear.

  OWL AND MOUSE

  1848

  EMILY WENT FOR A WALK ON HER LAST DAY at school. Her family was taking her out of Mount Holyoke Seminary; she was needed at home and she hadn’t been happy at the school. Her views were her own, and educators did not always appreciate free thought. It was time to leave. But before she went back to the family house and everyone else’s demands, she wanted to go somewhere she’d never been. She longed for the woods and for great distances. She’d often gone rambling as a child, collecting nearly six hundred species of wildflowers, some never seen before. She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse. There was something that came between Emily and other people, a white linen curtain, hazy. It made the world quieter and farther away, although occasionally she could see through to the other side. She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.

  She passed the boundary of the school grounds and kept on. She had always been a walker, and being alone was her natural state. Once she was in the woods, she was a shadow. She recognized wildflowers the way someone else might recognize old friends: velvet-leaf, live forever, lad’s love. She stooped to pick a sprig of lad’s love and slipped it in her shoe. Local people said it was a charm that would lead you to your true love. She did feel charmed. She went on, hour after hour. She spied red lily, wood lily, trout lily. She crossed two roads, then went into even deeper woods. The forest here was dark and green. The world had become topsy-turvy. Day was night and night was day, and no one on earth knew where she was. She had a wild, careless feeling that made her limbs feel loose and free. There was bloodroot in among the carpet of moss and leaves, hyacinth and squill. She had reached Hightop Mountain without knowing it. At last, she was visiting a place she’d never been to before. She had been walking for almost ten hours, and for most of that time she’d been caught up in a dream. There were black bears up here that could run faster than any man and weighed up to six hundred pounds. Emily had read that injured bears sobbed like human beings, and that gave her some comfort. They were not so unalike.

  She slept beneath a tree that night, sitting upright. She imagined she would have been scared for her life out in the open, for she was often terrified in her own room at home, even after double-locking the windows and covering the glass with quilts. Instead, she felt an odd calm spirit here in the wilderness. Was this the way people felt at the instant they leapt into rivers and streams? Was it like this when you fell in love, stood on the train tracks, went to a country where no one spoke your language? That was the country she was in most of the time, a place where people heard what she said but not what she meant. She wanted to be known, but no one knew her.

  It was cold in the morning when Emily awoke. She was shivering. Now that it was daylight she realized she had reached the top of the mountain. She made her way down, to the village below. There were brambles, thorn trees, yellow jacket nests, poison oak. She had never walked quite so far and was thrilled and terrified by her own bravery. Her hair was knotted. Her hands were raw. There was dew on her shoes.

  Soon the sun warmed the air. Emily went on, past an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. There were rabbits in the yard. They too cried like human beings when trapped. The house at the edge of the woods was old with a thatched roof. What if she lived there? If her brother and father searched for her, they would walk right past, not guessing she was inside. She could will herself to be invisible. Her family would give up hope and stop their search and here she’d be, safe and alone and free. She could make her clothes out of tablecloths, sleep on a pallet of straw, keep the windows open, leaving behind the overriding fear she carried so close to her bones.

  She went on, past meadows, through an orchard. There was a canopy of apple blossoms and the air was fragrant. When she gazed up through the haze of white she could imagine there was snow, that heaven had opened, that the world was hers alone. It was a small town she’d stumbled upon, and no one noticed her until she went past the Brady homestead, the oldest house in town. There was a man out in the yard, sitting in a chair in the sunlight. He was in his thirties, handsome, with a dark beard. He was looking up at the sky, but somehow he knew she was there.

  “Were you going to pass without saying good morning?” He had a slight accent, a charming manner.

  “Good morning,” Emily managed to say. She felt as if she had swallowed bees. Perhaps she’d been stung. Later, a red welt would rise on her wrist, one she hadn’t noticed as she stood at the gate. She was in a town she’d never been to, conversing with a man who had the nerve to address her as though he knew her, when no one on earth knew her. Likely no one in heaven did either.

  “You’re not from here,” the man said. He knew that much.

  “I was in the woods. Looking for wildflowers.” It was something of the truth. Enough.

  “You’re not afraid of bears?” the man teased.

  “I fear myself more than I fear any bear,” Emily blurted. It was the way she’d felt in her aloneness, the comfort she took in being on the mountain. What might she do next?

&
nbsp; “So you’re fierce?” He didn’t laugh at the notion but asked in all honesty. He sat forward, shifted his gaze.

  “I’m a mouse,” Emily said, suddenly shamed.

  “I doubt that. Have breakfast with me,” the man requested. He had a napkin tied around his neck. “I’m desperate to talk to someone interesting.” The dark-haired man wore a white shirt and a light-colored suit. He was casual, the way too-handsome men often were. He bordered on rude, but he did have a tray of delicious-looking food set out before him. There were muffins, honey butter, apple slices, along with a plate of bacon. Emily realized she was starving. Still, she hesitated.

  “Sir,” she said, “I don’t even know you.”

  “I’m Charles Straw,” the man said. “My friends call me Carlo.”

  Emily felt the bird in her chest, trapped in a net.

  “Don’t say no,” this man Charles urged. “How many times does a beautiful woman walk by this old house?”

  That was when Emily understood he was blind. She nearly laughed out loud. No one who could see would ever think she was anything but plain. She came in through the gate to take the chair that faced him.

  He felt her shadow graze his skin, and he knew he’d drawn her in. He smiled. “So you’re not so fierce as you pretend.”

  “It was you who suggested I was anything other than a mouse,” Emily protested. “What happened to your eyes?” she asked when she noticed they were without a gleam. They were the most unusual color—a flat, deep blue. If she had to describe them on a page, she would say a lake, a door to heaven.

  “You’re very blunt.” Charles laughed. “Or is it rude?”

  “If you think I’m rude, I can leave.” Emily’s hands were folded on her lap. She had no intention of going.

  Her remark made him smile. He found her charming, unlike most people. “You’re very observant. It’s called river blindness. Contracted in South America. The cause is a form of worm too tiny for the human eye to see. I swam across a lake in Venezuela that was so deep local people said it reached to the far side of heaven. Unfortunately, it turned out to be hell for me. That was when the world grew blurry. Though I can see you quite clearly.”