The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

  “Hence the tomatoes in our drinks.” Charlotte laughed. “Now I get it.”

  She and Abbey danced through the rows of tomatoes, their arms linked around each other’s waists, as the men applauded. Then Charlotte grabbed Hannah and they danced as well. When they came to the end of the row, where the vines were overgrown and met to form a bower, Charlotte leaned forward to kiss Hannah. The kiss was so hot and fast Hannah thought she had imagined it. But when the actors left, waving from the street, she was still burning.

  IN THE MORNING, Hannah stood at her window and drank iced tea. She gazed at her garden, but she didn’t bother to water or weed. At last she left home and walked to the Lamplighter Motel. At the desk she asked Betty Harkness where the actors were staying, fumbling over her explanation, finally saying she was their official guide. It was even hotter than the day before. There were hawks circling in the blue sky, and the asphalt in the parking lot felt as though it was melting as Hannah walked across to the Scotts’ room. It was number seven and she wondered if that meant good luck. She stood and tried to peer through the curtained window, agitated, there to accuse Charlotte of misunderstanding. She knocked at the door. Her head was spinning. When at last Charlotte appeared, she grinned, then grabbed Hannah’s hand to lead her inside, saying, “What took you? I could only get rid of them for so long. Now we only have an hour at best.”

  There were two double beds. They went to the one that was unmade and fell into it, already kissing. In moments they were naked and entwined. Hannah felt the way she had when she’d been cast to play the Apparition, her body in one place, her mind racing. She’d been terrified then. She remembered what her sister had told her on that long-ago evening, to let go and not think about anything else. She did that now, even though she could hear a car in the parking lot, though she knew that outside the sky was bright and the hawks were still above them.

  They were dressed and sitting on the bed when the others returned from their outing. Charlotte’s hand was inching up the back of Hannah’s blouse and her touch was burning. Hannah wished she wasn’t so fair; surely her blushing would give her away. The actors filed into the room groaning, exhausted from their hike, kicking off their shoes. Their second foray up Hightop Mountain had been just as much a failure as the first. This time Stan had been stung by a wasp, and they’d stopped to get ice at the coffee shop on their way back.

  “God, I hate the mountains,” Abbey exclaimed. She rubbed her feet and poured herself a drink from a bottle of vodka. “What I wouldn’t give for a bucket of ice.”

  “Take this,” Stan said, offering the small wedge of ice that had helped bring down the swelling on his arm. “It’ll put a sting in your drink.”

  James threw himself onto the bed and grabbed Charlotte around the waist, pulling her back with him.

  “ ‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,’ ” he intoned regally as he sank into the mattress. “If I ever mention hiking again, slap me,” he told his wife. “Hello, local girl,” he murmured to Hannah, pulling her down on the bed as well. “I’ll bet you don’t mind wasps and mountain trails and bears.”

  Hannah laughed and pulled away, quickly rising to her feet.

  “I only stopped by to wish you luck,” she remarked.

  “Never do that!” Abbey cried. “You’ll put a curse on us. Luck has nothing to do with good fortune.”

  “You look like the heat is getting to you,” Stan noted as Hannah edged away from the bed. “Maybe we all need a dip in the Eel River,” he suggested.

  “Tonight,” Charlotte agreed. “When the sun goes down. After the festival.”

  “Brilliant,” James said to her. “Eels and mud and cold water and starlight.”

  “Go with us,” Charlotte urged Hannah. “Meet us after the performance.”

  Hannah looked at the clock. She had no place to go, but the sudden desire to leave was overwhelming. “Good Lord, I’m late,” she said. “See you!” she called as she went out the door. She was reeling, walking as fast as she could. She thought of how irresponsible she’d been today. She hadn’t even bothered to water the garden despite the heat wave.

  Behind her, a door opened, then slammed shut.

  “Hey,” Charlotte called. “Hannah. Wait.”

  Charlotte came running across the parking lot, barefoot, her feet burning. “You forgot this.” Charlotte had Hannah’s hair clips in her hand. She stood in the one pocket of shadow cast by a tall sycamore tree, wearing only her slip with James’s shirt thrown over it. “Are you angry?” she wanted to know. “He’s my husband, after all.”

  “I’m not angry,” Hannah insisted.

  Charlotte walked up to her, over the melting tar. “It doesn’t mean I’m not crazy about you.”

  “I doubt that.” Hannah sounded hurt, even to herself. It was ridiculous. Charlotte was a married woman. They’d only just met.

  Charlotte gazed at her, amused. “A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.” She looped her arms around Hannah and drew her close. “James has no idea what a good actress I am. You know the real me.”

  HANNAH HURRIED HOME. She decided to run. When she ran, she didn’t think; and when she didn’t think, she was better off. She didn’t go inside when she reached her house. Instead, she went directly to the garden and watered, then set to pulling weeds from the damp, ruddy ground. It was so hot she couldn’t breathe. She hosed off the dirt when she was done, then went inside to look at herself in the mirror. She looked exactly the same. No one could see that her world had been turned upside down.

  When it was time to get ready, Hannah chose one of her sister’s dresses. She pinned up her hair with the tortoiseshell combs. Everyone in town was out for the evening. The paling sky was clear, but no cooler. Hannah splurged on some ice cream from the food stand. She realized she hadn’t had lunch or dinner. Instead, she ate vanilla and chocolate swirl from a paper cup while standing beneath one of the old apple trees. The light had begun to fade by the time the Founder’s Day play began. Everyone had seen it before, yet the audience was riveted. Jenny Linden’s little ghost drew the largest applause, especially when she cried I’m leaving this earth, but I’ll never leave you. Hannah felt oddly proud and moved.

  After the curtain call, the children in the drama society trotted out to take a bow and their teacher, Grace Campbell, thanked the town for their continuing support even in these dark days of war. Then it was time for the players from New York. They were nearly unrecognizable in their costumes. James was a swashbuckler who recited bits of Shakespeare. Abbey was dressed in swirling, filmy white. She’d taken on the persona of Emily Dickinson, thanks to the information Hannah had provided. Stan and James presented a comic skit about Johnny Appleseed. People roared when Johnny didn’t know the difference between a seed and a stone. Then Charlotte came onstage. She played the part of the town founder with a Spanish accent, clearly undertaken so that the skit could end with a tango danced by Charlotte and James. The acting had been mediocre, but the dance was something much more. Slinky and erotic and wholly absorbing. Music from a record player drifted over the meadow, and as the couple danced, the darkness became blue and deep. It was easy to forget there was a stage, or that this was still Blackwell. People left their lives at that moment, imagining they were in Spain, under a starry sky. Beneath the tree, in the gathering dark, Hannah felt entranced.

  When the performance was over, she waited for the crowd to clear, then found her way to the back of the stage. The only one there was Grace Campbell, packing up costumes and props. Hannah’s disappointment must have shown in her face when she realized Charlotte and the others were gone.

  “If you’re looking for the actors, they’ve just left,” Grace told her. “I warned them the Eel River wasn’t a place for night swimming, but they wouldn’t listen. That’s where they’ve gone.”

  Hannah made her way toward the river. She’d been invited, after all. She slipped off her sandals and carried them in her hand. It was easier to make her way barefoot. Af
ter a while she heard them on the riverbank. She peered through the dark and saw them as they began to strip off their clothes. They were still wearing their costumes, and they looked like strangers, clothed and then unclothed.

  “Thank God that’s over,” she heard James say.

  “Small towns and small people,” Charlotte crooned, slipping off her black lace dress.

  The men leapt into a deep pool, shouting at the cold.

  “Holy mother of God,” James Scott cried. “It’s pure ice.”

  “Will you miss your little friend?” Hannah heard Abbey ask Charlotte.

  “I have no idea what you mean,” Charlotte said.

  Charlotte waded into the water now, up to her knees. Abbey followed suit.

  “Don’t give me that,” Abbey protested. “You think I don’t know you by now?”

  “She wasn’t so little,” Charlotte remarked. “She was taller than I.”

  The women laughed and waded farther. There were mosquitoes and gnats, which they slapped away, hitting their own naked bodies. Together they dove right in.

  In the dark, standing in the tall weeds, Hannah felt her heart bumping against her chest. What would happen if she ran to the river? What if she threw her arms around Charlotte, packed up all her worldly belongings? Before she could think any further, she spied a spot of blue moving along the riverbank. It was a little girl, heading toward the water. She was there, and then she disappeared, as if swallowed by the dark river.

  Hannah ran toward the far bank. People had faltered here, carried away by the currents, but thankfully Hannah was a strong swimmer. She went right in, chasing after the child, but no one was there. The blue dress Hannah wore spread out in a circle as she paddled to stay afloat, shivering. All at once she knew what had happened. She felt she had witnessed a miracle, a moment so private it could never be shared. Hannah could hear the actors joking with each other, but she didn’t listen to what they were saying. She was convinced she had seen the Apparition, the child who’d drowned so long ago.

  WHEN AZURINE CAME home that autumn, Hannah went to the train station in Albany to pick up her sister. Azurine had been gone a long time, and she hadn’t come back alone. Hannah was so overjoyed, she nearly sank to her knees when she saw the little girl. Azurine admitted that she planned to tell everyone that she’d been married in France, and that the father of her child had died in battle. In truth she didn’t know who he was. She’d been in love a dozen times or more, but she was giving all that up now. Hannah laughed and said she was doing the same. Love was for fools and dreamers. On this they agreed.

  The sisters were glad to be together. They had the easy sort of relationship where they didn’t have to speak to be understood. For as long as the weather held they took their meals on the porch, looking out toward Hightop Mountain. They moved the kitchen table and chairs outside. Lunches often lasted an hour or more as the weather continued to be fine even after the maple trees were already turning. Little Kate was already a charmer. Her red hair was tufted and shimmery in the daylight.

  “What do we want for her?” Azurine wondered as they watched her, both sisters ready to dart over should she begin to fall.

  Hannah was about to answer true love, but love alone was never enough.

  “She’ll have us,” she told her sister. “That should do.”

  They were finishing the last of the summer’s tomatoes. They’d picked them that morning, just after breakfast, scrambling into the garden barefoot, racing to see which sister could collect the most. Now, when Kate came skittering back to the table, they let her take a bite, even though some people might say it was best for children to eat only simple things. In their experience, nothing was simple.

  THE MONSTER OF BLACKWELL

  1956

  HE WAS NOT FROM BERKSHIRE COUNTY or from anywhere in Massachusetts. He didn’t know where he’d been born or who his parents were. He lived with an aunt in Albany, near the railroad tracks, but he didn’t expect to be there for the rest of his life. He was convinced that something else was out there for him. He’d decided he would be ready, whatever his future might bring, whenever it might appear before him. He was prepared to vanish, take chances, disappear if need be. He thought perhaps he was enchanted. He was exceedingly ugly, so ugly he couldn’t look at himself. He’d always known this. People had told him so often enough, and, although he avoided mirrors, he’d glimpsed himself and had come to the conclusion they were correct.

  He expected the reaction he caused. People ran from him, and he didn’t blame them. If he could, he would have gotten as far away from himself as possible. His features didn’t go together; they were misshapen, large and broad, pushed in as if the doctor had made a mistake during his birth and tried to throw him back into the place where he’d originated, pushing in on his nose, and ears, and mouth. His shoulders were broad and his arms muscular, but he seemed twisted and tended to be hunched. His eyes, however, were dark and beautiful. People didn’t notice. They didn’t look him in the eye. They were gone before that.

  He’d always kept himself hidden. In school he hadn’t let on that he was smart. He’d made sure to sit in the back of the room, face averted. He’d been too big for his age, those big hands, big feet, big arms. He was as tall as a man by the time he was ten. His back was misshapen, pushed up onto his shoulders. That was why he hunched, in the hope of disappearing. When he was younger, the boys at school had him lie on the floor so they could climb over him. They said he was a mountain. They beat him. He stayed still and let them. He could have easily crushed his attackers, but it wasn’t in his nature to do so. He felt like a mountain, alone, far away.

  Perhaps there was a spell to undo what he was, one that would lead him to become something better. He prepared himself with a feverish attempt at self-improvement. He read voraciously at night while his aunt was sleeping, not just novels and poetry, but how-to books. He studied the skills he might someday need in another time and place: how to make a fire, how to gauge which plants were poisonous and which were edible, how to build a house out of sticks and stones. All the while he was getting ready for the life he yearned for, though it was so distant.

  HE LEFT THE year he was seventeen. To earn money he had worked summers in a foundry where he could wear a mask when he welded, an old iron thing that made him look as if he had crawled up from the Black Lagoon. It was time to leave Albany and he knew it. His aunt didn’t want him. He shouldn’t have ever been her responsibility or her shame. He had gotten a wreck of a car and rebuilt it. He was a fast learner, and hard work didn’t bother him, not if it meant getting away. Maybe his aunt knew what he was planning as he worked on the motor all that year. Maybe she heard him leave. He drove for hours. He was looking for a place where his aloneness would feel right. He found exactly that when he happened onto a road that curved upward, in a county he’d never been to before. He was headed toward Hightop Mountain. He felt something inside him shift as he drove. It was the first time he’d felt hopeful or alive. He was struck by the beauty of the countryside—the hay fields, the orchards, the delicate leaves on the birch trees. As he drove through small towns, children who spied him ran after his car pretending to shoot at him with their toy guns. He understood why they would chase him and shout out names.

  The more he drove, the better he felt. At last he was free. He stopped for gas on Route 17 at twilight, hat pulled down so no one would see him. He didn’t want to scare anyone. That had never been his intention. He gassed up his car, mumbled to the mechanic, handed over some cash. He wasn’t used to country roads, and it was growing dark the way it does in the mountains, suddenly, as though a curtain has been drawn. He kept on even though he was tired. Maybe he was light-headed or falling asleep.All at once something was in the road right in front of him. When he swerved too quickly, he lost control. The car flew into a ditch nose first, wheels spinning. It rolled over, and he rolled over inside of it. There was the sound of the axle cracking, the windshield breaking. He could hear his own hoars
e breathing.

  In a rage for all he’d just lost, he quickly climbed out of the car and started up to the road, indignant, ready for a fight with whatever creature had done this to him, ruined his car and his getaway plans. There it was. A six-hundred-pound male black bear. The bear didn’t scare him—he was used to being the one who frightened people. They faced each other and neither one backed down. The air was hot between them and then it wasn’t. Each took a step away into the dark, endless night. It wasn’t worth fighting over a mistake. Plus the bear was so beautiful the boy was glad not to have run him over. A car was just a car.

  HE LIVED IN the old wreck for a while, down in the ditch. He had a sack of groceries in the backseat, a pile of books. After a while he began to explore, tramping up the cliffs, growing stronger every day. He found a meadow at the top of the mountain and a series of caves, some of which had recently been inhabited by bears. He discovered freshwater and streams running with fish. He’d brought along a saw and a toolbox and his how-to carpentry books. While he was still living in the car, he began to build the frame of the shed that would eventually be his shelter. He collected rocks ribbed with mica for the foundation and the fireplace. He liked working outside in the sun. He took off his hat, his shirt. He stopped thinking. He got away from himself at last.

  By midsummer, branches were growing up through the rotting undercarriage of the wrecked car; vines twisted around the rusting axles. The woods were full of miraculous things—fossils, bats, grass so tall a man could stand in it and disappear. The boy was glad to be hidden, away from people. He’d gone to the nearest town only once, late, when everyone else was in bed. He felt as if he had wandered into a dream. All those houses with their dark windows. The bark of dogs tied up in the yards. The shuttered library, the town meeting hall. It was a world to which he didn’t belong. He jimmied open the back door of the AtoZ Market and hurriedly collected some items into a paper sack—a small bag of concrete mix, rice, matches, tinfoil, a frying pan—then left twenty dollars beside the cash register.