“I guess you were right,” she said to Cal. “There are monsters.”
He’d been so intent on looking for them, he’d brought one to town in the form of his so-called friend, a man who had disappeared, whose car Matthew abandoned when he reached Saranac Lake, from where he made the rest of his way on foot.
Kate sat in a clearing. She was certain they would be growing worried at home. They would be standing at the door wondering why she went off walking when the woods were clearly dangerous. She opened the letter only to find it wasn’t a letter at all. It was the first poem her beloved had written, on the evening after Cal Jacob wandered off the road into bear territory, when he first knew what they were to each other and she didn’t want to know.
It was a decision before it was a question.
That was the way things happened in the human world.
In our world, a leaf falls one day and we know it’s time.
We feel our hearts slowing down.
We try to fight it with cold water, bee stings, fresh kills.
But the leaf has fallen, the water doesn’t rouse us.
When we sleep we dream more than any other creatures.
We dream of entirely different lives.
We are men and women.
We walk and talk in houses, and fields, and farmyards.
Leaves mean nothing to us. Thousands can fall and we look
the other way.
A beautiful woman walks toward us and we fall in love.
We feel it happening, but can’t stop it.
In your world, love pins you to the ground.
You take it to bed and wake up with it.
You dream it and it becomes your life.
I knew I’d never sleep through a winter again.
I took a knife and cut myself to see how fast I would bleed.
Slow, and I would be a bear forever.
Fast, and I was yours.
I nearly died from a single wound.
That was what it meant to be human.
SIN
1961
IT WAS EARLY SUMMER WHEN THE NEW people moved into the cottage behind the Blackwell History Museum. The museum had once been the grandest house in town, a gabled three-story building with arched windows, but for many years those elegant rooms had held displays of dinosaur bones, cases of beetles and butterflies, and shelves of unusual rocks. There was a collection of tools the first settlers of Blackwell had used—wagon wheels, axes, a black frying pan—as well as an exhibit of local mammals, which included a wolf that was coming apart at the seams, two moth-eaten foxes, and several large desiccated brown bats that frightened visitors from the elementary school. Local children swore the museum was haunted. They whispered that the bats came to life at night. If you stayed past closing, they would tangle into your hair, biting your neck deeply enough to draw blood.
The cottage had been occupied by the groundskeeper until the museum’s funding dried up. Now it was rented out, and the new people were set to arrive. The cottage was small with a wraparound porch and a tilted chimney. There was a twisted wisteria vine all along the porch railing and red roses growing up a trellis that reached to the roof. Carla Kelly watched for the moving van, but there was only a station wagon with New York plates, packed to the gills. There was no man around, no father or husband, only Ava Cooper, a woman in her thirties dressed in blue jeans and a white shirt. She was surprisingly young and beautiful, almost as if she were a movie star, with her honey-colored hair pulled back into a tortoiseshell clip and her mouth streaked with scarlet lipstick. She didn’t look like someone’s mother, except that her daughter, Tessa, was equally beautiful, resembling her mother, only her long hair was a shade paler, an ashy blond. The daughter was also wearing blue jeans. She had on a red shirt that flared out behind her as she carried bundles back and forth from the station wagon to the cottage. The radio was still turned on, as if mother and daughter had no idea that a car battery could quickly go dead, which Carla knew only too well since she worked weekends in her father’s gas station, a job she despised. The car radio was playing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” It was Carla’s favorite song. The Kelly property met up with the museum acreage in the back, so Carla had slipped through the woods into the yard to spy on her new neighbors.
Blackwell was an isolated town in the Berkshires. The closest movie theater was forty miles away. People went to bed early and worked hard. Carla was bored out of her mind. Moving in from a hidden spot behind some pine trees, standing in a cool green pool of shadow, she surveyed the cottagers. The air was fragrant with honeysuckle and the bitter sulfur-tinged scent of bridal wreath that grew along the lanes in Blackwell. Carla imagined that she’d known the new people forever, that the new girl was her best friend. When they walked through the high school corridors the following autumn, everyone would call out hello, but they’d be far too busy with their plans to bother answering.
Ava Cooper tossed down a bundle of blankets and pillows. Fed up with work on such a gorgeous summer day, she began to dance to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” She threw her arms into the air as though it was the most natural thing in the world to be dancing in the driveway. Her daughter applauded, and the clapping startled the birds in the woods. All at once some crows flew up from the trees. When the Coopers turned to watch the birds, there was Carla watching them in return.
“Hey there,” Ava called, gesturing for their new neighbor to come over.
Carla walked out of the woods slowly, ashamed to have been caught spying. She was wearing pedal pushers and an old blouse that looked dingy compared with Ava’s. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Some of the girls at school whispered that she smelled like gasoline.
“Thank goodness,” Ava said as Carla approached. “You’re just what we needed.” The sunlight fell over mother and daughter as they stood there grinning, hands on hips. “A friend for Tessa.”
AFTER THAT CARLA was at the Coopers’ every day. She could hardly imagine what life had been like without them. All that first week she came over early while Tessa was still in bed. She’d sit with Ava in the kitchen, drinking coffee—something her own mother would have never allowed. Ava was divorced and her ex, Tessa’s dad, was an actor. “I should have been smarter,” Ava confided to the teenager, as if Carla was her girlfriend, too. Both Ava and Tessa called her Carly, which made her sound exotic, even to herself. “Anyone who falls in love with an actor should have her head examined,” Ava joked.
When Tessa would finally wake to join them at the table, she’d be wearing a white silk slip instead of pajamas. The fabric had a blue ribbon stitched prettily through the hem. It took Tessa an hour to wake up and at least three cups of black coffee. It wasn’t that she was lazy, it was simply that she was out of sync with the pedestrian everyday world. She was a night owl, often reading until dawn. She was madly in love with Jack Kerouac and before long lent Carla her dog-eared copy of On the Road. As far as Carla could tell the author was a drunken lunatic who rambled on about nothing in ridiculously long paragraphs. She told Tessa she thought the book was fascinating, but really she’d stopped reading halfway through.
“The only woman stupider than one who marries an actor is one who marries a writer,” Ava told them both at breakfast. Ava was an amazing baker. They were having honey buns along with their cups of black coffee. The combination of caffeine and sugar woke a person up, pronto, even dreamy Tessa.
“I don’t care. I’m in love,” Tessa remarked stubbornly. “Someday I’m going to get in a car and drive across the country to California and find him.”
“That’s far, honey,” Ava said wistfully. “By that time Jack Kerouac will be dead if he keeps living the way he does.”
“ ‘Tiger, tiger burning bright.’ ” Whenever Tessa wasn’t quoting Kerouac she was quoting Blake. Songs of Innocence and Experience was the next thing she tried to unload on Carla, also gone unread, although Carla had skimmed a few pages for appropriate quotes. Tessa told Carla that when she and J
ack Kerouac had a child together, they would name it Blake, whether it was a boy or a girl. “It’s better to burn out beautifully when you’re young.”
Ava got a funny look on her face when she heard her daughter say that, as if she’d thought similarly once, and had lived that way, and was only now realizing the flaws in such a philosophy.
WHEN THE GIRLS went down to the Eel River, Tessa confided that even though her mother joked around, she’d been terribly wounded in love. They’d come to Blackwell to start a new life after the mess of the divorce. Frankly, there had been a few men since then, but it never worked out. Her mother always chose the wrong ones. Tessa hadn’t bothered to change out of her slip to go to the river. She’d merely added plastic flip-flops and a brimmed straw hat, and she looked like a fashion plate.
Tessa and Carla spent most of their days lying on beach towels, using baby oil to improve their tans, although Carla had fair and irritable skin that burned to a crisp. Carla would reveal juicy bits of gossip about everyone in town as they baked in the sun, adding a few invented details to make life in Blackwell more interesting. The girls who never included Carla were turned into sluts, kleptomaniacs, and runaways. It wasn’t payback, not really. They were more interesting that way. Carla’s brother, Johnny, who worked at the gas station and was known for speeding around town like a demon on his motorcycle and getting into fights at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill for no particular reason, became a haunted loner in the telling of his story. Carla presented him as a deep, moody young man à la Jack Kerouac, rather than a self-centered lout who insisted that Carla not speak to him when she ran into him because he didn’t want to be seen with her. At least when Carla spiced up the truth, she had something to say that held Tessa in thrall, even if it was a lie.
The homespun village lore about Blackwell was probably lies as well, invented by the town’s forefathers, but the stories seemed interesting to an out of towner. Carla told all the old tales she’d heard since she was a child. There were the museum bats coming to life, and the rumor that Johnny Appleseed had passed through town, and, perhaps most interesting, the little ghost girl who wandered along the banks of the Eel River. They called her the Apparition and said she was searching for her sister. Whoever spied her on a summer’s evening would be lucky in love. Tessa adored Blackwell and all its stories. She loved the countryside and declared the Eel River to be a state treasure, one of the wonders of Massachusetts. She wished Jack Kerouac could see it, how the sunlight glinted over the green water, how the cattails grew so tall. She said that when the weather got hotter in late summer they would swim the length of the river. Carla agreed even though after a lifetime in Blackwell she had never done more than wade in the shallows. She had a wicked fear of eels.
AFTER THE COOPERS had been in town for a while, rituals were slowly established for the girls: breakfast, then suntanning at the river, then back to the cottage for supper. Usually they had macaroni or hamburgers, comfort food, all delicious, but it was Ava’s desserts that were truly amazing. That first week she made one of her Seven Deadly Sins cakes—devil’s food for greed. Each night thereafter there was a large gooey piece for dessert. It was the kind of cake that could make you want things you hadn’t even known existed. It made you yearn for more, especially when the last piece of cake was shared and devoured. Too soon the twilight would begin to turn into darkness and it would be time for Carla to go. Tessa always walked her halfway home through the woods. There were fireflies glinting in the underbrush, and branches broke beneath their feet. The girls usually took to whispering. They made up stories about what had happened in these same woods in days gone by. They imagined the pioneer women who had traipsed through the snow, and the strong men who had planted all the apple trees in town. There was also a ghost said to haunt these woods as well, the sister of the river ghost. People said she’d left town in the middle of the night with her beloved, but had always yearned to come home for she knew that her little sister searched for her from beyond the grave. Locals swore that if you saw her, there’d be a journey in your future.
The girls ambled along, telling stories, but as soon as they reached the huge old oak that signified the borderline of the Kellys’ property, Carla would shout “See you!” and take off like a shot. Sometimes she’d glance over her shoulder and Tessa would still be watching her, her pale hair framing her beautiful face. Even when Tessa called out, “Wait! Carly! I’ll walk you all the way home!” Carla kept running. Where she came from was so plain, so ordinary, she didn’t want Tessa to see it and think less of her. Carla’s mother was upset with her because she was never home anymore, but who could blame her for choosing the Coopers’ cottage over her own house? As for Marian Kelly, she didn’t like what she was hearing about Ava Cooper, who was going around town looking for work, chatting people up, offering free cakes to the folks at Hightop Inn and the coffee shop and even at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill as she looked for a position that would pay the bills.
“What’s she like?” Marian asked Carla.
“She’s an amazing baker.” Carla knew enough to keep her descriptions brief. No stories of Seven Deadly Sins cakes, particularly Lust Cake, a lemon poppy seed triple layer with sugary frosting that was impossible to resist. She wisely failed to mention that Tessa carelessly walked around town wearing little more than her underwear, unaware that this might be considered unusual. She certainly didn’t tell her mother that Ava served them coffee at breakfast or that on that very first night, when the Coopers had moved into the cottage and there were still unpacked boxes stacked everywhere, Ava had allowed the girls small glasses of champagne and they’d all made a giddy toast. Once Carla let slip that Tessa’s father was an actor, but she quickly fell quiet when she saw the look on her mother’s face.
ON SATURDAYS CARLA never went to the Coopers. “I’ll meet you at the river before supper,” she told Tessa. When asked why she was never around on Saturdays, she said only that she had family obligations, or errands to run. The truth was she had to report to the gas station. She prayed Ava Cooper’s station wagon didn’t need gas while she was at work. Carla counted the minutes while she sat behind the cash register or helped her father bleed the brakes on Leo Mott’s Chrysler. Her brother, Johnny, often had a hangover, and when he was in a bad mood, Carla stayed away from him. He was the sort of young man who could charm someone one minute and have a fistfight with him the next. He had the up-and-down personality many of the Kellys were said to have. Women couldn’t stay away from him.
Carla bolted her lunch while working the cash register and ducked her head when a group of girls she knew from the high school walked by. One of the girls, Madeline Hall, was sent in by the others to ask if Johnny was around. They were all much too young for him, yet they yearned for him, or who they thought he was. They’d become something of a fan club.
“He’s in the back working,” Carla said.
“Well, we’re all going to the movies in Lenox next weekend,” Madeline told her. “You could come, too, and bring Johnny.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Carla replied.
Before, she would have died for an invitation. Now she had plans with Tessa. Carla sat there the rest of the day dreamily biding her time. She had her bathing suit on under her clothes. As soon as the clock hit five, she headed out.
The high school girls were gathered on the steps of the library when she passed by. “Hey, Carla,” one of them called. It was Jennifer Starr. “Don’t forget the movies next Saturday.”
Carla wished those girls would disappear into thin air. They were so small-town in their shorts and T-shirts, their hair braided or pushed back with headbands. They’d never been anywhere at all, let alone seen Manhattan. They probably didn’t even know who Jack Kerouac was. And they certainly didn’t have Tessa Cooper as their best friend.
As it turned out, Tessa seemed to need Carla just as much as Carla needed her. She had confided that she was frightened of crowds. She grew uneasy on buses and in theaters. Sometimes she couldn
’t speak in class. She became totally tongue-tied. She was smart and beautiful and there was no reason for her to be shy, but she was.
“Don’t worry,” Carla had assured her. “We’ll be in all the same classes. If you can’t speak, I’ll just say you have laryngitis.”
Tessa had thrown her new friend a grateful look.
CARLA CUT THROUGH the woods after work. She followed along the marsh where there were cattails and the ground turned spongy. There were little frogs in the puddles and white butterflies with green specks on paper-thin wings circling the purple thistle. The sun was like honey, falling in splashes. It was a relief not to be on Main Street, in her father’s gas station, where everyone knew her and everything about her. Carla hadn’t imagined the ways in which her life might follow a different path until the Coopers moved into the museum cottage. Since then she’d been seized with the impulse to create a more intriguing persona for herself. Lately, everything seemed brand-new, including Blackwell, even though Carla knew every street and lane.
She heard the murmur of voices as she approached the river. There was Tessa sitting on her beach towel, laughing in the dappled sunlight, wearing her white slip with the red blouse thrown over it like a jacket. Next to her in the grass were Frank and Jesse Mott, both sixteen. They’d seen Tessa and Carla walking through the woods day after day, arms thrown around each other, beach towels over their shoulders. It was Tessa they were interested in. Once she was alone, without the pesky Kelly girl hovering, they’d been bold enough to introduce themselves. As Carla drew near, the Mott brothers stopped talking.
“Hey!” Tessa signaled her over. “Where’ve you been? Come on,” she called to Carla. She patted the picnic basket beside her. “My mother sent a treat.” Tessa turned to the boys. “We’ll share if you’re good.”
The Red Garden Page 16