The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  Judith’s voice floats over my head in a sort of chanting reassuring descant. “Look at it like this, Charleen, they’ve both been seen alive and well. Yesterday. So they’re okay. Maybe she’s a bit on the crazy side, but she isn’t dangerous, that’s what Doug Savage said on the phone. He said try not to get Charleen upset because Greta wouldn’t hurt a fly, it’s just a matter of hours before they find him.”

  Martin pats me awkwardly on the crown of my head. “Look here now, Charleen, she’s a little unbalanced maybe, but, God, who isn‘t, and you’ve known her for years. You know she wouldn’t do anything to hurt him, nothing really crazy. You’ve got to keep thinking what she’s really like.”

  Eugene sits wordless beside me. He’s not a wordy man, he never was a wordy man. He’s still holding on to my hands, and I’m grateful to him. There’s nothing to say. And nothing we can do.

  I think of the huge distance between Toronto and Vancouver, the blending agricultural regions, the mountain ranges, river systems, squares of acreage, contours, city limits, county lines, townships and backyards with chickens and shrubs and children. I try to hold that whole terrain in my head; it is a numbing exercise, though it shouldn’t be all that difficult, for haven’t I just crossed that country myself? Haven’t I touched every inch of it? I think of all the people strung out over that distance, imbedded in their separate time zones. Seven-thirty: they’re washing dishes. I can hear cutlery right across the country dropping into drawers. They’re bathing children, playing bridge, reading newspapers, all of them magically sealed in their preserving spheres of activity. Out there in all that darkness is Greta’s car, a blue Volvo—it has to be there—cruising past apartment houses and suburbs and farms; and these people, shutting their windows, watering their lawns, walking their dogs, they just allow her to go by. Maybe they even wave to her. Maybe she waves back, she has always been so friendly, so pathetically friendly. She would do anything to help a friend; she is so kind, she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Remember that, above all remember that; she wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  Eight o‘clock. We wait in the kitchen. The silence is minutely detailed like a blueprint for a piece of immensely complicated machinery. The minutes are sharply cornered and pressing, and each one hangs rigidly separate.

  Eight-fifteen. Why doesn’t Doug call? Something has happened. One of the policemen asks if he might phone in a report.

  “No,” I gasp.

  Eugene shakes his head, “Better not tie up the phone here.” The policeman nods politely and asks if he might use the next-door neighbour’s phone.

  At this my mother looks up, horribly alarmed, and I see her mouth twist into its tight diminishing shape. I know that shape, its denials, negations, interdictions, the way it closes to inquiries, the way it forbids, the way it ultimately blames and refuses. Now. She is going to do it now, going to give one of her terrible, unforgiving no’s.

  But she doesn’t. Bewilderment—or is it fatigue?—makes her thin lips collapse. She nods a shaky assent. Then she rises and puts the kettle on.

  In a moment the policeman returns; there are no further developments, he tells us. We will have to wait a little longer, that’s all.

  My mother is moving around the kitchen putting her trembling hands to work. (What have I done to her, what have I done to her this time?) Now she is making tea, now she is arranging jittery cups on a tray. Judith gets up to help her and together they begin to make sandwiches. How extraordinary, my mother actually has a package of boiled ham in the refrigerator. And cheese. Sandwiches are disaster fare; who would have thought my mother had a sense of occasion. She and Judith stand with their backs to us buttering bread. They are exactly the same height; I never noticed that. Their elbows move together, marionettes on a single lateral string. Abstract kinship suddenly made substantial. But why am I thinking about ham and cheese and kinship? Why am I not thinking about the centre of this disaster; why am I not thinking about Seth?

  Because I can’t bear to.

  Seth dead. No, that’s not possible. It’s not possible because my life isn’t possible without him; it’s not possible when I’m sitting here, wired with reality. Pulse, heartbeat, nerves, breath, sudden sweating, hurting consciousness, all the signs of life failing me now by not failing. In this kitchen every small sound is magnified; my mother’s half-invalid, half-despairing shuffle, the policemen laughing in the living room (laughing!), Martin crashing into his ham sandwich, the sugar spoon which strikes with dead neutrality on the formica table. And my eyes: suddenly I can see with wolfish clarity. I can see the neat hem on my mother’s sheer kitchen curtains, her tiny over and under and over stitches, and through the curtains a glittering, mocking, glassware moon is coming into view. Evening. Nine o‘clock. Doug Savage, why doesn’t he phone? Seth dead. No, it’s not possible.

  Sleeping pills. Greta stuffing Seth with sleeping pills; she is so small, such a weak, wiry woman, something dark about her face, always a sense of shadow. But Seth is quite strong for his age, well developed, remarkably healthy. His health is startling; something godlike nourishes him despite his inheritance; I’ve never been able to understand it. I picture his strength against Greta’s weakness, and a tiny flashbulb of hope goes off under my skin; she can’t possibly harm him.

  Then I remember how clever she is, how she is veined with a wily unaccountability. Her secrecy about Watson’s letters; she hints she has heard from him but says nothing more. And her sudden, piercing, illogical bursts of purity. Madness? Not really madness. How did Doug once put it to me? “Greta is rational enough, it’s just that her rationality is not as evenly distributed as it is in more balanced people.” Certainly she is not a fanatic, not in the accepted sense of that word, but she suffers from blinding pinpricks of virtue. The way, for instance, she once burned Doug’s thesis on the diseases of short ferns because she believed it had been conceived to fill an artificial academic requirement. (Only by good fortune had she overlooked the carbon.)

  Her weaving too is girded by purity; the way she refuses to touch synthetics and swears to give up weaving altogether if she is forced to work with wool which is chemically dyed and treated. Then there is her violent anti-smoking stance. And her contempt for Eugene and what she considers his crass profession. Her leaps into various systems of the human potential movement. Her bright, birdlike fixations: the insistence (I suddenly remember) with which she had determined to pick up Seth at school last week. Then there is her refusal to have children; here perhaps her fanaticism is grounded on objectivity, for she would have made a shocking mother for all her devotion to Seth. But most painful to me has always been her clinging admiration for Watson; she once confided in an orgy of tactlessness that she “reverenced” Watson’s decision to alter his life. She keeps track of him with passionate persistence, long after everyone else has given up, smothering him with letters, forcing him to acknowledge her existence, coercing him by her indefatigable energy to keep her supplied with news of his latest incarnations. Ah, Greta, poor Greta, poor, twisted, buggered-up Greta, where are you? It’s nine-thirty and I’m going crazy, where are you?

  In the living room the policemen have turned on the television. Hawaii Five-O. Screams, sirens, the sound of bullets, throaty accusations, weeping, all so bearably unreal. What a poor tissue fiction is, how naively selective and compressed and organized, justice redressed in exactly sixty calculated minutes, the violence always just marginally tolerable, the pressure just within the bounds of human acceptance, tragedy in an airtight marketable tin.

  Martin paces. My mother and Judith wash plates and cups, and Eugene goes next door to phone a car rental firm. He has decided that the minute Seth is located we must have a car to get to him.

  I think bitterly of Watson. Wherever he is, he is being spared this hour. Of everything he has left undone as a father this seems the worst.

  Even Louis—I think of him with a flash of envy—even Louis in his furnished room, so wonderfully protected from all this. So innocently unaware. What pe
ace not to know.

  And Brother Adam, you with your abstract wisdom, your fire-escape view, you know nothing of what I’m suffering, you are a dream, you don’t even exist for me now.

  And Seth, what are you thinking, wherever you are? Are you safe?

  Judith, always compulsive, is tidying the kitchen. She covers the tunafish casserole with a dinner plate and puts it in the refrigerator. Then she swirls a wet cloth over the table, picking up my purse and putting it on top of the cupboard.

  “What’s this?” she asks, picking up an envelope.

  I am slow to react; am I losing consciousness after all? Then I say, “Oh. That’s mine.”

  It is the envelope containing the child support cheques, my last connection with Watson. A business envelope, eight-by-eleven in business-coloured brown. Closed with a huge paperclip.

  I open it idly, and the cheques slide out on my lap. What a lot of cheques, twelve for each year, and yes—I count them—enough to last until Seth’s eighteenth birthday. And a stack of addressed envelopes with a rubber band around them. There’s even a sheet of postage stamps. How wonderfully organized of Watson, beneath his many layers he must still be in touch with that boy prodigy of his youth and with his dull parents who always paid their bills, in touch too with his unknown, sober ancestors who never ran away from their debts.

  There is something different about the final cheque: it is dated for Seth’s eighteenth birthday, May 21, and it is made out for five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars! I feel my breath harden; how had Watson managed to save five thousand dollars? He must have been exceedingly careful over the years to save that much money. But how pointless, how useless, a piece of paper for a son who is missing. A son who can’t be found.

  I can’t help it. I’m starting to cry. I can’t help it. This piece of paper, this five thousand dollars—it isn’t enough. It’s so futile, it’s just like Watson to make a gesture like this, so stagey, so impressive and so utterly, utterly useless.

  But there’s something else in the envelope. Still crying I pull it out. It’s another piece of paper, a page raggedly torn from a notebook. But the message on it is carefully typed.

  I have to read it twice before I realize what it is. It is Watson’s farewell note, the one he must have stuck on the screen door before he left the Whole World Retreat. Rob and Cheryl, those two good children, had been more than worthy of the trust he placed in them, guarding not only the cheques but his final words of good-bye. How absurd, though, to write a farewell note on a typewriter, how somehow incongruous, how like Watson. The note he once left me, the one I burned in the barbeque, that note had been typed too. I had forgotten Watson could type; I had forgotten a lot about Watson. But I had not forgotten his embarrassing penchant for prophecy; reading his words of good-bye, it all seems suddenly very familiar.

  Dear Brothers and Sisters,

  These words are written in love and sadness.

  The life of the spirit is love

  but it is also containment and peace.

  It is time for me to leave you.

  Time to go East.

  You will understand.

  Understanding is all.

  Two things I ask of you.

  First, care for the land which

  We have made green.

  It will feed you purely.

  But the grass will give you

  Peace and delight.

  Care for the grass before the grain.

  Secondly, I leave an envelope of envelopes.

  Please mail one each month for me.

  I put my faith in all of you.

  Remember

  There will be other lives

  Other Worlds.

  Watson Forrest

  At last the telephone is ringing. Eugene leads me to the hallway, holding my arm as though I were a thousand years old. Everyone—Martin, my mother, the two policemen—gather around me.

  “Hello.”

  “Charleen.”

  “Doug.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “What’s happened? Have you found them?”

  “No, but I think we’re onto something now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m out at Weedham, Ontario with the cops. At the Whole World place.”

  “Yes?” I breathe.

  “They said you were here—”

  “Yes, but—”

  “They’re not here. But we haven’t given up.”

  “Tell me,” my voice bends with pleading. “do you think they’re ... all right?”

  “Oh, God, Charleen, if you knew how terrible I feel about all this. You and Seth and ... if you only knew. But I think it’s going to be all right, I think we’re going to find them.”

  “What happened? Do you know what happened?”

  “I just don’t know. I thought Greta was okay on Sunday. A little edgy, but no worse than usual anyway. But as near as we can figure out, she overdid the meditation thing. She rounded. That’s what we think. She just rounded.”

  “Rounded?”

  “Went over ... you know, over the top. It happens sometimes. She lost touch with the real world, what they call rounding. But I know she’ll come around. You know Greta, she wouldn’t hurt a—”

  “But why did she take Seth?” I am crying into the phone. “Why did she have to take Seth?”

  “We’re not sure. That is, the police can’t figure it out unless she was just crazy to have a kid of her own. But I tried to tell them I don’t think that’s it. I’ve got a crazy hunch—this sounds really crazy—but I think maybe she’s trying to take Seth to Watson.”

  “Watson?”

  “I know it sounds insane, but you know Greta. She might take it into her head that Seth would be better off with Watson. You know how she idolized the guy, always has. And she was, well, a little uneasy in her mind about Eugene and all that, you know how she is sometimes ...”

  “You really think ...”

  “It’s just a guess, that’s all. That’s why I came out here, out to Weedham. But the kids here haven’t laid eyes on him for a couple of years.”

  “Greta is taking Seth to Watson?” I repeat this numbly.

  “That’s all I can think of. I’m going crazy trying to think. That’s why I’m two hours late calling you. I turned my watch back instead of forward when the time zone changed, I just found out, that’s how mixed up I am. I’ve just been looking and looking all week and I’m just about out of my mind.”

  “We’ll find them,” I say falteringly, unbelievingly.

  “Look, I’m sure Greta knows where Watson’s living. I mean, I know she writes to him now and then.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Look, Char, I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea yourself where Watson might be.”

  I think for a quarter of a minute and then I say, “Yes.”

  I give Doug the address very slowly so he will be able to write it down.

  Standing in my mother’s crowded little hall, we make hurried plans. Eugene and I and one of the policemen will go to the meeting point and wait for Doug Savage. The police will send reinforcements immediately.

  The other officer will stay here with the family. He has just received a message, he tells us a motel operator near Parry Sound reported renting a room last night to a middle-aged woman who was driving a dark coloured Volvo with B.C. plates. Was she alone? The report is not entirely clear, the officer explains. It was late at night, very dark, and no one is sure whether she was alone or not.

  “We can take my car,” Eugene says.

  “Your car?” Martin asks.

  “A rental,” Eugene explains shortly. “They’ve just brought it over.”

  “God,” Martin says, “that was quick.” He says this with mingled surprise and admiration, and for a moment all of us turn and regard Eugene who is checking his wallet for his license. Such a simple thing, renting a car; Eugene would never be able to understand why my family stands in awe of such simple acts. I
pick up my purse in the kitchen, and Eugene and I follow the policeman out the back door.

  It is a big car, hugely clean, and the three of us fit in the front seat easily, Eugene driving, I in the middle, the policeman enthusiastically giving directions from the right. Eugene turns the car south toward the lake.

  For me every passing car takes on extraordinary significance; each one must be checked off against Greta’s blue Volvo. She is sure to be in the city now. I strain in the dark to see.

  Vancouver, Calgary, Thunder Bay, Parry Sound, what could it signify? Perhaps a straight meaningless sweep across the whole country. What if they kept going, across Quebec, across the Maritimes, what if they dropped senseless into the sea like lemmings?

  Then suddenly I am overcome with flooding despair. A moment ago, hearing the gassy zoom of the rented car I had felt temporarily buoyant. Now, from nowhere, comes the knowledge that Seth is dead. The certainty arrives in the middle of a breath. I had inhaled with hope and by the time my breath left me I was certain he was lost forever. This dark road, this silence.

  It was a night like this when Seth was born. A spring night, the streets dry and dark with only a cold knot of a moon in the sky. Watson was out at a peace rally and I, drinking coffee in the apartment and feeling the first kick of pain, had been shocked and frightened and then, suddenly, for no reason, I had become serenely confident, packing quickly and neatly, phoning the doctor, locking the windows, calling the taxi, and then riding down the tree-arched Vancouver streets, sucking in the cool, friendly darkness as though it were somehow edible, exaltation knocking inside my heart. This was it, this was the beginning of my life, the only life that was going to matter.

  “You want to take a left here,” the officer advises Eugene after a mere ten minutes. “This is a one-way.”