The Girl in the Garden

by Melanie Wallace

  Not that he always showed when Bo did. Not that he ever came by on his own. And he never returned at all after Bo split with June’s mother, after what Bo claimed was the last straw the morning he woke up to find his pockets emptied and her mother and his wallet gone. June hadn’t seen her leave, but she knew her mother wouldn’t be back soon, that she’d be gone for as long as Bo’s money lasted and maybe even longer, for she always returned with something in hand: cigarettes, liquor, some cash, often another man or men, most of whom seemed interchangeable. Unlike Bo, whom June had taken a shine to: he’d brought Ward into her life, after all, and he’d been decent with her mother, hadn’t ever raised a hand to her never mind knocked her about, always showed up with groceries as well as a couple of bottles, and had twice brought June presents, once a kerchief, once a pair of oyster-shell barrettes. No, June told Bo, she didn’t know what direction her mother might take; she’d never known, and as far as she could remember she’d always been told never to ask. You mean she’s been walking out on you all your life? Bo queried incredulously as June helped him search through every drawer and cupboard for his wallet, knowing their efforts to be futile. Just about, June admitted. Well, he said, after they’d turned the trailer upside down for no reason, that’s that. And she wanted to ask Bo then about Ward—he hadn’t come around with Bo that weekend or the former—but she didn’t, she’d never asked after him, for so far as Bo and her mother were concerned she had no reason to mention his name, as neither of them had any inkling of what had happened between her and Ward. Who had never made any promises, never said he loved her; but he’d said other things, and with his body, his hands, revealed to June what he didn’t put into words, and that which she couldn’t because she was incapable of dreaming such a language.

  The day Bo called it quits with her mother, he gave June his telephone number and told her the name of the town he came from and said: Call me if she bothers to bring back my wallet, but sorry, she didn’t even leave me any change, and it’ll cost you long distance. And then she watched him drive away, take with him any hope on her part that Ward might return. When neither of them did, she was left with nothing but her longing, and that was bad enough until Auntie placed her ancient hands on June’s belly and pronounced she’d gotten herself with child.

  June considered, at the time, that this day was the worst of her life.

  But she was wrong. Worse days came later, after the season grew cold and the skies grayed in an endless overcast behind which the sun’s faint orb dragged from one horizon to the other, after the snows covered the barren landscape in a blanket of white, after her mother realized the condition her daughter was in and threatened to kill her, pelting Auntie’s trailer—where June had taken refuge—with snowballs until the old woman stepped out and placed one palm atop the back of her other hand and pushed both in the direction of June’s mother and warned: Throw one more, and I will curse you. June’s mother swayed, rocked, glared, took a step back in a knee-deep drift—she had never known where the old woman was from either, or how she had ever come to be in this place, or whether, as was rumored, she was descended from medicine hawkers, circus folk, magicians, shamans—and finally leaned over her feet, let drop a mouthful of spit. Keep your damnations to yourself until the day I kill her, which won’t be today and maybe not tomorrow, but there’ll come a time, June’s mother threatened. Begone, came Auntie’s reply, and June’s mother turned and stumbled toward the road in the ruts cleaved into the snow by that flatbed truck, and in the distance eventually disappeared into the promise of twilight. That was after the holidays that weren’t, the new year drifting on beneath a fishbelly sky pinning down a coldness that grew denser with every passing day, June trapped by her heavying body and the frozen landscape trapped beneath winter’s layers, the road narrowed by snowplow banks whose heights obscured the occasional passing of cars except at the drive’s end, which Auntie and June had cleared; but at the sound of any engine during daylight, June was wont to step outside and wait for the moment it passed by the drive, always in the insane hope that Ward’s ill-used and maybe even ill-gotten Buick would materialize. That he would come back to her, and for her. Which he didn’t, and then she could no longer wait: she began to fear that this entrapment—her body, the season—would paralyze her, and knew she had no choice now but to make her own way, search him out. Auntie gave June an old satchel with a wooden handle that might have been in her family since the time of the carpetbaggers, saying she’d never had any use for it and wasn’t considering moving anywhere anyway for the rest of her life, and she gave the girl what cash she could spare, enough to keep her fed for a few days and allow her to pay for a room for a night or two if she needed. They’d basted panels with buttons and buttonholes into June’s jeans, which panels could be removed after she gave birth, and she had an oversize sweater and a man’s peacoat two sizes too large, boots, a woolen hat and mittens to wear; the satchel held what little else she had. She waited until the appearance of the two men with their flatbed truck, who—after spending the night—told her the direction in which she needed to go to get to Bo’s town, then took her as far as they were going. She told Auntie she’d write, and for the first time asked the old woman’s name, but Auntie replied that her people had never done such, that the few who’d ever bothered even learning their letters just scattered and were never heard from again. Not that that mattered, she said, because gone is gone.

  Anyway, Auntie told her, you won’t be coming back. If you don’t find him, remember to head into the sun and keep going until the land gives out.

  That was their goodbye, at the crack of a cold dawn on a day when her mother was again nowhere to be found, June with the satchel at her feet at the door’s edge in the high old cab, the two men elbow to elbow and the truck cranking past the town, population now 647 minus one, where she’d sometimes gone to school; and beyond the town limits she saw that the land and sky were just the same as she’d ever known them to be, the endless overcast of the season above and the remnant moraine of a distant age’s glacial movements lying still beneath the snows that belied their sculpting. Both stretched on and on, and the changelessness did not surprise, as it was all she’d ever known. They stopped once at a gas station and again where they left her at a junction, which they said saw more traffic than the road on which they’d come. They pointed her in the right direction, told her the names of places she’d pass through, and claimed that drivers would be hard-pressed not to stop for someone in her condition. But she walked the rest of that morning—during which not a vehicle passed her—having no idea how far she’d come or how far she had to go, with the wind blowing spindrift over the rippled, pitted world and eating into her back, and she’d reached no town at all when, finally, a pickup came from behind and began to slow as she turned to face it, and she got her first ride of several. At the end of each, she was dropped off at a convenience store or gas station, where she warmed herself within the aisles or office and waited for someone going in her direction to pull in, shyly asking them if they could drive her on, and so by day’s end was close enough to where she was going that she walked the rest of the way, into the town’s outskirts of junkyards and auto repair shops and empty lots that were fenced in and sometimes shouldered by clapboard homes and the occasional house trailer. Then, closer to the town’s center, side streets and more homes, and on the main road—which became Cedar Street, for less than a mile—offices and clothing and hardware and grocery stores and secondhand shops and bars and diners. People were locking up their stores, walking the sidewalks, going into their favorite eateries or watering holes or heading elsewhere in trucks and station wagons and sedans whose make she couldn’t determine, their headlights shining high beams in the dusk that deepened into night as she walked to what she considered to be the town’s other outskirts, then wound her tired way back to the first diner she’d passed, the first bar, and—with that satchel in her hand and in that oversize peacoat and that woolen cap and mittens, with her frozen
cheeks and glistening eyes and protruding stomach and now swelling ankles and feet within those clunky boots, looking much the mendicant wayfarer from another place and time—got up her courage to ask of anyone who looked at her straight from behind the counter or cash register or bar whether they knew the man she was looking for, whether they might know where she might find him.

  When a bartender in a dive asked the drinkers mounted on stools if anyone knew Ward, she saw how the men took her in and then gazed at their glasses, some shaking their heads and others making no motion, no one saying a word; and she realized, feared then, that even if they knew everything about Ward they wouldn’t say because they saw she was pregnant and knew the predicament he’d be in—perhaps the same some of them had once upon a time found themselves in and not for the better—if she managed to track him down. June, however defeated she found herself by this reaction, told herself it wouldn’t be like that: those nights she’d spent with Ward were the only times in her life anyone had taken an interest in her, had wanted to be with her; he’d been funny and tender and had jokingly teased her, saying he’d desired her since the first time he laid eyes on her; she told herself—despite her gnawing fear to the contrary—that he’d be glad to see her now, that for one reason or another he just hadn’t been able to come back to her; also told herself she had to believe this, even when at a diner a young pretty woman behind the register couldn’t disguise her surprise when June said his name, then quickly looked off and studied the corner of the ceiling for a moment as though thinking hard before saying, Nope, never heard of him.

  It was Bo she finally found. She’d kept his phone number all those months, and she dropped change into the public phone she finally came across and dialed the number, and the woman who answered said, Just a minute. There were voices in the background, and then a man said hello, and June suddenly realized she didn’t know what to say, so that the man said hello again, this time as a question, which prompted her to ask, Is this Bo? and he said, Yup. She told him who she was, and there was a long pause. I’m sorry, she found herself saying, my mother never brought back your wallet, I don’t have it. Is that why you’re calling? he asked, and she said, No, well, I need to find Ward. And Bo asked where she was and she told him, and he said to stay there, so she did, leaning against the inside of the booth and feeling the deadness of the cold seep into her bones, and after a while it seemed to her that she’d been waiting for hours and that she’d most likely be waiting for the rest of her life. She didn’t see Bo park his pickup at the corner of a side street opposite where she stood in profile to him, didn’t see him get out of the cab or walk toward her, just heard him say Aw Jesus at the sight of her.

  He didn’t need for June to say why she was looking for Ward. He made a phone call, telling the person on the other end of the line that he’d be there soon, then took June to his place, a one-bedroom over a grocery store, and the woman named Jeanie to whom he introduced her made a fuss over her and saw to it that she ate something and that she’d be comfortable sleeping on the couch. The next morning Bo left for work, and Jeanie made breakfast and told June to go ahead and use whatever she needed to shower, there was shampoo and conditioner, and then she too left and Bo returned around five and poured himself a shot of whiskey and gave her a grin. June said, Your girlfriend is nice, and he replied, Don’t I know it, she’s got me so hooked we’re moving out next week and going back to where she’s from. He didn’t say where that was, just went and changed out of his work clothes and told her, C’mon, bring your bag or whatever you call it, and he drove her to a part of town she hadn’t seen the night before, into a neighborhood that probably wasn’t thought of as one—the run-down houses were far apart, the streetlamps few, hauling trailers and pickups and cars that had seen better days were snowed in in backyards—and stopped before a several-storied, ramshackle house of weathered slat boards and peeling window frames that had first and only ever been painted before she was born. She could see that additions had been built onto the place, jutting out like rectangular tentacles. Bo told her to wait in the pickup and he went in, and after a quarter-hour or so came back out and said, He’ll meet us later, give him some time, then took her to a diner and told her the fare was on him. He watched her examine the prices on the menu, and when she ordered an egg sandwich he told the waitress to scratch that and bring them each some meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, and they ate in silence until their plates were finished, when June ventured: So he’s with someone else. Bo looked her in the eye and said, I can’t rightly say, it’s been a while since I washed my hands of him, just have some dessert. She looked down at her plate and shook her head, said, I’ve got no craving for sweets, it’s the craziest thing, and when she looked up Ward was coming in through the door and walking over to them, with a movement of his head telling Bo to push over and sitting next to him across from her, not saying hello but running a hand through his hair and then resting back against the booth. So, he finally said, Bo tells me it’s mine.

  The remark crushed her. She’d never considered that he’d think or insinuate otherwise, and she felt herself reel as though from a blow; if she’d been standing she would have staggered; she hadn’t known what she’d expected but it wasn’t this. Even if it had come as a shock to him he should still have been the man she’d known, the one who’d been sweet to her, so attentive, the one who’d taken them both out of Bo and her mother’s way; they’d spent nights together in that Buick watching for shooting stars and trailing the moon and driving to the loneliest places on the planet, listening to the radio and with him sometimes singing—he had a sweet voice—at other times telling her bits and pieces about himself, that he hadn’t had much of a family life, his parents being divorced, and that he’d bummed around some after leaving home and that his only degree came from the school of hard knocks, that he’d done dishes in restaurant kitchens and roadwork on highway crews and had framed houses in places that didn’t have buyers, that he’d done time in mines and factories and once in a county jail—for what he didn’t say—and for a while broke mustangs, which he said were the orneriest animals on earth. You know, he’d tell her, I never talk to women like this, you’re too young to understand but there’ll come a time in your life when you’re no longer a girl and you won’t be wanting to listen to these things, you’ll be wanting men to tell you other things, oh lord are you ever going to be trouble—let me stop now, tell me about your boyfriend. But June had none, had never had, and told him this without saying why, that her mother was trouble enough, that she’d seen men come and go all her life and that the best she could say about them was that the only thing they all had in common was a stubborn selfishness, none of them ever wanting anything more than to get drunk or high or both and bed her mother until the good times soured; and the worst she could say about them was that when those good times went south most of them had a penchant for violence, their rages sometimes turning the insides of the trailer upside down and at other times leaving her mother, who like a wildcat tried to give as good as she got, broken and bloodied. So June told him only that she’d never had a boyfriend and didn’t say why, and after that he groaned and shook his head and told her she was every man’s dream because she’d never even ever been kissed, good lord did she know what that meant, what that could mean to a guy, until finally she said: So kiss me. And June never forgot that kiss, remembered everything that happened after, remembered every moment of what occurred between them all through that summer and into the fall, when Bo called it quits with her mother. She sat facing Ward in the diner with a hurt, astonished look in her eyes and said with utter finality, It’s ours.

  She refused to cry, but she couldn’t say anything more because of the lump in her throat. For chrissakes, Ward, Bo said, do the right thing. And Ward did, he took her back to his place in that rooming house and settled her into the private annex he rented, with its one room and a bathroom. The room had a single bed and a double electric burner plate atop a small table, above which h
ung a frying pan and one pot. There was a percolator, a clothes cupboard, one armchair, one naked overhead bulb; the bathroom had a tub and wash basin, towel hooks. The room was chilly until he turned on the electric heater. She sat on the edge of the bed and he told her he’d see her through the pregnancy and birth and maybe a few months thereafter but that that was all, and then he’d take her wherever she wanted to go, name it. From that first evening he held himself aloof, brokered no intimacy, set a pallet on the floor for himself that he rarely used because he rarely slept there, but he gave her a bit of spending money and saw to it that she fed herself. He told her never to enter the main house or any other annex, for the place was shared only by men, all of whom paid weekly rent and worked odd jobs or had seasonal employment or were just drifting through, except for the place’s owner, who lived there too and wouldn’t take kindly to the appearance of a pregnant female in their midst. When Ward came around, he checked in on her cursorily and then sat drinking and smoking and talking with the other men in the house—she could sometimes make out the voices of five or six others, carrying through the walls in the night—with whom she never came into contact except for the college dropout who aspired to be a national Frisbee-throwing champion and told her he’d once made a lot of money dealing specialized strains of fine Mexican and Vietnamese marijuana, the proceeds from which he was using to coast by. He’d seen her come and go from that annex room and one day simply waylaid her, said by way of introduction, Whoa, what in the world has Ward been hiding here, and he treated her with an almost awed reverence because of her impending motherhood, and—despite June’s misgivings, for what would Ward say—took to taking walks with her into town.

  Ward thought nothing of it, neither showed interest in nor softened toward her, never bridged the chasm between them with his body or words, never once rubbed the soreness out of the small of her back or put his hands on her belly to feel the baby kick, although at times she noticed him looking oddly at her, as if in morbid fascination, during that last month when she no longer fit into those paneled jeans and her belly had dropped so that she carried low. Because of those instances, she tried to convince herself that Ward might, in the end, become intrigued with the notion of fatherhood, just as she wanted to believe that after the birth they might make a go of it. She had nothing else to go on and was more than willing to take him as he was: detached, unbending in his refusal to reach for her, and mostly absent. And as she’d lived so much of her life in abandonment, she found desertion a normal state of being, and in her solitude she did what she needed to in order to prepare for the infant, bringing back from a secondhand shop an old but pristine baby carriage, buying a dozen cloth diapers and some safety pins, a half-dozen baby bottles, and hand-sewing and knitting clothes so small that she could hardly believe how tiny a newborn could be.