The Girl in the Garden

by Melanie Wallace

  Her water broke on a day Ward wasn’t present. She trespassed his command and got herself around the front of the house and knocked on its door, then entered without an answer and told an old man she’d never before seen that she was in labor and needed to go to the hospital. In turn, he shouted for the college dropout, who emerged from somewhere upstairs and took one look at her holding the bottom of her belly and somehow convinced the old man to lend him his car, which the old man did on the proviso that he drop her off and head back immediately. She gave birth almost as soon as she was moved from the emergency room into the maternity ward, and she—following Ward’s instructions, but not to the letter; he’d wanted her to say she didn’t know who the father was—said she knew who the father was but that he wouldn’t claim the infant as his own, and so gave the baby her last name as well as its first. The college dropout brought a gift of a small stuffed bear to the hospital that night, he her only visitor. He said he’d have brought her butterflies in a jar if it had been the right season but of course it wasn’t and also they weren’t in Mexico, where he’d once seen monarchs, what a trip, there’d been billions of them covering the enormous trees that grew on mountainsides. His pupils were dilated, he couldn’t sit still, and she listened to him in a twilight trance that was bruised darkly because Ward—the college dropout said he’d been told she went into labor—didn’t appear.

  He turned up for her and the baby’s release from the hospital—given her age, not quite sixteen then but almost, someone had to sign for her as the hospital wouldn’t allow her and the infant to leave on their own, especially as there was an account to settle—after making whatever monetary arrangement he could. He was hung over. He didn’t say where he’d been. The staff insisted she and the baby be wheeled to the exit, but he didn’t offer a hand when she stood or an arm to walk her to the car. He didn’t help her into it and refused to hold the infant, saying that he wouldn’t because he didn’t want anything to do with it. His name is Luke, and he’s our son, not an it, she told him, and the hurt in her voice gave him pause enough to slam the passenger-side door on her. They returned to the house in silence, and the college dropout came out through the front door as they got out of the car and headed toward the annex room in which she’d spent two almost solitary months and now would spend others on her own with an infant. Sonovabitch, Ward, the dropout shouted in greeting, what a lucky dog you are.

  If Ward was, if he ever even entertained such a notion, he never let on, just did what he needed in terms of making sure she and the infant had a roof over their heads. She managed as fairly as she could—Auntie had told her what to expect, what to do, when to switch over to formula, how to test the warmth of heated milk, how to sterilize pacifiers and bottles and diapers, how to soothe rashes with cornstarch, how to tell a cry of hunger from a cry of colic, how to swaddle and soothe—and kept in mind that Auntie had said, Just do the opposite of what you imagine your mother did and give that baby something to hold on to.

  Ward disappeared, remained absent for most of the time. He didn’t say where he went, where he stayed. He came by whenever she reached the end of what money he gave her. He didn’t make himself at home, never sat on the bed or in the armchair, and had, in that first week of Luke’s life, rolled up and removed his pallet. He never looked into the baby carriage, never reached out to take Luke, but as the infant grew into a being—and how rapidly changes occurred—she occasionally caught a glimpse of melancholy in Ward’s expression as he looked around at the lodgings he’d provided her, them. He kept his thoughts to himself and remained aloof, unlike the college dropout, who made a fuss over her and Luke and without whom she might not have managed to get through the late winter, that cold spring, the oddly cool, rainy, interminable and inclement summer, for he took it upon himself to shop and run errands for whatever she, they, needed. She finally mentioned this to Ward, saying: I’d rather you were here to help out. He met her eyes evenly before setting his mouth in a hard way and telling her: It shouldn’t matter that I’m not. But it does, she replied, and he repeated: It shouldn’t. I never promised you anything more than that I’d see you through, I’m doing as much as I’m gonna do and, like I’ve told you before, I’m just biding my time until you name where you want to go.

  And when I do.

  I’ll get you there.

  And then.

  He looked off, looked back at her, shrugged. I can’t say. But maybe—and here he did not lie, but June did not and would never imagine that he was considering walking away from that hospital debt he didn’t want to pay anything more on than he already had—it’d be the best thing for both of us.

  The next time he came by, June told him the Atlantic, said she’d never seen the ocean and had always wanted to, that that’s where she wanted to go. No, not the Pacific, the Atlantic; yes, she knew it was a longer way off than the Pacific. She didn’t say what she hoped, that if they went as far as possible, then maybe during the going and given the distance something in him would soften, that he’d be thinking throughout the drive or when they got to where they were going that there wasn’t a reason in the world not to begin over; and as he’d said Maybe it’d be the best thing for both of us, she clung to those words to perish the fear that he’d strand her in a place they’d never seen, where they knew no one. And so she calmly told him her desired destination, and he said, Well, that’s going to take some doing, I need some time to get shit together. She waited almost two weeks for him to do whatever it was he had to do while she chose among the paltry possessions she had and decided what the baby would need, and one evening he came back and told her he was throwing out the baby carriage, that it wouldn’t fit with whatever else they were taking, and that they were leaving the next day. That evening she decided to leave behind that old, too-large peacoat, her worn-out boots and ragged mittens and cap, and carefully packed into a box two cups, a few utensils, peanut butter, a loaf of sandwich bread, crackers, powdered milk and baby formula, clean baby bottles and diapers, and late that night he came by and placed the box in the trunk along with a bucket of tools and her satchel holding the few clothes she possessed, a bag of the baby’s clothes, and one suitcase of his own. Her heart sank upon seeing that suitcase, considering he couldn’t have put much in it; but she told herself neither of them needed much, that people start over with less. He said he’d be back at dawn, and he was, standing a ways down the street, leaning on the Buick and staring off, keeping his distance from the rooming house as she made her way out the annex door with a thermos of coffee in the bag she had over her shoulder and the baby in her arms. She didn’t know whether Ward had said his goodbyes to the owner, the other men. The college dropout had vanished—without a farewell—and June had no one but Luke to tell of their leaving.

  The landscape remained the same for hours, an entire day, into that first night—which they drove through as they had that day, stopping only at rest areas and filling stations, stopping only when the baby grew cranky enough to warrant being walked, stopping only to eat and to buy sodas and to fill the thermos—and only after dawn began to subtly transform itself into something other than what it had been, what she had ever only known the land to look like, be, a crenellate flatness the color of dun, mostly barren of growth. That flatness, the colorlessness, gave out on the second day, with the soft rise and fall of prairies a hundred or more years earlier plowed over and now bearing expanses of wheat and corn as far as the eye could see, interrupted here and there by farms and hamlets whose houses had lawns and whose boundaries were rimmed by rows of poplars planted shoulder to shoulder to demarcate habitations from the endlessness of all else. State boundaries marked no change in the landscape from one side to the next of each invisible line, which confounded her into wondering how such boundaries had ever been determined in the first place, how irrational the decision seemed, to have ended and begun two states when the land flowed in the same manner through both; there were as yet no rivers as natural bounds, not through that second day and night. B
y the third afternoon, their stops more frequent now, she became afraid of Ward dozing at the wheel, of the engine overheating—she saw the gauge climb beyond the middle of the range, hover just above the red warning line—and so afraid of dropping Luke, for she had barely slept, that she trussed the infant against her skin, inside the shirt she wore. And was relieved when, late that afternoon, the landscape to her amazement becoming forested and the highway now flowing through the dip and rise of rolling hills, Ward said Enough and chose an exit and pulled off of the highway onto a secondary route, drove along until they came to a motel whose vacancy sign, an affair written on cardboard, was posted inside the office window. Ward told her to wait and went inside, then returned and drove them to a door marked with a painted number, and settled her and the baby in a dim room whose rug and bedspread and furniture were in various shades of brown and the walls tan and stained and the water in the sink and shower rusty. The room smelled of disuse. Ward took from the trunk what she needed and told her he’d be back, and he must have seen the desperation in her face because for the first time since she’d shown up in the town they’d left behind, he touched her shoulder. Then repeated: I’ll be back.

  He stayed true to his word, returning at dusk with a cold sixpack and a pizza. They kept the door open, despite the late-day chill, to air the place out, and after he’d showered she left in Ward’s care the changed and fed baby lying on his back and reaching for his toes and gurgling in the middle of one of the two single beds. Ward popped open a beer and sat on the other bed and maybe even watched the infant as she showered and toweled down and got back into her clothes. There was no TV, no radio. He motioned for her to join him on the empty bed, and they ate pizza and she drank her first beer, shook her head at the offer of another. He finished off the pack and lay down, and before he went to sleep carelessly placed a hand on the small of her back. She sat stockstill, afraid to move away from or lean into his touch, until his breathing evened and his hand dropped. And then she lay beside him, telling herself this had to be a new beginning; for if it wasn’t, it was nothing at all.

  Which is what it was. During the next days there were no more overnights at motels, just rest area stops, with her and the baby now in the backseat and him in the front, sleeping where they pulled over for a few hours in the car and then driving on again, stopping for food and formula and water, Ward pushing the Buick no more than fifty to keep the radiator from overheating. The topography, the flora, the highway were beyond anything she’d ever dreamed, hills gave way to mountains, huge rivers were crossed and huge cities skirted, monstrous trucks tailgated and passed them, the traffic heavying and thinning, becoming dense again, lightening again. The baby in her arms exhausted her, and the going wore them down. On the sixth morning they stopped for breakfast at a diner and she took the baby into the women’s room and in a mirror saw herself as pale, tired, and haggard as Ward, and when she rejoined him she asked if they shouldn’t find a motel, sleep, but he didn’t answer and they ate what they’d ordered and then he paid the bill and they continued on. The last part of that day was the worst. Ward’s driving became erratic, she had to watch his eyes in the rearview mirror to make sure they didn’t close, that he didn’t lose focus, and they went almost as far east as they could before he turned north and left the interstate and began following signs to places she’d never heard of, small places, until he stopped and studied the map, then drove on and left the secondary route for an even smaller one, this less traveled than any road she’d seen since she’d walked out of her life almost a year before, and when that road swung them onto the coastline, Ward said: There’s your goddamn ocean.

  He didn’t stop. She gazed at the water dumbly, unable to make sense of it, too tired to be overwhelmed, not even fully realizing that they’d reached an edge of the continent, unable to process the enormity of having come to the destination she’d chosen, because every cell in her body was crying out for sleep. To her relief, he finally pulled into Mabel’s, and to her shock he asked to rent a cabin for ten days and pulled a thicker wad of bills out of his pocket than she had ever known anyone to have. And by the next morning, after the cloud of fatigue had lifted and she saw, sensed, more clearly, she reflected on that wad of bills and realized he had that much money on him for one of two reasons: either because they were actually going to make a go of it or because he alone had a need for it.

  She didn’t ask, and he didn’t say. Days, nights, passed. He didn’t touch her. He circumvented as best he could her nearness, barely tolerated her presence, paid no attention to either her or the baby except when standing in the doorway to keep a watchful eye out for Mabel, to whom he turned a cold shoulder and so barely acknowledged; but he kept up certain appearances, silently and morosely, driving them into the small resort community’s strip mall and buying whatever June cautiously chose, leading the way on foot to the dunes and beach across the road from the cabins, occasionally telling her tersely that at one point she’d have to stop hanging about his neck if he was going to go look for a job. The first day he left her alone, she dreaded he wouldn’t return, but he did. And then he drove off the next and—despite again telling her he’d be back—left for good.

  She had forty-seven dollars and change to her name. And she waited through that first day, then the next, taking the baby to the ocean at daybreak. The third morning, she’d made her decision, and took the baby through the foggy chill that bit through her thin clothes, the infant wrapped up warmly and wide awake, chirping, gurgling, making eyes at her and laughing on their journey through the dunes, onto the beach, where she stood at the water’s edge for a very long time before slipping off her shoes and stepping into the surf with Luke in her arms. The ocean as immense as the emptiness within her, its freeze cramped her feet, her calves, made her catch her breath and exclaim, hoist the baby—to whom she could give no father, no grandparents, no past or future; she’d lain awake all night, her mind churning with desperation because there was no one she could turn to and never would be—higher onto her shoulder. Gone is gone. Gone is gone. Thigh-deep, she braces against the swells, Luke now no longer laughing but squirming and crying as the waves soak through to his flesh, and he is so defenseless, so so small, that she dares not look at her son but concentrates on her determination and the roiling, terrifying pull of the undertow, the icy chill, her fear of the water’s infinity and her relief at its promise, the ocean—like life—simply beyond comprehension because of its magnitude, its meaninglessness. She tells herself, teeth chattering and clinging to the struggling infant now wailing in her arms, better to do this, keep going, it’ll take no time to freeze, to drown, and she stifles a cry, almost chest-deep and losing her footing she feels her body fight for its life, force her back, when she hears a rabid barking and so turns, sees a beast of a dog harrying the shoreline, racing to and fro in its shallows but looking directly at her, keeping her in its line of vision, the one sentient creature in the universe distressed by her immersion, Luke’s screams, the only creature in the world to bear witness, away from which she takes another step backward into the deep as a swell lifts her, bobs her upward, sets her down and onto her feet in its trough. And perhaps her, their, disappearance at that instant maddens what might be an already insane creature; at any rate, the dog takes the plunge, dolphins in and out of the breaking surf until it can no longer touch the seafloor and then swims strongly toward them despite the waves breaking over its head, the dog relentless and, she suddenly realizes, watching in amazement as the ocean tosses her about, beautiful. Gorgeous, crazy, this scene, her view toward the shore, of that deserted beach whose edges and dunes disappear into fog, this lone dog with its massive seal-like head, ears flattened, trying to set right what is not, trying to rescue her or perhaps only the baby—she’ll never know—and taking the chance it might follow them both to their deaths. And that realization, the magnificence of the creature’s intent, moves her, Luke’s cries move her, her own breathing takes on an unearthly sound not unlike the dog’s, the b
east so close now she can hear its keening, and as she grabs on to its tail the dog turns and strokes powerfully toward the shore.

  And then they’re in the shallows. She can’t feel her feet or legs, lets go of the dog, stumbles onto the shore as the dog circles and whines, herds her farther from the ocean’s edge until she falls to her knees and, gasping and shaken to her core, tries to hold on to Luke, for the infant is arching his back, arching away from her, pumping his arms, kicking his feet, his face wrinkled into a fixed wail and his lips blue, his skin translucent, his eyes rolling skyward. The dog pauses several times in its mad circling to shake itself off, then continues its herding, quieter now, no longer whining, as June tears at Luke’s clothes and at her own and finally rubs the naked infant against her shirtless chest, envelops and rocks him, rocks herself as the sun begins to cut through the mist, its thin warmth kissing her back, the baby’s crown, their skin, the dog’s thick fur as the animal settles onto the sand and rolls over once, twice, then quietly watches mother and son. When it later gets to its feet, the dog noses her arm and licks her hands before trotting off up the coastline, continuing on its way but pausing frequently to toss a look back over its shoulder in their direction. As if to make sure that she, they, remain on solid ground.