The Girl in the Garden

by Melanie Wallace

  She eventually lies down with Luke on her chest, in her arms. The dog does not return, disappears as any apparition, and although June never lays eyes on it again she will greet it with joy in those infrequent dreams in which the shaggy, huge creature appears over the course of the rest of her life, dreams she will never tell anyone, not even her son. When Luke’s skin is dry, she sits up and pulls her wet shirt back on and swaddles the again-protesting baby, whispers and sings and carries him back to the cabin, where she bathes him, gently towels and dresses him, then strips and rubs herself down and changes her clothes, wrings out her hair, and eventually sits, remaining stunned for much of the quiet day that passes before she enters the office and tells Mabel that she and Luke have been left behind, that Ward is not coming back.

  When Mabel replies, It’s just as well, June begins to weep—that decade of tears she holds within her is no longer dammed, there is nothing she can do to stop the flow—not only because of the woman’s hard, if kind, response, but because of that monstrous, almost magical dog that has saved two lives for no reason she can possibly fathom.

  Iris

  MABEL WAITS FOR IRIS, who from upstairs had called out to her that she’d be down in a bit, that she’d lost track of time, although Mabel wonders how that could be the case as Iris had obviously risen to unlock the outside door to what Claire had always termed, without ruefulness or resentment, Iris’s compound. Not an unfitting description in one respect, Mabel thinks, for the high concrete wall—smooth as pewter, and gunmetal gray—that extends from the house to enclose the entire property gives the impression of impregnability from both inside and out. June had blanched slightly at the sight of it and of Iris’s house, which from the street appears to be a windowless bunker adjoined to that wall. There’s hardly any frontage, just a short flagstone drive announced by a mailbox whose sole identification reads 154, and the drive ends at the wall—Iris had had the carport that was once attached to the house dismantled—in front of the only entrance door, which, despite being made of wood and its remarkable size, happens to be painted the same shade of gray as the concrete and so might be mistaken for a tromp l’oeil by discerning passersby or missed altogether by the undiscerning. What frontage isn’t flagstone-paved lies sterile beneath a spread of bluestone chips.

  And Mabel hadn’t said anything to assure or warn June that there was no describing the paradox she was about to encounter within, but smiled when June caught her breath after entering through the gray door. Waiting for Iris now, Mabel marvels at that paradox, Iris’s paradise, Mabel sitting within Iris’s livingroom and looking out through the French doors at the patio crested by a wisteria-covered pergola, and beyond that at the almost two acres of garden contained within that wall—hardly seen for the ivy and bushes and trellises of roses and morning glories and flowering creepers Mabel has no names for—that hems out the forest beyond and, as intended, deprives anyone of the possibility of prying. Within the garden, at its far end, a long wooden leanto backed against the wall harbors cordwood culled from every tree—maple, oak, cedar, ash—that had once graced the lawn, of which not one blade of grass remains; and while the cordwood fills three quarters of the leanto, the other quarter comprises an enclosed shed that holds rakes and shovels and gardening tools, bushel baskets, stools, hoses, watering cans, pans and canning jars. Closer to the house but not facing it, looking onto the garden from its own angle, is what had been the original house on the property, a one-room cottage with a severely pitched roof so high that a person in its sleeping loft can stand tall; and the cottage too has a porch, its shingled overhang supported by four cypress trunks whose bark was lopped off and their circumferences made uniform with an adze. Until Matthew died, the cottage, that original structure, hadn’t been lived in for decades and instead housed the castoffs of a previous time, harnesses and grain storage bins and horse blankets and milking pails, a wooden trough, all of which Iris had had carted away before she gutted and made the place livable—installing cabinets and closets and counters and electric heat and a kitchen alcove and bathroom and shower, restoring the fireplace and chimney, replacing windows and adding shutters, then furnishing the place spartanly—for herself, to inhabit alone during the months it took for the main house to be gutted, redesigned, rebuilt and refurbished. She made the cottage into a perfect guesthouse, and—as Iris would never have admitted to being prescient, to so much as thinking about Claire in those months never mind assuming that Claire would choose to live there—for the necessary duration felt herself a guest, a stranger, amid the detritus of a world she was intent upon, and succeeded in, destroying.

  And re-creating: this, the wonder of it all, Mabel thinks, looking out over the garden’s trees—apple and apricot, pear and persimmon and cherry, dogwood and rhododendron, weeping birches, Chinese maples, sumacs, blue firs and creeping junipers—interspersed among beds of yarrow, black-eyed Susans, echinaceas, asters, tiger lilies, peonies, roses, sunflowers, zinnias and chrysanthemums. Cobblestone paths whose edges sprout with spider grasses and herbs lace the grounds. Within and without, nothing of the house or acreage, but for foundations and bedrock, is as it was before Matthew died.

  Iris has not stepped out beyond these walls except to gather the mail since the year after his death. She sits upstairs, fighting back the nausea that has plagued her since waking, for close to dawn, once again, she dreamed her recurring nightmare of burying Matthew, again. It is always the same: his open grave, on a knoll, yaws pitch-black beneath a sagging cobbled sky that cannot be trusted not to give way, plummet piecemeal onto the heads of the living, obliterate all trace of them. The burial service is taking place in the midst of disorder; the surrounding tombstones, haphazard, tilted, or toppled and prone, are somehow portentous of worse to come. A flyblown mutt, dog of hell oozing maggots on the pile of earth pyramiding the foot of Matthew’s grave, raises its head to stare sightlessly through leafstrewn eyes at what it cannot see. The knot of cowled, dark-garbed mourners, slope-shouldered as vultures, fix the dog with a beady gaze until as a flock they become restless, apprehensive, cock their hooded heads and cast their eyes at the heavens whose netlike stitching holding the sky intact begins to unravel. One by one, two by two, by the dozen—in the way of dreams there is no accounting, no possible logic—the flowingly caped funeral-goers flap their arms, take their hurried leave as the deadeyed dog pushes onto its bony sore-infested haunches, lifts its nose, opens its muzzle in mute howl. Flies erupt from its fanged jaws, the fiend is voiceless, the flies as insidiously silent. As if signaled by the pests, a cassocked priest opens his missal. This, an ominous cue—here Iris always becomes agitated, struggles to wake from the nightmare, but the dream’s sequence is immutable, dreadful, repetitive, she knows the netting is about to split but fails to break through sleep’s veneer, although the mesh tears with a deafening resonance and the dream’s only sound becomes the thunderous timbre of canvas shredding. At this, the priest snaps the missal shut without having glanced at a passage and palms it in one hand, extends the other to point at Iris and then at the hole in the ground, Iris helpless as a puppet, her eyes directed by the gossamer pull of the priest’s gesture. She never wants to look, and terror fills her because her eyes are commanded to do so, and what she sees is always the same: there is no coffin, Matthew’s putrefied flesh is curiously waxy and almost indistinguishable from the leaden chains binding his arms to his torso, the padlocks huge, a leather cord biting into the swollen flesh of his neck; there is no coffin, and Matthew is blue-gray and swollen and horrific, trussed and throttled and naked but for the hood over his head and but for the flies attending his flesh.

  He is the way he was when Iris in life found him dead.

  She always needs to scream through the dream to wake herself, but can never manage; she always feels herself open her mouth wide, wider—always senses this, for the nightmare at times is more delirium than dream—as the first cobblestone falls from above, a second, before the sky caves and avalanches. Whatever the ether appear
ed to be it no longer is, and the cobblestones tumbling to earth are strangely unsolid, they hit with great thuds, splat with the consistency of wet clay and split with ooze, knocking the hellhound from its feet and burying it alive, secreting the tumbled tombstones in sludge, besmirching the priest’s vestments, sullying Iris’s dress. The priest scoops a handful of wet earth, wet sky, from within Matthew’s rapidly filling grave and stands over Iris. She never knows how she comes to be on her knees in the nightmare, there are moments of pure disembodiment, but she is still openmouthed. Instead of screaming, she extends her tongue as if to receive communion. The priest incants nothing, and he is never gentle. The mire tastes of fluvial rot and decayed flesh and makes her stomach heave, but Iris cannot retch because the priest has filled her mouth with putrefaction and holds a monstrous hand over her face as she is smothered, asphyxiated, burned by the bile rising in her throat.

  The bile is always real. Was upon waking.

  Iris finally rises from where she sits on the edge of her bed, steels herself to go downstairs, face Mabel. She can still taste the bitter residue of the bile, swallows hard, examines herself in the mirror. Khaki work pants, khaki work shirt: her wardrobe consists of nothing but, has consisted of the same like sets of pants and shirts—some in gray—since she moved back into this house. A face too thin. One arm with a slight tremor, today not quite noticeable. Her left leg doesn’t drag behind her, though she has the impression it does and so comes down the stairs placing her left foot first. She motions for Mabel to stay where she is, says: I’ll make tea. She thinks to confess the reason for her delay, describe what it’s like to struggle to swallow liquefied brimstone, suppress the fiery slurry of reflux, thinks to tell Mabel that this nightmare which came from nowhere some weeks ago now recurs with unnerving frequency. To admit she now despairs of losing that peace she created for herself by withdrawing from the world after burying Matthew, of instead remaining in this world within his grasp. To rail how unfair, how unfair, after all these years and after all she’d done to wipe the slate clean, to now be cursed with this dream of burying him again. After all, she’d seen to it that the coroner ruled Matthew’s death accidental, no easy task, so that the priest could say a funeral Mass and then accompany the casket and mourners to the cemetery and bless the gravesite, sprinkle holy water one last time, read one last psalm; the cemetery had been perfectly manicured, there had been no flyblown netherworld dog, no overturned tombstones, no strangers dressed like carrion birds; the sky had not collapsed, no one had rammed muck from Matthew’s open grave down Iris’s throat, and Matthew’s coffin had remained closed. Though, truth be told, for all Iris knew he might have been naked within, bound in that wrap of padlocked chains and that cord wound about his neck, that hood over his head, the way she’d found him.

  She had refused a wake with an open casket. Why look at the dead. Why. To know what is not sleep, to know what is already known.

  Matthew’s eyes had to be sewn shut.

  Matthew’s death, of which she’d emptied herself for years, remained fable beyond Iris’s insularity. Because people have a penchant for sensationalism, the tale became even more ghastly in its telling over time—so little out of the ordinary happened in the town then, Matthew’s demise occurred before the era of random drive-by shootings and not-so-random murders, and long before townsfolk thought to lock their doors even when they were at home or began to lay wages on how long any cashier working the lobster shift at the local 24/7 store might survive before some lone customer in the deep of night did violence to her—and a milestone in the town’s mythology. And Iris knew she’d never be able to extricate herself from that. She never considered that the aspersions—actual or imagined—cast on her were anything but inescapable: she’d felt herself tainted for life, had from the moment of Matthew’s burial, when all niceties had finally been exhausted. She also never considered, no matter the passage of the past, that she might ever be anyone but the woman whose husband had been found. In such a way as.

  He’d left her no choice: Iris determined that before Matthew’s wake. And stayed true to that determination after his funeral, to never again face anyone who knew him or heard tell of his death, and the latter included a good number of townsfolk who, despite best intentions, tend like all people to be unwittingly pitiless because they are for the most part bored, and to be essentially cagey because for the most part callous; and Iris was terrorized by the thought, no, her knowledge, that stories would circulate and that whispers would follow in her wake if she were so much as glimpsed anywhere. She was convinced that her presence in public would forever arouse furtive and outrageous conjecture behind her back, and that no coroner’s ruling, no priestly complicity, and no amount of time would soften the truth—not that the truth could ever be known—or settle wagging tongues. For Matthew had managed to die in a lurid, indecent, wholly obscene and inconceivable way, in the throes of some unconscionable act he was performing nude, chained, hooded, and—ostensibly, according to the police—alone. That being known as fact by the authorities, the priest, and the undertaker, Iris feared, correctly, that word would get out, that speculation would never be stemmed, and so resolved to avoid rather than inspire those rumors that the collective imagination would let run rampant. She once told Mabel she’d had no choice because she was incapable of removing herself, removing Matthew, from the gossip mill: she could only minimize her exposure by refusing to ever again acknowledge or be acknowledged by anyone in the town where she’d been born and brought up. Which was why, during the wake and funeral, Iris nodded speechlessly at people’s condolences, rebuffed with silence their attempts at commiseration, shrank from everyone’s touch, and hid her impenetrable grief behind impenetrably dark glasses, seeing through them darkly, indistinctly, knowing she had already steeled herself for what had just become the rest of her life.

  Everyone assumed that Iris’s behavior belied her shock. But she was not in shock: she was infuriated and unforgiving. For Matthew’s death set before her the task of banishing all memory of him in order to quash her outrage at having lived with someone she came to consider a monster and her rage at having been widowed in this way. She left Claire—to whom Iris would remain as good as dead—with Mabel and Paul for the better part of a year. In the first week of her widowhood she changed her telephone number and had it unlisted; shredded and burned her wedding photographs and every other photograph in which Matthew appeared; tossed Matthew’s clothes and toiletries into boxes along with what clothes he had ever given her or had ever seen her wear and brought those boxes to the town dump; donated what furniture, rugs, curtains, linens, towels, knickknacks, plates and glassware, cookware and silverware they’d accumulated together to a Goodwill shop. Iris’s activities did not go unnoticed, and Claire did not go unmissed, and so the town was rife with rumors that Iris intended to move. But a move was out of the question, for Iris could not bear the thought of starting over: new neighbors would be intrusive even if kindly in their welcoming; there would be questions as to where they were from, who they were, how they liked their new surroundings; and Iris would have to uproot Claire, she’d be expected to enroll her daughter in a new school, attend parent-teacher meetings, live a normal life—which she could not imagine leading—perhaps even be considered, after the requisite period of mourning, as an eligible widow. Instead, Iris traded in what had been their car, a sedan, for a station wagon at a dealership in another town, and in the same town sold her wedding band and engagement ring and every piece of jewelry Matthew had ever given her, then went to a hairdresser who’d never seen Iris before and certainly never saw her again, to cut her brown shoulder-length hair short and frost it. She gave out her unlisted telephone number to Mabel, and to Duncan, whom she’d sought out to handle the estate; Matthew’s several insurance policies—he’d been an insurance salesman, after all—came to an extraordinary amount of money Iris never expected (she hadn’t even known about the policies until after Matthew had been buried) and barely dented with the reno
vation of the cottage and house, the clearing and replanting of the garden, the final construction of that wall, higher than the height of a tall man standing on the shoulders of another, which could have served in another time and place as a stockade.

  Iris turned her back on their friends, their acquaintances, the town, and Claire, who finally returned from Mabel and Paul’s, only to find the house she had once known now entirely reconstructed and unfamiliar, emptied of everything she’d grown up with. Iris took no pity on her, indeed could hardly bring herself to look at Claire, because she needed to shield herself from that last vestige of Matthew. For Claire resembled him, and Iris needed no reminders: it was enough that when alone she was still being stunned at the oddest moments by the sudden recall of his face, the scent of his skin, the shape of his ears, his hands, the sound of his voice, the way he breathed and laughed, walked, held a martini, publicly charmed their friends, and privately humiliated her. It took more than a decade—Claire by then long gone and Iris long perfectly insular—to quell those unwelcome and unbidden shock waves that sometimes surged through and froze her with the same paralytic fright she’d experienced at having found Matthew beside that overturned stool, his garroted and strangely waxen body bloomed with splotches the color of amethyst, him vilely lewd, slightly bloated, stiffly contorted—perhaps there’d been a struggle of sorts; at any rate, he was twisted, one heel resting on a leg of the overturned stool as if he had attempted to reach it, gain some purchase, or perhaps his body simply fought its own demise—in the throes of rigor mortis.