Garden of Lies

by Eileen Goudge

  Her gaze returned to the room. A narrow closet-sized cubicle, its walls pocked with thumbtack holes, and lined with board and cinderblock bookshelves, all jammed with books. The books she herself dreamed of having the time someday to read. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Baudelaire. And in the corner, on the scarred oak desk, sat Brian’s ancient Underwood, a pile of typewritten pages spilling from a box lid. The novel Brian had been writing before he got buried in the dissertation.

  She had read the novel, and it was good. Better than good. Pride swelled inside her, warming her. It didn’t matter that this bed sagged terribly, and neither of them had two cents. He would be famous someday, she was sure of it. His books on shelves in student rooms like this one, beside Joyce and Faulkner.

  She studied his face. All planes and hollows in the shadowy half-light from the street. Sweat gleamed on his forehead, the blade of his nose. She licked a bead from his temple, savoring the salty taste on her tongue.

  “Mmm. I could eat you up.” She nuzzled his neck, whispering in his ear, “But what would I do when there was nothing left of you?”

  “Rose.” Brian sat up abruptly, sheets and blankets tumbling away. The cold air rushed in. “There’s something ... I should have told you before we ...” He turned, his profile silhouetted against the window. “Jesus, I hate this. I wish to God there was some way to make it easier.”

  [104] Rose shivered, crossing her arms over her stomach, holding her elbows. Something was wrong. Yes, she’d felt it. Back when Brian was making love to her even. So fierce, hurting her almost in his urgency.

  “Brian, what? What is it?” She sat up, clutching the sheet to her, feeling a need to protect herself against the bad thing she felt coming.

  “I should have told you before we—it’s just that, God, when I saw you all I could think of was holding you close to me, getting you in here.”

  She cut loose in a nervous laugh. “I know. Every altar boy’s wet dream, isn’t it? A nice Catholic girl. I think it’s something they put in the holy water, some kind of aphrodisiac. They ought to bottle it instead of perfume. Eau de Vatican. Do you think the Pope would endorse it?” If she kept talking, she wouldn’t have to hear him. “God, do you remember those terrible attacks of conscience I used to get? I know how martyrs must have felt wearing hair shirts.”

  “Rose. My draft number. It came up.”

  His words fell like a wrecker’s ball crashing into a stone wall. Her ears rang with the impact.

  “That’s impossible.” But even while she said it, her muscles were cramping, and cold fingers walked up her spine.

  “It happened.”

  “No!” The ringing had become a wild, clanging alarm inside her skull. “Just tell them. It’s a mistake. Somebody punched the wrong computer button. You don’t have to go. You’re deferred. They can’t take you. My God, Brian, Vic Lucchesi died in Vietnam. And poor Buddy ...” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  “Not everyone . -. .,” he started to say, but she covered her ears with her fists.

  “No. No. Not you. Not you, Brian.”

  She could hear her voice rising, turning shrill. But it seemed to be coming from outside her, an ambulance siren in the street.

  “Rose, don’t make it worse.” He tried to draw her into his arms, but she resisted, holding herself stiff, afraid somehow that if she gave in to him she would be accepting this terrible thing.

  “They can’t make you.” She forced herself to speak quietly, whispering almost. “You’re deferred.”

  [105] “No, Rose, listen. I got the notice to go in for my physical last week. I didn’t see any point in telling you, not right away. You know, if it turned out I had a heart murmur or something, and they decided not to take me. But I got word today. One-A. I’m to report for Basic next week at Fort Dix.”

  A terrible white static rilled Rose’s head. Then, as if tuning into a nightmare broadcast of the six o’clock news, she saw Brian lying in a rice paddy, blood staining his fatigues, spreading in crimson circles over the scummy surface of the water. No. Oh dear God, no.

  She shut out the dreadful image.

  But she couldn’t shut off the cold seeping through her, as if her heart were pumping ice water instead of blood.

  And this was real, not just some awful daydream.

  Brian was going to Vietnam. To be shot at, maybe wounded or even killed.

  “NO!” Rose shot out of bed.

  “Rose—” Brian swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, holding his arms out to her, supplicating.

  But she wouldn’t go to him. Damn him. He probably wants this. Big fucking hero.

  “Canada,” she pleaded. “Remember Rory Walker? He went to Canada. Montreal, I think. Or maybe it was Toronto. You could go too. Start over. I’d come with you.”

  Brian let his arms fall limp at his sides. His shadow stretched across the woven grass mat she was standing on, reaching over her like a dark premonition of death. She was shivering, all out of control, feeling as if she’d come down with a high fever. And she felt a hot pressure behind her eyes, a hammering in her temples.

  “Rory’s in limbo,” he said quietly. “He can’t come back, not even to visit his family. He’d be arrested.”

  “There are other ways. Conscientious objector.”

  “Rose, you know Pop. It would kill him. He made the landing at Anzio, fought all the way up to the Alps. My grandfather served in World War I, wounded in Verdun. I remember Grandpa had this velvet box tucked in the back of his top dresser drawer.” Brian’s voice turned soft. “He never showed me what was in it until one day, when I was maybe eleven, he caught me and Kirk playing soldiers in the vacant lot behind his store. Then he took us inside, [106] and showed us. His Bronze Star. He said maybe we were old enough now to understand what it meant. To him, anyway. He said people who thought war was all about being a hero and getting medals had bed ticking for brains. Fighting, he said, was real bad, but something that had to be done, like putting out a fire before it got out of control. Nothing to get puffed up about. You just did what had to be done.”

  “You’re not your grandfather,” Rose shot back desperately. “It’s a different war. No one even knows why we’re fighting it.”

  Brian raised his eyes, and she couldn’t help but see the light in them now, clear and shining. “Maybe not. But a lot of guys are being sent over anyway. Guys we both grew up with. Vic and Buddy and Gus Shaw. That means something. I’m not sure what. But one thing I do know is that if I duck out, it just means it’ll be someone else’s number they’ll pull. Someone else who maybe gets burned while I should’ve been there putting out the fire.” He paused. “I’ve thought a lot about it. Even before this. I didn’t tell you how guilty I felt about being deferred year after year because I knew it would upset you. But now ...”

  She thought of John Wayne in The Green Berets. A lot of talk about honor and duty, but the reality was, his guys really loved shooting off their guns. But Brian? No, he meant every word. God, she should have known.

  A memory crept in, one she had totally forgotten. Fifth grade, Brian coming out of school, the back of his hands red and puffy, striped with welts. Brother Joseph had given him half a dozen whacks with a ruler.

  “Why, Brian?” she’d asked, as shocked and hurt as if she’d been struck as well. “What did you do to make him hit you?”

  “Nothing,” he’d said with a shrug. Oh, how nonchalant he’d been! “It was Dooley. He broke a window in the rectory. It was an accident, but he’s up to his eyeballs in hot water with Brother Joseph already. He would’ve gotten ten times as many.”

  Oh, Brian. I would go in your place if I could, Rose thought. Because if anything happens to you, I’ll die too.

  Rose sank down, the woven jute cutting into her knees. The cramp in her belly was worse. She felt bruised all over, as if she’d been beaten up.

  How foolish she’d been, worrying that God would take Brian away from her.

  [107] No, this
was Brian’s own doing. He was choosing this as surely as if he’d gone down to the recruiting center and enlisted.

  He was leaving her.

  Anger erupted in her. Rose sprang to her feet, and grabbed the first thing before her—a jar full of pennies sitting atop the dresser. She hurled it against the wall. A jingling crash. Pennies sprayed everywhere, spanging off the furniture, rolling along the floor.

  “YOU SONOFABITCH! IF YOU GET YOURSELF KILLED OVER THERE I’LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU!”

  Something was burning her eyes, her face. Tears like acid, scalding, wounding.

  “I don’t care who goes in your place!” she sobbed. “I don’t care who gets killed. I only care about you. Oh God. My stomach. It hurts. I hate you. Bri. Do you hear me. I hate you for doing this.”

  Then his arms were around her, holding her, keeping her from flying apart. Grounding her. Warming her.

  Mother of God, what was she saying? Of course he wouldn’t die. Of course. She clutched him, weeping.

  “Don’t cry, Rose.” His voice was shaking, and she felt something wet against her neck. Tears. Brian’s tears. “I know a year is a long time, and I’ll miss you. Christ, I miss you so much already it hurts. But I’ll be okay. I promise.”

  Rose clung to him harder, feeling as if her heart had been torn out, just this great aching hole in her chest.

  How am I going to bear it? she wondered. The waiting. From one letter to the next. Not knowing if he’s all right. If he’s wounded, or worse, if he’s—

  She drew away from him, lifting her face to meet his fine gray eyes. The exquisite pain of her love cutting through her like glass.

  “Don’t promise, Brian. Promises get broken. Just come back. That’s all. Just come back to me.”

  Chapter 4

  “Dr. Mitchell. ER. Stat. Dr. Mitchell ...”

  Rachel hurried along Five West, through the swinging steel doors that led to the Labor and Delivery Ward. She glanced up at the clock above the glass-enclosed nurses’ station. Six-thirty-five. Late for morning rounds. Damn. That’s all she needed today, of all days.

  She felt groggy, sluggish, despite two cups of coffee on an empty stomach, and the frantic dash from her apartment in the icy rain. But at the thought of seeing David any moment now, her heart began to pound, and her hand slipped into the front pocket of her white doctor’s coat.

  She fingered the slip of paper.

  Rachel could see it in her mind, the sheet of pink flimsy from the lab, with its faint carbon type: PREGNANCY, POSITIVE.

  Even now, twelve hours old, those words seemed to burn her fingers, and send her head reeling.

  Okay, God, Destiny, whoever you are you’ve had your laugh. Now what?

  She had stayed up most of last night asking herself that, and now was no closer to an answer. All her life Mama had told her things looked better in the morning, but this morning Rachel thought they just might look worse.

  Grace Bishop, she realized, was giving her the eye, and she felt like she’d been caught chewing gum in the first grade. Grace had been head nurse on L and D probably back before Rachel was born, and took flak from no one. She was planted squarely in the corridor outside the nurses’ station, arms folded across a bosom the size of a janitor’s drum. She unfolded her arms to glance pointedly at the industrial-size wristwatch strapped to her coffee-colored wrist. Each [109] movement radiating her disapproval of every female intern who’d ever walked onto her floor.

  Rachel, the youngest by far at twenty-five—having graduated high school a year ahead of her classmates, and crammed eight years of college and med school into seven—felt even younger, a child late for kindergarten with the teacher looming over her.

  “Rounds have already started,” she said with her clipped Jamaican accent. “You’d best get a move on.”

  Rachel gave her a stiff nod, and thought with bitter amusement of that “Laugh-in” gag, Dan Rowan getting slapped and saying, “Thanks, I needed that.”

  Rachel then looked at herself through Grace’s eyes. The same rumpled khakis she’d had on yesterday, a coffee stain on the lapel of her white coat. Her hair caught back in a frazzled braid, her face—under the merciless high noon of the fluorescent ceiling lights—ghastly pale and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep.

  For once, she couldn’t blame Grace for looking askance. Suddenly the old semi-hysterical urge to giggle crept into her, along with the absurd impulse to say to Grace, Don’t worry, I’m qualified, all right. Who better to treat a woman in labor than a pregnant doctor?

  But no time to lose her cool now. She broke into a half-trot down the long green corridor toward Ward One, her heartbeat seeming to keep time with the slapping of her Adidas shoes on the linoleum tiles, while she imagined herself breaking the news to David.

  Sorry I’m late. ... She pulls him aside and then whispers, And by the way, I’m pregnant.

  No, not quite. Maybe okay for “Laugh-in.” But not for real life.

  David, I know it’s not what we planned ... but we’ll make it work somehow. ...

  Hadn’t she seen that in a movie? Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. Fade into sunset with couple tenderly embracing. Darling, I love you, and that’s all that matters.

  “Crap,” she swore under her breath, stepping out of the way as a gurney pushed by a harried orderly careened past, and at the same time berating herself for the tears that pricked behind her eyes.

  Grow up, why don’t you? He never promised you a damn thing, and [110] now you want it all. Valentines and violins, a box of cigars, plus the handsome doctor vowing to do the Right Thing by the girl he loves.

  Except who’s to say what the Right Thing is these days? A hundred years ago, even ten, a hasty shotgun wedding. Now there were choices. Options.

  You could have an abortion.

  Rachel tried to imagine the lump inside her that was their baby, no bigger than the head of a pin, and her vision blurred with tears. She half-stumbled, catching herself against the wall with its fat red arrow pointing the way to Radiology.

  It was so ironic. She’d always spoken out for abortion. She’d argued fiercely that it deserved to be as basic a right as female suffrage. And she’d been for zero population growth, too. But, dammit, this wasn’t just a rise on a population graph, this was a life growing inside her. A baby. Her baby.

  The idea of having it scraped out of her, flushed away in some toilet bowl, drove a bolt of pain through her stomach.

  And yet, what was the alternative? Have the baby, and put aside everything she’d worked so hard for?

  The years of med school, feeling as if her brain were being squeezed in a vise. The formaldehyde stink that wouldn’t wash off, her sleep haunted by nightmares of half-dissected corpses coming back to life.

  And yet she’d also loved it. Schwartz Lecture Hall, with its purple seats and permanent sweaty odor, the droning pathology professor who invariably put her to sleep, Dr. Duberman with his endless hematology quizzes. And then her third-year clerkship, working with real patients, people needing her, real people, feeling for the first time what it was to be a healer.

  And now she’d come this far, halfway through her internship.

  Rachel remembered coming here for her interview. The long subway ride, almost an hour, into the heart of Brooklyn, mostly black and brown faces crammed in beside her. Coming out onto Flatbush Avenue, with its run-down stores and weary-looking people, then six blocks over cracked and dirty sidewalk to this nondescript building, fourteen stories of sooty gray stone and wire-mesh safety glass. Except for the fact that there was no fence surrounding it, it looked like a prison, hardly a place where people came to get [111] well. But come here they did, she soon learned, in droves, Barbadians, Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, blacks, people with no insurance and no money, who needed medical care desperately.

  Which was why she’d chosen Good Shepherd, despite her father’s badgering that she go to Presbyterian or Mount Sinai. And she loved it here. If they accepted her, she wanted to stay o
n for the OB residency. And now she was almost there, two more months, her ER rotation, and she’d be finished with her internship. So how could she possibly leave, give all that up? She couldn’t.

  Turning right at the far end of the corridor, Rachel spotted a huddle of figures in white lab coats outside Ward One. Faces still puffy with sleep, sipping coffee from paper cups. Others, those who had been on call through the night, drooping with exhaustion, their eyes bright and glassy. Under the fluorescent glare, they all looked cadaver gray.

  But no sign of David yet, thank God. He fumed when anyone came late for rounds. And he didn’t pull any punches when it came to her, either. They had agreed in the beginning, there couldn’t be any special favors.

  Joe Israel greeted her with a yawn. “You missed all the excitement. Twins. Lady just walked in off the street at ten centimeters and dropped them like a litter of pups.”

  Rachel looked up at Israel, tall, achingly thin, an acne-scarred face that reminded her of a pool hall dart board. She liked Israel, but a litter of pups? Jesus.

  Janet Needham gave him a withering look. “Have you ever thought about switching to veterinary medicine, Israel?”

  Janet was the only other female intern. Rachel had tried to like her. But it was hard. Janet didn’t like herself. Overweight, her greasy brown hair pulled back with a rubber band, she wore a perpetual scowl, suspicious of anyone who made a friendly overture.

  Israel grinned at Janet, raising his coffee cup. “If I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Cool it, you two,” hissed Pink. His real name was Walter Pinkham. Rachel counted five pens clipped to the breast pocket of his white coat today. He was the only intern she knew who carried a briefcase.

  Then Rachel caught sight of David striding toward them. He [112] looked so tall in his spotless white coat, glowing with purpose, stirring the air, prompting the sleepy interns to straighten their shoulders a little, stand taller themselves.

  Her heart began to pound. Dear God, how did he have this effect on her? Sweaty palms, adrenaline surges, the whole bit. Years of believing she was frigid, and she was afraid now it might be just the opposite. Acute nymphomania.