The Garden of Blue Roses

by Michael Barsa

  "They would have had a book at the store for him to use," Klara said.

  "But the bookstore said he was going to read something new. Something about a sequel to A Portrait of the Artist?"

  Everyone paused. His logic was impeccable. Only he didn't follow up. Not after Klara's eyes filled again with tears. "Sorry," he went on. "Just tying up loose ends. I suppose they're not that relevant anyway."

  "I keep replaying that evening over and over in my mind," she said. "I wish I could be more helpful."

  She got to her feet. They shook hands. "I'm sorry for your loss," the detective said. "I should've said that right away."

  "Is there anything else we can tell you?" Klara asked.

  "Unfortunately I've seen this too many times. Alcohol and bad weather. A terrible combination."

  "I guess we're all left wondering why," Klara said.

  The detective put a hand on her shoulder, a hairy hand with fat fingers like spider's legs, while I stared at him and didn't say a thing, too busy thinking about my own nagging why—why Father would have driven to a reading of his sequel with nothing whatsoever to read.

  But these questions, like the shock itself, soon receded into the past, becoming like the old velvet wallpaper above the dining room's wainscoting: muted and dulled. The police report arrived with the verdict "accident." Then the insurance company called about the car. I overheard Klara say that we weren't interested in it, that they should sell it for scrap.

  And then? Silence. Blissful, fragile, rural silence. The snow melted; trees sprouted leaves. Life seemed to become less complicated, with only occasional letters or visits from Father's fans. Every now and then Klara still became distraught, and the attic tantalized me, but we began to focus on other things, doing crossword puzzles on the patio and taking long walks in town. For the first time we really talked, now that it was quiet enough to hear our own voices. We talked about little things: the weather, the pattern on Klara's favorite china. Over meals Klara would read the newspaper aloud, grim articles about suicide bombers or deadly typhoons—news that insisted on its own importance and made our own tragedy seem small. She sent checks to every relief effort. This helped her feel better. I suppose it did the same for me.

  Still something wasn't right—something in the air, in those shifty misty mornings or the late afternoon sun that kept throwing strange geometries of light across our floors. Occasionally I'd come across Klara on the living room sofa with her head thrown back, eyes far-away, book sprawled beside her. "Are you alright?" I'd rush over to ask, and she'd shudder as if woken from a trance; she'd claim she was just thinking of polishing the napkin rings or donating Mother's clothes to charity. At night I heard footsteps. I thought they were hers; I couldn't be sure. They whispered through the hallway, the guest rooms, up and down the stairs and across the attic—roaming, restless, searching sounds. Searching for what? Every time I looked there was no one, only the house with its gaping darkness. I began checking on her, hovering over the bed where she slept: on her back, arms folded across her chest. I put an ear to her mouth, fingers to her wrist and neck, not trusting her stillness after seeing Mother and Father on those slabs. Only once did she wake up, shot up like a resuscitated drowning victim—she had that same dazed panic. "What are you doing, Milo?" she gasped, and I just gazed at her and replied: "Making sure you're still here."

  "Where else would I be?"

  I didn't respond. This was precisely what I wanted to know. Where else was her mind? Once I saw her drift onto the patio to gaze at the trees. She spent nearly an hour in silent contemplation. Then it was the driveway, where she ran a hand across the half-empty garage. Did she need more time? For tranquility to take firm root? I imagined how it would happen, sitting on her bed, Mozart on the stereo, a light and airy tune—how she'd hold me like she used to do when I was small, and I'd close my eyes and hear the music and her breathing and the sympathetic beating of my heart. "It's us against the world, just as it always should have been," she'd say, and that's how I'd know that nothing could ever hurt us or come between us again.

  When did I first realize that she was waiting too? Harboring her own dark and secret hope, not for us but for him? Knowing is a gradual process, an accretion of detail that snaps into insight when you least expect it. I think of a bright early morning in June when she didn't descend for breakfast at the usual time. I was in the study. I'd just finished the Trojan Horse. Normally I'd pause after a complicated model like that and spend a few days watching television or burning ants under magnifying glasses. But when I saw that it was nearly thirty minutes past the appointed hour, I must have become especially ill-at-ease. I immediately began a 1/72 replica of an ancient Greek trireme, a wooden model a little over 20 inches long, with three banks of oars and two collapsible sails and a thin bronze ram. I quickly erected its support skeleton and began attaching hull planks using a powerful glue. In the process I managed to smear glue across my fingertips. I didn't panic—I'd used oceans of the stuff over the years—only this time I couldn't get it off. I rubbed and rubbed. It was like rubbing a magic lamp. The glue turned black and viscous. It was just like car grease. No—it was car grease. What was happening?

  Suddenly I was lying on my back, the underbelly of the Volvo looming inches above. I reached up, one hand feeling for the brake wires—rubber casing, behind the shock absorbers—while the other held a pair of wire cutters with sand paper to stop them from slipping. "It wasn't an accident, Milo. My killer is right here."

  No. This wasn't a memory, wasn't real. It was a conjured past, a fiction. I staggered into the living room. Father's novels lined the shelves. There it was, Sleep Little Babe, about a witch who snatched children and greased their hands so they couldn't fight or turn doorknobs to escape. I saw their lonely eyes, their helplessness, their tears. "Mommy? Mommy?" Their bodies were found buried beneath the witch's basement floor. Their skeletons looked like they'd died in prayer. The only one who'd survived had used wire cutters to escape, gripping them with sand paper as he snapped a basement window's lock.

  I turned the book around to hide its spine. I heard the wind, clashing leaves. What could be keeping Klara? I raced back to the study and slammed the door. I tried to focus on the trireme, something historical and real, but Father used to say that if you could imagine it, it was real to you, so I closed my eyes and tried to bury my imagination, to shovel it over with great mounds of earth. Only I couldn't do it. The memories began cropping up like weeds, shoots everywhere, impervious to every poison, demanding life.

  I'll begin with Mother, a glittering chrysalis. I see her painted lips, sunglasses, thick bejeweled fingers smoothing over the blazer and tie she made me wear to school. This seems like such a small thing in retrospect. Yet at the time it defined my existence. Beginning in second grade, every boy used me as the target of spitballs and charley-horses and wedgies and something I don't wish to describe called a "purple nurple." I refused to go outside for recess or to ride the bus. The cafeteria was like a shooting gallery. By fifth grade I'd developed kidney stones because I no longer dared use the bathroom. Why not? I'll simply say that no matter how much it's cleaned, toilet water still tastes like every defecation to ever pass through its porcelain receptacle.

  I begged Mother to change my wardrobe to something flannel and denim—something that might fit in. She refused. She said no child of hers would dress like a lumberjack. No child of hers? You'd think she were European royalty. In truth she'd grown up on an Austrian commune, selling art on street corners and ingesting copious illegal drugs. She still put brush to canvas with hideous results, but most often spent her days driving around, trying to sell her "work"—sentimental landscapes and fruit and the like—or visiting people with their own artistic pretensions. One of them, a Roland something-or-other, made the big ugly vases she kept in the entrance hall. She visited this Roland often. It was obvious what was going on. She was always coming home with hideous ceramic presents.r />
  Every now and then she kept up the pretense of mothering by insisting we eat supper together. I've never understood this penchant for masticating as a social ritual. We don't make other bodily functions like defecation or nose blowing into elaborate occasions of forced togetherness. Mother would train her huge sunglasses on Klara and me and ask: "So how was your day? Did you enjoy school?" I'd mumble the most blatant lies, waiting for her to notice my bruises or soiled ties or the fact that I'd changed clothes. She never did.

  "Now where's your father?" she'd say instead, as if he ever joined us—as if we were anything to him but distractions from his work. One night she claimed she was taking him to a reading at some Elks Lodge in town. "You know he'll never find it on his own," she said. "Of course he just has to follow the crowds. Everyone loves his latest book."

  "They're stupid," I explained.

  "Dear boy," she laughed, sending her silver pelican earrings tinkling against their hoops. "Whatever will we do with you?"

  Klara looked miserable that night as she watched Mother slide on her fur coat and pucker into the mirror to check her lipstick. She was itching to leave as well—to leave me alone—something she'd started asking recently to do. "Can you drop me off at a diner?" she inquired. "It's on the way, and some friends are meeting for a soda."

  These friends were always having sodas. God knows what they were really up to. Klara had just started high school and had fallen in with the drama crowd. Even then she was easily influenced.

  Thankfully Mother ignored her, as she often did, just consulted her watch and primped her sprayed-stiff hair. "John!"

  Most of the time he didn't come down, even for a reading he'd promised to do. Somehow the public didn't mind. They seemed to enjoy the suspense. But on that night, to our surprise, we saw his shuffling legs descend the stairs—the legs of a tramp, little sticks floating inside loose soiled pants. Then came eyes like a newly released hostage's and wildly disheveled hair. "Go clean yourself right now or we'll be late," insisted Mother with not the slightest recognition that he might be ill or out-of-sorts. Perhaps she knew something we didn't. He mumbled that he was trying to write a more literary and less bloody book for a change, a memoir describing his childhood in one of the rougher sections of London. "Only I can't do it," he moaned. "I'm a bloody failure."

  "Don't be so self-aggrandizing," Mother responded as she pushed him back upstairs. "Not in front of the children."

  "Milo?"

  Why was he addressing me? I glanced around and spotted one of Klara's old hand-puppets in the alcove. I thought its dome-shaped eyes might replace missing hatch lids on a model U-Boat I was building. When assembling a model I thought of little else, just those pieces that by themselves are nothing, but together are sublime.

  "Milo, I'm really trying . . ."

  I pictured the U-Boat: periscope, conning tower, torpedo bay, ballast tanks, green-painted engine room.

  "Enough," said Mother. "Get yourself in the shower, John. You stink."

  "The words just die on the page," he said to no one in particular, to his pale hand sliding up the railing, "when they're only real."

  "Go!"

  Mother pushed him out of view. I didn't care. By then my mind was absorbed by images of the shiny pocket knife blade I'd use to extract those puppet's eyes.

  Klara was livid when she found the puppet with only threads dangling from its sockets. She couldn't prove I'd done it—not after I painted the hatches a triple-coat of grey—but it didn't matter. Mother was venturing out more and more, leaving Klara in charge, and her frustration was boiling over—frustration at staying home with me, at being mommy to little Milo, as I overheard one of her so-called "friends" at school say.

  "Milo? What did you do with Kermit?" Klara said breathlessly, holding up the frog.

  I was sitting in bed reading an illustrated history of trench warfare. "I didn't touch him."

  I hoped my terseness would make her realize the grave danger of indifference—what a double-edged sword it was. But she remained in the doorway, clenching her jaw and glaring. "Why do you make Father feel so bad?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You hate him. That's why he won't come down."

  I squinted at the gruesome depiction of the first Battle of Ypres—bodies twisted in the mud. "Is that what he told you?"

  "He didn't have to."

  "He doesn't come down because he doesn't care about us, Klara. He only cares about his writing."

  "You're wrong."

  "No, I'm not."

  She bashed Kermit into the wall and stormed off. But the next day, after school, she pulled out her conductor's baton—the one she used to conduct her stereo. She claimed I needed lessons in civility. I rolled my eyes. She whacked me across the forehead, then dragged me to the dining table. I was shocked; she'd never done that before, never dared hurt me. For a moment I wondered if Father was somehow making her do it, conducting her just as she was trying to conduct me. I wouldn't have been surprised—that was the sort of hold he had over her. Or perhaps the truth was more straightforward; perhaps this was how she'd answer my implicit charge of indifference, through the most cruel attention imaginable. I sat. Another whack. "Ladies first." This went on for nearly an hour, until I could hardly see. The following week she added lessons in grammar, Euclidean geometry, Earth Science—every conceivable subject, all enforced with the baton if I didn't get things right. Once I pissed the chair—I couldn't help it, she wouldn't allow me to get up—and she delivered such a vicious spanking that I almost fell over.

  "I'm telling Mother," I managed.

  She laughed. Over supper I showed Mother my bruises. She refused to look at them. "Your big sister only wants you to learn," she said, patting me on the head. Did she know what was happening? I suppose she did. She just couldn't face it. Those sunglasses were her way of dimming the world, keeping out not only light but darkness too. I could see the way her hands shook as she insisted on talking about school, the weather, politics—all the nonsense people use to stave off despair. Then she drove away, visiting friends who socialized at all hours. Klara watched her go before shutting me in my room. "I'm not tired!" I protested.

  "I don't care."

  I put an ear to the door. Sometimes in the evenings, when Mother was gone, I'd hear Klara sobbing, or talking listlessly on the phone, or calling Father's name. But on that night I heard nothing—the most frightening thing of all.

  Then one day something odd happened. Klara missed an algebra lesson. By then I felt like a pincushion or voodoo doll, every inch of me subjected to that cruel baton. So when she locked herself in her room after school and didn't come out, I felt a wave of bittersweet relief. Only at suppertime did she emerge, and only after Mother began shouting Germanic obscenities up the stairs. What a transformation! My recent tormenter descended with the plodding of a death-row inmate, the delicate skin around her eyes splotched and raw. Even Mother noticed. "Is something wrong?" she asked.

  Klara shook her head and sat. I put down my fork, imagining a day of cat fights or social ostracism or locker theft—hallmarks of my world, not hers. Despite everything I wanted to tell her I understood, that we were still more alike than she knew, but Mother was in one of her dominating moods again and I couldn't slip in a single word. "Well?" she insisted.

  Klara sighed. "I got a B on an English test."

  Was that all? Then I realized what it meant. She'd never gotten a B on anything, let alone an English test. "What was the test on?" Mother asked, but I already knew—I'd seen her reading it that morning, over breakfast. Jane Eyre. One of Father's favorites.

  "It wasn't fair," Klara protested. "It was all about the social influences on Charlotte Brontë. There was nothing about the story itself."

  The story that Father read to her every Christmas morning. It was his great present—his presence—and Klara loved it, perched on his la
p, entranced by his nasal drone. She could recite whole passages before she was six years old, causing Father to nod and half-close his eyes as if listening to his favorite Franz Liszt. He always said how smart and accomplished she was. So how would he react to news of this B? Would she tell him? I could see the struggle in her face, the determination never to disappoint him again. Would she waste any more time tormenting me or trying to impress her drama friends? Surely not, I thought, too caught up in this prospect of freedom to wonder how she'd spend her time instead.

  I was right, at least. That test saved me. Did it do the same for Klara? While other girls began wearing tight jeans to show off their adolescent curves, she developed a lifelong fondness for Shetland wool. She studied until all hours and won every prize—the mathematics prize, the literature prize, even the science bridge-building prize. She became editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper, where she published a column on obscure New England writers and artists who'd attended that school. She went to the state Spelling Bee, only missing the final round when she bungled the last two letters of "espiegle."

  Only later did I realize Klara was acting a role even then. This was her play at competence, maturity, worldliness—all the qualities she must have known she lacked. In reality she was just as scared as I was: scared and trapped. She might have been preparing herself for the wider world, but it was our own world that loomed over us always, a lost realm in the Vermont woods that Father oversaw, like any god worth his salt, from a terrible remove. Even in his absence he was everywhere—in the creaking floors, the grandfather clock, the footsteps and shadowy trees, in the books crowding the living room shelves and appearing, like not-so-subtle reminders, on end tables and our pillows before we lay down at night. Not just his own books but the ones he thought we ought to read—Dickens and Hawthorne and Charles Brockden Brown—books to mold our imaginations to some uncertain and terrifying end.