The Garden of Happy Endings

by Barbara O'Neal

  Elsa found herself restless and irritable on that rainy afternoon. The encounter with Joaquin made her realize that she really needed to make some decisions.

  To do that she had to either walk or cook. Since it was a rainy afternoon and she could not leave poor Charlie alone, she decided to cook.

  Not that there was much food in the house. In the crisper, she found a package of carrots and a couple of forgotten bags of sun-dried tomatoes. There were potatoes and onions, a box of chopped, frozen celery. Carrot soup, then. And bread. She looked for yeast and found there was none. She would have Tamsin bring some bread home.

  She called Alexa on her cellphone and said, “Bring Carlos to dinner.”

  “I’m kind of embarrassed,” Alexa said in a low voice. “How can I bring him there? It’s so … working class!”

  “Alexa,” Elsa replied with exasperation. “Don’t be so shallow. I’m cooking dinner, and your mother wants to spend time with you and your beloved. He’s Spanish and he will understand that. Bring him.”

  “Okay.”

  She texted Tamsin and left a message asking her to bring home two loaves of some hearty bread. Keeping an eye on Charlie, who was sleeping in the dining room after the trauma of his cut foot and trip to the vet, she turned her iPod to a meditative playlist that included flutes and some medieval chant and women singing in Latin.

  The first step was to scrub and peel the carrots, a big pile of them. Letting the music and the repetitive hand movements soothe her turbulent mood, she rolled her issues around the back of her mind.

  Until this morning, she hadn’t realized that she could lose her deep, long friendship with Joaquin if she stayed in Pueblo. When she had returned to the States after they broke up, they’d picked up their platonic relationship by phone, and it had evolved over the years into a rich braid of support for them both, encompassing their shared childhood, their devotion to spiritual matters, and their history as a couple. Joaquin had been witness to her life, as she had been witness to his.

  Or so she had believed. She sharpened a knife and began slicing carrots into wheels, carefully and methodically. But in fact, they had not witnessed each other’s transformation into spiritual leaders. She had not, until the blessing of the fields, seen him as priest. He had never seen her teach a sermon or lead a class.

  But the rest … the rest was real and true. She loved him deeply as a friend, as if he were a brother. Dispassionately, she remembered their love affair and the connection they had shared, but she did not want to re-create it.

  Nor did he. She understood that. It was only because he had so easily managed his bodily hungers until now that the surprise of his carnal desire for Elsa had startled and unsettled him.

  Far in the distance, thunder rumbled. Charlie lifted his head, but when it didn’t repeat, laid it back down again. The vet had given him a pain medication. Would it work to keep him calm during storms? She’d tried a couple of things over the years, but they only seemed to make him dopey and crazed, which was worse than terrified and sober.

  Just now, he snored deeply, and his paws twitched with dream running.

  The carrots finished, she pulled out a heavy pot and poured olive oil into the bottom, and let it begin to heat. She diced a big yellow onion, wincing at the strength of it, then scraped it from the cutting board into the pot. While they softened, she crushed three cloves of garlic, chopped them, and added them to the slowly heating onions. Two ribs of celery, roughly chopped, went into the pot, the leafy tops set aside. After another minute, she dropped the carrots in, too, and let all the vegetables gently warm and soften in the oil.

  A part of her did not want to leave. She had loved this time with her sister, with the gardens, with the boys and Deacon, and the daily contact with Joaquin. All of it had come together to provide her with rest and ease and love. Given a choice, she would have stayed a little longer, asked Unity to give her another couple of months, to the end of the summer at least, to give her relationship with Deacon a chance to grow, to harvest the garden, to see how the community solidified.

  Do what is yours to do.

  The edict had guided her through her studies, into the ministry, into her daily work. Even here, she had taken on the soup kitchen because it had given her an outlet to directly serve the community, as the garden did.

  But she was bored. She stirred carrots and celery and breathed in the heady scent with pleasure. As lovely as it was, it wasn’t enough. She needed much more.

  What was hers to do?

  Immediately she thought of the little church in Seattle, the cool dampness on winter mornings as she unlocked the doors and came into the sanctuary. The memory of it filled her, covered every inch of her mind and heart for a moment, and she closed her eyes, feeling transported.

  Under her care, the church had grown from a congregation of 70, most over the age of fifty, to a sturdy, artistic body of 250. They had created programs to attract young families and children and young people, and there were a number of GLBT members who felt at home in the liberal environment. The disenchanted came to them from a wide variety of backgrounds and religions, and they welcomed discussion, offered a spiritual home for the lost and needy and broken, without judgment.

  A piercing sense of longing burned just above her heart, and Elsa put a hand to it. “I miss it desperately,” she said aloud.

  What had she come to believe during this sabbatical? What did she believe now?

  In the back of her mind ran the Apostles’ Creed, the declaration of faith made by Catholics.

  I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried …

  The onions were completely translucent. Elsa added four quarts of chicken broth from paper cartons, and waited for the liquid to come to a boil. Outside, thunder rumbled again, a little bit closer, but Charlie still didn’t stir.

  When the soup reached a full, rolling boil, she turned down the heat, added a bay leaf, thyme, and coriander she found among her sister’s spices, and the celery tops.

  What did she believe in? One of the things that had startled her during this time was how deeply Catholicism ran through her blood. She had wanted to abandon it, reject it as it had rejected her, a mere woman, but she could not, not entirely. She still longed for the rosary and the rituals and the Blessed Mother and the rituals of praying to saints.

  Taking a sweater from the back of a chair, she went to the picture window and looked out into the street. Rain always made the street fill up, side to side, and now it was running almost as fast as a river. Her sister would not be foolish enough to drive into that mess. She was probably waiting it out somewhere.

  What did she believe in?

  She believed that humans were basically good, that they could be encouraged to better things. She believed that if each person found the work they were meant to do, the world would be a happy place. She believed in an action-based spirituality—it was fine and good to talk, but people needed food and community and medicine and help, and that meant other human beings had to step in and do the work.

  She believed in alleviating loneliness whenever possible, whether through kindness or listening or teaching people to talk to Spirit.

  Behind her, Charlie snored. Elsa smiled. She believed in dogs. And friendships and family.

  She also genuinely believed Joaquin had seen an angel. She could not deny there was something when she prayed and meditated. She absolutely believed in the warnings she got. If that was not Spirit, what could it be?

  There was something. Something, capital “S.”

  Behind her, Charlie jumped up and then yipped in pain when he landed on his wounded paw. “Oh, baby,” she cried, and rushed to his side. “Lie down. It’s okay.” She sat on the floor and let him put his head in her lap. She sang to him, thinking of Deacon and his three rescues, his gentleness with
the boys, his tireless attention to the garden.

  To her body, to her mouth, to her—

  She shivered in memory, touching her mouth as she thought of kissing him. What a surprise he was!

  And that was the other part of leaving, of course. Deacon. What would she do about Deacon, about the nascent connection growing there?

  Do what is yours to do.

  As she rubbed Charlie’s sides, she suddenly caught the scent of rotten apples.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  All afternoon, Joaquin could not be still for ten seconds. His belly burned with warning and discomfort, and not only from his tangled emotions. Something was afoot. Something cloudy and dark, blowing in from the river. He kept peering out the windows, looking for a sign, but nothing was there.

  Finally in the late afternoon, there was a break in the weather. The sun came out and heated up the air. Joaquin prepared himself, then took a bottle of holy water to the garden. He walked the perimeter, chanting a blessing, asking for protection for all involved and for the earth itself. Calvin, Mario, and Tiberius saw him, and they ran over to him, asking if they could help.

  “I could get my drum,” Mario said.

  “I got a rattle my mom made from a gourd,” Tiberius said.

  “That’s fine.”

  As they ran to get their instruments, Calvin pouted. “What about me?”

  Joaquin gave him a small bell. “Ring this.”

  “What’s a bell do?”

  “It’s another way to bring God into the garden, just like the holy water and our prayers.”

  “And the drum brings good spirits. Mario tole me that.”

  “How’s his grandpa doing?”

  “Grouchy!” Calvin said. “He say his head hurts.”

  “I bet it does.”

  Mario rushed back with a small hide drum. Joaquin led and the boys followed, drumming and ringing. It felt urgent to do this, and he wondered if they should have someone in the garden tonight. The meeting had gone well this afternoon, with two men stepping up to organize a volunteer watch group. One man was a cop, and he thought he could recruit some other members of the force to participate when they were off duty. The other man, who had lost a grandson to gang violence right in this neighborhood five years before, wanted to name the group for that lost boy.

  But nothing was in place yet.

  As if his ritual had called them, a cluster of gang boys walked by on the sidewalk. Joaquin straightened, and met their eyes directly. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  The leader of the trio smirked, but one of the others said, “Evening, Father.” His friend shot him a look over his shoulder, warning. Behind the trio trotted another young man, wearing a blue hoodie. A rose tattoo marked his face, and Joaquin remembered seeing him around a lot lately, often with a cat. He hurried after the others now, a little too fat to be quick.

  Joaquin returned his attention to his task. Eventually, the garden would either create new unity and peace in the neighborhood or it would fall to ruin. If it was the latter, he believed that the spirits of those who had planted their hopes here would fall into darker despair than they had known before. He gave particular ferocity to his prayer.

  When he had finished, the boys ran off. Joaquin saw Deacon’s truck pull up at the far end of the block, and although he knew he should speak with him about the sense of trouble he was feeling, he simply could not face his friend. Not yet, not with the fresh hell of imagining Elsa with him so new a wound.

  Instead, he took his thorny jealousy into prayer. He and Santiago the cat wandered into the courtyard and sat on a bench. A few birds were still twittering here and there, and a wave of cool air washed upward from the grass. San Roque stood over the square with a benevolent and patient expression. The air smelled of roses.

  Someone was busy in the basement of the church, a youth group, he thought, and their laughter echoed into the evening every so often.

  Dear Father in Heaven, he prayed, I am a lost sheep instead of the shepherd I should be. I am riddled with doubts and sorrows and regrets. I am tortured by hungers I thought I had forgotten. Please help me. Lead me. Show me the way.

  It came to him that if he was so miserable as a priest, he could simply walk away. It was done all the time. He could refuse the call, leave behind his flock, and pursue a different life. That was, after all, what Elsa was doing. She questioned her call.

  And now she had taken a lover. The knowledge burned a hole right in the middle of his gut. She had done everything he struggled with, and God had not spit her out, had He? She had even turned her back on the Church, taken up another faith, and she still had not been smitten.

  He bowed his head. “Oh, God, I am only a man. I am lost. Help me.”

  But no angel came to anoint him in his very human struggle. No light filled the courtyard. His cat wound around his feet and birds sang in the treetops and Joaquin came as close to despair as he ever had. That, too, would be a sin.

  At last he picked himself up and let the cat into the rectory. The nave was quiet, though candles burned in two stations, before the Blessed Mother, clothed in her Virgin of Guadalupe mode, before St. Francis.

  He knelt in supplication before the crucified Christ. The room was still and holy, filled with the love and hungers of the parishioners who had brought their souls and hearts here to worship over the years. He could sense their spirits now, the prayers they had whispered. He knew a hundred prayers, a thousand perhaps, and he sorted through them to think what would most serve him.

  Through the centuries monks and priests had faced their mortal selves to rise above them.

  “Dear Jesus,” he prayed aloud, “in the Sacrament of the Altar, be forever thanked and praised. Love, worthy of all celestial and terrestrial love! Who, out of infinite love for me, ungrateful sinner, didst assume our human nature, didst shed Thy most Precious Blood in the cruel scourging, and didst expire on a shameful Cross for our eternal welfare! Now illumined with lively faith, with the outpouring of my whole soul and the fervor of my heart, I humbly beseech Thee, through the infinite merits of Thy painful sufferings, give me strength and courage to destroy every evil passion which sways my heart, to bless Thee by the exact fulfillment of my duties, supremely to hate all sin, and thus to become a Saint.”

  When he finished, he was overcome with a staggering exhaustion, one so vast that he nearly could not stand. He managed to make his way to his bed, where he fell, fully clothed, into a profoundly deep sleep.

  When the rain stopped, Elsa opened the door to the cool breezes, letting them blow away the cloud of rotten apple that followed her around.

  She had begun to set the table when the first crack of thunder shot through the heavens. The storm was circling back from Kansas, where it had spawned a dozen tornadoes. This time, the lightning was not distant. It boomed and cracked right at the tops of the trees.

  Charlie leapt to his feet and made a howling noise, lifting his paw up to protect it. Elsa made a dash toward him, but as she reached for him, a bolt of lightning struck so close that the resulting thunder sounded like the gods had taken an ax to the roof. Elsa felt his fur beneath the tips of her fingers before he bolted—straight out the screen door into the rain.

  Elsa bolted right after him. “Charlie!” she cried. “Come here, baby!”

  He ran at full speed, even favoring his paw. She could barely keep him in sight through the rain. All around them, lethal flashes of lightning slammed into the earth, knocking down trees and power lines. “Charlie, baby, stop!” she cried. “Come here, sweetie.”

  Charlie, out of his mind with terror and drugs, ran. So fast, so far, she couldn’t see him, couldn’t catch him. She was soaked, her clothes dragging at her, her hair dripping in her face, and her breath coming in raggedy gasps. Still she kept going, running the route they usually walked, circling, looking into gardens.

  “Don’t let him get hit by a car,” she prayed, starting to weep in fear. “Don’t let him get hit by lightning. Keep him s
afe, keep him safe, keep him safe.”

  The storm moved so fast that in ten minutes the lightning was in another part of town and the rain had slowed to a drizzle. Gasping for breath, freezing, soaked, Elsa made it to the garden by the church, sure she would find him there. “Charlie!” she called. “Charlie! Come back, baby!”

  She whistled, and jogged up the center aisle, unable to see much in the gloom. The ground was sloppy with mud and she was starting to shiver with cold.

  When she first saw Paris, she was so focused on her fear over Charlie that it took a long moment to make sense of the scene. It looked most like a fabled beast of some kind, a multi-limbed beast.

  Then Paris screamed. Elsa spied her on the ground, in the midst of a trio of gangbangers. Her legs and arms pumped as she tried to escape and she cried out again. She slipped out of their grasp, but was immediately hauled back, and Elsa saw her shirt being stripped away.

  “Stop!” Elsa cried, and ran toward them. She picked up a rock and aimed it at the boys’ heads. She threw it with as much force as she could muster, and it slammed into the shoulder blades of one of them, hard enough to make him stagger sideways. He turned with a roar of fury. Elsa saw that it was the leader, Porfie, with his long eyelashes. She thought, for one hopeful second, that he would run. Instead, he said, “Get that bitch, too.”

  Time slowed, one frozen frame to the next. Elsa saw Paris, smeared with mud and fighting the hands grappling with her slippery arms, scramble to her knees and yank herself free of the boy holding her. Porfie reached out like some kind of supernatural being and snatched her by the hair, hauling her back down. He hit her, and she went still.

  Elsa thought of Kiki, still alive, fighting. Instead of running away to find help, she ran hard for Porfie and leapt on him, yelling at the top of her lungs, “Leave her alone! Leave her alone! Leave her alone!”

  He reared, trying to reverse positions with her, but Elsa had an arm around his neck, a hand locked in his hair, and he couldn’t quite grab her.

  “Get this bitch off me!”