Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  “Oh—” Adele had looked around vaguely, as if her daughter might have been there just a moment before, as if she’d lost track of her for a second. “I think she’s out walking.”

  Conrad had stood and looked out the kitchen window, the streetlights coming on, blooming like Chinese chrysanthemums, colored aureoles wavering around them.

  “It’s getting kind of dark,” he said. “Maybe she went to the library? I could walk over there and meet her.”

  “Mmmm,” Adele had murmured. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

  And so Conrad had hung around, drifting into the front parlor, where John and James were bent over their homework. He had pulled a chair up to the table, looked over the boys’ shoulders, pointed out an error on James’s math paper.

  “Go mind your own business, bird boy,” James had said, annoyed. “Go kiss my sister or something.”

  Well, I would like to, but I don’t know where she is, Conrad had thought, standing, restlessly pacing the room before the long front windows.

  An hour had gone by. Two. The family sat down to supper, Conrad pushing the food around on his plate.

  “You growing a beard, Conrad?” John had asked him at one point, curious, and Conrad had been annoyed to be examined so closely. He felt hemmed in, under scrutiny.

  “Shouldn’t she be back by now?” he said at last, standing up and carrying his plate to the sink, lifting his arms while Adele tied an apron around his waist. “Where is she?”

  “Everyone’s entitled to get lost in their own thoughts sometimes, Conrad,” she said gently. “I’m sure she’s all right.”

  “But she’s always here,” Conrad objected.

  “Not always,” Adele said.

  And Conrad had stopped at the way she’d said that. He thought of the Sparkses’ home, so much larger and more comfortable than his parents’ apartment. With its warren of basement rooms and its lofty attic, its branching hallways and narrow back stairs, the house was a world unto itself, perfectly able to sustain, he supposed, an entire lifetime within its walls. It had never occurred to him that Rose might find it confining, because he had never experienced anything other than a sense of liberation, verging on recklessness, there.

  “I’m going up to the roof,” he announced when the dishes were done. He felt rebuked somehow, chastened.

  He climbed into the vestibule on the rooftop, opened the glass door, and stepped out under the stars. The white gravel glittered beneath his feet; the walls of Lemuel’s pigeon loft glowed in their clean finish of white paint. The sky was clear; a silver half-moon hung cocked over his shoulder, sharp and motionless. A cool breeze blew in over the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty’s uplifted white arm, and traveled across his face. Out over the water, the last of the Circle Line’s ferries for the night turned gently in its own thick gray wake to chug back toward the docks.

  Conrad walked to the edge of the roof, stared out over the dark street and the shadowy canyons of tarred rooftops. A few blocks away, he saw the orange glow of a fire, some building ablaze. A twisting column of bright, distant sparks rose in the air. The blue and yellow lights of the fire trucks revolved, spinning against walls. He could smell smoke.

  And suddenly he knew Rose wasn’t at the library, bent safely over a book in the deep hush of the reading room, her red coat spread out on the chair behind her, her fuzzy blue tam-o’-shanter resting on the floor at her feet by her book bag.

  She was out there, one among the numberless masses of people hurrying through the streets, past storefronts, the windows lit with a shallow brightness, a deep essential darkness behind them. He thought of the park, with its concentric circles of stones and dark shrubbery, of the damp and fragrant arboretum, where orchids with pursed, weighty lips hung from the crooks of trees lit from beneath by the round eyes of floodlights.

  He thought of the Marion Street Pigeon Exchange, the mumblers gathered in the back room under a bright light, making preparations for Saturday’s race, the sale birds asleep in the front window in their dark cages, their heads sunk into their breasts. He thought of all that darkness and all the people closeted away behind their locked doors, the night taking shape in the form of tall shadows that stepped out lightly behind passersby, overtaking them, racing across the walls on the long, impossible legs of insects.

  He looked over the city, its checkerboard of lights, the sprays of curving neon letters floating here and there in fantastic bouquets, the darting lines of cars’ headlights. The light and dark formed a chaotic pattern, but the dark was, in the end, so much greater, so much more potent. And then he knew that she was lost. No, no, not lost; he tried to correct himself. Not lost. Just—out of reach.

  He was back in the kitchen, his books spread out over the table, when she came home at last just after ten. He looked up when he heard the front door open and then close.

  “Lemuel,” he heard her call—she always called her parents by their first names—and then he lost her words as she passed into the front parlor, though he could still hear her tone, quick and excited.

  “Conrad!” she said a minute later, sticking her head around the kitchen door and looking in at him.

  Conrad affected a stretch. “Had a nice time?” he said, raising his eyebrows at her.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she advanced across the kitchen, bent over and kissed his cheek, put her arms around his neck. She smelled of the cold night air and something else, ashy and burnt. “I didn’t know you were coming home.”

  “Thought I’d surprise everybody,” he said, and then, despite himself, he extracted himself from her embrace and glanced at his watch, as if he’d been so engaged in his books that he’d lost track of time.

  Rose stepped back away from him, began to undo the scarf from around her neck, a giant knitted affair like a python, her own creation. “I saw the most amazing thing tonight, Connie,” she said, sitting down across from him and taking off her shoes, pulling up her knees to peel away her socks. Conrad watched the long fall of her hair slide over her cheek, a shining curtain of gold.

  “There was a fire over on Lawrence Street. People had to jump from the third-story windows. Two children. And one woman jumped with a baby in her arms.”

  Conrad affected a yawn.

  “I stayed to watch, the whole thing, till they had everybody out, everybody safe.”

  “That’s nice,” he offered finally.

  Rose glanced up at him, slowly tucked her hair behind her ear. She gave him a hard look. “The last one out,” she said carefully, “was a man. He was the one most afraid to jump. People were yelling up at him—‘Jump! Jump!’—but for the longest time he wouldn’t do it. He just kept standing there at the window, and every now and then he’d disappear for a moment, and then he’d be back again. You could see the flames in the room behind him.”

  “How exciting,” Conrad said, but before the words were out of his mouth he regretted them, regretted them enormously.

  Rose put her feet on the floor, looked away from Conrad. “He did jump finally,” she said at last, after a long silence. “And then his mother, I guess she was his mother, came through the crowd, calling his name, ‘Teddy! Oh Teddy!’”

  Conrad listened to her voice telling the story, heard the woman’s cry.

  “I was standing right at the edge, by the tape line the police had put up. And then I saw that he wasn’t so old after all. He was probably our age, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. And he was an idiot. A real idiot, I mean, retarded, with a blubbery face. That’s why he’d been so afraid. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand that they’d catch him.”

  A silence fell between them. Rose reached up, began to braid her hair behind her head, her fingers moving deftly, making a quick, nervous chain. Conrad looked down at his books.

  “I was just worried about you,” he said at last quietly. “I went up to the roof and looked out. I thought—I mean, I knew I wouldn’t—but I thought I’d see you, coming home, and—”

  Bu
t he didn’t finish. He didn’t even know what he’d thought. That he’d expected her to be there, waiting for him when he came back? That he’d seen, for the first time, how she lived a life apart from him? That he didn’t have enough faith to be able to stand it, the thought of her out in the world, away from him, her movements untraceable, unknowable? That he might have lost her? What had it been? All of those things, he knew. There didn’t seem any way to say all he felt, his shame and his relief, his fear and his gratitude.

  Rose was quiet a moment. “I couldn’t leave until they were all safe,” she said, looking away from him. She shrugged lightly. “Not that I could have done anything. No one could. The firemen couldn’t even get inside. But I had to see the end of it. I had to see it all the way through.”

  Conrad nodded. “I know—” he began.

  “I didn’t even know you were here,” she interrupted.

  He nodded again, felt her looking at him. He heard her sigh.

  “I would have been worried, too,” she said then. “You’d be surprised, maybe, how much I worry about you.”

  He looked up at her. She smiled at him, and he felt a rush of longing for her, imagined her gripping the yellow tape at the edge of the fire, her face upturned to the boy in the window, wishing it would all end well, wishing so hard that perhaps she had, just by wanting it so much, made that boy jump, made him step out into the smoky air, made his soft, weighty body slow as it sailed toward earth, made him believe he would be saved.

  HE PUT HIS head down on the steering wheel for a moment. There was nothing to be done here now. Toronto was right. What had he been thinking?

  But maybe there was someone left, he thought then, almost with relief. Maybe there was someone who hadn’t heard that the world could be a dangerous place, that it was filled with omens and warnings, flaming buildings and insidious disease and rising floodwaters. Maybe there was someone still asleep, still dreaming, in his bed.

  For a second he thought of his pigeons. But it was only a second, a moment that was more like a memory. He heard the buffeting sound their wings made, pulling up into the air above Lemuel’s rooftop. He saw them climb and then, having found the altitude they called home, steady their wings to proceed down the avenue of air between roof and cloud, land and sky, heaven and earth.

  Conrad turned the truck, drove away from the natatorium down the hill toward the low streets, toward the river, toward the place he knew he’d come to at last.

  Twelve

  CONRAD TURNED UP the heat in the truck. A blast of wet, hot air flooded his ankles, burned across his jaw. He turned down Forest Street and headed for the square, but as he neared the granite wall of the bank, he saw that the water was already too high in that direction. Through a dim gap between the buildings ahead, he could see water spread over the lawn in the center of the square—a lake where no lake ought to be, its surface writhing under the falling rain. The bandstand floated there like a strange dream-ship, its canvas curtains ballooning in the wind.

  He backed the truck up Forest to the Smile Market—its windows dark, its awning furled—and turned onto a side street, skirting the square and aiming for the residential part of town. Halfway down the block, through the disordering gusts of rain, he saw Lenore Wyatt hurrying toward her truck parked at the curb, the delivery boy, Burden, behind her with his arms full of boxes. Conrad saw Lenore recognize him, turn in astonishment to watch him drive past, Burden following her stare. Conrad made a gesture, a small, deliberate semaphore that said, It’s all right. I know what I’m doing, and then he drove on.

  Without lights anywhere, Laurel already looked strangely deserted. Here and there he passed people loading belongings into their cars, pulling away from their homes in steaming clouds of exhaust, glancing back through the rear window to see if they might have forgotten anything—a child or a dog left standing alone, abandoned.

  Water ran in streams down the sides of the streets, fountaining up at storm drains blocked with leaves and branches, but it was mostly draining off still, down toward the square and the river itself. Conrad gripped the wheel tightly, peered through the windshield. With only one good eye, he was finding it increasingly hard to see in such heavy rain; he seemed to be driving into a solid wall of water, or to be underwater already, the dark shapes of trees wavering above him like distant reflections floating on the surface. He had cracked open the window of the truck but closed it now against the steady, harsh sound of the storm beating all around him. The wet air bleeding through the truck’s vents smelled of things unearthed, and for a moment he was wildly claustrophobic, as if sodden leaves had been plastered over his nose and mouth.

  At the corner of Jackson Street, under the dripping leaves of a maple tree, he caught sight of a young woman. She was struggling, a suitcase in one arm, two small children clinging to her neck. She was trying to force open her car door, which was slightly ajar, with her knee, but the suitcase was slipping from her grasp. Two other small bags, tipped over near her feet, lay on the sidewalk. Conrad braked the truck and got out, drew in a sharp breath against the force of the rain and the sour scent of wet wood, torn bark. The children—one not a year old yet, he judged—were wailing. The woman, her hair soaked and slicked over her cheeks, was clearly frantic.

  He hurried toward them. “Please,” he said. “Do you need help?”

  The woman turned to him, her face surprised and alarmed. He supposed she had thought she was all alone, the last person left on the street. She hoisted the baby higher on her hip, stared at him a moment as if trying to weigh whether to trust him. “My mother,” she said then, but to Conrad her voice sounded indistinct, and he had to lean toward her, peering at her mouth. “She’s in the kitchen,” the woman said, putting her hand over the baby’s head. “In a wheelchair. Thank you.”

  Conrad looked toward the front door of the house. It stood partly open, the hallway behind it dark.

  “In there?” he said stupidly.

  “She’s in a wheelchair,” the woman repeated. “In the kitchen.”

  She dropped the suitcase and pulled the children roughly from her, forcing them into the front seat, though they tried to cling to her, tried to climb back out into her arms. “Sit down, Jared,” she said to the baby. “Sit down.”

  Conrad backed away, hurrying up the path.

  “To your left,” the woman called after him, her voice high and fierce. “Left off the hall. She can’t walk.”

  At the open door, Conrad paused a moment, then stepped over the sill onto a dirty tatter of carpet, which lay askew, crumpled at his feet.

  “Fisher?”

  He heard a thin voice. Through the gloom he took in the peeling wallpaper, a split of obscenely large, faded cabbage roses; behind the flowers the wall was papered in something older still, something yellowed with age—maps. Conrad stopped, drew near the paper, peered at it, and was startled to see a place he knew: the faded, concentric blue rings and ovals described the rising altitudes of the White Mountains, Mt. Abraham, his own Paradise Hill.

  “Fisher?” The tone rose, quavering, fearful, echoing through the house as if it were empty, as if it had been stripped already of its possessions.

  Conrad jumped. He stepped farther into the hall and saw a pile of boxes; clothes and books spilled out of them at the foot of the stairs.

  “I’m here,” he said into the darkness. “I’m coming.”

  He put his hand to the wall, jumped again when he saw his own image move across a round mirror, its surface a porthole, a well’s black eye. He stepped to the doorway on his left and looked into the room. A candle, guttering in its saucer, threw a low, flickering light.

  “Fisher?” The figure in the wheelchair turned suddenly at his entrance.

  Conrad cleared his throat, took off his cap. He looked at the woman, an old tam pulled down over her hair, a coat bunched up around her in the seat. Two broomstick legs, bedroom slippers over the misshapen feet, scraped the floor. He cleared his throat again, and the woman’s face registe
red alarm.

  “I’ve come to help you,” he said quickly then. “Your daughter—” He turned halfway and pointed to the door. “She asked me to help you.”

  “I’m waiting on Fisher,” the woman said, querulous and shrill. She twisted her hands in her lap. Conrad saw she wore a nightdress, pale blue and tied at her throat with two thin cords, beneath her coat. “I’ll wait,” she said, and suddenly her voice sounded clearer, firmer. “I’ll not go without him.”

  Conrad looked anxiously around him. Who was Fisher?

  The woman looked up at him. “You’ve seen him? He knows I’m here?”

  Conrad moved carefully then to stand beside her. He put his hands on the wheelchair, began to turn the chair slowly toward the doorway. The floor was sticky beneath his feet. A God’s eye, made by a child from fraying bits of yarn, twisted slowly in the window over the sink.

  “A tall man,” the woman said, craning her head around to look up at Conrad. “Fisher is a tall man. Black hair, black as a crow.”

  “Yes, I—” Conrad started, and then thought that it was best just to keep going, bearing the woman before him out of the house, into the rain, into the car, out of harm’s way. The dangerousness of his undertaking—racing against a river, a failing dam, the lake behind it—stuck suddenly in his throat; that, and the smell in the kitchen, something artificial and cloying, like spilled soap powder, or a tin of condensed milk opened long ago and left on a counter.

  The woman in the chair breathed deeply, a long sigh. “I said I’d wait on him,” she murmured. She leaned back against Conrad’s knuckles, and he felt a sharp sympathy for her, for the untidy head, the lifeless legs, this woman left alone to wait in her dark kitchen. At the front door he stopped, took off his coat, and spread it carefully, tentlike, over the woman’s head and shoulders, adjusting it so she could see. She sat quietly beneath his touch.

  “It’s raining very hard,” he said gently to her. “But there’s nothing to be frightened of.”