“Mostly that it’s a bad thing. Except Earl and William. They like it.”
“Earl likes it?”
Something swirling and dark flickered between them before it disappeared, but Misty could taste rage in her mouth, bitter as coffee grounds.
“I don’t like it, though,” Misty said. “It scares me sometimes. I keep thinking—”
“What?”
“It’s stupid.”
“No,” the garden said. “Your thoughts are important.”
Misty smiled. “Well, it’s stupid because it won’t happen. But sometimes I still think that the statue might move. Just start walking or talking. I don’t want to know what it might say.” Misty shivered.
The garden filled her with warm sunshine on bare earth, the way the heat crept down into the shadowy parts, the places that hadn’t known warmth for a long, long time. It said, “No more scary thoughts. Night is a bad time for those.”
“I like it out here at night, though. It’s so quiet.”
“I’m scared of night,” the garden said. “Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between dark and gone.”
Misty conjured the feeling of her favorite sweater, the one her mother had bought brand new for her from a store, not secondhand. It was so soft inside and out that Misty had almost worn a hole in the sleeve just from rubbing it between her fingers.
“I like that,” the garden said. “Soft and warm. You’re a sweet girl.”
Misty smiled. “I should get back inside now.”
“Will you come back sometime? And talk to me?”
Misty curled her knees to her chest. The garden seemed nice. It hadn’t filled her full of sadness and hurt the way she thought it might. It did seem lonely and it did seem hurt, but not so much that it scared her. And its voice was the first of its kind she’d ever heard inside her head, the first voice she didn’t have to struggle to translate or worry so much about sending the wrong message. It was what she imagined it would be like if she could talk to her mother or to Penny. So easy and quick. So comfortable.
“I could come back,” Misty said, “if we figured out your name.”
The garden was quiet for so long that Misty thought she might have lost touch with it. Then the voice returned, softly. “You could do that?”
“I don’t know,” Misty said. “I’ve never done it before, but I could try.”
“And I could help. Somehow. I know all kinds of things about names and speaking.”
“Sure.”
“And you’ll come back? Like a friend?”
“Yeah,” Misty said. “Like a friend.”
The sunlight feeling returned, heating Misty’s shoulders and cheeks as though she was sitting outside in the middle of the day, not the middle of the night.
“You should hurry,” the garden said. “He’s stirring.”
A board creaked nearby. Misty whipped her head toward Earl’s trailer. A shadow moved on the wall, followed by a deep, wet cough.
“Go,” the garden said. “Quick, quick.”
Misty had barely ducked around the corner of the trailer before Earl stepped into his doorway. He wore a dark shirt and a pair of weathered work pants. He braced his arms on either side of the door as he slid down until he was sitting with his legs splayed on the porch. He drifted a little to the side like he was still half-asleep.
Hatred boiled inside Misty’s chest at the sight of him. It heated her limbs until she clenched her hands into fists. The feeling surprised her. It came on so sudden and so strong, and it faded almost as quickly. Like the feeling had never been hers at all.
Misty looked at the garden. She couldn’t blame it for hating Earl after the way he’d worked the earth, all those years of emptying and tilling and breaking. It would be hard to forget something like that, and even harder to forgive.
But maybe Misty could help the garden, and it could help her. Maybe it knew a way for Misty to speak to her family. Maybe everything would be okay.
Eleven
Back in her room, Misty sat on the edge of her bed listening to the sound of Penny’s snores. Any fear or worry from kissing the green glass man must have worn off because Penny was splayed on her back with her limbs sprawled across the bed like she had fallen there from a great height. Misty wanted to shake her awake and tell her about the garden. Penny was always the person Misty told when she had a strange dream or lost a tooth, Penny the most likely to tell Misty to go away but the least likely to follow through on it. Penny who listened even when she seemed like she wasn’t.
But Misty couldn’t tell her sister anything.
She had no way to prove that it was true. Penny couldn’t talk to the garden like Misty could. And even if Misty tried to tell her about names and about talking to the world, Penny would say she was making it up and that it was ugly to lie.
Speaking to the world felt special, but it wouldn’t look very special to anyone else. It would look like sitting, like waiting. It would look quiet and there was nothing special about quiet, not to people like Penny who were always saying something, always moving, always seeking. If Misty was ever going to share her gift with her family, she’d have to show them firsthand. She had to learn how to talk to them.
Misty curled onto her side and reached out to the trailer. She could speak to the doors and the windows and even the linoleum in the kitchen if she wanted, but she could speak to the trailer, too, the whole that all the little parts made. The trailer’s voice was warm and familiar, if a little nervous. Its name a blurred tally of all the things inside it, including everyone who had ever lived there, scented with honey and woodsmoke and bathed in the golden light of one Easter morning many years before Misty was born. The trailer was a thunder of footsteps across its floors and a thousand nails piercing its sides to hang pictures of different faces; the slam of a door closing behind someone who had called the trailer home for the last time.
And when Misty asked the trailer to show her something nice, the trailer obliged, and countless images flooded behind her eyes. Her toes grew cold when the trailer remembered winter, and her cheeks were warmed by the light of a sunrise she’d never seen as the trailer strung together a whole whirl of memories.
Once the trailer had sat on a high hill with a sycamore tree growing just outside the kitchen window. The morning light that fell through was dappled and dancing. It shivered and shook over the floor, and it looked like glitter falling through the air. Misty saw families that she had never met. A little girl taking her first steps in the same spot where Penny had lain watching television. A mother that wasn’t Misty’s making breakfast in their kitchen, humming a song under her breath that Misty had never heard. Earl was there, too, though much younger. He was pointing through the open front door with a hammer in his hand, and a woman was behind him. She was thin and small with long brown hair and a bruise on her arm in the shape of someone else’s hand. It was the same woman that the garden had shown her earlier, the woman who was gone, gone, too. Earl laughed at something, but the woman just stared at the hammer. The trailer kept going, linking memories of everyone that had ever lived inside it, and because the trailer missed all of these people, the memories were tinged with longing, and Misty felt it all, and, filled to the brim, she fell asleep watching other people’s memories.
Twelve
Someone knocked on the front door with a heavy fist, a loud, banging knock that shook the glass in the windowpane.
Misty paused midstep in the hallway. Penny looked up from the television show she was watching, and their mother came from her bedroom with a needle in her hand, a long strand of white thread trailing beneath it like a comet’s tail.
They didn’t get many visitors and the people who visited—like the aunts or cousins—never knocked, so they all stared at the door as though it might open itself. The knock came again, gentler this time, as though apologizing for the noise it made
before. Finally, their mother dropped the needle on the kitchen counter and dusted her hands across her thighs, even though they weren’t damp or dirty. She opened the door an inch and frowned.
“Hello, Earl,” she said.
“Miz Combs,” Earl said. “I hope I ain’t interrupting nothing.”
“No, no. Just a regular day.” She eased the door open another few inches, and a beam of light landed on Penny’s upturned face. She scooted away from it, back into the shadows where she could watch without being watched. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“There may be,” Earl said. “I don’t want to frighten you or nothing. It could turn out to be nothing at all, but I told myself this morning that it was worth telling a mother and her children about just in case it turns out to be something. I know it’s what I would want somebody to do if I had little ones of my own.”
“Oh?”
“Have you seen or heard anything suspicious lately?” he asked.
Their mother glanced at the statue gleaming in the garden. “Like what?”
Misty took a few steps closer until she could see a sliver of Earl in the crack between the front door and its frame. His shadow landed on the carpet by her mother’s feet, and the shadow seemed too long, too thin to be his. Rage flared in Misty’s chest, sudden and warm. She curled her hand into a fist and felt the anger like an extra row of teeth inside her mouth just begging to clamp down. The feeling passed quickly, just like it had the night before, but it still left Misty a little unsettled.
“Well, for one,” Earl said, “I walked out on the porch last night and found a car idling on the road. I went up to ask them just who exactly they was, but they drove off before I could get to them. Same thing happened early this morning, except this one wasn’t coward enough to leave without saying hello. Claimed they was a friend just dropping by to see you.”
Misty’s mother shook her head. “No, we haven’t had any company.”
“I didn’t think so. I reckon people’s heard about what’s happened in the garden, and they’re coming to steal a look. But this is private property, and we don’t want them looking where they ain’t welcome.”
“The girls play by the road sometimes. If someone isn’t looking—”
“That’s right. It’s a danger. Don’t you worry, though. I’ll figure out a way to take care of them. I got a friend in the Sheriff’s Department who can help.”
Misty’s mother crossed her arms over her chest. “Is there anything else?”
“Well…” Earl paused. His shadow head turned to look behind him and his long shadow feet shifted. “There’ve been other things. Maybe you’ve heard it, too. A, uh, a buzzing. Like a phone ringing over and over, but it’s muffled. Like it’s hidden somewhere in the walls and you can’t ever pin it down no matter how close you get.”
Their mother shook her head. She looked at each of the girls in turn, and they each shook their heads, too. “No,” she said. “I don’t think we heard anything like that.”
“Nothing?” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Earl said, and Misty could hear the smile in his voice. “Not your doing. There’s just one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“The birds.”
“What birds?”
“Crows, mostly. But starlings, too. Blackbirds of all kinds. They’ve been gathering on my roof for the last two nights. Peeping in the windows. They keep tapping. Just tapping their beaks against the glass. And every time I go to chase them off, they’ve already gone. They must hear me coming. That’s the only way they’d make it out in time.”
“No birds here,” their mother said. “At least none like that.”
“No,” Earl said, “I thought not.” He was quiet for a moment and Misty’s mother stepped back to shut the door, but then his shadow turned toward her again. “Do you remember Ephesians 6:12?”
The muscles in their mother’s throat contracted as she swallowed. She glanced up at the space between the door and ceiling. The green light hovered there, bobbing up and down slowly. “‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…’”
“‘But against principalities,’” Earl said. “Against darkness. Would you remember me in your prayers tonight, Miz Combs?”
“I will,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Their mother waited until Earl made it all the way back to his trailer before she shut the door and locked it. For a moment, none of them moved. Then Penny turned off the television, sighed, and said, “I swear that man’s corn bread ain’t done in the middle.”
Misty laughed. Even their mother exhaled something that might have been laughter before she turned and walked back toward her room.
“I’m going to get some blankets,” she said, “and tack up these windows. Come help me, Penny. And you girls…” She paused and looked them both in the eye. “Don’t go wandering around the barn or Earl’s trailer when I ain’t around, you hear me? Corn bread or not, I don’t want you anywhere near that man.” Her eyes darted back to the space above the door, but the green light had moved again. It hovered on the ceiling above Misty’s head, shaking and trembling.
* * *
It was midday before Misty got a chance to go outside. Her mother left the front door open so she could hear Misty if she called, but Misty headed for the backyard instead. Earl nodded at her once as she rounded the corner of the trailer. He knelt by the garden with a hammer in his hand. The gray wooden boards from the barn lay on the grass near his knees mixed with other, newer boards whose golden color seemed somehow out of place.
Misty nodded back to him and headed for the woods behind her trailer. The garden hadn’t tried to speak to her all day, and Misty wondered if it was waiting for her to offer an invitation. As she walked between the trees, Misty let her fingers glide over the trunks she passed, and she could feel them waking at her touch, their names unfurling like a cat stretching its long back into the sun. Trees had some of the longest names that Misty had ever heard. The only name longer was that of the mountains themselves, which she’d heard only a handful of times in her life, and even then only in fragments. There was no way that she could hold the mountain’s full name in her memory. There wasn’t enough room in her body or her mind for all that the mountain had been. She could manage a few old sounds that tasted like snow, a few grating, grinding plates that shook the bones of her feet and rattled her teeth. And the mountains would stir a little before her, a great beast lifting its head from a long sleep, slowly opening a single eye to look at her—this strange, small thing with not nearly enough hair or enough bones to make it through this world alone—before it dropped back into its slumber for another thousand years.
Trees were nearly that old and complicated. Their names were doubled and tripled and twined. Their names joined the names of other trees seemingly at will, and they talked to one another all the time, about the air and the passing of the clouds and the people who lived around them. They had deep, gentle voices, and they liked talking to Misty, or at least they liked trying. They would humor her all day, starting at the beginning of their memories, from the very first seed that had ever fallen into the first patch of waiting soil, and up and up and up. Their names wound and twisted through blight and beast and storms so great that Misty’s shoulders quaked against the lash of the wind and water. The trees were old growth and new, their name the life of every tree that had ever withered before them so that they might have a chance to grow, and they boasted, often, of who was the oldest among them, though none of them ever agreed.
The trees filled Misty to the brim with wonder and a sense of unquestioned belonging. A rootedness so deep that she was surprised to find her legs could bend when she opened her eyes, surprised to know that she was a moving thing, a seed herself carried by strange winds.
If anything could help her figure o
ut how to find the garden’s name, it would be the trees.
When she was deep enough in the woods that she was sure she wouldn’t be noticed, Misty sat down on a pile of dried leaves and closed her eyes. The shadows were deep around her and it would be dark soon, so she tried to hurry as she conjured her name one moment at a time. She noted the changes—the fawn’s bloody hip appeared twice now, spliced with images of her dream of the green glass man, the trees knit dark above her, the sound of glass crunching close behind, Earl’s shadow on the floor of the living room and her mother’s throat contracting.
Misty was sweating by the time her name finished and her heart ached, too. This time her name didn’t include a single memory of her father.
She waited for the trees to come find her and listened to the chorus of their names mingled with the names of the birds in their nests and the bugs wriggling through the earth beneath her, each of them filling her with light and dark in equal measure. And then the still water feeling, the shifting on its surface like ripples in a pond.
“Hello,” the garden said. “I thought you might have forgotten me.”
“It’s just been a long day.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Misty said, but images flickered between them. A dark window in an empty house, the little lines of light etched across her favorite quilt when she hid beneath it, a pale green light quivering on the wall.
“I’ve felt that way before,” the garden said, and Misty felt grass growing all around her, but not on her, no trickle of water through her earth, nothing to shift, to change, nothing to keep her company. It was a dried and brittle feeling, like Misty would crumble between someone’s hands the moment they touched her.
“It’s lonely,” Misty said.
The garden curled around her shoulders like a coat on a cold day. “We can be lonely together. Little you, little me.”
Misty smiled. “I think I found somebody who could help us. The trees remember everything about the bottom. They have to remember you.”
Every Bone a Prayer Page 8