The Garden of Dead Dreams

by Quillen, Abby

  “You okay?”

  Etta’s gaze leapt to the voice. Carl was sawing at the quiche with his fork.

  “Sorry, did you say something?”

  He looked up, his face lit up by the tea candles. “Yeah, I was hopin’ to talk to you . . .” He dropped the fork with a clank onto the edge of his plate.

  “Is it that bad?”

  Carl blinked and glanced down at the quiche. “I reckon that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you prepared this fine dish.”

  Etta laughed, all at once feeling the wine buzzing through her empty stomach. She wrapped her fingers around the stem of the glass. “If it’s horrible, you should just tell me.”

  He grinned, his eyes pinching at the corners. “It’s delicious . . . ‘cept the crust might be a smidgen tough.”

  “A smidgen.” Etta laughed. “What exactly is a smidgen?”

  Carl frowned. “Ever tasted sheet rock?”

  Etta laughed so hard that it took her a minute to register that Olivia was at her side, crouching between her and Carl. Olivia gripped Etta’s arm. Her fingers were freezing, and Etta winced, automatically jerking away. Her glass teetered, and Carl’s hand shot across the table to settle it.

  “Liv, hi.”

  Olivia was hissing into her ear, but Etta couldn’t make out any words. She searched for Olivia’s eyes. They were wet, glossy. Had Olivia been crying? Etta glanced at Carl.

  “Are you okay?” The words sliced through whatever Olivia was whispering.

  Olivia looked over her shoulder, and then snapped her eyes back to Etta. “Please come. Now.”

  Etta glanced at Carl. “We were . . .”

  “We’re going to miss the play.”

  Her words were so sharp that Etta felt herself wince again. “Liv, I’m sure they’ll make an announcement.”

  Olivia stared at Carl. “Can my friend come with me to watch the play I wrote? Is that okay with you, or do you want to keep her in this corner all night?” Her words were icy.

  Carl set his wine glass down, his gaze shifting from Olivia to Etta and then down to his plate. “I was just leavin’. Got to go check on some things.” He slid off the bench and strolled past Olivia, leaving his plate and glass on the table.

  “Let’s go,” Olivia hissed. Etta let her roommate pull her to her feet. She gripped Olivia’s hand and followed her through the crowd and into the dark hallway that led to the dining room. She tried to seek out Carl in the fluttering shadows. But she only saw Jordan and Chase Quinn. Their gazes seemed to be following her down the hallway. Then Etta was sure Jordan had leapt to his feet and was following them. But it must have been her imagination, because Olivia and Etta’s footsteps were the only ones echoing in the darkness.

  Etta didn’t have to ask where they were going. She knew the hallway led to the theater, which was a relief, because something about the ragged way Olivia was breathing made Etta not want to ask any questions.

  Chapter Nine

  Smoke rolled out from beneath the blue velvet curtain and rose into the stage lights. Etta tried to pull her hand from Olivia’s. Her first instinct was to spin around and grab at the door handle. But then she inhaled the dusty smell of the theater. It didn’t smell like smoke. It must be a dry-ice machine. Etta’s feet and calves ached, and she was tempted to lean down and slip the high heels off. Instead she let Olivia pull her forward. Strands of Olivia’s hair had fallen from her hairdo, and they swung back and forth as she hurried down the narrow center aisle, her head flicking from one side of the room to the other. They had their pick of seats; the theater was empty.

  Buchanan had supposedly salvaged the seating from a theater in downtown Portland that had closed in the fifties, but they were in pristine condition. They were polished maple with spring cushions covered in royal blue velvet, and they had built-in ashtrays on the arm rests and brass fedora holders beneath.

  A door squeaked open, and a tumble of laughter vaulted into the theater. Etta turned to see who it was. “Pay attention” Olivia snapped, grabbing her hand. “Where will he sit?”

  Etta’s face filled with fire. Who, she almost asked, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Olivia looked so frantic, angry.

  “The first row.” Olivia’s fingers squeezed Etta’s palm. Etta tried to tug her hand away, but Olivia had a good grip. Olivia led Etta to the space between the front row and the stage.

  “We have to be able to see him.” Olivia’s head flew back and forth. Voices drifted in. The seats in the middle of the room started to fill up. “Etta,” Olivia snapped again.

  “What?” Etta snapped back this time.

  “Where’s he going to sit?”

  “Who? Who are you talking about?”

  “Olivia.” A deep voice came from the stage, and both Olivia and Etta spun around. The fake smoke swirled just in front of them. Winston Goss, the resident author directing the play, was standing over them, his legs hidden by the fog of dry ice. His torso seemed to float. “Oh thank goodness you’re early. I panicked when I realized I hadn’t saved you a front row seat.” He grinned, and Etta realized she’d perhaps never seen him smile. Winston was not unfriendly. He just usually seemed too consumed in thought to be genial. “I can’t wait for you to see what a marvelous script you’ve written. It’s just, it’s, you know . . . I think there’s too much smoke. You wouldn’t believe how much dry ice I had delivered.” He exhaled, wiping at his forehead. “I think I’m more nervous with this one than with my bigger productions, because it’s just so original, so unconventional. I hope you like what we’ve done with it.”

  Etta moved to the seat next to the narrow staircase leading to the stage. She slumped into the chair, only half listening to Olivia and Winston talk. A couple of people filed into the seats at the end of the row and others crowded into the row behind her. The play Etta had finally hammered out at the last minute for the contest was admittedly mediocre, perhaps worse than mediocre, but Winston had covered her pages with red ink. Her dialogue was forced. Her stage directions were too complicated. Her characters were unbelievable. On the last page, he’d written: “You should strive to entertain the audience, not firebomb them with your ideals.” It was only Etta’s first month at the academy, and it wasn’t as though she was a playwright or anything. It seemed to her that Winston had been a tad tough on her.

  The house lights dimmed, Etta lifted her gaze to the stage. Olivia’s face was flushed, her glossy eyes darting back and forth. She looked nervous. No, terrified. All at once, Etta wanted to hug her roommate. So what if Winston was ebullient with his praise for Olivia and thought Etta’s play was horrible? Olivia deserved it.

  From the stage, Winston scanned the room from behind his tiny wire-framed glasses and raised a hand. Olivia ambled to the seat next to Etta and dropped into it and then pushed herself forward and hovered on the edge, fixating on something across the aisle.

  “Welcome to the thirty-eighth annual fall equinox dramatic production at the Buchanan Academy. Tonight we celebrate the equinox.” Winston rose a hand, quieting the applause that followed. “A day where darkness and light are equal—a day of balance, of equity, of harmony. I can’t help but think of Vincent Buchanan’s deep reverence for this day, for the change of seasons, for creativity, for art. I was honored to teach here for several years when Vincent was here, and this night, like everything else here, is a reflection of him, of his belief in the extraordinary potential of young writers. The first time I came to the academy, to this lodge, to this small theater, he told me about this contest and insisted that the quality of the equinox play always surprised him. I was skeptical.” A few people in the room laughed. “I read plenty of plays, hundreds a year, and I can usually tell if the writer is an amateur in the first scene. But this year, wow, this year, I can truly say, I was . . . This one . . . I will let it speak for itself. Please give Olivia Saxon your applause. Stand up, Olivia. She deserves it and so much more.”

  The room explo
ded, whistles and shouts rising from the back. Olivia stood, her attention still on something on the other side of the aisle. Etta leaned forward to see what she was staring at, but the only people sitting across the aisle were Director Hardin, Major Mills, and Opal Waters. Olivia sat down as Winston disappeared into the smoke. The stage lights went out, the curtain rolled open, and blue light filled the stage.

  Etta was so transfixed by the performance that she forgot she was in the theater until Olivia’s elbow nudged her forearm. “Can you see him?”

  It was a climactic moment, and Etta didn’t want to pull her attention away from the stage. For the first time in more than an hour, she remembered that it was Reed on the stage, not Hans Gretelstein, his character.

  Hans was a troublemaker, a muckraker, a journalist who thrived on routing out scandals. The setting was obviously the academy, although it was never stated as such and there was far more blue smoke than Etta had ever seen at Roosevelt Lodge. But it was obvious: a college in the forest, a group of students draped across desks carrying on with pretentious, long-winded conversations that inevitably concluded with someone declaring that his own writing was magnificent. With each conversation, Etta felt laughter surging through her and rippling across the audience behind her, building on itself into something contagious and almost out of control. The character of “Poet,” much like Robert North, found a way to draw every conversation back to the artistic merits of his recently-published poetry collection.

  Hans Gretelstein divulged secrets about his classmates in his stories. At first they were small. He exposed a plagiarist. An affair. An accounting scandal in the administration building. But now he had written, “The Exposé,” which contained a secret so threatening to the academy that his classmates started plotting his demise. They would lead Hans out into the forest, deep into the trees, so far that he could never find his way back. That’s what they did, except Hans brought his scandalous stories with him and scattered the pages as they led him away. And then he followed his stories right back to the academy. His classmates led him out into the forest again, but this time all he had to scatter behind him was his poetry.

  “Can you see Hardin?” Olivia hissed.

  Etta glanced at Olivia, and then returned her gaze to the stage. Reed, or Hans, walked through the jagged paper-mache trees, his face pale in the blue light, smoke clouding around his waist. He looked scared, and he was far from the school now. His poems were confusing him, taking him down the wrong paths. “Poetry. Damn poetry. Nuances. Digressions. Pretensions. Meandering. Impossible to follow.” Hans slumped against a tree.

  “What’s he doing?” Olivia hissed. She was sitting on the edge of her seat, leaning forward, clutching onto one of the curling arm rests. “You can see him better. He’s on the far end.”

  Etta could just barely make out Hardin’s long legs stretched out in front of him. His face was hidden in the shadows. “I’m sure he likes it. It’s really great,” she whispered.

  “Does he look like he likes it?”

  “Truth . . .” Hans’ voice echoed through the theater. Hans had his exposé with him. He had brought it into the forest. Why hadn’t he scattered its pages instead of his poetry? Etta scowled at the back of Olivia’s head for distracting her from such an important moment. Hans fell to the ground, his face drawn, his eyes moist. Was he going to cry? He dug into the soil and set the exposé in a shallow grave, covering it with fistfuls of dirt. “You can bury me. But truth is immortal.”

  The royal blue curtain jerked shut, and for several seconds the theater was silent. Hans’—or Reed’s—gaze was so pained, so haunting in the moment just before the curtain closed that Etta squeezed her eyes shut. The house lights blinked on. The applause was deafening—whistles and hollers. Everyone seemed to stand at once, except for Etta. She pushed herself to the edge of her chair, but she couldn’t bring herself to her feet. She felt like the wind had been knocked from her. Did Hans die?

  The curtain jerked open, and the actors were standing in a long line, Reed in the center.

  Olivia stepped in front of Etta, blocking her view. Etta reached for Olivia’s arm, and Olivia spun around. Her eyes were watery, and her expression made Etta drop her hand.

  Olivia strode past Etta and climbed the steps onto the stage. She glided to the center and stood in front of the actors, who were now holding hands and bowing in synchrony, thrusting their hands into the air and swooping down, their knuckles almost grazing the stage. The applause intensified with Olivia’s presence. Someone shouted Olivia’s name. The actors came up from their bows and a couple of them dropped their hands. The applause began to die down.

  Olivia lifted her hand with a jerky motion and then dropped it. She stared at Director Hardin, and the director, standing now, stared back.

  A hole spread through Etta’s stomach as silence eased through the room.

  Etta heard a rustle and spun toward the staircase next to her. Robert North ascended the steps two at a time and made a beeline to the center of the stage. He stepped up beside Olivia. His beard had grown in—a swath of darkness creeping up his face. He put his hand on the small of Olivia’s back.

  Someone coughed behind Etta, and the sound echoed through the room, amplifying the silence.

  Robert North cleared his throat. “What a play,” he finally said. “Congratulations are due to Olivia. She has performed no easy feat. Someone once said that writers are either recluses or delinquents, or both. That’s no easy group to engage. So bravo. At the end of tonight’s festivities, don’t forget to travel back to the cabins in groups.”

  Robert stepped toward Olivia. But she stepped forward. “What did you think?” Her words sliced the air.

  The director’s voice wasn’t loud, but it catapulted through the silence. “I think I need a smoke. Nothing caps off the equinox like a Don Carlos. Do you have a light, Petra? I need a light.” Hardin strode toward the aisle, his shoulders thrown back. He looked relaxed. Had Etta only imagined the moment of hostility passing between him and Olivia?

  Then Etta glimpsed the director’s expression. The coldness in his blue eyes made her gasp for breath.

  Chapter Ten

  Etta sat up in her bed. Olivia was in a straight jacket with her arms folded behind her back, her mouth had been bound with duct tape. It dissolved into glitter when she spoke, coating her lips and dripping onto her dress.

  It was a dream. Etta rolled her head around, cringing at the ripple of pops in her neck. Sunlight flooded through the filmy curtains. How could it be morning? Etta had just shut her eyes. Etta’s gaze drifted to Olivia’s bed. The red T-shirt and black sports bra that Olivia had been wearing before the play were strewn across her pillows; her jeans with the red embroidery on the back pockets were crumpled next to the bed.

  The last time she’d seen Olivia, she was on the stage next to Robert North, the velvet curtain jerking shut in front of them. Etta had waited in her seat for her roommate to emerge from behind the curtain, sitting there until everyone had filed out of the theater. Finally Etta had returned to the great room, circling the room for more than an hour looking for Olivia. Then Etta had joined a group of girls walking back to the cabins, hoping Olivia would already be tucked into bed. Of course, she wasn’t. So Etta had sat up most of the night waiting for her roommate. Where did she sleep? Not at Jordan’s . . . In your haste to break our engagement . . .

  It took Etta awhile to realize what was different. The rain had stopped. The silence was almost unsettling. Etta stood and winced at the pangs in her calf muscles, remembering the high heels. She hobbled in a circle, trying to work the tightness out.

  Carl’s truck. It had awoken her sometime in the early morning hours. The coughing and wheezing of the engine had echoed through the night’s silence. Or had that been a dream?

  Etta pulled on a pair of running pants and a T-shirt and splashed some cold water on her face. At first she thought that the pipes were knocking, but when she turned off the faucet, the noise continued. Was
someone at the door? In all of Etta’s months at the academy, nobody had knocked on the door this early. Not one person.

  Etta unlocked the door and opened it a crack.

  Reed grinned. He wore an elastic sweat band around his forehead, which made his blonde mullet feather out around his face. “You remembered our appointment for this morning?”

  Etta swung the door open. Reed’s long-sleeved crimson T-shirt said Reed College in white letters, and he wore white shorts that exposed long, muscular thighs and white tube socks that were pulled nearly to his knees.

  Etta dropped her gaze to Reed’s vintage nylon running shoes, which were actually kind of cool. She vaguely recalled a conversation with Reed about running, but couldn’t recall when it had been or what exactly had been said.

  “Um, yeah,” she finally said. “Are you ready?” Behind him, narrow slits of sunshine striped the clearing. The chill in the air reminded Etta of Michigan. She imagined her favorite running trail in Ann Arbor would be ablaze in orange and red by now.

  “Can I ask a favor of you before we leave?”

  Etta nodded.

  “I know it is in violation of the code, and I would not ask if it were not critical. However, I am in need of your facilities.”

  Etta squinted at him for a moment, not just because the word facilities struck her as odd. She also cringed at the idea of inviting someone to use such a messy bathroom. She’d declared a mental truce of sorts with Olivia’s housecleaning, even growing used to the pile of laundry crammed behind the door and the lotions and perfumes that teetered on the sink. But inviting a stranger in was a different matter. Etta fought the impulse to rush ahead of him to clean. She waved him inside.

  While he used the bathroom, Etta gobbled down an energy bar from the dwindling stash in her desk drawer.

  Reed emerged and made a beeline to the door. When he got to the porch, he peered inside. “We’ll forget that happened.”

  Etta laughed. “You can come in.”