When Cello thought about life outside of the garden, he thought about someone like Dr. Santo, or Ben. Someone unafraid and far away. But looking into the fireman’s full, smudged face, he saw real despair, a kind of despair he understood. He looked at the door to the bathroom, limned with light, and the shushing of the shower within. Would he tell Joanie or would he turn off the TV and pretend he hadn’t seen it?
The door abruptly opened, and Joanie walked through the murk wrapped in a thin, gray towel to where he stood. She looked at him, and then at the lit screen.
“It’s on the news,” he said, his eyebrows drawn together. “I have to show you something.” He reached into his back pocket for the grimy paper towel and unfolded it between them.
“What is it?” Joanie asked, her hair still dripping from the shower.
Cello sighed, not sure how he should tell her. He opened his mouth, and everything he tried to say, to make his story gentler or easier to hear, just fell away.
“Letta and I found an envelope, on Miracle’s birthday. It was from whoever took the baby. Asking for money.”
“Wait, what?” Joanie put a hand to her temple. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Letta said not to.”
“Who gives a shit if Letta said not to? You should’ve told me, Cello. He’s my baby.” Joanie snatched at the paper towel, tearing it a little as she pulled it away from him. The footprint had bled into a cartoonish shape, but five distinct, miniscule toe prints were still recognizable as human. “Did this...did this thing come with it?”
Cello shook his head. “No. I brought some money to the spot the note told me to go, and this was there. Asking for more money.”
“Letta gave you money for this? Or was it Sil? Do you still have the note?”
“No. Not Letta, and Sil doesn’t know. I got the money myself.”
“Jesus,” Joanie murmured as she touched the oil stain with an extended fingertip. She sniffed at the square of paper. “What’re they doing to him?” She traced the scrawl of looping black script at the top.
“I don’t know, but he’s alive at least. We’ll get him back, Joanie. Don’t worry.”
“Cello.” Joanie’s voice was cold and hard—the resigned voice of a much older person. “This is Mother Joseph’s handwriting.” She sat on the edge of the bed, and Cello wondered if he should sit down with her.
“What? Are you sure?” Cello’s stomach lurched with nausea.
“The thing about all this is,” she continued, “I’m not even surprised.”
“What do you mean?” Cello watched the light from the muted TV cast shadows among the curves and hollows of her face.
“I mean,” she said, looking up, right at him, “nothing good can ever happen in a world like this. Now do you understand why my plan is so important?” Joanie brandished the torn paper towel. “I don’t want to live in a world, or raise my son in one, that has people like this in it! I’m going to get him back, no matter what I have to do. We are going to get him back.” Joanie looked out past him, determined.
It was the melody of that declaration, its cool mournful dip, that shook something loose in Cello. Like he’d been struck, and that movement sloshed his feelings over the edge of their containment. He was suddenly light-headed, impelled toward Joanie, toward his own idea about something good. The family he imagined they could be: him, Joanie and Junior. He would tell her how much he loved her, would kiss her and hold her.
More than anything, Cello wanted to show himself that his feelings about Joanie were the same they’d always been. He almost didn’t feel his body moving in toward her, and nearly missed the sight of her face contorted in disgusted alarm. Before he could put his mouth on hers, Joanie blocked his body with her forearm and pushed him away. “No, Cello,” she said firmly. “Not that. You know I love you, but I don’t want that.”
Cello straightened and stepped back; a rush of humiliation ousted all of the hopeful feelings he’d wanted to channel into Joanie. He ducked his head down, waiting for whatever else she was going to say. He hated himself for the tears he could feel forming. There was so much injustice between them, Cello thought, not just the injustice of Joanie never really loving him, but the injustice he’d just subjected her to—being loved when you don’t want to be. He felt his way through that bog of sorrow, understanding that he had reached the end of something, the oldest story he’d told himself.
“I should have thanked you for getting us here, and making me rest.” Joanie’s tone was soft and careful. “Where did you get the money?” she asked quietly.
Cello tried to keep the emotion out of his voice when he answered her. “I met a guy. We’ve been senging—digging up wild ginseng. We sold it to some other guy.”
“You took it from the garden?”
Cello nodded. “It was wild, though. Nobody knows.” He didn’t tell her his suspicions about Ben’s arrival at the garden right when Junior went missing, and he didn’t tell her about Dr. Santo.
“Then we have to go back. Or at least you do. We’re going to need more money. How long do you think I can stay here?” Joanie asked. “I don’t know how much time I’ll need.” Joanie stared off toward the corner of the room, squinting at something Cello couldn’t see. “Is there enough for a week? Two?” Cello was heartened by her sudden flash of practicality. It was like the real Joanie had been called back up.
“I’m not sure,” Cello answered. “Maybe. I can figure it out.”
They both breathed several lungfuls of mildew-tinged air before Cello spoke again. “How do you think she got him?”
“Doesn’t matter how she got him—the point is, she has him. And now I know exactly how to get him back.” A sudden dark splash of liquid ran from Joanie’s nose, splattering the bath towel over her ribs.
“Joanie, you’re bleeding,” Cello said, running to the bathroom for a clump of toilet paper. She made no move to stop the flow, but let Cello press the tissue to her face. They sat quietly, waiting for the bleeding to stop.
“I’m sorry, Joanie, about that. What happened before. I shouldn’t have tried to—”
Joanie lifted her palm to him, facing it out like she was casting a protective spell. “We’re not gonna talk about that again. I’m sorry, but I can’t—I can’t talk about it again.”
Cello nodded. “You still need to get to some kind of crossroads?”
She nodded back—a single, firm dip of her head. “Yes. But we’ll figure it all out tomorrow,” she said, not looking at him. “When you come back with more money. I’m not sure yet, what all else I’ll need.”
“When will you know? How will you?”
Joanie stood and moved around to the side of the bed, still gripping the foot-printed paper in her fist. “I just will.” Her voice was hard, different from before. Cello couldn’t explain why, but he believed her. She pulled the blankets down and slipped between them.
Joanie’s refusal clung to him in the dark motel room, in the TV screen’s thin light... Cello wondered if that life he’d imagined—the three of them as a family—could ever have existed.
He shivered away from those thoughts and switched off the TV, taking his turn in the shower. He fell asleep in the other bed thinking not only of Joanie and the baby, but about how he would find Ben again, without running into Marcela or any of the others.
20
In the morning, Cello left Joanie asleep. He hadn’t seen her sleep so soundly since before she’d left for the Josephs’. He locked the door as quietly as he could, and walked back toward the garden, hidden in the curling branches of a long row of horse chestnuts. The long grass and bald dandelion stems flicked out at his bare ankles with every step. When he got dressed, he couldn’t stand to put his filthy socks back on. Cello knew he was getting close to home when he smelled the char on the air.
He walked toward the dark seam of the burn that led back in
to the wild ginseng field where he and Marcela had dug up that first harvest. Cello was surprised to find Marcela, and not Ben, seated curled over her knees on a flat rock.
“Oh, hi. Nice to see you,” Marcela said icily, lifting her chin in Cello’s direction.
“What happened? You alone?” Cello didn’t approach her.
“Yes, I’m alone. You think Sil and Letta hired bodyguards to accompany me places now there’s a lunatic on the loose setting fires?”
Cello could feel the understanding between them, like a light patter of rain, about who that lunatic was.
“Do they know it was Joanie? Did the police come?”
Marcela hesitated, stuck her pinkie finger in her ear and twisted it. “They came.”
“Did they find anything? Any of the plots?”
Marcela shook her head. “Sil’s not sure, but probably not. He stayed by the fire, said he was hunting and smelled it. They didn’t care about anything else, he said. Just the fire. They didn’t follow him home.”
“They’ll be back since it’s easy to tell somebody set it. For the investigation,” Cello said, wooden.
Marcela nodded, inspecting the extracted wax on her finger.
“Will they come up to the trailers?”
“Probably. Letta thinks yes. I wouldn’t go back there if I was you. I wouldn’t go back there if I was me, but... Not like I have a choice.” She stared out at Cello, grim. “Unless I make some more money.”
“That’s what I was hoping for today, too.” Cello stepped closer to Marcela but didn’t make any move to be chummy or affectionate.
“Where’d you and Joanie go?” Marcela brushed her hands together and looked up at him.
“I’d rather not say.”
“Yeah, I bet!” Marcela let a sharp laugh into the air. “You’re probably in seventh heaven.”
“Not exactly,” Cello murmured. Joanie’s frightening hot-bright eyes, and her mysterious plan, flashed through his mind.
“Who’s in seventh heaven?”
Marcela and Cello turned together. Ben had snuck up on them from behind, and Cello felt a yearning lean toward the stranger. Cello envied the other boy’s clean clothes. A visible smudge of sunscreen streaked the side of Ben’s neck. Somebody should rub that in, Cello considered, but then quickly slapped away the thought.
“Cello. He’s snuggled up in a love nest with Joanie,” Marcela taunted, flipping a wave of dark hair over her shoulder, twinkling out at Ben. But it wasn’t Marcela Ben watched. Cello realized the stranger was staring at him.
“She the girlfriend?” Ben asked.
“She’s our sister,” Marcela said, delicately wrinkling her nose.
“She’s not anybody’s sister,” Cello said, just to Marcela, not looking at Ben. “Anyway, are we doing this?”
“Let’s split up,” Marcela said, giving him a sharp look. “We’ll get more done that way.”
* * *
Cello liked that he didn’t have to rush back to follow Sil’s instructions, or explain his absence to anyone. He could just work for himself. He let himself wonder: What would he do if there were no Joanie, no kidnapper, no garden?
He could go somewhere nobody knew him and have a fresh start. He would still work outside, but he would live alone. He could eat the things he grew, and sleep when he wanted to sleep. No one would hurt him. If he got tired of being alone or needed something, he could sell the things he grew, and use that money to buy whatever he wanted. He could go to the movies, and choose his own clothes. He could move forward.
The cool, shady calm he felt in this separate place—away from the garden, even away from Joanie—was disturbed only by Ben. He felt Ben shadowing his searching, assessing the spaces beneath logs and around clumps of rock that Cello had already checked. It wasn’t just that he could feel Ben; he could hear him, too.
“You didn’t grow up outside, did you?” Cello asked the other boy, who trailed about fifteen feet behind him.
“What? Who grows up outside?”
“You’re really loud.”
“Excuse me?” Ben’s voice lifted in pitch, incredulous.
“Not much of a hunter, are you?” Cello said. “Deer would hear you a quarter mile off.”
“No, I don’t hunt.” Cello was amused to see the stranger lift himself onto tiptoe, as though that would dull the noise he made.
“You go to class every day?”
Ben nodded, still looking down, presumably working, but Cello could see that he wasn’t really looking, that he was more with Cello than he was senging. “Practically.”
“Must be a good school. That teacher has a real nice house.”
“It is a good school,” Ben said. “They expect a lot from us. I have a scholarship there. To study chemistry.”
Cello tossed another body-shaped root onto their pile. “That doesn’t sound very easy.”
“It’s not. Really, I’m interested in history, and I’d rather be studying that. But, you know, jobs in that field are harder to come by. Not to mention they pay way, way less.”
Cello nodded like he did know that.
“You hear about that fire?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, on the news.” Cello shrugged, trying to keep his movements calm and smooth.
“Said they didn’t catch the guy.”
“Yeah, I saw. Sure it wasn’t you?” Cello asked, trying on a playful smile, the kind he might share with Sabina.
“No,” Ben said quietly. “I wouldn’t do something like that.” Cello watched the stranger from under his practiced harvest slouch. He seemed sincere, kind even, in his declaration. Cello hated what it said about Joanie. “Would you?”
Cello boiled under the question—would he? He’d never harm the garden or the land in that way. He’d been trained to feed and fuel the soil, not destroy it. It hurt him to think Joanie capable of such destruction.
“I don’t think so,” Cello answered.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I don’t think so, either.” He pulled a root from the ground, replanting the seeds in the socket of earth left behind.
“Can I ask you something?” Cello said.
“Sure.” Ben dusted his hands off and held his arms in front of his body, expectantly, like a waiter on TV. He was so confident and easy, Cello thought—the realization streaked through with envy.
“You planted that plot yourself, the one me and Marcela found. Right?”
Ben twisted his mouth into a soft lump of lip. He nodded. “Yeah, I did. I didn’t want to say anything because I thought it’d get me into more trouble. Your sister seems very...litigious.” He shook his head, smiling at the ground.
“She’s not my sister,” Cello said. His heart beat with a ferocity he only knew from extreme fear.
“Wow, you live with a lot of girls who aren’t your sister.” Ben smiled, and Cello caught a dull white flash of teeth.
“Yeah, I guess,” Cello said. “It’s not like that, though.”
“Like what?” Ben asked.
“It’s not really like anything. I don’t know how to explain it.” Suddenly, though, Cello wanted to try—he wanted to tell someone about the garden and its clusters of tragedies. The things he and the rest of his foster family had felt, it all just kept running through their closed circuit—each one of them passing similar thoughts and emotions over and onto each other, recycled and stale. It was a thrilling novelty to have a fresh heart and mind right there to address and engage with. It was seductive even. “There was a baby,” Cello began, “who lived with us. He got taken.”
“What?” Ben’s brow creased and he stepped a little closer, as though trying to make out what Cello had said over a wide distance. “You mean like by the state?”
Cello shook his head. “One morning he was just gone.”
“Oh, my God,” Ben said, reaching out, putti
ng a hand to Cello’s forearm. “What happened? Was he okay? Was it—” he bobbed his head a little to catch Cello’s gaze “—was it your baby?”
“No.” Cello shook his head and looked away from the stranger’s eyes. “It was Joanie’s.” He felt his eyes heat with tears and was humiliated—he didn’t want to cry in front of the stranger, and held it back the best he could. “The people who took him, they’re bad people. The money, all of this—” Cello waved vaguely toward the ground “—I was giving the money to them, so they wouldn’t hurt him. I wanted to help him, to just do whatever I could.” He cringed, remembering Joanie’s face when she’d identified Mother Joseph’s handwriting. Why hadn’t Letta seen it, and he wondered in a single dark instant—did she have something to do with it, too?
“Sure you did, man,” Ben said, putting an arm around him awkwardly. “I’m sure you tried to do the right thing. Can’t you tell the police, though?”
Cello shook his head. “It’s complicated,” he explained. Cello wiped his dripping nose with the back of his hand. He didn’t like the way Ben was looking at him, all wincing sympathy, tinged with a sour note of judgment. He was suddenly desperate to change the subject, to escape this sudden, forbidden confession. He had no right to tell a stranger about what happened at the garden. It wasn’t Ben’s place to know, and it wasn’t Cello’s place to tell.
“So those plants you’ve been watching, and all the rest of this.” Cello gestured out over the shade-dappled ground. “This is just you? Nobody’s helping you?”
Ben shook his head and abruptly paced a little farther up the hill. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s check up here.” He turned and looked straight at Cello. “You coming?” The stranger’s open face had shifted, sliding into the flat, calm surface of a pond.
There, Cello thought—Ben was lying.
21
When Joanie woke up, she saw that Cello had gone. She stood and moved around the room, considering the items that occupied it. It was wholly unblemished by other lives and bodies. The room was unlike any place Joanie had ever been; every other place had been indelibly marked by the people or creatures who lived in or used it. Whatever had happened before in this place was meant to be erased. It was perfect and clear, just as Joanie was, away from the garden, away from the Josephs. She was free of all former tangles of emotion; she was open and new. She was ready to make something new, and the room’s clarity magnified her purpose.
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