Back to the Garden

Libby was fifteen when she started sleeping with her daddy, but it was only because of her nightmares. It seemed natural to climb into his big bed, into the place where her mother had slept until Libby was eight, to snuggle under his strong, muscled arm and his watchful eye. Daddy was always watching, just like God, and it made Libby feel safe as houses.

They came and went, her nightmares, but somehow she just never moved back to her own room. Daddy joked that her nightmares were just God trying to get a direct connection, but Libby knew it was her mother. She never doubted where her overwhelming sense of dread and abandonment came from, the kind that left her sweating and shaking and gasping for breath—it was all she’d ever known when it came to her mother.

The night before her mother came back, Libby woke up pounding on their bedroom window, screaming, “Let me out!” Her father, who never woke her during one of her sleepwalking incidents, actually shook her until she could see him, his eyes wide and concerned, more panic in them than she’d ever seen before.

“Where are you, Libby girl?” he murmured while he held and rocked and stroked her as she hitched sobs against his chest. “Where do you go?”

“Hell,” she whispered, clinging.

She thought she knew what hell was, and then her mother came back.

Libby remembered her leaving, packing her big blue suitcase in the middle of the night, the screaming and the crying and the yelling. Little Libby in her Cindy-Lou-Who nightgown, shifting from foot to foot in the doorway, listening to them argue, her eyes flickering between them.

Her mother came back carrying the same big blue suitcase, walking right back into The Garden of Eden as if she had never left. Her father was a kind man, but as Libby watched them hug hello, she wondered if even God would be that forgiving. It was the one time Libby wanted to believe that once Eve had fallen, there really was no going back.

And of course, her mother was wearing clothes.

A stylish yellow sundress with a pair of white heels which made her legs look even longer, and her auburn hair, darker than Libby’s orange-tinged mane, was pulled up on top of her head. She was beautiful, as always, and in spite of her absence, or maybe because of it, Libby’s father hugged her hard and long, his eyes squeezed shut. To Libby, he looked like he was in pain.

“Libby!” Her mother held her hand out to her only daughter. Libby felt eyes raking down her form, lingering at her naked breasts. “My goodness, you’ve grown!”

Her father came up behind her, wrapping his arms around Libby’s little waist and kissing the top of her head. She glanced up at him and saw the pride glowing in his eyes.

“Hasn’t she?” His voice was warm, his nude body strong and solid behind hers. “She looks like you did at that age, doesn’t she, Kim?”

Libby glared at her mother. “Ten years is a long time.”

The older woman frowned, her eyes falling to Libby’s bare hips, where his hands rested. “Don’t you think it’s a little inappropriate for her to be running around like that?”

Libby rolled her eyes and snorted. “What did you really expect?”

“Libby!” Her father reprimanded her but gave her a squeeze before letting her go.

Libby flounced over to a chair, watching her mother fan herself with her hand. “God, it’s hot in here...”

“Not if you’re naked,” Libby retorted.

“Libby!” Her father shook his head, grinning in spite of himself.

“Ed, do you have anything to drink?” Kim asked. “Iced Tea? Diet Coke?”

Libby left them, going out the back door and sitting on one of the chaise lounges. She heard her father putting ice in a glass, her mother’s voice going on about something.

“Hey, Lib—sunscreen!” her father called through the screen door on his way by.

Libby sighed, reaching under the chair and finding a bottle of it. Her father kept them everywhere. Being a redhead in a nudist community wasn’t always a picnic. If she forgot sunscreen, even once, just for an hour or two, she turned as red as a lobster and could barely move for days.

She could still hear them—something about Arizona. Was that where she’d been? Libby wondered, rubbing cream over her freckled shoulders, down her chest, over her rounded breasts with their cherry tips pointing toward the sky and her soft, flat belly, past the triangular red patch between her legs and over her slim, creamy thighs and calves.

Libby poked her head back in through the door. “Daddy, can you do my back?”

“Sure.” He motioned for her to come in.

Libby handed him the bottle and turned a chair around, sitting on it backwards and looking over her shoulder at him.

Her father squirted lotion in a line down her back and she squealed. “Daddy!”

“Sorry.” He chuckled, rubbing the white lotion into her shoulder blades and down her spine. Libby saw her mother watching them, her eyes veiled, her mouth tight.

“Did you get your little butt?” He slapped it playfully with his hand and she laughed.

She stood, kneeling on the chair. “Nope. Can you get it?”

Libby saw her mother’s jaw working as her father used both hands to rub lotion into her bottom.

“Done,” he announced, rubbing the excess up his arms, but Libby knew he didn’t need it. Daddy was as brown and sleek as a seal all over. She climbed off the chair, grabbed her book from the kitchen counter and headed out the door again.

“Ed, this is just wrong,” Libby heard her mother say.

She opened her book, leaned back in the lounger and tried to read. She couldn’t concentrate, though. She kept hearing a few words here and there drifting out towards her.
Remarried. Divorce. Papers. Sign.
They were mostly her mother’s words, although she heard her father say
when?
and
extra room
and
you can ask her.

Her mother came out onto the patio after a while and Libby felt for a moment like she couldn’t breathe at all. All she could remember was her mother and the blue suitcase going out the door, while the girl in the pink nightgown stood there calling, “Aren’t you going to take me, Mommy?”

She knew she was that girl, but she didn’t want to remember the feeling of being left standing there as her mother climbed into a cab and disappeared.

“Hey, Libby.” Kim sat on a patio chair, crossing one knee over the other. “You’re probably pretty mad at me, huh?”

Libby didn’t put her book down, but the words were swimming.

“I don’t blame you.” Her mother sighed, looking out across their patio and the yard bleeding right up into the sand leading to the ocean.

It was an incredible view, one Libby had grown used to—she saw it every day of her life. There was a volleyball game going on, the pink and tan of nude bodies moving in the distance, the far-off shouts of “side-out!”

“Libby, I’m sorry.” Her mother’s voice was soft, distant, her eyes somewhere out over the horizon. “I couldn’t stay here, then, living this way...”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Kim’s jaw tightened again. “I couldn’t condone what your father wanted to build here, with this place.”

Now Libby’s jaw tightened, her eyes flashing. She looked a great deal like her mother in that moment. “How would you know what we have here? You never stayed to find out!”

“No.” Her mother folded her arms across her chest. “I left. That was my choice. But I’m here now.”

“And so?” Libby rolled her eyes, swinging her legs over the side of the lounger. “What do you want here? You hated it, you said so. You hated Daddy, you hated me...”

Libby felt tears welling and willed them gone.

“No, no, sweetie.” Her mother’s voice was soft, trembling even, her hand reaching out but not quite touching Libby’s bare knee. “I wanted to see you...I just couldn’t...”

“Forget it.” Libby shook her head, standing. “I don’t want to know.”

Her mother reached for Libby’s hand as she passed, grasping her wrist. She looked into her mother’s green eyes, mirrors of her own, with those strange gold flecks in them.

“Listen to me.” Her mother’s voice was pleading now. “I want you to come live with me and David. You can go to a real school. You can go to prom—”

“I’m done with school,” Libby countered, her mouth set in a grim line. “I’m eighteen now...if you didn’t remember.”

“College, then,” her mother continued. “You can have a real life, Libby. You don’t have to live this way...”

Libby yanked her arm out of her mother’s grasp. “
This way?
You make it sound like I’m living in some sort of a cult. I’m happy here with Dad, helping him run things. This
is
a real life. My life.”

“I’m staying for a few days,” her mother said flatly, shading her eyes as she looked up at her daughter. “Your father and I are finally making this divorce thing official, and there are some papers he needs to have a lawyer look over.”

“Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable in a hotel?” Libby snapped, flicking the screen door open. “Where you could wear clothes?”

“All right, Libby,” Kim sighed, standing. “Maybe I misjudged this place. Maybe I’m just being a prude, like your father always said.”

Libby narrowed her eyes, frowning. “You’ll give it a chance?”

“If you give me one,” her mother said, reaching for the girl’s hand. Libby took it, reluctant, as they headed into the house.

—

Libby fell asleep on the sofa in the middle of
American Idol
and knew she’d spent just a little too much time out in the sun today. She woke up with a line of drool running down the cushion and sat up to discover the dog had eaten the rest of the bowl of popcorn which had tipped to the floor.

“You can have Libby’s old bed,” she heard her father say. Her mother was still here. It wasn’t a nightmare.

“Libby’s bed?” They were in the kitchen, it sounded like. “Where does Libby sleep?”

Uh-oh.

“With me.”

There was a long silence, and Libby felt it stretching.

“Ed, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Her father was putting away dinner dishes, she heard cupboard doors opening and closing.

“It’s innocent,” he replied. His voice was tight, she noticed. “She has nightmares.”

“I assume you sleep—?”

“Naked?” her father finished. “Yes, Kim. We do everything naked. That’s what nudists do. Being naked isn’t a sin.”

“You’re sleeping with your teenage daughter!”

Libby winced at the tone in her mother’s voice and for the first time felt like she wanted to hide herself. She looked around the living room for a blanket and found one hanging over the back of the sofa.

Her father’s voice shook in reply as he quoted, “ ‘And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.’ ”

“Oh please!” her mother cried. Libby heard a chair scraping on the linoleum. “Spare me the scripture...and she’s not your wife, even if you’ve tried to make her a second best replacement for me.”

Libby pulled the blanket over her head, trying to drown out the words.

“She’s the best of you.” Her father slammed a cupboard door. “And she isn’t ashamed of her body or who she is, and I won’t have you making her feel that way. Don’t you dare come into my house and do that...don’t you dare!”

“Fine...okay,” her mother muttered. “I just don’t think you see how really wrong this is. Your moral compass is way off.”

Her father had his preacher voice on now, Libby recognized it as well as she recognized the words from the Gospel of Thomas inscribed on the plaque in the main meeting room: “ ‘When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid.’ ”

“Like I said, spare me the scripture,” her mother sighed. “She’s my daughter, too, you know.”

Libby ducked her head and pretended to be asleep as her mother came into the living room.

Her father’s voice followed, “You should have thought of that when you walked out that door, Kim.”