The Memory Garden (11 page)

“A witch?”

Nan is having difficulty adjusting to this aged Mavis who has trouble staying on topic. Who would have guessed Mavis would get funny in the head?

“Yes,” Nan says, careful to speak clearly. “If she saw the three of us and how normal we are…” But Nan doesn’t know how to continue, looking at Mavis with her lavender hair and pasty face, thinking of Ruthie with her prayer circles and exorcists.

“Oh, Nan,” Mavis sighs.

“What?”

In this bright light, Mavis, frowning broadly beneath her frantic hair, looks like an unhappy chrysanthemum. In spite of everything, Nan giggles.

“I’m glad you find something amusing,” Mavis says. “Apparently, my face.” She wipes her hands on the nightgown, sets aside the saddle shoe she’s been working on, and with a good deal of effort, stands. “Come. You need to get out of the heat.”

Nan looks at the flowers lying in the sun; there is still so much to be done. But when Mavis extends her hand, Nan takes it, rising to her knees, slowly standing. Mavis puts her arm around Nan, in that stiff way she has. It’s not a comforting hold, Mavis being more mast than sail.

“But the flowers—”

“What about Bay? We can’t leave her alone in there with Ruthie and Stellora, can we? Who knows what they’ve been telling her.”

Why has she been worrying about the garden when Bay is alone in the house with Stella’s questions about Eve and Ruthie’s way of speaking without censure? It is disturbing for Nan to realize she’s lost her focus so entirely. “Wait,” she says, stopping on the porch. “We need a plan.”

“A plan?”

It’s distressing
, Nan thinks. Mavis, who used to be so wickedly smart, standing there frowning as if Nan makes no sense at all.

“You know, how should we act around Stella?”

“How should we act?”

Nan decides right then that the best way to proceed with the weekend is to rely on her skill for subterfuge. It’s clear she can’t count on Mavis, and Ruthie has never been a serious contender for cunning. “We need to act like we have nothing to hide. We need to act normal.”

Mavis turns to look at the front door as though she doesn’t know how they have arrived there. “Okay,” she says, “we’ll act normal. Whatever that is.”

In spite of the solemnity of the situation, Nan is giggling when she enters the house, blinking away sunspots in the dim foyer.

“Good morning.” Bay’s voice floats from the top of the stairs. She seems to have taken special care in dressing, wearing her yellow sundress, languidly descending the steps like a 1940s film ingénue, stealing a look in the direction of the parlor.

Bay kisses Nan’s cheek and turns to Mavis. “I can’t believe everyone is up! I slept terribly late!”

Nan exchanges a look with Mavis. Obviously the girl is overdoing it, but why?

“Isn’t it a beautiful morning?” Bay says, glancing at the parlor.

“Don’t do anything drastic,” Mavis says to Nan. “I’ll be right back. I have to take care of a little business.” She walks up the stairs, clutching the banister like a seasick cruise passenger.

At the end of the hallway, the kitchen door swings open. Ruthie, wearing an apron over her nightgown, takes short, quick, black-socked steps toward Nan and Bay, pausing at the open front door to shake her head and wave her spatula, turning to point it at Nan. “What are you doing? Breakfast is ready. Come. Eat!” Without waiting for a response, Ruthie pivots, pushing the door as she does, though it only closes halfway as she glides across the wooden floor to the kitchen.

Before Nan can stop her, Bay strolls over to look outside. It’s one of those habits she inherited from Nan; they both like to begin the day by greeting the garden. Nan steels herself for the hysterics sure to erupt. Bay always has hated the tricks people play, and as she’s gotten older, her despair over such behavior has gotten worse. Also, Bay loves the shoe garden, though she won’t admit it. Nan suspects Bay loves the garden more than she loves breakfast, which is saying a lot.

“What a beautiful day,” Bay says, turning to step back into the foyer. “Do I smell pancakes?”

Nan watches Bay, with her new languid walk, stroll toward the kitchen. How could she not have noticed the destruction? Maybe she was stunned into a stupor; she’s in shock, poor thing, but when Nan rests her hand on the door to close it entirely, she finds that she is the one stunned. She shakes her head in case she’s having one of her memories again, in case she isn’t really seeing what she thinks she sees.

The walk is clear of dirt, flowers planted in shoes that only moments before were scattered in the yard, the hollyhocks returned to their boots, the cosmos happy in their sneakers, the daisies in their slippers; every flower in a shoe, every shoe standing. Nothing is in the right place, but the entire front yard is restored to some semblance of its own, quirky normalcy.

“Pancakes!” Bay hollers from the kitchen.

Nan loves pancakes! She swallows, licks her lips, and swallows again. The taste of ash is gone, replaced by a slightly sweet, floral flavor, as though instead of planting flowers this morning, she’s been eating them.

Nan closes the door and turns to smile at Mavis as she comes coughing down the stairs, clutching a pack of cigarettes. She looks startled but returns the smile, a fleeting expression that subtracts a great deal of age from her face. Nan understands. The thing about witches, after all, is that they must learn to wear masks. It’s something almost all of them do as protection against judgment. Even in the midst of this summer morning, Nan shudders at the history of witches: tortured, burned, hanged, or strangled. Horrible things were done to them as ward against their rumored strength. It is so easy to forget that they were real women. Nan decides not to frighten Mavis (who apparently still does have her power after all) with words of gratitude, but what harm can there be in a smile, even if Mavis now scowls in response? They walk to the kitchen together, inhaling the wonderful aroma of coffee and pancakes.

Ruthie, humming at a surprising pitch, stands at the stove, flipping pancakes. “Good morning, Sunshine!” she says. “Bay, this is Stella.”

Stella? Bay doesn’t remember anything about someone named Stella. The newcomer sits at the table with her chin in her hand. Her smile reveals dimples and small white teeth. Bay wonders what her Nana could possibly have to do with someone so young? She suddenly realizes that the stranger, her head tilted, is studying Bay as though thinking the same thing.

“She makes the best pancakes,” Stella says. “I mean, seriously, what’s your trick?”

Bay pulls out a chair, and Ruthie sets a plate of pancakes before her.

“No trick,” she says.

“No trick?” Stella shakes her head as she eyes Bay’s plate. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Well, you don’t really expect me to give away all my secrets, do you?”

“I was hoping you might,” Stella says, watching Bay fork a triple-decker slice of pancake into her mouth. “You know, I think I will have one more!”

“Oh my gawd,” Bay says, maple syrup dripping from the corner of her mouth.

Stella nods. “I know, I know. They’re not even pancakes.”

“They’re…they’re heaven—”

Together they exclaim, “Heavencakes!” which makes them laugh.

Mavis, wearing a dirty nightgown, her violet hair spiked like an attack on her head, pushes through the swinging door, followed by a smiling Nan, also still wearing her pajamas accentuated by red boots. She glances sideways at Bay and Stella smiling at each other across the table. “What’s going on here?”

“Pancakes. They taste like heaven,” Bay says.

Nan drags the computer chair across the floor to the crowded kitchen table. Stella offers Mavis her chair, but she replies with one of her looks, as though the suggestion she might need to sit is insulting. Ruthie flips a perfectly round pancake from the spatula to Stella’s plate.

“How many for you, Nan?”

“How many what?” Nan asks, which has the effect of freeze tag on everyone. Ruthie stops between table and stove, her spatula held upright, a cook’s exclamation point. Mavis stands with one hand on the coffee pot, the other holding a mug; even Stella stops chewing to frown at Nan, who, Bay realizes, looks especially odd this morning, her hair dotted with petals and stems.

“Nana?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you feel all right?”

Nan presses her fingers against her temple. “I’m having one of my headaches.”

“How many would you like?” Ruthie asks. “How many pancakes, that is?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nan says, “perhaps six.”

“Six?”

“Nana loves pancakes.”

“Do you need an aspirin? I think I have some with me,” Stella offers.

“I’ll just have my headache tea.”

Nan moves to stand, but Ruthie tells her to stay put. “I’m right here. I can get the kettle on.” She veers around Mavis, leaning so far into the refrigerator she is all backside. “What are you looking for?”

“Apparently the only thing not here,” Mavis says. “What is all this? Why are there all these flowers?”

“Flowers? In the refrigerator?” Nan asks. “Why ever would you be looking for flowers in the refrigerator?”

Mavis backs out, standing to her full height of shocked purple hair, a small pink petal dangling above her ear. “I don’t suppose there’s any cream.”

“Right there.” Ruthie uses the spatula to point at the blue pitcher on the counter.

How fun,
Bay thinks,
to have a whole kitchen full of people for breakfast. Is this what it feels like to be part of a large family?
Ruthie hums something unidentifiable and off-key as she flips pancakes. The stove is remarkably clean, Bay notices. When she makes pancakes, the batter gets everywhere.

Mavis stands by the screen door, staring into the backyard as she drinks her coffee, which gives Bay a chance to observe that even someone as intimidating as Mavis looks frail in a nightgown, positioned in such a way that the light appears to pass right through her.

“Nan,” Mavis says. “Do you know that Howard is in your backyard?”

Howard! Bay can’t believe she forgot about him—well, not forgot, because she had been disappointed not to see him when she came downstairs, thinking nothing could distract her from him, until breakfast did.

“Six pancakes!” Ruthie announces, setting a large stack in front of Nan.

“Howard? I thought he left.”

“He appears to be doing something untoward to the flowers.”

Nan’s forkful of pancakes stops halfway to her mouth.

“You eat, Nana,” Bay says.

“Yes. Eat. You need your strength.” Mavis sets her mug firmly on the counter. The teakettle whistles, and Ruthie yelps, which causes a distraction. The next thing Bay knows, the screen door is banging shut, and Mavis is gone.

“I’m surprised at Howard,” Ruthie says. “He’s starting to remind me of my son. Now, where’s this headache tea of yours?”

“I’ll get it.” Bay says, glancing out the window beyond the glass jars filled with cut flowers and various stones littering the sill, to see Howard, who is sitting in the backyard, look up at Mavis’s approach. Even at this distance it’s clear he’s surprised, and perhaps a bit horrified.
Well, Mavis is looking pretty scary,
Bay thinks, though Howard looks kind of odd himself, still wearing her Nana’s nightgown and holding a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace surrounded by… Bay leans across the sink to peer at the backyard littered with overturned shoes and tossed flowers.

“I wonder what caused him to act so criminally,” Ruthie says. “Maybe he’s had a seizure of some kind.”

“A seizure?” Stella asks.

“You know. A fit,” Nan says. “Ruthie, these are the best pancakes!”

Not wanting to alarm Nan, though her gut quivers with that feeling of wasps building their nest again, Bay opens the herb cupboard (really an old broom closet fitted with shelves) and easily finds the headache tea; it’s been used so much lately. She turns, jar in hand, surprised to find Ruthie and Stella watching with peculiar expressions, as though it were a closet of bones.

Stella turns slowly to address Nan. “Is Howard your husband?”

“No, he’s just a boy she hired,” Ruthie says, “to transport us about. Nan never married.”

“He’s very nice,” Bay adds, pouring hot water over the filter of herbs.

“She thinks she’s in love with him.”

“Nana!”

“Oops, it’s just these pancakes.”

“Isn’t it unusual for someone of your generation never to have married? I don’t mean to pry, if you don’t want to talk about it, though that is part of what my book is going to address, I think. You know, how you were when you were young, and how you are now. Well, not you, specifically, of course.”

“Here’s your tea,” Bay says, frowning at Stella.

No one ever asks Nan about a husband. Bay hasn’t thought about it since she was a little kid and used to fantasize a wedding for Nan and a father for herself, until she decided she liked her family just fine with only the two of them.

Nan doesn’t seem to mind the question, however. In fact it is unclear if she heard it; she appears entirely absorbed in eating pancakes and doesn’t seem to notice that Stella sits across from her with an expression that reminds Bay of Nicholas stalking a bird.

Who
is
she, anyway? What is she doing here?
Bay wonders, suddenly eager to leave the warm kitchen, with its heavy scent of coffee and pancakes and an uncomfortable feeling she can’t quite name, the way the air feels before a storm, though it isn’t going to rain. “I’m gonna see if I can help,” she says, which no one seems to notice, so absorbed are they in their separate tasks: Nan eating her pancakes, Ruthie pouring batter onto the griddle in what appear to be perfect heart shapes, and Stella, her dark eyes slit, watching them both.

Bay carefully closes the screen door behind her.
It’s one of those days, a Sugar Day
, her Nana calls them, when the sky is bright blue and the sun polishes everything to a glow, like the sparkle of sugar-dusted frosting. She wishes she could enjoy the sweet feeling, but how can she with the entire back garden destroyed?

***

She runs down the little hill, remembering how easily she used to run to her special place, while now her feet hit the ground with a shock. When she stops in front of Mavis and Howard, they are both frowning. “This isn’t how it looks,” Howard says from his position among the ruin.

For some reason Bay feels like crying. She can’t imagine any good reason for Howard to be in the midst of this destruction, but having so often suffered cruel conclusions based on incomplete evidence, she decides to give him the benefit of a doubt.

“It isn’t how it looks,” she tells Mavis.

“Why don’t you go back inside, Basil? I need to talk to Harvey.”

“She can stay,” Howard says, casting a wary look at Mavis.

“Your nightie is bunched around your hip,” Mavis says.

Howard pulls at the gown, which, ruched high on his thigh, reveals the tiny hairs there, golden and pretty as saffron. In this light, the bruise on his cheek looks pronounced; Bay wonders if he is the sort of boy who always gets in trouble.

“Aren’t you a little old for this sort of game, Basil?” Mavis asks. “You have Nan fooled, with your tricks, but I am well aware that you are the culprit here.”

“Me?” Bay thinks it is bad enough to see the beautiful garden destroyed, the entire backyard a mess, all these flowers dying, all the pretty shoes her Nana so lovingly restored thrown about like trash. How many nights has Bay looked out her bedroom window at the fireflies blinking over these flowers? How many times has she leaned close to the screen to inhale the scent of home? It’s bad enough that this terrible thing happened, without being accused of doing it.

“I didn’t,” Bay says. “Why would I?”

“It’s obvious you’re an angry child,” Mavis says. “Maybe you’ve been given too much to deal with, Nan being the way she is.”

Bay makes a sound, a strange, abrupt noise somewhere between laugh and bark. Yes,
Nan
being
the
way
she
is
has been a challenge. But that’s not really Mavis’s business, is it? Or Howard’s. Bay realizes they are watching her as though she might do something terrible, which gives her a confused thrill.
Like
I’m one of the mean girls, like I have power
. It is almost funny, as is the look on Mavis’s face, her frown deepening until it morphs into a coughing fit that goes on so long Bay reluctantly steps closer to pat her on the back until the cough subsides.

“Are you all right?” Howard asks.

“No. I am not. I think that’s obvious. I want to talk to you,” she says, pointing a bony finger at him, but the cough returns.

Mavis shakes her head at Bay when she raises her hand for further back-patting, which she appreciates. Her palm burns for some reason.
Probably
just
another
one
of
the
freaky
things
about
me
, Bay thinks.

“I need to go back inside, but I don’t want you to leave until we have our conversation,” Mavis rasps to Howard in that way she has of making it seem like no isn’t even an option. She turns to wag her finger at Bay. “Don’t you break Nan’s heart, young lady. Do you hear me?”

Bay is tempted to think really mean things about Mavis, with her clown hair and drawn eyebrows, but she resists. Bay isn’t one of those mean girls, and she determined, some time ago, that she wouldn’t let all the meanness in the world make her so.

“Of course I won’t break my Nana’s heart.”

Mavis nods abruptly, turning to address Howard. “There’s pancakes for breakfast,” she says before lumbering across the yard toward the house, a green vine trailing from the heel of her dirty foot.

Bay kneels to the ground, trying to decide what to save in the damage around her. She didn’t realize how brittle she felt until she softens at the sight of Howard tenderly handling a white phlox. She had been right about him, after all. This would be a happy thought if it didn’t arrive with the unpleasant conclusion that some unknown person caused this damage. Remembering all the smashed pumpkins of her life, Bay wonders if this is going to become something seasonal. She reaches for a red lily, torn from its stem; already dying, it can’t possibly be saved.

“I would never hurt my Nana’s flowers,” she says softly, holding her breath until Howard answers, which seems to take a long time.

“I know. Hand me that sneaker, will you?”

Bay’s hand, gold with lily dust (a flower’s kiss, her Nana used to say) hovers above the dirt-streaked shoe when she realizes. Karl! Of course! This is one of the pair she left out for him. She picks up the shoe and hands it to Howard.

“Don’t you like pancakes?” she asks. “Ruthie makes the best ever.”

“I do,” Howard says, pouring dirt into the high-top and making a hole for the sad phlox.

“This’ll take all day,” Bay says. “You should go eat. Find out what Mavis wants to talk to you about.”

The phlox droops across the dirty shoelace like it’s depressed
,
Bay thinks.

“I do kind of have a headache,” Howard says. “But you can’t do this all by yourself.”

Bay shrugs. “I’m just going to see what I can get done before it gets too hot.”

“Is there maple syrup?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“Real maple syrup?”

Bay nods solemnly. This is a matter her Nana takes quite seriously, buying it by the gallon from that guy with the big mustache at the farmers’ market. “There is no other kind,” she says.

In spite of everything, when Howard smiles, Bay does too.
It’s as if our happiness is connected
, she thinks.

“Well, then.” Howard rises awkwardly, still adjusting to the nightgown. “If my dad could see me now,” he says, turning toward the house.