A Strange and Savage Garden Read online

  So many people came and went—neighbors, former teachers, childhood friends and classmates, now grown with kids of their own. Lauren felt a distant pang of loss upon seeing the children, though she told herself it had nothing to do with the phantom “memory” she’d experienced at her father’s graveside. She made sure the little ones had cookies and juice so they had something to occupy themselves while the grown-ups made sympathetic noises at one another.

  The sun was edging toward the horizon by the time Stephen Eardley stopped by the house.

  It was Grandmother who let him in, who called to Lauren to come see who was here. Lauren—who’d been in the kitchen getting another platter of cold cuts ready—wiped her hands on a dish towel and walked to the front door, annoyed. She’d had more than enough of hearing variations on “Sorry your father died” and “It’s good to see you again” and “Hope you’ve come home to stay,” and she was not looking forward to another round. But when she saw Stephen standing with Grandma in the foyer, she smiled.

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to come,” she said, surprised at herself. It had been eleven years since they’d last spoken—not so much as a single phone call in all that time—and here she was chastising him, even if she meant it affectionately.

  She wouldn’t have blamed him if he turned around and walked back out the door, but instead he returned her smile. “I figured I’d give things a chance to die down before I dropped by.”

  Anyone else might’ve suddenly become aware of their choice of words—die down—and stumble over themselves trying to apologize, but not Stephen. He knew Lauren understood what he meant, and she did.

  “I thought we might have a chance to talk.” He looked at Lauren’s grandmother, as if seeking her permission.

  She smiled. “Lilah, Mark and I can handle the few folks who are left. Why don’t you two take a walk and catch up a bit?” She turned to Lauren, a poorly suppressed twinkle in her eye. “If you’re feeling up to it, hon.”

  If her grandmother had been anyone else but Madelyn Carter, Lauren might’ve been astounded that she’d play matchmaker on the day of her son’s funeral, but Grandma was above all else a practical woman. Life was for the living, and all that. Besides, she’d always liked Stephen and had never made any secret of the fact that she thought Lauren and he made a good couple. And Lauren was hardly much better; it was her father they’d buried today, and now she was reacting to Stephen’s arrival as if he’d come to pick her up for a date. Maybe she was more like her grandmother than she thought. She found this notion both amusing and disturbing at the same time.

  “I think I am,” Lauren said.

  Grandma nodded, thanked Stephen for dropping by to pay his respects (even if he hadn’t exactly done so), then gently but firmly pushed Lauren outside and closed the door.

  They stood there for a few moments, just looking at each other and smiling. Stephen hadn’t changed much. Oh, he was twenty pounds or so heavier, but Lauren thought the weight looked good on him, made him seem more solid. His hair was the same chestnut brown, tousled and in need of trimming, as always. His eyes were the same striking green, though now there were the beginnings of laugh lines at the corners. His lips…

  Lips pressing against hers, dry and painful. Tongue shoving at her mouth, trying to pry open her lips and force its way inside. Hands on her shoulders, pinning her to the ground. Past his head, she sees a canopy of green blocking out the sky. He’s a skinny boy, shouldn’t be this strong, but his grip is like iron, his weight on her like lead, and no matter how hard she struggles, she can’t dislodge him. His erection jabs her naked belly like a blunt knife. She’s not what the other girls euphemistically refer to as “experienced”, so she has nothing to compare it to, but she knows his penis is big, much bigger than it should be, and she’s terrified of having that thing inside her, terrified what it will do to her once it’s in. She imagines ripping, tearing, blood and pain, so much pain.

  She opens her mouth to scream—not that it would do any good; there are only trees to hear, and the oak, elm and birch do not care what these two hairless animals do in their presence—and his tongue slithers inside, blocking her air, squirming down her throat as if it were a serpent. And maybe it is, maybe it is.

  As she struggles to breathe, she looks into his eyes and sees they’re no longer green. They now shine with yellow dancing light, blazing strong and pure as the fires of Creation itself.

  He shifts his weight and she feels the head of his penis probing her vagina, seeking entrance, and she wants to scream, needs to, but his tongue is still in her mouth, and then he enters her. Pain blossoms inside her, molten fire and glass shards, and she realizes that she only thought she needed to scream before.

  And then he begins to thrust…

  “Are you all right?”

  Lauren looked at Stephen for a moment, confused, unable to place his face. She realized she was sitting on the porch steps, Stephen beside her, an arm around her shoulders. He was holding her left hand, stroking the back with his thumb; it felt good. His eyes—his normal green eyes—were full of concern.

  When she didn’t answer, he went on. “Do you want to go inside and lie down? Maybe we should call the doctor.”

  She smiled. She remembered who he was now, Stephen Eardley, the best friend she’d ever had in her life, her first boyfriend, and, quite possibly, the only man she’d ever truly loved. She squeezed his hand to reassure him.

  “I’ll be okay. It’s…something that comes over me from time to time.” She stood, still holding on to Stephen’s hand and pulling him up with her. She wobbled a little, but she managed to stay on her feet.

  Stephen looked doubtful. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “C’mon, let’s take a walk, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  He smiled then. “All right, but promise me that if you start feeling sick again, we’ll come home and you’ll lie down.”

  “I promise.” She grinned. “I’ll even let you carry me all the way back.”

  Still holding hands, they descended the front steps and started down the sidewalk. Lauren glanced back at the house once and thought she saw someone—Grandma, most likely—peeking between the curtains. But when she turned again for a second look, the curtains were closed.

  Inside the house, Madelyn Carter walked away from the window and headed for the kitchen. There weren’t that many people left. Most of the sympathy-wishers had already paid their visit, but there were still a half-dozen people or so remaining, some who’d come late, others who’d stuck around because they had nothing better to do. They stood still now, every one, quiet, arms at their sides, gazes empty and faces expressionless—including Madelyn’s daughter-in-law and her grandson.

  She walked past them all as if they were nothing more than furniture, enjoying the silence. Normally, she’d let them do as they would: move about, talk, eat, whatever they liked. But today had been a busy day. She was tired and her side pained her worse than usual. She rubbed it without thinking, her hand moving over the contours of whatever it was that had been growing inside her over the last few months. The pain sapped her energy and concentration, making it harder for her to maintain everything day in and day out. She had to be extra-careful to keep things just so. She’d slipped up twice already today as it was—once in the kitchen before the funeral service when Lauren had caught a glimpse of Lilah as a stick-and-mud golem, and again in church when the windows had suddenly become open.

  And wasn’t that an interesting little development? Because, unless Madelyn missed her guess (and she never did), the windows had suddenly become open because Lauren had wanted them that way.

  She went to the fridge, opened it and retrieved a bottle of beer that, if Lauren had been here, would’ve looked like a Coke. Or would it? Madelyn wondered. She took a pack of cigarettes (which to anyone else would’ve resembled a deck of cards) from a drawer, along
with a lighter, then sat with a grunt (goddamned side!) at the table. She twisted the cap off the beer, took a long drink, then lit a cigarette, drew smoke into her lungs and let it curl out of her mouth slowly. Things were going better than she’d hoped. Much better. Of course, that was no guarantee of success, but then Madelyn Carter knew better than most that there were no guarantees in this life. Not yet anyway.

  She took another sip of beer, and did her best to ignore the dull ache in her side as she sat and thought, her cigarette slowly burning down to the filter.

  “It’s funny.”

  “What?” Stephen asked.

  “My father is dead. I sat through the service, watched his coffin being lowered into the ground, listened as dozens of people came to the house to tell me how sorry they were. But I don’t feel anything.”

  The western horizon was tinted orange, leaving the rest of the sky a darkening purple. A breeze stirred tree limbs, causing leaves to rustle against one another. It was cooler now, still warm enough to raise a light sheen of sweat on your skin, but pleasant. She might have been content to be walking hand in hand with Stephen past houses with the lights on, curtains open, family sitting at dining tables and in front of TV sets, going about their lives. If it hadn’t been for the reason she’d come home… If it hadn’t been for the hallucinations.

  “You’re just numb, that’s all. It hasn’t hit you yet.”

  “Maybe.” But she knew that wasn’t it. How could she explain to Stephen that she had never felt close to any of her family—except Grandma, that is? She didn’t fully understand it herself. The entire time she was growing up, her mother and father had been good to her. Loved her, took care of her, provided for her, nursed her through illnesses, taught her, helped her grow into the woman she had become. But she’d always felt a distance from her mother, father and brother, as if there were some vital connection missing. Sometimes she’d fantasized that she was adopted, that someday another man and woman would knock on the door of Grandma’s house (her mom and dad had never gotten a house of their own), introduce themselves as her real parents and say they’d come to take her back to her real home.

  Of course, that fantasy had never come true, but this feeling of disconnectedness had made it much easier for Lauren to leave Trinity Falls when she was seventeen, and it had kept her from calling more than a few times in the years since. She supposed that made her a terrible daughter and sister, but she couldn’t help the way she felt—or rather, didn’t feel. She’d long ago chalked it up as yet another personality defect, one more item on her Lauren is Well and Truly Fucked Up List.

  Her relationship with Grandma was an entirely different story, though. Madelyn Carter was the center of her household, and sometimes, it seemed to Lauren, of the entire town. She was the matriarch of the Carter clan in the truest sense of the term, guiding her family in all matters, sometimes with a gentle touch, other times with a firm hand—whichever was needed at the time. It was Grandma who made the rules and served up the punishments, who praised and criticized, motivated and bullied. It was her arms you ran to for comfort when you were hurt, and her hands you ran from when you were due a whipping. Lauren felt no indifference toward her: she both loved and hated the woman in equal measures, the two emotions so bound together that she was no longer certain they even counted as separate feelings; they’d blended completely, fused into a new emotion for which Lauren didn’t have a word.

  Though she felt guilty for thinking it, part of her wished it had been Grandma that they’d put in the ground today.

  “So what have you been up to for the last eleven years?” Stephen’s tone was light, but there was a tension beneath the words, as if he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know. And was there some resentment mixed in as well? Maybe, Lauren thought.

  “I didn’t have any sort of plan when I left. I just…needed to be somewhere else, you know?” She hoped he wouldn’t ask her to explain further because she couldn’t. She didn’t even remember the first time she’d realized that she no longer knew why she’d packed her suitcase in the middle of the night, “borrowed” Grandma’s ’75 Chevy Nova (which Grandma never drove and kept parked in the garage, but always with fresh oil and a full tank of gas) and headed west. She just had. One more mystery to add to the multitude in her life.

  “I ended up in California, believe it or not.” She smiled. “I guess I kept driving until I ran out of land. I moved around the first couple of years before I finally settled in a little town called Santa Margarita.”

  Stephen smiled. “Don’t tell me you turned into a beach bunny.”

  She smiled back and shook her head. “Santa Margarita isn’t on the coast; it’s kind of in the center of the state. It’s not the So-Cal you see on TV all the time, but it’s not a bad place to live.”

  Black shapes darted and swooped in the air above them: bats feeding on night insects.

  “Well, if you’re not a beach bunny, what do you do there?”

  She would have loved to tell him that she was an artist or an architect, or maybe even a landscaper. But the truth was much more mundane. “I work as a cashier in a grocery store. Been there for nine years.”

  She must’ve sounded a bit embarrassed because he gave her hand a squeeze. “Hey, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m the assistant manager at Hal’s Hardware. A job’s a job, right?”

  “I suppose so.” Still, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she hadn’t done much with her life, that she really hadn’t changed anything by fleeing to the West Coast. If she’d remained in Trinity Falls, her life would’ve turned out pretty much the same. Better, maybe. At least Stephen was here. Who knows? If she’d stayed, they might’ve gotten married, had a couple kids…

  “Do you have anyone…special back home?”

  It felt strange hearing him refer to Santa Margarita as her home, even though she’d lived there over a decade. “Not really. I’ve dated a few guys, gotten serious once or twice, but it never worked out.” That was putting it mildly. Lauren was an absolute disaster in the relationship department. She had what the various therapists she’d seen over the years referred to as “intimacy issues”, which, in layman’s terms, meant she hated having sex. She could do it when she forced herself, but she never enjoyed it, and she’d never had an orgasm, not even during the few times she’d tried to masturbate (at a therapist’s suggestion). Her “issues” had gotten worse over the last few years. As soon as she got physically close to a man—progressing beyond simple hand-holding, cuddling and kissing—she experienced a rapid pulse, shortness of breath and an overwhelming feeling that she was going to die if she let things go any further. One therapist had recommended she take anti-anxiety medication to help forestall these panic attacks, and she’d tried it, but it hadn’t helped much.

  And of course there were the nightmares… What man likes being wakened in the middle of the night by a screaming woman who can’t remember what she’d been dreaming about that had terrified her so much?

  So Lauren had given up on dating, given up on therapy, had pretty much given up on everything except working her mindless job at the grocery store day in and day out while the years crawled by, with nothing more to look forward to each evening than sitting on her couch in front of the TV set, staring at the empty, flickering images on the screen.

  But now she was back in Trinity Falls, walking with Stephen, the last threads of daylight fading as night claimed the sky, crickets chirping from the safety of grass and bushes. And though she’d been brought back by her father’s death, for the first time in years, she felt relaxed and comfortable, at ease with herself and the world around her. For good or ill, she was home.

  “How about you?” she asked. “Any lucky girl in Trinity manage to get her hooks into you yet?”

  He smiled, his teeth a smear of white in the deepening gloom. “Not really. There was a woman over in Ash Creek that I was seeing for a while, but nothing came
of it.”

  So neither of them was married or had kids, and from the way things were going, it seemed they both still had feelings for each other. During the long drive from California, she’d fantasized about her reunion with Stephen, had imagined a dozen different scenarios, everything from him professing his undying love and asking her to marry him, to him calling her a selfish, thoughtless bitch for leaving town eleven years ago without so much as saying goodbye. But this—walking hand in hand as night fell and insects sang—was better than anything she’d fantasized because it was real.

  “You didn’t keep it.”

  “What?”

  “The mustache. Don’t you remember? When I…when I left, you were trying to grow one.” She grinned. “Trying being the operative word.” Stephen had been a teenager then, and the best his upper lip could manage was an irregular patch of brown-black hair that was too soft to be called whiskers. She hadn’t teased him about it then, though. At least, not much. She’d loved him and hadn’t wanted to dent his male ego. Besides, she kind of liked the way his lip hair had tickled when they kissed.

  “It’s funny, but of all the things I missed about Trinity Falls, I think that scraggly little mustache of yours—” She glanced at him to gauge his reaction to her words and broke off mid-sentence, for there, nestled comfortably between his nose and upper lip, was a full, thick mustache. A man’s mustache, the kind that teenage Stephen could’ve only dreamed of growing.

  Lauren stopped walking, forcing Stephen to stop as well. He frowned and cocked his head in that way he had. “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, unable to answer. How could she tell him the problem—that he now had a mustache when only a second ago he’d been clean-shaven?

  She reached out with trembling fingers, intending to touch the mustache, afraid to find out that it might be real—and equally afraid to find out that it wasn’t. But either way, she had to know.