Garden of Stones (27 page)

“Stop it. Stop it,” Garvey said roughly. “Use this, for God’s sake.”

Lucy backed out, aware of how she must have looked, prone on the floor. Her skirt had ridden up, and she tugged it back down, embarrassment flooding her face. Something touched the top of her hand. A long stick with a metal hook at the end. Its point was dull, but it looked like a miniature version of Blackbeard’s arm, an image that came from an illustrated copy of Peter Pan that she had once owned.

“
Use
it.”

Lucy accepted the tool Garvey was holding out to her. She pushed it under the cabinet and hooked the end around the white object and coaxed it forward. It rolled easily over the floor, and in seconds it was in her palm, smooth and cool against her skin.

It was an eye. Made of glass, only half an inch across, perfectly colored with a blue iris, a coal-black pupil. Like the eyes that belonged to the beautiful doll Lucy had received for her eighth birthday, the doll that had been given away as they prepared for evacuation.

But without the benefit of long-fringed lashes, without the closing plastic lid, the eye looked naked, almost...obscene. Lucy didn’t want to touch the thing. She held it out to Garvey, brushing his fingers with hers. He seized it and jerked away from her as though even that slight touch repulsed him.

“What is it for?” she asked.

He didn’t respond, but began moving things around on the worktable. He found a little ceramic dish and dropped the glass sphere into it; it made a tiny ping. A pleasant sound.

“Are you almost finished with your...squirrel?” It was a guess, based on what she could see of the creature taking shape on the fragile form.

Garvey turned on her, his fury unabated. “Does it look finished?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I just thought...”

He picked up the animal by the wooden base to which it was clamped, and thrust it at Lucy with the mouth facing up. The teeth were set into some sort of clay or modeling compound, and the rough outline of a tongue and the roof of the mouth had been sculpted inside the form. Over that assemblage, the creature’s lips were peeled back wider and farther than Lucy would have thought possible—a nightmare scream, with the snout bunched up under wrinkled flesh.

“There’s ten, twelve hours left on this, easy.”

Lucy felt nauseous, and wondered what would happen if she were to vomit here in this room. The odor would get into the floorboards. Garvey would hate her even more. She swallowed down hard.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, whispering.

“You don’t even know why she sent you over here, do you?” Garvey said, placing the thing gently on the worktable. “You have no idea what she means for you to do.”

Lucy stared at the floor, the distance between her shoes and his chair. She felt her pulse in her throat. Her fingers touched the key in her pocket.

“My
sister...
”

More time passed. The smell in the room held a very faint, odd note, mostly unpleasant, the smell of meat left out in the sun. But Lucy’s stomach had settled back down and her breath came more easily.

“Look at me.”

She did, briefly. Garvey’s expression was hard, but Lucy couldn’t help noticing that his hair was soft and silky, his face smooth from his shave.

“
Look
at me, I said.”

Lucy forced herself to keep her gaze on him. She focused on the space between his nose and mouth.

“Do you think any woman could want this? Could want
me?
” Garvey demanded. “
Do
you?”

Lucy ground her teeth against each other, hard enough to make her head pound. What was she supposed to say? Did he not see her standing in front of him, wrecked and ravaged?

“You want to know about what happened to me? How I ended up like this? There isn’t much to tell, unfortunately. Boom. A shell blew up, they fired on us. I didn’t feel anything. I just knew I couldn’t move. I figured I was dead or almost dead. Guy next to me, he went down with his guts hanging out of his stomach. I watched him trying to stuff them back in. He was two feet away, his hands covered with blood, he kept pushing at himself, trying to talk. After a while it was just me and him, everyone else was dead or went on ahead. It was so...quiet.”

“Did he die?”

Garvey shook his head slowly. “What—what the hell kind of question is that? A shell took out half his guts. The rest were—it was like at the butcher. Picture a string of sausages. Can you do that? Lucy? He. Died. With. His. Hands.
In. His. Own. Bowels
.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered again, but she wasn’t sorry. She was angry. Did he think she had never seen anything horrifying? “But
you
lived.”

Garvey’s eyes narrowed and his lips thinned. “You’re done here. Get
out
—I’m not asking again.”

“Or what?” She was trembling, her insides hot with shame and anger and emotions she couldn’t name.

He snatched something from his workbench, metal glinting, and brandished it at her. A knife—curved, wicked, at home in his hand. Lucy jumped, more from surprise than from any real threat. And then she backed away. Two paces, three, all the way to the door. Her hand groped for the knob behind her; she never took her eyes off Garvey.

He would never cut her, she was sure of it. But something dangerous had showed itself nonetheless, and its energy arced between them like lightning on a lake.

31

It was Lucy’s job to clean the downstairs bathroom in the big house every day, since nearly every guest used it when checking in, a practice made necessary by the long drive to Lone Pine from Fresno or Bakersfield. Lucy knew every inch of the room by heart. Each day she wiped down the mirror, faucet and sink. She placed the cake of soap on the windowsill while she cleaned the porcelain soap dish that jutted from the wall. She swabbed out the toilet and wiped every surface.

Still, as she sat in the tub full of water as hot as she could stand it, she imagined that every surface teemed with germs and filth. Bacteria were oddly harmless-looking things in the textbook photos—little tubes like so many Mike and Ike candies—but Lucy knew they could poison you. Who knew what bacteria were waiting to burrow down your neckline or into your eyes and ears, to tunnel through your pores into your organs, your brain?

Only in the water did she feel safe, despite the heat making sweat trickle down the back of her neck. She washed with a rough rag and the lye soap Leo used to remove motor oil from his hands, scrubbing until her skin stung and turned the red of an overripe tomato. It took a long time for her to feel clean enough, and then she stayed as still as she could in the water, trying to feel nothing at all. At one point Mrs. Sloat knocked on the door, but after Lucy ignored her long enough she finally went away.

Lucy drowsed, the bathwater lapping gently over her stomach, her breasts. Her arms floated, her hair swirled around her face. She sank lower, her ears under the surface; only her nose, lips and eyes remained exposed, and she listened to the groaning of the house, magnified by the water. Only when every bit of heat had left the water, and her knees, bobbing above the surface like pale islands, were pocked with gooseflesh, did Lucy finally get out of the tub.

She put on clean clothes and used her damp towel to pick up the dirty clothes, and took them to the laundry. Sharon and Ruby had arrived and the aroma of fried onions filled the air, but Lucy avoided the kitchen, slipped out the front door, fetched the cleaning cart and got to work.

Lucy welcomed the ache in her muscles from washing Garvey’s walls the other day. By the time she finished the last room, she was out of breath, sweat dampening her dress and dripping in her eyes. She hadn’t bothered with gloves, and her hands were raw and itching. Her scars throbbed, her whole face pulsing with the rhythm of her shame. But at least she had managed to keep her thoughts at bay.

It reminded her of something Sister Jeanne had told her when her pain was at its worst, when she’d stopped screaming only because she lost her voice. Jeanne told her she had known a wounded soldier who described his pain as a burning sheet of foil, a thousand degrees, curling from the heat. When the pain was greatest, the foil glowed as though the sun was shining down directly on it. When the pain lessened the surface seemed to dull, like tin or tarnished silver. Jeanne said this was as good a way to think about it as any, and that Lucy should practice envisioning her pain this way, folding this sheet of foil into a tiny square using only her mind. That she should fold it over, and over again, and over and over until she made it small enough to bear.

Lucy dragged the bucket to the backyard one final time, drenching the parched soil around the roses before she went to the fence at the edge of the forest and sank to her knees, exhausted from the afternoon’s cleaning. Weeds and bits of dead grass poked her knees. She didn’t care. The pain was everywhere. It was in the pads of her fingers and the rough ends of her hair, the dry skin of her knees and heels and the soft flesh of her stomach. It was inside—where her organs were, the muscles and veins and fat.

She shifted from her knees to her haunches. The buzzing of insects had swelled as the sun grew high in the sky. The sounds of the meal—conversations in the dining room, kitchen sounds, cars pulling into and out of the parking lot on the other side of the building—seemed safely distant. No one would search for her here. No one would search for her at all. She was neither expected nor wanted until morning, and if she didn’t return at all until then, she doubted anyone would care.

After a while, Lucy allowed her eyes to flutter closed. She dozed, in between waking and sleep, listening to the night sounds. An insect buzzed near her ear. A rustling in the brush signaled some small animal startled into flight. Sister Jeanne had once given her a prayer card bearing a picture of Saint Francis, surrounded by small creatures—a doe, a pair of rabbits, ducks with ducklings. Lucy wished for animals to encircle her now, to beg with their dumb eyes for her caress, for her kind word. There had to be something in this world that needed her.

Later, much later, the last of the cars pulled out of the parking lot. Sharon’s truck belched exhaust as it trundled into the road. Then the house was quiet. Afternoon faded to evening as Lucy dragged herself farther into the woods, sitting with her back against a tree. She was hungry, but the thought of meeting Garvey or Mrs. Sloat or even Leo in the hall was too much to bear. The light in the upstairs rooms went out. A little later, so did Garvey’s. The moon was three-quarters full but weak, its light thin and treacherous. Lucy picked her way with care across the backyard, avoiding by memory the biggest holes, the clothesline poles. Her keys were in her pocket, but the back door was unlocked. How quickly the house had adapted to her; she had become the one who locked up at night.

To her room, sliding her feet along the waxed floor. Hands trailing the wall, like Mrs. Sloat. Silent; no one in the house would know she was there.

Her door was open a few inches. Lucy wondered if Sharon had looked inside. She would not have found the loose board, the stash of money, but she might have been surprised at what Lucy had accomplished. It still smelled strongly of bleach. That was a comfort as Lucy shucked off her ruined dress and slipped her nightgown over her arms. Tomorrow she would wash the dress, the rags, even the nightgown, and she would bathe again. And again.

Lucy fought the images that flickered at the edges of her mind—the smooth glass eye rolling in her palm, the anguish in Garvey’s eyes—but she was able to keep them away.
No,
as she breathed in.
No, no, no,
as she exhaled.

* * *

The next time Lucy went to Garvey’s room, to collect his laundry, the door was locked. When Lucy tried her key in the door, it wouldn’t budge. Garvey had lodged something—a dresser, a chair?—against the door.

When Lucy reported back, Mrs. Sloat’s lips narrowed and she fumed for a moment before disappearing up the stairs. A moment later, she came back with Leo, puffy faced and sleepy looking—and holding a rifle.

“Don’t worry, he’s not shooting anybody,” Mrs. Sloat smirked when Lucy gasped. “Only talking some sense into my brother.”

Still, Lucy was relieved when half an hour passed with no shots being fired. Leo returned first and glared at his wife with disgust as he passed her in the kitchen. “Last time I do your dirty work,” he muttered. When Lucy tried the door again later, it was open—but the apartment was empty.

Lucy got to work. After starting the laundry, she began dusting the tops of the shelves, the objects that Garvey couldn’t reach. It was almost lunchtime when she finished, and she was carefully arranging a tray of what looked like tiny bottles of paint when the door opened and Garvey rolled into the room.

Lucy braced herself to be yelled at, but Garvey didn’t even look at her. His chair was dusty, and a few wisps of weeds were caught in the spokes. Had he really tried to take the thing out across the yard—into the woods? Lucy realized then just how trapped he really was: he couldn’t even go through the forest to the creek, or to the path that led to grazing land on the ranch across the street, as Lucy had on occasion when she wanted to be alone.

The wheels tracked dirt across the floor Lucy had just swept, but she said nothing, holding her breath to see what Garvey would do. The last time she had stood in this room, he’d drawn a knife on her and practically chased her out.

He pulled something from his pocket and laid it on the worktable: a plump gray-blue quail whose brown belly was streaked with white. Lucy had no idea if he’d shot it or trapped it or bought it or even found it dead in some sunlit vale, but as he prodded it gently with a finger, sliding its small, pretty body this way and that, she knew instinctively that he was figuring out where to make the first cut. After a few unhurried moments of consideration, with his left hand he picked up the curious knife with which he had threatened her, the one with the blade shaped like a beak.

Lucy ventured closer, unable to resist. She peered over his shoulder at the bird. In the light from Garvey’s gooseneck work lamp, it looked almost alive—as though it had died only moments ago, as though its blood was still warm. Garvey smoothed its white-tipped feathers tenderly, caressing the delicate ruff at its throat, and Lucy felt the pulsing excitement of discovery, a ravenous curiosity about the gateway between life and death through which the tiny creature had passed.