Garden of Stones (30 page)

The chilly smile never left Mary’s face. She picked up her suitcase and started walking down the sidewalk toward the platform. Lucy stumbled, trying to keep up.

“He was always the golden boy,” Mary said. “Everyone loved him. He should have died in the war. But he came back, and now he has to pay the price.”

* * *

Once they were settled in San Francisco, an edgy peace took hold between them. There was a library branch a few blocks from the rooming house, and Lucy spent most of her afternoons in the reading room, losing herself in any story that could make her forget for a while. Mary left for hours at a time, but Lucy wasn’t sure where she went. Sometimes she’d glimpse her staring into shop windows or buying a pastry at a bakery. Lucy was amazed that in a city as busy as San Francisco, she would ever see Mary at all; it seemed as though the crowds and streetcars and traffic would swallow them both up. But late every evening, they both found their way back to the room, to another meal spent mostly in silence, another night when Lucy woke to find the city’s gilded glow seeping into their room, casting its frenetic energy across the worn carpet like rice spilled from a jar.

Sometimes, when Lucy couldn’t sleep, she went up to the roof and stared out at all the tall buildings, the sky hazy with the glow of the city. She sat so still that the pigeons, unsettled by her arrival, eventually touched down and flocked around her. As the weeks passed, they learned to anticipate her arrival, especially after she started bringing them morsels left over from dinner.

Sometimes, the words Lucy whispered to the pigeons were the only ones she uttered all day, other than the terse conversations she had with Mary. The frequency of her visits with the pigeons became a barometer for her loneliness. A hundred times, Lucy thought about running away. But where would she go? She had nothing, not a dime to her name. Mary had known about her secret hiding place all along, allowing Lucy to keep adding coins and bills to her stash until the night before they left, never letting on that she knew. Now she kept their accounts at the rooming house and diner, and stored her money in a cloth wallet that she wore around her neck, even while she slept.

There was no way to escape. And even if she could, the penalty for leaving was one that Lucy could never bear. She wouldn’t give Mary a reason to hurt Garvey further. So she waited. She just had to endure a little longer. And endurance was one thing Lucy knew how to do well.

Mary told everyone they met that Lucy was her ward. No one asked questions. The people here were nothing like Lucy’s old neighbors in Los Angeles. They were not friendly. They seemed willing to take Mary’s explanations at face value, and if they didn’t seem repulsed by Lucy’s damaged face, they didn’t seem the least bit interested either. Lucy watched the other girls in the building grow bigger and bigger until one day they simply disappeared, and she would know they had given birth and gone back to whatever lives they’d had before, or whatever new ones they were able to carve out for themselves.

* * *

Finally, the baby arrived, making remarkably little fuss during her arrival, as though she knew her conception had already caused enough problems.

A few nights later, they packed their suitcases. In the morning, Mary would go to the train station for the first leg of her journey back home, but before she left she would give Lucy the money she owed her and the key to her new apartment, a shabby studio near Mission Dolores. She seemed surprised by Lucy’s decision to keep Patricia—Lucy had chosen the baby’s name from a little booklet one of the girls had left in the rooming house parlor—but also indifferent. For her part, Lucy’s decision had been made after one glimpse of Patty’s tiny mouth, her black eyes bright with life, her little hands shaped like starfish. Besides, she could never have left Patty at the orphanage, knowing that the staff wouldn’t try to place a baby with mixed blood. Lucy refused to doom Patty to the life she herself had narrowly escaped.

Lucy had little to offer, but it would have to be enough. She would find a job, someone to watch Patty while she worked; their needs were few. She would take care of Patty and she would not be afraid and she would not allow fate to swallow them as it had her own mother. She would survive as she always survived.
I can,
Lucy had whispered to herself the first time she held Patty in her arms.
I can
.

* * *

Lucy waited until Mary was asleep to make one last visit to the roof. The baby was asleep and would, if the experience of the last few nights served, remain asleep for at least a couple of hours, more time than Lucy needed.

Lucy climbed the twisting staircase, out into the drizzling, misty December night. Fog obscured the buildings all around, creating glowing coronas around the windows where lights burned all night long. Lucy looked out over the rooftops, across the financial district, toward the sliver of the bay that she could see on clear days. In the tenement a block down Franklin, she imagined figures silhouetted against windows, and wondered, as she had every night of the past three months, what Garvey was doing at that moment back in Lone Pine.

Lucy took her customary place on the parapet at the roof’s edge and immediately the moist air surged into her ears, her eyes, her lungs. It was a small inconvenience. She wouldn’t be here long. She dug in her pocket for the packet of saltine crackers she had taken from the diner. She crumpled one in her fist, shaking out the crumbs at her feet. It took only a matter of seconds for them to come, four of them this time, but there was only one she wanted.

A large bird perched near her feet, with wings checkered in blue-gray and mottling on his smooth white head. Lucy couldn’t be sure he was a male, but Garvey had taught her a few things to look for—overall size, size of head, relative aggression with the other birds.

Tonight, the bird came strutting toward her, his feathers sleek and glossy, head angled jauntily, emitting his warbling coo, repeating the same stanza over and over. Lucy broke another cracker and set a piece in the middle of her palm. He hopped into her hand while his companions cawed and circled.

As he finished the last bit, Lucy stroked his crown down to the nape. He’d allowed this intimacy only for the last few weeks. Lucy had worked hard to get him this far, because she knew their time together would be ending soon.

The bird seemed to lean into Lucy’s caress, his smooth, pretty head curved against her fingers. His warble softened to a purr, and Lucy wrapped her fingers tenderly around his body, feeling his heartbeat under his warm breast.

Then she began to squeeze. She meant to smother him, to keep squeezing until he lay limp and lifeless in her hand. She had planned this for weeks: her final gift to Garvey. She would beg Mary to take him back, wrapped in a napkin, a thing of beauty for the joy Garvey had given her, preserved forever in death to remind him that they had each loved, once, no matter what came after. She’d imagined Garvey preparing the bird’s perfect pelt, arranging his wings in flight, suspending him in the room where they had spent so many happy hours together. When Garvey looked at the bird, he would think of her.

She squeezed, and the bird blinked his bright, glassy eyes—and suddenly her hand went limp and tears came to her eyes. She couldn’t do it.

He bobbed his head, no worse for wear, and hopped down onto her knee and from there to the asphalt roof. He pecked at a speck, lost interest and wandered off, joining the other birds who fluttered and jostled a few feet away. A moment later they all swooped into the air at some invisible signal, the air filled for a second with the thrum of their beating wings. Then they flew away as one undulating cloud, disappearing below the rooftop, dipping and diving into the city’s canyons below.

Lucy stood and dusted the cracker crumbs from her hands. It was all right. She and Garvey needed no mementos of each other. They had healed each other, sealing over the hurts they’d borne before and guarding against the ones to come.

* * *

When she walked down the stairs to their room, Lucy heard raised voices inside.

She threw the door open and was astonished to see Garvey in the green armchair next to the window. For a second she thought he was a vision, a miracle. But he was real. He had come for her. She raced across the room and knelt in front of him, put her head in his lap and wrapped her arms around his waist, sobbing his name.

He shoved her violently to the floor. Her chin hit first, jarring her head, and as she struggled to sit up, her vision wavered. “What—”

Garvey was gripping the sides of his chair, his face distorted with rage. “Don’t touch me,” he muttered. “Don’t.”

“I had to tell him.” Mary was sitting on her bed holding the baby, who was awake and blinking. “About Hal.”

“Hal?”
Garvey demanded. Up close, Lucy could see that he hadn’t shaved today, something that hadn’t happened in all the time she had known him. His beard came in thick and ginger-brown. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows despite the chill in the room, and the tendons in his arms bulged as though he couldn’t contain his fury. “All this time, it was
him?
”

Lucy gaped, at a loss for words. In the corner, she saw a burly stranger standing with his arms folded, watching silently.

“How...how did you find us?” Lucy asked.

“Sharon called when she got the telegram.” Garvey sounded sickened. “You really thought she’d keep it from me, Mary? I’ve known her my whole life.”

Mary shrugged, jostling Patty, who squeaked in protest. “It wasn’t her business. I paid her to pick us up, that’s all.”

“I guess some people aren’t for sale, even for
your
money.”

“Garvey, listen to me,” Lucy implored. “There’s nothing—has never been anything—with Hal.”

“Think hard before you say anything else,” Mary snapped at her. “Hal’s just a dumb kid. Everyone will understand what happened between you and him. You didn’t mean anything to him. He’ll have forgotten you by his twentieth birthday. But if you try to convince people that Garvey...”

Lucy looked from one sibling to the other: Mary calculating and cold, Garvey’s face contorted in anguish. It was all she could do to stop herself from crawling to him, begging him to listen. “But I
never
—”

Mary cut her off. “You want to keep this baby, that’s your choice. But before you say one more word, understand this. If you insist on telling some crazy story about you and Garvey, if you bring a baby back to Lone Pine and say it’s his, he stands to lose everything. The age of consent in this state is eighteen—he could go to jail. You think I can’t prove how old you are, Lucy? I’ve known since the day you came. It’s in your
papers,
Leo was just too dumb to ever read them. And all I need to do is tell the lawyer.”

The room was silent except for the baby’s whimpering. “Garvey,” Lucy whispered, pleading.

“Is it true?” he demanded. “Just tell me that—only that.”

Lucy could read the hurt, the uncertainty in his eyes, and longed to tell him it would be all right. They could stay here in the city, the law would never pursue them this far. They could turn their back on the motel, the house, the inheritance, and be a family—the two of them and the baby.

As soon as the beautiful fantasy flickered to life it was snuffed out. She and Garvey had been dealt harsh hands. They were broken—he couldn’t even walk the stairs to this room on his own. He couldn’t ride a streetcar or go up a flight of steps. He’d never find work. And every stranger who saw her face recoiled. They would never survive here together.

She blinked back tears, and her fingers twitched with longing to reach for him, to touch him. But at the last minute she twisted her hands into fists, and got to her feet. She turned her back on him before she spoke.

“It’s true. I’m sorry, Garvey. The baby’s Hal’s.”

“I don’t believe you.” His voice, cracked and broken.

Lucy took Patty from Mary and buried her face in the baby’s warm neck, already as familiar as her own skin. “Believe what you want, but Hal and I... It just happened.”

Mary waited, quiet for once, the amusement wiped from her expression. The baby suckled air, whimpering, her small and perfect mouth brushing against Lucy’s cheek.

“Come get me, boy,” Garvey demanded, and the young man stirred from the corner of the room. “Get me the hell out of this place.”

Lucy kept her face pressed to the baby, her eyes shut tight, to give him this last bit of dignity.

There was nothing else she could give.

35

San Francisco
Friday, June 9, 1978

By five-thirty, the police station had emptied out dramatically, and Patty had to fight a sense of panic that her mother was going to end up spending the night in jail. Or wherever they were keeping her.

Patty and Jay had been drinking coffee from a machine and sharing a packet of cheese–peanut butter crackers when the attorney came out to the waiting room to give them the news that the case had been dropped.

“There’ll be paperwork,” he said, tugging his tie loose, “but essentially that’s it.”

“I don’t understand,” Jay said. Relief made Patty feel a little dizzy, but she forced herself to stay composed. She hadn’t told Jay about going to see Van Dorn. She’d given him a condensed version of what her mother had told her about Manzanar, leaving out the part about the abuse her grandmother had suffered, about the man she had killed. Talking about it in the police waiting area felt like tempting the Fates, and Patty told herself she would share the whole story later, when she and Jay had some privacy. But as the attorney explained that Forrest’s death was going to be ruled a suicide, Patty wondered if it would be better just to try to forget the whole horrible story. She thought about the albums hidden underneath her wedding dress and realized that she could simply get rid of them, destroy the evidence. Maybe her mother had been right to try to shield Patty from the darkness of the past.

When the attorney left, Jay pulled Patty into a hug. “See?” he said, smoothing her hair back from her face. “Nothing to worry about. All a big misunderstanding. Your poor mom—I hope she isn’t too upset.”