The Garden of Dead Dreams (12 page)

He pulled a taper candle from a box and stared at it, twirling it between his fingers. “Oh yes, even we visitors get a room—a desk, an adequate view, a bathroom down the hall. Buchanan didn’t want to make things too comfortable for the drifters, of course. But I’ve never envied the poor bastard residents with their fancy suites, stuck in the drizzle for a year. I’ll only be here a few more days. It’s hunger that feeds the artist’s soul, not a paycheck.” He laughed and the skin around his eyes pinched into their familiar creases. “Hate to break it to you, but that’s the only lesson you need, and you didn’t have to pay twenty-five thousand dollars to frolic in Buchanan’s little Writerland to learn it. Spend every second of your life hungry—esurient.”

“Esurient,” Etta repeated. She had no idea what it meant, but she liked the sound of it on her lips. A poet’s word. Robert North didn’t look like he’d ever been hungry. He looked like he’d always had money and good looks and talent. A boarding school education. A mother who played bridge at a country club. A father who yachted. Fans who spent hours staring at his picture.

“Maybe they like teaching.” It was Carl’s voice, husky and twanging. Etta had almost forgotten he was in the room, and her pulse hammered into her chest at the memory of his breath in her hair, his lips on hers.

Robert North laughed again, but this time it was like an afterthought. “Oh right, that’s why people do the things they do. They enjoy them. Silly me.” He dropped the candle into the box, and picked up a framed black-and-white photo that Etta had found in one of Olivia’s desk drawers. She had long dark hair and dark eyes like Olivia’s. Olivia’s mother?

A sound came from Robert North’s mouth. Etta stepped closer. Had he said something?

Carl stepped between them and strode toward a box next to the door, his gait long and relaxed. “I reckon I should get started here if I want to make it to Jackson and back before the sun sets.” He knelt, clutched the bottom of a box, and heaved it to his chest.

“Can I keep you company?” Robert North didn’t lift his gaze from the photo. “On the drive.”

“All right.” Carl stepped outside, his figure long in the doorway. “Long as I can pick the music.”

“As long we can stop at that dark joint on the way back for some whisky and companionship.” He looked up and his dark eyes flashed with sunlight as he met Etta’s gaze. “Not everyone’s lucky enough to find love out here.”

Etta’s cheeks flashed with heat again. Robert North dropped his gaze to the floor. He was staring at the story by M.K. Lowther, which was splayed across the floor next to Etta’s bed. “Mat,” he whispered. “Where did you get this?” He reached for the papers.

“I’ve got to go.” Etta lunged toward the papers and plucked them off the floor, hugging them to her chest as she retrieved her bag from next to the door. They felt delicate crushed against her bare arm, tenuous.

Etta jogged down the stairs and around the truck. Halfway across the clearing, she spun around and called goodbye to Carl, who was sliding a box into the pickup bed. She wasn’t sure if he heard.

“Mat,” Etta said aloud as she rounded the curve toward the lodge. No, not mat. Matt. Etta broke into a jog. M. must stand for Matt. But who was Matt Lowther?

* * *

The air in the great room was cool, and it sparkled with beams of sunlight and dust particles. Etta stood next to the fireplace in the same spot where she’d stood listening to the raspy moans of Rodney’s cello two nights before. Everything from the equinox party was gone now—the long tables, the confetti, the streamers, the balloons. Perhaps she’d dreamt the party, the entire macabre night, invented it as she would a novel. Except if that were the case, Olivia would be sitting upstairs in the classroom. And she wasn’t. She was . . . where? At a hospital? At her mother’s house?

Etta crossed the room and dropped into one of the oversized chairs that faced the windows. She smoothed the papers in her lap and glared at them. The story was a distraction. Was it really going to tell her anything about Olivia plagiarizing or about where Olivia was or why she’d left? Etta should be writing the story for her critique. She remembered Olivia’s eyes two nights ago—so watery—Olivia, beautiful Olivia—Where was she now?—and Carl, Carl’s lips, his breath in her hair, the salty taste of his mouth.

Robert North obviously knew who Matt Lowther was, and there was something about the way he’d looked at the story that made Etta shiver. Maybe M.K. Lowther was famous. But why hadn’t Etta heard of him? She couldn’t stop herself from reading, starting from the beginning again, the first two words: “Cherry Blossom,” by M.K. Lowther.

* * *

“Ah, a truant.”

Etta was so immersed in M.K. Lowther’s world that it took her a moment to realize someone was speaking, and a few more seconds to raise her head. Petra Atwell stood clutching her misshapen mug in her crimson-tipped claws. She pursed her waxy lips, blowing on whatever was in the cup. A puff of steam floated up and disappeared in front of her.

Etta rose to her feet, and the papers slipped from her lap, fanned out, and slid in all directions. A few of them disappeared beneath Etta’s chair and she stooped to retrieve them, sitting back on her heels to steady herself. She peered up at Petra, who was smiling down at her. The resident author had a smudge of lipstick on one of her teeth.

“Jesus, you scared me,” Etta said.

“Thank you, but you don’t need to call me Jesus. So you’ve decided you’re too good a writer to bother with pesky lessons and workshops?”

Etta shook her head. “No, I . . .” She glanced down at the papers and leaned forward to scoop them up. “I . . .” She let the sentence die in the air between them and concentrated on stacking the thin pages into a pile.

“Well, you certainly are good at creating fiction, I’ll give you that,” Petra said.

Etta felt some of the heat drain from her face. Petra was staring out the window, her expression concealed somewhere beneath her layers of makeup. “What do you mean by that?”

“You don’t like compliments, do you Loretta?”

“Etta.”

“Oh, yes. My mistake.”

Silence hung in the room. Petra blew on her drink again, an audible hiss, and the aroma of her coffee wafted to Etta’s nose, a burnt smell. “You’re right, you know? Most of it is a waste of time. You can’t teach talent. It’s the only forgivable thing we get from our parents. It almost makes the emotional baggage endurable.”

Etta had the sensation something was crawling up her neck. She knew nothing was there, but she lifted her hand and rested her fingers on her collarbone.

“So your friend couldn’t handle the pressure. She always seemed more interested in flirting than writing, wouldn’t you say?”

“She was . . .” Etta almost said a great writer, but then thought of Jordan’s words: a plagiarizer. Heat flashed through her face. “No, I, I wouldn’t say,” she finally stammered, but only because she didn’t want to leave another sentence hanging in the space between her and Petra. Olivia was a flirt, but she was the kind who didn’t differentiate between men or women, friends or enemies. Olivia turned her charms on everyone in her presence; she drew people in, flattered them, and made them love her.

“Tell me something. Why did you come here?” Petra wasn’t asking; she was demanding an answer.

Etta had a well-rehearsed answer for that question, but she shifted her gaze to the windows, surprised that the afternoon light was growing dusky, the trees a thick swath of shadows against the whitish gray sky. Were Carl and Robert North on their way to Jackson already or still in Etta’s cabin? Etta had no sense of how much time had passed since she’d spoken to them. She’d read the story through once then half-way through again. Had she been sitting an hour? Two?

“Look at that,” Petra said.

Etta glanced at her, trying to keep her expression even, and then she followed Petra’s gaze to the trees. She didn’t want to appear too interested in anything Petra found worthwhile.

“I thought I saw a fox,” Petra said. She smiled at Etta and spun around, her long skirt feathering out around her. Her footsteps hardly made a sound as she crossed the room. Etta didn’t bother to look out the window; she knew exactly what Petra had meant. A fox. Loretta Ann Fox.

Etta frowned and stared at her lap. Petra knew. And if Petra knew, who else knew? They weren’t going to award the Buchanan Prize to Loretta Ann Fox.

Etta smoothed the papers on her lap, trying to put Petra out of her mind. She read the first line of the page that had ended up on top of the pile. It was the last page, the final scene of the story where Peter Morrison and Yumi meet up again in an unnamed American city, which seems a lot like San Francisco. The couple know they can’t be together. A war between the U.S. and Japan is inevitable. Peter no longer feels safe in Kyoto. Yumi is scared to live in the United States. So they spend one final night together.
Their encounter was fevered and brief. In a hotel room on South Market Street, Yumi showed him that it is impermanence that gives the monotony of breathing its radiance.

Beneath the typed text, the author had signed M.K. Lowther, October 1985, Oregon in fading ink. Etta ran her finger over the loose, cursive letters. She wanted to lose herself in the story again, wanted to become the story. To disappear in it.

* * *

Although Etta visited the library often, she’d never had a reason to knock on Uriah Winston Mills’ office door, or step into “Major Mills’ Quarters,” as the embossed plaque beside the librarian’s door read. His office was a closet-sized room next to the archives room. The window in the door revealed his barren desk and shelves to everyone who visited the library, but he usually wasn’t there. Students weren’t required to check books out in the traditional way; they just had to leave placeholders with their names where they withdrew books.

The major, as students referred to him, was tall and wiry, over six feet, Etta would guess, although she was too short to be a good judge of height. His head was nearly hairless except for a stripe of gray bristles near the nape of his neck. His angular cheeks and bulbous nose were a permanent crimson, which Etta thought may have been the result of too many years in the sun. Jordan was convinced that he drank too much. Mallory Chambers, found it endlessly humorous to compare him to the prim stereotype of a librarian. “If Major Bookworm had more hair, do you think he’d pull it into a bun?”

As his nickname suggested, Major Mills had been a military librarian. When Etta had met him at orientation, she’d asked, in a moment of nervous babbling, if soldiers were allowed to check out books on the front lines. She’d gathered from his curt reply that he was not someone who tolerated stupid questions. Thus, when she sat down at the computer, located the catalog icon, double-clicked on it, and the message
Ask a librarian
for assistance popped onto the screen, she had to muster a lot of courage to walk to the major’s office door and gently tap.

The librarian’s face was illuminated by the green banker’s lamp on the corner of his desk. He looked up from some papers and eyed Etta over the wire-framed spectacles on the end of his nose, which looked too delicate for his weathered face. He frowned. Was that Etta’s cue to come in? She swallowed down a breath, twisted the brass doorknob, and prodded the door open enough to squeeze through, wincing at the squeak of the hinges.

A wall of cologne met her. Etta’s eyes watered. She heard a rattling and was startled to see that it was the papers in her hand. She shoved the story behind her back. The major frowned at her.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for anything by an author. Matt Lowther. Or, um, M.K. Lowther.”

Etta watched the major’s reaction and wished she could grab her words from the air.

Major Mills took his spectacles off, folded them, and slid them into the breast pocket of his white short-sleeved shirt. The outline of his glasses showed through the thin material. He leaned back in his chair. His expression became unreadable as silence settled between them. Maybe Etta had imagined the flash of anger.

Her eyes and nose were running. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “The catalog isn’t working, so I just wondered if maybe, I’m looking for books by an author named M.K. Lowther, Matt Lowther I think . . . I’m just curious. Maybe he’s written a novel?” She hated the chirpy quality of her voice when she was nervous. She wiped at her eyes again.

Major Mills stared at her. A thin scar, which Etta had never noticed before, ran from his right eye to his ear. It was all she could look at.

“Just curious?”

Etta nodded. The acrid air filled her throat. She coughed and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve.

“You’d do well to invest your time in more worthwhile reading pursuits. The classics, for instance.” He rocked from side to side. His movement cast a fan of shadows on the empty bookshelves behind him.

“I don’t know.” Etta regretted the words as she watched the major’s cold eyes draw close together. “I mean yes, the classics are good and important and all, but there are other worthwhile books too.”

The major drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. “Most books aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.”

“I don’t . . .” Etta swallowed her words, realizing she was only being defensive about her own writing. Besides her head felt too loose and watery from the cologne to carry on a debate with anyone, especially Uriah Winston Mills, whose thin lips turned down in a scowl when he wasn’t talking. She wiped at her eyes again.

Major Mills continued his lecture about the classics. Etta glanced out the window behind her at the last slants of sunlight coming into the library and lost track of what he was saying. How long would she need to stand there politely nodding before she left? “
The Western Defense
is the only book anyone needs. We could burn the rest. ”

“I don’t know.” Etta regretted the words instantly, mostly because of the major’s sharp intake of air, but also because she felt strange and light headed, with all of her orifices full of cologne. Why was she arguing with him? “I mean, it’s a good novel, great really.” Etta’s voice was rising, building into the annoying girlish chatter again. She glanced over her shoulder into the shadows in the library.