The Garden of Dead Dreams (6 page)

A hand rose in the front of the crowd.

Etta straightened her spine and tried to see over all the heads, the rows of hair—straight, curly, a bald spot. Amanda Watson? Was it Mandy? She would be eager to spend the day flirting with Carl. Without thinking Etta thrust her hand into the air, and Hardin nodded in her direction.

“Okay, Ms. Saxon, and whoever that is back there. Two should be sufficient.” He slipped the card back in his jacket and continued shuffling through his pocket.

The director pulled cards from his pocket, glanced at them, and slid them back in, dropping his hand to his side. “I thought I had . . . in any event, if there are no further questions, I will call this meeting to an end with a reminder for everyone to be vigilant. If anything strikes you as out of place in any way, it is imperative that you report to me immediately.”

Edwin Hardin stepped away from the hearth and made a beeline for the staircase. The room swelled with a cacophony of voices. Olivia had volunteered? Etta slumped against the back of her chair. Liv liked to cook? Etta could hardly prepare a ham sandwich and had once started a fire while boiling eggs. At home she ate as many dinners as possible at a restaurant or out of a take-out box. Of course, how hard could party food be? Anyone could arrange carrots and celery on a platter.

“I suppose you will be curtailing your solo runs.”

Etta jerked her head toward Chase, but he was no longer in his chair. Reed Morinsky stood in front of Etta gazing at her through his wire spectacles.

“Oh, hello Reed.”

There was a red lump on the end of Reed’s long nose that Etta hadn’t noticed earlier. She shifted her eyes away, and glimpsed Carl leaning on the doorway to the dining room. Robert North glided up beside him. Robert North gestured as he talked to the chef. Carl laughed.

“Is that satisfactory?”

Etta turned back to Reed, who was staring at her expectantly. Had he asked her a question? Etta nodded.

“Excellent. Shall we start Wednesday?

“Wednesday?”

“It’s the day after the equinox. We will not have any classes in observance of the end of the first quarter. And the dramatic production will be over, so I shall have more time for other pursuits. I should alert you, however, my cross-country team in high school called me Cockroach. Of course, you should not concern yourself about falling behind; I shall not leave your side, with Galen roaming the woods.”

“Cockroach?” Etta giggled. “They called you a cockroach?”

“Yes. Cockroaches hold the record for the fastest land insect. The Periplaneta americana has been clocked running four point nine feet per second.”

Etta tried to stifle her laugh and managed another nod.

Reed grinned, revealing his gapped front teeth. Etta’s eyes went again to the red spot on the end of his nose. “I must excuse myself,” he said. “I’m assisting the major with the cataloging project, and I have a thousand words to compose tonight to reach my daily quota.”

Etta nodded, but the mention of writing made her feel short of breath. The equinox party was tomorrow. And then she had five days until her critique.

Reed threaded around the groups of students clustered in front of the staircase. None of them said hello or seemed to notice him pass. Did Reed have any friends at the academy? Etta couldn’t remember seeing him with anyone. What would it hurt to go running with him?

Pari and Hillary stood talking at the foot of the staircase. Hillary’s pale face looked even more washed out than usual, her eyes watery. Etta should have asked Reed to fill her in on what she’d missed at the beginning of Hardin’s speech.

Carl. Etta could ask Carl. She swirled toward the doorway to the dining room. But the chef and Robert North were gone. Carl had probably returned to the kitchen.

Etta made a beeline for the dining room. As she stepped inside, she halted, blinking to adjust her eyes to the darkness. She wound around a few tables then froze.

A voice eased from under the kitchen door—shrill and high-pitched. A woman. And she sounded angry. But Etta couldn’t make out her words. Etta stepped toward the door, wincing at the squeak of her hiking boots against the wood floor.

“This is dangerous. I don’t think you understand how much trouble . . .” This voice was male. He didn’t sound angry. More pleading. Scared. Etta took another step toward the kitchen. A thin line of light sliced the darkness below the swinging door.

“Leave me alone.” The woman’s voice dissolved into sobs.

“Wait. Listen. Listen to me. This isn’t . . .” The man’s voice was louder. Closer. Etta realized what was about to happen, and she shot into the shadows next to the kitchen door, leaning into the wall. The door swung open and hit her foot. It flapped closed, and Etta stifled a gasp as Olivia glided across the dining room.

Etta held her breath as the door swung open again and swished shut. Robert North crossed the room, steps behind Olivia.

* * *

Etta pushed the weight of her down comforter off, exposing herself to the cold air for as long as she could stand it. Then she buried herself in her comforter’s warmth again. The outline of Olivia’s empty bed was lumpy, strewn with clothes and books. Olivia’s conversation with Robert North earlier was tangled and hazy in Etta’s mind, as though she’d dreamt the entire incident. Had Olivia pronounced her love for Robert North? Or had Robert North said he loved Liv? No, there was no mention of love, only danger.

Etta sat up. The thought of turning on her lamp and looking at her watch filled her with relief.

Ten forty-one.

Forty minutes since she’d looked last.

Etta slipped out of bed, padded across the room, and sat down on Olivia’s bed next to the twisted-up comforter and Olivia’s lime wool sweater. Both smelled of Liv’s lavender-scented oil.

Etta would walk to Reed’s cabin and ask him to unlock the archives room for her. If he was working with Major Mills in the library, he’d probably know where the key was.

It was a crazy idea, walking to the men’s cabins in the middle of the night, waking someone she hardly knew. But once it had flitted across Etta’s mind several minutes—or was it hours?—ago, she couldn’t let it go. Maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea. Crazy would be staying all alone in this messy cabin, sitting awake in this suffocating room.

Before Etta could talk herself out of it, she slid off of Liv’s bed and marched across the room to her dresser. She yanked her rain pants over her flannel pajama bottoms, laced on her running shoes, and slipped her rain jacket off the hook in her closet. She grabbed her key off of Liv’s desk, nearly knocking over the can of Diet Coke that still sat there. Then she crossed the room and stepped outside.

All of the cabins were dark. Etta descended the stairs and took a couple steps into the clearing. Something rustled. Etta spun toward it, squinting at the outline of her cabin and the trees towering behind it. For the first time since she’d overheard Olivia and Robert North’s fight, she thought of the director’s speech.

An unstable man camping in the forest? It seemed funny all at once, like something from a novel, except it was too preposterous for serious fiction. Etta had lived alone for years and had never been scared of ghosts or serial killers, or walking alone at night. She’d worked as a volunteer ranger in Isle Royale National Park for a couple of summers during college, and she’d savored the long nights, the creak of the trees, the sound of Lake Superior lapping onto the shore.

Another rustle.

Etta sprinted to her cabin and jabbed at the lock with her key. She collapsed against the door for a few minutes. Then she walked to Olivia’s bed and slumped against the clump of pillows. Something jabbed her arm and she untangled it from the twisted blankets. A book. A black paperback Penguin edition of Vincent Buchanan’s
The Western Defense
.

“Introduction by T. Clarence Johnson,” read the small white letters along the bottom.

Of course, it had been required reading at Taylor High School. But it was one of the few reading assignments she hadn’t finished. The battle scenes were so tedious. Etta flipped the book open to the introduction and nearly dropped the book. Someone had scrawled a word across the bottom of the page. Etta steadied her hands as she stared at it. “Murderer.”

She lifted her gaze and read T. Clarence Johnson’s introduction:

More than any other novel in the history of American literature, Vincent Buchanan’s
The Western Defense
begs the question: can a work of fiction change the course of history?

When Viking Press released the novel in January of 1943, the author had already written three novels, won a Pulitzer Prize, and been hailed by critics around the world. His soaring status in the literary community gained him unprecedented access to high officials in the U.S. Armed Forces and Defense Department to pen what would become his magnum opus.

The Western Defense
poses a hypothetical question that was not far from any American’s imagination at the time: What if Japan carried out an attack on the West Coast of the United States in the winter of 1944, striking three metropolitan areas in a single night? Buchanan’s answer was unapologetic: Americans would wage the most Herculean response the world had ever seen—and they would triumph.

Within weeks of its publication,
The Western Defense
was credited with increasing the morale of American soldiers in the Pacific and Europe and bolstering the willingness of the men and women on the home front to sacrifice for the war effort. Franklin Roosevelt called Vincent Buchanan “a modern day Paul Revere”—a nickname that would later become the author’s epitaph.

“This novel may have saved the world,” Harry Truman reportedly proclaimed a year and a half later, after the Japanese surrendered.

The Western Defense
also has its critics. Opponents of the Japanese Internment argue that Buchanan’s book is a loosely veiled justification for Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to round up Japanese Americans on the West Coast in 1942 and relocate them to inland camps. Some even decried The Western Defense as propaganda, conjecturing that the Office of War Information commissioned Buchanan to write it. In 1945, when the Pulitzer Prize Committee named
The Western Defense
as their distinguished work of fiction by an American author, a handful of editorialists across the country denounced the choice.

Half a decade later, at the close of the nineteen hundreds, among the balloon drops and Y2K hysteria, the historian Nicholas Bryce opened yet a new chapter of controversy when he revealed on ABC’s
Great People of the Twentieth Century
that Harry Truman read
The Western Defense
during the summer of 1945 just before the blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki echoed across the world. The same week
Time Magazine
named Buchanan’s novel the most influential book of the century.

Nearly all readers and critics agree, however, that
The Western Defense
is a work of literary genius, which stands without peers for its vivid characters, emotional depth and breathtaking detail. Despite the controversies surrounding his best-known book, Vincent Buchanan’s legacy as America’s most-celebrated author and patriot lives on.

Etta pulled the book closer and stared at the word “murderer.” Was it Olivia’s handwriting? She flipped through the rest of the book. Forty pages of critical commentary by two different scholars then the text of the novel. No more handwritten comments.

She closed the novel and flipped it over. The picture on the back was of a young Buchanan. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. His black hair was buzzed on the sides and wavy at the top, and he had a sober look on his angular face.

Etta carried the book to her own bed. She took off her shoes and rain clothes, crawled under the comforter, and flipped past the commentary to the first chapter. She pulled the book close to make out the small font and read one of the most famous first lines in American literature: “One hundred and seventy million cubic miles of churning salt water separated good from evil in November of 1944 . . .”

Etta couldn’t put the book down. The characters jumped off the page—a young mother who survived the L.A. bombing and decided to walk with her children to Mexico, a group of generals at the Pentagon who planned the U.S. counterattack, a soldier in San Francisco who drove tanks down Haight Street and set up enforcements on both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes she backtracked and read aloud, listening to the haunting melody of Buchanan’s language resonating through the room. At some point Etta dropped the book on her nightstand and flicked off her light.

She awoke later and turned toward a sound on the other side of the room. Olivia’s silken hair was splayed across her pillow.

Etta awoke on the equinox to the sound of raindrops rolling across the roof. She sat up. It had been a dream, of course. She’d been in San Francisco and felt the earth shake with Vincent Buchanan’s bombs. A blinding light had flooded the sky, fluorescent white. A blast followed —earsplitting and silent at the same time. Etta was in a cable car, teetering up a hill, sitting across from her mother, who was old and growing older every second, her gray hair turning white, dissolving to ashes, her skin brittle, splintering apart as she spoke. Everyone was scattering, running, yelling. But Etta could only stare at her mother’s arms. Blue veins laced her translucent flesh, as though a spider was spinning webs beneath her skin.

Etta clicked on her lamp and blinked back the yellow light. Her cellular phone was tucked away in her desk drawer, where it had been for two months. It didn’t get reception on the grounds, which wasn’t a problem because no one would be trying to reach her.

Etta had called her father from the administration office a few weeks after she’d arrived. But she’d waited until it was after eight in Michigan and called his office phone at Temple Christian College, hoping even he wouldn’t be at work so late. She’d left a curt message, explaining that she’d be unreachable except in an emergency and had recited the academy’s phone number.