The Garden of Dead Dreams (7 page)

Now Etta felt desperate to hear her mother’s voice, not the razor that had sliced her ear the last few times they’d spoken, but the one that used to sing hymns to Etta and her brothers when they drove to Grand Rapids on Sunday mornings. It was the only thing Etta had liked about church—hearing her mother sing.

A memory tugged at the corners of Etta’s brain. She’d heard Olivia’s voice sometime in the night. A male voice too. Was it another dream? No, she remembered seeing her roommate there. But now Olivia was gone. Her bed was hastily made, the white comforter pulled across the narrow mattress.

Etta reached for
The Western Defense
. Today was a holiday at the academy. There would be no mandatory writing sessions. No morning workshop. No lectures. Everyone was preparing for the festivities that evening.

Several hours later, Etta finished the last page, closed the book, and stared again at the grainy black and white photo of Buchanan. The empty sensation that accompanied finishing a book settled over her. Then she remembered what had made her read it in the first place. She flipped to the introduction again and stared at the word “murderer.” What did it mean?

She would ask Olivia today. They would be together all day, preparing food. She’d ask Olivia about visiting the archives, about Jordan, about Robert North.

* * *

Etta rounded the bend, and Roosevelt Lodge came into view, the windows glowing yellow in the rainy haze. Etta was nearly to the porch when she glimpsed Chase Quinn in front of the wooden doors, his coppery hair tufting out from beneath a black skullcap. He was talking to somebody, his arms flying up from his sides as he gestured.

Chase swayed, and Etta glimpsed the sleeve of Petra Atwell’s red coat and the glowing embers of her cigarette extending from one of her talons. A puff of smoke clouded around Chase and rose into the porch light.

Etta swirled around and hurried back into the trees. She couldn’t face Chase and Petra right now. She’d take the shortcut through the forest to the men’s cabins and then take the trail from there to the theater entrance.

Etta stepped into the clearing outside the men’s cabins, and her eyes went to Jordan’s door. The porch light was on, a ghostly blue beam in the haze. Was Olivia there? Etta had only been over to Jordan’s cabin twice, both times with Olivia, but she moved toward the light. Maybe she and Olivia could walk to the kitchen together; they could talk. Etta knocked on the door and waited. No answer. She knocked again, and then pulled her hood off, wiping beads of water from her eyebrows and the tip of her nose.

“Jordan?”

She waited.

“Olivia?”

Etta stared at the doorknob. Jordan didn’t lock his door so that Olivia could come and go as she pleased. Etta brought her hand to the doorknob and twisted, pushing the door open a crack. “You here, Jor?”

The curtains were drawn. It took Etta’s eyes a minute to adjust to the shadows. Then a chill rose through her. Jordan’s bed was neatly made. The dressers were bare. The cabin looked vacant, except for Jordan’s 1939 Remington typewriter, which sat on his desk. “Would Fitzgerald have used Microsoft Word?” Jordan had asked Etta over lunch one day. Etta didn’t see why he wouldn’t have if it had been available, but she hadn’t challenged Jordan on it.

“Jor,” Etta called again. She stepped into the cabin and the floorboards gave a little under her weight. She pressed the door closed behind her and looked around, searching for any signs her roommate had been there. Then she saw Olivia’s name. For a moment it felt like she’d conjured it. But there it was,
Olivia
, on a small yellow sticky note affixed to the top of a stack of papers next to Jordan’s typewriter. Etta stepped closer, leaning over the chair to make out the rest of the words.

In your haste to break our engagement, you forgot “your” story.

Etta almost reached over to pluck the sticky note off the paper so that she could see the notebook paper beneath it. But she yanked her hand back. She was dripping wet. Beads of water were rolling off her coat onto the floor.

The pages beneath the sticky note were yellowing at the edges, and someone had written across the pages in jagged all-caps letters, The felt-tip pen had bled in spots and blacked in parts of some of the letters. Something about the way the words crowded into the margins made Etta want to draw her eyes away. It certainly wasn’t Olivia’s handwriting.

After Etta slammed Jordan’s door shut, ran down the path, and pulled the heavy theater door open to the sound of Maura Wilkins’ girlish voice echoing from the stage, Etta finally absorbed the words on the sticky note:
In your haste to break our engagement . . .

* * *

Flute music drifted from the kitchen. Etta stopped outside and ran her hands through her hair, trying to shake some of the water out. The flute faded, and was replaced by a synthesized drumbeat. Then chanting female voices. Was Carl listening to New Age music? Etta pushed the kitchen door open.

Candy stood behind a stainless steel table in the center of the room, her blonde hair and bangs flattened beneath a hair net. Pots and pans hung on a rack several feet above her, like oversized wind chimes. She punched her fists into a ball of dough, her eyes closed.

“Hello,” Etta called.

Candy didn’t seem to hear, which wasn’t surprising with the chanting vibrating through the room. Etta walked to the table and watched Candy flip the dough over and form it into a ball. Her eyelids sparkled with a swath of silver eye shadow, which extended to her tweezed eyebrows and onto her temples. It looked a little like the Elmer’s glue and glitter projects kids concocted in grade school. A high-pitched hum was coming from somewhere behind her nose—more of a whine than a chant.

The song ended, but the breathy high-pitched hum still emanated from Candy’s nose. Her head circled lazily. She flicked her eyes open, and Etta stepped backward.

Candy frowned. “We’re out of biscuits, and the coffee’s long gone.” She rounded the ball of dough with her chubby fingers and then dropped it and punched both fists into it, flattening it onto the table.

“Is Carl here?”

Candy pretended to look under the table. “Hey Carl, take off your invisibility cloak.”

Etta smiled. “Do you know where he is?”

Candy shrugged. “If you must know, he and the director were in here for like a half hour whispering back and forth about something then the hillbilly says he has to go somewhere and he doesn’t know when he’ll be back, and now I’m stuck making all the food for the biggest party of the year.” She rolled her eyes. “He promised some stupid girls are supposed to come help, but did they even bother to show up?”

“I’m one.” Etta smiled. “I’m Etta.”

Candy said something, but a gong reverberated through the room then another and another. They grew louder and louder.

“Can we turn that down?” Etta shouted.

“It’s Peas Lite,” Candy shouted back.

Etta tried to make the words make sense. Then she spotted the stereo on a shelf across the room and made a beeline to it, grasping for the knob. The gong faded to a more humane volume. The top CD on a pile next to the stereo said Peace Light. Etta glanced through the rest of the pile.
Jewels of Silence
,
Transformation Trance
,
Music for Healing
, and six or seven CDs by someone named Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Etta slid one of the Jimmie Dale Gilmore CDs from the middle of the pile.

“Be glad the hillbilly’s not here, or we’d be listening to that. ‘The chef gets to pick the music,’ he says. Just my luck I have to work for a hillbilly.”

Etta set the CD on top of the others. “Carl doesn’t like New Age music?”

“He calls it Sew-age music.”

Etta laughed and studied a framed photo of a woman propped next to the stereo. The woman was young, mid-twenties perhaps. Her reddish brown hair fell below her shoulders, and she was squinting into the camera like the sun was in her eyes.

“Let me guess, you’re wondering if the hillbilly has a girlfriend.”

“No,” Etta said, even though that’s exactly what she’d been thinking.

Candy grinned. “You wouldn’t be the first one. You are a pathetic bunch of girls out here, stuck in this forest with that weird chastity code, all hot and heavy for the hillbilly. You should see the ladies at the grocery store in Hicksville Jackson fawn over him. ‘Can I help you, Carl?’ ‘Let me get that, Carl.’ It’s disgusting. I wouldn’t worry too much about the girl in the photo though. She’s dead.”

Etta’s face filled with heat. Dead? She opened her mouth to ask what happened to the pretty woman, but decided against it. She glanced at the door. Where was Olivia? “So, do you want me to cut up vegetables or something?”

Candy dropped the dough ball onto the table. “We’re going to need five quiches—two vegetarian, two with bacon and sausage, and one with smoked salmon. The ingredients are in here.” She wiped her hands on her apron and started across the room.

“Quiches?”

Candy spun around, her hair hardly moving beneath the hair net. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what quiche is?” The air hissed between her teeth as she exhaled.

“Of course I do.”

“Thank God. It would be just my luck if the hillbilly sent me someone who doesn’t even know how to cook. Don’t wait for a hand-written invitation. Follow me.” Candy pulled open the door to the walk-in refrigerator.

Etta trailed behind the intern.

* * *

Four hours later, Etta’s T-shirt and jeans were coated with flour, her upper back was stiff, and she never wanted to hear another chime, gong, or synthesizer for the rest of her life. But as she scanned the steel table holding her five quiches, in addition to the crab cakes; bacon-wrapped scallops; salad; five loaves of bread; and two layered cakes that Candy had somehow prepared in the same amount of time, she felt more pride than she’d felt about her writing in a long time. She had an impulse to put her arm around Candy, and the words
thank you for letting me help
bubbled into her throat. But Candy was smacking her gum and staring at the food with a dullness that made Etta swallow her words.

As Etta walked down the trail to her cabin, she started to feel giddy at the idea of a party: music, cocktails, and fancy clothes. She’d never liked parties much, but seeing all the food laid out made the idea of people and conversation seem electric.

Etta stepped into the clearing as a screen door slapped shut. It took her a minute to register that it was the door to her own cabin. Olivia’s voice flooded into the clearing. Etta stood staring at her porch. Her first instinct was to close her eyes and pretend she wasn’t seeing what she was seeing. But there they were, Carl and Olivia, coming out of Etta’s cabin, standing just inches from each other, staring at Etta.

Silence spread across the clearing. Carl drawled a hello. He’d hardly said her name when she heard her own voice, loud, sharp, and angry: “Where the hell were you guys today?”

She felt her body twisting. She ran into the trees, her feet somehow finding the trail, and she didn’t stop until she couldn’t take another step. The firs loomed around her, blocking out much of the dusky afternoon light, and the sound of her breath filled her ears, short spasms of air in and out.

She heard her name. Olivia was jogging toward her, her long hair wet and crushed to the sides of her face. “Etta. Please. Wait.”

By the time Olivia caught her, Etta was laughing. She leaned over and grabbed her knees with her hands. The laughter wouldn’t stop gurgling up. Etta had written so many scenes just like this. Of course in one of Etta’s books, it would have been Carl who raced up the trail, his shirt wet and clinging to his muscular chest, his drawling voice calling out Etta’s name.

“Etta, please it’s not how it looked.” Olivia heaved the words out.

Etta tried to swallow her laughter.

“I know how it must have looked. But . . .”

Olivia looked almost gaunt as she folded her arms across her chest; skeletal fingers clutching bone-thin arms.

“He’s going door to door. Warning everyone to be careful, to walk to the lodge in pairs and all that.” Olivia didn’t make eye contact. Shadows filled the hollows beneath her eyes.

“Are you okay?”

“Out of shape. You run fast, girl.” Finally Olivia met Etta’s gaze. “Please say you’re not mad at me.”

Now it was Etta who couldn’t make eye contact. She dropped her eyes at the hollow spot in Olivia’s neck. Olivia was just so pretty, so flirtatious. When Etta had seen Carl, she’d just assumed . . . But when she met Olivia’s gaze again, she realized she’d been mistaken. “I’m sorry, Liv.” Etta stepped toward Olivia and put her arms around her, surprised at how small and fragile her roommate felt in her embrace. When Etta dropped her arms, she took a step backward. “It’s just, you guys didn’t come today. I had to make all the food . . .”

“The party.” Olivia’s voice was sharp. She spun around and started down the trail. “The play. We can’t be late.”

Etta watched Olivia’s form disappearing around the bend.

The play.

Olivia’s play.

Etta had almost forgotten.

Someone had hung Japanese lanterns from the trees, lighting the path to the lodge. But even with the hazy light, the trail was difficult to negotiate in high heels. It didn’t help that Olivia and Poppy were striding toward Roosevelt Lodge at a stallion’s pace or that the umbrella Poppy was supposed to be holding over all three of them kept swaying so that Etta’s cheek got sprayed with the pools of water collecting on top. Etta grabbed the end of her dress. The red satin feathered across her legs, sending a tingle up her spine. As they rounded the curve to the Lodge, cello music floated through the trees. A man’s baritone voice and a woman’s throaty laugh buzzed through the drizzle like an electric current.

At the base of the stairs, Poppy collapsed the umbrella and shook it out. Paper lanterns hung from the porch’s eaves, illuminated spheres in the darkness that made the slanting slivers of rain shimmer silver. One of the doors to the Lodge swung closed, and Etta was standing alone.

She teetered up the stairs into the porch light’s yellow glow and unzipped her raincoat, wincing at the rush of cool air that flooded across her neck. The cello music emanated from the seams of the Lodge—a haunting melody that seemed too somber for a party.