The Red Garden (23 page)

“They’re just boys,” Tessa said dismissively. “I need a man like Mr. Jack K. Someone with experience. Frank and Jesse have probably never been outside of Blackwell.”

That was true of Carla as well, but she agreed with Tessa. “They’re mere babies,” she remarked, even though she herself would have run off with Jesse in the blink of an eye.

The Mott brothers were waiting behind the museum. Their mother volunteered in the gift shop, and Jesse had swiped the key to the back door. They stumbled inside, laughing, giddy, then stopped so their eyes could adjust to the dark. There was the wagon wheel that had been on the first settlers’ carriage. There was the wolf someone had shot up in the mountains when there were still wolves slinking through the woods in Massachusetts. They stood in front of the bats in the big glass case. When Jesse made a
whoo whoo
noise, the others all jumped in a fit of fear, then exploded into laughter.

“Come over here,” Jesse said, grabbing Tessa by the arm. “I want to show you something.”

When he led her into the rocks and minerals exhibit, Frank
and Carla stood there uncomfortably. They knew what Jesse was initiating—a kiss, maybe more. Still, they had nothing to say to each other and were somewhat grateful when Tessa shrieked. They both ran into the room where there were fossils and samples of the local mica.

“I saw the ghost,” Tessa cried. “The runaway sister. She was right outside the window, with her horse.”

Jesse rolled his eyes; he had one thing on his mind, but Frank said they should go out to investigate. Carla and Tessa held hands. “What did she look like?” Carla asked.

“She was about our age. Long hair. She looked sad.”

“There’s nothing here,” Jesse said, disgusted.

Frank was kneeling on the ground. “Look,” he said.

They all crouched down. There were the marks of something that might have been a horse’s hooves. Tessa sat down in the ivy. She declared that she thought she might faint, and in fact her creamy skin had paled dramatically.

“Come on, Tessa,” Jesse urged. “It was probably some kind of joke.”

But Tessa was so upset it was decided she would go home with Carla since Ava was out at the Independence Day party. The boys walked them through the woods, then regretfully said good-bye. Although Carla was pleased to have Tessa to herself, she worried about having her worlds collide. When she took Tessa in to meet her parents, the Kellys were wary but polite. The girls went into the living room and looked through a copy of
The History of Blackwell
. They found a reference to the two sisters who were said to be ghosts, both from the Starr family. They had lived in the museum when it was still a house. One was a little girl who had drowned, the other was her older sister
who had run off with a horse trader. There was a hazy photograph of the elder one, whose name was Mary.

“That’s her!” Tessa said. “I’m not kidding. She’s the one I saw tonight.” She took Carla’s hand and whispered. “It means someone will be leaving Blackwell to go on a journey. Probably me.”

“Don’t say that!” Carla cried.

Because it was so late Mrs. Kelly asked Johnny to drop Tessa at home on his way out to the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. She didn’t want her daughter’s friend to be wandering through the woods all alone.

Tessa was absolutely thrilled when she saw Johnny’s motorcycle. He was in the driveway wearing boots, torn jeans, a white T-shirt. She remembered him from the time the car broke down. “Let’s go to California!” she said. “We won’t stop till we get to City Lights bookstore.”

The idea of Johnny in a bookstore made Carla laugh out loud.

“Who’s paying for the gas?” Johnny said in a jokey way. He was especially nice to Tessa, flattered by how thrilled she was over the prospect of getting on his motorcycle. He had never once taken Carla for a ride. “Hop on,” he said grandly.

Tessa hugged her friend good-bye, then got on. She put her arms around Johnny when he told her to, to make sure she wouldn’t fall off once they began to soar down the bumpy road. Carla stood watching them. When her brother gunned the engine, dust rose up. Carla had grit in her eyes. He came so close when he took off he almost hit her and she’d had to jump back, heart pounding.

Carla’s mother stepped onto the porch. There were still fireworks going off and sprays of red, white, and blue filled up the
sky. Carla thought about the disappearing sisters who had once lived in the history museum. The motorcycle tore off down the street.

“Pretty girl,” Mrs. Kelly said.

Carla looked over at her mother, who was gazing at the fireworks display.

“She’s the kind who will always go far.”

C
ARLA WOKE UP
in the middle of the night. At first she thought she heard thunder, then she realized there were still fireworks being set off, homegrown ones, cherry bombs and sparklers, the kind that always sent someone racing to the emergency room of the Blackwell Community Hospital. Carla got out of bed and got dressed. She felt restless and spooked, trapped in her little bedroom. She climbed out her window and went through the woods. Because the moon had risen, the path wasn’t as scary as usual. When she reached the edge of the woods, however, she stopped. She thought she saw the ghost weaving past the museum. She went forward, straining to see. A girl with blond hair was in the yard. Johnny’s motorcycle was up against an old oak tree.

Carla could feel her pulse pounding. The girl disappeared into the woods, so Carla went on, following, toward the river. She felt reckless, the new her, a girl who refused to be frightened by imaginary creatures. There were still splashes of fireworks up above, and the sky was ashy and bright at the same time. She heard voices, so she slowed down a bit. When she looked over at the river, she felt her heart jolt. There was something blue on the riverbank. She thought it was the Apparition, the ghostly
little sister in the blue dress, perhaps going to meet her older sister Mary. But when Carla crept closer, she saw it was only a pair of jeans. They’d been tossed onto a tangled pile of clothing. White T-shirt, boots, a black belt, a red shirt.

Carla leaned against a tree and listened to them as they dove into the water. There was the rise and fall of their muffled, watery voices. She heard their laughter and their desire. She felt dizzy in the dark, consumed with hatred. She saw them in a still deep pool, arms around each other, kissing. The girl’s cascade of blond hair looked green in the dark. Carla’s brother looked like a stranger. They were naked in the water, wrapped around each other. He was running his hands over her breasts and she was letting him. Carla crouched down and watched the stranger who was her brother. She realized that he was fucking the blond girl. The girl arched her back, her neck. He put one hand on her throat and brought her close to him. He kissed her until it seemed they might drown. And she kissed him back. She kissed him like crazy.

Carla turned and ran back through the woods. It was a long way, and she was out of breath when she got home. She was shivering even though the night was hot. In the morning, she reported the incident to the other girls in town, Jennifer Starr and Madeline Hall and all the rest. She told the Mott brothers, who looked dumbfounded. Jesse said, “She wouldn’t even let me kiss her.” Once she started telling she couldn’t stop. Right before supper she told her mother, who slapped her face, then called her father home from work.

From her bedroom Carla could hear her parents arguing with Johnny when he came home, and Johnny shouting back, then her father’s angry voice telling him to get the hell out.
Johnny slammed the door and left, and they could hear his motorcycle roar away. Carla stayed in her room all the next day. That week she didn’t go to the Coopers’. She didn’t go the whole rest of the summer. She started to spend afternoons with Madeline Hall when Jennifer went to Maine with her family. Her brother gave her murderous looks, and once he said, “How does it feel to be such a bitch?” but after that he stayed clear of her, which frankly was a relief. He drank too much, and at the end of the summer he moved into a room in a house full of college students from the community college even though he didn’t know a single one. He continued to show up for work. Carla, on the other hand, had been allowed to give up her job. It would have been too uncomfortable for her to be there, considering the animosity between brother and sister.

Once, Ava Cooper came to the Kellys’ house, carrying a cake tin. She was wearing the red blouse Tessa had been wearing on the day they moved in, the one Carla had spied on the riverbank the night she’d stumbled upon the lovers. Mrs. Kelly went out to meet Mrs. Cooper in the driveway. Carla watched through the window for a while, then she got into bed. She had a sinking, sick feeling. It was the red blouse. She hadn’t known they shared clothes. She started to feel confused about what she had seen that night. Her mother knocked on her door, then opened it.

“Your friends sent you something.”

Carla sat up. Her mother was holding a red velvet cake.

“She said it was an Apology Cake.”

“I don’t want it,” Carla said.

When school started, Carla felt anxious. She started biting
her nails. She didn’t know what she would say if Tessa tried to sit with her and Madeline and Jennifer at lunch. Maybe Tessa would accuse her of being a liar. Well, then, she’d just say Tessa was a slut, even though she now knew it wasn’t true. But Tessa didn’t show up on the first day of school. Later that week, Carla went past their house. The station wagon wasn’t there. The shades were drawn.

“They’ve moved,” her father told her when she asked if he knew what had happened to the Coopers. “The mother came and got the car serviced before they left. They went to California.”

Carla thought about them often, how the ride to California must have taken days, through wheat fields, across the desert. Once she got a cookbook and tried to make a red velvet cake, but it was a disaster, all tilted and mushy, and a single bite turned her mouth red. She worried that she was cursed, that her mouth would stay red forever. But it was just the red dye in the recipe. It washed away after she drank some cold water. When the following summer Johnny was killed in a motorcycle crash, Carla was the one who had to clean out his room. Her mother was too distraught. Her father couldn’t bring himself to go over to the house where Johnny had lived since the falling-out in their family. A young man let Carla into the house. She was surprised to see how small her brother’s room was and how neatly he’d kept it. Searching through his bureau she found a packet of letters addressed to Ava Cooper that had been returned to him.
ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN
had been stamped on the envelopes. She’d heard that Ava had opened a restaurant in San Francisco, that people stood on line on Saturday nights, hoping to get in. She thought her brother had the address right, on Montgomery
Street, but that the Coopers most likely didn’t want anything that had been mailed from Blackwell and made sure it was sent right back. They probably never even thought about the Eel River anymore, the way the sunlight fell across the water, the fact that it was one of the wonders of Massachusetts.

BLACK RABBIT

1966

T
HE
M
OTT BROTHERS WERE IN TROUBLE
from the time they could crawl. Their mother, Helen, had grown up in Hartford, Connecticut. She was a sheltered woman, educated at private schools, known for her sweet temper and lovely singing voice. She’d been engaged to a medical student, but when Leo Mott came tearing through Hartford on a lark with some of his buddies one summer night, Helen fell for him on the spot and moved to Blackwell. She appeared to settle easily into small-town life. But something happened to her during her pregnancy. She seemed unsettled. She kept to herself and didn’t return phone calls. People saw her wandering through town, as if she were lost. One day she started off at a brisk pace as if she could walk her way out of Blackwell and a
pregnancy that had caused her to become enormous, a stranger to herself. She might have made it all the way back to Hartford if she hadn’t come face-to-face with a bear on Route 17.

Helen closed her eyes and waited to die. She said a silent farewell to her children-to-be who might never be born and to her husband and to everyone else on earth. She made a vow that if she did happen to survive, if some miracle occurred even though she hardly deserved such good fortune, she would never again complain about Blackwell. When she opened her eyes, the bear was gone, but there was his footprint, huge as could be. Helen ran home, then drove back to the site, having stopped at the hardware store for a sack of plaster of paris and a thermos she hurriedly filled with water so she could set the footprint and bring it home. That way people would believe her.

Every time the Mott boys got into trouble, people said the twins’ fearless nature had been formed during that ill-fated meeting. The boys were named Jesse and Frank before their mother understood that these had also been the names of the notorious James brothers. Frank was dark and intense. Jesse was blond, always the favorite in town. His appearance was so angelic that his antics were usually overlooked. He stole his father’s car at the age of thirteen and drove it into Dead Man’s Pond, but no charges were brought. He burned down the bookstore, but it was declared to be an accident; he was merely setting off a cherry bomb on the Fourth of July, and insurance paid for the rebuilding. Jesse usually got off scot-free, leaving his brother behind to clean up the mess, which Frank did willingly because of his bond with his twin. He insisted that he was the one who’d forgotten to test the brakes of his dad’s Chevy and swore he’d
bought the cherry bomb. For as long as they’d lived, the brothers had never spent a day apart.

But in 1966, the year Frank was drafted to go to Vietnam, Jesse Mott ran off to California. He did everything he could to convince Frank to go with him. They would slip out of town in the middle of the snowy midnight, escape from the backwater where they’d never belonged in the first place; even their mother had known that in the months before their birth when she tried to return to Hartford. To Jesse’s surprise, Frank wouldn’t go. He was more stubborn than people might guess. He wasn’t the sort to run away from his responsibilities, even if that meant fighting a war he didn’t believe in or even understand. There was a big blowup between the two brothers at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. Both men were hammered; they swung wildly and slugged each other. They called each other names, then wound up crying together in the parking lot in the snow.