The Wonder Garden (26 page)

“Look at that!” Rebekah points. Young men in Victorian clothing, women in leafy halter tops, all perched high on stilts. They strut in circles, gesticulating like circus performers. It is hard to tell the difference between regular people and entertainers here. It seems to Bethany that everyone is imbued with some stardust indigenous to this festival and inaccessible elsewhere. The beauty around her is not exclusionary but inclusive. Just by being there, she might absorb it through her skin and begin to glimmer.

They reach the main stage where Barterhouse, a bearded jam band, is riding an upward swell of guitar licks to heaven. Rebekah begins to sway. Everyone is dancing, the boys wiggling in place, the girls swinging their hair. And this, Bethany remembers with a thrill, is just the beginning of the festival.

Rebekah taps her on the shoulder and holds out a thin, warped cigarette that has materialized out of nowhere. Bethany shakes her head. “You know I don't smoke.”

Rebekah rolls her eyes. “
Here
, just take it.”

“Why?”

“It's all part of the experience.”

Bethany puts the wet end into her mouth and pulls a few times, coughing, then hands it back to Rebekah, who shoos it away.

“Pass it on.”

Bethany looks around, makes eye contact with a shirtless guy in a bandanna. He smiles and accepts the joint. “Peace, man,” he actually says to her.

She is relieved, as if she's rid herself of a hot potato. There are no police in the crowd, she is sure, but glances around despite herself.

She lets herself sway now, feeling the splash of the cymbal. The weed has made her throat dry. She has tried it only once before, at a cast party. The colors around her are candy bright. A fuzzy rainbow totem joggles above the crowd like a neon caterpillar, along with an impaled beach ball and some crude puppets. People dance with foil pinwheels, dream catchers, bubble wands. It's as if they've all come together to achieve a giant resurrection of childhood. Bethany laughs. All at once she grasps something so basic: this is what people mean when they sing about
getting back to the garden
.

Bethany and Rebekah last for the rest of the set, until they are both parched. Back at the campground, they fill their Thermoses with water and drop into chairs under the canopy. Rufus is picking out a tune on a strange little guitar. The other men are still under the canopy, drinking out of Solo cups. Their sunglasses make it hard to tell if they are awake or sleeping. Bethany doesn't recognize any of them from town. There don't seem to be any girls besides Rebekah and herself.

Rebekah taps one of the guys on the knee and he turns toward her with a slow smile.

“Hey, Chris, this is my friend Bethany.”

“Hey,” he says.

“Chris is from Old Cranbury, too.”

He shifts his sunglasses to nest in a sheaf of sandy hair. His heavy eyelids reveal half-pools of languid blue. The surrounding skin is pale where the sunglasses were; the rest of his face is the bronze of year-round exposure.

“Nah, my parents just moved there a couple years ago.”

“But you're there now,” Rebekah prompts.

“Just for the summer, then I'm going back to Vail.” Chris looks at Bethany, openly sliding his gaze down her legs and up again.

“His parents are the ones who had that crazy art project, those insect sculptures all over their house, remember that?” Rebekah says.

“Seriously?” Bethany chirps, leaning forward. “I
loved
that. I'm so sad they took it down.”

Chris chortles. “You're the only one.”

“Naw, man, I liked it, too,” the guy next to Chris interjects. “That shit was sick.”

“How the hell do
you
know?”

“I saw the picture in the paper. Your parents rock.” The guy drinks deeply from his cup and appears to go back to sleep.

Chris gestures to his friend. “He's from freakin' Dunfield. He's never even seen my parents' house.”

“So, uh, how do you know Rufus—and these other guys?” Bethany ventures.

“They were all roommates at some point,” Rebekah answers for him. “Right?”

“Yeah.” He chuckles. “Crazy times.”

Bethany is quiet. These crazy times, she surmises, must have included Rufus's overdose. These are very likely the people who were with him when it happened. Through the smoothing plane of her high, Bethany feels a millipede of agitation. She stays quiet with her Thermos while Rebekah tries to talk to Chris about his time in Colorado. He really mellowed out there, seems to be the gist of it. All that sun and snow.

He and the others seem to be well into their twenties—­perhaps even thirty—resting like complacent tortoises. She allows herself to feel a sizzle of aversion, then willfully dampens it into something tolerable, something more like anthropological interest, like being embedded with another tribe. She studies the men. The one next to Chris wears mismatched tube socks, pink and orange. His dark hair is shaggy, too long to be fashionable, flattened at the top as by an invisible hat.

Rufus has now put the instrument down, and stands in the middle of the tent until he has the group's attention.

“You all know that I'm clean now,” he begins. “But this is a special occasion, and so I brought something special, just for tonight. For everyone.”

“Something
really
special,” Rebekah adds.

Bethany looks sharply at her, and Rebekah grins.

“Yes, something really special. You can't even get it in this country. It's from the Amazon, a very ancient, medicinal brew. I made it at home from the caapi vine and some other imported ingredients. The tribespeople call it ‘vine of the soul.'” He pauses. “It's not really a drug, more like a potion. It's supposed to be taken communally as part of a ceremony. My mentor went down there and drank it with a real
curandero
. He said it was like a soul purge, like ten years of therapy in one night. It cracks the whole world open.”

“You done this before?” one of the Solo guys asks.

“No.” Rufus smiles. “I've been waiting for the perfect time to try it, and I decided that instead of saving it for myself, I'd share it with you guys, do a real ceremony. There's no place I feel more comfortable and safe than this.”

Rebekah looks admiringly at him. Bethany feels dread like a trapdoor opening beneath her.

“All right, bro, bring it on,” says the guy in tube socks.

“Not yet, Stooge.” Rufus holds up a hand. “Not till after the music's done tonight. Maybe midnight or so.”

“Cool.”

“Just to warn you, it's so powerful it can actually cure drug addiction.”

The guy called Stooge laughs, exposing a set of stained teeth.

Rufus finishes his announcement and takes a seat. Bethany stares at the war paint on his chest while Rebekah reaches for his hand.

“Hey, babe,” she says, as if they are alone. “Can I see that?” She points to the little guitar where it rests on a folding chair.

“Did I ever show this to you? Apocatequil brought it back for me.”

“You told me about it, but I never saw it,” Rebekah says, blinking her lashes. She turns the instrument over in her hands, then passes it to Bethany. It is made from some sort of animal shell.

“What—” Bethany begins.

“Armadillo,” Rufus answers.

Bethany touches the scaly hull, the stiff hairs still attached, and feels a small shudder. The instrument is hollow, eerily light. She thinks of the armadillo that was sacrificed, its flesh scooped out.

“It's called a charango,” Rufus says. “It's for courtship rituals.” He points to a mermaid carved into the head of the instrument. “This is a totem to the sirens who can help the musician win love.”

He takes it from Bethany and plucks a few wobbly notes. “Maybe we can use it in the ceremony tonight.”

Bethany's pleasant haze has turned heavy. Her body sags in the camping chair and it seems possible that she won't get up again today. She hears her name being called and listens vaguely to this, thinks what a funny thing a name is.

“Bethany,”
she hears again, more distinctly.
“Bethany Duffy.”
She looks up to find three boys standing beneath the canopy. She knows that she knows them, but it takes a moment to fish their names out. Noah Warren, of course—what is he doing here? And the Hatfield brothers. Kurt. And the younger one—Jason? Martin? All three of them look too clean, too fresh for this place. She smiles.

“Hey, do your parents know you guys are here?”

Noah laughs, then Bethany. Noah's mother, too, would keel over dead if she knew. She is one of those exasperatingly buoyant women in town who volunteer for everything, cheer at every sports game, and behave as if no world exists outside Old Cranbury. The persistence of her budgetary dreams is one of the reasons Bethany's father finally quit the school board.

“I'm at
their
house,” Noah says, nodding to the Hatfield brothers.

“We're at
his
house,” adds the younger Hatfield.
Mason
, that's his name.

The older one, Kurt, is staring at Rebekah. “You're Rebekah Foster, right? You went to OCHS.”

Rebekah gives him a queenly smile. “I graduated three years ago.”

“I thought so. I remember you.”

“Hey, fellows.” Rufus comes over with a bunch of folding chairs and hands them out. “Have yourselves a seat. Chill with us for a while.”

There is no space in the circle's perimeter for them, so they awkwardly open the chairs where they stand, in the middle of the tent.

“I thought I saw you from across the campground,” Noah is saying, “but Kurt said I was imagining it.”

Kurt is still looking intently at Rebekah, as if trying to decipher something. He is dressed for a sailboat, in khaki shorts and navy polo shirt.

“You're at college in California now, right?” he asks.

“Very good,” Rebekah says.

“I'm going to Dickinson in a couple of weeks. In Pennsylvania.”

“Well, that will be different.”

Kurt smiles despite this teasing, which Bethany can tell has already bled into scorn.

“He's just here to pick up girls,” his younger brother pipes in.

“And what's wrong with that?” Kurt smiles at Rebekah, then at Bethany.

“Plenty of those out there,” Rebekah says, motioning beyond the tent.

Bethany feels the urge to kick her friend. She normally would have little use for these boys, but she likes having them here now.

“Are you guys thinking about college yet?” Bethany asks Noah and Mason in a kind, sisterly tone.

The boys look at each other.

“I don't know,” Noah says. “I'll probably go to college eventually, but I want to travel first. For at least a year. Maybe go around the world, like, backpacking. It feels so claustrophobic in Old Cranbury, you know? I feel like I've been cooped up my whole life. Even this”—he sits forward and flaps his hands outward—“it's so homogenous. Have you noticed that it's all white kids?”

“No, it isn't,” Rebekah snaps.

“Yes, it
is
,” Noah says. “Look around. People think this is such a wonderful melting pot or something, such a representation of our generation. That's why I wanted to come. I mean, it's fun and everything, but it's not, like, earth-shattering.”

“Well, no one's gladder to be here than I am,” Rebekah says, putting her hands to her heart.

Bethany meets her friend's eyes and smiles back. She knows that, at home with her fanatic parents, Rebekah would be churning butter or helping her mother weave yarn into the household loom.

“So, where do you want to travel?” Bethany presses on.

“India. Bangladesh. Then further east, I guess. Maybe China and Russia.”

“I'm sure your mom loves
that
plan.”

Noah rolls his eyes cheerfully. “I haven't exactly mentioned it. But soon it won't matter. I'll be eighteen and I'll just go.” He pats his friend on the knee. “Mason here has ideas, too.”

Mason is a good-looking boy, well built. He peers downward and shifts in his seat.

“Hey, do you guys have beer?” Kurt inquires, looking around.

Rebekah scowls. “You have to go to the beer tents and buy whatever cat piss they're selling.”

Kurt shifts his gaze one last time between Rebekah and Bethany, then pushes himself up from the chair. “All right.” The younger boys don't move for a moment, then reluctantly go after him.

Left behind on her drooping chair, Bethany feels a tug of disappointment. Rufus has disappeared into one of the tents to prepare his rain forest potion. Someone has rigged a phone to a boom box and watery music leaks out of it, a sad mimicry of the day's live performances. In a remote part of her brain, Bethany knows she should be out there by the stage, not wasting time here. Instead, she sinks into the chair and finds herself thinking of her father.

Bethany had known all along that there was trouble. For several months her mother had been saying foreboding things like, “I thought he was a different kind of man,” as if talking to herself, trying out the words. “Or maybe I'm the one who changed. People change, you know.” She would look sternly at Bethany. “How did I get to be almost fifty? I have to make things happen if I want them.”

Her mother never explicitly said there was another man, someone who represented these unspecified “things,” but Bethany couldn't guess what else she could be talking about. She wasn't making exotic travel arrangements or adopting a risky new career. She wasn't buying a sports car. Sometimes Bethany overheard her on the phone, using a murmuring, coquettish tone. She had never spoken to Bethany's father that way. When she went out at night in new clothing, sharply tugging off the price tag before picking up her purse, it was clear she was not going out alone. It had made Bethany feel grown-up to co-harbor this unspoken understanding.