The Wonder Garden (28 page)

The next few moments are a confusion of mopping and swearing. The tent is tropical, noxious with stink. Chris bundles his soiled camping pad and sleeping bag together with his shorts and underwear. Bethany watches, prone on the damp nylon floor, as he crouches around, naked from the waist down. Finally, he pulls on a pair of cotton pajama pants and looks at her with a kind of flustered reverence. “Are you all right?”

She nods, her head rubbing the ground, the nylon making static in her hair. He nods back and ducks silently out of the tent with his bundle. Relieved depletion overtakes her. She falls asleep to the lullaby of the susurrating
chakapa
.

In the morning—much too early, only a hint of daylight through the moldy tent walls—there is a stir at the campsite. Bethany lies, stiff and cotton-mouthed, upon a circuitry of roots and stones. Through the hammering of blood in her brain she hears agitated voices.
“I don't know, I don't know,”
someone is saying over and over.

She crawls to the tent door and peers out. There is a bleak indigo cast over everything, and it seems that objects have been rearranged in the night: the propane stove and log and plastic cups on the ground. Rebekah is standing outside the yellow tent, arms hanging at her sides. When she notices Bethany, she stares at her for a long black moment. Even at this distance, Bethany recoils from what she sees in the gaze.

“Only three people ended up drinking the brew,” Rebekah tells her when she comes into the white tent. If she notices the rancid smell, she does not mention it. Her fingers knit and unknit themselves as she speaks, as if deciding whether to pray.

“Rufus was hysterical the whole time, rocking back and forth and trying to run away. That took up most of my energy, just trying to keep him calm. Then Holmes kept puking, like three or four times, and I had to deal with that, too. Stooge just kind of fell asleep, so I thought,
Good, I don't have to worry about him
.”

“Rebekah, what happened?”

Rebekah looks at Bethany. “He never woke up. He hasn't woken up.”

“But you tried . . . ?”

Rebekah's mouth pulls downward. “I knew the tent was too hot,” she cries, and bangs a fist on the ground. “I fucking knew something was going to happen.”

When they emerge from the tent together, Chris is outside with Rufus and the other one, Holmes.

“He was probably on something else, man. We should've asked,” Holmes is saying.

Rufus does not respond. He turns to look at the girls.

“What are we going to do?” Rebekah says calmly.

Rufus stares at her. His face is pale, and he is wearing a shirt now. The shirt is white with a big blue eyeball in the middle of it.

“I think we should go to the medical tent,” Rebekah answers herself.

Rufus stares another moment, then says, “No, they'll send the cops.”

“What else are we supposed to do, Rufe?”

“All right, I'll go to the medical tent,” Rufus says quietly. “Let the cops come.”

The ambulance arrives, barreling through the campground. Curious people gather nearby and murmur as the EMTs hunch into the yellow tent and, after a few minutes, slide out a stretcher with a sheet strapped over a body. That's what it is, Bethany realizes. A body.

“This happens every year,” Bethany hears someone say in a hushed, authoritative tone. “There's always at least one person . . .”

The police come. When it's her turn to talk, Bethany feels like she is reading lines in an audition. She listens to herself telling the story of her evening, pointing to the white tent, pointing to Chris. The officers seem serious but unsurprised. Their tone wavers between sympathy and contempt. They unceremoniously take down her name and address in case they have further questions. She gives her home address—her father's address—­without thinking, then feels a blade of fear that her parents might find out about this.

The police move on to Rufus. They speak to him for a long time. After they finish, one officer remains with him as the others poke around the tents. Bethany wonders what has happened to the magic brew, whether they'd drunk all of it last night, or if Rufus—or, more likely, Rebekah—had poured the remainder somewhere. Maybe a dog would sniff it out, attuned to whatever telltale chemicals, but the officers have not brought dogs.

After the police lead Rufus away, people from other campsites begin to infiltrate, rooting for information. Rebekah will not talk to them, but walks around in circles shaking her head. She is still in her patchwork pants and tank top. Her hair is snarled down to the tips.

“Well, it's bound to happen, with people mixing drugs,” one girl is rattling on in a regular voice. “Not everyone knows what they're doing. People make dumb mistakes all the time. It happens every year.”

“He was probably one of the Yggdrasil crew. I heard they had some bad Molly.”

“Did you know him?” someone asks Bethany. She shakes her head mutely.

“We need to find Amos,” Rebekah says, suddenly insistent. Her voice is high and strained. “You know, not having phone service fucking sucks. What the fuck are you supposed to do in an emergency? Walk around with a freakin' totem until someone sees you?”

“I think he's with his bandmates,” Bethany offers. “He said he was going to stay at their campsite.”

With a growl, Rebekah grabs the Argus totem. She holds it aloft as they wander the campground, until at last they find Amos and his friends playing guitars around a little table of bagels. Amos looks clean and rested. The breakfast setup strikes Bethany as neat and civilized; the mugs appear to be filled with real coffee. Bethany wishes intensely that she could sit down with them and pretend nothing has happened.

Amos looks up with innocent surprise.

“Let's go,” Rebekah says to her brother. “We're leaving.”

“What? Why?” His brow knits, and he keeps strumming the guitar.

Rebekah yanks him up by the arm. She takes him aside and talks quietly. Bethany can see her back quaver as she starts to cry, and she sees Amos put an arm around her.

They collect everything they can from the campsite and lug it out with them. Rebekah carries the Argus totem, now an unwelcome beacon. As they walk, it seems that some people are whispering, watching them with a curiosity bordering on envy. Others look on ignorantly, blinking like dumb cows, wondering why they are leaving the festival early. The story will spread through the campground, through the festival, eventually reach the ears of the performers themselves. It will dampen the mood for a while, or—possibly—enliven it, add new fuel to the manic dancers. Perhaps this direct news of death will underscore the present moment for them. They won't be surprised, that much is certain. This happens, apparently, every year. If that is true, Bethany thinks, then the festival itself is nothing but an enormous glittering gambling table where life is traded roughly in order to inflate its value, remove its guarantee.

Rebekah walks with a look of grim focus. Amos, too, is quiet. Bethany feels no sharp emotion, just a general numbness. Only in an abstract way does she understand that a man is abruptly dead—a man who was alive in front of her just hours ago, only a few years older than herself. The idea beads on the surface of her consciousness like oil on water.

A girl in braids approaches them. “Hey, are you leaving already? Here, take this.” She holds out a fan of glossy postcards.
Did you become someone else at Aether?
the postcards inquire, showing a picture of a purple-wigged woman with butterfly wings.
Send us your photos!

With every step toward the exit, Bethany thinks, she is fashioning a permanent memory that will remain with her. She
is
, in fact, a different person coming out of the festival. Now, walking beside Amos, she catches herself considering the unexpected advantage of having witnessed something he has not. This is such an unscripted moment that anything could be excused. She could grasp his hand right now, and he would have to hold it.

She does not grasp his hand. They continue walking, apart from each other, toward the parking lot. The sneaking light of dawn is gone, replaced by the white slab of morning. There is no special color in the sky. There are no cloud formations or intimations of a higher firmament. It occurs to Bethany that this story will make the news. There will be something about it on television. There will be a spin about the danger of music festivals, and she will have to sit silently while her mother obliviously warns her about it.

Eventually, she will distance herself from the incident, tamp it into a story she tells at parties. She will put herself apart from the man who died. He was fundamentally different, she will rationalize, not from Old Cranbury, unanchored by good parents and constructive surroundings. As they approach the gate Bethany thinks of the town, small and safe, awaiting their return. It is cloistered, oppressively familiar, but maybe—and her mother's trembling hands return to her—mired with its own dark disturbances. It is its own kind of restive campground, in a way, its properties penciled upon common land, impinging on one another despite the fences meant to hold them apart. Huddled in that encampment are their families, steely cohorts within the greater clan. Even Rufus must have parents of his own, although this seems improbable. He seems parentless, born from nothing, sprung from the thigh of some god.

Far off to the side, before the parking lot, Bethany notices a gathering of people on an open field. This would be the morning yoga session, offered to those able to rise early enough, still interested in breathing. The rows of people move in sync, adopting the same poses, configuring and reconfiguring their limbs like children experimenting with their bodies. Bethany watches as they all bend at once to plant their hands upon the battered field, then arch up in unison, a hundred arms saluting the sun.

M
OON
R
OOF

L
ORI
H
ATFIELD
takes a different route home. She isn't sure what inspires her, after pulling out of the bakery parking lot, to turn onto a quiet side street connecting Edgeware Drive to Cannonfield Road. Part of it, no doubt, is impatience. It's rush hour, for what that's worth in this town, and the red light at Mercy Avenue is notoriously long; she once timed it at two full minutes. Or perhaps, after a long week of car errands, she just wants to pry open a tiny new vein of experience.

The road is called Iron Horse, a name that to Lori evokes the image of a horse cast in a high-kneed pose, mane sculpted in waves. In eleven years as an agent, she's never driven it. Somehow she hasn't had the occasion to bring buyers to a listing on this particular road. When returning from town, she always takes Mercy home. This is a more scenic route to be sure, she now sees, as her Lexus climbs a hill lined with loose stone walls. The trees are mature and generously leafed. She feels a lightness of heart as she drives and commends herself for doing something as delightfully simple as taking a new road home.

Too quickly, she reaches the end of Iron Horse. The hill has attained its crest and now slopes to a stop sign. She brakes and comes to a gentle halt at the intersection where, with a faint sense of resignation, she waits to turn left onto Cannonfield. A steady stream of cars approaches from each direction. These are people returning from work, coming home from the small city to the east and the larger town to the west. Lori keeps her foot on the brake and waits for a lull in traffic.

The car smells good. On the dog-haired passenger seat is a box of fresh cookies from Amici Bakery, the most expensive bakery in the area, where she went as much for the embossed sticker as for the quality of the cookies. She'd intended to bake something from scratch for the Christensens' party tonight, but ultimately aborted the plan, certain that no lemon meringue she achieved would equal the sunburst in August's
Bon Appétit
. It's probably gauche, anyway, to bring food to an event like this. Still, she fears arriving anywhere empty-handed.

Harold Christensen is the head of her husband's company, a private equity firm. Lori has heard many anecdotes about Harold but has never met or seen him, though he and his wife presumably live in the same town as Lori and Mitch. It occurs to her that she may have encountered Mrs. Christensen—Carol—without knowing who she was. Lori pictures her as one of the ageless capri-panted blondes who populate the town and who seem to have dwelled here, with their headbands and quilted bags, since its founding by the Pilgrims.

This is the first year Mitch has made the guest list for the party, an annual affair that the Christensens stubbornly bill as a backyard barbecue, an informal gathering to acknowledge Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer. Lori considers this a terrible purpose for a party. What is there to celebrate about the slow drying of greenery, the sneaky flash of autumn, the onslaught of another New England winter?
Bring your bathing suits!
the invitation commands in breezy cursive. Lori knows that the Christensens live on Pelican Point, on the waterfront, and this will not be a casual cookout. There will be passed hors d'oeuvres and a tuxedoed bartender. Whatever in-ground pool is offered for the guests' enjoyment will be rimmed with bluestone and rock outcroppings through which will flow a simulated waterfall. No one will bring a bathing suit.

The traffic continues to hurtle along Cannonfield. Lori holds the steering wheel, waiting to make her turn, but the cars are traveling too closely together for her to safely enter. The nature of the left turn, too, requires her to wait for simultaneous gaps in both eastbound and westbound traffic. Adding to the difficulty is the presence of a blind curve to her left, obscuring the eastbound cars until they are almost upon her. For this reason, she focuses on the westbound traffic—watching the distant cars as they approach and noting any promising spaces as they draw closer. Almost without fail, by the time the promising gap has reached Lori, it will have been narrowed to nothing by the accelerating car in the rear. And in the instances when the space remains, a quick check to the left reveals a new cavalcade swinging out from the curve.

The turn signal blinks on her dashboard with a lazy, plinking sound. Lori watches as vehicle after vehicle appears over the eastern horizon with twin headlamps like unfriendly eyes. A red sedan, followed by a silver SUV, pursued by a white pickup truck. She becomes aware of the pressure of her foot upon the brake pedal. It hits her that only by continuing this pressure is she preventing her car from gliding into traffic, becoming a jumble of steel. Perhaps this is what distracts her from acting when a suitable opening arrives in the wake of a Mercedes convertible. The opportunity registers in her brain, and yet the appropriate neurons do not fire, and her foot does not rise from the pedal. Instead, she stares at the empty road in front of her until a moss-green Subaru approaches and closes the gap irretrievably. Behind the Subaru comes a van, and behind that another Subaru. Lori reprimands herself. She could have made her turn twice in the amount of time she had. Now, who knows when the next opportunity will come. She breathes out and pumps her foot impotently on the brake.

Just one more minute and another chance will come. She will have to be patient. Well, she is good at that. She is patient, in little ways, every day. And she has been patient in a large way for years, waiting for her children to become independent. She has waited through midnight crying spells, failed toilet-training programs, food-flinging phases. She has waited through driver's ed. That is what motherhood is about, she reflects: patience. If she is not patient, no one is.

Now, suddenly, her boys are on the brink of manhood, and time will be hers again. Soon, she can do what she wants. She can give more attention to clients, really make a name for herself. She earned her real estate license after the kids started school, but has worked only as a buyer's agent, never taking listings of her own. Mitch was doing so well at his job—the firm was so crazy about him, giving him generous raises each year, plus bonuses—that it seemed unnecessary. She knows that some women find self-worth through work, pegging their identities to their careers, but she has never needed that crutch. And, in all honesty, she's become accustomed to her time at home. There is plenty to do with even just one teenage son in the house. Mason has his driver's license now and doesn't need rides anymore, but still needs his dinners cooked and clothes washed. In her free time, Lori enjoys doodling around the house, choosing new paint for an accent wall, finding new ways to organize the linen closet. The more open houses she attends, the more ideas she gets. No home is ever truly finished, as so many women her age are fond of saying. And she alone is the steward of their home, tirelessly pushing it to its potential, singlehandedly keeping it from regressing into chaos.

She has also begun the job of badgering her younger son about college. As expected, he is more interested in playing football than filling out applications, and she fears that any lapse of persistence on her part will lead to the casual trashing of his future and—more profoundly—to the reversal of her bloodline's ascent. Lori was the first to attend state college; it rests with her children to pierce the private sphere.

She is gratified to have succeeded with her older son, whom they dropped off at a well-regarded, very expensive university just two weeks earlier. Perversely, her reward for this success has been Kurt's empty bedroom, finally tidy, but so vacant that she cannot look in. For the past two weeks, she's struggled against telephoning him. She knows it's better to stay cool, to wait for him to make contact. Again, patience! And her waiting has paid off: he'd finally called the day before, although she has to admit that the conversation had been short and unsatisfying. He is planning to take a class in a subject Lori didn't quite catch—social biology? bio-anthropology?—and she hung up the phone with a strained good-bye and the feeling of a gauzy cluster in her throat.

The cars keep coming. Lori sits erect in the driver's seat, calm, like a good student, still silently berating herself for the missed opportunity to make her turn. Now she is going to be behind schedule; she is going to have to rush when she gets home. She has already chosen a dress for the party, but she hasn't actually worn it in centuries and is concerned that it might need ironing, or might not fit the way it used to. She should have tried it on earlier in the week. But, really, how was she to have guessed that she'd be held up tonight, and for such a silly reason? When she'd rushed out of the house that afternoon, she hadn't intended to be gone for more than twenty minutes. She hadn't even brought her cell phone.

And, really, this is getting ridiculous. People
live
on this road. How do they contend with this intersection day after day? She looks for evidence of previous trouble—skid marks on the road, bark shaved from trees—but finds none. Her current difficulty must be a fluke. She considers turning around, going back down Iron Horse, back to Edgeware, back home via dependable Mercy and its protracted but functional stoplight. If she had only taken the usual route in the first place, she would be home by now; she would already have tried on the dress and begun fixing her hair. A broken-down Volvo comes past with a patchwork of bumper stickers on its rear. No. If she goes back now, the traffic will relent the instant she is out of sight. She's lived long enough to know that's how the world works. And she's committed too much time to waiting already. How much time
has
it been? It feels like ten minutes, maybe more. It's better, she thinks, not to look at the clock.

Again, a space approaches, but this one she judges to be too tight. The decision is made: she will not accelerate; it's not worth the risk. Instead, she sits and waits as the Toyota speeds past, followed by a long brown Cadillac. She sits and waits as the Cadillac approaches, and realizes too late that it is traveling at an exaggeratedly slow speed, that she could have gone in front of it politely at least three times. As it passes, she sees the driver's head in profile, straining forward in the way of the elderly. Somewhere, she imagines, are the man's worried adult children, exasperated by their father's refusal to give up his license, by his insistence that his reflexes are still sharp as knives.

Lori takes a deep breath and holds it, calling up reserves of patience. It is not so easy to control the proud and aging. Her own parents are still stubbornly upstate, holding on to the decaying home of her childhood, despite its staircases and sunken living room, despite the Hasidic families swarming the neighborhood like black ants. Her mother has fallen twice already, bruising each hip. And yet they refuse to visit the assisted-living facility Lori has found for them here in town, where they could have an apartment with its own kitchenette. They don't want a kitchenette, her mother says. They want to stay where they are comfortable, and stay there until they die.

The traffic on Cannonfield is still dense, but there seem to be slightly longer intervals between cars now. With new hope, Lori waits. She notices that the sunlight is changing, taking on a warmer, angular quality. Across Cannonfield is a wall of trees. This is still considered the country, more or less, and it comforts her somehow to know that there are birds in these trees, and any number of undiseased rodents. Lori lets her eyes blur out of focus as she stares at the deep green foliage, discerning patches of shade and light. She sits like this for a long moment, until a movement in her frame of vision catches her attention, and she is startled to notice a vehicle in her rearview mirror. It is surprising, really, that no unlucky driver has yet gotten stuck behind her. Now she feels the renewed anxiety of her situation, compounded by the presence of a waiting stranger in a black BMW. She sits up straight and returns her attention to the physics of approaching traffic. How frustrating that the driver behind her has no way of knowing how long she's been sitting here, how laughably impossible this left turn has been, how stupendously patient she is.

The cars continue to flow steadily in both directions. Finally, a space approaches—it is tight, yes, but it's now or never—and Lori's foot again does not respond to the command to accelerate. There must be some contradictory command interfering with it, beyond her conscious control. For an instant, Lori understands herself as a split being, with a gulf between her voluntary and involuntary selves, between that which can be helped and that which cannot.

She glances at the mirror, sending an invisible apology to the driver behind her. And yet when another eligible space approaches, she again lets it pass, dumbfounded. The BMW honks and, at last, pulls alongside her, idles for a moment, and moves ahead onto Cannonfield, making a smooth left turn and disappearing around the bend. Lori feels her face flush in humiliation. Really, it couldn't have hurt the BMW to wait more patiently. Sometimes other drivers are terrible, forgetful of their shared humanity, their common fallibility. Too many people honk the instant a light turns green, make responsible people feel incompetent.

And yet, what is wrong with her today? She has never been so timid behind the wheel. It's as if she's entered a variation of that common nightmare: anchored feet, the sucking of quicksand. The stop sign looms, its message like an existential injunction for her alone. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. The thing to do is relax. It will do no good to think of the passing time, of the fact that the day is now visibly darkening, the patterns of sunlight disappearing from the road and trees.

Now, another car comes up behind her. It lurks in her rearview mirror, its black grille scowling at the back of her head. A moment later, another appears behind that, and then another. Two, three—maybe more—drivers are now depending on Lori's judgment, Lori's decisiveness, Lori's lifetime of experience on the road. They have places to be, perhaps urgently. Lori struggles to keep her focus on the streaming traffic, but her heart is pounding too heavily now, the blood surging in her skull, and her vision seems strangely blurred, her depth perception skewed. With a trembling hand, she presses the hazard button on the dashboard. A moment later, the first car noses tentatively alongside her and passes, followed by the others.