Rose's Garden (28 page)

Water ran in streams down the sides of the streets, fountaining up at storm drains blocked with leaves and branches, but it was mostly draining off still, down toward the square and the river itself. Conrad gripped the wheel tightly, peered through the windshield. With only one good eye, he was finding it increasingly hard to see in such heavy rain; he seemed to be driving into a solid wall of water, or to be underwater already, the dark shapes of trees wavering above him like distant reflections floating on the surface. He had cracked open the window of the truck but closed it now against the steady, harsh sound of the storm beating all around him. The wet air bleeding through the truck's vents smelled of things unearthed, and for a moment he was wildly claustrophobic, as if sodden leaves had been plastered over his nose and mouth.

At the corner of Jackson Street, under the dripping leaves of a maple tree, he caught sight of a young woman. She was struggling, a suitcase in one arm, two small children clinging to her neck. She was trying to force open her car door, which was slightly ajar, with her knee, but the suitcase was slipping from her grasp. Two other small bags, tipped over near her feet, lay on the sidewalk. Conrad braked the truck and got out, drew in a sharp breath against the force of the rain and the sour scent of wet wood, torn bark. The children—one not a year old yet, he judged—were wailing. The woman, her hair soaked and slicked over her cheeks, was clearly frantic.

He hurried toward them. “Please,” he said. “Do you need help?”

The woman turned to him, her face surprised and alarmed. He supposed she had thought she was all alone, the last person left on the street. She hoisted the baby higher on her hip, stared at him a moment as if trying to weigh whether to trust him. “My mother,” she said then, but to Conrad her voice sounded indistinct, and he had to lean toward her, peering at her mouth. “She's in the
kitchen,” the woman said, putting her hand over the baby's head. “In a wheelchair. Thank you.”

Conrad looked toward the front door of the house. It stood partly open, the hallway behind it dark.

“In there?” he said stupidly.

“She's in a wheelchair,” the woman repeated. “In the kitchen.”

She dropped the suitcase and pulled the children roughly from her, forcing them into the front seat, though they tried to cling to her, tried to climb back out into her arms. “Sit down, Jared,” she said to the baby. “Sit
down
.”

Conrad backed away, hurrying up the path.

“To your left,” the woman called after him, her voice high and fierce. “Left off the hall. She can't walk.”

At the open door, Conrad paused a moment, then stepped over the sill onto a dirty tatter of carpet, which lay askew, crumpled at his feet.

“Fisher?”

He heard a thin voice. Through the gloom he took in the peeling wallpaper, a split of obscenely large, faded cabbage roses; behind the flowers the wall was papered in something older still, something yellowed with age—maps. Conrad stopped, drew near the paper, peered at it, and was startled to see a place he knew: the faded, concentric blue rings and ovals described the rising altitudes of the White Mountains, Mt. Abraham, his own Paradise Hill.

“Fisher?” The tone rose, quavering, fearful, echoing through the house as if it were empty, as if it had been stripped already of its possessions.

Conrad jumped. He stepped farther into the hall and saw a pile of boxes; clothes and books spilled out of them at the foot of the stairs.

“I'm here,” he said into the darkness. “I'm coming.”

He put his hand to the wall, jumped again when he saw his own image move across a round mirror, its surface a porthole, a well's black eye. He stepped to the doorway on his left and looked into the room. A candle, guttering in its saucer, threw a low, flickering light.

“Fisher?” The figure in the wheelchair turned suddenly at his entrance.

Conrad cleared his throat, took off his cap. He looked at the woman, an old tam pulled down over her hair, a coat bunched up around her in the seat. Two broomstick legs, bedroom slippers over the misshapen feet, scraped the floor. He cleared his throat again, and the woman's face registered alarm.

“I've come to help you,” he said quickly then. “Your daughter—” He turned halfway and pointed to the door. “She asked me to help you.”

“I'm waiting on Fisher,” the woman said, querulous and shrill. She twisted her hands in her lap. Conrad saw she wore a nightdress, pale blue and tied at her throat with two thin cords, beneath her coat. “I'll wait,” she said, and suddenly her voice sounded clearer, firmer. “I'll not go without him.”

Conrad looked anxiously around him. Who was Fisher?

The woman looked up at him. “You've seen him? He knows I'm here?”

Conrad moved carefully then to stand beside her. He put his hands on the wheelchair, began to turn the chair slowly toward the doorway. The floor was sticky beneath his feet. A God's eye, made by a child from fraying bits of yarn, twisted slowly in the window over the sink.

“A tall man,” the woman said, craning her head around to look up at Conrad. “Fisher is a tall man. Black hair, black as a crow.”

“Yes, I—” Conrad started, and then thought that it was best just
to keep going, bearing the woman before him out of the house, into the rain, into the car, out of harm's way. The dangerousness of his undertaking—racing against a river, a failing dam, the lake behind it—stuck suddenly in his throat; that, and the smell in the kitchen, something artificial and cloying, like spilled soap powder, or a tin of condensed milk opened long ago and left on a counter.

The woman in the chair breathed deeply, a long sigh. “I said I'd wait on him,” she murmured. She leaned back against Conrad's knuckles, and he felt a sharp sympathy for her, for the untidy head, the lifeless legs, this woman left alone to wait in her dark kitchen. At the front door he stopped, took off his coat, and spread it carefully, tentlike, over the woman's head and shoulders, adjusting it so she could see. She sat quietly beneath his touch.

“It's raining very hard,” he said gently to her. “But there's nothing to be frightened of.”

At the curb the young woman hurried toward him. “Your coat!” She gestured at the car, ducking her head against the rain. “I can't take the chair,” she said hurriedly. “The van picks her up, but the chair won't fit in the car.” She bent down, peered into the old woman's face. “Mother? You're all right?”

“She's asking for Fisher,” Conrad said then, through the steady, annihilating wash of the rain.

The young woman stood upright, pulled her coat against her throat, appealed to Conrad. “Can you lift her? Just into the car?”

But Conrad did not release the wheelchair's handles. “She's asking for Fisher,” he repeated. It seemed to him that perhaps the young woman had not heard him, that he needed to tell her again.

“I'm sorry,” the woman said then. “Please just help me. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I got called earlier, by her aide. I drove here right away. The children—” She gestured at the car.

Conrad didn't move. His head felt heavy.

“This is her house,” she said more loudly, as though Conrad hadn't understood. “She's afraid to leave. She thinks my father's coming back.”

Conrad stared at her.

“He passed,” she said, and she had to raise her voice again to be heard through the rain, had to shout at him. “A long time ago.”

Conrad bowed his head then, took in a deep breath against the force of the old woman's delusion. And then he stooped to reach beneath her, one arm snaking around her back, the other fitted under her legs. She smelled of unwashed sheets. And when he lifted her in his arms, he was amazed at her slight weight, the small head held upright, alert, on its thin neck, the hands reaching for his shoulders.

The young woman hurried to open the back door of the car. Conrad bent, the woman in his arms, to settle her gently in the seat, the rain pounding his back. Carefully he lifted his coat from her shoulders, slipped it from behind her.

“I'll tell him,” he said, leaning close before he backed out, “where you are.”

And she nodded, satisfied, reached out to touch his hand.

When he stood back up, the young woman was fumbling in her purse.

“No, no,” Conrad said, backing off, hurrying into his coat, wiping his hand across his face.

The woman stopped, then held out her hand to him. “You came out of nowhere,” she said, and Conrad thought of the maps papering the wall inside the old woman's house, the surprise of finding himself not in strange territory after all, but here where he belonged, at home, his own house marked at the top of Paradise Hill with a tiny black square. It was right there, on the map.

When the car pulled away from the curb, exhaust spewing from
its tailpipe, its wheels sending up a plume of water, he saw that they had left the wheelchair behind on the curb, left the front door ajar. He hurried back up the short path, pushing the chair ahead of him. Inside he stopped uncertainly at the foot of the stairs, then pushed the chair carefully into the recess below the risers. He went into the kitchen and, bending over, blew out the candle on the table. The room filled with a swift and final darkness.

He walked back outside, pulling the door closed behind him. It was then that he realized he didn't know who these people were. Though he had thought he could recognize nearly every person on the street, Laurel being such a small town, he had never seen this family before.

HE DROVE SLOWLY
, wet and shivering. He had not forgotten about the danger, about the lake with its restless cargo of black water lapping the rock edge, the old dam straining at its mortared seams. He sensed in one part of his mind that he ought to leave now, head uphill. But he couldn't tear himself away from the low streets and the empty houses; someone might still be left behind. It would be his fault, he thought, if someone were left behind.

He remembered his pigeons, and his heart wrenched against an image of the river spread over the meadow, trapping his birds, drowning them. He shook his head, spoke reassuringly to himself. They were on the second story; surely it hadn't reached that high. There's time, he comforted himself. Keep looking. I need to keep looking.

He passed the clotheslines of his neighbors, with their array of stiff trousers and drenched sheets, forgotten clothes dropped here and there on the lawns, a tiny pink sock belonging to a child, a patterned dress shriveling in the mud, the empty arms filling with water. He saw loose shutters beating the walls. He saw empty
chairs on porches, some tethered to porch rails with baling twine, and bicycles resting against fences, chained tight. He saw doghouses trailing ropes, and swings winding and unwinding from the branches of trees in the unnatural wind. In the flower beds, the early fall phlox was blown to the ground, its flowers smashed like paper pulp. Here and there a child's toy lay in the street—a red bucket partly submerged, a ball spangled with gold stars, a sodden doll, one arm missing, its blue glass eyes staring heavenward into the rain.

Driving down Williams Street, he passed Harrison Supplee's house, foursquare and upright, white as a wedding cake, one of the five or six bigger houses in this part of town; most of Laurel's better addresses were up on the hill. The few grander houses down low were among the town's oldest, built by the original owner of the mill, who had spawned similar dwellings, purposeful and white, as dowries for each of his four daughters. A widow's walk, a folly, perched atop Harrison's house. The front door had been barred with a series of heavy two-by-fours nailed across the frame, over the knocker, which, as Conrad recalled, bore the shape of a branching tree, its trunk curved smoothly beneath your hand. How like Harrison, Conrad thought, to be prepared, to have barricaded his door. The wine red draperies in the front rooms were drawn.

He drove up and down the streets, staring through the windshield until his eyes ached, retracing his path, the same houses appearing over and over again. He turned down back alleys, now running with water and flotillas of wet leaves backed up like barges stuck in a canal. The water was rising. He could feel it under the tires of the truck, how the body shimmied now and again, rudderless for a second and then grinding, catching on higher ground.

And for a moment he understood how he could already be lost
in the flood, a tiny figure moving swiftly downriver, turning over and over, passing familiar storefronts and fences propped up here and there like signposts in a dream. He was carried past the dark windows of leaning buildings, past sloping gardens and toolsheds and deserted places where doors hung ajar at a crazy tilt, where windows gaped, blown out. He was borne into the darkness of the pine forest, where the river ran silent and swift, into the wavering meadows now become a wide sea, past May Brown's house, high on the hill above, its windows bright with a hot white light, and then past his own house, his arms reaching out as he was swept past his loft, his pigeons washing back and forth, wings limp, in the tide that ran through their roosts.

The smell of the river that bore him away—it was not clear and sweet but choked with green wood and torn root, with nail and fur and ripped bark; it filled his nose and eyes and mouth. And the sound of it—like Lemuel's organ, he thought, the rushing arpeggios and heaving wind, curtains blowing through the tall windows into the front parlor of the Sparkses' dusty brownstone, Lemuel himself bent over the instrument, his back shaking with joy. Where had he learned such joy? Wondrous Lemuel, now become an angel—he'd believed he could ascend on the wings of his birds into the blue ether, see the umbra of the earth itself cast into space. Of course he had preferred things built of stone, Conrad thought. The bigger the better. He had admired anything that would stand forever, cathedrals, the pyramids, the temples at Luxor, anything aimed at God's throne. That high.