Into the Garden (12 page)

The telephone was ringing when we entered the house. I was holding open the door so the girls could carry in all the boxes, but I managed to get to the phone in time. The girls hurried to gather around me, anxious to hear who was calling. Was it the bank again?

"Hello?" I said, looking at them. After a moment I swallowed hard and said, "Just a minute, Doctor Marlowe."

What should I say?"
"Tell her your mother said she has nothing to
say to her," Jade dictated. "Go on," she urged, "and
make it sound truthful."
I took a breath and did what she suggested. "I'm sorry, but she won't come to the phone,
Doctor Marlowe. She has nothing to say to you." That wasn't really a lie, I thought. She has
nothing to say to anyone.
"She's not doing the right thing, Cathy. You
need your follow-up visit. There are too many loose ends," Doctor Marlowe insisted. She sounded like she wasn't going to be satisfied until she spoke to
Geraldine.
"I'll speak to her about it, Doctor Marlowe," I
promised, "and call you as soon as I can."
"You know I'm right, Cathy. We should do
what's best for you." I thought she was going to end
the conversation but then at the last minute she spoke
again. "I understand you had some sort of an
accident?"
"I'm fine," I said, maybe too quickly because
there was a long pause.
"Have you seen or heard from the other girls?"
she asked. The tone of her voice suggested that she
already knew the answer.
"Yes, we've been in touch with each other," I
admitted.
"I'm happy about that. I really do think you're
all good for each other. Please don't let too much time
go by before I hear from--you," she urged.
"I won't, Doctor Marlowe. Thank you for
calling," I said and hung up.
"Well?" Star asked.
"I don't know. She sounded like she believed
me. She wants me to convince Geraldine I should
return for a follow- up and call her soon."
Jade looked thoughtful.
"Cat could go back to see her, pretend she's
convinced her mother to let her go. Maybe that would
end it," she mused aloud.
"Too dangerous now," Star said. "You know
how smart Doctor Marlowe is. She'll take one look at
Cat and know everything. She's bound to ask difficult
questions."
"Maybe she won't call again," Misty hoped. "We'll stall as long as we can," Jade agreed, but
a dark cloud of concern had moved in over our
excitement, threatening to rain reality down on our
efforts to create an oasis of fantasy in this desert of
hard, sad times.
"I'm getting started on the redecorating," Misty
declared. "I refuse to let anything depress me." She attacked the project with her characteristic
explosion of energy. Before long, we were all
contributing in one way or another. Star and Jade
rearranged furniture in the living room while I
hobbled along beside Misty and helped her hang
pictures and posters. She also set up the new CD
player and the speakers. While we worked, we
listened to the new CD's we bought and for the first time ever, rock music flowed through this house. Whenever Jade and Star passed Misty and me in the hallway, they were singing and dancing, and before long, we were all in the hallway, even me with my
cast, singing, swinging, and swaying to the rhythms "I can't wait for our first party!" Misty cried. "Who will we invite?" I wondered aloud. "We'll be careful and take great care about who
we choose," Jade said. "We should discuss every
suggestion and make a rule we all have to accept
anyone someone suggests, okay?"
"How are we going to do that?" Star asked. "I
don't know your friends and you don't know mine." "We'll talk about them and do the best we can,"
Jade insisted.
"Let's not worry so much about everything,"
Misty piped up. "Let's just have fun for a change." "Hmm," Star grunted. She looked at me and
then shook her head. "Don't worry about Doctor
Marlowe; don't worry about the bank. Don't worry
about this and don't worry about that. Maybe we
should be calling ourselves the OWW's then, Orphans
Without Worries."
Misty laughed. Star looked at Jade and then
they both laughed, too. It was good; it was good to hear that sound in this house, a sound so alien to my home, I was always taken by surprise whenever I
heard it here.
Our work continued. On the way back from the
mall, we had stopped at a house and garden supply
store where Star chose some plants and bushes to
cover the grave while Misty and Jade picked out the
paint for my room. We bought all the rollers and pans,
too. Then Misty said we should think about painting
the hallways as well. We talked about doing
something with the house lighting. Geraldine always
kept it dim, the fixtures loaded with low wattage bulbs
to save on energy costs. Misty wanted us to buy some
tinted bulbs, but Star thought it would make the house
look too much like a bordello. In the end we agreed
on a lighter shade of blue for the hallways and Misty,
who seemed inexhinstible, decided to start on that
while Star went out back to finish dressing up
Geraldine's grave with the plants and bushes we had
purchased. We were going to hang my new curtains,
too, before the end of the day.
Jade was the first to grow tired of the work and
began to complain about being hungry so we planned
what we would order in from the nearest Chinese
restaurant. Then they each called home to say they were staying at my house for dinner. Only Star's Granny was actually home to receive the call. Jade's mother was at a dinner meeting already and Misty's mother had left word with her answering service that
she was going to a movie with one of her girlfriends. "I thought you were getting permission to stay
with her overnight anyway," Star reminded Misty. "I was. I mean I will. I thought it would be
easier to ask from here and not have to answer any
questions about it," she explained.
'Well, Granny said I can stay for dinner," Star
declared, and then looked to me, "but only if you
promise to come to our house for one of her homecooked meals. I told her you would and she said
tomorrow night. One thing about my granny, she
doesn't dwell in the world of fluff. None of this 'we'll
do lunch or dinner' stuff. If you say you will, she pins
you down to being real. You can stay over, too," she
added.
Jade and Misty both nodded with looks in their
eyes that told me how much they wished they lived in
Granny's world rather than their own.
"Do you have anything to drink here?" Jade
suddenly asked. It was as if just the suggestion of
something dark and unpleasant had to be kept out any
way possible.
Misty's eyes widened. She looked clownish.
Her cheeks had dabs of blue paint on them and there
was a streak under her chin.
"Yeah, something to drink. That's a real good
idea," she seconded.
"Drink? You mean, alcohol?" I asked Jade. "I know you have milk and cookies," Jade
quipped.
"Oh. I think there's some liquor in the pantry," I
said. "I don't know what it is. My father was the only
one who drank it."
Jade went to look and returned with the report
that we had half a bottle of vodka and nearly a full
bottle of gin. She had the vodka in hand.
"I'll make everyone screwdrivers," she
announced, "and we'll relax before dinner."
Misty went to wash up and I called in our
dinner order, putting it on the charge card. All the
shopping, the work, the music, and laughs really had
made me feel better. Not once during the day had I
had a chance to relive the night before. As long as we
kept occupied and excited, we didn't dwell on what
we had done and what it all meant. Bigger questions
like how would we manage to continue all this once school had begun again and we were all occupied with our own little worlds didn't even come up. For now, we were all on a roller coaster and no one wanted to
do or say anything that might bring us to a dead stop. After Misty returned from cleaning her hands
and face, we gathered in the rearranged living room. I
had to admit it looked brighter and gave the
impression of being bigger by not separating the
chairs as far from the sofa. We pulled the curtains
fully open and let in the twilight, which threw a hazy
glow of pink and yellow over the otherwise dull
brown walls. Star and Jade sat on the sofa while Misty
and I chose the easy chairs. It was when we had
stopped and relaxed that we all began to feel the
fatigue settle in. We sat there quietly for a few
moments, sipping the drinks. I didn't taste the vodka,
but I knew from my previous bad experience of
drinking rum and Cokes that it can sneak up on you. "Did you read any more of your real mother's
letters to you?" Jade asked me.
"No. I was too tired last night."
"What did she tell you in the first letter besides
the stuff about your trust fund?"
"Not that much," I said. "She made it sound like
she wasn't in love with her husband, Grandpa Franklin. She said she arranged for Geraldine to adopt me so that I would be close to her always, to keep me
in the family."
"Some family," Star muttered.
"She found another letter in Geraldine's
pocketbook today, too," Jade told Star and Misty, who
sipped their drinks and looked at me with interest.
"An apology or something, right?"
"Yes," I said. I reached into my pocket and
produced the letter. "She doesn't say exactly who my
real father is, but she suggests Geraldine loved him
and maybe wanted him to be her husband?'
"So it was probably someone younger than your
real mother if Geraldine was interested in him too,"
Jade conjectured.
"Maybe?' Star said. "Though Geraldine could
have been in love with someone's grandfather, too, the
way she thought."
"Actually, the letter suggests that my real father
was
older than Geraldine," I added,
"Do you think your father's name is in the other
letters then?" Misty asked.
I shrugged.
"How can you be so calm about it? Don't you
want to know who he is?" she asked.
"Sure she does," Jade answered for me, "but
you should know from our experiences at Doctor
Marlowe's that we don't just rush headlong into any of
this. It's too traumatic."
"But maybe when she finds out, she can go to
him and maybe he'll want her to move in with him
and be his daughter finally," Misty said in her dreamy
tone of voice again. Actually, it sounded more like
something she wished for herself.
Star shook her head.
"You do live in Never-Never Land, don't you?
That's the last thing her real father wants to happen.
He's probably got his own family and wife and how
do you think they'll feel learning about Cathy, huh?" "Oh," Misty said. Then she smiled. "So what?
We're here now. You don't need anyone else. Still,"
she said after a moment, "if it was me who didn't
know who my real father was and I had a chance to
find out, I'd be very excited and anxious to do it. I
wouldn't wait."
"Cat isn't you," Star said. "So shut up about it
already." Misty looked glum for a moment and then
brightened. "Let's talk about our first party. When
should we have it?" she asked.
"We're having it now?' Star said.
"No, I mean with boys," Misty insisted. Star looked at Jade.
"Not until we've got everything the way we
want it," Jade said, as if it was the most obvious fact
of all. "When the time comes, we'll tell whomever we
all decide to invite that Cathy's mother has gone away
for the day and we have the house."
"We don't want to invite too many people," Star
cautioned, "and we better be sure no one makes it
sound like an open party or we'll get all sorts of
riffraff."
"Let's just invite boys. Four of them," Jade
suggested. "Who needs any more competition, not
that I'm afraid of it or anything."
Star laughed and drank some more of her
screwdriver. "I'm not! It's just ... not prudent to invite
other girls at this time," Jade insisted.
"Prudent? I like that. What do you think, Cat?
Should we just invite boys?" she teased. "Is that
prudent?"
"I don't know?' I said. "You girls know about
the only party I ever went to, really, and you know
what happened to me," I said, gazing at my drink. They nodded, all looking both sad and angry
for me as they recalled the story I had told them at the group therapy session. I had been given too much rum and Coke to drink and some boys had taken advantage and groped me while girls I thought were my friends
looked on and laughed.
"Nothing like that is going to happen here," Star
assured me. "We won't let it."
"That's right," Jade insisted. "We'll always look
out for each other!'
I smiled. I really did feel safer now, even safer
with them than I had felt with Geraldine. And that's
what family was supposed to do for you, I thought,
make you feel secure, let you know that there are
people who care about you and want to protect you
and love you. We'd be friends forever and ever, and
there was nothing I wouldn't do for them and nothing
they wouldn't do for me. It wasn't just the vodka that
made me feel warm and comfortable now. It was their
smiles and their laughter and their promises. We could believe in the promises we made to
each other easier than those our parents made to us.
Because we were all veterans of disappointment, we
knew how painful it would be to disappoint each
other. What better guarantees were there than the ones
born out of mutual pain and respect?
"To the OWP's," Misty cried, holding up her glass as if she could read my very thoughts. "One for
all and all for one!"
"To the OWP's," we joined, and drank down
our drinks.
Jade started to prepare another for all of us as
the dinner arrived. We were just beginning to feel
very good and be happy. The best was yet to come, I
thought. My friends had helped me bury all my
disappointments, forever and ever.
Was I being too optimistic? Was Misty rubbing
off on me? Was I turning into a dreamer? What if I
was? Anything was better than what I had been, I
thought. This was like being born again and there was
no turning back now, never.
Geraldine could rise from the grave; she could
haunt this house; she could turn shadows into shapes
and hiss her displeasure from the darkest corners. She
could glare at me from behind my eyes, from my
deepest, darkest memories, but she wouldn't turn me
around. You always wanted doors to be shut,
Geraldine, I thought. Well, this time, I'm slamming
them shut on you.
Maybe it was the vodka talking, but I felt brave
and strong. I drank another and I sang along with the
girls whenever they burst into song. We ate
everything in sight and then collapsed on the sofas and in the chairs, laughing at our appetites, not caring about the loudness of the music or the noise we made It felt so good to do it, to have the freedom, but I couldn't help gazing up at the doorway and thinking about Geraldine. It was just habit. She wasn't gone