The Garden of Last Days (38 page)

IT WAS FOUR
in the morning, her son gone an hour, and Virginia poured herself some cold coffee, put the mug in the microwave, and pressed the button. She leaned one hand against the counter and smoked. Alan always made too much. In the mornings he’d drip a whole pot and drink only a third while she drank another and had to dump the rest down the drain. The oxygen flow in her nose tube was getting weak. She was going to have to switch to the backup tank soon. Later this morning, when the sun rose and businesses opened, she’d call the air people for a refill.

The microwave beeped. She pulled out the hot mug, poured the steaming coffee into a cooler cup, then spooned in three sugars and laid her cigarette in the ashtray and carried it and her coffee out to the dark living room, her air hose dragging lightly behind her.

Alan’s bed was untouched, the blanket and sheet pulled back from the pillow the way she did for him. Called into work early and he
was still out doing Lord knows what, though two or three times she’d seen on the end table among his change and crumpled bills a wadded cocktail napkin, the black shape of a naked woman under the name of the place. She knew where it was. Years ago it’d been a pool hall she and Eddie would go to till they started fighting about his drinking.

She shook her head and made her way around the foldout to her chair by the sliding glass door. She set her ashtray and coffee down on the end table and was about to sit, but the air tube pulled against her upper lip and she turned to see it snagged under the bed leg.
Your own damn fault, Virginia. Don’t even start
. It was a running conversation she had with herself. This ball and chain she had to wear so she could breathe because she never was able to quit. Even now.

She nudged the tube free with her toe, pulled the slack behind her, sat in her easy chair. She took a deep drag of her cigarette and held the hot coffee under her nose. It was night still though the sky had lightened to a dark blue and soon she’d be able to see her patio and tiny lawn, the statue of the Virgin Mary that Alan had set for her against the fence. He’d done it on a Sunday, hadn’t he? Because she remembered sitting with his wife at the patio table while she breastfed the baby and the two of them had talked about God.

“You going to christen him?”

“We don’t think so.” The girl looked down at Baby Cole suckling her. She ran her fingers over his scant hair, blond as Alan’s had been. “God’s everywhere, isn’t he?”

“So’s the devil, Deena. Have you thought about that?” Virginia’s voice had sounded more ornery than she’d intended, but who was this plump and plain girl with no fire in her eyes and never a smile on her face? What did Alan see in her anyway? And him over by the fence sinking a shovel into a wheelbarrow of crushed stone, lifting it out and dumping it into the box he’d set into the ground so carefully. Always a worker. Always working.

“Do you really believe in the devil, Virginia?” Her daughter-in-law was looking down at the baby.

“Yes. How can I believe in God and the angels if I don’t believe in the dark one too?”

“I just don’t believe in all that. Hell or a devil.”

“Then what about heaven and God?”

The girl glanced back up at her, the flash of a challenge in her eyes. “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. I don’t know.” She looked back down at Virginia’s grandson, pushed two fingers into her breast to give him more room to breathe, but it was Virginia who needed room to breathe; what kind of house was this child going to be raised in? Alan didn’t even like her to quote the Bible and it was her fault because she’d been in darkness till only recently; she’d done her best but she’d raised him with no guidance from above and now he was drinking and wasting his hard-earned money, locked out of his house away from his son, and she blamed that Godless fat ass he’d married for that. She did.

Virginia stubbed her cigarette and tried not to light another for at least five minutes. She could see the clock radio on the kitchen counter on the other side of the room: 4:24 a.m.; everything else was going—her lungs, her leg strength, her bladder and bowels and hearing, but she could still see as well as she ever could. At least across a room. She needed her reading glasses, but who didn’t?

She sipped more coffee. Every day she wanted to call her daughter-in-law and say just what she thought of her, and every day she prayed for the strength not to because she knew how that could hurt Alan’s case. But God forgive her, she never did like the woman, especially now that she’d sent her son into darkness. And the way that girl always looked at him, her dulled eyes narrowed, sizing him up, forever looking like he fell far short of her expectations. She didn’t even know how blessed she was to have a man like Alan James. A man who worked enough for three men. A man who didn’t lie or steal or cheat. A man who was kinder and sweeter to his son than any man had ever been to him.

She could still see him sitting beside her in the front seat as she drove from one cleaning job to another, his feet not touching the
floorboards, his blond hair and little face as he held his chin up so he could see over the dash and out the windshield. How many nights when he was young—when she was alone and not taking in the first man to give her a wink and a smile—had she lain in bed and tried to wish a father into her boy’s life? And how many nights—
Admit it, Virginia; there were one or two
—did she lie there and wonder why she’d kept that baby?

She was already forty-one years old, cleaning rooms for the leisurely and the wealthy, content for the time being to put in her hours and live alone, knowing love always comes again somehow. Was she thinking that when it happened? Was she thinking at all?

It was a Sunday afternoon at the resort on Longboat Key. She was more than halfway through cleaning the weekend checkouts, the beach white under the sun, the Gulf a lovely deep green that stretched out blue to the horizon where there were no clouds. She was standing at the window, looking forward to a cigarette and admiring the view. She heard the door close behind her. She thought it was the other girl from housekeeping, but it was a man, standing there in a V-neck T-shirt and white tennis shorts, his thick forearms and legs covered with curly blond hair, his eyes a brighter blue than she’d yet seen, but he wasn’t handsome; his features were all scrunched down from forehead to chin, and she apologized, said she thought the room had been vacated, and she dropped her duster into her cleaning cart, something she remembered because he moved toward her just as the duster landed on dirty towels, and even before he got close to her she could see how drunk he was, could smell the liquor and his aftershave, one of those men from the tropical bar on the beach under the thatched roof drinking his morning away dressed for tennis.

Her heart was beating so fast she felt sick and there was a flat light in his eyes that scared her more than his hands on her shoulders, more than the air she was now falling through, more than the bounce of the mattress against her back. She turned and tried to swing her legs off the bed but his hand squeezed her throat and she could feel all the strength he was withholding and she only looked at his face once
more and had to look away because it was clear he’d made up his mind about this long ago, his hand reaching up her skirt and jerking down her underwear, her apron now raised up over her belly and breasts, and then he let go of her and she heard his zipper and
you could’ve kicked him and run;
for thirty years these words bled themselves into hundreds of quiet moments like this one, now ruined, as she herself had been ruined; dry and beginning to chafe, it took him such a long, long time, and when he was done she was bleeding, knew her blood was mixing with his seed, the early-afternoon sun beginning to slant itself into the room.

It was hard to breathe under his weight. There was a deep burn between her legs. Would he kill her now the way thousands of women over thousands of years had been killed? And in a shuddering breath, as if from her own memory, she felt joined to them on all the dusty floorboards and alleyways of ancient cities, the damp blankets of ships at sea; in horse-drawn wagons and roadside ditches and empty box cars; in the backs of trucks and buses; in hay-strewn barns, dark basements, and dank tool sheds; on barroom tables and the cooling asphalt of a parking lot; in the mud of river bottoms, cornfields, and woods, and in beds in sunlit rooms like this one on a Thursday when she was alone and thinking about love—she was part of them all now, yet one more in this sisterhood none of them had sought.

It seemed odd that he was being so quiet, so still. He’d softened and she could hardly feel him inside her and she wanted his weight off her chest and knew she was a fool for wanting that much. But his breathing had steadied. She could hear the breath through his nose and half-opened mouth, could feel the slow rise and fall of his chest against her. How familiar this all was now, to slide out from under a drunk who’d be out till he came to and would he even remember? And if only she remembered, did it really happen?

She was afraid to try and push him off her. She grabbed the edge of the mattress and pulled till she was halfway free. His head was on the pillow now, his face turned toward hers, his breath bad, and she hated
him, this passed-out piece of trash who took her for himself as if she went with the suite and clay courts and beach. She pulled harder and wiggled her legs and hips till he was off her, belly down, his tennis shorts around his sunburned ankles. She avoided looking at the rest of him. She slid off the bed and stood, his seed running out of her and down the inside of her thigh, and she yanked a towel from her cleaning cart and wiped it off her as if it were gasoline near a flame. She pushed the towel between her legs, wiped hard, and dropped it back into the cart.

The sun was in her eyes. She shielded them with her hand and found her underwear under the window. He was snoring, his rear big and pale. She stepped into her torn panties one shoe at a time, then let her skirt fall back over her knees. His arm hung off the bed, his gold watch glinting in the sunlight. Her underwear was loose on her. She still burned and knew she would for days and what if he came to right now?

The kitchenette drawer slid out too loudly as she reached in and gripped one of the pearl-handled steak knives. It was heavy and cool. She was thirsty but afraid to turn on the faucet. An inch of leather was sticking out the back pocket of his shorts and her heart had slowed and she almost felt calm as she stepped over and with two fingers pulled out his wallet. It was thick and worn. She opened it. Under her blade was a picture of him smiling into the DMV camera. Her fingers were trembling. Ward Dunn Jr. He was ten years younger than she was and lived in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ward Dunn Jr.

She reached in and took out all the bills—hundreds, twenties, fifties. She pushed the money into her apron and fought the feeling rising up in her throat that this now made her a whore who’d asked for it.

Ward Dunn Jr. was still snoring. She’d like to stab him in the neck. The head. The face. But what would happen now? Just go to the manager and tell him? Would he believe her? Would the police? But
even if they did, she’d lose her job, and how could she stay here anyway? How could she ever come back to this place where Ward Dunn Jr. might be?

There were business cards with his name on them, two telephone numbers under the etching of a horse. Ward Dunn Jr. was a horse breeder. A racer of horses. The Kentucky Derby and money in the bluegrass hills. She’d heard of these things and now hated him even more. She felt sick again, but her fear had lifted and she pulled out the photos behind his driver’s license. Black-and-white baby pictures, four of them, then one of a younger, fitter Ward Dunn Jr. in a tuxedo, his arm around a short blonde in an ivory wedding dress.

Virginia dropped the photo into her apron pocket. She pulled out Ward Dunn Jr.’s license and one of his business cards, took them too. She looked back at him once more, the knife handle pulsing in her hand, and that’s when she saw the mole on his rear, the one she described much later.

She’d been smoking and driving for hours: south, east, north, then south again; She stopped and bought a Coke and a carton of Tareytons, and later, when her Chevrolet ran out of gas outside Myakka City, she pulled into a Texaco station and asked a skinny boy with grease under his chin to fill it up. She handed him one of Ward Dunn Jr.’s twenties. She was still in her cleaning uniform, the black skirt and white blouse and white shoes, though she’d untied her apron full of money and carried it rolled under her arm, and even though she burned where he’d been, she couldn’t get out from under this feeling that she was fleeing a terrible crime she’d committed.

In the ladies’ room, she washed her hands. She ran the water hot, wet a paper towel, raised her skirt, and scrubbed the inside of both thighs. She folded it into a small dripping square, then pressed it between her legs. Dabbing and wiping, she wanted to push it all the way inside her and scrape off the walls of her own flesh.

She washed her hands again. She dried them. She reached into her
purse, found her lipstick, and put some color into her lips: burgundy red. Her fingers trembled. Her eyes looked tired and old to her, the whites flecked with too many capillaries.

She left the bathroom with her purse and apron full of Ward Dunn Jr.’s money. The boy was cleaning her windshield and maybe he’d even checked the oil. She felt momentarily cared for, and she sat behind the wheel and smoked a cigarette and waited for him to finish. She watched him work the squeegee, watched him wipe off the rubber blade onto his jeans after each stroke; it made her think of swords, blood dripping from the blades before they were wiped clean. And penises. Were they wiped clean, too? Would Ward Dunn Jr. come to, remember, then clean her dried blood off himself?

The boy dropped the squeegee into the pail. He buffed the glass with a dry rag, working his hand in quick circles. It was hard to watch and she blew smoke out her open window and looked past the pumps to a dense stand of mangroves, the sky above a fading tangerine. Near the road was a phone booth. It leaned to the left.