Garden of Lies (10 page)

“NO!” Rose shot from her chair, toppling it, erupting with rage. “You’re lying! My mother

wasn’t like that! She was good and ... and ...” She couldn’t find the words to fit the huge hot

hurting emotion that ballooned inside her chest.

Brian. She had to find Brian. He would know, he’d help, he’d stop this and make it not hurt so

much.

[50] Rose pushed her way past Marie and Nonnie, tears spilling hot down her cheeks. She

stumbled through the living room, momentarily blinded by its perpetual twilight. Then her eyes

caught the gray light leaking through the tightly drawn Venetian blinds, the waxy gleam of the

plastic-slipcovered sofa.

Rose imagined herself a bug her grandmother wanted to crush and kill, a cockroach. She

wrestled with the front-door chain, hating it, hating everything about this room, this awful

apartment.

Then she was in the hall, free, pelting up the stairwell to the top floor, to Brian, praying he

would be home.

The noisy confusion of the McClanahans’ apartment enveloped her the moment she stepped

inside. Brian’s mother greeted her holding a baby braced against one generous hip, while another

clung to her leg. A warm spicy odor invaded the living room, which was cluttered with kids,

couch cushions on the floor, and empty baby bottles ringed with dried milk.

“Rose, you’re a godsend! Will you take Kevin while I get the cake out of the oven? It’s

Jasper’s birthday and I—oh, here.” She shoved Kevin at her, soggy diaper and all, and scooted

off toward the kitchen, calling, “Bri-an! Rose is here. If you don’t take Sean out of the tub, he’ll

shrivel to a peanut!”

Rose swiped at her runny eyes with the heel of her hand and sank down on the seat-sprung

couch, balancing Kevin on one knee. “Hey, buddy. You want to do the cha-cha?”

The baby broke into a huge toothless grin. His favorite game was Rose bouncing him to the

rhythm of an invisible Latin band. He giggled helplessly. Rose began to feel a tiny bit better.

The messiness cheered her somehow. The huge braided rug was a shipwreck of scattered

Tinker toys and Lincoln logs, alphabet blocks half-chewed by teething babies, an empty Band-

Aid box, Matchbox trucks, galoshes, broken crayons, and Golden Books with the covers ripped

off. Atop the nicked coffee table was a pile of clumsily wrapped birthday presents. And perched

on the old plaid recliner where nightly Mr. McClanahan put his feet up and read the
Post,
was

two-year-old Jasper, mashing a graham cracker between his toes.

“Welcome to Pandemonium City. Have you heard? President Eisenhower just declared this

place a disaster area.”

Rose looked up, and found Brian grinning at her, carrying [51] four-year-old Sean, all rosy

from his bath. The sleeves of Brian’s Brooklyn College sweatshirt were rolled up over his

elbows. Stray flecks of shampoo suds decorated his dark brown curls like snowflakes. Just seeing

him made Rose feel almost happy.

Before she could answer, he put Sean down and sank onto the sofa beside her. The front of his

sweatshirt, she saw, bore the wet imprint of Sean’s little body. “Hey, Rose, you all right?” he

asked softly. “You look like you’ve been crying.”

Rose shook her head, clamping her throat against the fresh tears that threatened. “I’m okay. But

Kev here needs his diaper changed. I don’t think either of us can hold out much longer.”

“Sean,” Brian yelled across the room, “watch Jazzbo, willya? Don’t let him near the presents,

okay?”

In the shoe box of a room Brian shared with two of his brothers, Rose and he worked together

to pin a clean diaper on Kevin despite all his squirming. Brian propped him in his playpen with a

mangled Zwieback and a ring of plastic keys.

“All quiet on the Western front,” he whispered, grabbing her hand. “Come on, now’s the time

to make our getaway before the Indians get wind of our trail.”

Rose thought, with a rush of affection,
He knows. He’s taking me to the fort, because he knows

something is wrong.

The fort. They hadn’t been up to the fort in—how long?—a couple of years at least. Since

Brian graduated from Precious Blood two years ago and enrolled at Brooklyn College. After that

it had seemed sort of ... well, babyish. She could recall, though, when it had once seemed the

most exciting place in the world.

The McClanahans’ apartment was on the top floor. Brian’s mother had long ago installed

window guards throughout the apartment. But Brian had devised a way to get into the super’s

locked cleaning closet off the public hall. It had a window opening to a small exterior platform.

Above that there was an access ladder to the roof. The regular stairway inside the building had

been sealed off to tenants since four-year-old Jimmy Storelli tumbled over the edge eight

summers ago while his mother was unpinning laundry from her clothesline. The access ladder

consisted of eight rusted rungs bolted to the side of the building, with nothing below but a five-

story drop.

She’d been seven, Brian eight and a half, when they first [52] discovered it. She remembered

being terrified to climb out on the platform, much less actually climb up. But Brian cajoled and

encouraged her, promised he’d be right behind and promised he’d catch her if she fell. He even

climbed it twice all alone, scampering up like a monkey, just to show her it was no sweat.

God, had she been scared. Even now, scrabbling up behind Brian in the twilight, easily hoisting

herself rung over rung, she could remember how back then the wind had torn at her corduroy

jumper handed down from Marie. How it had filled with wind like a sail, billowing one moment,

then snapping in hard against the backs of her knees. Her heart playing catch with her stomach,

she had thought of poor little Jimmy Storelli, and imagined herself plunging down, then hitting

the sidewalk with the hollow splat of a watermelon rolling off the back of a moving truck.

Halfway up, she had frozen, her knees turning to Jell-O.

“I can’t!” she’d wailed.

Brian’s voice had floated up to her. “Sure, you can, Rosie. I know you can. It’s not hard. I

promise you won’t fall. But even if you do I’ll catch you.”

And she had believed him. Brian
would
catch her. Of course he would, absolutely, positively.

Hadn’t he always taken care of her? She remembered his walking her into the kindergarten that

first day when Marie, disgusted by her crying, had left her outside in the schoolyard. Brian was

already in the third grade, but he’d given her a licorice whip and walked her to the classroom.

And he’d held her hand. That was the best part, even with his friends all looking, the big boys

from Precious Blood, razzing him. So Rose, frozen there five floors above the sidewalk, knew

without a doubt that Brian would keep his word, even though another part of her knew that if she

did fall he could never catch her.

Rose smiled now as she hiked her foot over the top rung, onto the roofs warm weather-heaved

tar-paper surface. She paused a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the orange-gray dusk. There,

wedged in between the chimney and a ventilator shaft, was the fort. Their secret hideout. She was

a little surprised to see it was still there. Years ago, they’d built it from stuff scavenged out of a

construction site behind Gross’s Bakery—scraps of plywood, leftover Sheetrock, a roll of

fiberglass insulation, some old foam cushions, a [53] shower curtain decorated with pink

seahorses. How awed Brian had been when she showed him the system she’d devised to haul all

that stuff up with ropes and pulleys. The two of them, using Mr. McClanahan’s toolbox—Brian

with his perfect vision of what it would look like, she the careful one who made sure every board

was level before they drove a nail, then that all the cracks got caulked—had worked side by side

to build it.

The trouble, she realized now as she crawled in behind Brian, ducking her head to clear the

board onto which Brian had burned the wavery words “Spy-Glass Hill” (after the lookout in

Treasure Island
), was they sure had outgrown it. The scrawny kid she’d played with back then

was now six feet of bone and ropey muscle. Stretched out on the foam cushions, leaning against

one wall with his feet tucked up against the other, Brian looked a little ridiculous. Like Gulliver

in Lilliput.

Still, Rose felt a strange peace creep over her. God, the hours they’d spent up here! They

hadn’t done anything all that special, really, she thought. Just hanging out. Playing cards mostly.

Gin Rummy, War, and Spit. Or smoking the Winstons he’d cadged from his father. But mostly

just talking, imagining different ways their lives might turn out.

Brian was going to be a writer, like Ernest Hemingway. When he was thirteen, Brian wrote a

novel. It was about big-game hunting, full of scenes with the hero escaping being gored by a

rhinoceros in one chapter and savaged by lions in the next. And the heroine kept fainting in the

path of stampeding elephants. Parts of it made her laugh, it was so ridiculous, but she’d loved it,

too.

Rose’s dream wasn’t nearly as big or exciting. She wanted only one thing: to get out, get away,

far away. She’d spun fantasies about running away, to California maybe, where Nonnie would

never find her. She dreamed of sneaking aboard a ship, or a train, going as far as it would take

her.

There was only one problem. Running away would mean leaving Brian.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Brian broke into her reverie.

Rose sighed. “Better make it a dollar.”

“That bad?”

Pulling her knees to her chest, she leaned her head back against [54] the wall. Years of rain and

snow had buckled and warped it. But they’d made the wall several inches thick, and secured it to

the chimney with baling wire. It could withstand a hurricane, Rose thought.

She looked over at Brian. His arms were behind his head, the back of his neck braced against

his interlaced palms. In the twilight that filtered through the torn shower curtain, his face was all

contours and shadows. She studied the long bony ridge of his nose. His eyes, that’s what really

got her. They were like the eyes of saints in devotional paintings, a sort of silvery gray, shining

with a light that seemed to come out of nowhere. Brian was no saint—she thought of all the

cigarettes he’d “borrowed” from his father, and the time he’d roped Brother Paul’s bumper to a

fire hydrant—but he was the only truly good person Rose had ever known, the only one who

really cared about her.

She looked away. She couldn’t bear the thought that those eyes could ever be turned on her in

disgust.

“Do you ever think about your parents ... you know ... doing it with people besides each

other?” Rose asked.

Brian laughed. “With seven kids? Even if they wanted to, when would they have the time?”

“I was wondering about ... well, other people. Doing it even though they’re not married to each

other.” Rose picked at a chunk of dirty gray foam coming loose from a cushion. “Marie and Pete

are getting married.”

“Hey, that’s great!”

“She’s pregnant.”

“Oh.” He was silent for a moment. “Is that why you were crying?”

“No. I’m happy for her. Pete’s okay. It’s what she wants. I just ...” In a burst of feeling, she

told him what Nonnie had said.

Brian looked at her for a long time. Then he said, in that slow, thoughtful way of his, “Even if

it was true, why would she tell you?”

“To get back at me.”

“For what? What did you ever do to her?”

“She thinks I killed my parents. She doesn’t care about my mother. It’s my father she was

really crazy about.”

“Jesus, you were just a
baby
.”

[55] “He was away, a radioman on a destroyer. After my mother ... after I was born, he came

back ... but only for a few days. I always thought the reason he didn’t hang around was because

he was sad about my mother, and seeing us—Marie and Clare and me—reminded him too much

of her. Then after he was killed ... I made him into this big hero in my mind. My mother, too. I

pictured her as some kind of saint, like Joan of Arc. And now Nonnie is saying—” Hot tears rose

in her throat, choking off the words.

“
Forget
what she said,” Brian broke in angrily. “It’s not true. You know it’s not. She’s always

been out to get you one way or another.”

“But what if she’s right?
Look
at me, Bri. I’m not like anyone else in my family. It’s like ... like

I fell out of the sky or something.
No one
is dark like me. You know what some of the girls at

Sacred Heart call me? Aunt Jemima. They say one of my ancestors must have been colored.”

Brian stiffened, his face glowing white in the twilit shadows. “You never told me that,” he said.

“I knew you’d be mad. Anyway, I took care of
them
.” A wisp of satisfaction threaded up out of

her misery. “I wrote their names on the Interested list for the all-day bus trip to St. Mary’s

Convent. When Sister read them off, she was so happy—and none of them had the guts to back

out.”

Rose started to laugh, but her laughter caught in her throat. Suddenly she was weeping, hard,

gasping sobs that doubled her over in pain.