The Garden of Dead Dreams (13 page)

“What’s your name?” The radiators clicked under the windows in the library. “Just curious,” the major said in falsetto, mimicking Etta’s use of the same words a few minutes before. She mumbled her name and reached for the door knob.

“Ms. Lawrence, I can see you’re pleased with yourself. You think you’re smart and just curious. Listen, those old guys going to bingo games at vets’ clubs on Friday nights, the ones who ride on parade floats on the Fourth of July, they’re the ones who shot without asking questions. The curious ones are rotting in the jungle.”

Etta gave the major a tight-lipped smile as she did when she disagreed with someone but didn’t feel comfortable saying so or when she suspected someone may be mentally ill. She wasn’t sure which category the major fit into at that moment, but she knew that she wanted to leave. She stared at the major’s angular face, his porous nose, his silken scar. He rolled his chair toward his desk, picked up a file folder sitting atop a pile of papers, and turned it over, resting his hands on it.

Etta spun around, pushed the door open, and raced through the library, gulping in the stale, dusty air.

She ran down the spiral staircase then stopped and watched the reflection of the great room in the windows across from her. A fire had been lit in the hearth. A few students sat on the couch in front of it. She could only see the backs of their heads in the reflection. Their voices swirled to her, slow and distorted, as though she were under water. Somebody else sat reading in a chair facing the window. A wave of nausea hit her when she saw her own reflection. She looked small and pallid, like a ghost.

Either her eyes had deceived her or the type-written label on the major’s file folder had said, “Lowther, Matthew.”

* * *

Etta skipped dinner, went to her cabin, and tried to put the pages of M.K. Lowther’s story back in order. She sat down at her desk and skimmed the story again. Olivia had a typed manuscript by someone named M.K. Lowther. Someone Robert North knew of. Someone the librarian had a file folder on and was rude when questioned about. Etta stared at his signature on the last page of the manuscript.
M.K. Lowther, October 1985, Oregon
. She tucked the pages into the bottom drawer of her desk and crossed the room. Olivia’s side of the room was empty except for five red plastic clothes hangers that were scattered across the bare mattress. They looked bright and garish.

Etta slid her closet door open and waved her hand around in the darkness. The string for the overhead light bulb feathered across her fingers, and she yanked on it. White light illuminated the shadows.

Air rushed from her chest. She dropped to her knees. The box with Olivia’s papers—it was gone. A single sheet of white paper lay on the floor where the box had been. Etta swiped it off the floor then released it. It fluttered to the ground, but Etta could still see the words. They swam off the page then snapped into focus.
You’re in trouble. Go home.
She stared at them for so long that they didn’t make sense. Home. What was home? She plucked it the paper off the floor and crumpled it. Then she smoothed it and stared at the words again.

Go home.

“I don’t have a home.” Etta folded the paper into a square, pushed herself to her feet, and squeezed it into her pocket. She spun around and stared at the place where Robert North had stood rifling through Olivia’s things. How dare he open her closet? Her heartbeat hammered in her ears. She grabbed her rain jacket and threw her door open, flinching at the icy air that flooded into the room.

When she pulled open the door of Roosevelt Lodge, she was met by the muffled commotion of dinner time—voices, laughter, dishes clinking. A pungent scent hung in the air. It smelled like Candy’s spaghetti. The thought of the intern’s briny tomato sauce made Etta’s stomach turn sour.

She made a beeline to the staircase and jogged up the spiral steps until she was on the third floor landing, standing face-to-face with an oil portrait of Vincent Buchanan. It was like the one outside of the classroom on the second-floor landing, except it hung in the shadows, lit only by a beaded lamp on a round table nearby.

Etta stepped closer, trying to make out Buchanan’s features. He was older than in most of the portraits in the Lodge. His once-black hair was white. His boyish face had become jowly. Even in his old age, though, Buchanan’s eyes were youthful—dark and shiny.

How dare Robert North open her closet, go through her stuff, and tell her to go home? “I don’t have a home,” Etta wanted to shout at him. She peeled her gaze from the portrait and spun around. She’d never been on the third floor before. The ceiling was low and two dimly-lit narrow hallways stretched out perpendicular to each other. Etta’s heartbeat pulsed in her ears.

She moved down one of the halls. Wall sconces—orange light bulbs shaped like candle flames—lit circles on the plush burgundy carpet. If she did find Robert North, the damned prodigy poet, she’d yell at him. What right did he have to take her things—or Olivia’s things, but what did that matter? They certainly weren’t his things. Or maybe Etta would just slip the stupid note under his door. You go home, Robert.

The carpet swallowed Etta’s footsteps. She stared at the dark brown doors, each with small shiny gold numbers. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d have no way of knowing which room was his. She stopped halfway down the corridor. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea anyway. She could keep the note and show the director, tell him that Robert North—a man who was supposed to teach, to encourage, to mentor—had told Etta to pack up and leave her dreams behind.

Etta heard a voice. It was so familiar that Etta moved toward it without thinking. She was almost to the narrow window at the end of the hallway when she realized whose voice she’d been drawn toward. She froze. She was standing between the last two doors—numbers six and seven—and Jordan Waterhouse sounded as though he was standing right next to her.

The door for room number six flung open, and Etta stood face-to-face with Olivia’s ex-boyfriend. Jordan looked over his shoulder, a strand of his blonde hair falling across his cheek. Etta followed his gaze and met Opal Waters’ pale, gray eyes.

“Oh.” Etta glanced down the hall. “I was . . .”

“What? What are you doing?” Jordan’s voice was sharp. Etta took another step backward. She gestured toward herself and tried to think of something to say, but all Etta could do was stare into the aquamarine eyes of one of the only people at the academy she had considered a close friend just a week before.

“You’re the one who followed me up here, Etta. The one who seems to be following me everywhere I go. Are you spying on me?”

“Jor, no. I was . . .” Etta’s words died in her throat. She could feel Opal’s gray eyes on her. The author’s quarters were off limits to students. Buchanan had designated the third floor as a writer’s retreat, a refuge for authors to live and work separate from their lecturing and teaching duties.

“If you must know what I’m doing at every second, why don’t you just ask me?”

Etta tried to shake her head, but she felt paralyzed.

“My father asked if I would give Opal a copy of his latest collection. I didn’t want to make an ordeal of it with everyone around, so I came up here to leave it next to her door. Opal heard me in the hallway, and insisted on writing Dad a thank-you note while I waited. Is that okay with you, Etta?” He thrust a pink envelope toward Etta, but Etta’s gaze went to Opal’s room instead. It was awash in soft, yellow light. A gossamer curtain encircled a four-poster bed. Behind it, an open laptop sat perched in the middle of a downy white comforter. Had Jordan interrupted Opal while she was composing one of her painstaking poems?

“Just stop following me. You’re creeping me out.” Jordan brushed past Etta. His hair flapped across his collar as he glided toward the stairwell. It didn’t occur to Etta until he was at the other end of the hall that he was a student too, and thus just as prohibited from trespassing on the third floor as she was. Of course rules had never seemed to concern Jordan much.

A sound made Etta jerk her head back to the room. Opal was just a foot away. She rested her slim fingers on the side of the door, and for a moment Etta was sure Opal was going to push the door closed, but the poet stood gazing at Etta. Her blonde hair was loose, and it was the first time Etta had seen her silky whitish locks, kinky from being in a twist all day, hanging around her slender face. “I think he’s upset about Olivia,” Etta whispered.

Opal’s gray gaze didn’t falter. “Of course. We all are,” Opal’s voice sounded exactly as it did in class—dignified, reserved, and distant. “She had so much talent. For her to throw it away—it’s a tragedy.”

“Jordan thinks she was plagiarizing.”

Opal’s pupils dilated instantly, as though she was hearing the news for the first time, and guilt washed through Etta. Why had she said it? Had she been jealous of Opal’s compliment? She wished she could take the words back. “That’s a rather serious charge.” Opal said. “Do you agree with him?”

“No.” Etta glanced down the hall. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t think it wise to spend time worrying about another writer’s work. It’s best to focus on one’s own, and I’m glad you’re here, because I’ve been meaning to talk to you about yours. You’re up for critique soon. Isn’t that right?”

Etta nodded and tried to smile although she wasn’t sure she managed it.

“Can I give you some advice? I’ve been teaching at the Buchanan Academy on and off for nearly thirty years. Do you know that within a week, I can usually predict who will be a writer and who won’t? Some students are just hungry for it. Do you think you are?”

Etta stared at her. Was that advice? “I guess so.”

“The first critique is your unveiling, your debut. I don’t . . ”

“You predicted I would fail?” Etta interrupted.

Opal stared at her. The poet’s lips formed a taut smile. “Oh my. It’s not that easy to hurt your feelings, is it? Sensitivity is not an author’s ally, which brings me to my advice.” Opal stepped closer to Etta, and Etta noticed the poet’s long nearly invisible whitish-blonde eyelashes for the first time. “Don’t kid yourself if you think the literary world is different from any other business. It’s a paternalistic boy’s club run by a bunch of ass-slapping, locker room buffoons. To succeed at this game as a woman, no matter how brilliant or lackluster your prose is, you must discard every distraction from your life—hurt feelings and romantic amusements and, in your case, worrying about your roommate, who obviously couldn’t hack it here, plagiarizer or not. You’ll find out, it requires a ruthless amount of focus for a woman to succeed. If you don’t have it, you may as well go home.”

After Opal said good night and closed the door between them, Etta mouthed the words, “Go home” and pulled the note from her pocket. She unfolded the crumpled paper and reread the words.
You’re in trouble. Go home.
For the first time, in the faint light from the candle-shaped sconce behind her, the words looked like a threat. Etta folded the paper and stuffed it in her jacket pocket, her fingers feathering against another crumpled piece of paper there.

She stood in the hallway, reading the words on it a number of times, but couldn’t make sense of them.
All of us back together again. Except one. Where is he? Something else I’ve wondered—Did my father love you, or were you just another geisha?

Then Etta recalled the sensation of her fingers sliding into the satin-lined pocket of Opal’s pea coat so many days ago.

Maura left Poppy’s cabin first. Her thick, brown hair was pulled into a bun at the crown of her head, and it bobbled as she walked. She was nearly past Etta’s cabin when she glanced up and brought her blue mitten to her mouth.

“I didn’t mean to scare you.” Etta’s breath clouded in front of her. She burrowed her hands further into the pockets of her down coat. “Where’s Poppy?”

“In the shower.” Maura dropped her hand. “Why haven’t you been in class?”

Etta pulled her hand from her pocket and ran it through her hair. Should she tell Maura she’d been hiding out in her cabin for two days, grazing from her dwindling food stash, and mostly lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling? She’d tried to work on a story for her critique, but hadn’t gotten far. She kept coming back to the same questions. Where was Olivia? Why hadn’t she said goodbye? Why had she been acting so strange for the weeks before she left? What had happened between Olivia and Jordan? Who was Matthew Lowther? How was he connected to Olivia, to Robert North, to Major Mills?

What Etta hadn’t given much thought to in the last few days was her appearance. And she could tell from the expression on Maura’s face that she looked disheveled. She pushed her hand back into her pocket to warm her fingers.

“You must be nervous about your critique?”

Etta shook her head, but a wave of panic rose through her and locked around her throat like a vice. She glanced at Poppy’s cabin. Class would start in less than thirty minutes, and Poppy never missed her morning cup of sugar and coffee.

“Did you hear about Isabella Peña?”

“No. Is she in jail?” The controversial author had been the main story on WXYZ out of Detroit the weekend before Etta left for Oregon. They showed the same author photo repeatedly of Peña leaning against a tree and gazing at the camera. Peña, a Mexican-American activist and the author of several literary novels, had supposedly stabbed a man with a ball-point pen at a book-signing in Cleveland. The victim, a lineman in an auto manufacturing plant, had apparently waited in line for over an hour at a signing in a San Francisco bookstore, slid his copy of Peña’s new novel
The Long Struggle
across the table, and whispered that the U.S. needed machine gunners on its southern border. The last Etta had heard, the victim had recovered but was considering filing assault charges against Peña.

Maura shook her head. “No. She’s coming here tonight.”

Etta laughed. Except Maura didn’t look like she was joking.

“It hasn’t been formally announced yet, but Winston told us. The press is hounding her, and she’s decided to retreat here for a few weeks.”