The Garden of Dead Dreams (3 page)

Where was Walker Ryan? Until today the four resident authors had always overseen the afternoon workshops, which were dedicated to the critiquing process. The Buchanan Academy was notorious for the grueling weeklong formal critique. The resident authors represented four different forms of writing: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and screenplay. And the students focused on critiquing corresponding aspects of a story with each one. They dissected plot on Mondays with Walker, the novelist. They assessed character development with the memoirist Petra Atwell on Tuesdays. They analyzed dialogue with the playwright Winston Goss on Wednesdays. And they scrutinized language with the poet Opal Waters on Thursdays. On Fridays, the resident authors conducted the afternoon workshop together, and the students assessed the merits of a story in its entirety.

“Come on now, it may be a sadistic exercise.” Robert North strode down the center aisle. “But you’re joining the literary community. When you’re not writing, you’ll be criticizing other writers. Just ask Truman Scott, who incidentally was once a classmate of mine in this very room. Yes, take a look around. Your enemy may be sitting next to you. Of course, with friends in this business, who needs enemies?” Robert North’s voice faded, and his blue gaze went to the back of the room again.

Etta glanced over her shoulder, and a chill zipped up her spine. Robert North and Olivia were staring at each other, and Olivia’s dark eyes were glossy and bloodshot, her mouth curling down at the corners.

“Now will you kindly read your critique for us … what’s your name?” Etta swirled around and exhaled when she saw that Robert North was pointing at Pari Daswani, not her. Pari bounced to her feet and said her name for Robert North, the words rolling off her tongue in her Indian accent. The class had critiqued Pari’s short story a few weeks before. It was set in New Delhi, and Etta’s classmates had called it exotic and alluring, adjectives Etta was certain no one would ever use to describe her prose. Pari glided to the front of the room, her yellow and red printed skirt swishing behind her.

Etta flinched, and it took her several seconds to register that the door at the back of the classroom had slammed shut. She spun around. Olivia’s desk was empty.

When the workshop ended, Etta stuffed Chase’s critique in her notebook. Perhaps she would revise some of her more pointed remarks and give it to him during the evening mandatory writing session.

“Isn’t that for me?”

Chase stood over her. His pale, freckled fingers reached toward Etta’s notebook, and a messy pile of critiques stuck out from under his other arm.

“Oh right.” Etta retrieved her critique and handed it over, averting her eyes from Chase’s. Maybe he’d appreciate her honesty.

She slipped past a group of students talking in the doorway, hurried down the hallway past the framed oil portrait of Vincent Buchanan, and jogged down the spiral stairs. It was her favorite time of the day—the three hours Vincent Buchanan had appointed as “unstructured time,” He’d encouraged the students to fill it with non-writing activities. The author had recommended that they spend at least part of it doing some form of physical exercise: walking along the nature trails near the lodge, playing tennis or badminton, working in the organic vegetable gardens, tending the orchids in the greenhouse. For the rest he recommended a non-literary creative activity. Some students drew, painted, worked with clay, and did other handicrafts in the art studio on the lower level of the Lodge. A few women knitted on the couches in the great room several days a week. Other students practiced musical instruments or sung in the old stables, which had been converted into a soundproof music studio years before. A dozen students spent their unstructured time in the theater rehearsing Olivia’s play, which would be part of the autumnal equinox festivities on Wednesday.

“Loretta.” The voice was shrill. Etta halted and gripped the handrail even though her foot was hovering above the last step.

“Did I scare you?” Petra Atwell sat on one of the couches, her dark eyes reflecting the fire. She held a paperback in one hand and a mug in the other. Etta stepped off the stairs. “No. It’s just, I told you, that’s not my name.”

“Well it certainly gets your attention.” Petra sipped from the mug. It looked out of place in her manicured hand—misshapen with a lopsided handle, like a child had made it. “I asked that Texan for a shot of Irish whiskey. I think he used a thimble.” Petra’s laugh sounded like two pieces of sandpaper scraping against each other. “Etta’s not short for anything? Did your mother stammer? Sounds like a stutter, not a name.”

Etta forced a tight smile and started toward the entryway.

“Don’t tell me you’re stupid enough to go on one of your little excursions today. Fog like this, you’re liable to vanish out there.”

Etta turned around. “How did you know?” She paused. She was going to ask Petra how she knew that Etta went running during her unstructured time. But it wasn’t as though Etta’s runs were a secret, even if she usually steered toward the lesser-traveled trails to the west of the Lodge to avoid seeing anyone.

“You’d be surprised at all the things you know when you pay attention.” Petra rested the mug and the paperback on the arm of the couch and examined her fingernails. “Like your friend sitting with the poets today.” Another gravelly laugh. “She a Robert North fan?”

Etta glanced toward the door. “He’s helping her with a story.”

Petra’s laugh was louder this time. She ran a hand along her stiff curls, which didn’t budge beneath her fingers. “Robert doesn’t know shit about stories. The man writes lyric poems.”

Etta blinked. For some reason that fact hadn’t occurred to her before. “Well maybe he’s helping her with her word choice.” Etta avoided Petra’s gaze, annoyed at how defensive her own voice sounded.

“Yes, well, I suppose she wouldn’t be the first girl Robert helped with word choice. Frankly, I’m not sure it would be wise to take his advice.”

“He writes beautiful poems,” Etta said and then blushed, realizing Petra wasn’t talking about writing.

“You should tell your friend to be careful.” Petra lifted the paperback to block her face.

Heat flooded from Etta’s body. Swirling red rose border. Gothic typeface. A half-clad, red-haired model. It’s the last place Etta had imagined she’d see a Courtesan romance. At least she didn’t recognize the cover art. She twirled around, made a beeline for the door, and pushed her way outside.

An ocean of fog swam before her.

Etta edged down the porch steps. She glimpsed a movement in front of her and halted.

“Is someone there?” The fog swallowed her voice.

She glanced behind her at the double doors to the lodge. She couldn’t bear the thought of another conversation with Petra. She took hesitant steps forward, the bark underfoot reassuring her that she was on the trail.

The fog silenced the usual forest symphony: bluebird and thrush songs, woodpeckers drumming their beaks against hollow trees, squirrels jetting through the undergrowth. Etta could only hear her own footsteps and her breath moving in and out.

She rounded the bend and stepped into the clearing. The fog thinned slightly, and she made out the women’s residences: two rows of ten small cabins facing each other. She jogged toward her cabin, digging in her pocket for the key.

Etta glimpsed the person sitting in the wooden chair next to the front door as she stepped onto the porch. She let out a sound halfway between a gasp and a scream and jumped backward even as she recognized him. She laughed. “Jeez Jordan, you scared me.”

His blonde hair fell across his face as he shifted forward in his chair.

“Was that you on the trail ahead of me?” Her voice sounded unnaturally high-pitched, and she eked out a laugh as she poked at the lock with her key. “Where’s Liv?”

“You tell me.”

“You okay?” Etta pushed the door open, flicked on the light, and sighed at the usual disarray. Olivia’s blankets and down comforter were twisted into a clump on the bed, her sweaters and jeans scattered in piles across the floor, her desk mounded with papers, empty soda cans, and a pair of socks. Etta stepped inside. “I’d invite you in, but you know the rules.” Etta laughed. The “Carnal Code” forbade male and female students from socializing alone in cabins, but the students universally ignored that stipulation.

“Did you look in the greenhouse? She’s been helping Poppy with the orchids.” Etta sat down on her bed and glanced toward the door, expecting to see Jordan leaning on the doorframe. “Jor, I was kidding. You can come in.” She waited. “Jordan?” She slipped her shoes off and padded to the porch.

The chair was empty.

The next morning Opal Waters leaned on the desk in front of the classroom with her long legs stretched in front of her. She brushed a whitish-blonde lock behind her ear and scanned the room while Etta’s classmates finished their writing warm-up. It was too early for anyone to look as composed as Opal did. Carl jestingly called Opal a food fascist, because of her list of dietary sensitivities and restrictions, but Opal’s diet clearly had some merits. The poet had to be in her fifties, yet her blonde hair was silken, her ivory skin flushed and dewy. Hardly any lines etched the skin around her pale gray eyes.

Unlike the other resident authors, Opal rarely congregated with the students outside of class. She ate her meals with the director, his assistant, and the librarian. She never lounged in the great room in the evenings, or read in the library, or sunned herself at the swimming hole on hot summer afternoons. Some students speculated that the resident author thought herself too distinguished to associate with amateurs after she’d been presented with the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry last year. But maybe she was just upset because she couldn’t eat Carl’s fried catfish fritters or New Braunfels bratwurst. That would put Etta in a bad mood.

“You’ve all written two pages now, correct?” Opal stood. “Tell me, were you inspired to write when you walked in the door this morning?”

Someone groaned. “No,” boomed a voice behind Etta.

In the center of the room, Chase Quinn raised his hand and spoke before Opal called on him. “A lot of us write best at night. These morning writing exercises can be, you know, less productive for us . . .”

Opal fixed her pale gaze on him. “Am I wasting your time, Mr. Quinn?”

Chase shook his head and lowered his gaze to his notebook.

“Sir, I hate to disappoint you, but writing is not about inspiration. Writing is discipline. It is self-control.”

Etta glanced at her notebook. She knew all about discipline. For years, she’d written one to two thousand words a day. At that pace, she’d be done with her story tomorrow. But lately it felt like the words were trapped somewhere just out of her reach, and the few she managed to wrest loose were maimed and limping.

Opal’s gray gaze drifted to the windows. “Writing is the pestiferous gadfly that won’t let you take a vacation or day off. It’s what stops you from becoming a doctor or a lawyer, an executive with a corner office and a secretary. It’s what strips you of friends, of children—of noise.” She clenched her fists. “It won’t let you enjoy anything for its own beauty—only for your next poem or story, for your own aspirations. For your own ego.” She let her breath out at once and spun around.

Opal stacked her papers and inserted them into a manila folder. Then she gripped the folder, plucked her coffee cup from the desk, strode down the center aisle, and disappeared out the door.

Etta stared down at her tidy handwriting. She’d written two rambling pages about the weather. The wind had started blowing sometime late in the night, and Etta had written about the currents carrying the fog away, ethereal wisps of vapor fanning out above the trees and sweeping out to the Pacific Ocean. There was no point to it whatsoever, but Etta had written for twenty minutes in a row, a feat compared to her progress in the last couple of weeks.

“Writing is anguish,” a voice came from the front of the room. Etta lifted her head. Mallory Chambers, one of the Poet’s Row students, stood where Opal had a moment before, a smirk on his face. “It’s worse than being on the rag or going through menopause. It’s worse than when I told my mother I’m a raging dike. It’s worse than when I realized that the few people who have read my dismal poems committed suicide straight after, because I make people miserable.”

Mallory paused, and Etta felt a giggle rising in her belly. She didn’t want to laugh, but Mallory was trying to make his baritone voice high-pitched, and he sounded more like a puberty-wracked teenager than like Opal. Etta stole a glance at Mallory’s twin sister Hillary. Although the fraternal twins had deep-set dark eyes and short, muscular frames, Etta never would have guessed they were related if someone hadn’t told her. Mallory wrote outlandish poems and loved to perform them for the class, whereas Hillary hardly spoke and hadn’t let anyone read excerpts from her novel-in-progress. Rumor had it that Hillary was writing about a pair of siblings whose father murdered their mother when they were children and that it was at least somewhat autobiographical. Hillary stared at her notebook, her face hidden behind her brunette frizz.

Laughter rippled up from the back of the room. Mallory grinned and took an exaggerated bow. He lifted a hand and cleared his throat. “Writing is my anorexia and bul . . .” Mallory looked up. His face turned scarlet, and his gaze shot to the floor.

Etta spun around in her chair. Opal Waters leaned against the doorway, looking even slighter than usual, drooping and wan, like a dandelion just before the seeds scattered.

Before Etta could contemplate how much Opal had heard, the resident author was gone. Etta thought about rising and following after Opal to express her disagreement with Mallory’s words. But she guessed comfort would be the last thing the resident author would want. Apparently the rest of the students felt the same way, because for a long moment, they all sat staring at the door.

* * *

Olivia was the first one to rise and stride out of the classroom.

Etta stuffed her notebook in her book bag and jumped up as her roommate disappeared out the door. Etta squeezed past a group of students converging in the aisle, sailed out the door, and jogged down the stairs to the second floor, hoping to catch up with her roommate. The morning mandatory writing hour would start in fifteen minutes.