The Devil_s Garden

TEN

Abby watched the girls at the dining-room table. They had eaten dinner, just the girls, and done an assembly-line job of rinsing the dishes and putting them in the dishwasher.

When they were done they put two pots of water on the stove, hard-boiling two dozen eggs. The windows were soon covered in mist. Emily drew a smiley face on one of them.

Twenty minutes later the dining-room table was covered in newspaper, mixing bowls, wire dippers, decals, and egg cartons. The kitchen smelled of warm vinegar and chocolate. It brought Abby back to her childhood, she and Wallace coloring eggs, hand-weighing chocolate bunnies to see which ones were hollow, which ones solid, fighting over the Cadbury Cremes, spiriting away marshmallow peeps.

When Abby had learned, years earlier, that she could not have children, this was one of the scenes that flashed darkly through her mind, a scene that would never be, along with Christmas mornings, Halloween nights, birthday parties with too-sweet cakes bearing candles shaped in the forms of 2, 3, 4…

It was one of the million blessings that were Charlotte and Emily.

At six-thirty the doorbell rang. Abby wasn’t expecting anyone. She crossed the kitchen, into the foyer, looked through the peephole in the front door.

It was Diane, her neighbor from across the street.

Diane Cleary was a hotshot realtor in her early forties. She was slender and toned, had collar-length dark-blond hair, and was wearing a navy blue suit that probably cost more than the left side of Abby’s entire closet. Her son Mark was a junior at Princeton, her to daughter Danielle was in kindergarten. Abby didn’t know her well enough to ask about the disparity, but Diane and Stephen Cleary had one of those marriages that were either hell on earth, or textbook romance perfect. Regardless, Diane had the kind of metabolism that allowed her to eat anything and everything – Abby lost count at four pieces of birthday cake at the previous day’s party – and not gain an ounce. She hated her.

Abby opened the door. “Hey.”

“Any cake left?” Diane asked with a wink. “Kidding.”

Diane stepped inside, made a beeline for the kitchen.

“Time for coffee?” Abby asked.

“No thanks. I’m showing a condo in Mahopac.”

“Say hi to Mrs Cleary,” Abby said to the girls.

“Hi,” Charlotte and Emily said, neither looking up from their egg-decorating chores.

“You know you have the cutest girls in the world.”

Now the girls looked up and smiled. Such little divas.

“You guys have to stop getting cuter every day,” Diane added. “You have to save some cute for the rest of us.” Diane looked at her own face in the toaster. A funhouse visage looked back. “I need all the cute I can get.”

Abby could almost hear the lead sinker break the surface of the water. Diane Cleary spent half her time fishing for compliments, the other half refusing to reel them in.

“Oh, I don’t think you have any problems in that department,” Abby said, taking the bait.

Diane smiled. “So who was that guy who looked like a younger, taller Andy Garcia at the party?”

“That was my husband’s friend Tommy. They work together.”

“He’s a prosecutor?”

“Yep.”

“Maybe I’ll get arrested.”

Abby laughed. “You’ll have to do it in the city.”

“Speaking of which,” Diane began, looking out the kitchen window, at the absolute blackness of the night, “I’ve never asked you this, but do you miss living in the city?”

Abby didn’t have to think about it too long. “Well, except for the noise, pollution, crime, danger, and general apathy, not so much. On the other hand, I’m not that suburban. I haven’t burned my little black dresses yet.”

Diane laughed, glanced at her watch, which probably cost the entire right side of Abby’s closet. “Anyway, I just wanted to remind you about tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? Abby wondered.

“The block sale?” Diane asked.

“Oh, right, sorry.” Twice a year a dozen or so of the neighborhood families pooled their junk and had a block garage sale, hosted by the luck, or misfortune, of the draw. Abby had done her time the previous sale. “I have the boxes in the garage.”

“Great,” Diane said. “If you have any big stuff let me know. Mark and some of his friends are coming in for Easter and they’ll be happy to haul it over.”

Abby desperately wanted to get rid of the old waterfall buffet they’d had since she and Michael were married, but it was one of the few things Michael had left that belonged to his parents. It was probably not the right time, or the right way, to dispose of it. “I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Bye, girls,” Diane said.

“Bye,” they said.

Abby made a note about the block sale and put it on the refrigerator with a Care Bears magnet. She was getting terribly forgetful in her old age.

Twenty minutes later, with two dozen brightly colored eggs drying on the kitchen counters, the girls turned their attention to coloring an Easter egg drawing. Or, more accurately, a portion of an egg. Emily was drawing the top half; Charlotte the bottom. Even this was not entirely accurate. They were each drawing what would turn out to be a third of an egg – top and bottom – leaving out the center.

Charlotte was working on the top of the egg with her usual precision and care, colors never straying over the lines. Emily was working on the egg with her usual flair – bright colors, bold lines, abstract images.

Abby sipped her tea, watched with amusement and no small measure of puzzlement. The girls were leaving out the middle. It was the second year running for this. To Abby’s bewilderment, they’d made the same sort of drawings the previous Easter (and, now that she thought about it, the previous Halloween too, leaving out the center third of all their pumpkin drawings).

When they were done, Abby took the two drawings and taped them together. The edges didn’t line up, but probably would have if there had been a center to the drawing.

Why was there always a missing third to everything the girls did? Abby wondered. Three chairs at the tea table in their room, three Peppermint Patties at the store the day before. Abby tacked the big egg on the refrigerator. The two girls stood, admiring their work.

“It’s very pretty,” Abby said. “Daddy is really going to like it.”

The girls beamed.

Abby pointed to the odd shapes. At the top and bottom of the egg were a pair of strange looking little creatures. “What are these?”

“That’s a duck and a bunny,” Charlotte said, pointing to the figure at the top.

“That’s a bunny and a duck,” said Emily, pointing to the other.

On the top of the egg, the duck seemed to be inside the rabbit, and inside the rabbit looked to be another egg. On the bottom, it was the exact reverse.

To Abby it looked like the drawing she had seen in the Russian folk tale book at which the girls were looking in the library. Right down to the needle inside the egg.

Kids were like sponges, Abby thought. They absorb everything with which they come in contact.

She kissed the girls on top of their heads. “Okay, my little duck and bunny,” she said. “Let’s brush up.”

The girls giggled, then took off for the stairs and the upstairs bathroom.

Abby glanced again at the drawing. An egg inside a duck inside a rabbit. Inside them all, a needle.

With the girls tucked in, Abby checked the messages on her cellphone. Nothing from Michael. She knew that he would call if he was going to be any later than midnight. He was out with Tommy, and she knew he wouldn’t drink too much – he never did on the night before a case started – but if it all ran late he would call, and probably crash at Tommy’s place in Littleneck.

She left a few lights on and headed upstairs.

Abby had discovered Pilates in her second year at Columbia. With all the stresses of second year she had found that she was sleeping two hours a night, eating once a day – many times while cycling across campus – and drinking a bottle of sauvignon blanc just to get sleepy enough to crash for two hours and wake up with a hangover so she could pop a fistful of Advil and start all over again. She had found a yoga center near the campus that practiced Satyananda yoga, but for some reason it did not stick. She was an A-type personality, and yoga seemed a little too passive for her. She found a speed-cycling class in the West Village, and for a while that worked.

But the problems of getting there – two trains at least – stressed her out to the point where the class was only neutralizing the excess stress.

Then she discovered Pilates. The emphasis on strengthening ligaments and joints, increasing flexibility, and lengthening muscles, combining with the quality, not quantity of workout, seemed like a perfect fit.

Now it was a natural part of her day.

She slipped on the earphones, and began warming up. She stretched for a few minutes, and would soon move on to her pelvic tilts and abdominal exercises.

At first she had needed almost complete silence to practice, but when you have toddlers in the house, near silence, any silence at all, was a distant memory. In the past two years she could work out with a 747 landing in the living room. This was good news and bad news. Good news because she could grab twenty minutes when she needed it. Bad news because she, at times, seemed to block out the rest of the world. She could still hear what was going on around her, of course, but sometimes it mercifully drifted away.

Midway through her routine, she thought she heard a noise. A loud noise. In fact, she’d felt it. It was as if someone had dropped something large and heavy inside the house. She pulled out the earbuds.

Silence.

She left the bedroom, walked down the hall, looked in on the girls. Both were sleeping soundly. Emily with the covers twisted in a knot. Charlotte lying with the covers pulled up primly to her chin, like a children’s bedding ad in a JC Penney’s catalog.

Abby listened to her house. Other than the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer, the house was silent.

Had Michael come home?

“Michael?” she called out in a loud whisper. Loud enough for her husband to hear – unless he had gone down to the basement – but not loud enough to wake the girls.

Silence.

Abby moved slowly to the top of the stairs. Another glance into the girls’ room. Still asleep. The Care Bears nightlight cast the room in a warm ginger glow. The house was so quiet she could now hear them breathing in tandem.

Abby half-closed the bedroom door, then gently padded down to the landing. The light was on in the kitchen, as was the light in the mud room, the small space near the back door in which they kept their boots, umbrellas, raincoats, slickers, and rain hats. In summer they usually kept that light on all night. In winter, when the snow was known to drift halfway up the back door, they kept it off.

She had imagined it. It was probably a passing car, one of the rolling boom boxes with the trunk-sized bass speakers that seemed to be passing by with more frequency of late. She hoped it wasn’t becoming a trend. They’d moved to Eden Falls precisely because it was quiet, and the thought that -

A light snapped off. Abby spun around.

The mud room was now dark.

Abby’s heart skipped a beat. She backed up one step. In a loud whisper: “Michael!”

No response. A few moments later, in the kitchen, another light snapped off.

Abby looked down the steps. She saw the alarm panel on the wall near the front door, the digital panel that armed the three doors and sixteen windows in the house. The single green light in the lower right-hand corner was aglow, meaning, of course, that the system was unarmed. If it were Michael, he would have come in through the garage door, through the kitchen, into the foyer, and armed the panel. This was his routine.

In the past year there had been two break-ins in their neighborhood. Because the houses on this block were relatively isolated, hidden by trees, there were no witnesses. Neither time were the burglars caught, nor any of the stolen items recovered. There had been no violence in either case – the owners had been out of town – but there was always a first time for everything. The burglaries were one of the reasons they had gotten an alarm system installed in the first place.

In the eight months since they had first subscribed to the security service, Michael had never failed to arm it the moment he arrived home. Not once.

If there was someone in the house – and there was no doubt in Abby’s mind that there was – it was not her husband. No one else had a key.

She listened intently, searching the silence for a noise; the creak of a floorboard, the scrape of a chair, the intake or exhale of a breath.

Nothing. Just the click of the clock. Just the sound of her own heartbeat pulsing in her ears.

Abby gently leaned over the railing and glanced at the dim light spilling into the living room from the kitchen. Her cellphone was charging on the small roll-top desk, right next to the cordless phone.

Shit.

The rest of the room – the dining room and living room beyond – was consumed by darkness, a darkness that drew shapes and spirits in every corner. She knew every inch of her house, but at the moment it looked like a foreign land, an ominous, threatening landscape.

There was no phone upstairs. She and Michael either had their cellphones with them, or when the cordless wasn’t charging, kept it on the nightstand.

Abby returned to the master bedroom, pulled over the short step stool, climbed on it. On the top shelf of her closet was an aluminum case. She pulled it down, spun the combination, all the while glancing toward the hallway, looking for shadows, listening for footfalls. She opened the box. Against the egg-crate foam lining was a Browning. 25 semi-automatic pistol. Abby checked that the safety was on.

When she was ten, her father had taken her out to her uncle Rob’s farm in Ashtabula, Ohio. There he had taught her to shoot. They hunted quail in summer, rabbits in fall. Although never a great shot, the first time she bagged a quail she felt a rush of exhilaration. Of course, when Morton, their beautiful Golden, brought the bird back, Abby cried for two straight days. After that, it was target practice, and at this she excelled. She found that shooting a target, even the silhouette of a man, was easier than shooting small game. Although she liked a good steak as much as the next person, the notion of killing a living thing was anathema to her.

But this was different. This was her family.

She slipped the pistol into her pocket, stepped down the hall. She entered the girls’ room, snapped off the nightlight. She checked the windows. Everything was locked tight. Before pulling the drapes, she peeked out the window. From this vantage, at the front right side of the house, she could not see the driveway, nor the area in front of the garage. If Michael had returned, she would not have been able to see his car anyway. The yard, the street, the block was quiet, dark, serene.

Abby exited the room, closed the door, descended the stairs. Before she could turn around, she heard a noise, the unmistakable sound of someone walking across the kitchen floor. There were two boards, right next to the island, they had been meaning to shim for more than a year. Abby looked at the wedge of light spilling from the room.

There. A shadow.

Abby glanced back up the stairs. Should she try to bundle the girls up and get out of the house, or risk crossing the foyer to get to the phone and the police?

She thought about trying one last time to call her husband’s name, but if it wasn’t him, she would have to confront the intruder. She slipped across the foyer, and remembered. There was a panic button on the alarm panel. Press it, hit a three-number code, and the Eden Falls police would be alerted. All silently.

When she was just a foot away she heard the footsteps crossing the kitchen. The shadow on the floor grew larger, less sharply defined. Whoever was in the kitchen was coming right toward her.

She hit the panic button, drew the weapon, and put her back to the wall. The shadow grew even larger as it filled the doorway.

She smelled something in the air, something she knew.

Cologne. A familiar cologne.

She flipped on the light. The intruder screamed.

“Walk this waaaaay, talk this waa-aa-aay!”

It was Michael. He was signing Aerosmith. He was listening to one of the girls’ iPods and he hadn’t heard her calling his name. He hadn’t heard a thing.

“Hey babe!” He leaned against the counter, pulled off his headphones. His eyes focused on the. 25. “Man,” he said, smiling. “Am I that late?”

Abby shook. Her eyes filled with tears of relief. She let herself slide down the wall to the floor.

The girls were fine, she was fine, Michael was fine. Everything was just peachy.

“So, I guess a blow job is pretty much out of the question,” Michael added.

Abby wanted to shoot her husband anyway.