The Devil_s Garden

PART ONE
ONE
EDEN FALLS, NEW YORK – FOUR YEARS LATER

On the day Michael Roman realized he would live forever, five years after the last day of his life, his entire world went pink. A pastel pink at that: pink tablecloths, pink chairs, pink flowers, pink crepe banners, even a huge pink umbrella festooned in smiling pink bunnies. There were pink cups and plates, pink forks and napkins, a plate piled high with frosted pink cupcakes.

The only thing keeping the property from a listing with Candy Land Realty was the small patch of green grass barely visible beneath the maze of aluminum folding tables and plastic chairs, grass that would surely never be the same.

Then there was that other vision of green. Departing green. The money.

How much was all this costing again?

As Michael stood behind the house, he thought about the first time he had seen it, and how perfect it seemed.

The house was a three bedroom brick colonial, with buff-colored shutters and matching pilasters, set far back from the winding road. Even for the suburbs, it was isolated, perched atop a slight hill, embraced by a stand of sycamores, shielded from both the road and neighbors by a waist-high hedgerow. Behind the house was a two-car garage, a gardening shed, a wide yard with a latticework trellis. The lot gave quickly to the woods, sloping down to meet a meandering creek, which ran toward the Hudson River. At night it became eerily silent. For Michael, having grown up in the city, the change was hard to take. At first the isolation had gotten to him; Abby too, although she would never admit it. The nearest houses were about a quarter-mile in either direction. The foliage was thick, and in summer it felt like living in a giant green cocoon. Twice over the past year, when the power had gone out in a storm, Michael felt as if he was on the moon. Since that time he had stocked up on batteries, candles, canned goods, even a pair of kerosene heaters. They could probably survive a week in the Yukon if they needed to.

“The clown will be here at one.”

Michael turned to see his wife crossing the yard, carrying a plateful of pink frosted cookies. She wore tight white jeans and a powder blue Roar Lion Roar Columbia University T-shirt, along with a pair of drugstore flip flop sandals. Somehow she still managed to look like Grace Kelly.

“Your brother’s coming?” Michael asked.

“Be nice.”

Abigail Reed Roman, thirty-one, was four years younger than her husband. Unlike Michael’s working-class childhood, she had grown up on an estate in Pound Ridge, the daughter of a world-renowned cardiac surgeon. Where Michael’s patience seemed at times to be nonexistent – his temper usually hovered at a constant 211 degrees Fahrenheit, often rising – his wife ran on an even keel. Until she was cornered. Then there were rodents in Calcutta that bowed to her ferocity. Nearly a decade as an emergency room nurse at New York Downtown Hospital will do that to you; ten years of crack heads, PCP heads, exploded lives, torn people, and broken souls.

But that was another life.

“Did you frost the cake?” Abby asked.

Shit, Michael thought. He had forgotten all about it, which was unlike him. Not only did he do most of the cooking in his small family, he was the go-to guy for all things baked. His Bienensticke had been known to make grown men weep. “I’m on it.”

While jogging back to the house, dodging pink Mylar balloons, Michael thought about this day. Since moving from the city a year earlier, they had not had that many parties. When Michael was small, his parents’ tiny apartment in Queens seemed constantly filled with friends and neighbors and relatives, along with customers from the family’s bakery, a symphony of Eastern European and Baltic languages floating over the fire escape and onto the streets of Astoria. Even in the past few years, since his meteoric rise through the district attorney’s office, he and Abby found themselves hosting at least a handful of cocktail or dinner parties for well-selected political guests every year.

Here in the suburbs, though, things had slowed down, almost to a halt. Everything seemed to revolve around the girls. Although it might not have been the best career move, Michael found he didn’t want it any other way. The day the girls came into their lives, everything changed.

Standing in the kitchen, ten minutes later, the cake frosted and decorated, Michael heard four little feet approach, stop.

“How do we look, Daddy?”

Michael spun around. When he saw his twin four-year-old daughters standing there, hand in hand, dressed in their matching white dresses – with pink ribbons, of course – his heart soared.

Charlotte and Emily. The two halves of his heart.

Maybe he would live forever.

By noon the party was in full cacophonous swing. Eden Falls was a small town in Crane County, near the banks of the Hudson River, about fifty miles from New York City. Situated north of Westchester County – and therefore further from Manhattan, and therefore more affordable to young families – it seemed to boast an inordinate number of children under the age of ten.

To Michael it looked like every one of them had been invited. He wondered: How many friends can four-year-old girls have, anyway? They weren’t even in school yet. Did they have their own Facebook pages? Were they Twittering? Socially networking at Chuck E Cheese?

Michael surveyed the partyscape. In all there were about twenty kids and matching moms, all in some version of J. Crew, Banana Republic, or Eddie Bauer motif. The kids were a constant buzz. The moms were all standing around, cellphones at the ready, chatting softly, sipping herbal tea and raspberry acai.

At twelve-thirty Michael brought out the cake. Amid the oohhs and ahhhhs, his daughters looked concerned about something, little brows creased. Michael put the huge cake on one of the tables, got down to their level.

“Does it look good?” he asked.

The girls nodded in union.

“We were wondering something, though,” Emily said.

“What, honey?”

“Is this organic cake?”

Coming from a four year old, the word sounded Chinese. “Organic?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “We need organic cake. And guten-free. Is this guten-free?”

Michael glanced at Abby. “Have they been watching the Food Network again?”

“Worse,” Abby said. “They’ve been making me Tivo reruns of Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger.”

Michael soon realized an answer was required. He looked at the ground, the sky, the trees, again at his wife, where he found no shelter. “Well, okay, I would say this cake has guten-free properties.”

Charlotte and Emily gave him the fish-eye.

“What I mean is,” he continued, reaching into his lawyer’s bag of tricks. “It has guten-absent characteristics.”

The girls glanced at each other, in that way that twins have, a secret knowledge passing between them. “It’s okay,” Charlotte finally said. “You make good birthday cake.”

“Thanks, ladies,” Michael said, enormously relieved, and also a little disbelieving, considering that this was only the third cake he had made them, and found it hard to believe they remembered the first two.

As Michael prepared to cut the cake, he saw the moms whispering to each other. They were all looking toward the side of the house, fluffing hair, straightening clothes, smoothing cheeks. To Michael, it could only mean one thing. Tommy had arrived.

Thomas Christiano was one of Michael’s oldest friends, a man with whom Michael had, in the gaudy plumage of youth, closed every bar in Queens, and not a few in Manhattan; the only man who had ever seen Michael cry, and that was the night Michael and Abby brought Charlotte and Emily home. To this day Michael claimed it was pollen. Tommy knew better.

When Tommy and Michael were in their twenties they’d been a holy terror. Tommy with his dark good looks and smooth lines; Michael with his boyish face and ocean blue eyes. They’d had that Starsky and Hutch, Hall and Oates, swarthy and fair thing down pat. They were both around six feet tall, well dressed, and carried with them the confidence that came with authority. Where Tommy’s tastes went to Missoni and Valentino, Michael’s went to Ralph Lauren and Land’s End. They were the dynamic duo.

But that, too, was a few years ago.

Tommy swaggered across the back lawn, on display, as always. Even at a kid’s party, he was turned out – black Armani T-shirt, cream linen slacks, black leather loafers. Even at a kid’s party, or especially at a kid’s party, Tommy knew that there would be a number of women in their twenties or thirties present, and that a certain fraction would be divorced, separated, or separating. Tommy Christiano played the percentages. It was one of the reasons he was one of the most respected prosecutors in Queens County, New York.

The number one spot, the most feared assistant district attorney at Kew Gardens, was Michael Roman.

“Miss Abigail,” Tommy said. He kissed Abby on both cheeks, Euro-style. “You look beautiful.”

“Yeah, right,” Abby said, waving a hand at her battered sandals and frayed jeans. Still, she blushed. Not too many people could make Abby Roman blush. “I look like something that just washed up on Rockaway.”

Tommy laughed. “The prettiest mermaid ever.”

Blush number two from Abby, followed by a playful slug on Tommy’s shoulder. Considering Abby’s nearly demented devotion to Pilates, Michael bet it hurt. Tommy would rather die than show it.

“White wine?” she asked.

“Sure.”

As soon as Abby turned her back and headed to the house, Tommy rubbed his shoulder. “Jesus Christ your wife is strong.”

“Try playing touch football with her. We always have paramedics standing by.”

Over the next half-hour, a number of people from the mayor’s office and Queens County DA’s office made their perfunctory appearances. Michael was a bit flattered and more than a little surprised when Dennis McCaffrey, the district attorney himself, showed up with a pair of outlandishly big teddy bears for the girls. Michael had recently been to a party for the deputy mayor’s five-year-old son, and at that gathering Denny McCaffrey – a nineteen-year veteran of the elected position, and the most politically savvy man Michael had ever met – only brought a rather puny Beanie Baby penguin. It seemed that, as Michael’s reputation as the hottest ADA in the city grew, so did the size of the plush toys for his children.

At one o’clock the entertainment arrived in the person of a tall, feathery woman who went by the professional name Chickie Noodle the Clown. At first Michael thought she might be a little too long in the tooth for a kid’s party, but she turned out to be a trouper, with more than enough energy and patience to deal with twenty little kids. In addition to the balloon-twisting, face-painting, and something called the Merry Madcap Olympics, there was also the obligatory pinata. The kids got to select which one they wanted, a choice that came down to a shark pinata and a butterfly pinata. The kids chose the butterfly.

Two questions instantly arose in Michael’s mind. One, what kind of clown buys a pinata in the shape of a shark? And two, perhaps more importantly, what kind of kids wanted to pick up a plastic bat and beat the crap out of a butterfly?

Suburban kids, that’s who. They should have stayed in Queens where it was safe.

At two-thirty the pony clopped onto the scene, and there was near pandemonium as Chickie Noodle was left spinning in the dust, holding a stack of cardboard cone hats. One by one the kids got to ride an indifferent Shetland named Lulu around the perimeter of the backyard. Michael had to admit that the act was pretty good. The owner of the horse, the guy who led the animal, was a short, kindly looking cowpoke in his sixties, replete with droopy white mustache, bow legs, and a ten gallon Stetson. He looked like a Shetland-sized Sam Elliott.

At three-thirty it was time for presents. And man were there presents. Michael considered that he and Abby would be buying reciprocal gifts for every child at the party during the next year or so, a suburban kid pro quo.

Midway through the consumer love fest, Abby picked up a pair of small square boxes, read the card. “These are from Uncle Tommy.”

The girls ran over to Tommy, arms extended. Tommy knelt down for a pair of big kisses and bigger hugs. It was his turn to blush. Despite two brief marriages, he had no children of his own. He was godfather to both Charlotte and Emily, a position he took with the solemnity of an English archbishop.

The girls zipped back to the table. When they got the wrapping paper off the small boxes, and Michael saw the logo on the sides, he did a double take. The second glance was unnecessary. He’d know that logo anywhere.

“Yaaaay!” the twins cried in unison. Michael knew that his daughters hadn’t the slightest idea what was inside the boxes, but that didn’t matter to them. The boxes had been wrapped in shiny paper, the boxes were for them, and the pile of birthday swag was growing exponentially.

Michael looked at Tommy. “You bought them iPods?”

“What’s wrong with iPods?”

“Jesus, Tommy. They’re four.”

“What are you saying, four year olds don’t listen to music? I listened to music when I was four.”

“Four year olds don’t download music,” Michael said. “Why didn’t you just get them cellphones?”

“That’s next year.” He sipped his wine, winked. “Four is too young for cellphones. What kind of parent are you?”

Michael laughed, but it occurred to him that his daughters weren’t all that far off from cellphones and laptops and cars and dating. He barely survived them going to preschool. How was he going to handle the teen years? He threw a quick glance at Charlotte and Emily, who were tearing into a new pair of presents.

They were still little girls.

Thank God.

By four o’clock the party was winding down. More accurately, the parents were winding down. The kids were still jacked sky-high on cookies, chocolate cake, Kool Aid, and ice cream.

As Tommy prepared to leave, he caught Michael’s eye. The two men gathered at the back of the yard.

“How’s the girl?” Tommy asked, lowering his voice.

Michael thought about Falynn Harris, the quiet girl with the sad angel’s face. She was the star witness – no, the only witness – in his next homicide trial. “She hasn’t spoken a word yet.”

“The trial starts Monday?”

“Monday.”

Tommy nodded, taking it in. “Anything you need.”

“Thanks, Tommy.”

“Don’t forget Rupert White’s party tomorrow. You’re coming, right?”

Michael instinctively glanced at Abby, who was cleaning the frosting off a neighborhood boy’s face, neck, and arms. The kid looked like a chubby pink fresco. “I have to clear it with command and control.”

Tommy shook his head. “Marriage.”

On the way out, Michael saw Tommy stop and talk to Rita Ludlow, a thirtyish divorcee from the end of the block. Tall, auburn-haired, shapely, she had probably populated the daydreams of every man under ninety in Eden Falls at one time or another.

Not surprisingly, after just a few seconds of chatter, she handed Tommy her phone number. Tommy turned, winked at Michael, swaggered off.

Sometimes Michael Roman hated his best friend.

Because the invitations said noon to four, when they heard the car doors slam out front, it could only mean one thing. Abby’s brother Wallace was making his regal entrance. He was not just fashionably late. He was fashionista late. Which was all the more ironic, considering his past.

Angel-hair thin, freckled and balding, Wallace Reed was the kid in high school who ironed his book covers, the kid who would have played triangle in the school band if he hadn’t gotten smoked in the audition and ended up playing second triangle.

Today he was chairman of WBR Aerospace, pulling down something north of eight figures a year, living in a McMansion in Westchester, and summering in one of those sea-foam green Gatsby places in Sagaponack featured in Hamptons Magazine.

Still, despite his card-carrying status in Nerds Anonymous, Wallace had romanced an astonishing array of beautiful women. Amazing what a few million dollars can do for your image.

This day his belle du jour didn’t look a day over twenty-four. She wore a Roberto Cavalli halter dress and a pair of burgundy ballet flats. This according to Abby. Michael wouldn’t know a ballet flat from a flat tire.

“Now here’s a woman who knows how to dress for cake and Kool Aid,” Abby said, sotto voce.

“Be nice.”

“I’m going with Whitney,” Abby whispered.

“I’ll take Madison.” It was a running five-dollar bet they had.

“There’s my favorite sister,” Wallace said. It was the standard line. Abby was his only sister. He kissed her on the cheek.

Wallace wore a bright plum Polo, razor-creased beige chinos and green duck boots. Barney gone LL Bean. He gestured to the girl. “This is Madison.”

Michael could not look at his wife. He just couldn’t. The twins came running over, sensing fresh chum.

“And these must be the girls of the hour,” Madison said, getting down to the twins’ level. The girls did their shy act, fingers to lips. They hadn’t figured out the woman’s gift-potential yet.

“Yes, this is Charlotte and Emily,” Abby said.

Madison smiled, stood, patted the girls on their heads, like they were schnauzers. “How adorable. Just like the Bronte sisters.”

Abby shot a desperate glance at Michael.

“Right,” Michael said. “The Bronte sisters.”

Here was a party-pause longer than the one where Rock Hudson came out of the closet.

“The authors?” Madison said, blinking, incredulous. “The British authors?”

“Of course,” Abby said. “They wrote…”

The second longest pause.

“Wuthering Heights? Jane Eyre?”

“Yes,” Abby said. “I simply adored those books growing up. So did Michael.”

Michael nodded. And nodded. He felt like a bobble-head doll in the back window of a car with busted shocks.

The girls circled the four adults. Michael could almost hear the theme from Jaws. Presents from Uncle Wallace were like the Oscars. Best picture was always last.

“You ready for your gifts?” Wallace asked.

“Yes!” the girls chanted. “Yes we are!”

“They’re out front.”

The girls made a move to rocket across the yard, but instead waited for Wallace, taking him by the hand. They were no dummies. They knew how to work their quarry. Even though Charlotte once said Uncle Wallace smelled like pickles.

“He said they’re out front,” Michael said, once they had disappeared around the corner. “They’re. As in they.”

“I know.”

“He did not buy them bikes. Please tell me he did not buy them bikes. We talked about this.”

“He promised me, Michael. No bikes.”

Getting your daughters their first grown up bicycles was an important thing, a father-daughter thing to which Michael Roman was greatly looking forward. He was not going to let a millionaire who wore eau de gherkin take that away from him.

When Michael heard the yay come flying over the house, his heart sank. Moments later he saw his daughters come racing around the corner in their matching pink motorized Barbie Jeeps.

Oh, Jesus, Michael thought.

They’re driving already.

Twenty minutes later the final few guests gathered in the driveway. Thanks were proffered, cheeks were kissed, promises were made, and teary little ones were bundled into SUVs – the party was over.

On the back patio, Charlotte and Emily shared a piece of chalk. They drew a hopscotch pattern on the concrete. Emily found a suitable stone in the flower garden, and the girls played a full game. As usual, they did not keep score, neither wanting to best the other in anything.

When they tired of the game, they began to draw something else on the concrete, an intricate figure of a big blue lion with a long curling tail. They worked in silence.

At six o’clock, as deep violet clouds gathered over Crane County, New York, their mother called them inside. The little girls rose, looked at their drawing. They each whispered something to the other. Then, in their private way, they hugged, and went inside.

Twenty minutes later it began to rain; huge gobbets of water falling to earth, soaking the grass, giving life to the spring garden. Before long, small ponds pooled on the patio, and the symbol was washed away.