Chapter Two
The blaring alarm woke me up at five. I lifted my head to check the time, not about to get up this early, and smacked the snooze button. Sinking back into the comfortable bed, I started to fall asleep when someone banged on my door.
“Come on, girl! You need to start that garden!”
This has got to be hell. Was I seriously going to spend a full year doing this crap? I pulled my pillow over my head, but she began pounding on my door with strength I didn’t know a two hundred year old woman possessed.
“All right!” I shouted finally. “I’m awake!”
The knocking stopped. I pushed myself up and groaned. My body hurt from the work I did yesterday. Not at all wanting to be awake, I had a feeling the old lady wasn’t going to cut me any slack. I dressed in gym clothes, sleepily tied my hair back and left my room.
She was waiting for me in the hallway. “I’m up,” I grumbled.
“Breakfast is at seven o’clock sharp,” she said and whirled, starting down the hallway.
“What do I do until …” Never mind. I clearly had to earn my meals around here. Trudging down the stairs, I went down the hallway and to the kitchen. The sun had started to lighten the sky on the opposite side of the house. I shivered in the early morning chill and eyed the stupid shack. I let the screen door slam behind me.
“You’re in charge of the garden?”
Blinking, I glanced grouchily at the man seated on the rocking chair on one side of the porch. He wasn’t one of the jumper-men. Middle aged with a graying goatee, he was the first person I’d seen smile around here. His eyes were a shade of liquid gold I’d never witnessed before.
“Yeah,” I said finally, realizing he had asked me a question.
“The drought’s affecting it, I think.”
There’s a lot more wrong with that patch of dust than drought. But I nodded. “I didn’t hear you come in last night.”
“I got in late. We travelers keep odd hours.”
“Start the garden, girl,” Caretaker bellowed from the kitchen.
God, I was starting to hate that woman. “Nice to meet you,” I told the stranger and then walked off the porch towards the shed. I opened it and glanced back over my shoulder. The stranger was in the kitchen with Caretaker.
Dragging out what I thought I’d need for the garden, I stood in the center of the large space, at a loss as to where to start. Finally, I picked a spot near the corner of the house and dropped onto my knees with a spade in one hand and handful of seeds in the other.
With absolutely no knowledge about gardening, I was able to guess all I had to do was bury the seeds and then wait a few months for something to grow. The sun had cracked the horizon and was perched on one of the distant mountain ranges.
“Thanks, Caretaker!” someone called from the front porch. “Good luck with the garden this year.”
“Thanks. I’ll need it with the help I have,” replied the disgruntled Caretaker.
Rolling my eyes at her, I leaned to see around the side of the house. The man with the beautiful eyes was walking down the driveway towards the road, a pack on his back. He wore a cowboy hat and boots befitting how I thought people out west dressed.
“What’re you doing, girl?”
I jumped, not expecting the old lady to move so fast. She stood behind me, as if she’d sprinted from the front porch through the house to sneak up and scare me. I didn’t put it past her. I motioned to the ground. “I’m planting seeds.”
“In order?”
“What?”
“Are you planting them in order?”
“In order according to what? I don’t see any instructions anywhere.”
She sighed noisily and strode away. “Yet another year I won’t have a garden.”
I gazed at the seeds in my hand. They were a jumbled mix of colors and sizes. I assumed if they came that way, they went into the ground that way as well.
With a glance towards the driveway, I started to turn then stopped.
The stranger who had been halfway down the driveway when the Caretaker confronted me was completely gone. Not walking down the long road to town or off the road into the desert. Just … gone. I hadn’t heard a car, but maybe …
No dust trail. When Officer Santos left yesterday, he’d left a dust trail.
There was something really weird about all this.
“It’s too early,” I told myself. I was hungry, sore and tired. If anything, my eyes were playing tricks on me, because people didn’t just disappear.
Kneeling down, I began to sling seeds into shallow graves and cover them up.
The sun came up and began its climb into the sky. It was already warm by the time breakfast rolled around. I went in the back door to the kitchen. Muffins and coffee, homemade mini-quiches and other wonderful foods sat buffet style in platters on the rectangular table. I grabbed a plate and filled it up then went to sit out on the back porch to eat. The sounds of others in the kitchen drew my attention. The four men in gray jumpers were eating as well.
Not remotely interested in them, I finished up and grabbed a water before going to the side of the house.
Several of my seeds had sprouted slender green ribbons that poked above the dirt. For some reason, the sight of them cheered me up for the first time in a very long time. I knelt and touched them very gently, admiring how something so delicate could grow in this hellish place. I thought back to my mother’s apartment, where I’d lived my entire life. We never had plants, so I had no experience to compare this to. Everything about my life the past year and a half had been miserable and here I was, growing a garden. It didn’t make up for my misery, but it felt good to see the green ribbons poking out of the clay-dirt and know I had something to do with it.
I hurried to the shed and grabbed a bucket then went to the world’s oldest well pump and filled it with water.
All but staggering back to the sprouts, I watered them carefully, pouring a small stream of liquid from a measuring cup onto the ground. There were more sprouts, and as I stood back to watch, even more sprang up.
“I had no idea gardening was this easy!” I said, proud of myself. Eager to see more of the garden start to appear, I went to work in earnest this time.
By the time it was noon, I had stripped down to my sports bra and leggings and was laboring over the sixth row of plants. I stood, hungry once more and ready for a refill of my water, when I heard someone pounding on the front door.
I peered around the house to see the front porch, puzzled as to why no one in the country used cars.
The group of men at the door were dressed stranger than the space-jumper-men, in an unusual combination of fur-lined leathers, boots and … something else. It looked like crushed velvet embroidered in bright colors from where I stood. Were these Indians? Deputy Santos had told me we were on the border of a Native American Reservation. If so, why were they dressed for the Arctic and not the desert?
There was no method of conveyance in the driveway, no dust trail to indicate they’d been dropped off and nowhere they could’ve come from aside from the desert.
To add to my confusion – they were soaking wet and dripping, as if they’d walked through a storm to get here. The sky was clear in every direction. Again, no one had luggage. Shouldn’t people coming to a bed and breakfast have at least an overnight bag?
“Caretaker!” One cried in a voice as rough as his clothing.
The door opened, and the three of them entered. They carried someone among them, and I caught a glimpse of a bloodied face.
Of the visitors I’d seen here so far, none of them were the typical bored tourists from back East in search of an Old West adventure. I didn’t understand what kind of business Caretaker was running.
“Yankee!” Caretaker cried out the front door. “Bring me my medical kit! The blue one! It’s in the office!” She slammed the door.
Concerned, I hurried to the front door and spotted the trail of blood leading back to
wards the road. It splattered across the steps and pooled on the porch, mixed with water that had dripped off the men’s clothing.
They’d walked here with some guy who bled this much?
Distracted by the thought, I followed the trail of blood and water from the porch down the lane and back to the road. It started where the driveway met the dirt road. Unable to go farther for fear of causing a statewide manhunt, I studied the area beyond without finding any other footprints or pools of blood and water.
Where did they come from?
“Girl!” the Caretaker shouted.
I really hate that. I turned, trotted back to the house and vaulted up the porch stairs and into the house. The men were upstairs. I went to the office – the room beside the three sitting parlors – and looked around for the medical bag. There were five bags on a shelf, all marked with red cross symbols, and each a different color. I grabbed the blue one and hurried up the stairs, following the sounds of talk and movement down the left wing, which I hadn’t yet explored. Pausing in the open doorway of one of the rooms, I found myself staring at the visitors, whose appearances were even stranger up close. I could’ve sworn they were dark skinned on the porch, but up close, they were sun tanned and light skinned.
They wore different colors of dyed, old school leather, like I imagined cavemen or Native Americans wore, in layers mixed with furs, as if they traveled from someplace cold. Crushed velvet edged and detailed the leather. The men’s heads were shaved and their faces tattooed with red whorls and spiraling designs. They were armed, too, with swords of varying lengths and knives, and all of them the size of the professional lifters at the gym.
Who the hell were these people?
“Quickly!” Caretaker beckoned to me.
I edged by the men, none of whom moved. In fact, they stared me down, their expressions almost feral. I had the sense of being in a movie or watching myself from the outside.
I set down the bag beside the caretaker, and my breath caught. The guy on the bed before her was unconscious, his tattoos purple-blue instead of red like the others’ markings. He was hemorrhaging blood.
Caretaker snatched my wrist with strength and speed I didn’t think someone that old capable of and planted my hand over a wound in his chest.
“Oh, god!” I breathed as warm blood gushed through my fingers. “I’m not … this isn’t … oh, god!” Already, I was starting to get dizzy.
“You can’t handle the sight of blood?” Caretaker demanded.
“Not really … I have a weak … stomach …” I started to sag beside the bed.
She slapped the back of my head hard enough to snap me back into the moment. “If you don’t do this, this boy dies. Look at him.” She gripped my chin and forced my focus to his face. “You see him?”
“Y…yes.”
“He will die if you pass out. Keep that in mind.” She released me and tore open the bag.
I stared at the man’s features. It was impossible to make out much about him beneath the combination of blood and tattoos but he appeared to be around my age. He was in shape, lanky to the point of skinny yet wiry. I could feel his muscles beneath the blood gushing over my hands. I was starting to feel claustrophobic again and closed my eyes to try to block the panic building.
“Breathe deep,” Caretaker instructed me. “Look at his face. Not at the blood. You are all that’s keeping him alive right now.”
Visions from the night of the incident, of the night I’d almost been raped and ended up killing my attacker instead, pummeled me. I recalled waking up covered in sticky blood, the man’s lifeless body beside me. His eyes had been opened, his stare vacant.
“Focus!” Caretaker slapped the back of my head again.
My eyes opened. “Ow!” I complained and blinked away the images. But I obeyed, staring so hard at the guy’s face, I started to get a headache.
Caretaker was yanking supplies out of the bag.
The young man mumbled in his sleep, his head moving back and forth. His eyelids fluttered and then opened. He stared at me with eyes so dark blue, they were almost brown, before launching up.
“Hold him down!” Caretaker instructed.
The men around us pounced, pushing him to the bed once more. I pressed hard into his wound, unable to do anything for fear of panicking and fainting.
“We’re trying to save you. Do you understand?” Caretaker leaned over the man to peer into his face. “Be still, so we can help you.”
He blinked, and the tense body beneath my palms relaxed.
Blood soaked the front of my sports bra from his attempt to get up. The edges of my vision were starting to grow dark.
“Don’t you dare!” Caretaker slapped me again. The sting drove away the darkness.
How she was so nice to the others and mean to me … god I wanted to smack her back so bad!
“You look at him, girl. You know if he dies, it’s your fault!”
Not again. My breath hitched in my throat, and I stared once more down at the injured boy. This time, he stared back at me, unblinking, intense and just as wary and feral as his friends. There was fire in the depths of his oddly hued gaze. All I could think about was how much I didn’t want to be there if he passed, and I saw his eyes like I did those of the man I’d accidentally murdered. Empty. Glassy. The definitive proof that we as humans had souls, because I’d seen the shell left behind once the soul had been driven out.
The world around me blurred, the sounds and colors shifting into surreal movement I was too terrified to acknowledge. Caretaker and one other were starting with the injuries in the guy’s legs, while I pressed hard enough on the wound in his chest for my arms to shake and stared at him, terrified of losing him, even though I had no idea who he was or what he’d done to end up this way. For all I knew, he’d tried to rape someone like me and ended up almost dead.
He gazed back at me, and we stayed in our own little world, bracing ourselves against reality so neither of us had to face the pain waiting for us.
Please don’t die, I begged him over and over silently.
It felt like we stared at each other for an eternity. Caretaker pushed me aside finally, and the world outside of us erupted into sight and sound again.
And smell. I had forgotten what blood smelled like, but it made me nauseated at once. I stepped back, out of her way, my hands trembling.
“Hold him down. This is going to hurt,” I heard her say to one of the other men.
Feeling sick, I slipped by the three men hanging back and into the hallway. I was feverish and half a second from a full blown panic attack. I raced out of the house and into the backyard. Frantically, I washed off the blood from my skin at the well then hurried to my t-shirt. I flung off my blood drenched bra without a second thought and tugged on my t-shirt then sank down beside the house, my courage spent.
I couldn’t get the visions of that night I’d almost been killed out of my head. Over and over, I relived what he’d tried to do to me. I relived waking up to find him dead and my arm broken, my body scratched, stabbed and bruised. Those aches and pains had never gone away. Their ghosts lingered, along with the fear and emotion of the past year and a half.
I trembled and clenched my knees to my chest, emotion holding my chest in a vise and my ability to think immobilized.
Gradually, the sun warmed the coldness inside me, and the gentle sway of grass in a breeze comforted me. As happened often, I lost track of time. I survived the panic attack but didn’t move for a long time after, not yet ready to face the world.
Wiping my face free of tears I hadn’t felt myself shed, I closed my eyes and worked on freeing my chest from the vise. My breathing turned from shallow and ragged to deep and regular once more. The rustling of …
Rustling?
Blinking out of myself, I lifted my head.
My six rows of plants were in different stages of growth. The first one I’d planted was filled with knee high plants, the sixth with those mere i
nches off the ground, while the other rows somewhere in between.
Some of those nearest me had yellow flowers, and at least four appeared to be trees rather than vegetable plants. I gazed at them, comforted by the whisper of their swaying in the dusty breeze.
I knew nothing of gardening, but I was beginning to wonder if my plants were … normal. Were they supposed to grow this fast?
I shifted to my knees. Panic attacks drained me. I was a shell of myself, hungry and exhausted and ready to curl up and sleep the rest of the day away. I forced myself up and returned to the water pump, paling when I saw the bloodied water around it.
“Your plants need water, Gi,” I told myself hoarsely. “You can’t let them die, either.” A lump formed in my throat, and I went to fill up a bucket for the garden. I watered all six rows and then returned to the kitchen. Leftovers from breakfast were in Tupperware in the fridge.
I microwaved my lunch and sat to eat it on the back porch. I wanted to go upstairs, to grab a new bra and change pants, but I was afraid of another attack or finding out the guy had died and I’d failed him. At last, though, I couldn’t stand the thought of wearing bloody clothing and crept upstairs.
The door to the injured guy’s room remained opened. I went the opposite way, wishing him well yet also wishing I’d never met him. Safe in my room, I washed my face and fixed my mascara before changing clothing.
I still felt his blood on me. I scoured my body in the mirror to ensure I hadn’t missed anything. I looked like complete shit, but I didn’t really care.
I sneaked out of the house and returned to the garden. If nothing else, I was doing something worthwhile today. My body hurt from muscle soreness and pain with no source, and I soon lost myself in planting rows of random plants and trees.
Dig a hole, drop in seeds, cover it, sprinkle with water.
Over and over I performed this routine beneath the hot Arizona sun until darkness swept the sky clear of light and heat. I worked until I was too tired to work anymore then sat back and gazed at what I’d done.
The first row of plants was waist high now, and I managed to smile. Moonlight dusted the dark leaves and flowers, and a light breeze caused them all to lean away from the house.
“This is the first thing I’ve ever done right,” I whispered to my twenty rows of random plants and trees. Was this why so many people gardened as a hobby? Because of the sense of accomplishment, of doing something good, that came from a day of hard work?
“Girl. Dinner.”
At the sound of her voice, my spark of happiness was snuffed. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to hide out or better yet, go back to New York and rot in a prison cell. My probation officer had told me to keep my head down and suck it up, but I was considering calling him in a few days if this place didn’t get any better.
“Coming,” I said softly and rose. God, I was so tired!
With what energy I had left, I put back my tools in the shed and walked inside, heart racing, in case there were more dying men lying around everywhere I went.