They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 7

Marco answered the pool hall three nights later, and he did not answer me. He answered the street, at the far end of it, where an old woman lives alone.

Mrs. Abernathy is eighty-one years old and pays me in tomatoes because money embarrasses her. Her house at the end of the lane is the one with the blue door and the porch swing and forty years of photographs in cookie tins.

I smelled the gasoline through the open bedroom window before the shouts started. I was pulling my boots on before the first window cracked under the heat.

The front of the house was a curtain of fire when I reached the curb, and the porch swing was burning on its chains. Inside the front parlor, her voice came thin through the smoke, calling not for help or the fire department, but for Harold, who had been dead eleven years.

I ran around the hydrangeas to the back stoop. The screen door was unlocked. I pulled my wool work jacket up over my head, ducked low where the air was still cool enough to swallow, and kicked the kitchen door open.

Smoke hung three feet off the pine floorboards, thick and yellow from the burning carpet in the front hall. I found her on her knees beside the linen press, her flannel nightgown singed at the hem, both arms wrapped around three round cookie tins.

"Leave them," I said, crouching beside her.

"Harold's in these," she said, quite reasonably. "The wedding. The lake house. I'm not leaving Harold in a fire."

I did not argue with eighty-one years of marriage. I hauled her up under my left arm, locking my forearm against her ribs, and pinned the tins to her chest with my right hand. The kitchen door was eight paces behind us.

We were halfway across the kitchen linoleum when the ceiling above the stove buckled. A beam came down. I ducked my chin and took it across my shoulder blades, and it drove me to my knees. I shoved it off toward the sink and got us out through the back door.

We hit the wet clover together. Mrs. Abernathy sat up in the grass, coughing soot onto her collar, clutching three cookie tins tight against her collarbone. The Tran family was already running across the lawn with blankets, and down the street the first sirens were winding up from the avenue.

"Harold's all right," she told the street, astonished. "Harold's all right. The old gardener went in and got him."

Sarah dressed my back in her kitchen at two in the morning. Noah was asleep in the spare room at the Chens', and outside the front window two pumper trucks were still idling by the curb.

The burn ran from the base of my neck across both shoulder blades. Sarah worked with saline and burn salve, and her fingers were steady.

"That's a burn across both shoulders, Elias." She laid a wide strip of white adhesive tape across the gauze and pressed it flat with her palm.

"She was saving photographs," I said, looking at the toaster on her counter.

"You ran into a burning house at your age, alone, in the dark, and came out carrying an eighty-one-year-old woman and her entire marriage. Who does that?"

"A neighbor," I said.

She tore another strip of tape with a sharp jerk of her wrists. She did not ask another question. She taped the rest of the gauze down in clean, overlapping lines.

At dawn the fire captain walked across the soaked lawn to the yellow tape line. He carried a heavy red metal can by the wire handle and set it in the wet grass near my boots.

It was a five-gallon gas can, commercial grade, with a pressed steel crest stamped into the side: a crowned snake eating its own tail. The same crest as the lighter Sarah had pulled out of my burned garden. Its cap lay in the dirt beside it.

I bent down, picked up the cap, and closed my fingers around the hard ridges. Sarah stood beside me holding two mugs of black coffee, watching my hands. She looked at my face, and she did not look away. Neither did I.

"Sarah," I said. "The account starts now."

◆

Milo came home almost a month after the fire that took my garden, in the blue hour before the street wakes.

I heard a scratching at the bottom panel of the back door, low and furious. When I pulled the door open, a gray stray cat stood on the sill. Half her whiskers were singed down to white stubs. Her coat was matted with dried mud and black ash, and she held her left hind leg tucked tight to her belly, dragging the paw whenever she shifted her balance.

She had crossed a month of ash and danger on three legs to come back to a burned garden and a porch with no bowl on it, because she is a cat who is not my cat, and the contract between us was never about food.

I sat down on the cold wooden step in my bathrobe and wept. She hobbled past my slippers and inspected the spot where her bowl used to sit with mounting outrage.

Noah arrived at a dead run twenty minutes later, his flannel pajama pants tucked into unlaced sneakers. Sarah followed behind him in her coat, still buttoning the cuffs. She said Noah had sat straight up in bed next door and announced she was back before anyone else had heard a thing.

The boy dropped onto the porch floor, buried his face directly into the cat's matted gray fur, and cried. Milo tucked her burned head beneath his chin and started her motor, loud enough to hear over the morning sparrows.

We moved inside to the kitchen table to tend the leg. Sarah held Milo's front shoulders against an old bath towel while I examined the break. The lower bone in the hind leg had snapped clean above the hock, but the skin was unbroken.

I took two wooden lollipop sticks from Noah's craft box, wrapped them in sterile cotton, and laid them along the bone. I checked the temperature of her back toes with the pad of my thumb, wrapped the sticks in narrow gauze, and checked the color of the skin again before pressing the adhesive down.

Sarah watched every movement of my thumbs.

"You set that like a field medic," she said quietly. "The splint. The pressure check. You checked her circulation twice, Elias. Gardeners don't check circulation."

"Gardeners who keep bees learn to be careful with small bodies," I told her, smoothing the tape along the fur.

She watched me gather the spare gauze and put the scissors back in the drawer. Sarah Miller is patient, and she is clever, and she loves me like family. That morning she was fond of a man she no longer entirely believed, and she did not push. She carried the cat home to her own front room and let Noah build a nest of wool blankets beside the radiator.

By nine that evening I was on Sarah's sofa with a mug of mint tea, and Noah had fallen asleep on her rug with one hand resting on Milo's flank. The burn across my shoulders had talked me into a fever, and I fell asleep sitting up.

Sarah told me the next morning that I stayed there until midnight. She said I talked through the fever in two languages, neither of them English for more than a few words at a time. She said I gave orders to people who were not there.

Most of all, she said, I repeated a single word. A syllable spoken over and over into the dark room, like a name and a warning in the same breath.

She did not tell me what the word was. She waited until I woke enough to walk across the grass to my own bed, locked her deadbolt, and sat down at her kitchen table with her phone.

Wraith.

The internet gave her almost nothing. Only one old message board, fourteen years dead, where old men argued about ghosts.

The thread ended with a post from an anonymous account, sitting untouched at the bottom of the screen:

Wraith isn't a person. Wraith is what they send when a whole street has to disappear.