The Garden

Chapter 1-3

Cam obeyed, not wanting to be yelled at the way he had been the previous night. He went to his room, closed the door and sat on his bed, staring at his mother’s note. A wave of panic swelled in his belly as he realized and feared that he knew exactly what was going on. His mother was gone, and she wasn’t coming back — ever.

* * * *

Cameron never did see or hear from his mother again after that. His fears had been accurate back then, she never did return nor did she ever call or write. For the first little while he trusted that she would return. He believed she had told him the truth in her note and she would come home. He believed it with all of his being, until a couple of months after she had left when his father told him otherwise...

Jared had come home from work one evening to find Cam watching television in the living room. For no reason that Cam could figure, his father grabbed him by the arm and yanked him off the chesterfield, screaming at him: “What the f**k do ya think you’re doin?”

Cam was so startled by Jared’s outburst that it took him a few moments to answer. “Watching TV,” he timidly replied.

“Do you pay the utility bill around here? No! I do! You’re just like your mother! Ungrateful and selfish. Ya know she’s gone because of you, don’t ya? She left me because of you, ya stupid little asshole!”

“Pa, I... you’re hurtin’ me,” Cam begged, squirming in Jared’s grip.

“Hurt? You don’t know what hurt is, boy!”

“Pa, please. Mom’s coming back, she said so,” he pleaded, tears welling up in his eyes.

“Comin’ back?” he roared. “How stupid are you? She’s not comin’ back. She’s never comin’ back!”

Jared threw his son to the floor and glared down at him. Cam’s face — now wet with tears — displayed just how completely shocked and horrified he was. He scrambled to get up and ran to his room, slamming the door behind him.

* * * *

That day was only the beginning. From then on Jared took his anger out on Cam every chance he got. It really wasn’t that bad; his pa had been beating on him for three years now and Cam had become somewhat desensitized to it. He had set himself up a system that allowed him to avoid most confrontations, and it worked most of the time but when his pa did get a hold of him, he got him good. Today after school, when he dropped his bike on the front lawn, was just a couple of little taps; the calm before the storm.

The sun had just started to rise when Cam’s alarm quietly sounded, waking him. He got out of bed, gathered his dirty clothes off the floor and stuffed them into a duffel bag. He tossed the bag out the window, and then replaced the screen. Pressing his ear up to the bedroom door and listening for any signs of life, he could hear that the TV set was still on but that was all. He moved the chair that had been wedged under the knob and opened the door quietly. Jared was still asleep on the sofa as Cam skulked silently by to the front door.

“Cameron,” Jared grunted, from behind.

Cam stopped dead and pulled in a deep breath of absolute dread. “Yeah Pa?”

“C’meer boy.”

Cam turned and walked into the living room, looking at his father as he sat up on the couch. The empty bottle he had been drinking from the night before slid off his gut and fell to the floor. It clanged and rolled toward the wall on the slanted floorboards. “When’s your summer break. Soon ain’t it?”

“Today’s the first day, Pa.”

“Jesus H, where does the time go?” Jared asked, more to himself than to Cam. He looked up at his son and tried to look fatherly. “Did ya get your report card?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, where is it? Lemmee see it, boy.”

Cam obeyed his father and returned to his room to retrieve his report card from his schoolbag. He returned quickly and handed it to his father. Jared lit a cigarette and peered down at the letter sized yellow card while revoltingly clearing his throat of morning phlegm. “Hmmm, is this the right card? This isn’t yours is it?” he asked, sounding suspicious.

“Yeah, it’s mine.”

“It’s got your name on it.”

His heart beginning to pound with uneasiness, Cameron stared at his father trying not to let his mounting fear show.

“It says here: ‘Cameron is extremely bright and mature for his age. He exhibits... extra-ord... extrodary... extra-ordin-arily... ad-vanced problem solving and reasoning abilities. Does sats... satisfact-orily in all subjects but very obviously isn’t working up to his full po-ten... poten-chee-uhl... potential. Also shows some issues with preocc-upa-tion; seems bored with not only his lessons but the other children. May do better if challenged in advanced classes that match his intelligence...’”Jared laughed and peered up at his son. “So this is what I pay taxes for: so some b***h can tell me my kid’s a little loner weirdo retard with no friends that needs to go to some special school with the other little loner weirdo retards?”

“Can I go now?”

“Where ya off to this early?”

“Out Pa.”

“Always ‘out Pa’. Don’t ya wanna spend some time with your old man?”

This had to be the creepiest and most unexpected question ever asked of him. Would he really have to live through the torture of spending even five minutes with this man he detested so immensely? Just the notion of it nauseated as well as petrified him. “Sure Pa. What do you wanna do?” he asked, sounding less than enthusiastic.

“How’s about goin’ to get your pa some beer? I’m fresh out,” Jared said, pulling a twenty from his wallet and holding it out.

The relief he felt was immeasurable. “Sure Pa,” Cam said, taking the money and stuffing it in his pocket.

He left the house and made his way around to his bedroom window where his bike sat waiting for him. He pedaled away feeling quite pleased. Every time his father gave him money for booze, he’d pocket a dollar or two. Jared never noticed and Cam had saved somewhere close to eighty dollars. He kept it stashed in a large Mason jar beneath a loose floorboard in his room. It came in handy for laundry, food, and the clothes he seemed to be outgrowing so fast. Just six months ago he spent a whole twenty-seven dollars at the Salvation Army Thrift store. He walked away with three pairs of jeans, four T-shirts, and a pair of sneakers that were in fairly good condition. He also had plans that when he had saved up enough, he could run away and find his mother in Vancouver, which he had since learned was a large coastal city in the province of BC, and over a thousand kilometers away.

* * * *

Ani woke up feeling excited; it was, after all, the first day of summer vacation. The sun was shining brilliantly into her room, beckoning her outdoors and to the wonders of the garden.

Her mother had made her favourite: banana pancakes sprinkled with a dash of powdered sugar and cinnamon, and drowning in melted butter and syrup, and after they ate and dressed they headed out back to start weeding and dead-heading the faded blooms.

Crouching bare foot in the warm but solid earth, Ani began pulling what her mother had taught her over the past several years to be weeds. She filled a small basket, occasionally getting up to dump its contents into a large bag over in the yard. The sun warmed her back and made her feel glad to be alive. She had no friends out this far in the rural area of the county, but she didn’t mind not seeing her schoolmates very frequently over the summer; she and her mother seemed to have fun all on their own. There were only three kids that lived nearby, two young kids that were still wobbling around in the single digits of age, and Cameron Keller.

So it was just her and her mother for the summer and Ani was just fine with that. It had been this way ever since her father left four years earlier. Ani was only eight at the time but was old enough to know that her father had been physically abusive and unfaithful to her mother. One night the fighting between them became so heated that the police arrived. Ani wasn’t sure whether it was her mother or their closest neighbour that called for help, but she wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was the latter. Normally they wouldn’t hear a thing — their house was over three hundred yards away — but that night was by far the loudest fight her parents had ever had.

She could remember very clearly the night that the police came. She remembered how small her father looked standing out by the police car in handcuffs, the blue and red lights spinning around and shining up on the house and in through the windows. Ani watched from just inside the door as they read him his rights and stuffed him into the backseat of a police cruiser.

There had been some legal negotiations that went on after that, none of which Ani understood. She even had to dress up for court and sit in that box next to the judge on one occasion. “Did you ever see your father hit your mother?” they had asked, and “Did you see your father hit your mother the night the police came?” and “Has your father ever hit you?”

She answered the blizzard of questions as best she could, sometimes truly struggling not to cry, but in the long run she had no idea where any of it was leading. The judge said something about a restraining order, and a whole lot of other things about divorce proceedings, child support, and court supervised visitation that flew far too far above Ani’s head. All she knew was that her dad was gone and wouldn’t be back. But that was fine with her; she hated him for what he had done to her mother.

Over the next few years her mother asked her several times whether Ani wanted to spend one day a week with her father, but Ani refused, telling Francine she would rather die than ever see him again. She had spent the first eight years of her life in fear of the man and never wanted to feel that kind of fear again. Her mother never argued her wishes when it came to this and never forced the matter.

* * * *

Cam washed his clothes at the Laundromat in town and then headed off to the YMCA to take a shower. He usually showered after school, and only every third day, so the onset of summer was welcome, allowing him to shower in the morning — every day if he wanted to. He had already purchased his father’s beer at the small grocer down the road from his house and delivered it to a luckily passive father. The clerks at the grocer knew Cam well at this point. They knew that they had better sell him the liquor or that big burly drunk fucker from down the road would come in and start screaming his head off.

The beer delivered, his laundry done, and having showered, he rode his bike out to the field behind Ani Sauvé’s house. He didn’t know why, really; he just did.

* * * *

“Ani,” Francine said. “Isn’t that the boy who teases you, out there in the field?”

Ani peered up and out into the knee-high grass where she saw Cam, his sandy blond hair blowing in the breeze. He appeared to be holding a long stick and beating down some of the weeds as he wandered. “What’s he doing out here?” Ani asked, almost to herself, then looking up at her mother. “Let’s go inside.”