The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

ONE NIGHT HARRY Partridge looked out to see Hallie in what should have been the garden but was now a graveyard. She wasn’t alone. There was a bear out there with her.

She was able to take care of herself in the wilderness, for once upon a time the wilderness was all she had.

John Chapman was tall and thin and didn’t need much sleep. He had long dark hair, which he vowed he would never again cut. His face was angular and beautiful, but in his opinion an ant was more beautiful than he would ever be, a black snake more wondrous.

For some reason he didn’t feel the cold, perhaps because he was burning up with ideas.

When the cider went down, it burned. The burning spread out into Minette’s chest in an arc and then in a circle. She laughed at the feeling, and at the larks, and at the fact that she was still alive when she hadn’t meant to be. “You forgot that the world was this beautiful,” John said to her then, and she knew she’d been right in her first impression, that he was indeed an angel, and that he’d been sent to her, and that while she had believed she had come out on this morning to finish her life, there had been a different plan meant for her all along.

She kissed him then, in a way she had never kissed her husband. She leapt forward into the shining light. When she’d been married she had been too busy to notice that the world was beautiful. Or perhaps she’d known and had forgotten.

That night John and Minette went back into the woods and lay together. John had never been with a woman before, and everything about Minette was a miracle to him. Once she laughed out loud because of the way he was studying her. “It’s because you’re perfect and wonderful,” he said solemnly. He watched while she slipped out of her clothes, something her husband would have never done. She felt as if she was a constellation or a blade of grass.

“I mean Minette. Your intentions toward her.” John nodded. “I intend to remind her that she’s alive.”

He had specimens preserved in jars of salt and liked nothing more than to study the desiccated bodies of bats and birds.

She was a voracious reader and secretly borrowed her father’s books, even the ones about anatomy. She was bright enough to have frightened her mother with her ideas. On more than one occasion, Rebecca had taken her eldest daughter aside to ask, “What good can ever come from a girl with so much knowledge?”

She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.

Day was night and night was day, and no one on earth knew where she was. She had a wild, careless feeling that made her limbs feel loose and free.

But at night when she stood in the garden, she looked young. She looked the way she had when she killed my father in Brooklyn.

At some point, as twilight was falling, my mother would call my name and we would go down to the cellar the way some people do in towns where there are tornados, except in our house my father was the tornado. It was him we hid from.

Azurine was in the battle zone, facing the terrors of the world, driving over muddy fields, performing surgery she hadn’t been trained for should a doctor be unavailable, falling madly in love with one doomed man after another, spending torrid nights in their beds, and mourning each one before he had walked out the door. There may not be another chance to live, she wrote to her sister. If not now, when?

Kate had grown up knowing that she wanted to travel the world. She wanted to get as far away from Blackwell as possible, to fall in love fifty times over, to swim in the Nile, walk along the Seine, see war and life and death.

You told me to wait in a field. It was dusk and I could smell summer. The world was green. I had been a bear for so long I couldn’t imagine anything human. There was nothing I missed living in another world Except this: A woman cutting through the field to meet you Grass in her hair, pollen on her fingers, your name in her mouth.

“Remember when I told you I wished you would die?” René said in her soft, pretty voice. Frank thought that he might. Either way he got a chill. “I didn’t really mean it,” René admitted. “I meant I still loved you.”