The Gardener

  Holding the coffee between her hands, she lifted the warm cup to her face and held it there for a moment. “I’m not dumb.”

  I touched her arm. “I never said you were.”

  She didn’t say anything, so I added, “I never even thoughtit.”

  The girl lowered the coffee. “I’m just a little out of sorts. Lacking common sense maybe, not sure how to deal with the everyday stuff. But trust me.” She tapped her head and smiled a bit. “I’ve got a good brain in here.”

  I smiled back. “I’m sure you do.”

  We stayed there about fifteen minutes, but she didn’t drink the coffee, just held it.

  I said, “This seems to be some kind of pattern with you.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “What?”

  I pointed at her cup. “Beverage holding.”

  And, for the first time, she laughed, this wonderful giggle that made me chuckle along.

  She stopped giggling but didn’t stop smiling for a few seconds. But she still didn’t drink any coffee.

  I asked, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  She shook her head and held out the cup. “There’s a little left.”

  I didn’t want any more coffee, so I tossed both our cups into the garbage. Heading out, I grabbed a free arts newspaper from the rack near the door. “Umbrella.” I held it over the girl’s head as we stepped back into the drizzle.

  We reached the street across from Powell’s and weren’t too drenched when we finally walked in the front door of the massive bookstore.

  Inside, I grabbed a color-coded map from the stack on the counter. “This place is huge,” I explained.

  With four floors, numerous sections, and even a coffeehouse, Powell’s Books was an event. The girl stood, staring.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Quickly she turned to me, the biggest smile I’d seen yet on her face, enough to make little wrinkles appear by the corners of her eyes. “Look at all the books.”

  Smiling back, I squeezed her hand.

  She said, “I know it sounds funny, not knowing anything about myself. But I can tell, just from the feeling I have right now, that I love books.”

  My breath caught. As much as she was a stranger to me, I was starting to feel I knew her. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted to know everything about her.

  We walked over to the information desk, where a man in a ponytail and horn-rim glasses stood behind the wooden counter. His T-shirt said will write for food. His gaze rested appraisingly on the girl for a moment, then he turned to me, his eyes widening a bit before they locked with mine, avoiding my scar. I could almost hear him thinking What is she doing with him? Then he asked if he could help us.

  I nodded. “Where’s the Dr. Emerson talk?”

  “You guys have a big interest in the food crisis?”

  “Huh?” I glanced sideways at the girl.

  The guy rubbed his beard a little. “The food crisis that Dr. Emerson’s new book is about?”

  Thinking fast, I said, “No interest other than a little extra credit.”

  “Aha. Gotcha.” He pointed up. “Pearl, upstairs.”

  The sections of Powell’s bookstore were color coded, purple, rose, gold, and so forth. But I thought it might be wise to browse in the stacks near the stairs for a bit. For what, I wasn’t really sure.

  The girl pulled out book after book, running her hands over the covers, then putting them back. She saw me watching her and blushed. “I can’t help it. I want to touch them all.”

  As we looked at books, several people went up. No one seemed interested in anything other than heading up the stairs. Maybe I was being overly paranoid.

  Finally, I looked at the girl and said, “Ready?” We climbed three flights to the pearl section. Like the rest of the store, it was a huge room in sections with rows and rows of bookshelves, stacked with hundreds and hundreds of books everywhere you looked. Several dozen metal folding chairs faced a screen and podium, where a lady in a blue dress fiddled with the microphone. She looked up at us. “Reading starts at three.”

  With the day we’d had, it already felt like midnight, but we were actually early. I led us over to a couple of couches. The girl dropped onto one with a sigh. She looked paler than she had before, which worried me. “You okay?”

  With two fingers, she pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes. “I don’t know. I just feel kind of tired.” Shaking her head slightly, she dropped her hand and blinked. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

  I reached out a hand and set it on her arm. “Still cold?”

  Her expression went slack and she froze, seeming to ignore me. Then she spoke in a quiet, detached voice, as if she were telling me what someone else was experiencing.

  “The arrival of the Gardener was met first with the trembling, then with a shared stirring, as if we were all awakening at once. We knew the arrival meant the stimulating part of our existence was about to occur.

  “The Gardener moved to the front; the odd accompanying squeaks were familiar sounds to me. In anticipation, my heart beat faster. I waited for what I needed. Craved. Desired. And then, with a loud clank, the Gardener pulled the switch up front, and the light came.”

  God, it was so weird, like she was watching a movie, narrating it. I glanced around to see if anyone noticed. A woman and a little kid were looking at books nearby, but they weren’t paying any attention to us.

  “As one, our heads turned upward to the false sun. A murmur rose, like one big satisfying Ahhhhhhh.…”

  The sound was too loud, and I quickly covered her mouth. She stopped. When I removed my hand, she spoke again.

  “Revived vitality and strength seeped into me. Into us. I felt myself renewing, growing stronger, and I felt the shared strength emanating from my neighbors. My eyes opened and lowered as a small whirring sound preceded the opening of the small hole in the floor in front of me, from which rose a monitor, the same as the one that sat in front of the group. The screen flickered in blue, and I readied myself for that day’s education.”

  She stopped speaking.

  “What education?” I waved my hand in front of her face.

  She finally met my gaze, but her hands were twisting together in her lap. “What?”

  Hesitating just a little, I set a hand on hers. They were icy. “You said something about education. And I wondered, what education?”

  Her gaze darted quickly from side to side. “I don’t know. I’m remembering more. But it’s just small … pieces. The books…”

  “You remember books?”

  She shook her head. “Not books. Information. There was a screen with information. So much.”

  “A computer? Is that the education?”

  She hesitated, and then said, “Maybe.” She sounded unconvinced.

  Holding my breath, I pulled her close to me. I let out my breath. “We’ll figure this out.”

  At that moment, the little kid walked over by us. He had red hair that stuck up, and there was a Transformer on his blue sweatshirt. He looked at the girl and said, “Hi.”

  She looked at me, then back at the boy. “Hi.”

  Wanting him to go back to his mother, I told the kid, “You shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  He stared at my scar for a moment. “Did a stranger do that to you?”

  I probably could have gotten rid of him by lying and saying yes, but instead I shook my head. “It was a dog. A dog I knew, actually.”

  The girl reached up and touched my face. “I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged.

  The boy pointed up at the girl’s exposed arm. “Is that a butterfly?”

  She twisted her arm to give him a better view of her tattoo.

  He said, “Hey, I’ve seen that one before.”

  “You have?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Want to see?”

  The girl and I both said, “Yes.”

  The boy disappeared around the corner, and I half hoped he wouldn’t c
ome back. But a couple of minutes later he returned, hoisting a coffee table book in both arms. He plunked it down on the table in front of us. The cover photo was of a blue butterfly. The boy tapped it. “See?”

  Leaning forward, the girl compared her tattoo to the butterfly on the cover. The boy sighed. “Oh. It’s not the same one.”

  The girl frowned and said, “That’s okay.” She opened the cover and started paging through the book. “There are lots of blue butterflies in here.”

  The boy brightened. “Maybe we can find it.”

  “Maybe.” The girl smiled. “Let’s look.”

  As they searched, stopping at each page to compare the photos to her tattoo, I started to pay attention. Both she and my father had blue butterfly tattoos. But the video of my father was old and not that crisp, so it was hard to tell just how alike, or different, they actually were.

  The boy squealed. “That’s it! That’s the one.”

  Taking a good look at both the book and her tattoo, I said, “Yeah, looks like it.”

  The boy’s mom called him then, and he waved at the girl before running off. The girl was already leaning down to read the book, and I joined her. According to the book, the butterfly was the Karner Blue, about one inch across. I kept reading. The Karner Blue was completely dependent on one plant, the wild lupine, which they laid their eggs on. But with lupine becoming more and more scarce because of developers digging up and building on native prairie, the butterfly was losing its habitat.

  “Bummer,” I muttered.

  The girl asked, “Are they endangered?”

  I nodded, reading a bit more. “Yeah. They’re pretty much toast. They probably should have expanded to different kinds of plants.”

  People started arriving and, before the seats filled up, we took seats near the back. The lady in the blue dress introduced Dr. Emerson’s new book When the Food Runs Out.

  Not exactly a picker upper.

  The author was short, with dark hair to her shoulders, and wore a black suit with a white shirt. She immediately started referring to her PowerPoint, where a photo of Earth seen from space filled the screen. “Today in the world, approximately 120,000 people will die. Also today, approximately 360,000 people will be born. Meaning that, on the average, every two days we add the equivalent of the population of Portland to an already overcrowded world. But that doesn’t affect you, right? That’s what you’re thinking?”

  Actually, that was what I was thinking. I mean, I knew about overpopulation. But in Melby Falls, it wasn’t high on my list of concerns.

  “As long as you can drive your Hummer to Safeway and buy your groceries, this means nothing for you, am I right?”

  Several people in the audience chuckled a bit, nodding.

  The picture changed to a black-and-white portrait of an older guy in a white high-collared shirt. The author pointed. “Thomas Malthus, an economist born in 1766. His Principle of Population states that, first, food is necessary to the existence of man. Anyone disagree with that?”

  Again, some chuckles. Most everyone shrugged and shook their heads.

  She continued. “Second, passion between the sexes will always be there.” She stopped and smiled. “To put it in simple terms for my younger audience members, people are not going to stop having babies.”

  Some people laughed.

  The picture on the screen changed to a barren field with one cornstalk. “The problem is, as Malthus states, the power of population is greater than the power of the earth to provide enough food for that population.”

  A guy raised his hand, and Dr. Emerson pointed at him. He asked, “You’re saying that, as the population grows, eventually we’ll run out of food?”

  Dr. Emerson nodded. “Yes, the Malthusian catastrophe—our return to subsistence-level conditions because population outgrows agricultural production.”

  The guy scratched his chin. “But isn’t that unrealistic in this day and age, with all our technology? We’re so far beyond subsistence. We have plenty of food and we keep coming up with better ways to grow food. I can see it being an issue in his day, but not in this century.”

  “Aha!” She pointed at the man. “A technological optimist. You believe that humans will always get out of every situation we get ourselves into.”

  The guy nodded and crossed his arms.

  In front, the screen changed again, now to a map of Cuba. Dr. Emerson said, “Sorry to say, but this has happened, and quite recently. For decades, most of the food in Cuba came from Eastern Europe or was grown on big state-run farms with equipment provided by the Eastern Bloc countries. In 1989, the average Cuban was eating three thousand calories a day.”

  The picture changed to one of the Berlin Wall.

  “But when the Eastern Bloc countries fell, Cuba’s food supply was cut off, and their big farm operations were dependent on pesticides and on fuel for their machinery, which they no longer could get. Four years later, the average Cuban was getting only nineteen hundred calories a day, which is roughly equivalent to skipping one meal a day, and had lost twenty to thirty pounds.”

  A woman called out, “What did they do?”

  Dr. Emerson raised a palm. “What could they do? They learned to grow food again, without relying on machinery or oil or pesticides to do it. The old-fashioned way succeeded. They are now back up to that average three thousand calories a day. And Cuba is a working model of sustainable agriculture. They don’t rely heavily on machinery or fossil fuels or fertilizers. They can maintain what they are doing indefinitely.”

  Another woman raised her hand. “Are you saying we should all grow a garden?”

  “In so many words.” Dr. Emerson laughed a little, and then looked serious. “Here’s the thing. Climate change, wars, and our dependence on oil: These all affect the food supply. And the day is coming when, as Malthus predicted almost two hundred years ago, the population will outgrow the food supply, and those of us growing vegetables in our backyards are going to deal with it much better than the people driving to Safeway in their Hummers. Because the day will come when even the grocery stores will be empty.”

  Next to me, the girl started to nod off and her head came to rest on my shoulder as I felt her deep, slow breaths. When Dr. Emerson finished and called for questions, hands went up. They were fairly dull and academic until the guy sitting in front of me raised his hand.

  “Did you work on the food crisis when you were at TroDyn?”

  Exactly what I was hoping for.

  Dr. Emerson didn’t miss a beat as she started to recite that well-rehearsed spiel, same as she had at the press conference, and the same as Jack had read to me at the cabin. “While my time with TroDyn was enriching to my career…”

  I sat up straighter, accidentally waking the girl. She bolted up, startled.

  Dr. Emerson glanced our way and faltered, her words trailing off as her eyes widened and one hand sprang to her parted lips.

  I rolled my eyes. I mean, sometimes I forgot how strangers reacted to my face. Although that was the first time it had ever interrupted a lecture.

  But then I realized she wasn’t looking at me. The look on Dr. Emerson’s face was clear and obvious, and could mean only one thing.

  Dr. Emerson had seen the girl before.

  TEN

  DR. EMERSON SEEMED TO GET AHOLD OF HERSELF, BECAUSE after she finished her sentence, she quickly turned to the lady in blue and said something. Then the lady turned to the audience and said, “I’d like to thank you all for coming. That will conclude our program. The author will autograph your books at the front.”

  The girl shifted in her chair and I turned her way. “Did you see the way she looked at you? It was almost like…” My hand covered my mouth. Was it possible? It made sense. Why else would the author have been so stunned? “It was like she recognized you.”

  She didn’t answer.

  I noticed the girl seemed to be weaker. She just seemed less than she was before we got to Powell’s. “Are you okay?”
br />   She turned sideways in the chair and put her arm on the back, then lay her head down on it. “If I could just sit here for a little bit.”

  “Yeah.” I looked up toward the front where people lined up with their books to get signed. That look on Dr. Emerson’s face was just too odd to not investigate further. “We’re gonna hang out and see if we can get a moment alone with the author.”

  The line showed no signs of shortening anytime soon, so the girl and I went over to the couch by the butterfly book.

  When the last book had been signed, Dr. Emerson gathered her things. She stood and looked around for a moment.

  Was she looking for the girl?

  I stood up.

  She noticed me, then her gaze dropped to the girl. Dr. Emerson quickly shook hands with the lady in blue, glanced our way once more, then walked around the corner to the stairs.

  I debated. As much as I wanted to speak to her, ask her about the girl, she certainly didn’t seem like she wanted to talk to us. Still, it was time to take a risk. “Come on.” I grabbed the girl’s hand.

  We hurried down the stairs, just in time to see Dr. Emerson head into the second floor. We followed, turning the way she did, but she’d disappeared. A bright orange traffic cone sat in front of the men’s room with a big closed for cleaning sign on it, and from inside, I heard the click of a mop on the floor. Hoping that Dr. Emerson was the only occupant of the ladies’ room, I slid the cone over to block the entrance and pulled the girl inside.

  The author stood at the sink, applying lipstick, and her hand froze midair as she saw us in the mirror. Her eyes locked on the girl. She turned around to face us. She fumbled with the lipstick, capping it and slipping it into the bag on her arm before moving toward us. “When I saw you in the audience, I…”

  Not knowing exactly why, I stepped partly aside.

  Her eyes narrowed as she moved closer to the girl, and her hands reached out.

  The girl’s eyes moved to me as she took a slight step back.

  Dr. Emerson set a hand on either side of the girl’s face. “It is you.”

  I grabbed her arm.

  But Dr. Emerson shook me off as her eyes squeezed shut, tears spilling out. When she opened them, her eyes were glistening. “I never thought I’d see you again.” Ignoring me, she pulled the girl to her chest in a deep hug and said one more thing.