Eliza’s Garden

The only time in my marriage that I slept on the right side of the bed, I dreamed of Eliza Valsnev.

We had not been in contact in more than a decade.

Eliza entered my subconscious, acting as she always had in person: tersely cutting you off when making a point, smirking, coming up with wise-ass rejoinders. She was a blonde shaggy-haired punk, with a small nose and gray eyes that added to the intimidation factor when she was mad.

Eliza was often angry, burdened by a bill of particulars that began when she was slapped by her mother.

Eliza said she was three when it occurred.

Eliza landed hard on the floor.

Eliza grew her bangs long to mask the scar on her forehead.

Her scar was shaped like a jagged L, the hue a deep red.

We had a thing where I would brush her hair away from the scar, and Eliza would push it back. This started out annoying to her, but she later accepted it until we broke up.

***

The dream began in a motel room out in the desert. It was when we drove to California, because when I looked out the window, I saw a Standard gas station across the highway, with barren, aged mountains rising against the eternally blue sky.

This road trip was many years ago. We went to Los Angeles to see John Fante.

Eliza and I wanted to meet him. We met through his writing.

I spotted Eliza one afternoon in the school library, hunched over at the table, her palms pressed fiercely against her cheeks, reading Ask the Dust.

I asked what the book was about.

I fell in love with her intensity as she talked about his work.

We took the long route to Los Angeles. Left the interstate in Arizona and drove north to Vegas, then on to Pahrump, Nevada, crossed the furnace wastelands, taking in what it must have been like for Fante’s Bandini desperately searching for Camilla.

He never found her.

Fante died the day before we arrived at his house in Malibu. Turned out he had lived at the retirement home for actors and writers in Woodland Hills.

It was just as well we had not met. Eliza took a photo of the garden walk leading to the house. Through the brambles, we spotted his wife standing under a tree in the yard, staring southeast.

We decided not to go further.

***

Eliza lay on the bed. It was already grossly hot in the Mojave in May, but she wore a long-sleeved tiger-print blouse and a fake snakeskin mini, and her black patterned hose dipped into Doc Maarten boots. Her legs dangled to the floor. Eliza lazily scraped her heels against the worn carpeting.

She stared at me. “I am apprehensive. Perhaps an apparition."

I answered with a non sequitur. “Why was it that whenever we were at your house, you would step around a certain spot in the kitchen?”

She leaned to her side, looked at me, and smiled. Eliza had a glorious, expressive grin that opened a gate into her inner world.

Her eyes were intense, piercing.

“If I ran into the desert, would you search for me for a day and a night, and then throw a book you wrote so I may find it someday? Just like Ask the Dust?”

“Are you in that much pain, Eliza?”

Eliza said. “One day, when I was older, I had an epiphany that I struggled as Christ during the Stations of the Cross. As the weeks passed—years—I tended to my garden of cruelty. I watered my sorrows, dug palos between the rows, and pruned the thorny roses.”

She paused before continuing.

“With each year, my garden grew larger. I planted new bushes, placed rocks around each plot, and soon added trees. a forest for my soul. Once finished, this was not what I had expected.”

“You want to run into the desert,” I said, while gazing at the Standard Oil sign across the road.

***

We wandered deep into the desert, but it was no longer the Mojave. The terrain was more like the Tabernas in Spain. The terrain was mountainous and semi-arid, not nearly as hot as the Mojave.

I watched storm clouds gathering before us. The clouds formed as smoke, billowing like omnivorous devils. Soon, the sky transitioned to dusk.

I lost my way in the darkness. In the meantime, Eliza ran away.

As thunder rumbled through the low mountains, I chased after her.

I had a sense of where Eliza was. I saw an abandoned convent at the summit of the tallest mountain.

Upon arrival, I entered a long, twisting gallery. On the walls were portraits of the abbesses staring blankly at me as I ran through the labyrinthine hall.

I made a right and found myself at the entrance to the cloister. Hanging beside the door was a painting portraying Eliza. She sat on a simple wooden chair in her mother’s kitchen, with one hand holding a book, and in the other a rose.

I opened the door and entered the cloister. At the center of the colonnade stood Eliza wearing the purple dress and matching stilettos she wore to our high school prom. Her hands were firmly placed on the stone balustrade, staring impassively into the abandoned, overgrown garden in the quadrangle.

I stood next to her, silent as the rain poured down, as it thundered above.

Eliza broke the silence.

“I found you, Bandini.”

I woke up to the cell phone buzzing on the bedside table.

I picked it up.

I knew.

BIO: Mike Lee is a writer, photographer, and editor at a trade union in New York City. His work appears in or is forthcoming in \Wallstrait, Panoplyzine, The Airgonaut, Bristol Noir, BULL, and many others. He also has a story collection, The Northern Line, which is available on Amazon and elsewhere.