The road is long and straight, the land flat as a table. Even in the dark I could drive fast, but I don’t. I know that three miles ahead there’s a turn coming up, a turn screened by eucalyptus trees and tall scrub growing by the irrigation canal. If you miss the turn, you’ll find yourself hubcap deep in the strawberry fields–if you’re lucky.
When the time comes, I go sharp right, forty degrees or more, moving dead slow. I cross the narrow bridge over the canal and let the car coast to a stop on the shoulder. I cut my headlights, turn off the ignition, crank down my window, and settle down to wait.
At first the silence is absolute, but soon I hear the faint, faraway voices of dawn birds. The branches of the eucalyptus, invisible a moment ago, go dark against the paling sky. The leaves give off a resinous, cough-mixture smell that mingles with the fetid reek of the canal. No smell of strawberries yet; the fruit won’t be ripe for another month. This means that the pickers won’t be out this morning. I try to soak up the emptiness, to draw it in, to flood my mind with it.
As soon as I can see shadows on the ground, I get out of the car. I have my camera on a strap around my neck, my jacket zipped over it. I go around and open the hatchback and survey my equipment, but I decide that before taking anything out I need to have a look at the site. I go into the field, walking between the rows, tiptoeing, heading for the scrub on the near side of the canal. There in the elbow of the turn is a place where no strawberries grow. It’s marked out with a line of stones, a little triangle of turf planted with three orange trees, three oleanders, and three rose bushes. There, the vegetation comes in threes.
Inspection time. It’s too early in the year for the roses to bloom, but by and large, they look all right. The oleanders have been nipped by frost, and their dead branches should be pruned. The orange trees have green buds on them, and their scent will rival that of the eucalyptus pretty soon. No pests that I can see among the leaves. Not many weeds around.
I fetch a bucket from the car and several plastic bottles of mineral water. I’m not going to irrigate these plants from the canal. Around the roses I make little circles of raised dirt to hold the runoff, and then I pour the water into them. I take the bucket and the bottles back, pick up a pair of clippers, and get ready to clean up the oleanders. Then I put the clippers back in my pocket. A car is coming down the road. By the time it gets to the turn, I have my camera in my hands.
The car makes the turn and pulls up just behind mine. A man gets out and walks slowly toward me. I can tell that he isn’t young. He’s wearing jeans, boots, and a work shirt. Carefully, he avoids the strawberry plants, advances between two of the orange trees, and stops a couple of yards away. His hair is grey, and so is the stubble on his chin. His eyes are vivid blue, and they’re fixed unblinkingly on my face.
“Good morning,” I say to him.
“Good morning. Out early, aren’t you?”
“I hope I’m not trespassing.”
He doesn’t speak for a moment. He looks from me to the roses, to the scrub beyond, to the edge of the canal. “No,” he says finally. “That’s ok.”
“The light is good now for pictures,” I say, fingering my camera.
“You from the newspapers?” asks the man.
I fiddle with my lens cap. “I’m freelance.”
“People from the newspapers used to come here pretty often once. Not so much nowadays.
I say nothing, but give him a noncommittal smile
He’s watching me again. Silently, he waits me out. Soon I feel I have to say something, although I don’t want to talk to him or anyone else.
“Somebody told me this place was… special.”
“Ah.”
Again we stand looking at each other, then the man turns and squints into the rising sun. At last he says, “So there’s ‘somebody’”—I can hear him put the quotes around it—”‘somebody’ who remembers.”
I look down at my feet, expressionless. I wasn’t happy when the man drove up, and now I’m beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable. No, more than that. My breath comes faster and my heart begins to thud.
“So you know about it, then?” asks the man.
“A little.”
“‘Somebody’ didn’t tell you the whole story? Of course, it’s old news. Ten years.” His blue eyes bore into me. “Ten years to the day.”
“That long?” The words escape me in a whisper, almost a sigh.
“You would have been—what? Sixteen?”
I can’t think of an excuse to go back to my car and drive off, so I say, “About that.”
“They went off the road just here, at the turn. Going too fast. Flipped and ended up in the canal, the four of them. Just kids, they were.”
He follows my glance as it fixes on the turn and on the black line of the canal cutting through the fields.
“That railing wasn’t there then, of course. It was put up afterward. There was nothing to keep them out of the water, back then.”
Mud, I think. More mud than water. Dark, sticky, stinking mud.
“I came for the garden,” I say, a little too fast and a little too loud. “That’s what I heard about.”
He’s not going to let me off, however. “It was dark. Police thought they must have been doing sixty, sixty-five. On this road. Didn’t see the turn in time.”
“It’s a sharp turn.”
“No reflectors for it. No warning at all.”
“I understand.”
“Not drunk, though.”
“No?”
“No. Just happy.”
I bite my lip and draw breath to speak. No words come.
“Car landed upside down. Two-door. If they had taken the four-door, the kids in the back might have gotten out. Girl in the front passenger seat had a chance, but didn’t take it. Stunned by the impact, they say.”
The man isn’t looking at me anymore. His eyes are on the damp earth around the rose bushes and my circular piles of dirt.
“Afterward, the kids from the high school came around and wrote things on the road in paint. They brought flowers, too, and left them here. Colorful, it was.”
“I can see why they’d want to do something like that.”
“And in the middle of the road, someone left a special message, written bigger than the others.”
I don’t ask him why he’s telling me this. I know now. And he knows that I know.
“‘I’m sorry,’” he quoted. “‘I wish it had been me.’”
I hear a tractor start up in the distance. The birds are louder now, too. The trees by the turn are starting to be reflected in the water of the canal, which isn’t dead black anymore. There’s a touch of blue down there, down where you’d think there’d be no light at all.
“Penny Fairfax,” said the man. “She was driving. All the others died. Tammy Lukas, Donny Fitch, Peter Ikeda.”
I don’t answer.
The man goes on, “It must have been bad for those kids down in the mud. But just as bad for the one who lived.”
Words pour out of me before I can stop them. “Awful for the one who lived. But for the others, maybe…maybe not. They hit a bump and went airborne. They were flying. They were flung up high; they were soaring. And for all they knew, they never came down.”
The man is looking at me again. His cheeks furrow and, incredibly, he smiles. It’s a sad smile, very gentle—a torment to me. I’m stripped and flayed by his compassion.
“Yes,” he says. “They were soaring. We’ll say that’s how it was.”
I clench my hands together so that they won’t shake.
“Then,” he says, looking past me, “somebody planted this garden. Somebody who didn’t forget.” Slowly, the man reaches inside his jacket and brings out a pair of clippers. “Shall we tidy it up a bit?”
I don’t trust my voice, so I just nod.
I go back to my car and take out a spade and three pots of Easter lilies. While the man prunes the oleanders, I dig places for the lilies, firm up the soil around them, and give them a sprinkle from my bottles of mineral water.
“They’ll bloom in a few days,” I say.
“They’ll look good.”
I put my tools back in the car, along with the empty lily pots and the water bottles. I hesitate, looking back at the man as he stands in the garden beside the lilies. Then I raise my camera. He nods. I snap the picture.
I get in the driver’s seat and start the car. I wave from the open window. I see the man’s lips shape the words, ‘Good-bye, Penny,’ but I don’t hear a sound. I pull out on the road. I don’t look in the rearview mirror as I go, but I know he’s standing where I left him, watching as I drive away.
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author bio:
Virginia Revel grew up in Southern California but has lived in Europe for many years—Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, and now Austria. She works for an international organization and loves to write fiction after a day spent on speeches, policy statements, and diplomatic correspondence. She is a compulsive reader and thinks one can never have enough books.