They started digging at night; they used the little backhoe against the roses I trenched for the winter just last week, then switched to shovels and now trowels and brushes. From the kitchen window it looks a little like an archaeological dig, two narrow trenches criss-crossed with white twine and two men stooped over sifters, poking around in the little pebbles and stones on wire mesh. A blue tarp is spread on the lawn with gray and white objects scattered across it; I try not to look at the small things they’ve unearthed.
Sgt. Andersen stands at the back door in his muddy boots, fists on his hips, watching the excavation. It’s six in the morning, still dark, and they’ve been at it all night under big halogen lamps plugged into the generator by the garage. For a while the news trucks bathed my backyard in noon-time light, but they left at about four o’clock. This story is worth a few seconds on the morning news, a minute or two in the evening, if only for its seasonal appropriateness, but they won’t camp out in my yard for as long as the police will. It was an old and private crime, and can no longer be set right.
I pull one of Nick’s big sweaters over my nightgown and bring a mug of coffee to Sgt. Andersen. He takes it with a big smile, then frowns after a sip.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he says.
I nod. He’s said that a hundred times since he appeared at the front door just after I tucked Celie into bed. And I can tell from his down-turned mouth and wet blue eyes that he really is. Sgt. Andersen is younger than me, without a hint of wrinkling around his eyes, and I’m sure his mother raised him to say “please” and “thank you” and to take off his shoes before going inside. Boys who were raised right don’t dig holes in people’s yards. The unearthed roses, still wrapped in burlap, lean neatly against the fence; he made sure they were set safely away from the excavation.
“I think they’ve found two, “ he says. “And a cat.”
“And you think how many–?”
“Three. She said there were three—1958, 1960, 1963. Then she went into the hospital and never came out.”
I wrap my arms around myself; the sweater’s sleeves hang far past my fingers. One of the men at the trench sets a long gray object on the tarp and stoops into the hole for more dirt to sift.
When I called Nick at about midnight, he sounded groggy and distracted. He’s in Ft. Lauderdale, where it’s still summer, giving a paper at a computer conference. When Celie was younger, sometimes we’d go to conferences with him and hang around the hotel pool while Nick exchanged business cards and talked shop; he always comes back with an extra bag full of manuals, brochures, and t-shirts from vendors. I call it his “nerd booty,” and spend a month quietly culling the logo-covered shirts and mugs. With Celie in school now, it’s easier if Nick goes alone.
“They’re doing what?” he said the third time I repeated the story.
“They’re digging up the back yard. There’s a squad car in the alley and they’ve got yellow tape up everywhere.”
“Jesus.” I could picture him sitting on the edge of the hotel bed in his boxer shorts, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his fist, fumbling for his glasses. “Should I come home?”
“No, it’s okay. They said they’ll be done tomorrow. Sgt. Andersen said they’ll put everything back.”
“Jesus.”
“I just thought I should tell you. Everything’s fine. Celie’s still asleep.”
“Jesus. I should come home.”
“No, honey. There’s nothing you can do. It’ll all be over when you get home.”
“I’ll call in the morning. What time should I call?”
“Whenever you like. I’m walking Celie to school.”
“Jesus.”
After we hung up I stood at the kitchen window for a long time, watching the little backhoe rolling back and forth where the roses were.
Nick calls back while I’m getting Celie her breakfast—a bowl of Rice Krispies, a glass of orange juice, and a sliced apple. I closed the kitchen blinds before I went to rouse her; her room is at the front of the house, so she never heard the digging out back.
“Are you okay?” Nick asks. He sounds fully awake now, the befuddlement from last night replaced by his reasonable voice.
“I’m fine, just a little tired.” I take the phone to the living room and put my back to Celie at the kitchen table. “They’ve found at least two.”
“How many do they expect to find?”
“Three. That’s what Sgt. Andersen says. They’ve found two and a cat.”
“So this woman just now decides to confess?”
“Right before she died.”
“Jesus. I can’t—how long ago?”
“Early sixties.”
“And no one knew?”
“Apparently not. At least no one said anything.”
“Someone must have known. Someone always knows. So what are they doing?”
“Just digging them up, I guess. There’s no one left to charge, they’re all dead. The woman, her parents. Probably the father, or fathers, if they even know who.”
“Did you tell Celie?”
“No. Maybe tonight, I don’t know. She doesn’t need to know about this.”
“Is that Daddy?” Celie yells from the kitchen.
“It is; you want to talk to him?”
I hand the phone to Celie and leave to get dressed. She has a loose tooth, and she makes a little sucking sound into the phone so Nick can hear it wiggle. She’s worried that if it falls out today it will ruin her costume tomorrow night—she’s going to be a fairy princess—but I’ve assured her she’ll be beautiful, tooth or no.
I have a picture of the girl who buried her babies in my backyard. At least I think it’s her. When we remodeled upstairs, tore out the old closets under the eaves to add a bathroom, I found it wedged between the floor and the wall, bent and dusty. It’s a square snapshot, colors faded, of three people—a woman, a teen-aged girl, a little boy—standing in front of the mulberry tree that still shades the garden.
The third or fourth time I looked at the picture, I thought there was something odd about the girl. The woman and boy are squinting into the sun, both smiling broadly. But the girl doesn’t squint or smile; she stands straight and stiff between them, looking dead center, eyes wide and face blank. At the time I figured it was just teen-aged standoffishness, the universal surliness of every girl that age when made to pose with her mother and little brother.
While my yard was being excavated, I got the picture out of the box in the sock drawer where I keep odd little things and tried to put it into this new context. If this was the girl who buried her babies, when was the picture taken? She doesn’t look pregnant in the picture—she’s wearing a loose shirt and blue jeans, her blonde hair down around her shoulders, and though she’s a big-boned, round-faced girl, there’s no swelling around her middle. Has she already planted one child in the garden beyond the picture’s edge? Is another growing inside her, just starting to take shape? Has she missed her period, and already begun to plan a secret burial?
Someone always knows. Except when no one knows; except when the ignorance is willed and the act is forgotten with great determination. The mother in the picture wears a blue-checked housedress, her dark hair tied up, and she has her arms folded under her breasts. Her head is turned away from the girl, maybe out of habit. Has she spent the winter and spring with her eyes averted, refusing to notice that her daughter vomited every morning for a month, wore loose clothes and big jackets, went from her room to school and back to her room without speaking to the rest of the family?
Since I was about ten, I’ve had a dream that visits me once or twice a year. I’m standing on a wooden dock jutting into a lake; it’s midnight, and I’m in my nightgown, and everything is dark and still. Somewhere in the lake is a little boy, drowned, and in my dream I remember him thrashing and screaming before he disappears under the water. But now it’s still, and there’s no sign of his struggle on the lake’s flat surface.
In some versions of the dream, he was a neighbor; in others, a brother that my waking self knows I never had. As I grew older, he grew younger, until he became my own child. I never dream the drowning, only the memory of the drowning, like a scene twice removed from daytime. After I wake up, for a few minutes and sometimes all day I’m certain that this is a real memory, that I witnessed something awful, maybe drowned the boy myself, and I feel I need to confess a crime, come clean at last.
I’ve never been able to tell my parents or sister about this dream, or Nick when the dream started to change. I could never think of a way to start that didn’t sound silly; I know there was no little boy, that there could never have been a lost brother or son. I have a sister and a daughter; there have never been little boys in my life. But what if I’m wrong? In those foggy minutes I can almost reconstruct how I’ve managed to forget him all these years, to close up the seams around the tear his drowning left. Did this woman who buried her children in my yard push the memory into dreams and wake up from nightmares until finally their heft would no longer fade in the morning?
Sgt. Andersen didn’t have a lot of details; I’m not sure if I’m even permitted to know more, since I’m just the unwitting caretaker of the graves. All I know is that she brought three babies to life in my house—where? in the room Celie uses? in the basement? outside by the garage?—and just as quickly snuffed them out. Smothered them, Sgt. Andersen said, wrapped them in a pillowcase and smothered them. Not just once, but three times. And then carried them out to the garden and buried them deeply enough that forty years later the police would need a backhoe to bring them up.
When she turned twenty-one, her parents sent her to a hospital because they couldn’t keep her at home and couldn’t trust her on her own; Sgt. Andersen can’t tell me what she did or didn’t do to force that decision, because he doesn’t know himself. I can only imagine what a mental hospital was like in those days; I picture shock treatment and dunkings, straitjackets and rubber rooms, empty-eyed zombies roaming the halls in white gowns. Maybe it wasn’t like that at all; maybe it was a warm and loving place where her broken spirit could thrive. But in any case, she went in and never came out. She was only sixty-one when she died.
“Did she dig the graves herself?” I asked him when I brought the coffee. He just shrugged and shook his head.
“No one knows. She just one day started telling a nurse about the first one, said she smothered the baby and buried him in the yard. No one believed her until the second day. Four days later she was dead.”
“How could no one know?”
“I don’t know.”
I keep Celie away from the back door and the kitchen window, get her dressed and cleaned and put together for school. I like walking her to school; we talk about her teacher and classmates, I get to meet some of the other parents, and on the way home I can stop for coffee and a muffin. Except today I’ll go straight home.
Most of the houses we pass on the way to school are decked out for Halloween. Ghosts made from plastic bags hang in bare trees, and dark-eyed jack-o’-lanterns grin from porch steps. A couple of the more ambitious neighbors have built graveyards with plywood tombstones. Celie has to kneel at each marker and read the painted epigraphs.
“What does ‘rip’ mean?” she asks.
“It stands for ‘rest in peace.’ You see it on real tombstones sometimes.”
“Oh.”
This means nothing to Celie, who has never seen a real grave. She’s blessed with four healthy grandparents and no interest in pets—we may not have the death talk for years, so long as I can keep the backyard graves a secret.
“What are these question marks for?” She’s pointing at Count Dracula’s purported grave, dates given as “1648-????.”
“It means they don’t know when he died, or if he’s dead. It’s like a joke, I guess.”
“Oh.” She stands and brushes her knees clean. “It’s not really funny. I think I like the ghosts better.”
“Me too.”
On the early news there were pictures of the excavation, between the war news and the weather. They didn’t give our address, and in the dark you’d have to know my yard and garage well to identify the dig site. First-graders don’t watch the early news, and Celie’s teacher has never been to our house, so I’m not worried that Celie will learn about the babies in the garden today.
But Liz, who lives a block away and walks her son Terry to kindergarten, watches the news and knows my yard. When she sees me on the sidewalk in front of the school she arches her eyebrows and makes an “O” with her lips. I try to avoid her after I kiss Celie and send her to the playground with a tap on her butt, but Liz catches up to me on the corner.
“Margie, is that your house they’re digging up on the news?” she says in a loud, horrified whisper.
“The same,” I say as I scan the street for traffic then step off the curb.
Liz jogs to keep up with me. “God, I just can’t imagine! One is horrible, but three?”
“It’s pretty awful.”
“And to keep it a secret for forty years! God, Margie, I just can’t imagine!”
I look at Liz—skinny Liz, who organizes play groups and has all the neighbors over for Terry’s birthday parties; who told me all about her efforts to get pregnant: taking her temperature, tracking her cycle, getting into strange positions guaranteed to aid conception; who even told me more than once that her husband’s sperm are slow and misshapen so now I can’t look at him without imagining Liz with a bullhorn and stopwatch, ordering his little soldiers to pick up the pace. I know more about her husband’s sperm than I care to know about Nick’s. No, Liz couldn’t keep a secret for forty years.
“It’s strange,” I say.
“And to smother your own babies; how could you smother your own babies?”
“I don’t know.”
We’re at the coffee shop I like to visit—they have huge muffins so full of fruit that the bread is stained blue and red. Liz pauses at the door and shifts from foot to foot as if she has to use the bathroom. I also know about the incontinence she suffered for a year after Terry was born.
“I’d better get straight home,” I say. “I need to make sure they’re cleaning up.”
“Oh.” She makes no effort to hide her disappointment. “Isn’t Nick home?”
“He’s out of town.”
“Oh, that’s awful!”
“So I’d better get home.”
“Well. You’ll tell me all about it?”
“Of course. But I’d better get home.”
She nods and backs into the coffee shop, watching me as if I’ll disclose some parting secret. I wave and smile and march across the street.
When Celie was born, I had nightmares about smothering her, dropping her out windows, leaving her at the grocery store and just walking away. She was a wakeful baby—not fussy, not difficult, but wakeful. I would check her crib in the middle of the night and find her lying with her eyes open and alert in the dark, glowing in the light that spilled in from the hallway, an awful intelligence trapped in a paralyzed body. I would scoop her up and carry her to the living room, afraid to leave her alone and awake; some nights I slept only an hour or two, and I began to resent her watchful, wakeful eyes.
This went on for three months. Sometimes Nick would come downstairs and find me asleep on the couch with Celie awake in my arms, and he’d take her himself and fall asleep in the chair. Then I’d wake up with a start, childless, and for an instant I’d know that I had done something horrible, and how can I tell Nick? How can I hide it from him?
When I get home, the yellow tape is down and the squad car is gone from the alley. I go in through the back gate, letting it click quietly behind me, and find Sgt. Andersen in the garden with a shovel. One of the rose bushes is back in place, and he’s digging trenches for the others.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say.
He looks up with a smile on his too-young, too-tired face. I feel the urge to get him one of Celie’s blankets and put him to bed. We’ve both been awake all night, but at least I’ve been inside; he’s been standing out in the chilly autumn air with his feet in the mud, staring into open graves.
“Yes, ma’am, I do,” he says. “I’m really sorry about this.”
“It’s okay. I can finish up.”
He turns another shovelful of dirt; the excavation has mixed up the layers of clay and rock and sand, aerated the garden as my hoe never could when I first planted the roses. I wonder if the roses will like their new bed in the spring, if their roots will drain better now that the secrets beneath them have been exhumed.
“They found all three,” he says without looking up. “And a cat. Did you have a cat?”
“No. Must have been someone before us.”
“I wonder how many cats and dogs are buried in these yards? Some of these houses are seventy years old. It must be like a secret cemetery.”
I nod even though he can’t see me. When I was twelve we buried our dog Bucky in my parents’ yard with much ceremony, wrapped him in a blanket with his collar and leash, but I don’t think I could find the spot now with a quarter century past.
“What happens next?” I ask.
“I go home and take a shower, get some sleep. You should, too.”
”I mean with the babies.”
“I don’t know. The M.E. has them. I guess he’ll look them over, sort them out, bury them again.”
“So you’re done?”
“Nothing for us to do but pick up the pieces and fill out the paperwork.”
“Where do they bury them?”
“I’m not sure. The city has a contract with a cemetery on the north side. For John Does. Probably there.”
I help him lay the last rose bush in its new grave; the dirt makes a pinging sound as it strikes the burlap shroud. After he goes I’ll get the hose and soak the buried bushes, get fresh mulch to keep them warm this winter. In the spring Celie will be old enough to help me plant another one.