A Garden of Her

Fiction

Anihea Allen

I wish I had more time to prepare for what I am about to say. Fifteen years wasn’t enough. But will I ever feel fully ready? I’ve never even said what I’m about to say out loud. But it’s time that I do. It’s time that I give everyone peace of mind. I have nothing to lose.

I sit stoically as Amanda and her crew set up all of their equipment. I have never seen technology like this. Technology has come a long way since I’ve been in here. Not that I’d know much. I am a scientist, not a filmmaker.

Amanda is a long-haired brunette with some of the softest brown eyes I have ever seen. She is a very beautiful young woman. She couldn’t be much older than thirty. She is wearing a simple but cute maroon blouse, along with tight black slacks and heels that make her tall enough to be intimidating by height alone. I haven’t seen a woman dressed this nice and this close in too long.

They’re struggling a bit to get set up. They have so much equipment to fit inside such a small room. This room is one of five private visiting rooms. They’re as big and bland as all of the other cells here. The cells only consist of bare beige walls, a bed of steel topped by a mat that feels all too similar to the one you sit on during a doctor's visit, a metal toilet that clogs way too easily, a small sink, and a desk. I’ve decorated my walls with pictures of my daughter and wife, to make them a little more personal. There’s not much to make a good background for this interview. At least that’s what the guy holding the camera said. He’s right. The only difference between this room and the cells is that this room only contains two foldable metal chairs. But what the hell did he expect? It’s a fucking prison. I’ve never been inside any of these rooms before, but I clearly haven’t been missing much. They’re only used for conjugal visits. I’ve never had a conjugal visit. I’ve never had anyone visit. Not since I was put here fifteen years ago.

No one cared to visit me because of what I had done. Everyone must still be so angry about what I did, and what I have kept from them. But for some reason, Amanda cared–     not about me, I’m not naive–but about my story. When I first received a letter from her, I almost dismissed it. All of the letters I’ve gotten over the past fifteen years are from strangers cursing me for what I did. They don’t know me. They have no right to write to me about my actions. But they’re a reminder that I am still being thought about. That I haven’t been forgotten and that brings me just enough comfort to keep going. But something told me to read her letter.

So I did. I had nothing else to do with my time. I skimmed through it, expecting to see the usual: “Murderer,” “How could anyone do this,” “You deserve to rot in jail,” and a lot of other creative things. But I didn’t see any of that. Instead, the letter read:

Dear George Benson,

My name is Amanda Drouse and I am an independent filmmaker. Your story caught my interest, specifically how unfinished it is, and I would love to make a short documentary about what happened in 2005. What really happened. It’s been fifteen years since you’ve been arrested. I think it’s time you tell your story. My documentary could give you a platform to do it on your terms. If you are open to this, please get back to us as soon as you can. We already have permission from the prison to come in and interview you, given your permission. We hope we caught you at the right time.

From,

Amanda

It wasn't until I received this letter that I decided I was ready to talk. I spoke to a guard who spoke to whoever he needed to speak to in order to give Amanda Drouse the green light. I was informed three months later that my interview would be the next day. Truthfully, at that point, I had forgotten I agreed to this. And here we are today.

“Thanks again, Mr. Benson, for agreeing to this interview. We weren’t sure you’d say yes,” Amanda says as she settles into the chair her crew has set up diagonal from me. We both have little microphones hanging from our collars and are being partially blinded by the bright lights they’ve put up. Amanda seems used to the harshness of them.

“You can call me George,” I say. I don’t feel nervous in front of the camera, but I don’t feel comfortable either. But then again, this isn't a comfortable topic we’ll be discussing today.

“Okay, George. If you could just introduce yourself while looking straight into the camera there,” Amanda juts a thumb behind her to point at the camera, coaxing my eyes to follow, “and explain what we’re doing here today to start us off. That would get us going.”

I nod and take a deep breath. Here it goes. I clear my throat and look directly into the camera.

“My name is George Benson, and I am here today to talk about how I murdered my wife and daughter … and to finally confess for the first time, where I have hidden their bodies.” Once I say that, I feel the tone in the room shift. It’s a much more serious one. The small smile Amanda has kept on her face this whole time has straightened out into a thin line. With a swift crossing of her legs, her eyes pierce straight into mine. Her soft brown eyes harden within my gaze. It feels like it’s just her and me in this small room, despite there being the three men in her crew and the guard standing right by the door, close enough to just be out of frame.

“Why don’t you start with how you met your wife.” Amanda starts. Okay, here we go.

~~~

My wife, Wilma, was a gardener. She could transform the dullest patch of dirt into something people walking by in a hurry couldn’t help but to stop and look at. Whatever she touched became so vibrant, so lively. She volunteered to start and care for small gardens all over town. From schools and nursing homes to hospitals and prisons. She did it all for free. I was around twenty at the time, when I would volunteer at the hospital on weekends. I would spend a couple of hours a week at the local hospital for some extra credits for med school. One day, I had run into her there. While I was on break, I decided to step outside for some air. I walked around outside a bit until I came upon a little garden. Everything caught my eye. I started to walk around it and get a good look at what kinds of plants it consisted of. All of the other flowers were outshined by our State’s flower, the wild prairie rose. There were pink ones, yellow ones, even red and white ones. As I bent down to give them a whiff, a girl came out of a little shed that stood in the center of the garden.

“Isn’t she pretty?” she said as she approached me.

I looked up at her, a bit startled by her sudden appearance. When I laid my eyes on her, I was taken aback. She was more beautiful than the flowers that surrounded us. She had dark black locs that went down to her shoulders with some of them pinned up by a clip at the back of her head. Her skin was a deep brown that matched the color of her eyes. She had on light blue overalls that were covered in dirt and grass stains. She was shorter than me, just by an inch or two, which made our eye contact easier to hold.

“Very pretty,” I responded. By the smile that crept onto her face, I knew she could tell I was not talking about the garden. “I’m George.” I stuck out my hand to her. She quickly slid the dirty glove off of her hand and shook mine.

“It’s nice to meet you, George. I’m Wilma,” she told me. We held eye contact for what felt like hours.

We couldn’t get enough of each other after our first encounter. I wanted to learn everything I could about her, and she, me. Eventually, I learned that her father was a landscaper. When she was a girl, she would go with him on jobs and watch him. Learn from him. She said that plants were her first love. Unfortunately, she couldn’t live off of gardening alone, so she got a degree in education. She taught elementary school students a bit of everything. English, math, and her favorite subject, science, which also happened to be my favorite.

She loved teaching children what she knew. She said she saw her younger self in each of her students. But especially our daughter, Flora. She chose Flora’s name, of course. I wanted to name her Anette, after my mother, but Wilma refused. She said she grew and nurtured Flora all by herself, so she was going to choose the name. That led to numerous arguments throughout her last trimester.

~~~

“Would you say that your disagreement on the name was the beginning of the end of you two?” Amanda asked. I almost forgot this was an interview. I’ve just been talking, not really leaving room for any questions. Maybe that’s what documentarians like in a subject: someone who does all of the work.

“No, that definitely wasn’t the catalyst. We had been going through a rough patch ever since I started my career as a medical scientist, which is right around the time we got married. I never had any spare time. I was always working. I didn’t even have time to have a wedding. We ended up eloping. So Wilma was right in a sense. She had gone through this pregnancy alone.”

~~~

During Wilma’s pregnancy, I was never home. I was always at the lab researching or at the hospital running tests. I wanted to figure out a way to edit genes responsible for hereditary diseases. I made good money. Enough to keep Wilma comfortable. More than comfortable. I put her in her dream house that had enough land for her very own garden. Two, even. But work took up all of my time. She would always say “I have everything I have ever dreamed of, thanks to you. But if I knew it would come at the cost of losing you, I would have dreamed a lot less.” I was losing Wilma’s love faster than I had gained it. I couldn’t let that happen, which is why I had to make sure I was always there for my daughter.

I got to cut my daughter’s cord when she arrived. I almost didn’t want to sever that connection between my two girls. But I had to. A broken cry sliced the air after that. How such a small being could make such a loud noise still amazes me. She wanted to be heard and, my God, I heard her. I gave Wilma a kiss on the forehead. She did a good job. She did a great thing.

I looked at my baby girl as she lay in Wilma’s arms. She was so beautiful. The most precious thing I had ever seen in all twenty-six years of my life. Her furrowed eyebrows were as thick as Wilma’s, her nose was as thick as mine. Her lips were shaped just like mine too. She was mine. How I could have created something so beautiful is beyond me. I never saw any beauty in myself. But I knew there had to be for me to create this. A seed that I had planted, a seed that Wilma nurtured and sprouted, a seed that grew into a beautiful flower. She is a part of me. She will always be. My Flora.

“Do you want to hold her?” she asked me. I nodded. Of course I did.

She gently put the baby into my arms. A nurse came from behind me to position my arms correctly. This baby and I fit together like a puzzle. I gently rocked her as I carefully made my way to the chair at the side of the bed. She opened her eyes for the first time. She opened her eyes to look at me. Her eyes, I noticed, were green like mine. It wasn’t long before I began to worry about what else she had inherited from me.

~~~

“It’s obvious that you really loved your little family, George,” Amanda says softly, breaking me out of my memories. I look at her.

“Of course I did. I loved them to death. Wilma was everything I could have ever dreamed of and Flora…Flora was beyond my wildest dreams,” I told her. There are no words in the whole world that could describe the love I had for my family.

“So what happened? Would you say that murder is a form of love?” Amanda asks coldly. I wish I could laugh right in her face. How sharp she thinks she is, asking me such a complicated question.

“In my case, Amanda, yes. My love for my daughter exceeded my love for my wife by a landslide. I think most fathers would say the same. What I did to my family was done to make my daughter live eternally,” I told her. Her face doesn’t crack. I can’t stand that I can’t tell what she’s thinking. But I don’t care, either.

“Whether you, or whoever sees this documentary, understands me or not, it doesn’t matter. No one needs to understand why I did what I did. I’m just here to tell my story,” I grumble out.

“So tell your story, George,” she says.

~~~

As Flora grew older, she began to look a lot more like Wilma than she did me. She seemed to have inherited everything from Wilma. She got Wilma’s calmness. She rarely cried or whined or got scared. She just knew how to handle things and knew how to handle herself. She shared Wilma’s interest in gardening. Whenever Wilma went outside, Flora was right there beside her. She was like a mini-Wilma.

I would go outside, sometimes, to join them and try to bond with them over gardening, but I would always do something wrong, causing them to deplore whatever I did: “You’re giving them too much water,” or, “You’re putting them too close together, George,” or, “Don’t touch the Conium, Dad.” The Conium warning was Flora’s favorite note for me. Wilma instilled the danger of the Conium so much into Flora that she grew a fear of even getting close to it. She sounded just like Wilma when she would get on me. There were times I would be in the middle of a conversation with Flora, and it would be like I was talking to Wilma. She inherited her mother’s vocabulary and cadence, too. It made me so anxious.

~~~

“Anxious? Why?” Amanda asked. Finally, some movement in her face as her eyebrow raises in curiosity and she is naturally leaning a bit forward. I don’t really want to answer this question. Not yet anyway. But now’s as good a time as any.

“Because she was bound to inherit something from me, and not everything of mine should be passed down.” Before she can ask any follow-up questions, I continue on.

~~~

“That girl is half you, and half me. Straight down the line if there were one,” Wilma would say when I voiced my feelings about feeling disconnected from Flora. This time, we were in our bed. Wilma was only half-listening to me, as most of her attention was on the book she was reading.

“I just mean we don’t have any interests in common. You know I asked her if she wanted to come to work with me tomorrow.”

“And?”

“She said no. She said she wanted to help you out at the town’s greenhouse.”

Wilma sighed. “Well you know she doesn’t like going to the lab, George. Why don’t you find something she does like and do that with her? She’s only ten. She’s not completely closed off yet,” she suggested as she took a sip of the tea she made. She would make a cup every night.

“It’s not that easy. You got lucky. I don’t think she’s capable of loving anything else besides gardening,” I said.

“I can’t say I blame her,” Wilma said. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek before rolling over and turning out her lamp. I followed suit. But I couldn’t sleep.

“What if she gets it?”

Wilma groaned, not moving. “George–”

“Seriously, Wilma. I still haven’t been able to find a way to prevent genetic diseases. I mean, we’re nowhere close to finding–”

Wilma sat up and turned on her light. “George. Our daughter getting ALS is something we don’t need to be worrying about at her young age, let alone at midnight. What you saw your father go through was horrible, love, I know.” Wilma put a hand on my shoulder. “But you cannot put these fears onto Flora,” she finished sternly before turning off her light and laying back down, and turned away from me. I sighed and closed my eyes. She didn’t get it. She never would.

The idea came to me one morning. I was sitting at the desk of my home office, reading the day’s paper when a story caught my attention. A young boy who went missing a week prior was found in the lake behind his house. There was a quote by his mother: “I don’t know why we didn’t think to look in the lake earlier. He loved the water.” Turns out the kid wasn’t taken from his bed in the middle of the night like everyone thought. He just wanted to go for a swim. But, instead of feeling pity for the boy, I felt proud. What a great way to go: becoming part of the thing you love. My Flora deserves that. I would create a garden of Flora.

I knew Wilma would never allow me to do what I planned to do, but I wouldn’t let her get in the way of my daughter’s eternal peace. I would, however, let her be a part of it. When living with two people who know a little too much about plants, it’s easy to pick up on things. Things like which plants are poisonous. Poisonous like the one that grows in our backyard. The one Wilma made Flora deathly afraid of touching. The one that Flora warned me about when I joined them outside. Conium. As dangerous as it is, the girls didn’t want to get rid of them. “They’re too beautiful,” they would say when I would voice my worries about Flora getting into them. Thank God they never listened to me.

I took the day off to research how I could make this happen. What I wanted to do wasn’t really practiced yet, not publicly at least. It definitely wasn’t legal. This made what I was doing a lot more exciting to me. I wondered, if this goes to plan, could this also be a breakthrough in my career? This was something I would discover soon.

Later that day, I made my way over to the corner of the yard where the plant was growing. I grabbed as much as my shaky, gloved hands could hold and stuffed the petals into a small box. When the girls came back home, I would have some tea waiting for them. We’d sit outside on the patio and watch the sunset. It would be the perfect way to spend their last night alive. I already missed them.

And that’s exactly how the night went. As water boiled on the stovetop, I poured my box of Conium into a bowl of warm water and ground it up. Once the water was boiled, I put the mush of Conium into their favorite mugs, followed by the boiled water, and then topped it off with milk to make the contamination unnoticeable. I could barely contain my excitement as I brought the tea out to them on the patio. Most kids don’t like tea, but Flora always has. And at the age of ten, she was growing her own herbs to make her own tea bags. She made me so proud. The things she could do…

I began the night with an apology for being so tied up with work lately. They took the bait and soon, we were watching the sunset. I sat between them so that if either of them tried to get up and run, I could pull them back down with ease. It wasn’t long until they started to lose feeling in their muscles. They couldn’t move. They were so relaxed in their chairs, it took them a while to realize. They started to freak out but I told them to calm down–that they needed to save the last bit of breath they had so that I could explain to them what was going on. That didn't calm them. But they couldn’t react. They were paralyzed.

I spread a blanket on the grass. Then, I picked up Wilma from her chair, carrying her over to the blanket. Next, I did the same with Flora. I felt them try to fight and to say something, or maybe even scream, but their efforts were pointless. Their vocal cords were too taut by that time. I tried my best to ignore their pleading eyes, but I couldn’t help but look at them. Tears were flowing from each of their eyes like waterfalls, and the sight broke my heart. But I knew that once I explained everything, they would understand. I gave Wilma a kiss on her lips, and Flora a kiss on her head. I put my arms around them both, and looked out into the garden. They had created such a beautiful thing.

I decided to start with why I was doing this. I needed them to understand why. So I told them.

“I’ve never told you this, Flora, but my father died from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is also known as ALS. I watched as the disease killed him. It killed his spirit long before it killed his body. My father–your grandfather-was the most cheerful person I knew. He always kept a smile on his face, no matter the situation. He was only forty-five when he got the diagnosis. He didn’t let that get him down though. He was sure he would beat it. But it’s hard to stay optimistic when you have no control over your body. He could smile through the muscle twitches and the slowed speech. He even stayed smiling when he couldn’t move his right arm anymore. But once he lost the ability to walk, and soon after, the ability to talk, he lost his spirit. The last time I saw him smile was a year after he got diagnosed. The last time I saw him alive was the day after my sixteenth birthday. It was then that I realized what I wanted to do with my life.” It upset me that Flora couldn’t respond. It seemed like she was too focused on breathing.

“The reason that I’m telling you this, sweetheart, is because my grandfather died from the same thing ... which means there’s a good chance I will. And you, as well. Your mother knows this.” I looked over at Wilma. Her eyes rested on Flora as she focused on her own breathing. It seemed like their time was coming. This brought me some peace. I hated to see them suffer.

“That brutal death, it kills everything you are, and then that’s it. There is nothing more for you. And Flora, baby, I just can’t let you go out like that. This way seems more humane, to me at least, because this way I can make sure you live on. I chose a great spot for you. Somewhere you’d both love.” I smiled at them as they cursed me with their eyes.

“There’s this garden that is very special to us as a family. The one at the hospital. It’s where we met, Wilma. It’s where you were born, Flora. It’s where you two tend to go on weekends. I want to plant you both there. So that you can grow and become part of the very thing you love, in a place that means so much to me. And you can make a lot of sick people feel better when they lay their eyes on you. You two would make beautiful plants. Isn’t that amazing? Doesn’t that bring you comfort about the end? Life may be taken from you, but me taking it ensures that you come back to life again. Both of you!” Neither of them could react to anything I had said, but I knew they heard me. And I heard them take their last breath. Flora first. Wilma shortly after. They were at peace. We were all at peace. But I still had a lot of work to do.

~~~

The whole room sits in silence for a minute after I finish speaking. I watch as Amanda tries to wipe away a tear quickly so that I don’t see it.

“So, Wilma and Flora…” she begins. I turn my head directly to the camera.

“My wife, Wilma, and my daughter, Flora are the trees that stand tall in the center of the hospital’s garden. They have been there since a month after they went missing. They’ve been there this whole time. Living. Breathing. Becoming what they loved,” I state, and turn my head to Amanda.

“What did you do with their bodies within the month they were declared missing? Before you turned yourself in,” Amanda asks.

“The human composting process takes about a month,” I simply state.

“Why did you turn yourself in?”

“Because at the end of the day, I committed a murder. Two. While I would have loved to see my girls grow into what I can only imagine they are now, I knew I couldn’t live freely with what I had done. My plan for them was done. There was nothing left for me. My life ended when my daughters did.”

“Do you regret anything?” she asks. This is something I have thought about a lot.

“I did, for a while. For years, even. Up until I officially got diagnosed with ALS a year ago. If there was any chance my Flora would have to suffer the way I am suffering right now, I’m glad I ended her life when I did,” I answer. Amanda shakes her head.

“Amanda, the world may not understand, but this is what she would have wanted in the end, and I’m glad that I could be the one to give that to her.” I now feel I have nothing left to say. We have both gotten what we wanted: Amanda got to capture, firsthand, the location of the bodies of two missing women from fifteen years ago; and I got to get that off of my chest before this illness could stop me from doing it. I have done everything on my own terms. I have no regrets.

“Guard,” I say. The guard that’s been supervising this interview motions for one of the crew members to take the mic off of me. The sound guy quickly comes over and unclips the mic. He’s shaken up. I can tell by how bad his hands are shaking. I couldn’t do anything to him, even if I wanted to. My hands are cuffed. Even if they weren’t, I have no movement of my arms.

I didn’t murder my family out of anger or out of insanity. I murdered them out of love.

As the guard rolls me out of the room, I wonder if I will see my family being dug up out of that garden on the news tomorrow. Maybe, now, I do have regrets.