Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,89

the first cut. After a few unhurried moments of consideration, with his left hand he picked up the curious knife with which he had threatened her, the one with the blade shaped like a beak.

Lucy ventured closer, unable to resist. She peered over his shoulder at the bird. In the light from Garvey’s gooseneck work lamp, it looked almost alive—as though it had died only moments ago, as though its blood was still warm. Garvey smoothed its white-tipped feathers tenderly, caressing the delicate ruff at its throat, and Lucy felt the pulsing excitement of discovery, a ravenous curiosity about the gateway between life and death through which the tiny creature had passed.

“Can I do it?” she asked breathlessly.

“Can you do what?”

“Cut it open.”

Instead of answering, Garvey put the tip of the knife to the top of the breastbone, his hands steady. Slowly, surely, he drew down, and the bird’s flesh split. When he reached the end under the tail, he peeled the skin away tenderly, revealing its glistening pink innards. There was no blood, which surprised Lucy, and then it didn’t.

“No. You can’t,” Garvey said. Then he set the split bird carefully on the table. “Not yet, anyway. You have a lot to learn first.”

32

Years later, when Lucy thought back over her time at Lone Pine, it was the months that followed that she thought of as the happiest of her life. She did her work each day, the smells of ammonia and bleach becoming as familiar to her as once was her mother’s perfume or her father’s pipe smoke. As spring was overtaken by summer, Mrs. Sloat divided her time between motel business and trips to Owens Lake several times a week. Sometimes she returned with fish; sometimes she didn’t. Twice, Lucy glimpsed Mr. Dang when she went into town on errands with Mrs. Sloat. Both times, he wore a necktie and a hat, despite the heat. Lucy had a hard time imagining him on a boat in his shirtsleeves, checking his lines and dipping his hand into a bucket of bait.

Ruby and Hal ate their weekend meals with Lucy and took her for drives in their mother’s truck. They made her laugh with their clowning around. The stash of coins and the occasional bill grew in her secret hiding place, each addition bringing her closer to her dream of escape. And best of all was the time she spent with Garvey, learning and assisting at his bench after her work was done each day.

As time passed, Lucy learned to relax around him, and his silence gave way to measured conversation, and later to longer stories, from his boyhood adventures in the foothills and hunting camps, his college years, the football games and fraternity pranks. Hours could pass before Lucy noticed the sun sinking in the sky or her stomach growling in hunger.

And the animals: Lucy watched Garvey study them before he took them apart and slowly, with tender and fastidious attention, put them back together. He coaxed emotions from them that they’d never experienced in life, using his scalpels and thread and forms and glues and paints to create poses and expressions that were somehow knowing and sly and mischievous. Garvey’s animals were not only livelier than their former selves, but transformed by his hands into nearly mythic beasts.

Lucy watched Garvey when she was supposed to be studying the way he notched a jaw or slit the dry tissue of a nose. Tragedy had transformed her, but it seemed that Garvey was teaching her that her transformation was not yet complete. That like the limp, lifeless corpses that he began with, there was, buried inside her, the potential for wondrous and surprising things, things that only he could see.

Their lessons slowly took on a new rhythm. Garvey would have the tools and supplies laid out when she arrived, but instead of beginning right away, they would talk for a while. Lucy told herself it was only a courtesy, nothing more. But there were days when talking took the entire afternoon, when they never got around to the animals at all. Or when, as he guided her hand along the knobby curve of a spine or the smooth-sanded surface of a base, his fingers lingered on hers.

One warm June day, Mrs. Sloat came to the doorway, which Garvey had propped open to let air into the room. She was wearing a town dress and a slash of lipstick.

“Lucy,” she snapped. “I need you to come pick up the drapes