Chapter 16 Jill #2
As more and more bricks emerged, Jill forgot about Mrs. Smith and the ocular windows of her house. Sweat pearled on her forehead
and trickled down the back of her neck. A nimbus of gnats hovered around her head. The air filled with the threatening buzz
of wasps, but Jill was too absorbed in her work to notice.
When her trash bag was full, she waved her brother over. “Look at this brick.”
He wiped his face with the bottom of his Lake Tahoe T-shirt and crouched down next to her. Brushing bits of orange dirt away
from the shape stamped in the center of the brick, he said, “Looks like an anchor.”
“I wonder if she ever owned a boat.”
J.J. shrugged and returned to the task of rescuing a row of bushes from the greedy vines. The bushes were barely alive. They
were spindly and colorless. Their fragility reminded Jill of the prisoners of war in the movies J.J. liked.
Jill tied off her second garbage bag and dragged it to the curb. She had no idea how long they’d been working. And even though
she was hot and thirsty, she had no desire to go home. The brick path had curved to the right at first but was now curving
back to the left. She wanted to follow the wave of bricks to the center—to the heart of the ruined garden.
She and J.J. didn’t talk much. Occasionally, he’d pause to show her a bit of detritus caught in a nest of the vines or speared
by a thorn. There was a bleached comic strip, a torn Thurman Munson baseball card, and a scrap of pink ribbon.
“It’d be cool if we found some money. Or old jewelry.” He slowly ripped the baseball card until Munson’s head separated from
his body. “I should bring my metal detector up here.”
Jill shot a wary glance at Mrs. Smith’s house. There was no window on the ground floor, but there were two on the floor above. Mrs. Smith could be looking down at them right now. Watching.
“Better not,” she whispered.
She’d almost filled another bag with moss and weeds when her trowel revealed a line of bricks moving in another direction.
It seemed she’d finally reached an intersection. The path continued meandering to the east but also split off, heading north
and south as well. There was a round stone in the middle of the place where the paths crossed.
Jill wondered if she’d uncovered a rose compass, but then she saw grooves carved into the center stone. Strange symbols ran
around its perimeter.
“J.J.!” she hissed. “You have to see this!”
Her brother was dragging a massive hairball of vines toward the garden door. He was red-faced and sweaty. His arms were mottled
with dirt and small lacerations. Glowering at her, he warned, “This better be good.”
Jill knew that voice. Her brother was angry. He wanted to hit or kick or swat at something.
She didn’t want that something to be her.
“Look. It’s a face.”
J.J. lumbered over and put his hands on his hips, fully prepared to disparage his sister. But the sneer forming on his lips
evaporated when he looked down at the image. “What the hell?”
Jill pointed to the path leading from the door to the side of the face, then to the start of another path jutting out from
higher on the face. “I think it’s a sun. The paths are, like, the sun’s rays.”
Grabbing her trowel, J.J. scraped along the edge of the stone until a series of diamond shapes began to emerge. They looked like snake scales.
“Maybe it’s Medusa,” Jill said.
“Jesus Christ. You’re obsessed with her. Just because you did that book report at the end of the year doesn’t mean everyone is into Greek myth. I mean,
duh. Don’t be such a dolt. No normal person would have a Medusa head in their garden.”
Mrs. Smith isn’t normal.
“Use your brain for two seconds,” J.J. sneered. “The bricks have anchors. The face has scales. The house is on the water.
It’s a fucking mermaid.”
He walked back to the mass of vines and dragged them out of the garden.
As Jill scraped more dirt and moss from the circular stone, scales continued to emerge around the edges.
She pulled a tapestry of small stubborn roots away from the bowed lips and wide, flat nose. The eyes were narrow ovals under
a heavy brow. The woman wasn’t pretty like the mermaids Jill had seen in books. Her unsmiling mouth and lowered brow made
her look angry.
Determined to prove J.J. wrong, Jill started probing the ground for more bricks. If more wavy paths grew out of the stone
head, this woman had to be Medusa.
Jill worked as if in a fever dream, sliding her trowel under thatches of moss, tugging grass, and yanking out dandelions.
She filled another garbage bag. Then another.
The drone of wasps became more persistent. More gnats gathered. The hostile buzz of a horsefly sounded in Jill’s ears. She
idly swatted the insect away.
Suddenly, a shadow moved though the grass a few feet in front of her right hand. It shot forward quickly, the grass blades
shivering in its wake.
The thing could be a field mouse or a chipmunk, Jill told herself. But it hadn’t scurried like a rodent. It had slithered. Like a snake.
Jill froze.
She hadn’t seen a snake since last summer, when she and her father were working in the vegetable garden. A little green snake,
no bigger than the ruler in Jill’s pencil case, had poked its head out from under the leaves of a cucumber vine.
“Careful,” her dad had said. “We don’t want to hurt him. He’s good for the garden because he eats bugs.”
The thing in Mrs. Smith’s grass was much bigger than the green snake. And darker. Jill stared at the spot where the grass
had moved, searching for a shape. A shadow.
Behind her, J.J. let out a groan of frustration. Jill turned to see him wrestling with a vine as thick as his forearm.
She turned back to the grass in time to catch another movement. An S-shaped wave formed in the grass, traveling away from
her. She caught flashes of dark brown or black, and then all was still again.
Jill didn’t resume her work. She stared at the stone face and remembered a Sunday school lesson from when she was Justin’s
age. She didn’t recall everything, only that their class had been learning about Adam and Eve. The teacher had shown them
a painting of the Garden of Eden, and Jill’s eyes had gone right to the snake coiled around a tree trunk. It had a shovel-shaped
head and a forked tongue. The tongue, which was black as tar, caressed the swollen curve of a bloodred fruit.
The horsefly buzz grew louder, and Jill snapped to attention. She didn’t want to be bitten by a fly, a wasp, or anything else.
She didn’t want to startle another snake. There could be a copperhead in this wild garden. Maybe even a rattlesnake.
“They hunt at night in the summer, and I’ve never seen one,” her father had told her the day she’d seen the green snake. She’d asked him what other snakes lived on Long Island, and if any were poisonous.
They hunt at night.
His words drifted in her head, merging with the angry thrum of the horsefly. The wasps were getting closer. Mud daubers and
yellowjackets swooped lower and lower. A mosquito landed on her arm and bit her before she had the chance to flatten it with
her hand. Flicking its body into the dirt, she grimaced at the thin streak of blood on her skin and the huge red welt already
rising. It itched so badly that she had to take off her glove and scratch it. She scratched and scratched until it no longer
itched but burned.
“What time is it?” she asked her brother. She’d had enough of Mrs. Smith’s garden for one day.
“Almost noon.”
“Why isn’t Mom ringing the bell?”
“Because she loves it that we’re up here, sweating our asses off and dying of thirst.”
Jill was about to put her glove back on when she saw a wink of iridescent green from an object wedged in between two bricks.
She leaned over for a better look. Whatever it was had serrated edges, like a bread knife, and a pointy end.
She pinched the object between her fingers and pulled it from the dirt. She didn’t know why she bothered. It was probably
just a piece of a mussel shell. She’d cut the bottoms of her feet on the stupid shells more times than she could count, but
she’d never seen one glow green before. Nor had she seen one that had broken into a perfect diamond like this one.
Using her shirt to wipe off the rest of the dirt, she held it up to the light. The black shell flashed green and silver. Jill
was mesmerized by its beauty.
Glancing to her left, she stared at the woman trapped in the stone. Then she looked from the diamond-shaped scales around the edge of the woman’s face to the shell cupped in her palm.
Suddenly, the clamor of a ringing bell sailed through the air. The sound startled Jill and she reflexively balled her hand
into a fist. The serrated edges of the shell pierced her skin.
Yelping in pain, she dropped the thing on the ground.
“What are you doing?” J.J. yelled. “Stop spacing out and let’s go!”
Jill didn’t respond. She just sat there, staring at her palm.
Tiny beads of blood appeared where her Head and Fate lines intersected. Then the beads swelled and merged, forming new lines.
Those lines became a shape. A diamond, just like ones on the stone woman’s face.
It’s not a shell.
Jill picked up the black scale. After tucking it in her pocket, she gathered her tools and followed her brother out of the
garden.
At home, she washed her hands in the bathroom, horrified and fascinated by the bloody shape in the center of her palm.
The wound looked just like an eye.