The Walled Garden
Michele Lang
Columbia College
New York City
He had left me for dead.
I think this is what bothered people the most. That, and the fact he had attacked me in broad daylight, as I had wandered through Riverside Park in September, daydreaming.
The doctors had established that he had only tried to choke me to death and had only ripped my clothes, not taken them off completely.
So when I returned to school – my freshman year – with a bruised trachea and a battered soul, the other girls couldn’t kid themselves that I was somehow at fault.
I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What a downer, I know. But in the end, I was just another statistic in a gritty, crime-ridden city. Plenty of my ex-friends tried to rationalize me away, leave me for dead, too. I don’t blame them, at least not any more.
But at the time, I survived by staying angry, not by leaving the past to the past. I was used to being the weird kid: Mireya, the Puerto Rican girl from Brooklyn on a prep school scholarship in New England, now on scholarship at a fancy Ivy League school in New York.
My mom was a seamstress, never finished high school. I already knew how to make my own way.
I kept to myself, and kept silent, long after the physical harm to my throat had healed for the most part.
I slept in my clothes, and I kept the light on for a solid year.
My best friend Colleen made me eat, and until I could go back to swallowing pizza and home-made chilli, she cooked me split pea soup.
Two years passed, years in which I excelled in my studies but lost myself.
I was OK in the daytime, in the dullness of my routine. But at night, all alone . . .
If it weren’t for a man named Jonathan Mellon, my would-be murderer would have won. But Mellon refused to leave me for dead. When it really counted, he stood his ground. And he did it to set me free.
I first encountered Jonathan Mellon at the scene of a different crime, two years after I almost paid for daydreaming in the park with my life.
The Columbia campus centres on a quad of buildings, libraries, lecture halls and dorms. But most of the students live in housing off-campus, sprinkled around the iffy neighbourhood of Morningside Heights.
I lived in River Hall, around the corner from the place in Riverside Park where I had almost met my end.
The morning I found Mellon at the entrance to River Hall, his antique Mercedes was parked in front – what was left of it, anyway.
Some evil bastard had taken a baseball bat to the doors, smashed in the lights and all of the windows, and slashed all four tyres.
I had just returned from my first class of the day, and the street was relatively deserted.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I walked around the car to survey the damage.
A polite note in the rear window proclaimed: “No Radio, Don’t Bother”.
Spray-painted along the destroyed side of the champagne-coloured car in response: “JUST CHECKING”.
I caught the anguish of the young guy, who was about my age, and I winced for him and his murdered car. “That’s pretty cold,” I muttered, not expecting him to reply or even notice me – by now I had perfected the art of invisibility.
“It certainly is,” the man replied, his focus staying steady on the car, the expression on his face pained. He had a faint accent that I couldn’t place. “This is my bitchy little sister’s car, too. Oh, bother.”
His genteel misery troubled me somehow. Guys like him – tall, preppy, golden blond – were not supposed to have problems. They were supposed to live off-campus in their own daddy-purchased apartments, go to the Village to party with The Cars and the Talking Heads, and show up for class just often enough to pass.
“Maybe you should call the cops,” I said, my voice husky with disuse. This was the longest conversation I’d voluntarily had with a man in months. “You should report it. I know it’s a pain, but at least they’ll put your complaint on file.”
He turned to face me for the first time.
His eyes burned with cold, blue fire, and I could see he was angry as well as in mourning.
But his lips remained fixed in a small, careful smile.
“This is the third car I’ve had smashed up like this in this neighbourhood.
The police just shrugged and did the paperwork last time. A man’s got to choose his battles.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, and I suddenly had the strangest feeling that I had met this man before.
The stranger broke the silence with a smile and a nod. “I know you,” he said. “You’re in my miserable art history survey course, aren’t you?”
I felt the jolt all the way down to my shoes.
Did he know me for the notorious reasons most people did?
I’d heard the whispers trailing after me in the cafeteria, on the quad.
Maybe this preppy blueblood moved so far outside my customary circles that he just didn’t know about me. The thought gave me hope.
I swallowed hard, turned my attention back to the remains of his car. The intrepid radio hunters had smashed up every car on the block the same way. “Art history,” I finally, lamely said. “It’s miserable? I like the teacher.”
“Oh, her,” he said, and laughed uncomfortably. “She’s ready to toss me out altogether.”
“Really?” Amanda Zee was one of my favourite teachers, just out of graduate school, and passionate about teaching as well as publishing her scholarship. “She doesn’t seem like such a hard-ass.”
“She’s not. I deserve to fail.”
I swung back to face him, and for a moment all of the upper west side of New York held its breath. My heart decided not to stop but instead to gallop, and the ragged edges of a familiar panic began to prickle on my arms like phantom brambles, poking into my skin, pulling me down.
There was something uncanny about him, about the deserted street and the smashed-up cars. He was a rip in my grey, mundane reality, a flash of gold on the cement sidewalk.
I forced myself to smile, though the effort probably looked pretty ghastly. “Sorry about your car,” I whispered, and I slipped away into River Hall, my student ID at the ready. The security guard, an ageless mummified Egyptian named Ali, sat silent behind his desk as I streaked by.
But I swear this time I saw Ali smile as I fled from the golden stranger still standing in the street.
He reappeared the next day, like the sun over the horizon. I saw him from far away from my perch at the top of the Low Library steps. A slip of paper he held between his long, aristocratic fingers fluttered in the breeze.
He climbed the steps, his long legs conquering them with no apparent effort. “This is you, isn’t it?” he said without preamble, as if he was used to addressing the commoners of the world and commanding them at his will.
I shrugged and went back to studying the textbook open on my lap, hiding the jolt of fear as best I could. A listless breeze crawled up the Low Library stairs and swirled around my ankles – it was a hot spring that year. “Yeah, I was me, last time I checked.”
“No. I mean this.” And he waved the paper at me.
I flinched. Had he found the newspaper articles about me, what had happened to me?
I raised my head, ready to blow him off with a quick, efficient snarl – and saw just in time that’s not what the guy had in mind, not at all.
He didn’t have a newspaper clipping, but my own hand-lettered sign.
One that I hadn’t even thought of for a year or more.
“You type papers,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “I need help. I’m failing out of school because my typing skills don’t exist. Can you type fast?”
My heart started racing again, at the man’s close proximity, but also at the prospect of cash. The paper-typing idea was born of desperation in my sophomore year, and before now it had never borne fruit. If anything, I needed money even more than the year before.
“What’s your name?” I said. I didn’t mean to act rude, but my voice came out husky and rough, like I’d been crying.
“Jonathan Mellon, of the Philadelphia Mellons.” He extended a well-tended, manicured hand, and after a moment I took it and shook it. He was all business, and I took refuge in that.
I leaned back on the steps and smiled. “You already know me from class and by my sign. Mireya Rodriguez, of the Brooklyn Rodriguezes.” For the first time in I didn’t know how long, I started to laugh at this awkward, lovely white boy, slender and earnest as a greyhound. “Our numbers are legion, Mr Mellon.”
“Well, ours aren’t.” His smile widened and, after a moment’s hesitation, he sat down next to me, a careful distance away. “I hope you can type fast.”
And so began our nefarious partnership.
I didn’t mean to re-engineer his papers, not at first. I got out my trusty IBM Selectric, Mami’s high school graduation present to me, checked the ribbon to make sure it was nice and fresh.
The spring morning thrummed with life, and I propped up my only window with a wooden coat hanger to let in the semi-fresh air from the enclosed courtyard.
A single huge gingko tree grew there, and a family of cardinals had made it their improbable refuge.
That courtyard was loud – an opera singer lived in the building across from me, and an oboe player liked to practise until midnight during the week.
But I loved that courtyard. For two years now, it had kept me connected to the living world.
On that morning in April, I took a first look at the art history paper due the next day. Mellon’s handwriting was terrible. Awful. But his writing was even worse. Plenty of ideas, sure, but they choked each other like too many baby birds crushed together in a too-small nest.
“You got five separate papers here, mi corazon,” I whispered under my breath as I reread his work. “Hm . . . leave this for next time. Switch these paragraphs, fix the spelling over here . . .”