In The Secret Garden, when Mistress Mary heard noises in the night, she was brave enough to explore that creepy old house. But I am not so brave. I can’t just open the door and face her. I know that she will be on one side of the door and that I will be on this side and that, although there is a barrier between us, she has a way of making the fear creep into my bones and pulse in my head that is more terrifying than I can describe.
I can live with being tormented by her during the day, but the terror I feel at night is unbearable.
May 1, 1982
A few more of them left today. Some of the quieter ones who I think would be okay if they weren’t scared of her too. Jenny and Karen are going to that new home in the next county and Tracy got into a posh school that takes boarders. Sophie went while I was recovering from the pantry incident.
The numbers are dwindling. With fewer of us here, Thornhill seems bigger, colder. Even less friendly than before, if that’s possible.
May 3, 1982
Today has been mostly okay, at least it was once I found where they had hidden my schoolbag.
In history Mrs. Davies quietly called me to her desk at the front, where she was marking a pile of exercise books. She asked me why my homework had been stuck together with mysterious yellow sludge. She didn’t want to say the word snot, although as I peered at it across her desk, that was the word that came to my mind. How did they do that? If it was snot, how did they get that much of it? Mrs. Davies was going on about how I should take care of my work and my appearance when she stopped midsentence.
“Mary, are you okay? You look as though you haven’t slept for weeks. You look very pasty. You’ve got even darker rings under your eyes than usual—you look awful … ” and then I think she realized she sounded a bit rude and she got all flustered. Then someone threw an eraser at the board, and she was distracted.
I took my history book and tried to carefully unstick the pages.
I saw Mrs. Davies glance at me a couple of times during the lesson, as if she was puzzled by something, as if she suspects that something is wrong, but can’t put her finger on it. I know she won’t take it any further. I am surrounded by adults at school and at Thornhill, but none of them can really see what is happening. They don’t want to know. I wonder why that is. What is it that stops an adult from sitting down and really saying, “How are things with you?” or “Is everything okay?” I suspect that they are afraid they might get a truthful answer and then they would have to do something, get involved. Or maybe they just can’t imagine anything unpleasant or nasty. Maybe they don’t want to think that something horrid can be happening to people they know.
May 4, 1982
I decided this morning that I am going to try to get out a bit more. Not downstairs, obviously, but out into the gardens. They are trimmed and mowed and look more like a park or the gardens of a stately home than the kind of gardens ordinary people have—those real lived-in gardens with bikes and trikes and laundry on the line. The gardens here are lovely, but a bit unfriendly—I half expect to see a “Do not walk on the grass” sign. But there isn’t one. Not yet anyway.
I have been here for years, but have never spent much time exploring. Rereading The Secret Garden has made me want to look around. I’m not foolish enough to think that I will find new friends out here, but I do think being away from her would be good. A bit of head space.
I spent this evening exploring. I crept out while they were all together watching Buck Rogers. The farther away from the house you go, once you are beyond the gravel drive where Pete parks his car, the more amazing the gardens become.
Just past the apple orchard, I found a lovely spot, surrounded by bushes. It is almost like an outdoor room. The bushes are trimmed like a wall and there is an archway cut into the trees with a wooden door in it. In the middle is a statue of a child on a pedestal. It’s beautiful. It is lovely and quiet and from inside those green walls I can’t see Thornhill—so they won’t be able to see me.
On my way back I bumped into Jane and Pete in the garden. They looked surprised to see me and then went a bit red. Are caregivers allowed to get together? I don’t know. It’s none of my business, I guess.
I came back in and went to my room. The other girls were busy crashing in and out of each other’s rooms, raving about their favorite bands, laughing in an exaggerated, overloud way, or rehearsing lyrics to songs they had recorded from the radio. I walked past doors with posters from Smash Hits stuck on them, through wafts of sickly sweet hairspray, and up into my room. None of the others had seen me go in or out. I am invisible again and I am glad.
I have found my own secret garden.
May 8, 1982
I have had a lovely day. Alone, but quiet and calm. I have spent it outside in the garden, my garden, completely absorbed in making body parts for my new puppets. I prepared my materials last night: the scraping tools for shaping clay and needles for definition and an airtight tin for keeping the bits in, and put them all on a tray. I sneaked down to the kitchen at seven a.m., before everyone else was awake, as Kathleen was just taking off her coat and slipping into her apron. She must have seen me slope out with a yogurt and an apple in my pockets on the way to wedge open the wooden garden door, because when I went back to collect my tray of puppet-making stuff, she had prepared a bacon sandwich wrapped in tin foil and a flask of tea—which she balanced alongside the rest of my stuff with her usual wink.
I can’t tell you what a sense of relief I have to be outside, how it feels as though the shadow, the weight of Thornhill, evaporates as I step farther away from its walls. I feel a thrill of freedom to know that I can’t be seen or heard by any of them, even though I am within the grounds.
I spent the day in my enclosed garden, hidden from the house, sitting at the base of the statue with my tray of equipment spread out on the stone step. It wasn’t sunny but I didn’t feel cold—I was too engrossed in making arms and hands, upper arms, thighs, lower legs, and feet. I am making Colin and Dickon from The Secret Garden to keep Mistress Mary company. As I designed all the shapes and measurements, I knew exactly what I was aiming for, exactly what would evolve from my fingertips, as long as I concentrated.
Unwrapping Kathleen’s bacon sandwich was a treat. I sat under the statue, munching away, surrounded by teeny body parts, listening to birdsong and the hum of invisible traffic somewhere, and felt as safe and calm and happy as I do when I am up in my room.
I write this back upstairs, the row of arms and legs laid out on my bedside table with the darkness outside my window. I know my night will be disrupted. I know she will be here. But I can smell fresh air on my skin and have made and planned and feel more myself somehow.
And I can go back tomorrow.