Chapter 3: The Ghost in the Garden
During the weekdays, while Avery attended physician assistant school at UAB, I worked at a massive garden center in Hoover. I began at nineteen, hauling bags of wet mulch until my shoulders screamed. By 2017, I managed the entire woody plant division. Every oak, maple, and shrub on the tarmac was mine to curate. I possessed hands that knew the earth. My family remained oblivious to my promotions because asking would require acknowledging I existed.
On a crisp Tuesday in October 2019, Avery Lockheart walked onto my lot.
My heart slammed against my ribs. I knew her face intimately. It had monopolized our refrigerator for five years—smiling beside Mitch at tailgates, glowing at Gulf Shores. She was twenty-four, clad in royal blue scrubs, a silver stethoscope peeking from her pocket. She looked right through me. She had never seen a single photograph of my face.
“I desperately need a dogwood,” she announced, her tone laced with frantic perfectionism. “A spectacular one. It’s for my church’s memorial garden. My boyfriend’s family suffered a tragic loss years ago. Every Easter, my mother reads the names of the dead at sunrise. I want to donate a tree they can be proud of.”
A cold dread pooled in my stomach. I assumed, naturally, she was referencing my recently deceased grandmother. It felt oddly intimate, so I swallowed my panic and did my job. I guided her through the rustling rows, rejecting three saplings before settling on a flawless Cherokee Princess. I knelt in the dirt, inspecting the graft union at the trunk’s base. If the living wood doesn’t fuse perfectly, the tree will eventually hemorrhage sap and die, regardless of how beautiful the canopy appears. The graft was pristine.
I filled out the plastic botanical tag with a heavy black marker. On the reverse side, I scribbled my signature advice: Graft is strong. Water deep. She’ll bloom.
Avery handed me her credit card. As she signed the receipt, she paused, her eyes narrowing as they searched my face. “You look intensely familiar,” she murmured. “Like someone I should know.”
It was the closest I came in eight years to screaming my name. Instead, I handed her the receipt, selling her the very tree that would soon haunt my nightmares.
When the pandemic locked down the globe in 2020, I was ironically granted a reprieve. Nobody visited anyone. For eight blissful weeks, I lived inside my own home. My mother, however, paced the floors like a caged animal. One Sunday, Avery FaceTimed Mitch in the kitchen. My mother panicked, spotting my shoulder in the frame. Out of shot! she mouthed violently, shoving me toward the pantry. I ate my turkey sandwich standing in a dark corner beside the canned goods, listening to my mother cackle over banana bread with a girl who believed I was drafting spreadsheets in Atlanta.
By April 2022, my yellow notebook contained 211 harsh black tally marks.
The eviction text arrived on Tuesday: Lockhearts for supper Saturday. Sunrise service Sunday. Be gone by 10 AM.
I drove to Ruth’s farm on Saturday morning. At 9:00 PM, sitting on my cot, I reached for my pill organizer. The Saturday compartment was hollow. I had only portioned my medication through Friday. The amber bottles were locked inside my Hoover bedroom, guarded by my mother’s deadbolt.
“Go retrieve what belongs to you,” Ruth commanded from the kitchen, wiping her hands. “Then come straight back.”
I killed my headlights a block away and crept through my own side yard like a burglar. The Lockheart’s massive Suburban dominated the driveway. The downstairs windows blazed with golden light. I navigated through the azalea bushes, crouching beneath the hallway window. It was cracked open to catch the spring breeze, the sill crowded with overpowering Easter lilies.
I heard the slow, reverent footsteps before I saw the bodies.
I pressed my face to the glass. Suzanne Lockheart, Avery’s elegant, silver-haired mother, was walking down my hallway. My mother shadowed her, dabbing her eyes with a crumpled tissue. Avery clung to Mitch’s arm behind them. My father loitered in the kitchen doorway, staring fixedly at his loafers.
Suzanne paused directly in front of my bedroom door. “May I?” she whispered.
My mother offered a tragic, trembling nod.
Suzanne stepped forward, pressing her manicured palm flat against the heavy wood of my locked door. She bowed her head, her lips moving in a silent, desperate prayer.
“I still cannot bear to turn the knob,” my mother sobbed, playing the grieving matriarch flawlessly. “It’s exactly as she left it.”
My blood turned to ice. You do not pray over a door unless you believe the person on the other side is permanently in the ground.
I fled back to my car, my lungs screaming for oxygen. I waited in the shadows until 10:20 PM, when the Suburban finally backed out. By midnight, the house went dark. I punched the alarm code and slipped through the back door.
Sitting in the center of the dining room table was a framed 8×10 photograph, partially unwrapped from tissue paper. It was an image of a magnificent dogwood in full, explosive bloom, standing against a brick church wall.
At the base of the trunk sat a freshly carved granite stone. The edges were still sharp and white.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF ANASTASIA DUNAWAY. 1995 – 2014. She is not dead, but sleepeth.
A handwritten card was tucked into the frame: We will read her name at sunrise, Lynette. – S.
I read the polished granite until the letters lost all meaning. Then, my eyes drifted up to the photograph of the branches. Hanging from a low limb, twisting slightly in the wind, was a white plastic tag. I leaned in. The blocky, capitalized handwriting was unmistakable.
CORNUS FLORIDA. CHEROKEE PRINCESS.
I collapsed into my mother’s dining chair. The entire eight-year charade rearranged itself with terrifying, violent clarity. The candle burning down. The missing obituary. My boyfriend’s family lost someone. The lock on the outside of the door.
She hadn’t told them I was thriving in Atlanta. She had told them I succumbed to the darkness in 2014. She let them believe I was a corpse. And I had personally selected and tagged my own memorial tree.
I sat in the humming silence of the kitchen for an hour. Calm is rarely peace; usually, it’s just the body’s refusal to process a fatal wound.
I stood up. I walked to the ceramic dish by the coffee maker, took my mother’s keys, and unlocked my tomb. I packed my birth certificate, my medication, Ruth’s grafting knife, and the yellow notebook. I left the wardrobe. I left the memories.
When I stepped into the hallway, I did not close the door. I left it gaping wide open, the brass key dangling from the lock, the bedside lamp burning a hole into the darkness. I wanted absolutely no ambiguity. When my mother woke for her sunrise service, she would have to stare into the empty, illuminated room and know the ghost had finally escaped.
