Do Not Trust The Men In The Garden

When my father died, he left me the key to a safe deposit box. Inside sat a lone poker chip from the Mirage casino. Four palm trees swayed in my blurred vision as I held the pathetic plastic between my fingers, worth nothing on its own.

The outside was blue. Mom always said he had wished I were a boy. Maybe this was his final fuck you.

I was going to leave it, meaningless as it was, when a crumpled piece of paper caught my eye in the back corner. Fishing it out, I smoothed it against the metal edge.

THEY ARE GOING TO COME LOOKING FOR THIS. EITHER FIND THEM FIRST OR BE DEAD WHEN THEY SHOW UP.

Fitting, I thought, leaning against the bank’s metal wall of secrets. The man who gave me life, and then disappeared for two decades, would leave me with something useful: a threat.

I popped the chip into my pocket, slipped the note back into the box, and left the bank on the path of sunlight littering the street ahead.

There are no photos of my father anywhere in my mom’s apartment. She said he didn’t like photographs, that the only real image was the one happening right in front of your eyes. She used to throw those words back at me when I fell. I was a clumsy child, tripping over nothing, and she joked that I didn’t know how to see what was right in front of me. I hadn’t paid the poker chip much thought; surely it was a bad dad joke, until I walked into the apartment later that evening, tripped on the rug, and flung out the contents of my pocket on the way down. The chip spun, then settled.

$1.

The phone rang.

I don’t remember picking up.

“Hannah?” The voice sounded underwater.

“Are you at your mother's? You need to get out of the apartment. Now.”

That voice.

“Daddy?!”

His voice rang louder now: “Do not trust the men in the garden.”

“What garden?!” I was screaming now, shrill.

“The men are,” A knock sounded at the door.

I dropped the phone.

The phone seemed to fall through the floor, my body with it. When my body hit solid ground, I was on the Las Vegas strip, sweating, sprawled in front of Treasure Island. The pirate ship rose up behind me. Tourists side-stepped.

The phone was nowhere to be seen, and in my left hand, I clung to a tall can, opened, halfway sipped, painted with a jungle cat’s face peering between tall grass.

A family of four began to walk around me. The youngest, a boy, stopped and picked up my poker chip, lying near where I had fallen. Hurrying, so as not to get scolded, he threw the coin at my feet. The same cat laughed on his shirt. The chip landed heads up, $10.

“What in the hell, “ I asked the sky. I blinked my eyes against the glare of the sun and woke up in the apartment.

When the drowsiness left my body, Mom stood over me with a worried frown.

“What is going on?” I asked tentatively.

“You opened the box, didn’t you?”

“You knew?” I screamed, trying to fumble my way out of the blankets she had laid around me and only getting more stuck.

“Calm down,” she soothed. “You’ll hurt yourself fumbling around like that.”

I stilled, patting my body for the poker chip.

“It’s in the other room,” Mom said, knowing exactly what I was reaching for. “You can’t be too close to it, or you will keep shifting.”

“Shifting?” My mouth went dry. “I fell, I was in Vegas-”

“I know,” she said.

“You don’t know.”

“I do, I saw you. I was in the bedroom when you got home from the bank. I heard the voice you were talking to. It wasn’t your father. I saw you fall, and you were just gone.”

I crumpled against the couch, letting the blankets pull me under.

“Mom,” I said slowly, “how long has this been happening?”

“Honey,” she paused, “it’s been three months.”

Three months. What had felt like minutes to me had lapsed three months of my life.

“You have to bring it to me,” I raised my body, certain, staring at the bedroom door.

“Hannah, it’s not safe. Your father-”

“I know, Mom”, I cut her off. “Dad has been this mystery to me my entire life. I’ve always felt unstable. Something is happening, and I have to know why. His note, I think we are in danger. You have to trust me.”

I felt certainty creep up my spine. I needed to trust myself.

I pushed myself off the couch and shoved my way past her. When I reached the bedroom door and pulled it open, she was close behind. I saw the poker chip on the nightstand, blue, palm trees swaying as if taken by a breeze. I reached for it and felt Mom’s hand grab me, push me down. My hand was inches from the chip, close, but not touching, when my body hit the ground. For a brief second, I could feel the shift in climate, time, and space. I landed, harshly, in the grass. Birdsong, sunshine, heat.

The grass did not feel real, as if it had been laid on hot pavement. In the distance, light refracted, bending toward something that might have been water.

I got to my knees and began to crawl, anything to get off the grass.

A low growl stopped me.

I looked up.

The cat stood where there had been nothing a second before. Large, unmoving, its teeth pulled back in something that might have been a smile. Its eyes did not blink.

I had seen it before. Not here. Not like this.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said, or thought I said. My voice didn’t seem to travel.

The cat turned its head slightly, as if listening to something behind me; the sound of rain falling, the clink of rushing coins.

Poker chips. The grass was littered with poker chips.

“Hannah,” a voice sang.

“I don’t know what’s happening.”

In answer, the cat paced back and forth, looping in and out of invisible trees.

“Do you see it yet?” the cat asked suddenly, in a booming, male voice. The voice was warning me on the phone.

“Daddy?”

A voice, strange, familiar, reached back to me.

“I’ve been waiting for you, baby.”

“What is this? Where are we?”

“This is my garden, Hannah. I made a deal so that I could have you.”

“I don’t understand. What is happening?”

“There are ways ghosts cross between worlds, Hannah. Objects, Portals. I laid the chips for you, I tried to get you to fall through. Your mother would not let you go. Her side is very strong. But I had money. I bought this garden for you, Hannah, for us. I paid.”

The cat’s shadow stretched long across the ground, rooted where no tree stood, instead, swaying forms that looked like bodies moved back and forth.

“You died,” I remember, even though I don’t remember anything.

“Physically, yes. But I left you the key first. I knew, when your soul was tired enough, it would tempt you.”

“Am I dead?”

“The world gets us all, Hannah. The cost of living can be immense, but in death, it just takes one good hand. I made a deal, Hannah. I spent the money. Here, we can be anything we want.” My father's face began to shift, morphing into the Cheshire grin of a cat. “Don’t you want to play in the garden, Hannah? We have money here, all the money, and friends.” He nodded toward the swaying bodies. “Your mother doesn’t want you to play.”

“I don’t want to be here,” I told the grinning cat. “I don’t want whatever you can buy. I want to see what is right in front of me.” I didn’t know my father; I only knew the idea I had made of him. It allowed me to want an idea, any idea, the mirage of who the man should have been.

“You gave me the energy to feed off your need.”

I did not want this deal.

I did not want this man.

“We will find you,” my father sings, as shadows begin to move forward. “There’s so much desire in this world: for money, time, attention. My warning pulled you in, Hannah. Remember that.”

I stood up, my feet unsure on the chip-laden grass. I remembered being a little girl, clumsy, blaming myself for not being good enough. He said I could fall through. I turned my back and let my body fall, fall into the grass, into the unknown, the earth shifting, taking me back home, letting him remain a mystery.