The Night Gardener
by Marie-Helene Bertino
The first balloon arrives at midnight when Claudia is gardening. It is late summer in Pennsylvania, and the bats are already gone. The short-eared owls and the sandpiper, too. The last known family of great egrets has recently produced a clutch of eggs. They live in a park near Claudia, on the edge of the city. She is nagging the rhododendron roots, thinking about their wide white wings when she senses a figure behind her. A green balloon hovers, lilting on its string, as if summoning the courage to speak. Claudia opens a folded ecru paper stapled to its neck and reads the patient, handwritten scrawl: HELLO.
“Hello,” Claudia says.
How long had it been there, levitating over a pile of discarded lily ends? Where had it come from? The yards to her left and right are person-less; the woods that border the yard empty. A deer that had checked on her earlier is gone. Hands covered in earth, Claudia uses her forearm to manage a brow itch. Even the clouds seemed paused, to wonder.
Only a week remains before the Horticultural Society will judge her in the City Gardens Contest. Claudia had been hoping to finish before the rain.
Collecting discarded lily ends signals the end of her gardening session and though she loves it—the sealing in of the night’s practice—she is sorry for the work to be over. She considers her- self an assistant to unburdening, trimming stems of waste energy. The bodies of the dead lilies are cool against her palm as she hangs her tools in the shed. The balloon flinches, flicked in- visibly on all sides; the first raindrops. Claudia pulls the balloon inside the house. Before bed, she reads a few pages of her nocturnal farming digest. In one of the photos, a line of combines harvest grain in a staggered formation at night, hulking their sieves through a field under powerful headlights. It is an aerial view, the machines fall down the image diagonally. Their conical beams light the wild, moving wheat in front; the furrowed field left in darkness behind. They look like spaceships, Claudia thinks.
In the morning, Claudia’s thighs are sore. She likes when the previous night’s work visits upon her body. In the garden that afternoon, a blue balloon twists in the branches of her willow tree. Claudia braces the ladder against the trunk and climbs. She unwinds its measure from the hanging vines. A folded card identical to the first is stapled to its string.
YOU SEEM LONELY.
The moon and yard provide no answer. Internet searches (spam balloons, balloon messages while gardening) prove fruitless.
That evening, Claudia peers at Raj through the peephole. He wears dark jeans and holds a sleeve of peonies and two silver metallic balloons: HAPPY 4TH BIRTHDAY. Behind him a student drifts by in a Cutlass Ciera. A nearby driving school owns a fleet of them, roofs outfitted with enormous STUDENT DRIVER signs.
“I thought it was funny,” Raj says.
Claudia met Raj at her data entry job. The promise she felt when they began dating has transformed into a two-sided gem; in some lights flashing boredom and in others disgust.
“Is this your house?” he says, following her inside.
Claudia does not understand the question. He gestures to the green and blue balloons in the corner kowtowing from air loss. “Looks like someone got here before me.”
Claudia makes a simple dinner of greens and avocado and shows him the cards that landed with the balloons. Raj does not suspect anything mysterious. He explains that the local grade school holds field days when students write messages on balloons they release simultaneously. He participated when he attended. There had probably been a balloon release a few days before, he reasons.
Claudia attended a school that did not have field day. “That sounds horrible for the environment.”
He laughs and says most balloons never make it out of the parking lot. One year his was popped by a power line. She appreciates that he does not use the occasion of remembrance to brag. Yet his story feels like a dismissal of her balloons, and she doesn’t like the metallic ones he brought that shine against the ceiling like cleavers.
“Thank you for the peonies,” she says. It is meant as a closing remark that will propel him to leave.
“Irises,” he says.
She takes a picture of the flowers and texts it to her sister: WHAT KIND OF FLOWERS ARE THESE? “No one knows more about flowers than my sister.”
He seems pleased they will have a future reason to talk, but Claudia knows she will not update him. He leaves. Relieved, she slits the Mylar balloons with scissors, squeezes them airless against the counter, and junks them. Loyalty. She imagines the green and blue balloons nodding in approval.
After midnight, she is winding a cucumber vine through a trellis when she feels a blow against the top of her head. She’s been buzzed by a—it cannot be. A bat makes wild arcs through the garden. Claudia thought all of the bats were gone but this one is as real as she, slicing the air with its might, making inquiries of each bank of branches. Its searching takes it to the treetops; a small, black, beating muscle pounding back reality above her. Even as it pauses at the farthest edge of every arc to reposition for the return, allowing her to take in its unmistakable grips and wingspan, she cannot believe in it.
Claudia began to garden at night because of the heat index but had developed an instant love for its weatherlessness, its sense of hovering and secrecy. She liked that the night yard contained only a handful of sounds and that they were natural sounds: the yeps of the toads and the katydids’ measured counting, though she missed birdsong. The day’s colors could be garish and over- whelming but at night she dealt in placid greens and navies, the occasional sheen of her trowel under the moon, but mostly gentle dark. In the dark her hands were untroubling ideas working the soil where unearthed worms burrowed into deeper earth. She liked the air’s cold, firm hand, and that she almost always entered the house shaking with exhaustion, skin coated in a mist she hadn’t felt collecting. One gardening session ended when, startled as if from reverie, Claudia found herself surrounded by the rattles and whoops of morning birds. The world seemed kinder at night, and she was more susceptible to that kindness. Like the moon lilies that wait until the sun has set to speak.
This is the first year Claudia has entered the City Gardens Con- test. First prize is a professional rain gauge. The runner-up receives a five-dollar gift certificate to a garden supply store.
A few members fussed because Claudia lives on the outer edge of the city in a freestanding house. I pay city taxes, she typed in a letter, I have a city zip code. It worked. In a few days, senior members will judge the area of land she has ordered and trimmed based on her taste and talent.
In the yard the next morning, Claudia jumps for an arriving yellow balloon.
Behind it, timed like a passenger jet, an orange.
The yellow balloon’s card reads:
DO YOU LIKE YOUR LIFE? The orange:
WE ARE VERY SCARED.
The messages are not what a grade schooler would write, but Claudia dials the elementary school and leaves a message. She excavates her art supplies from her basement, cuts a small square of paper, and writes:
MY NAME IS CLAUDIA ROSE. I AM A BROWN DATA ENTRY CLERK AND I DO NOT LIKE MY LIFE. WHY ARE YOU SCARED?
Claudia removes the card that reads DO YOU LIKE YOUR LIFE?, replaces it with her reply, and releases the balloon. It sends itself out of the yard on its original path, lit dimly by the waning moon.
She pulls the lawn mower from the shed but after several tries must accept it is broken. She can’t afford a new one. She remembers reading about a nocturnal farming collective that trimmed what was left of their grass with scissors. A photograph: Young people holding slim, delicate shears, on their hands and knees, constellated over a lawn.
The next evening, a red balloon arrives:
WE ARE SORRY YOU DO NOT LIKE YOUR LIFE.
A few minutes later, a pink:
WE ARE UNDER ATTACK.
Lighthearted with romance, Claudia sends:
I AM NOT RARE. MOST AMERICANS DON’T LIKE THEIR LIVES NOW. MANY OF US ARE SCARED TOO.
Wanting to express interest in the person or people sending the cards, she adds:
WHO ARE YOU? WHO IS ATTACKING YOU?
She watches the balloon sail out of the yard, flirt through the willow branches and the gap between the electric poles, over the maple copse furred in heat.
Later, she watches the news and boils water for spaghetti. The American bittern is gone. The black-crowned night heron and the long-eared owl. The great egret eggs should hatch within the week. The mother and father take turns incubating. Volunteers camp beneath the tree, shooing climate tourists. The president stoops to receive a golden necklace on the other side of the world. Claudia wonders if her balloon friends live near the faraway country, where gay people and dissidents are beheaded. She never should have watched that infamous video. What does it say about her, that it was at once more and less brutal than she anticipated?
Claudia’s job requires her to spend several hours seated at a desk in a climate-controlled office. She inputs sheets of names and addresses into a massive spreadsheet. The names belong to older people who sold their life insurance policies to Claudia’s company in exchange for a lump sum. Claudia only feels awake at night, kneeling under a variation of the moon.
The next evening, before leaving for a data entry clerk happy hour, Claudia crawls across her yard, snipping the grass with her sister’s vintage scissors. A black balloon arrives:
WE DO NOT HAVE MUCH TIME. IN A FEW DAYS WE WILL BE GONE OH WELL.
A purple balloon:
THE BIRTHMARK ON YOUR NECK IS LOVELY.
Claudia sends back:
HOW CAN I HELP?
The balloon vaults the maple copse before making a purposeful retraction, as if asking itself a question, then answers through the opening made from two electric poles, skirts the willow, and investigates a farther breeze.
She waits for a response until she must get dressed.
The bar is in the basement of a local housing complex. Her manager has ordered chicken fingers, chicken wings, and chicken nuggets for the team. Plates of them are spread around the cock- tail tables. Claudia nurses a whiskey and listens to gossip regarding a new associate. She longs to be home, scanning her backyard for balloons. Please let there be a balloon when I get home. She retreats into the bathroom to press a fingertip against her birthmark, waiting as if for a lover’s text.
“Such a nice spread,” one of her coworkers says, meaning the fingers, wings, and nuggets.
“Unless you’re a chicken,” Claudia says. “At which point it’d be like a house of horror.”
“You’ve been absent-minded all week,” another clerk says. “Messing up your twos and fours.”
“Love,” guesses another clerk. She winks at Raj across the room, who grins, winks back.
Claudia announces she will leave. Explains about the garden, the lawn, the contest.
“What does a professional rain gauge do?” the coworker says. “It measures rain.”
The coworker glances toward the window. “Not much to measure these days.”
Outside the bar Claudia takes a picture of a large tree with green stalks topped by wild yellow lilies. A tiger lily variant? She’s never seen one so large. She texts the picture to her sister: WHAT FLOWER IS THIS?
On her street, Claudia gets stuck behind a student driver creeping down the road. Feeling selfish and warranted, she leans on her horn with the rigor of shame. But at home there are no balloons. She sleeps crosswise on the bed, still in her go-out clothes.
Raj wakes her and tells her to dress quickly, there is something she must see. They are in the empty parking lot of a featureless concrete building. At a side door, Raj backhands a curtain to reveal a room retrofitted to hold an enormous churning machine. Pumping and whistling, it produces her ecru cards, dozens a minute. They churn and spit and replicate, piles stacked to the ceiling. Raj hands her a few to read. YOU SEEM LONELY. HELLO. WE ARE VERY SCARED. YOUR BIRTHMARK. YOUR THROAT. O DEAREST CLAUDIA.
You’re one of many, Raj says. You are not rare.
Claudia feels betrayed, furious. The noise of the machine grows louder. The stacks grow. Claudia, Raj, and the room are suddenly underwater. Claudia swims to catch a student driver passing at the edge of the lot.
“Come back.” Raj swims after her. “You must stop telling yourself stories.”
Being able to admonish her through water feels like a practical ability only he would have, which infuriates her more. Claudia paddles furiously but the car remains the same distance away.
The next evening, a white balloon arrives:
YOU CANNOT HELP US IT WILL SOON BE OVER THANK YOU.
A lavender:
EMBRACE EMERGING EXPERIENCE.
Claudia resents the flimsy spirituality, something she could crack out of a fortune cookie. Lack of sleep makes her skittery and mean.
I HATE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE SCARING YOU.
She sends it and turns to her garden things, intending to busy herself. She cannot spend another day distracted by worry. A few minutes later, a new balloon floats behind her. Her scream is so loud it makes her laugh.
WE DO NOT WANT YOU TO HATE THOSE WHO HATE US.
Claudia gazes at the sky. She writes: WHAT CAN I DO?
She neatens the yard, locks the house, and drives to the twenty- four-hour supermarket. On a vine blooming over the mangled shopping cart gate, burgundy trumpets lift toward the moon. She texts a photo to her sister: WHAT FLOWER IS THIS?
She purchases a dozen balloons and drives home where she at- taches cards and brings them to the backyard.
She releases the first:
TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
The second:
TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
The third, fourth, and fifth, etc. . . .
The activity clears her anxiety, enabling her to pull weeds. She stands in the middle of the garden at dusk, holding a hose.
No balloons arrive.
Days pass.
Claudia feels too big for her body. She doesn’t know where to put herself. She tries the bathroom, the kitchen, the yard. Her life before the balloons feels like it belonged to someone else. Let nature take the garden, she thinks. It is obscene, anyway, to force plants to do one’s bidding, to pretend that ordering a plot of flowers will stave off whatever’s coming.
Raj visits, holding another metallic balloon. On it he has stapled a card that reads: I’M IN LOVE WITH CLAUDIA. Her lack of interest has clarified his desire.
“At least let me see the garden,” he says, gleaning her disappointment.
He follows her to the yard where the grass is half trimmed, half wild. “Mower’s broke,” she says.
He gazes at the portulaca, the willow, the lilies. His voice is respectful, careful. “How did you learn to garden like this?”
“My sister,” she says. “She must be so proud.”
Claudia is too tired to protect his experience. “She’s dead.” “But you,” he says, “texted her the other night?”
“It wouldn’t be fair if everything had to end when someone dies.”
He seems to expect a longer explanation, but she can’t help if it’s not simple for him, and she cannot forgive him for the dream. A weed. After he leaves, she murders the Mylar balloon and throws it and the card into the trash.
The evening news reports the great egret eggs failed to hatch. Too much time has elapsed, it is hopeless. The father has vanished. The mother refuses to surrender her station. The newscast shows footage of her, head tucked into a wide pale wing, a bright smear on a mirror. Claudia looks onto the front street hoping a leaping cat will appear or a sudden downpour or even a student driver pausing underneath the streetlight to gather strength. But there is only a trash can wearing a flattened box like a hat. Not even a moon.
Claudia drives to the local elementary school. The receptionist reads the cards and agrees it’s strange. She looks up the last field day and finds there hasn’t been one for twenty years, since Raj was a student. She shows Claudia a photograph from the final one and tsks over the image of smiling children holding balloons on a vast lawn. “Grass and balloons. Terrible for the environment.”
Claudia feels vindicated. “That’s what I said.”
A tree hangs over the parking lot, heavy with an embarrassment of flowers. Falling over one another, enough for every branch plus extra. The richness of its lemony fragrance catches in Claudia’s throat as she holds up her phone.
Claudia drives home, mind buzzing with theories. Could the balloons be from that last field day, delayed? Or replicated by some lonely person with a helium tank? It occurs to her to be scared but the balloons seem friendly, altruistic; receiving them felt like being regarded with neutrality. Someone curious who does not wish to intrude. The way the deer check her when she gardens. Intending nothing more threatening than You, there. For a moment, she allows herself to imagine her sister is sending them. From heaven or some other, more believable place.
A Cutlass Ciera coasts by, piloted by a driver filled with fear.
The messages use “we” but Claudia does not rule out the source being one person. She knows that we-ness can be a singular experience. Further, that one person can contain many.
Claudia enters the house feeling deflated. She pours a tumbler of water and stands at the counter, drinking, gazing through the window to the yard. The Horticultural Society people will arrive in the morning and the grass is still overgrown. This, plus her address-related shaky standing plus the tenuous strand that separates newbies from veterans could mean disqualification. After a hasty dinner, Claudia spends hours crouched in the yard, clipping the grass manually. The grass soaks through her jeans as she moves around the maple, the rhododendron, Siberian iris, and portulaca. The woods are dark. Fireflies point things out on the lawn. Ordinarily, their gentle lamps would fill Claudia with ease, however fireflies are an insult when all she wants are balloons.
An hour has passed when a huff of sound retracts Claudia’s attention into sharp focus. Dark bodies surround her in the dark. She remains motionless and catches glimpses of them in parts: Shining eyes, a muscled torso, the flick of a tail. Their hesitant breath. She senses the others waiting behind farther trees. The deer move past her into the forest. In the center of their party, a dew-slick fawn tests new legs. The others shield and teach with their unhurried movement. Claudia doesn’t move until the final one, a doe that faces her until her family is through, turns and with a showy leap rejoins them.
This is no receipt of new information. Yet the clarity of this encounter, the clap of moisture against her palms, prompts an inarguable feeling of dread.
The great egret father is hit by a motorist traveling to the mountain festival. The son of the driver catches the entire encounter on film. The father egret swoops too low over the highway. The collision tears one of its wings. Beating the remaining wing, it at- tempts to ascend and is hit by a second car.
Claudia turns the news off. Her face is hot with anger. What is the worst part? That she had seen the bird in pieces? Or that even after being hit he was still trying to fly?
Three pale, blazered women holding thick pads of paper glare into the sun. They decline glasses of water and the colorful plates of food Claudia had laid out as they file into the yard. None of them live in the city, she discovers through small talk, but descend from the suburbs to judge the city gardens that usually happen in window boxes or rooftops or in communal plots.
They scribble notes as they move around her work. Claudia stifles the urge to explain every plant.
They commiserate under the maple as she un- then rewinds the hose.
“Good,” one of them says. “Except for the rhododendron situation.”
“Situation?” Claudia says.
They glance at one another before one of them says, “Dead, of course.”
“What is your definition of dead?” Claudia says. “Unable to produce new growth—”
“Get on your hands and knees and look at the work I did.” They look at the ground.
“This is bullshit,” Claudia says before realizing she will say it. “You come in here and judge my garden?”
The judges consult each other. “That’s our job.”
“For a lousy rain gauge?” Claudia makes a shooing gesture.
She no-thank-yous the judges out of the garden.
One of the women pauses at the fence. “It’s a very good rain gauge. Professional grade.”
“There’s nothing to gauge!” Claudia says.
The judges retreat to a boxy car parked in front of the house as a student driver glides by, pumping the brake. One of the judges, waiting for her colleague to unlock her door, does not see him and is clipped. Two collisions: the bird and the judge. For a moment, Claudia conflates them. There is an unsettling thumping sound, and no screaming.
Late that evening, Claudia returns from the hospital. The judge had been only bruised, but it had been an upsetting experience for her, her fellow judges, and the student, who followed them to the hospital at a glacial pace, signaling when it wasn’t necessary and taking too long to park. He is likely ruined for driving. Claudia’s membership to the Horticultural Society has been revoked, a decision she agrees is best for everyone.
In the kitchen, Claudia pours a tumbler of water she immediately drops. It shatters against the floor. The garden is filled with balloons. Hundreds of colors and strings. An undulating body consisting of separate parts, flashing in moonlight.
Claudia runs outside and gathers as many as she can. Relieved to tearfulness, she unfolds the first note with shaking fingers. The next and the next. Each bears the same message, hitting harder with each repetition. She clambers to reach the ones stuck in the maple, the power lines. Maybe one will say they survived. Maybe one will contain what she needs, a location, a reason, a point. But she finds only the same violent fold, again and again, hundreds, an onslaught, bearing the same painful, impossible thought: CLAUDIA, FILL YOUR HEART WITH LOVE.