Garden of Angels Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  One - September 1974

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five - October

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine - November

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve - December

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen - January

  Seventeen - February

  Eighteen - March

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one - April

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four - May–August

  Twenty-five - November

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  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Copyright Page

  At the house, I saw our car in the driveway and ran up the walk ahead of Adel. In the kitchen, Mama was sitting at the table and her eyes looked as if she’d been crying. Papa was sitting beside her, but he stood when we came into the room. “Hold up, girls.”

  “What’s wrong?” Adel asked.

  He and Mama exchanged glances.

  I went all cold and clammy. “You all right, Mama?”

  She shook her head. “I have to go back to Emory, girls . . . on Wednesday,” she said, her voice a bit hoarse from crying. “I—I have to have an operation.”

  Dear Reader,

  When we hear the word “cancer,’’ it’s a word that frightens. We know that cancer does not distinguish between rich and poor, fat and thin, good and bad people. Cancer can just appear, and the individual who becomes ill, as well as the family and friends of the patient, must cope. I have written many books about people who have become victims of cancer. You may have read some of them already.

  This book is a departure in many ways from other books I’ve written. I have chosen to place the story in 1974 and ’75, a time before many of you, my readers, were born. The setting is the Deep South, the place of my roots—the place so dear to my heart. Although this is fiction, I’ve included many actual events from those two years that helped shape and define the world we live in today.

  During this time, our country was struggling to escape from a very unpopular war that we were fighting in Vietnam. The President of the United States, Richard Nixon, had to face the reality of his actions in connection to a number of scandals and voluntarily stepped down from his office. Gerald Ford was inaugurated as the new

  President. Bill Gates, who was twenty years old, had just founded Microsoft, but at that time technological resources and products were still years away from everyday items that people now use e fortlessly. There was no e-mail. The Inter-net was seen as futuristic, as were home computers, cell phones and pagers. Most homes had a color television set but few had VCRs. Music was recorded on hard plastic records or on large eight-track tapes. CDs and DVDs were yet to come.

  The first McDonald’s “drive-thru’’ with its golden arches was opened. Disposable razors appeared in stores for the first time. Middle schools were gaining in popularity, but many kids still attended junior highs—seventh, eighth and ninth grades. Across the country, high school began with the tenth grade.

  The popular TV shows were All in the Family, Good Times, Maude and The Waltons. What had previously been the most popular show, The Brady Bunch, went off the air in August 1974. October of ’75 was the excitingly innovative premiere of Saturday Night Live. Rock star Bruce Springsteen was just starting out. Musical celebrities of those years were Elton John, Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Eric Clapton. The pop song “I Honestly Love You,’’ sung by Olivia Newton-John, was named 1974’s Record of the Year. The United States was changing, and social issues were being more openly discussed and were being dealt with in society and in the courts.

  In medicine, cancer research was at the forefront, which it still is today. Although cancer was a major health concern, breast cancer was not discussed as openly in society. Most of today’s network of support groups didn’t exist yet. There were no Breast Cancer Awareness Week, no pink ribbons to symbolize the ongoing battle, no walkathons or general fund-raising e forts to eradicate the disease. Breast-saving surgeries were just beginning to be seen as a viable alternative to the more invasive and body-scarring radical mastectomy.

  The treatment of breast cancer has changed dramatically in the years since 1974–1975. What has not changed is the emotional complexity of dealing with losing someone you love. Happily, today many women can “beat’’ breast cancer because of early detection and new treatments. The story you will read is about the love of a family— about how universal love is never set at a certain time: it is forever.

  I hope the information in this note helps you better understand the time and the world in which this story is set. When you’ve finished the last page of this novel, I have added an endnote—I will tell you why I wrote this.

  Sincerely,

  Lurlene

  Prologue

  When I was fourteen years old, four things happened that shaped the course of my life. If you’ve ever felt that things were under control, in the blink of an eye, the world can change. Here’s what happened to change my world:

  American troops were pulled out of Saigon in South Vietnam, half a world away from the United States.

  My sister, Adel, met Barry Sorenson, a soldier and a Yankee from New York City.

  Jason Polwalski, a hunky seventeen-year-old, live-in-the-flesh juvenile deliquent from Chicago, came to live with his sister, our Baptist pastor’s wife, in our town—Conners, Georgia.

  And my mother, Joy Leigh Donaldson Quinlin, was diagnosed with a malignancy called breast cancer that ate her up cell by cell while we all stood around wringing our hands and praying prayers for healing that fell on God’s deaf ears and we visited doctors and hospitals, always hoping.

  All I knew in those days was that the protective walls of my childhood were crumbling. At fourteen you can’t be expected to have the strength or the wisdom to shore them up.

  I was born Darcy Rebecca Quinlin and raised in Conners, population 2,900. The town had one school that shepherded kids from the first through the twelfth grade, four Baptist churches—three for the whites and one for the blacks—plus a Roman Catholic chapel, and a main street defined on either end by traffic lights. As the locals liked to say, “If you blink, you’ll miss it.” Conners was a place I loved, with a history that stretched all the way back to the early 1800s, when the Creek Indians ceded portions of north Georgia to the United States and settlers built log cabins in the pine forest.

  Our family home was built in 1860, right before the start of the Civil War, or as the elderly ladies in Mama’s garden club called it, the War of Northern Aggression. My great-grandmother Rebecca, whom I was named after, became a local legend when, like the fictional Scarlett O’Hara, she hid the family silver and shot herself a Yankee as Sherman was burning his way through Georgia. That happened in late 1864. The war ended seven months later.

  We had farmland before the war, but most of it was sold off afterward to keep life and limb together. The house and a generous yard are all that remain of the original homestead. The house is large and rambling. My mother was born in an upstairs bedroom. Papa moved in directly after their wedding and Adel and I both were brought home from the hospital as infants to live there. My grandmother lived with us until she died, when I was still a child.

  I was raised Southern, which is to say, with the idea that a belief in God is the basis for existence. That serving one’s country is noble and a just and worthy cause. And that loyalty to one’s family is the foundation of civilized life. These tene
ts are, as Mama used to say, “the Southern gospel.”

  When I think back to that time, I see it as through a kaleidoscope of colors, some violent like flash fires, some soft and watercolored. Yet it isn’t right to begin a history lesson in the middle of an event; instead it should be seen from a starting place of safety and security. And so this is how I first remember my history, not from scenes of chaos, upheaval and unbearable heartache, but from my place of contentment, from before my endings began. So I will go back to 1974. I had just started ninth grade with my best friend, Becky Sue Johnson.

  One

  September 1974

  “We walking home together?” Becky Sue asked me as I rummaged through my locker on Friday afternoon. We had just finished up our first week of school and I was in a hurry to go.

  “Only if we leave right now,” I told her, slamming my locker door.

  “What’s the rush?” Becky eyed my stack of books. “How much homework have you got, anyway?”

  Last year’s testing had put me into accelerated classes, Conners’ college prep program. It meant a lot more book work for me. Yet I was glad to be among about twenty in our entire school to be selected for the newly created mix of high-scoring students. I realized that it had fallen to me to do what no female in our family before me had done: go to college.

  I said, “Two papers due Monday, plus a current events report for government class. Mr. Kessler wants weekly written reports about current events. He also wants everyone in his class to do a project before the end of the year.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe something about Vietnam because there’s lots of material about it.”

  “He lost a son in Vietnam. Remember? We were in fourth grade.”

  “I remember.” Mama and Papa had gone to Jeb Kessler’s funeral and to the funerals of three other young men from Conners in the following two years. “I just have to think of a good angle,” I told Becky Sue. “I want an A.”

  Becky took two of my books and settled them onto her smaller stack. We walked out of the building together and the September heat hit me like a volleyball slammed over the net. The locals called it Indian summer. I just called it hot. The sidewalk in front of our school swarmed with kids. First graders were lined up waiting for cars to pick them up. Conners only had one school bus and it did triple duty, taking elementary kids home first, then middle-schoolers, and finally high-schoolers. I lived about six blocks from the school and Becky Sue lived two blocks farther, so we never had to ride the bus. We’d walked to and from school together ever since we were nine years old.

  “Can you come to Byron’s with me tomorrow?” Becky asked. “I’m going to buy Mom a birthday present.”

  Byron’s was Conners’ only department store. Short of going to Atlanta, sixty-five miles north, it was the only place to shop in our town. “I reckon,” I said. “Papa’s driving Mama to Atlanta tomorrow for an appointment at Emory Hospital, so I can’t leave until after they’re gone.”

  “All the way to Emory? What’s wrong with Dr. Keller?”

  “She’s already been to Dr. Keller and he wants her to go to Emory for some tests.”

  “What kind of tests?”

  I shrugged. “They didn’t say. That puts me and Adel at the house together alone, so as you can imagine, I don’t want to hang around with my sister all day. Maybe we can go to the movies after you buy your mom’s present.”

  Two squirrels jabbered at us from overhead tree branches as we walked.

  “Is Adel still going to those weekend gettogethers at the army base?”

  “Hasn’t missed a weekend in the past seven,” I said. The training base was just outside Atlanta and was full of young soldiers, but that was about all I knew about it. That and the fact that my sister and her best friend, Sandy, drove there once a week for Red Cross–sponsored gatherings with lonely servicemen. Adel had assured our parents that there was plenty of supervision and that everything was conducted in an upright and proper manner.

  There were five years and a whole lot of differences between Adel and me. Ever since her graduation, she’d been working at Papa’s bank. Well, Conners Community Bank didn’t really belong to my father, but he was responsible for running the place. He’d hired Adel for training as a teller right after she graduated from high school because it was a known fact that while my sister was beautiful, she wasn’t college material.

  “Bet she’s got herself a boyfriend at the base,” Becky said.

  “Bet you’re right. I mean, what would she do without a boyfriend to worship and adore her?”

  We laughed about my sister’s popularity. At school she’d been Queen of Everything and had left a string of brokenhearted boys behind her when she hadn’t agreed to marry any of them. “I don’t plan to stay in Conners,” she’d told everyone. “I want to see the whole wide world.” But to me it looked like Conners was where she’d always be. I, of course, was planning on staying in our hometown forever. I loved Conners.

  A car full of boys drove past us. The driver honked the horn. J. T. Rucker, a junior and one of our high school’s top football players, leaned out the window. “Hey, Boney Maroney! How’s your sister? She ready for a real man?”

  I felt my face flush. “You know any?” I yelled back.

  “Come over here, Darcy. I’ll show you my manhood.”

  “Get lost, you creep!”

  He slapped the side of the car hard, making me jump; he laughed and the car drove off. “I really hate that guy!” I said to Becky.

  “Don’t judge all boys by J.T. Take Russell Danby, for instance. Don’t you think he’s cute?”

  We’d known Russell since first grade and I’d never thought he was cute. “When did you start thinking Russell was cute?” I asked.

  “Ever since third period when I dropped my pencil and he picked it up for me. When our fingers touched, I got a physical shock. I’m telling you, it went right through me. It was like I was seeing him for the first time. My heart went thump-thump and I knew he was the one I wanted.”

  I decided not to mention static electricity. Becky Sue was my best friend. She liked a different boy every year. She’d write his name on her notebook cover and go all flirty every time she got within ten feet of him. “So your heart thumped— that’s a dead giveaway if I ever heard one.”

  “One day you’re going to fall like a rock for some boy and I can’t wait until it happens. Then you’ll see what it feels like and you won’t be so skeptical of others’ emotions,” Becky lectured.

  “Not likely,” I said with a laugh. I didn’t think much of any of the boys at school—they bored me. “But if it happens, you’ll be the first to know.”

  We stopped at the place where I was to cut through the alleyway that ran behind my backyard. “Call me in the morning after your parents leave,” Becky said. “Maybe we can see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  “Will do,” I said. I watched her walk off, then turned, cut through a hedge, opened a tall wooden gate and stepped into paradise.

  My mother’s gardens were the most spectacular for their size in all of Georgia. On the acre and a half behind our house, she had created magnificent beds and planted stands of trees that had no rival. Mama urged growth from the earth the way God spilled sunlight on the South. It was said that Joy Quinlin could coax flowers from a stick poked in the ground. I believed it. She was president of the local garden club, as her mother had been before her. And it was my wish to be president of it one day too. So I read gardening books and I learned the names of every plant in the yard. I knew when they bloomed, what diseases and insects attacked them, what remedies to use to fight blights and infestations. To me, Mama’s gardens were holy, and I felt closer to God when I was in the yard than when I was in church.

  The yard was meticulously laid out with terraces and paths that boasted annuals, perennials, vines, bushes, a pond and a special section resplendent with a variety of roses. In the spring and throughout the summe
r and fall, the yard was alive with color in every shade of the rainbow. In the center of the yard, Papa had built a gazebo and a path that led to the pond. The pond was rimmed with rushes, and in the spring, water irises. Water lilies floated on the water’s surface. A wooden bench beside the pond was encircled with peony and camellia bushes. Morning-glory vines spread over rocks like delicate fingers.

  When I was a small child, my mother would walk me through the yard and point to the different flowers and tell me their Latin, common and sometimes old-timey folk names. She would point and say, “Now, the maiden pink attracts butterflies, Darcy.” Or she’d stop in front of a particular flower to say, “Those are four-o’clocks because they only come out in the afternoon.” Or, “Look, Darcy . . . there’s a love-lies-bleeding.”

  On our garden walks, Mama used to tell me, “Angels live in gardens, Darcy.”

  “Where?” I would ask, looking around for the white-winged beings I saw drawn in my Sunday school papers.

  “Close your eyes and breathe deep.”

  “All I smell is flowers, Mama,” I would say.

  “Not so. That’s the breath of angels. And the stirrings you hear in the leaves are their wings brushing past.”

  When I was four, I believed her. When I was seven, I knew better. But now that I was fourteen and looking out on Mama’s gardens, I again believed that angels lived here.

  Whenever Mama planted, I helped. I liked to dig in the dirt—unlike Adel, who hated getting her hands dirty. The fresh loamy smell of the earth, the sound of summer rain, the scent of newly mown grass, the sight of sunlight speckling the trees sometimes brought a lump to my throat and made me want to cry for the sheer joy of seeing such beauty.

  I balanced my books on my hip as I passed through the yard. Fall was coming. Despite the humid heat, I could see fall’s telltale signs in the foliage of the trees and the withering clusters of summer flowers. I went up the back steps, across the screened porch and into the kitchen. I dropped my books with a thud onto the table, where Mama was sitting, sipping a cup of coffee and staring out the window.