37. The Return of the Garden Rapist

 Later that Saturday evening as Thad and I got ready to go eat, there was an aggressive knock at the front door.

Looking to him inquisitively, I went and opened it and then and there almost shrieked: As I live and breathe it was the Garden Rapist, standing there on the front porch looking just crazy as a loon with her giant gleaming gardening fork, luridly abnormal ponytails, and distressingly snug mom jeans.  

“Remember me!” she said, her Latoya Jackson eyes spinning around in their sockets as if on individual gyroscopes.  

“Oh! Yes. Hello.” I glance down to make sure the screen door was locked. It was: that would surely protect me from her attack.

“I was just driving by,” she began, “And I thought I would stop by and see if you wanted to do another flower exchange, you know?  I got a whole bucket of my irises out in my truck, and I brought my fork.” She brandished it and laughed like a deranged imbecile. “So what do you say, Michael?”

“No!” I just blurted out, having learned my lesson with her last time. But then afraid she might stab me, softened it with, “But thank you. We’re about to go to dinner, so now is not a good time.”

She narrowed her eyes, “Then when would be a good time? I can come back. The flowers I brought are real pretty. Just come on out and look at them. Come on out. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“No…no thank you.” I shook my head. “We are really busy right now, just really busy lately.”

“But, I mean, I can come back right? You did say I could. I gave you all of those pretty irises before. I thought we had a deal.” She had not moved her body since I opened the door; she had been motionless except for waves of that big fork to punctuate her sentences. And now she was just speaking flat crazy.

I took a step back and deepened my voice slightly, “You know, I don’t think I ever said that. I was fine with the one exchange we did last summer.”

“But you did say it, Michael. You did.” Her eyes flared up like wild fires.  

I was truly afraid of this small woman, as you could tell there was something unholy creeping deep inside her.

“I’m really sorry but I have to go,” I said with a forced smile. “Thanks for stopping by, and you take care now.”

As I started to shut the door she did not move one bit. Our eyes locked and her look was a murderous one, like she wanted to cut me and cut my flesh and lap up all of my blood till it was gone.

The door lock clicked. Through the stained glass window on the door, her shadow was clearly visible to me, still unmoving. 

I stayed perfect still, waiting- praying- for her to leave.

“Who was that?” Thad said walking through the room.

I jumped so high I almost fell over, and turned to hiss, “Shhhh….”

When I looked back the shadow was gone. I had not heard her leave. I took a step toward the living room window and pulled back the lace curtains: no one was out there, not even her car. How could she have gotten off the porch and driven away so quickly? Maybe she just slipped around the corner of the house? Was she hiding on the other side of the window, just out of view?

“What the Hell are you doing?” Thad snapped from behind me, and I again almost jumped out of my skin.

“Quit doing that!” I said in a loud whisper, running my hands over my bald head.  

“Why are you whispering?”

“It was her,” I said. 

“Her, who?”

“The Garden Rapist.” I mouthed.

His eyes widened and he whispered, “Oh! Is she gone?”

“I don’t know…I don’t know.”

We both looked out the window wide-eyed.

After we searched the porch and backyard and found nothing, Thad tried to convince me she had been a ghost, and that I actually had been dead the whole time since the beginning of the movie.  I did not think that was funny, but he sure did. 

          Thirty minutes later, as we sat down to dinner at the Chinese restaurant, I pulled out my list.

          “What’s that?” he asked, suspiciously.

          “It’s the list for Gaga.”

          “Jesus Christ,” he sighed. Can I at least get some food first?”

          “Well, yes of course.” I said, crossing ‘EAT DINNER’ off of the top of the chronological list.

I waited in somewhat silence until he was about half-way through his plate of noodles and sushi before I pulled my list back out. He hated my list-keeping, but it was necessary for me.

          “So I booked us a hotel room downtown, right near where the concert is going on. I’ll take care of the hotel since you got the ticket.”

          “Good,” he smiled.

          “The concert is at 8 PM, so why not leave here at 1PM? That would put us getting to Tulsa at 3 PM, we can settle into our room, have dinner somewhere, walk around downtown, and then be at the concert just before eight, okay?” 

          I looked at him and he said nothing, not even looking up at me.

The problem we had was that I required multiple levels of planning to stay calm, especially when leaving town, yet planning had the exact opposite effect on Thad: it just tripled his nerves.  He would rather just sprint out of town with not a plan in the world, and be perfectly fine with that; whereas that would literally just kill me flat dead on the spot. But where he could not plan to save his life, I was perfectly capable of spontaneity, as long as it was planned well in advance. Suffice to say, we did not travel well together. 

          “Is that okay?” I repeated louder.

          He rolled his eyes and banged his fork down. “Michael, I want to go to this concert with you, but I don’t want you to make it into this big ‘thing,’ like you do with everything. I don’t want things to be so analyzed and planned that we can’t have fun. We’re just going to Tulsa for the night, for the concert. It’ll be okay. Please let it be okay.”

          “It will,” I lied. I was so tied in knots waiting for my lab results that I could hardly focus. Putting all of my attention on Gaga had really helped, and I had actually calmed some. There was no way that I was going to lessen that organizational hold on this concert, at least not until I got clean bill of health. Surely I would get the results back before the concert. But I had ceased sharing these feelings with him, as he told me I was being ridiculous.  

          We were silent for a minute as we ate.

          Then I just could not hold it in any longer, “Well, what do you want to do the day after the concert up in Tulsa?”

He stopped eating and frowned. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
“Well,” I began as animated as I could to try and engage him, “I thought the

next day we could go to brunch at the Philbrook Museum, and sit there and overlook the gardens and eat. Wouldn’t that be nice?”  

          “Yeah,” he softened, “It would be. That sounds great.”

          And with that we both melded into talking about the trip and how fabulous it was going to be, and how exciting the concert would be and what souvenirs we wanted to buy, and how excited we were to see Gaga, and for that meal I actually quit thinking about my impending test results and the fact that I might actually be dying of, oh, I don’t know, Bell’s Palsy.

          Back at the house after dinner, as I fumbling with the key at the door, Thad whispered, “Look…”

          I turned to see a car slowly driving by the house. The driver was in the shadows at first, but then I made out a woman…in Jackie O glasses… and a head scarf…the Garden Rapist, and she was staring right at us!  

          “Get in! get it!” he screamed.

          And we ran inside like terrified school children to frantically lock all of the doors, shaken to the core.   

          “She’s evil, you know,” Thad whispered.

          “I know. I know.” I said, peering out of the front window, shaking.  

          She again was nowhere to be seen.