(2008) Down Where My Love Lives (36 page)

Sweat had begun to bead on her top lip, and an I'm thinking wrinkle had creased the skin between her eyes. The ripple effects of the coma had been many, but it had done little to dampen her intensity.

I prodded her. "No, seriously, we probably need a few more of those."

She pointed a crooked, double-jointed finger in my face and said, "You want to end up on the couch?"

"Only if you're there."

She turned and kept counting flowers. "Don't get your hopes up."

"Yeah." I spread out my arms and yawned. "That whole snowangel thing probably wouldn't work too well on the couch."

She cracked a smirk, picked up a handful of dirt from a nearby pot, and threw it at me.

Unfazed, our young assistant smiled and held up every plant like a true professional. With each one, Maggie stuffed her pencil behind her ear and weighed the look of the plant, the color, the size, and the cost. Several times she put back a perfectly good plant because the price was too high.

I picked up on her process and sensed her growing disappointment at the expense. I could see the high prices were quickly diminishing her idea of what our yard would look like. She had come in here thinking Martha Stewart's garden and was walking out thinking Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. So I backtracked to pick up what she'd passed over. When I reappeared, she looked at me and whispered, "Dylan, we can't afford all that."

I looked at the cart. "You're right, but I'm married to a woman who spends twenty dollars on a Christmas tree and a hundred and fifty on lights."

Our assistant laughed and then, seeing we needed a minute alone, excused himself and disappeared toward a huge greenhouse at the back of the property.

"Maggs," I whispered, "I don't care what they cost, because-"

I looked at her. She had regained some of the muscle she'd lost in the hospital, and the chiseled tone in her face and jaw had returned. Her overalls were faded and baggy, but they couldn't hide her strong shoulders, lean arms, the way the sweat beaded on her temples and just in front of her ears, and the penetrating depth of her eyes. Maggie was still that complexity that found meaning and expression between extremes, and all that beauty was just starting to bubble back up to the surface. Like the flowers she tended, my wife was full of buds and on the verge of exploding with color.

"But, Dylan ..

Blue circled around us, wagging his tail.

"It's all right. Really."

"But how?"

"'Cause at the end of the day"-I held up my hands, dirty and green from loading pots-"we're living ... and life is thick."

Our assistant returned, leading an older man who wore a straw hat with a hole in the brim. "This is Mr. Wilson, my boss."

The man extended his hand. "Merle, all my customers call me Merle."

Maggie turned, tried to wipe her eyes without being seen, and stood behind me.

"Hello, sir. I'm Dylan, and this is my wife, Ma-"

"I know who you are. I seen the papers." He smiled and blinked several times, then pointed around the nursery. "Anything you want, at my cost. And if you'd like, come with me."

He led us to an enormous greenhouse out back where it looked as though he did his own seeding and potting. The place was overgrown with mature plants. "This is where I bring some of my best customers and those folks who really know and love plants."

Maggie stepped inside, eyed the rows of his well-kept secret, and sucked in a breath of air large enough for a woman three times her size. When her head and shoulders slowly lifted, it looked as if someone had shoved an air hose into her spine and filled her up.

I extended my hand. "Thank you, sir."

He nodded and stepped backward out the door. `Jes' holler, if'n you need anything."

We filled six carts that would later require four trips in my truck to haul it all back to the house. Eventually, Merle just let me borrow his mulch trailer, which on the last trip I had them fill with about eight cubic yards of potting soil and mulch. I returned the trailer, then found him at the register so I could pay our bill.

While he totaled it, I noticed a pink orchid stretched out across the counter. "How much for the orchid?"

He smiled, cleared out the calculator, spat a stream of dark juice into a can behind him, and said, "Follow me." We walked around the back of the property, and he led me into a humid greenhouse filled entirely with orchids. 'These are my favorites," he said. "I don't usually let customers in here, but ... again, at my cost whatever you want."

There must have been two hundred plants. As Merle explained the story behind several of them and told how to care for them, I made mental notes. When he finished, I bought fourteen. He totaled my order and laughed like a man who knew the pleasure of dirt beneath his fingernails. He followed me home in his van so the wind wouldn't damage the orchid buds, which were just days from opening.

I thanked him again, carried the orchids into the house, and then found Maggie out between the house and the barn surrounded by her plants. She was holding a watering hose set on high, and the spray spread out into a wide fan that was doing a pretty good job of soaking everything we'd just bought. I tipped back my hat and sat on the front porch steps, trying to estimate the number of planting hours I had coming.

She clamped the hose off and said, "Honey, how much did all this cost?"

I smiled and stuffed the receipt back into my pocket. "Let's just say we won't be going back to New York City anytime soon."

Her jaw dropped. "That much?" Then she smiled, looked at her plants, and said, "Well, this is better than Riverdance."

I scratched Blue's head and laughed. "Honey, you're weird."

She nodded, and then a sneaky look stole into her eyes. I tried to jump out of reach, but I slipped on the steps, tripped over Blue, and landed on the grass face-first. Maggie unclamped the hose and doused me in about three gallons of well water. By the time I wrestled myself free of Blue and out of the stream, Maggie was on top of me and showering my head with her fire hose. I grabbed her by the pant leg and wrestled the hose free.

When she realized she was about to get a taste of her own medicine, she howled, "Dylan Styles! I do not want to get wet!" But it was too late, and she didn't really mean it anyway. I held her by the bibs and poured ten seconds' worth of egg-smelling water down the back of her bibs. She squealed at the feel of cold water that had come up from almost six hundred feet belowground and was now spilling out the bottoms of her pant legs.

It took us the entire next day just to set the plants where she wanted them, and another three to get them in the ground. The day after we finished, I drove to the hardware store and had a bronze plaque made that read YARD OF THE YEAR.

AFTER TWO DAYS IN LABOR AND ONLY MOMENTS before delivering our son, Maggie's cheeks had become flushed as she lay in bed. She'd clenched my hand, watching the contractions under the haze of the epidural, and I watched her. I remember thinking that there in that place, draped in sweat, exhaustion, and the giddiness of expectation, Maggie had never seemed more alive.

Moments later she opened her soul and pushed for what seemed like hours. Physically spent, defying what I thought were the laws of physics, she did what only she could do, and then, as if his universe somehow collided with ours, he appeared. The doctor caught him, there was a gush of liquid, and the doctor never even hesitated. He rushed him to the table, spread him like a lab experiment, and started to work.

That's when the smile left Maggie's face. Blazing only seconds before, it drained out of her like light from a candle that had burned out its own wick. It dimmed, sputtered, and snuffed itself out. Only the trail of smoke and the threat of hot wax remained.

Maggie had never held him. She had never held her own son. Wide-eyed yet afraid to breathe, she'd watched as they failed to revive him. Then she watched as they pulled the sheet over his scrunched, blue head and recorded the time. That was one of the last images she'd seen before she went to sleep. The other was my face. When she woke up, he'd been in the ground for months.

For Maggie, the desire to have a child was like that. It was like breathing. It was as hardwired into her DNA as the sound of her voice, the look in her eyes, and the touch of her skin. Take it out and you might as well take the Maggie out of Maggie. But it was that very desire that had put her in the coma in the first place. I wondered how she'd see it from the other side, but if anything, it seemed that the coma had made the desire that much stronger. If I'd thought she was on a mission the last time, I had another thing coming.

Toward the end of March-having conquered the weedswe returned to the hospital for her first female checkup.

Dr. Frank Palmer was a good man. Midforties, father of several kids himself, he was always running between soccer, basketball, or baseball games. His wife and his kids were his life. I liked him and admired him for the way he went about his doctoring. Let's face it, people's privates are private for a reason, but he spent his entire day invading other people's privacy. Somehow he managed to do it with class and respect for his patients. He treated Maggie like a niece or a cousin whom he was both comfortable with and protective of.

Following her exam, Dr. Frank pulled me aside while Maggie was getting dressed. He raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice. "You might want to exercise some caution for a while in what you two do together."

"Like?"

"Don't watch too many Hallmark movies, don't go to a baby store anytime soon, try to keep her away from anything that involves needing Kleenex, and-most importantly-try to keep her thoughts on the future, not the past."

I looked down the hall. "But I don't understand. She's not responsible."

He nodded. "We know that, but her emotions don't, and until they level out, no power on earth can reason with them."

Dr. Frank referred us to a reproductive specialist whom he'd heard was setting the world on fire. With referral in hand, we drove to Charleston and saw a female doctor with more degrees on the wall than anyone I'd ever met. Between medical school and residency, she'd been in training for twenty years. And judging from all the plaques and signed pictures of famous people, I knew we'd come to the right place.

Her nurses ushered us into the examination room, which was nice as examination rooms go. In fact, it was the nicest one I'd ever been in. Of course, it had the cold, hard examination table with the stirrups tucked up along the sides, but it also had some artwork on the walls, a few comfortable chairs, and even a couch along one wall, suggesting that they had worked to put their patients at ease.

As I was studying the room, a petite nurse with a ponytail so tight it was pulling back her eyes set a small plastic cup on the table next to me and said, "We'll need a sample." She pointed over her shoulder at the small sliding door that led from this room into what must have been a lab or something, and said, "Just slide it through there when you're done." Then, as if she'd just asked me to record the time of day, she walked out and pulled the door shut behind her.

I eyed the cup. Why would a fertility doctor need a urine sample from me? What good would that do them? Confused and bewildered, I turned to Maggie, who, unable to hold it any longer, began laughing like a hyena. That was about the time I understood what the nurse meant when she said sample.

I looked around the room again and got a whole new understanding of the decor. I shook my head. "Is she serious?"

Maggie was laughing so hard she couldn't talk.

I pointed at the cup. "I'm not doing that."

Evidently Maggie had assumed I knew that when a couple visited a fertility doctor for help, the first test they performed was a sperm count. She slid the lock on the door, turned off the light, and sat down next to me. Swinging both her legs across mine, she hung her arms around my neck and pressed her forehead against mine.

"Hey, forget them. It's just me, and we can do this together. We're good at this."

I looked around, wiped the sweat off my face, and nodded. Sunlight broke through the cracks in the blinds and lit the dust particles that were floating through the air, settling on Maggie's skin as she changed out of her clothes. She slipped into a pink, flowery gown and then tiptoed across the room barefooted, took me by the hand, and led me back across the room to what I understood was the husband's couch. With my heart pounding inside my chest, the growing fear that someone was about to walk in that door, and my embarrassment evident, my wife did the one thing she alone could do. She made me forget about everyone but her, and she loved me.

A few minutes later, Maggie slid the sample into the lab and unlocked the door. I guess that sent a signal to the nurse, because she appeared pretty quickly after that. Maggie sat on the end of the table, knees together, her legs bouncing slightly on her toes. The nurse laid Maggie back on the table and prepped the equipment for the doctor, who walked in a few minutes later.

She was older, maybe midfifties, and looked serious. She extended her hand to me, then to Maggie. "Hi, I'm Dr. Madison."