Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (9 page)

It might have seemed natural for my sister-in-law to join us in the garden, but it never worked out that way. Her passion lay in flowers, not food. Her own yard was neat and orderly, with hedges and borders and blooming vines. It was a place of relaxation and recreation, not of productivity. The branches of the neighbor's plum tree that arched slightly over her fence irritated her when they dropped their soft fruit on her stone path. She did not see it the way my mother did. Perhaps she had never been hungry enough.

Instead we fell into a pattern: my sister-in-law dropping off the girls at my mother's house when she wanted some free time. Occasionally I joined them, though usually by coincidence rather than plan. One day I came to do some gardening, and when I walked through the wooden gate, I stopped in my tracks, stunned by what I saw before me.

Blankets were spread on the sloping lawn, books and plates of fruit scattered about. Abby and Cate were wearing flowered dresses from a closet my mother kept stocked with dress-up outfits. Japanese paper umbrellas in bright colors lay blown around the grass. It looked like a graceful scene of bucolic outdoor recreation, an impressionist painting come to life. I was dumbstruck by the beauty, in an aching, wistful way.

Was this scene of wonder and delight my mother's doing?

To me my mother was all necessity and catastrophe; I hadn't imagined she could extend to grace. Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe I had been wrong about her—or maybe this part of her had just been buried so long by worry and fear.

We planted sunflowers that day, digging small holes and showing the girls how to drop in the large gray seeds and mound the earth back in place, to press down gently and water them well. We didn't know that, over the next few days, crows would dig up all the seeds and in the end not a single one would sprout or bloom. It didn't matter. It felt like something else was being planted that day, something that would grow in the girls for the rest of their lives.

When my sister-in-law came to pick them up, she sat on the grass in the sunshine and chatted a bit, as the girls changed back into their regular clothes. She told us what she had bought that day, her plans for the weekend, how happy she was to have such nice weather. But she never picked up a trowel or garden gloves. Even though the lawn she sat on was marred with dandelions, even though there was more than enough work to go around, she never jumped in.

Maybe we didn't make room for her; maybe we never invited her in. Maybe we should have. But then again, she never offered. It's hard to know where the lines are drawn.

Abby had been almost one when my mother left Seattle the first time, after a year of trying to live close to my brother and his new family. After she left she visited frequently, but still she worried her granddaughter wouldn't remember her, that she might die without Abby knowing who she was. When Cate was born, that fear doubled.

This may sound extreme or paranoid, but my mother has only a single memory of her own mother. Everything they
shared in the first three years of her life—hugs and lullabies and scraped knees and first teeth and bath time—is lost to the limitations of a child's mind and a death come too soon. My mother didn't want history to repeat itself.

“If I die before they remember me,” she often asked in those days, “will you tell them how much I loved them?”

“Of course I will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

In those days, when my mother visited Seattle to see her grandchildren, she brought books. On the inside cover she always inscribed the same message. It was what she told the girls on the phone from California, whenever they could be persuaded to talk to her:
Grandma loves you all the time
.

As the girls grew, they learned to parrot my mother, they said it together at the end of phone conversations or when she was leaving after a visit. Their high, chirpy voices blended with her own low tones to make a chant, a chorus, a call to arms. She would start and they would join in: “Grandma loves you all the time.”

They thought it was a game, a joke. Only I knew the sad, scared place it came from. Only I knew what it really meant: a little girl with a single memory of her own mother. A little girl who did not remember ever being loved.

Even if she is not here, even when you cannot see her, even if she dies, even if you don't remember her: Grandma loves you all the time
.

For a number of years, when my brother and I were young, we drove every summer from our home in California to the mountains of Colorado. There was a graduate school just starting up in Boulder; my mother was teaching there.

Mostly what I remember is the drive: long and unending,
my brother and me in the back of my mom's old Volvo. We ate plums along the way, throwing the pits out the almond-shaped rear windows that were held open by a funny little hinge. Our pits made tracks of slime on the outside of the car that stayed there until someone washed them off in Colorado three days later.

We sang in the car too. Once we were out of radio range, we sang songs our mother taught us or that we knew from school. We got so good we could sing three-part rounds, each person staggering their start time and going around and around and around until we were dizzy with the music, our high voices combining sweetly, gracefully. You might have thought there were angels singing in the backseat.

We were angels and we were devils. We sang and we fought. There was a line down the center of the backseat and no wartime border was ever so well defended. The mere hint of a finger straying over the line was grounds for outright attack or wailing.

“Moooommmmm, he's on
my
side!”

But even devils get tired. Eventually my brother grew sleepy. When he did he snuggled up to me, and I let him, temporarily suspending the rules of engagement and allowing him room on my side of the car.

“Make your hands like Mommy,” he said, and I gently stroked his hair until he fell asleep. I sat as still as I could as my mother drove late into the night and my brother slept, his golden head in my lap, and together we crossed the desert plains of Nevada and climbed high into the dark mountains, up the spine of a continent and down the other side.

It was my brother who first suggested I move to Seattle. I was still living in Japan at the time, but back for a visit. I had one year left on my contract, and I was thinking about my options. That
summer I visited friends in Colorado and Washington, D.C., as well as San Francisco. Everywhere I went I wondered: Could this be my next home?

The one place I never considered was Seattle. I stopped there only to visit my brother—and because it was partway between my mother's house near San Francisco and the island in Canada where she was teaching for the summer.

We hadn't been close growing up. The teen years in particular had been a catfight. Though perhaps it was a catfight all along. I have a scar on my forehead from a spoon my brother threw at me in a fit of childhood anger. It split the skin, and when our mother heard the screams and came running, she found blood coursing down my face. I was eight, he was six; we had only been trying to play cards.

In the year or two before I left Japan, however, there had been a softening, perhaps a warming. My friend Paul had a little to do with it. We were both working in Japan, and when I heard about the great time he'd had when his sister visited him, I blurted out, almost without thinking, “I want my brother to come visit me.”

“Invite him,” Paul said. And he told me exactly what to say when I called my brother, out of the blue, to ask him to visit me on the other side of the world.

“I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse.”

My brother did come—our mother quickly offering to pay for his ticket. That trip felt like the beginning of our adult relationship, no longer competing for scarce resources. He met my friends, won over local students (“Leo! Leo!” they cried, thinking he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio). He and Paul both teased me, each of them knowing all too well what buttons to press. Suddenly it felt like I had two brothers.

Still, when he suggested I consider Seattle on my list of possibilities, it surprised me. I thought the reason he had gone off to college and never come home was a desire for distance from
family. I thought we were on the same page about that. I had moved to Europe and then to Asia. Distance was a game I was good at.

“Would you
want
me here?”

“I don't think we'd hang out all the time,” he said, a bit defensively. “We'd have our own friends—but I think you'd like it here.”

In high school my brother had surpassed me. Somehow this small child I used to take care of had picked up a social rhythm I couldn't quite grasp. He was funny, popular, a quick wit with sly humor. I was always a beat or two off, standing alone in the cold.

He could have brought me into this circle, but he didn't. He made fun of me; he shut me out. Perhaps he learned it from me. Hadn't I been first to sell him out?

“Nobody likes you,” my brother taunted. It wasn't true, but part of me, the most scared and tender part, feared that it was. That my brother could somehow see through me in a way other people couldn't. That he knew what I really was: a fraud, a failure, destined to be a social outcast. It was years before I realized he wasn't right.

But sometimes my brother surprised me. A few years after he moved to Seattle, I stayed with him on my way down from Canada. I would be arriving late and leaving early and couldn't even tell him for sure when I would show up—ferry lines and border crossings take time. When I arrived, late and tired, I found he had gone across town to my favorite restaurant and picked up an order of the soup that he knew I liked. When I thanked him profusely he shrugged it off, but in those moments I could see the little blond boy who had fallen asleep with his head in my lap.

Now, nearly a decade later, I asked my brother if he was okay with having me in Seattle. I asked several times, just to be clear.
It's one thing to have your sister in your city for the summer, babysitting your kids and dropping off dinner. It's another thing to be stuck with her there, possibly forever.

“You can do whatever you want,” he said several times. “It's fine with me.”

By then I had some friends in Seattle. I knew my way around. But still. Living in the same city would connect us in ways we never had been as adults. At the time our mother still lived in California and traveled often. If something happened to me, he would be the only relative in proximity. Besides my mother, he was the only family I had in all the world.

This change in geography would force us to be more to each other than ever before. Perhaps that is what I should have asked about. Perhaps I should have spelled it out for him.

Are you prepared to be my family?

Was he willing to take that on? Did I trust him enough to let him?

The first winter I spent in Seattle, I got sick. It started on a Saturday when I had driven north of the city to a large thrift sale. I wandered through buildings filled with everything from sporting equipment to antiques but left early, feeling sick. On my way home, I called my brother and sister-in-law to report on the sale. They had been undecided about making the trek.

“There's good stuff,” I told him, “but I feel awful. I have a fever. I'm going back to bed.”

“Sorry to hear that,” he said. “I'll give a call later to check on you.”

He did call to check on me—but not until Tuesday. By then I had spent days in a blazing fugue, feverish and sicker than I had ever been. My sole memory of that weekend is getting out of bed to go to the bathroom and collapsing on the floor, the rough feel of carpet under my cheek. I remember trying to crawl across
the room. I remember wondering if I might die there. I woke two days later, in bed, spent and shaken, the sheets twisted around my legs.

By the time my brother called, I was angry. He was the only one who knew I was sick, knew I was alone. How could he have not checked on me? Was I not more important than a trip to Home Depot—or whatever he had been doing that weekend?

But mostly I was scared. I could have died there. Alone.

I was no stranger to being sick on my own. By that point I had been sick all over the world. In my student apartment in Vienna, my roommate had translated the dosage instructions on my medicine and made me garlic soup. In Thailand, kind guesthouse owners took my temperature and offered food from their own kitchen. In China, fellow travelers I had met only the day before ignored my protests and went out to buy soft tofu for me. They told me it was the only thing to eat after food poisoning.

I had been cared for more graciously by strangers than I had by my own brother.

Even in San Francisco I had been better off. There was Chinese takeout across the street. I knew my neighbors; our buildings adjoined. If I were truly dying, I could pound on the floor, and eventually J.L. would come to investigate. I could shout across the air shaft, and George would likely hear, or Mark and Chris upstairs. We might not have been friends, but our lives were unfolding in close proximity. I knew they would help if I needed it.

In San Francisco I had resources. I knew how to protect myself. But in this new city I was stripped bare. The neighborhood I lived in was desired for its proximity to the Arboretum, the university, the bridge that led to technology companies across Lake Washington. The houses were handsome, some stately, but the well-tended blocks were deserted during the day and quiet at night. Everyone had their yard, their space. Money bought isolation as well as privacy.

I could have pounded, I could have shouted, but nobody
would have heard. This cold fact left me more scared than I had ever been.

The one person who was supposed to be my family had let me down.

That Tuesday, when my brother finally called, I insisted he come over. When he did—still in his work clothes, checking his phone—I yelled at him. I shouted. We fought as we had not fought since high school. Since the days when we slammed doors and ripped them open with such ferocity that the knob went through the plaster of the wall behind, leaving a round, gaping hole. A tribute to our rough anger with each other.