The Mother Garden (7 page)

India comes onto the porch.

“What's going on?” she asks, touching his back. She follows his gaze to the egg. He turns to her, ready to plead—for what, he's not quite sure—when he sees that she's laughing. “Oops,” she says. Her dark lashes shine in the last light of dusk.

I
T'S DAY TWO OF OUR FIVE-DAY VISIT TO MAINE AND
Nick's stepmother, Anna, has barely uttered a word to us. She sits in the center of the braided rug in lotus position, her body draped in a faded violet sweat suit. The room used to hold a giant loom, but it's been moved to the garage. Now the room is empty save for a few low benches where candles burn and bundles of leaves sit, wrapped in embroidery floss.

“Just ignore her,” Nick says. I follow him up the shiny wooden staircase to the bedrooms. He's not ignoring her. He's learned to live with all of this silently, but if I reached out to put my hand on his shoulder right now, he would feel as tense as a snake drawing back to bite.

The whole scene is wrong. It's been wrong from the beginning. When Nick was twelve and his father, Gray, left his mother for Anna—that was wrong. It was wrong that Nick's mother had to live alone in that run-down rental on the outskirts of town, drowning the noise of the neighbors with her radio, while Gray and Anna woke to views of rolling hills. The world has continued to spin like this, tilted poorly on its axis, and it's worn a lopsided groove in the universe.

Despite the sun streaming through the skylights and the white, clean walls, there's no peace here. The door to Milo's bedroom is shut, but I know that if we opened it, the bed would be unmade, the snowboarding poster would still hang on the wall above it. Anna will not allow the room to be emptied or cleaned; it's a battle she's been winning for years.

The windows in Nick's room open to the garden. The air is cool, spring, eastern wood air—the sweet smell of old leaves and new buds. It's a tiny room. There's hardly anything in here—an antique dresser with an old porcelain pitcher on it and a stiff-backed chair next to the bed. No trace of Nick as a child. Milo, age seven or eight, grins from a speckled silver frame. On the wall hangs a framed crayon drawing—Milo's, certainly.

“What do you want to do today?” Nick asks. He wriggles out of his thick brown sweater. It's not really warm enough to be without a sweater, but I admire his optimism. The trees outside shine in the brightness of the day. In the distance, you can hear the bleating of the sheep, occasionally, the squawk of a chicken.

Nick and I used to come up to this big house on long weekends, but I haven't been back in the three years since Milo's funeral. That day, we came up to this room, climbed into bed, blind with shock and exhaustion, and Nick told me that someday he would really understand love, but that he didn't think he did then, he didn't think he ever really had—at least not with me. Under the thick quilt his body altered, became solid and separate in a way I hadn't known before. His knees were sharp, his legs selfish. Inside my own body—which was already still with grief—a deeper silence landed. I closed my eyes and the darkness was particulate, full of spinning shards and gyrating orbs, but my blood and heart had stopped moving.

Nick waits for me to say something. He leans against the dresser, crossing his arms. His eyes are the impossible green of old Coke bottles and shine with a cool, glassy clarity. I could walk across the room and put my lips against his neck and he would put his hand on my back absently and I would stand there breathing the soapy smell of his skin.

The mattress sags when Nick sits. We've only been back together six months. Nick got a job in San Francisco, heading the archival sound department at the public library. He called me once he took the job. We met in Golden Gate Park, went to a bar, then back to his apartment with the futon on the floor and his clothes in low crates. We drank hot toddies and I wouldn't let him touch me. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “You have to believe me.” And I haven't forgotten about the way he left me, the girls he plugged the absence with until I didn't want to talk to him anymore, until whatever passed between us just felt like a joke, some adolescent clinging we never should have engaged in.

“How long does Anna do that for?” I ask. Nick sits up straighter.

“Oh, Becca,” he says, putting a hand over his eyes. “Let's not get into this now.”

“We're not getting into anything. I'm just asking a question.”

“This isn't the worst of it,” he says. “There's a group that comes on Sunday nights.” Outside a car whizzes past on the main road with a horse trailer. A bunch of geese rise off the small pond and disappear over the house. “They channel the dead,” he says. He turns to face me, smirking. Does he really think I can't see it—the broken look that's particular to this older Nick? A mild shifting in the facial muscles that might be mistaken for aging?

“How many are in the group?”

Nick sighs. “I don't know, about five.”

“They meet here?” I ask.

“Sometimes here, sometimes at other people's houses.” He cracks the knuckles of his left hand. “Let's go get the bikes.”

But on the way out to the shed, Nick's father, Gray, barrels up the driveway in his old pickup. He pulls up next to us.

“Becky!” he shouts. Nick kicks the gravel behind me. Gray's been on call since we arrived, so this is the first time I've seen him. He swings himself down from the cab; he's dressed in scrubs and white running shoes. Some of his neck hairs scraggle up around the vee of the shirt. He looks older, as if he's worn a hole in his body somewhere and the water in his skin has leaked out.

“Welcome!” he shouts. I'd forgotten how tightly wound he is. A dad on fast-forward. He talks as if someone's put a time constraint on his life. “It's been too long! Too long!” He thumps me on the arm, then grabs it and pulls me into an awkward hug. He smells strange, like the inside of a film canister.

“You always were a pretty one,” he says, winking at Nick. Nick grimaces. “What are you two up to?”

“We're going to the reservoir,” Nick says, and I can feel his body gravitating toward the shed. Part of him is already on that bike, fleeing down the gravel road.

“Oh, no. Come inside and we'll make a pot of coffee. Becky, I want to hear how you're doing—Becky, Becky.” He shakes his head. “And Nick, I was hoping you could pull up some chairs from the basement for dinner tonight.”

“Dinner?” Nick asks.

“Anna invited some people over.” Nick tenses. I step backward into him, but he doesn't soften or put his hand on me. Gray fishes a bag out of the bed of the truck. He swats me on the arm again as he walks into the house.

While Gray makes coffee, Nick and I go down to the basement to find the folding chairs. They're under a bunch of tarps and old paint cans, and Nick begins to dig them out.

“You okay?” I ask. His hair falls over his eyes.

“Mmm,” he says. “He put this damn belt thing over the chairs. Why would you do that?” Nick yanks on the belt and the chairs, which sit on wheeled palettes, roll toward him slightly. “It's like he's afraid even the fucking chairs are going to try to get out of here.” Nick kneels over the strap and starts to wiggle the metal clasp. I hoist myself up to sit on a workbench. Above my head the shelves are stocked with Ball jars of pickles and jams. The three freezers whir and hum. I like it down here. It's organized and spotless, and there's a feeling of abundance. At Thanksgiving, every dish Gray and Anna serve they've grown and prepared themselves, including the turkey. There's something romantic about it, even if it is self-righteous, as Nick says.

Nick gets the belt off and the chair on the end falls to the ground, making a sharp clatter.

“Take two of them,” Nick says, grabbing three more off the end. The wooden stairs creak as we head back up.

“Thanks, kids,” Gray says. He's holding a black plastic pitcher of coffee and three mugs. Anna still sits cross-legged on the small carpet in the weaving room, her eyes closed, her spine rigid. Gray doesn't acknowledge her.

You wouldn't know it was Anna who planned the dinner. She's still very quiet, even after the guests arrive, and she's careful to sit next to Gray at the corner of the table. She was young when she married him, twenty-six to his forty-one. Her face is still smooth, despite the hollowing of her eyes. She's done something odd with her hair tonight, a princess Leia look with braided buns muffling her ears.

“I lost my baby,” the woman next to me says. I can't remember her name. She holds her knife and fork above her plate and trembles slightly. Her bright blond hair is pinned loosely on top of her head so that it flops to one side and her gray eyes are as focused as a gun. She's shockingly pretty. The smattering of color in her cheeks looks like a small, ragged continent. “He was only six months old,” she says. The rest of the guests talk loudly about Gray and Anna's recent kayaking trip.

“I'm so sorry,” I say.

“And then I lost my husband,” she says. “To leukemia last year.” I can't bring my knife down to the chicken on my plate, though I want to. A gesture of normalcy, cutting chicken off the bone. Nick hasn't touched his food. I can tell he's listening to the blond woman, but he doesn't turn to help me out. He just grabs his bottle of beer and takes a purposeful swig. I set my knife down.

A peal of laughter erupts from the head of the table.

“That's terrible,” I say.

“It changes you,” she says. Nick picks up the bowl of green beans.

“You want some?” he asks, handing it over to me. I take the bowl and hold it for a moment. It feels heavier than it should. I'm afraid I'm going to drop it.

“Thanks,” I mumble. I set it between the blond woman and me. The beans look oily. I can't think. If I don't leave, I feel like I might pass out.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, scooting my chair out. “I'm sorry.” It's awful to do this, to let her words hang in the empty air over my place setting, but I don't have it in me to respond. I don't even know what a response would sound like.

In the bathroom, I sit on the lid of the toilet and focus on my breathing. It's cold in here. Nick and I spent the afternoon helping out around the garden, drinking beer after beer, and then Scotch as we roasted the chicken with Gray, then more Scotch as we hovered around the crackers with the guests as they filtered in. I'm feeling less drunk than tired. Tired from the roof of my mouth inward, into the pockets behind my eyes, down in my windpipe and deep in my lungs.

We've talked about death, Nick and I. It's like a secret we pass around at night but don't dare mention in the light of day. Three years ago, Milo took a rifle out of the gun cabinet and went outside to shoot at the geese. He was fourteen years old. When Anna came home with a pizza from town, Milo was facedown on the grass in a pool of blood.

The day of Milo's funeral I locked myself in this bathroom and cried until I was sick. I imagined Milo crinkling to the grass after the bullet went smashing through his temple. I imagined the bits of gray brain that wormed their way between the green blades, the dark black of his blood, the hose the medics used to wash it away, how his skin sank to his bones moments later. I'd been at the house a few months before and Milo would spend all day in the game room obsessively playing pool by himself. His unwashed hair stuck to his forehead in serpentine clumps. He was small for his age, with long eyelashes and a thin neck.

“We'll show you how it's done,” Nick told him, taking a cue down from the wall. But Milo shook his head. “I'm practicing,” he said. “Alone.” Every time we passed the game room, we could hear the clack of pool balls. We ignored him. It seemed to be what he wanted.

But what made me cry wasn't really Milo. It was the hole that Milo left that frightened me. My mother had been sick for nearly five years. Her death was in every absence—in the quiet of the air when the phone didn't ring, the emptiness of a white wall, the sleeping moments of the cat. It hung around my hands and hair like a fog.

The first year Nick and I dated, our freshman year of college, I lived in a dorm that used to be the women's infirmary, back when the women's college was separate from the men's. It still looked like a hospital, each room complete with a sink and cold slate floors. The building was U-shaped and when the winds picked up in winter, they'd shriek against the stone. I had fevers that year, fevers and hives for no reason anyone could detect. And Nick sat up with me boiling water in the electric kettle, making me powdered soups and tea. He joked about the ghosts of the dead girls and made weird hoo-ing sounds before I'd fall asleep. In my fever dreams, they would appear, the dead girls, their cheeks sanguine, their eyes sad. They'd be dressed in plain cotton gowns and they would show me their hands, always too small for their bodies.

I put my hand on the porcelain sink beside me. It's solid and cool and real, and I wish I could carry it out with me, sit it beside the table. I have to get back to the dinner. Nick isn't going to come to find me, though I wish he would. I wish he would come down the hall and knock on the door and make hoo-ing sounds.

Nick still hasn't touched his food. The blond woman talks with the two women on her right. She doesn't turn to face me as I slip back into my chair. I put my hand on Nick's leg under the table. He gives me a sideways glance.

“We haven't seen Becky in years,” I can hear Gray saying.