HADLEY
Hadley’s house was small,
bought almost four years before with the money from her husband’s
life insurance policy, the one that listed “automobile accident”
but never told you about the red of a car slamming out of its lane,
the way life couldn’t be insured, only paid for. The way the future
could become a bank of clouds you couldn’t fly over.
The real estate agent had shown her the house,
nonchalant in her certainty that Hadley would say no. The house
had, to be sure, seen better days, and even from the outside the
shape suggested that the original architect had perhaps not been
one at all. But for Hadley the house had been perfect, its main
entrance a side one, hidden by an arbor drenched in climbing roses.
Loneliness would look for a front door, Hadley thought, might not
track her down the narrow bark-covered path, might get lost among
the unruly green, the whispered distractions of sweet white scents.
She’d paint the door, her door, a quiet blue, she decided, even
before she opened it and saw inside the house.
It was a house too small for ceremony, marriage
or otherwise. A side porch just big enough for taking off gardening
boots, and then instantly the kitchen with its old milk-paint
cupboards rising to the ceiling and an ancient apron sink with rust
marking the well-worn path of water dripping from faucet to drain.
An afterthought of a table with one chair nestled into a corner
next to a 1930s range. A checkerboard floor of faded red-and-white
linoleum, the edges of the tiles catching gently on the soles of
Hadley’s shoes. Beyond that, a child-sized living room looking out
to a tangled mass of garden, a footnote of a bathroom, and a
bedroom with a twin bed pushed against the wall to make space for a
tiny dresser.
“It doesn’t even fit a real bed,” the real
estate agent had said, shaking her head in disbelief.
Sean had been tall; a queen bed was the smallest
size they could ever consider. Hadley had spent her three hundred
and sixty-three married nights entangled in his limbs as his long
legs reached across the mattress, searching for space like vines
stretching for the sun. After the funeral Hadley had begun sleeping
with pillows packed around her; it kept her from moving, waking
into the recognition of his absence.
“A twin bed is fine,” Hadley answered, ignoring
the curiosity on her agent’s face. Her agent was young—not even
thirty, her bed still a playground, Hadley thought. No need to tell
her it could be otherwise. No need to realize that they were likely
the same age.
But as Hadley looked around the house, she found
she was drawn to its diminutive proportions, the way each piece of
furniture fit into a nook like the living quarters of a sailboat. A
safe place, out of the weather. You could even pretend you were
sailing forward.
“Are you seriously interested?” the agent
asked.
“Let’s see the garden,” Hadley responded, as she
headed back through the kitchen. But she already knew.
HADLEY’S FRIENDS AT WORK had thought it strange
that she bought a house. It seemed so conservative and grown-up,
inconsistent with the fun-loving Hadley they had known who worked
in marketing and went kayaking and biking with her boyfriend, then
husband, on the weekends. It seemed odd for a woman to settle down
and buy a house after her husband died. In their universe, the
order was usually reversed, and preferably with a long lag time
between one and the other.
But for Hadley it had all been perfectly clear.
When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely
human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order
simply to move forward through their days. If that suspension
faltered, if you truly understood, even if only for a moment, that
human beings were made of bones and blood that broke and sprayed
with the slightest provocation, and that provocation was
everywhere—in street curbs and dangling tree limbs, bicycles and
pencils—well, you would fly for the first nest in a tree, run
flat-out for the first burrow you saw.
But her friends still saw everything the old
way; they crossed streets against the lights, ate hot dogs from the
corner vendor who everybody knew didn’t throw out his unsold
product at the end of the day. It was more than Hadley could bear,
to watch them. More than she could bear to sit at her desk and
remember the woman who used to sit there, the woman who had a
husband and who kayaked and biked on the weekends. When her boss
called her into his office to offer her a leave of absence, she
agreed, except she made it a permanent one. She had money saved up,
for the trip she and Sean had been planning to South America. And
there was more left from the insurance; the house was small, not
expensive. She didn’t need much. She wasn’t planning on doing
anything. One more move and she could be done.
SEAN’S MOTHER HAD COME to the apartment, sobbing,
to take whatever of his childhood Hadley hadn’t hidden in the back
of dresser drawers, in the cabinet above the refrigerator.
“I know you loved him, honey,” her mother-in-law
said, her voice made greedy by loss, “but surely you can’t want
these things from when he was little. When he was my boy.”
And Hadley, looking at her mother-in-law’s raw
and jagged grief, couldn’t say yes, she did. Couldn’t tell her
about the nights when she had worn Sean’s high school track and
field letter jacket and nothing else, Sean laughing at how very
much of her it covered, making hopelessly awful jokes about hurdles
and endurance and pole vaulting as he undid the snaps, one by one.
Couldn’t say she wanted Sean’s silver baby cup for the child that
would not be conceived.
In the end, however, there had been relatively
few things that Hadley brought with her to the new house. After her
mother-in-law had left and the apartment returned to silence it
seemed as if each object Hadley picked up was suddenly freighted
with the heaviness of hidden fists, ready to sucker punch. A
toothbrush, its bristles splayed with use. A magazine with the
corner of a page turned down. The bowls, red when all the rest of
their plates were white, because Sean said cereal deserved a happy
color. After she had answered the phone that evening when
everything changed, she’d tried to eliminate the reminders. She
took the black T-shirt and jeans she had been wearing and convinced
the funeral home director to sneak them in with Sean’s body just
before the cremation. She stayed far away from the smells of
roasting chicken and lemons, smashed the dinner plates that had
been set out on the table, dropping them extravagantly from the
third-floor apartment window until the landlord agreed that it
might be best if she were allowed to break her lease as well.
But it had turned out that reminders were like
dandelions; yanking one out only seemed to grow dozens, and Hadley
had found herself putting one item after another out on the curb in
front of her apartment building. They were always gone by
morning.
SHE HAD MOVED into her new house, bought plates
and a twin bed at a garage sale, borrowing other people’s lives,
and sat on the couch in the living room for months, drinking tea
and watching the garden encroach, welcoming the feeling that she
was surrounded, getting smaller, buried like an acorn under the
leaves.
A friend from college passed through town.
“Dear Lord, darling,” she said, looking out the
living room window at the garden. “They’re going to need the Jaws
of Life to get you out of here.” A Freudian slip. It was
astonishing how often they showed up, Hadley thought, as if Sean’s
death was an uneven step people couldn’t help tripping on.
But Hadley didn’t mind the unruly nature of her
garden. She was safe; there wasn’t a car in the world that could
blast through that wall of green. She could feel the garden
reaching out its arms to protect her.
HADLEY HAD BEEN MAKING toast one Saturday morning
in early summer when she heard a van grumbling up the driveway next
door. The house had been built on speculation, the freshly laid sod
around it as plain as her own garden was overgrown.
Hadley stepped out the kitchen door and heard
the sound of a young boy’s voice, muffled at first by the closed
windows of a car, then let loose into the world.
“Mom, look! It’s a secret garden!”
And within a moment, she heard the sounds of
something large and heavy being dragged across the yard and landing
hard against her fence.
“Tyler!” a woman’s voice called out. “What are
you doing?”
“Looking!”
Hadley heard the boy’s voice muttering as the
object shifted against the fence, and then a head popped over the
top of the boards. The face looked to be about six years old,
towheaded, both hair and skin showing the remains of a peanut
butter sandwich. The boy stared at Hadley, who stared back.
“I live here now,” the boy said, finally.
“So do I,” replied Hadley.
The boy looked about. “I think there are fairies
in your garden.”
“Maybe.” Hadley had to admit there had been
times she’d had the same thought, usually late at night, when a
scent she couldn’t identify floated in the open kitchen door.
“I’m sorry.” A woman’s head joined the boy’s, a
newborn cradled against her shoulder. “Is he bothering you?” she
said, nodding toward her son.
“Not at all,” replied Hadley, feeling the wheel
of politeness creak slowly into motion.
The woman’s smile was relieved.
“I’m Sara,” she said. “The ringmaster of this
traveling circus. This is my son Tyler, and that’s my husband,
Dan.” She nodded across the yard toward the house, where a young
man, another baby in his arms, was trying to open the front door of
the house for the movers.
“We thought we’d be in the house before the
twins came,” Sara said, a bit apologetically, but whether the
apology was to Hadley or the babies, Hadley couldn’t tell.
ONE MORNING, about a week after Sara and Dan
moved in, Hadley had been trying to muscle open a reluctant living
room window when she heard the babies crying next door, first one,
and then both. Hadley went outside and looked over the fence.
Across her neighbor’s yard, she saw Sara through the curtainless
living room window, walking in her bathrobe, holding a nursing baby
in one arm, while attempting to balance the other on her shoulder.
Hadley started to draw back from the intimacy of the scene but she
saw Tyler at the window, looking out toward Hadley’s house. He
spotted her and waved.
Hadley found herself walking across the grass in
Sara’s yard, the damp blades cool against the soles of her bare
feet. Tyler came and opened the back door.
“The babies have been awake forever,” he said
simply.
Hadley entered the living room; Sara saw her and
merely nodded, any personal need to apologize for the bedlam of her
household long gone in the fog of her exhaustion.
Hadley crossed the room and took the extra
baby—the boy, she figured, seeing the blue sleeper-suit. She
brought the small body up to her shoulder, patting his back. He
smelled soft and warm, like flour that had been left in the sun.
She could feel the waves of his sobs as the sound blasted near her
ear. Instinctively, she took him outside, where the fresh air
startled him momentarily into stillness.
“That’s a good boy,” Hadley said, rubbing his
back. “See how nice it is.”
Tyler followed her and stood, his hand touching
her elbow.
“That’s Max,” he commented. “The other one’s
Hillary. They cry a lot.”
“Well,” Hadley responded, thinking about it. “It
must be hard not to be able to talk. Do you remember what that was
like?”
Tyler shook his head.
“Me neither,” said Hadley. “But I bet it’s
lousy.”
She moved her feet gently, back and forth in
rhythm with the breeze outside. The baby burrowed into the warmth
of her body, settling against her chest, his head resting on her
shoulder. Every once in a while the shudder of an almost-forgotten
sob ruffled his body and she would press her hand against his back,
letting his movement sink into her body.
“I’m going to check on Mom. I’ll tell her you’re
okay,” Tyler said, his voice grown-up and companionable.
Hadley walked the baby over to her yard. The
roses cascaded off the wooden arbor in huge curtains of white. She
opened the gate and walked inside the garden, over to an old blue
garden chair that was just barely holding its own against the
overgrowth of ivy. Holding the baby firmly with one arm, she bent
over and swept off a layer of dried leaves and sat down, sinking
into the deep embrace of the chair. The garden was quiet; soft,
forgotten scents filtered down from the arbor and up through the
overgrowth around her. The baby relaxed, his body lowering into
sleep. She could feel the heat of his body against her chest as he
sank deeper, the way the warmth seemed to open her ribs, leave room
for her lungs.
An hour or so later Hadley woke to the sound of
the gate opening. Sara stood there, smiling.
“Tyler said there were
fairies in your garden,” she commented.
AFTER SARA LEFT with Max, Hadley had walked back
into her kitchen, running her fingertips along the countertops and
the rounded handle of the old refrigerator, feeling for changes.
Because things had changed, the air warmer,
quieter somehow. She felt stronger than she had in a long
time.
She paused in the middle of the kitchen, turning
to tell Sean, and then realized what she was doing.
AFTER THAT, it had been the most natural thing in
the world to cross the yard, pick up a baby, stir a pot on the
stove. Whatever needed doing.
“You are a lifesaver,” Sara said. “What can I do
for you?”
“This,” Hadley answered, and she had bought a
small blue wooden step, just high enough that Tyler could reach the
latch on her gate.
ABOUT THREE WEEKS AFTER Sara had moved in, a
woman had arrived at Hadley’s door, introducing herself as Marion
and asking if Hadley wanted to join a baby-holding circle for Sara.
Although Hadley had not been excited about the concept of joining
anything, a feeling of protectiveness rose up in her—she was hardly
going to let Max and Hillary go into hands she didn’t know—and so
she agreed. Marion also roped in her younger sister, Daria, a
choice that Hadley questioned the first time she met her, but Daria
melted into the twins and quickly became a favorite. Marion’s
friend Caroline suggested her friend Kate. And there they were—five
women, one for each weekday.
Eventually, Hadley had come to know all of them.
It was Marion who started the tradition of stopping by Hadley’s
after her shift, for a cup of tea if it was morning, or a glass of
wine if she had a late afternoon slot. One by one, the other women
followed suit until sometimes Hadley wondered, not always
gratefully, just whom the circle was holding. But over the months
she came to look forward to these visits, the way the edges of the
women were softened by their time with the babies, their voices
becoming lower and more melodious, words caressing things they
loved rather than darting out at the world’s frustrations.
Of course, they all wanted to set her up with
someone.
“Hadley, you’re young. You’re gorgeous,” Daria
had remarked early one evening. “You should be going out and seeing
people. Men.” Daria liked the afternoon shifts with the twins; they
allowed her a full day working at her pottery studio and then a
chance to unwind with the babies, as she put it, before going out
in the evening. Daria said there was no aphrodisiac for men like
the look in a woman’s eyes after she had been holding a baby.
“It’s like we’re just radiating pheromones or
something,” Daria said. “You should use this to your advantage.
Find a guy—at least have sex.”
“I’m fine,” Hadley replied. “I don’t need anyone
right now.” Hadley had wondered why it was so important to all of
them. Truly, she was so much better than she had been after Sean
died. She simply didn’t have an interest in men anymore. It wasn’t
that she didn’t like them; she just knew how easily they
broke.
“BUT DON’T YOU WANT this?” Caroline asked one
morning, nodding her chin down toward the sleeping baby in her
arms. She had come over, bringing little Hillary with her.
“No,” Hadley lied.
ONE AFTERNOON, almost a year after the women had
started the baby-holding circle, Kate and Hadley had been sitting
in Hadley’s kitchen. Hadley was making tea, watching the steam
rise, the way the hot water lured clouds of brown tea from the
bags. As Hadley poured milk into a small pitcher Kate turned to
her.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
Hadley nodded, concentrating on the milk, the
way the white of the liquid met the white of the pitcher, the two
so similar and yet if you paid attention you could see the
difference. She knew what Kate was going to say; she had seen the
change in Kate’s face over the months, the way her eyes had
darkened, pulling in her thoughts. You could tell, the same way you
could tell if a woman was pregnant. The opposite of glow.
“They think they’ve caught it early,” Kate said.
“They say I should be just fine.”
Hadley waited, listening. She remembered the way
people used to talk and talk when she told them what had happened
to Sean, as if words would somehow fill up the space that suddenly
gaped around her. What she had wanted was silence. But now,
listening to Kate, it was as if she could hear the brakes
screaming, the sound of the impact as fate hit her friend and sent
her life flying. No wonder people wanted to talk.
“I knew this would be hard for you; I wanted to
tell you myself,” said Kate. She looked outside to the garden, away
from Hadley. The kitchen was quiet. “It’s so green,” Kate said,
almost to herself.
“WE’RE CHANGING THE baby-holding circle,” Marion
had told Hadley. “The twins are a year old; Sara’s got it under
control. It’s time to take care of Kate.”
Hadley felt her chin pull back, an involuntary
movement.
“It’s too soon,” she said. Her voice sounded
childlike, even to her, but she didn’t know what else to say.
She had been waiting, the way the books and her
mother on the phone and the nurse at the hospital that night had
said. They said it would get better, day by day. And it had. Each
day was one more stick in the bridge she was making over the
crevasse of Sean’s death. One more thing to stand on. But all it
took, apparently, was one piece of news, one small sideswipe of
someone else’s life and you were standing on the edge again, your
stomach already falling.
“I’m not ready,” she said.
Marion nodded. “When do you think you would be?”
she asked, her voice calm and nonjudgmental.
Hadley stopped; she couldn’t imagine.
“You know,” Marion said, “I met a woman once
when I was a teenager. I knew she had gone through a lot, but she
was so strong, so compassionate. I asked her how she could be the
way she was, and you know what she told me?”
Hadley shook her head.
“She said, ‘You can be broken, or broken open.
That choice is yours.’”
AFTER HER TALK with Marion, Hadley had gone to
the hardware store and bought a long-handled lopper. When she got
home, she chopped a space out of the ivy that surrounded the chair,
a rough frame to the chaos around it. Still, it was space. When
Kate saw it, she laughed.
“Any port in a storm, Hadley,” she said.
After that, Kate often came to Hadley’s house
after her treatments. Kate would fall asleep in the big blue chair
in the garden and Hadley would sit and watch the ivy grow around
her. And every time after Kate went home, Hadley would cut it back
again.
FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS the women had held tight
around Kate, as if simply by their existence they could form a
boundary that would hold her inside when it seemed everything else
was trying to pull her away.
But Kate hadn’t died, had stayed inside the
circle, and after the last test results had come back stunningly,
miraculously clean, they all had met that September evening for
Kate’s victory party. And when Kate had told Hadley that her
challenge was to take care of her garden, there wasn’t a single
woman at the table who was surprised.
IT WAS A MORNING in late March. Hadley stood at
her back door, looking out at the green sea that was her backyard.
The ivy flowed over shapes that might have once been bushes,
swirled up the trunk of the plum tree and along its branches, crept
up the walls of the house and edged across the windows. It was easy
to be seduced by the lushness of it all, to be overwhelmed by the
determination that carried it green and thriving through winter
when so many plants cut loose their leaves and sent their roots
hustling deeper into the ground at the first sign of cold weather.
Hadley had promised Kate that she would take care of her garden,
but she had delayed, daunted by the task, watching as the ivy came
closer, winding its way along the path and up the porch. As she
stood on her back porch, Hadley glanced down to see a tendril
casually reaching out for the doorknob.
She walked resolutely into the kitchen and found
the gardening gloves Marion had given her. Then she went outside,
hearing the screen door close reluctantly behind her.
“Okay,” she said, and put on her gloves.
SHE STARTED at the back door, unraveling the
serpentine vines that traveled up the porch railings toward the
house. The soft green tips came loose easily under her fingers, but
it was only a matter of a foot or two before the tendrils hardened,
their glossy leaves hiding clusters of threads tenaciously latched
onto the wood. Pulling them off left footprints of suckers and
brought away chunks of paint.
Well, Hadley thought, I needed to repaint
anyway.
And she pulled, dropping the leggy strands into
a pile that grew until her only option was to get rid of it. She
dragged an old black plastic trashcan from the garage and plunged
her hands into the mountain of discarded ivy, shoving in armload
after armload. When the can was full, she climbed in, using the
railing for support, and stomped down with her feet until there was
room for more. When she could cram no further, she gripped the can
with both hands and dragged it to the curb out front and
returned.
An hour later, Hadley stepped back and looked at
the porch. Ripped clean of its vegetative covering, it had a
slightly scarred quality, its white paint mottled with bare patches
and ivy threads, the area around it bare. But its lines rose clean
and straight from the ground, claiming its space. A firm place to
stand on, she thought as she looked at it—part inside, part out.
She wondered who the architect was who had first understood that
basic human need to have a place, a moment, to pause before
entering, to shift from the person you were outside to the one you
would become when you walked through the door.
She hadn’t gotten that, she thought, looking at
the porch—when Sean died, there had just been before the phone call
and after. No illness, no aging. Just Sean and then no Sean. No
porch to stand on, to get ready to go inside.
I needed a porch, she thought.
She stood hot and dirty in the early spring air,
looking out at the garden. Above the tidal wave of green she could
just make out the tops of the plum tree branches.
“My yard,” she said, looking at the ivy. “Not
yours.”
She took off her sweatshirt, then picked the
first vine she could distinguish from the tangle on the ground and
yanked; it gave way with a quick snap and a spray of dirt and dust,
leaving her holding a piece some five feet long. She’d never win
like that, she thought. She chose a new strand and pulled, slowly
and steadily this time, drawing it toward her hand over hand,
feeling the tension grow as she worked her way down the vine. She
closed her eyes and increased the pressure as she felt resistance,
feeling only the hard line of energy between them, the rope of the
vine through the gloves on her hands. She pulled, hard. Somewhere,
deep in the undergrowth, the ivy was giving up, unlatching from the
ground at its very source. She was almost there.
There was a crack and she flew backward, landing
hard on her tailbone. She swore loudly, not caring who heard her.
It felt good. She opened her eyes, stood up and grabbed another
vine and then another and another. The muscles in her arms and legs
grew warm as she worked; her mouth became gritty from the dust and
dirt that flew through the air. She worked, not thinking, time
measured in huge paper yard bags—one, two, three, four.
After hauling the fourth bag to the front curb,
she took a break. She was hungry, her body demanding food. She made
a sandwich and brought her plate outside, sitting on the porch
steps in the cool air, taking huge, gratifying bites of turkey and
bread, sweating slightly and looking out proudly over her progress.
She could do this, she thought. It wasn’t such a big deal.
The sun had changed position as she worked and
was shining down through the leaves in the back of her yard. She
had always wondered what kind of trees lined the fence—their trunks
were hardy, the branches thick as her arm. The ivy didn’t stand a
chance against them, and the thought had always brought her hope.
She had looked forward to clearing the space around the trees,
giving them more room to grow. Now, between the sun and her
efforts, she could truly make them out for the first time. Her gaze
idly followed the patterns of vines climbing up them.
No, not up them, she realized with a start—from
them. The trees were ivy.
“Oh no.” The words came out of Hadley’s mouth,
small and quiet. She stood up, her hands shaking, took the sandwich
to the kitchen and placed it carefully on the counter. Then she
walked to the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and got into her
tiny shower. She sat on the floor, her back against the cold tile
wall, her face in her hands, feeling the water falling over her
head.
HADLEY WOKE UP the next morning to the sound of
voices in her yard. Her head ached and her eyes still felt swollen.
What time was it? She reached over to check the clock, feeling the
creak and growl of her muscles, the blood still heavy in her head.
Nine A.M. Who was in her yard? Maybe the ivy had really taken over,
grown legs and voices and was coming for her house. It didn’t seem
impossible.
The voices became louder, laughing.
She pulled on her bathrobe, wincing when she
reached her left arm back to find the sleeve, and then walked
gingerly to the kitchen door.
They were all there—Sara and Dan and Tyler and
the twins, Kate and Caroline, Marion and her husband, Terry, Daria
and Henry. Marion held up a machete, Dan a chain saw.
“We’re bringing in the big guns,” Tyler said
stoutly.
IT WAS AS if she had been gardening with
fingernail scissors the day before. As she watched, the sharp blade
of the machete flung aside curtains of ivy while the chain saw
ripped through branches. The ivy, so invulnerable the day before,
seemed to melt in the face of so much concerted energy. In front of
her eyes, the climate of her backyard was changing from shade to
sunshine.
They worked in pairs, cutting and bagging. They
took turns filling water bottles and passing them around, or taking
care of the twins, who, unlike Tyler, were not enthralled with the
scream of motorized tools. At one point Caroline convinced Dan to
let her use the chain saw, wielding it with great satisfaction
against the trunk of one of the ivy trees.
When she was done she passed the chain saw into
Hadley’s hands. “Try it,” she shouted over the noise of the
machine. “It feels great.”
The machine vibrated and bucked slightly, just
barely in control; it was like holding on to the handlebars of a
mountain bike while flying down a steep and rutted trail. Dan
slapped a pair of goggles over Hadley’s eyes and pointed to another
ivy tree, giving her a thumbs-up.
She put the edge of the blade against the trunk
of the tree and felt it buck back.
“You gotta commit,” Caroline yelled,
laughing.
Hadley tried again and felt the blade dig into
the hard surface, chewing its way through. As she reached the far
side of the trunk, a canopy of branches and limbs fell to the side
and sunlight rushed into the opening.
Dan took the saw back and turned it off. The
garden vibrated in the sudden silence.
“Come on,” Caroline said to Hadley, “let’s pull
this sucker out of here.” And they grabbed two of the larger
branches and dragged their prize out to the truck Terry had waiting
at the curb.
SIX HOURS LATER, they all stopped and gazed about
them.
“It looks great,” Marion declared.
“It looks like a clear-cut,” Daria
snorted.
“Let’s call it a clean slate,” Caroline
corrected with a smile. Looking at her, Hadley thought how much
Caroline had changed in the past months, her hair short now, her
eyes clear and honest.
That said, Hadley had to admit that Daria had a
point about the clear-cut. It was hard even to guess the names of
the pitiful combination of bushes and bedraggled plants that had
emerged from under the ivy.
“There’s a whole world still in there,” Marion
said. “You’ll be amazed what you find when you get into the
details. See the roses in the back?” She pointed toward the fence.
Sure enough, Hadley could see the leggy stems of a rose, climbing
up the post.
“Dinnertime!” Sara came to the open gate, Max on
her hip.
“It smells fantastic,” Caroline said. The scent
of butter and truffles drifted across the yard from Sara’s
house.
“You should see our dinners since Sara got back
from Italy,” Dan commented happily.
“HERE’S TO A DAY well spent,” Kate toasted,
lifting her glass of red wine.
Platters of pasta and bowls of salad were passed
around the table along with the twins, who traveled from one lap to
the next, mouths ready to catch the bites that were sent in their
direction. Tyler had chosen a permanent seat next to Hadley, who
sat, still slightly in shock from the accomplishment and affection
of the day.
“Mom’s been reading me The
Secret Garden,” Tyler said to her.
“Really? I loved that story when I was a kid.”
Hadley had a sudden image of the backyard of her childhood, its
hidden alcoves and the woods that rambled away from its edge.
“Usually secret gardens are for kids,” Tyler
noted sagely.
“Secret gardens are for whoever finds them,”
Sara commented from the other side of the table. “But I’m sure
Hadley will share.”
MARION CAME OVER a few days after the clear-cut.
Hadley watched as Marion’s eyes gazed about the yard, detecting
patterns.
“How old was the woman who lived here?” Marion
asked.
“Eighty or so, I think. The agent told me she’d
been here forty years.”
Marion smiled. “You can tell. It’s an old
garden. There’s a lot more roses than I thought.”
Hadley looked closely and saw the browned,
curled edges of a rose blossom.
“And there’s her kitchen garden.” Marion pointed
to the corner closest to the house where Hadley could just make out
a rectangle, about five feet by ten feet, bordered by smooth, round
rocks the size of her fist. And that was a tomato cage, she
realized, lolled up against the side of the house.
“The plants would get the southern sun there,”
Marion continued. “Now, I would bet . . .” She made her way toward
the kitchen garden along a brick path, almost invisible under a
coating of black mold, then stopped abruptly. “Yes! I figured she’d
put herbs along the walkway. See?”
Hadley bent down. It was all a mass of seemingly
dead sticks and stems, a leaf here or there, no two the same. But
as Marion’s fingers moved from one to the next, pointing out
distinctions, Hadley saw the tiny pointed leaves of thyme and a
broad silvery oval of sage. Hadley touched first one, then another,
laughing softly as the scents were released into the air.
HADLEY SANK HER SPADE into the soil, loosening
the roots of the weeds that had taken hold around the base of the
plum tree. She wondered sometimes what she was doing, digging up
the insistent survivors, the dandelions whose roots sank down like
surveyors’ stakes into the ground, the frothy green lace that
suddenly appeared, floating tenaciously over the surface of
everything, turning red as it established its reign. But there were
green shoots sprouting as well—tulips and hyacinths and irises. She
wanted to give them room.
The garden was taking shape. A few days after
the clear-cut, Hadley and Tyler had cleaned the mold from the brick
pathway. Tyler had pretended he was a pirate prisoner, forced to
scrub the decks. Hadley claimed the role of Cinderella, left behind
by her cruel stepsisters to wash the kitchen floors. As their
brushes worked down into the cracks of the bricks, a warm red color
appeared, lightening to a friendly orange as it dried.
“Now,” Tyler had said, standing back proudly to
survey their work, “you have a safe path to take you between the
alligator-infested waters.”
And Hadley had started from the safe path,
working back foot by foot into the garden. Over the weeks, the
chaos had receded, giving way to soft dirt, small mysteries like
welcome notes sent from the old woman who had once tended the
garden. Day lilies and wild geraniums and tufted primroses, sage
with its silvery leaves, the green spikes of rosemary and the
blue-gray leaves of lavender, slowly, one by one, rising up out of
the earth as Hadley cleared the way around them. She found she
could spend hours filtering the clumps of dirt into smooth soil,
cutting back the dead stalks of roses that grew gratefully,
greedily after she had tended them. Life between her fingers.
She had come to love the soft spring rain, when
the ground opened up to the water from the sky, and the roots of
the weeds came out easily in her fingers. She bought a big rain hat
and coat; Marion said it made her look like a yellow mushroom, but
she didn’t care. She delighted in the feeling of being in her own
dry shelter as the moisture slid across the slope of her hat and
down the back of her rain slicker. She welcomed the sight of her
green rain boots waiting for her on the back porch when she
returned from the grocery store, like dogs anxious for a walk. Some
days, when the rain came down soft around her, she felt as thirsty
for it as the earth beneath her feet.
One day she found an old nest, tucked in a crook
of the plum tree. She went and found the rock that Kate had given
her and placed it in the nest, where it lay like a smooth black
egg.
“HAVE YOU NOTICED SOMETHING odd about this
garden?” Hadley commented to Marion one afternoon. Marion had come
over, tools in hand, for a little “gardening therapy,” as she
called it. Why Marion needed another garden Hadley could never
quite determine, as Marion had a large and well-established one of
her own, but Hadley chose not to point that out. As much as
anything, Hadley realized, she wanted to stay near the maternal
assurance that Marion radiated. Hadley’s own mother had come for
the week after Sean’s death, but she had a job and the rest of the
family on the East Coast. She had tried to convince Hadley to move
home, but Hadley couldn’t bring herself to leave. Being with Marion
helped her feel a bit more like here was home.
“What do you mean by odd?” Marion asked.
“Well, it seems like almost all the flowers that
were planted in this garden are white.”
“Hmmm . . .” Marion smiled. “I think we may have
a night garden on our hands.”
“A night garden?”
“It’s meant to be seen at night. Moonlight, in
particular. Interesting choice in a rainy climate.”
“Do you ever wonder about her? The woman who
planted this?”
“It’s hard not to.” Marion shook the extra dirt
from her gloves. “She’s everywhere you look. You can tell so much
about a person by the garden they plant.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I know she was thrifty and probably a
good cook because of how much space she gave to her kitchen garden.
On the other hand, what kind of woman grows a night garden? Did she
work during the day? Was she an insomniac? Or maybe she was just a
complete romantic.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Once you start looking, it’s hard to stop. You
can tell more about a person from their garden than you ever will
from what they say about themselves.”
It was true, Hadley realized. She had taken
Tyler and the twins for walks around the neighborhood for years
now, but after her talk with Marion, Hadley began observing her
neighbors’ gardens as she walked, a fascinating activity, as
intimate as reading their mail. There was the woman on the corner,
the quiet member of a large and noisy family, her house hidden by
bowers of honeysuckle, surrounded by pale lavender and sage, pastel
flowers asking only for sympathy. Next door was The Fence, imposing
and blank; one day when the gate was mistakenly left open, however,
Hadley had seen inside a garden of such abundance that she stopped,
shocked. Some yards were planted as if with plans for long tenancy,
others created with the impulse buys and on-sale annuals found near
the checkout stands. Some people had their gardens taken care of
for them, never feeling dirt between their fingers. The more time
Hadley spent in her garden, the more she wondered what she would do
without that feeling and the way it held her to the ground, gave
her something to stand on.
Now, Hadley found herself taking walks simply to
see the next garden, the next story, lives opening up before her.
Tyler didn’t always come with her. He was busier now; his
grandfather was staying with them for the summer and these days
when Hadley worked in her garden she could hear the sounds of
construction coming from the garage next door, the excited exchange
of voices between grandfather and grandson. But Tyler still came
with her on her walks sometimes, his insights filtering through his
eight-year-old eyes.
“That one, for sure, was a pirate before he
bought a house,” Tyler said, gesturing toward a tall, thin house
set far back in a narrow lot, its top floor peering out above the
tops of the trees. “And I bet that lady”—he pointed to a
well-manicured lawn, its edges precise, the flower beds planted in
rows of annuals—“makes cookies every night, but they don’t taste
very good.”
HADLEY FOUND IT HARD to describe what she had
been seeing in her walks, feeling in her garden. The way the roses
in her arbor bent down to caress the top of her head as she walked
underneath them to her door. The first frilly tops of the carrots
in her kitchen garden coming up to greet her, each moment of green
making her stand a little straighter with the knowledge that she
could make her own food. The glow of the white palette that
surrounded her house, pulling her outside as the sky began to fade,
tempting her to sit or work in the yard and listen to the
neighborhood around her, the families coming together, settling
down. Sometimes her garden felt like a benevolent parent who seemed
to know what she needed before she did.
She tried to explain to Marion as they sat on
the porch steps one afternoon, fresh mint from the shady part of
the garden flavoring their glasses of iced tea.
“I wonder what it would be like to design a
garden to take care of a person,” Hadley commented.
Marion smiled. “Have you ever thought about
becoming a landscape designer?”
Hadley shook her head, but the thought didn’t
dislodge with the action. It stayed with her, insistent as a small
child, leading her by the hand to the local community college where
she signed up for summer classes.
HADLEY FOUND TO HER Surprise that as much as she
liked the actual tending of plants, she liked learning about the
creation of gardens even more. She was quickly absorbed in the
intricate equation of soil and water and light, the constantly
shifting dance of fragrance and color palettes. As she learned to
see gardens as stories that unfurled over spring, summer, fall and
winter, landscapes became fluid, the plants within them developing
their own personalities over the course of a year or a decade.
There were the annuals, blasting their way through the spring and
summer with a blaze of color and produce, ramming straight into the
wall of winter without any thought other than reproduction; the
perennials, pulling back into the ground as cold approached, then
reappearing again in an elaborate game of horticultural
hide-and-seek; the weeds, their desire for life so strong that
daily growth had to be measured in feet, not inches. Creating an
aesthetic harmony in the midst of such abundance was far more
complicated than she had ever imagined, yet she dove into the
particulars with the first real happiness she had felt since Sean
died, tumbling into the beauty of a tall blue iris set against a
pink rose, the soft, feathery grace of pale yellow columbine
draping over the edge of a shaded stone walkway.
At the end of the day, she would come home to
her own garden and walk into its lush green, the cool white of its
flowers. If the day had been warm, she would turn on a sprinkler
and sit outside as the evening air softened around her and the
plants stretched up, green and alive. Afterward, she would move
along the narrow walkways of her garden, artemisia and sweet
woodruff brushing wet against her ankles as she leaned over to cut
a huge teacup of a rose for her kitchen table.
One evening she noticed that a vine growing
along the back fence had developed what looked like long green
tubes. The vine had shown up one day, seemingly out of nowhere, but
it had quickly and conveniently covered the rough edges of the
chopped ivy and she had let it be. Now she looked at it, wondering
what would come next. As she watched, the moon came out and one of
the pale green tubes rose as if to music, unwinding slowly like a
pinwheel, spreading, extending, opening into a great white flower
the size of her outstretched hand.
AND THEN THE HEAT wave came, unexpected and out
of character for the Pacific Northwest. Without air-conditioning,
people made do with portable fans, propping them on kitchen
counters and in windows, anything to push the molten air.
Gardens gasped. The days were too long, the
length of time between water seemingly infinite. The regal stems of
her daisy plants were dragged to the ground by the weight of their
flowers. The leaves on the plum tree curled up in fetal
positions.
People retreated into more primal behaviors as
well—etiquette and good humor pitched aside like candy wrappers.
Clothes became just another trap to hold the heat, and in the
mornings Hadley found herself moving past the jeans and T-shirts in
her closet to pull out sundresses she hadn’t worn in years. She
would walk up the stairs to the school, the gauzy fabric whispering
across the surface of her skin and fanning the air around her bare
legs. After school she would buy a soda from the vending machine
and drive home, holding the cold can between her breasts. She would
return to a house that had soaked up the calidity of the day and
then held it jealously long into the night. Even with every window
open, the rooms seemed to vibrate. Hadley lay in her twin bed, her
arms and legs outstretched beyond its boundaries. The heat hung
about her and she was filled with a desire to take down the wall
between the living room and bedroom, to make one open space where
the air could move and she could see the garden from her bed.
On the third night, Hadley finally gave up on
sleep and went outside. It was almost midnight and the city around
her had grown quiet, a miraculous occurrence in a city that always
had the growl of a freeway in the distance or the sound of children
playing in the yards. Out on the street, a car went by, windows
down, jazz music playing, and then nothing. The streetlamp out
front flickered off, leaving only the moon.
It took a moment for Hadley’s eyes to adjust,
the white of the tiny sweet woodruff flowers and the huge and
luxurious petals of the roses coming first, and then the silver of
the sage and lamb’s ears, and finally the deeper greens, the
outline of leaves and lacy edges aided by the faint glow from the
kitchen. The garden lay before her, waiting.
She had watered earlier that evening, the
sprinkler head still at the end of the long black hose that ran in
sinuous curves across the thyme and along the path between the
lilies to the plum tree. The plants didn’t really need any more
water, but she could feel the desire for it in her skin and the
heaviness of her limbs. She turned on the faucet and then breathed
in the smell of thyme that was released by the water, a scent of
evergreen and citrus and innocence, a cool green place in the midst
of the heat. Hadley stepped into the arcs of flying drops, feeling
them land and slide across her skin. She stretched her arms up into
the branches of the plum tree and let the water fall down the long,
straight column that was her body.