The Garden of Small Beginnings, page 14
“Drumroll, please, Clare.” He had somehow discovered Clare’s secret beatboxing skills, maybe during My Little Ponies. She did an excellent drumroll.
He pulled out a stone house, about three feet high and very detailed. It was shaped like a mushroom, with little rooms and stairways inside and an attic in the spotty cap part. It was ridiculously cute. Then he pulled out a smaller box, filled with a dozen tiny fairy figures, all made of weather-resistant resin, presumably, but still remarkably detailed and colorful and, well, magical.
There was silence as the girls took it in. Clare leaned across the table and moved one of the little fairies inside the house. Then she reached over and took Edward’s hand. I looked at him, but he was looking at her.
“Edward,” she piped in her little voice, “this is the most awesomest, awesomest, awesomest thing ever. You are the nicest boy I have ever met, and next time you can play Sparkleworks.” Then she dropped his hand and waited. She knew a moment when she saw one.
“Truly?” asked Edward, still looking at her and smiling.
She nodded solemnly. I literally felt a lump in my throat. Sparkleworks was Clare’s favorite Little Pony. Nobody got to touch Sparkleworks.
“Thank you,” said Edward. “Do you like it, Annabel?”
Annabel nodded, utterly overcome. She had taken one of the little figurines and was turning it over in her hands. There were several boy fairies, too, which would be nice for Bash, although they looked a little like Broadway chorus dancers, rather than gnome-stomping terror machines.
All three headed to the garden, and I watched as they placed the house in the perfect spot. After a few minutes, Edward came back in. He looked ridiculously gorgeous and flushed with success.
“A triumph, I think. Do you think so?” He peered out of the kitchen window and tried not to preen.
We stood and watched. “Just promise me you’ll stay until I have to send them to bed. Otherwise, I will be shit out of luck and they will try to sleep in the garden. It’s a wonderful gift. You’re very nice.”
He turned and leaned against the sink. We were very close. I couldn’t help it, I blurted, “I had a big fight with Rachel last night, and now I can’t reach her and I’m worried about her.” I don’t know why it came out, it just did, and then I made it worse by starting to cry. He was going to think I was a complete nutcase.
He handed me a paper towel. “Why did you fight?”
I shrugged. “Because we had too much to drink and I am an asshole.”
He smiled. “Everyone is an asshole when they drink too much. Do you think she is fine and just angry with you, or do you actually think she’s in trouble?”
“I don’t know. She stalked off into the night, and I haven’t spoken to her since.”
“You fought outside?” He was confused.
I nodded, ashamed. “Yes, in the street, like teenagers, or hookers.”
He made a mock shocked face at me. “I am shocked. Except not at all. Everyone does it once or twice.”
“They do?”
He shook his head. “No, just teenagers and hookers, but I am trying to make you feel better.” He pulled out his phone. “Why don’t I try calling her, and then if she’s avoiding your call, she’ll answer and we’ll know she’s fine. And if she doesn’t answer, then we can alert Interpol.”
He was so calm and capable. I gave him the number. He dialed and waited.
“Hello, Rachel? This is Edward Bloem, your gardening teacher.”
She was alive, that was good. However, I was clearly on her shit list, and that was bad.
“I am visiting your sister, and Lilian was worried about you.” He listened for a moment, and his mouth twitched. “I don’t know if I can pass on that message verbatim. Are you sure you don’t want to just speak to her?” He paused. “I’ll tell her.” He hung up and looked at me. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, but says to tell you that she’s fine.”
I looked at him. “What was hard about delivering that?”
“I had to edit in English. It’s not my first language, you know.” He looked at me thoughtfully, and smiled slowly, his green eyes warm. He smelled of the outdoors, he was so tall and broad shouldered and so . . . male . . . in this house of women he was shockingly different. All I could think of was how much I wanted to kiss him. I was clearly losing my mind.
Needing a minute to think, I stepped closer to the sink and peered out the window to see if the children had started fighting yet, but so far peace reigned in the fairy kingdom.
“Do you know,” continued Edward in a conversational tone, “that the side of your neck has a curve like the inside of a shell, and that the place where you hair touches it is where I would most like to kiss you?”
I flushed. And someone’s voice said, “Go ahead,” and it was my voice, amazingly, as apparently my mouth had seized control of my brain.
Edward leaned forward and kissed the side of my neck. It was the most romantic moment of my life for years, and I literally felt my knees buckle. He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him, but it was me who leaned harder into the kiss, me who put my hands on his hips and pulled him closer. And it was definitely me who forgot in this sudden swoony blast of lust that I had kids, a dead husband, a lost job, and a furious sibling. All I could think about was the taste of him, the strength of his hands on my back, and the shocking awareness that I wasn’t dead from the waist down.
Edward pulled back and looked at me, his pupils as dilated as mine were. This wasn’t just a kiss, and we both knew it: We were going to be lovers, we were going to undress each other and taste every inch of skin, we were going to please each other over and over again. It had been so long since my body had felt this aroused; I was drunk with anticipation. He could see it in my face, and his skin flushed, his mouth was hot on mine again, his hands tightening in my hair. This is one advantage experience has over youth: You know that it’s real, you know you want this man inside you, you know it’s going to happen, and it’s as certain a knowledge as any in human experience. There is nothing, nothing, as powerful as the first hour of a sexual relationship. It’s like rocket fuel. Edward started to move away, tugging my hand, pulling me toward the kitchen table, starting to push things aside.
Which is exactly when I heard Clare calling from outside. “Mom! Annabel told me my fairy was badly painted!”
• • •
We had about fifteen seconds before the kids came roiling into the room. We looked at each other, and Edward said something in Dutch that sounded deeply, deeply frustrated.
I laughed, shakily. “Shit, I have kids.”
The color was still receding from his face, but he gathered himself enough to reply, “I am ashamed to say I had completely forgotten them.” He was still holding my hand, and he quickly pulled me to him, kissing me hard one more time and whispering against my mouth, “We are not done, this is a promise.” He bit my lip, gently, and released me. I was aching, literally aching with desire, but as the kids crashed in, it just . . . evaporated. It was shocking, but it had to be that way, and I knew it.
Clare was still pissed at her sister and didn’t see anything strange about two adults standing in the middle of the room with red faces. “Annabel said this fairy doesn’t have a nice dress on, which is totally untrue.”
Annabel was behind her and stopped inside the door to take in the scene. She knew she’d walked in on something, but she didn’t know what. Her eyes narrowed, but she was also overtired and not willing to parse the social indicators at that moment.
“I didn’t say that, exactly.”
Clare changed tack. “I’m taking the fairy house to bed.”
I shook my head. “No, you’re not. However, it is time for you guys to get ready for bed. Edward was just leaving.”
He smoothly took my suggestion, reaching for his jacket. “I will see you girls in class on Saturday, and you can tell me if you still like the fairy house.” He turned to me. “Good-bye, Lilian. We will speak soon.” He didn’t need to say anything else. We were still both trembling. Besides, Clare chose that moment to throw herself at him and thank him about a million times, hugging his legs and gazing up at him. She’s effusive, I’ll give her that.
I switched on my autopilot and started bedtime. The sudden downshift from desire to domestic felt painfully familiar. There are so many times when what I want to do conflicts exactly with what I have to do. I want to sleep, but I must get up and help a child with a nightmare. I want to go lie in the park and read a book, but I must push a swing instead, must adjudicate little fights, must stay focused when all I want to do is daydream and drift.
After Dan’s death, I would have happily starved myself to death but there were these children in the house . . . they needed feeding, they needed clothing, they couldn’t have cared less that I was grief-stricken. They just peed and pooped and cried and ate and slept as if nothing at all had happened. Often, in the hospital, I would forget they were alive. I was living shallowly, refusing to eat, refusing to drink, aching to just let go and spiral slowly off the cliff like a scrap of vellum, transparent. Some days I remembered they were out in the world somewhere, and part of my heart would ache for them, shame slowly chilling me, a colder breeze on an already cold day. And frequently I would wish them dead, too, because then I could just shut my life down and stop breathing. I never told anyone that I wished for that, not even Dr. Graver, and sometimes now my heart clenches in case God heard my wish and wrote it down somewhere.
Once I was out of the hospital, and mostly accepting the fact that I had to keep going, I found the mundane repetition actually helped. I knew how to do this stuff, the stuff I had always done without Dan. I mean, he helped, but I was used to flying solo as a parent and could handle it. It was harder to do the many things we had done together, or that he had always done. I have a friend in AA who calls it “sober reference,” the concept that you need to do things sober that you used to do drunk. I don’t have a snappy name for it, but I had to do things sadly that I used to do happily, and that slowly became acceptable. Somehow, I continued breathing, and here I was years later, still alive.
The kids talked about the fairy house all through their bath. Apparently, I hadn’t been sufficiently appreciative, because I heard all about its wonders and secret rooms through the drying off, the pajama choosing, the stories, and on until it was time to turn out the light.
“And if you look at the back of the bedroom, there’s a little closet door, and inside there is an actual closet with teeny-tiny hangers painted in there, with very small clothes on them.”
“They’re really small.”
“But you can put a fairy in there.”
“Why would you do that?” I stroked Clare’s hair from her forehead, wondering how she’d gotten chocolate pudding into her hairline and how I’d missed it in the bath. I scratched at it until she batted my hand away.
“Well, I did it so my fairy could jump out at Annabel’s fairy, but I guess you could do it for other reasons.”
I shut the door, then opened it the obligatory three inches, and wandered into the living room. Frank had poured me a glass of cabernet and was readying the massage table . . . kidding. Without the distraction of the kids, my body was starting to complain about its recent disappointment. What the hell? it was saying. Why did you start that and then not finish it? Jeez. Strangely, I wished Dan was there to talk to, but he wasn’t. He was dead, dead, deadedy dead. And Rachel wasn’t even talking to me.
I tried her again. This time she answered.
“OK,” she said, “it’s been twenty-four hours since you were an asshole. I am ready to accept your apology.”
“I’m very, very sorry.”
“I expect you are. Tell me some more.”
I smiled. “I really, really am the biggest dickhead. I am totally grateful for all you’ve done for me and don’t for a minute think you are a saint or anything. I have no idea where any of that came from.”
She sighed. “Fine, it’s over. But I think it’s healthy for us to occasionally air our inner grievances, however weird and unprovoked they might be. Next time, let’s do it indoors, though, agreed?”
I nodded, not that she could see me. “Did you get home OK?”
“I did. I realized once I had stomped off that I had left you in the middle of the city with a very drunken Maggie, but I could hardly go back after my grand exit. Did she throw up on you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. So, what’s happened since then? Why was Edward with you? What happened?”
“He came over to drop off a fairy house.”
She snorted. “If I had a dime for every time a guy used that excuse . . .”
“And we nearly had sex on the kitchen table.”
There was a pleasingly lengthy pause. I’d actually surprised her.
“Wow. Way to bury the lede.”
I shrugged. “You were the one who encouraged me to broaden my horizons.”
“True,” she replied. “But I didn’t think you’d go all the way on the first date.”
“Why not? You always do.”
She laughed. “Well, how else would I know if I wanted a second date?” She sighed. “But presumably you remembered you had children just in time, and didn’t actually do it?”
“Exactly.” I sighed, too. “Now I’m just all confused and stressed-out. This is exactly why I don’t want to start dating again.” I plucked irritably at a loose thread on the sofa. “I don’t want to do this.”
“You were honestly planning on spending the remainder of your life celibate and unattached? You’re only in your thirties. You could live another sixty years.”
I leaned back on the sofa and looked around my living room. Everything was as it always was. I had invested a lot in creating routine and predictability in my life since Dan died. I tried to explain it to Rachel. “It’s not that I don’t find Edward attractive. I assure you, I really do. I honestly forgot the details of my life for about five very hot minutes this evening, and that’s really compelling because, let’s face it, those details aren’t exactly the stuff of legend. If it were just me, then sure, I’d already have broken the kitchen table, but it’s not just me, and by the time it is, it will be too late anyway.” I felt my throat starting to close up, and got irritated. “And now I feel like crying, and I don’t even know if I’m sad because I didn’t get to sleep with Edward or because I don’t get to sleep with anyone, or if I’m just still sad because I miss Dan so much that it’s like another person in the room the entire time. I don’t need that kind of confusion, Rachel. I want to know what I’m crying about, get it?”
She sounded sympathetic. “Hashtag life goals: To know what I’m crying about.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Shall I change the subject so we can talk about something else until you feel OK enough to hang up?”
I loved her so much. “Yes, please.” I sniffled a bit, and wiped my nose on my sleeve.
She took a breath. “I was thinking about adopting a cat. What do you think?”
How to Grow a Pumpkin
You need a spot with lots of room and plenty of sun. And so do pumpkins.
• The soil will warm more quickly and the seeds will germinate faster if you plant them in little hills. You have to make the little hills, they don’t sell them at the garden store.
• Plant the seeds inch deep into the hills (4 to 5 seeds per hill). Space hills 4 to 8 feet apart.
• When the plants are 2 to 3 inches tall, thin to 2 to 3 plants per hill by snipping off unwanted plants without disturbing the roots of the remaining ones.
• If your first flowers aren’t forming fruits, that’s normal. Both male and female blossoms need to open, get to know one another, maybe hang out and watch a movie and, just, you know, chill.
Chapter 11
In the morning, after a night of dirty dreams, I felt cranky. Annabel also woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and the two of us growled at each other all morning as we got ready for school.
She needed the pink T-shirt.
Not that pink T-shirt.
Not that one, either.
Not that one, either. God, Mommy, the one with the horse.
Yes, that one.
It was dirty.
Tears.
Why was nothing ever clean in the house? Why did no one care about her? Why was I so busy with other things (said with deadly emphasis) that I didn’t do the laundry?
How about this other T-shirt with a horse?
No.
Or this other pink one? No horse, but pink.
No.
Firm voice: Choose the shirt you want. I’m going to make breakfast. What would you like?
Nothing.
Toast?
Nothing.
Eggs?
Nothing. I’m going to starve because no one cares.
I care. I want to make you breakfast. Clare, what would you like?
Pancakes.
Pancakes it is.
I don’t like pancakes. I want eggs.
No, I’m making pancakes.
Tears.
Stomping to the kitchen. (Me)
Wailing in the hall. (Her)
Clanging on pans. (Me)
Wailing outside the kitchen door. (Her)
Throwing up from stress. (Frank)
Then I had to get them ready to leave the house, which involved shoes.
If they repealed the wearing of shoes, I would run into the streets and set off fireworks. I own three pairs of shoes, my children own about a dozen between them but will only wear one favored pair at a time, and those they like to hide each afternoon when they come home from school. Sometimes they only hide one of them, so I can be filled with hope when I see it, only to be dashed against the rocks of despair when I realize the other one is nowhere to be found.
