The file opened to a one-sentence entry dated December 8, when Will and I were still together, when he had no idea of the depth of my unhappiness. I don't know why the file opened to that entry, but I had not seen it before, and I turned my head the instant I finished reading it: I would have killed myself ten years ago if it had not been for Sophy's love.
The Garden
August is one of the quietest months in the garden, matched in some ways only by the deepest winter months. But whereas in those months Nature seems bound in a deep sleep, in August she appears to be merely in a daydream, or perhaps a gentle doze.
– Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd,
A Year at North Hilclass="underline" Four Seasons
in a Vermont Garden
15. A Happy Ending
IT IS NOT a manicured English garden nor the rambunctious, wild place in The Secret Garden that meant so much to Vicki. It is a garden that purists would frown on, because I did not plant it myself. I did not design it. What I like to do best is look at it, either from the kitchen, through the sliding glass doors, or in the yard, where the children and I spent much of the last week, or from the nursery upstairs-I still think of it as the nursery-where I set up my desk with a view of it, and where I write now. The bee balm, the asters, the marigolds. The heirloom roses and snapdragons. A garden at last.
With Ginny and Susanna's blessing, and a bit of the money they gave me from the life insurance, I hired an imaginative landscaper from Island Design to do everything. Since it was late in the summer by the time he started, mid-July, I had him plant flowers already in bloom. I know that is cheating at a very high level. It may as well be a stage set, a shopping mall, my own Potemkin Village. Why didn't I just stick plastic flowers into the ground like birthday candles on a cake, you're probably wondering, and plan instead for next year? I thought about it.
But next year is a long way off, and since Will died, I have been afflicted with that common response to death, carpe diem. Until it happens to you, you have no idea what form it will take, which days you'll want to seize and which you'd rather do without. And of course it's a metaphor; you can't clutch a day the way you can an umbrella, a steering wheel, a book. The saying implores you to seize your pleasure, seize the pleasures of the world while they are still available to you.
In this spirit, this effort to live in the moment, not the spiral of the past or the maze of the purely speculative, I recently gave up thinking it is essential to have all the answers: How precisely did Will die? How did the dog end up the way he did? And why did I get a telegram from a man Will had known in Manila even before the obituaries were published? I wrote to the man, Arthur Glass, to thank him for his condolences and ask how he had found out before everyone else. I don't expect an answer from him-he's a spy, after all-but when I wrote two months ago, I still felt that if I didn't learn the answer, if it existed somewhere in the world and I could not seize it, know it, pull it from the sky like a helium balloon on a string, I would never have a moment's peace. Some days, speaking of days, it's touch and go, but other days I think I might.
The day the coroner's report came back, two weeks after the funeral, was not a good day. Cause of Death: Inconclusive. It's funny how that's being the last word doesn't mean you stop thinking about it. It means only that you're one of the few left thinking about it.
Today, six weeks later, one of the last days of August, is a much better day. First thing after breakfast, Vicki and Cam watered the garden. Tran and Van bicycled up and down the street. We went grocery shopping and to the beach for many hours. When we got home, Daniel phoned, as he has done every day, from London, and the children lined up to speak to him. They all reported that they were still having a good time, after five days here, and three out of four asked why they cant live on Swansea, because there are more things for kids to do here than in New York. Then we had a cookout, as we've had every night since they arrived, with toasted marshmallows on sticks for dessert. Putting them to sleep after so much sunshine is a cinch; they long for the bed, they collapse onto it like actors doing pratfalls. Boom, down, and they're out.
Tonight moths hurl themselves against the screens. Maple leaves and oak and sycamore on long branches sway and rustle like distant waves crashing against the shore. The night is thick and lovely, the children are asleep upstairs, the wind is warm, and I am at the kitchen table with the early pages of the story I have just told you, when I hear a soft skittering noise. A squirrel on the roof? I go back to my pages, so when I hear Vicki's voice across the room, at the foot of the stairs, I start. Her eyes are the color of ebony and as bright as a cat's. "I had a bad dream" is all she says.
When I open my arms, she comes to me. Her hair smells of baby shampoo and her skin faintly of salt, of long days in ocean water. She's wearing Lion King theme pajamas, the summer model, with all the beasts of the jungle emblazoned on her narrow chest. "What happened in your dream?" She folds herself onto my lap, and to me, her bad dream, her needing me, the feel of her hair against my cheek, the pulse of her heartbeat against my palm, are bliss.
"When I got to my house, there was no one there. And everything was gone. I opened the front door, and there were no rooms, no floors, no ceiling, only air and the sky on top of it."
"Where was everyone?"
"I think they were in Haiti with Toinette."
In real life, Toinette, their housekeeper-nanny, is in Haiti; that's why the children are with me in Will's house. Daniel had a business trip to London planned for some time when Toinette's mother died suddenly and she had to go back to the island. There aren't many people you can ask to take care of your four young children for five days. You are desperate. You ask your former lover. You ask me, the woman one of your kids pretended to run away to. I did not hesitate for an instant before I said yes. He made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I made him one: the children could spend the last week of August on Swansea. Tomorrow morning he'll fly into Boston from London and take an Island Air flight here to pick them up.
It has been two months since Will was found dead. Two days after the funeral, I returned briefly to New York to collect some belongings, pay my bills, and tell Daniel I could not keep doing what we had done before. I was surprised at his surprise. "But you always seemed to enjoy yourself," he said.
"It was starting to feel a little thin."
"How so?"
"Watery."
His brow furrowed in puzzlement.
"Lacking nourishment."
"I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at."
"I want to be with someone who loves me."
"I didn't imagine that would be important so soon after your separation. I assumed you'd want to sow a few wild oats. I never could understand why you chose someone in my position."
Sitting now with Vicki on my lap, I shudder to think of how oblivious he was; how thoroughly he had misread me; and how thin his feelings for me had been. I shudder on my behalf and also on his children's. When they tell him they have bad dreams, does he have any idea what they mean? Does he know they have meaning? Is he aware that they matter?
I say to Vicki, "Would you like to be in Haiti with Toinette?" She shakes her head against my neck. "How about London with your dad?"
"Maybe a little."