I nodded.
“I will, too. I guess it’s my turn.”
She kissed me again. Then she let me go. She went to the door, opened it a few inches, and looked into the hallway.
“It’s clear,” she said, “but be careful.”
I slipped past her, took a step onto the thick carpeting like I was coming back to earth. When I was halfway down the stairs, I heard a sound behind me. I stopped dead, expecting to hear Mr. Marsh’s voice. Hoping he didn’t have a gun in the house. When I turned, I saw Amelia looking down at me. She gave me a little smile and raised one eyebrow a quarter of an inch. Then she waved good night and shut her door behind her.
From one summer night… to the very next morning. How quickly the whole world can turn on you. How much I’d give to stop everything right there. Those few hours in Amelia’s bedroom. Finish my whole story on that note. Close the book. The End.
But no.
That’s the one thing prison teaches you. You can close your eyes and dream about the way you wish things could be. Then you wake up and everything comes back at you at once. The isolation and the locked doors and the crushing weight of the stone walls all around you. It all comes back and it feels worse than ever.
So maybe you shouldn’t dream at all if you’re in a place like this. Not that kind of dream, anyway. Don’t dream that kind of dream unless you don’t plan on waking up.
I left her house that night. I drove home. I went inside. I sure as hell didn’t sleep that night. I kept smelling her scent on me, kept feeling her lips against mine. Alone in the darkness of my room, my heart still beating as fast as a hummingbird’s. Until the sun finally came up and I was on my feet again, ready to go back to her house.
It felt funny to drive over there that morning. I couldn’t help worrying that the whole thing would fall apart in the light of day. That she’d see me and shake her head, put up her hands as if to say, no, that was just a mistake. Just go to the backyard and keep digging and forget it ever happened.
I didn’t see her when I pulled in and got out of the car. I stood there in the driveway for a few moments, waiting for her face to appear in one of the windows. It didn’t happen.
There was a strange car there. Somebody new in town. I didn’t think anything of it yet. I went around the house, remembering what Mr. Marsh had said to me the day before. About how I was through with the pool-digging, and that he’d be finding something else for me to do. Something more rewarding, he had said. Whatever the hell that meant.
He was just drunk, I thought. By today he’ll have forgotten the entire conversation, and I’ll be right back to work, filling up that wheelbarrow and dumping the dirt in the woods.
But there in the backyard, waiting for me, was a big surprise.
I saw the white tent first. It was as big as one of those huge white tents you see at outdoor weddings, big enough to cover the area where I had been digging every day. I blinked a couple of times, taking it all in, then finally seeing the two men standing in the shade underneath the tent. It was Mr. Marsh and my probation officer.
When Mr. Marsh spotted me, he stepped out into the sun. “Michael! Come on over!” He had a maniacally big smile on his face.
“Look who’s here,” he said, gesturing to my PO. “We were just talking about our little project back here.”
The PO stepped out and shook my hand. He peered into my face. “Good to see you, Michael. Boy, you look a little red.”
“I told the kid, you should always wear sunscreen, eh? Skin cancer? Melanoma? You think he listens to me?”
Mr. Marsh gave me a playful punch on the shoulder.
“I finally got this tent for him,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get one, anyway.”
“Sure’s a beaut,” my PO said, looking up at it. The fabric was blinding white in the sunlight. “Turns your whole backyard into a real oasis.”
“You picked the right word,” Mr. Marsh said. “An oasis. As you can see, we’re really trying to do something special back here. Michael’s been such a huge help.”
“It’s gonna be impressive, all right. I better not bring my wife over here, or she’ll have me digging up our backyard in no time.”
The two of them kept smiling at me, their teeth as blinding white as the tent. I looked away from them and finally got around to noticing all of the stuff someone had dragged out here. There were a dozen potted plants, each one bigger and more multi-fronded than the next, all sitting on the ground. A large black tarp was draped down into the hole. My wheelbarrow was filled to the brim with rocks as big as Volleyballs.
“Mr. Marsh was trying to describe how this is going to look when it’s done,” my PO said to me. “I can’t wait to see it when you’ve got the fountain set up. Although how are you going to…”
He looked all around his feet at the straw and the stubby new grass. “You’ll need an electric line back here, won’t you?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Mr. Marsh said. “Of course. That’s the last step. We’ll need an electrician to run the wire from the house.”
My PO followed an imaginary line to the house, nodding his head in agreement. “It’s a shame you can’t do that yourself.”
“The union would complain, eh?” Mr. Marsh put his hand on the back of my neck. I could feel the strength in his fingers.
“Well, it’s good to see that things are working out so well. I’ll be glad to report this as a success story.”
“I was just telling Michael yesterday… all the people I pay good money to work for me, and not one of them works as hard as he does.”
“That’s great. That’s outstanding.”
“Like you say, a success story. That’s exactly what this is.”
I still didn’t know what was going on, but the two men shook hands and smiled some more, and then Mr. Marsh showed my PO to his car. When he was done with that, he came back around to the back of the house. I was standing there next to the pretend oasis, marveling at how much effort had gone into the illusion. I hadn’t dared to go under the tent, figuring that even the shade itself would be forbidden to me. That he’d tear the whole thing down now that my PO was safely gone. Pull up the tarp and tell me to get my ass back to work.
Instead, he came back to me and put both hands on my cheeks. Grabbed me right by the face. “I tell you what,” he said. “Your stock is up today, young sir.”
He gave me one last little slap in the face and then let go of me. “Just hang loose for a while. I’ll be needing you inside in about a half an hour.”
Hang loose, he says. I didn’t know how to do that. I walked around the tent, looking for the shovel. I found it over by the edge of the woods. It felt so strange to be there without that wooden handle held tight in my hands. But what the hell, right? It sure looked like the pool was on hold today. I dropped the shovel and went back to the tent, looking up at the windows.
Please show yourself, I thought. Everything would feel a hell of a lot better if I could just see you smiling at me for one second.
I finally went under the tent and sat down on the edge of the hole with my feet on the plastic tarp. I kept waiting.
Finally, Mr. Marsh came back out through the back door.
“Come on in!”
He held the door open for me. I went inside, feeling the sudden chill of the air-conditioned air.
“Right this way, Michael.”
He showed me to his office, the same room where we had had our first extended conversation, about seven thousand shovelfuls of dirt ago. The same stuffed fish was there, the great blue marlin frozen in midair above his desk.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Marsh said. “Can I get you something to drink?”
I put my hand up to decline.
He didn’t look interested in taking no for an answer. “A Coke, maybe? Dr Pepper? I know we’ve got something. Let me see.”
He went to the wet bar on the far wall and rummaged around in the little refrigerator. “You want ice?”