The Unfinished Garden

Tilly gulped back why, because she didn’t want to know. Her thoughts were like tender perennials in a greenhouse, and she didn’t need some stranger to crack the glass.

He blinked rapidly, and his mottled eyes filled with an expression she recognized. She hit a fawn once, driving along Creeping Cedars at dusk. Sprawled on the verge, the poor animal lay mangled and broken, its quivering eyes speaking to Tilly of the desire to bolt, hampered by the knowledge that there was no escape. The same fear she saw now in James.

Vulnerability, the one thing she could never resist.

A burst of sunlight caught on James’s small, black ear stud. A black pearl?

“Please,” James said. “Please show me your garden.”

She would have agreed even without the second please. “On two conditions.” She slugged her gin. “You understand that I’m not agreeing to take you on. And I fix you a drink while I freshen up mine.”

But James didn’t answer. He was wandering along Tilly’s woodland trail, his index finger tapping against his thigh.

Chapter 2

Faster. James floored the gas pedal, even though faster was never fast enough. Twenty-five years ago, he would have been tearing across farm tracks on his Kawasaki H2, a motorbike that had earned its nickname of Widowmaker. Tonight he was racing along some county road in his Alfa Romeo Spider with the top down and the Gipsy Kings blaring. He conjured up his favorite scene from Weekend at Bernie’s in which a corpse water-skied into a buoy, but couldn’t even rustle up a smile. Movie slapstick was his happy pill, although obviously not this evening.

He glimpsed his reflection in the rearview mirror. God Almighty, some stranger could zip past the Alfa right now and have no inkling of the horror festering inside its driver. At worst, he looked like a guy trapped in a killer hangover and the black-only fashion dictum of the eighties. No one would guess that he was, quite simply, a man trapped. James had read somewhere that life was about how you lived in the present moment, which might be true for millions of people without obsessive-compulsive disorder. But for James, living in the moment was hell. And he never got so much as a day pass.

Would he ever find peace, or would he always be that kid terrified of the boogeyman hiding in his own psyche?

He could feel germs mutating in the soil. Soil Tilly had transferred to him. Why, why had he shaken hands?

The Alfa screeched onto the gravel in front of an abandoned gas station and James leaped from the car, leaving the engine running. He grabbed one of six bottles of Purell from the glove compartment and emptied it over his hands, shaking out every last drop. Terrific. Now his palms were sticky as well as contaminated. Cringing, he rubbed them together until they throbbed.

A squirrel shot in front of him, rustling dried-up leaves as it disappeared into the forest, squawking. Smart little rodent. I’d run from me, too, if I could, buddy.

Shaking his hands dry, James glanced up. He needed big sky, Illinois sky, not this wimpy patch of cerulean obscured by trees. Even in Chicago, he could see more sky than he could in Chapel Hill, where the forest closed in from every angle. And at night, the roads were dark like pitch, trapping him, blind, in purgatory.

Was it too late to reconsider this whole move? Yes, it was. He had started down this path the only way he knew how—with absolute commitment. There could be no running back to Illinois. He had made sure of that by selling everything—the farm, the business, his apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Everything but the Widowmaker and the Alfa.

He had moved south with one purpose: to be part of the exposure therapy trials at Duke University, and finally, finally learn how to reclaim his life from fear.

A rusty white pickup truck lurched down the road, an animal crate on its flatbed rattling against restraints. His father had offered to cage him once—a drunken joke that wasn’t remotely funny. Regret rose in his gut, and James hardened himself against it. Back then no one, not even James, had understood that his bizarre behavior and repetitive thoughts were caused by an anxiety disorder. And his dad? His dad died believing that his only kid was damaged beyond repair. But James was going to prove him wrong. Hell, yes. He was going to prove his dad wrong. OCD had nearly destroyed James’s life once. And he would do whatever it took to become that guy, that normal guy, who could shrug and say, “You know what? Once is enough.”

The original plan had derailed, but he wouldn’t turn back. Not that he could even if he wanted to, since he’d never been able to walk away from anything. OCD was behind that, too. It was the root cause of every success, every failure, every gesture, every desire, every thought…every thought.

This was his amended plan, 1b. No! 2a. Odd numbers tingled through him like slow-working poison and jinxed everything. This plan held the promise of freedom—freedom from the nightly window and door checks, freedom to sleep past the 4:30-a.m. treadmill call. Freedom to expose himself to the minefield of unallocated time. Doing nothing was akin to unrolling the welcome mat for every funky ritual his short-circuiting brain could sling at him. It was beautifully, impossibly straightforward, his plan: face his fear. And not just any fear, but the mother lode. The biggest fucking fear of all. Dirt.

James’s pulse sped up, and his heart became a jackhammer pounding into his ribs. He swallowed hard and tasted panic, metallic as if his throat were lined with copper. The voice inside his head that wasn’t his own drowned out everything as it chanted over and over, “You’re going to die, die from disease in the soil.” He started rocking. Movement, he needed movement. The voice told him to twist his hair, told him if he didn’t, he would catch cancer from the soil and die. But he didn’t have to listen! This wasn’t a real thought. This was brain trash, right?

Or he could just twist his hair twice. Then twice again and twice again. Six was a wonderful number. Soft and round and calm. But rituals were cheap fixes. Compulsions only fed the OCD monster. It would return, stronger, unless he fought back.

He thumped his fists into his thigh. Don’t cave, don’t twist your hair. If you can fight for ten minutes, the urge will pass. He counted to forty and stopped. Ten minutes? Hell, he couldn’t make it to one.

Was he crazy to retire at forty-five and abandon work, the only distraction that restrained fear? There would be no more relabeling irrational anxiety as the stress of running a successful software company. No, those days were over. Now he was free to follow the lead of his faulty brain wherever it led.

Me and my fucked-up shadow.

James tapped his lucky watch. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

Now he’d contaminated his watch.

Panic gnawed at his stomach. Germs were mutating in the soil, breeding like bunny fucking rabbits, but he was not going to twist his hair. James sucked in a breath to the count of four. He held it for two seconds then exhaled. One, two, three, four. Repeat, James, repeat. Slow the breath, and the heart and mind will follow.

Everything would be okay if he could just hire a landscaper—Tilly Silverberg—under the pretext of beautifying his new ten-acre property, when really, he would watch and learn from a professional. She’d made it clear no amount of money would change her mind, which was intriguing. Not that he was cynical, but money talked. There had to be another way. Did that bring him to plan 2b?

James concentrated on slowing down his breath, winding down his fear, and reliving the moment he had seen her garden on the edge of the woods. His pulse had slowed, his thoughts had fallen silent, and he’d known, just known: whatever lay at the end of that driveway held the key to his plan.

Piedmont Perennials had been his final appointment at 6:00 p.m. Six, a sign that everything would be okay, except for that god-awful honking. James glanced up as a skein of geese flew over in textbook formation—an imperfect, imbalanced V with one side longer than the other. Symmetry soothed his fractured mind, but the lack of it….

James jerked around, searching for a focal point, a diversion, anything.

Stop. Please, just stop. And a picture of Tilly dropped into his mind. She moved with the elegance of a prima ballerina, albeit one in a scarlet top and frayed cutoffs. Scarlet, she was a woman of bright colors who could spin through life laughing, gin in hand. But there was a sadness in those huge, pale eyes. Yes, she was beautiful, but beauty held no meaning for him. He was attracted only to women who were as screwed up as he was, even if they hid it better. Fuck. Not good, not good. Eighteen months celibate and focused on one thing—fixing himself. Fighting terror sucked up enough emotional energy. How could he salvage any for the mess of love and desire? Besides, being alone was his default button. Best for others, best for him. And yet…Tilly had made him smile.

His insides were heaving with fear, and she made him smile.

Her feet, poised for a pirouette, were so small, so vulnerable—so bare. Bare and dirty. And covered in soil. Soil on her feet, soil on her hands, soil she’d transferred to him. Soil poisoning her, poisoning him.

Boss back the thought, James. Boss it back.

Bossing back, the most basic weapon in the cognitive-behavioral therapy arsenal, sounded as easy as flipping on the turn signal. Don’t want that thought? Toss it and change direction. And yet summoning those three short words, boss it back, demanded enough focus to cripple him.

Why, why had he shaken hands with a gardener, a woman with dirt under her thumbnail? He must get to the rental apartment and throw everything, even his Pumas in the washing machine. Scour himself clean and then scrub the car inside and out.

Lose himself in time-consuming routine, his comfort and his curse.

But first, vomit.

Chapter 3

The ache in her right shoulder blade, an old symptom of her scoliosis, continued to throb to the cacophony of spring peepers. Or had they already become bog-standard tree frogs by early June? One of those Southern things Tilly could never figure out. Read-aloud time, that most precious part of the day, had slipped by unnoticed, so she’d promised Isaac he could come back outside in his jammies to catch fireflies.

The phone rang and Tilly picked it up on the first ring. “Piedmont Perennials.” She swallowed a yawn.

“Tilly? James Nealy.” His voice was deeper on the phone. Or did she mean sexier?

Bugger it. She really must start checking caller ID. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” He paused. “Listen, I realize you’re probably doing bedtime with your son.”

At least he was aware of that fact. Half a Brownie point in his favor.

“And I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I know I took up enough of your time yesterday evening, and you’ve made your position perfectly clear. Perfectly clear. But I’m—” he hesitated “—obsessed with your garden, and sadly for you, that won’t change. Name your price and conditions. I’ll agree to anything.”

“How about agreeing to find someone else?”

“Not an option.” In the forest, a blue jay jeered. “It has to be you. Your garden speaks to me.”

She laughed. She had a gardening groupie? Was this how David had felt every time a grad student drooled over one of his lectures? Not a bad sensation, really. “Are you always this sure?”

“I have good intuition, Tilly. I wouldn’t be retired at forty-five if I didn’t.”

“Lucky you, because mine is crap.” One irreversible mistake, that’s all it had taken to dull her intuition into nonexistence. Tilly shivered, despite the clawing humidity. For a second she was back in the cold, white hospital room. Some days she wasn’t sure she’d ever left.

A carpenter bee looped past, searching for a place to burrow. It would, no doubt, drill a pretty little hole in her cedar railing. One bee, one hole, meant nothing, but small things had a nasty habit of becoming big things. And she didn’t want to think about the damage a colony of bees could inflict.

“So there is a chance for me?” James said.

Obviously, she hadn’t mastered no quite as well as she’d thought. “You know, I really, really want to dislike you.”

“Yes, I can have that effect on people. Although they tend to skip the want part.”

Tilly smiled. If he kept this up, she might have to change her mind. “It’s late, and you’re right. I’m in the middle of bedtime.”

“Can I call tomorrow?”

“You’re pushing it.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

“Do you always apologize this much?”

“It’s one of my more annoying habits.”

“You might want to work on that.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone line. “I’m trying.” His voice was lower, quieter.

“Good night,” Tilly said, and hit the off button before James could reply.

She scuffed up a dusting of red clay with her gardening clog and imagined rain. English summer rain that pattered and pinged and smelled fresh, clean and cool. James’s talk of childhoods the day before had unsettled her, left her with an aftertaste she couldn’t nix. A quick fantasy blindsided her—running home to her mother, her twin sisters, Caitlin and Bree, and of course, Rowena. Tilly may have changed her name and citizenship, but she was English at heart, just as she would always be a Haddington.

Isaac, who had been searching the edge of one of her shade beds for who-knew-which disgusting creepy-crawly, rose and yanked up his pajama bottoms. “Thinking of Daddy?”

“Nope.” Her eyes followed a vapor trail toward the stratosphere.

“England?”

“Busted.” Bugger, she was a pitifully easy read. Thank God she never had secrets to keep. “I was remembering gloriously wet summers when I was your age. Snakeless, too.”

Isaac recoiled as if she’d driven over skunk roadkill with the truck’s windows open. “Are you going to drag us back?”

“Wow. Why would you ask that?” Avoidance, smart move.

“You think everything’s better in England.” Isaac twisted his foot, and a hunk of guilt constricted in her stomach. “But I want to live here, in our house, for ever and ever.”

“I know, my love. I used to feel the same way about Woodend.”

“Do you still?”

Not a fair question. Woodend was the place that caught her when she fell from life, and it always would be. Isaac continued to wait for an answer, but a sugarcoated one she couldn’t give.

“Woodend is a place of memories. I was born there. I met Daddy there….” Tilly stared at the dogwood tree they had planted on the sixth-month anniversary of David’s death.

“This is a place of memories, too, Mom. Yours and mine and Daddy’s.”

But the memories here were polluted with grief. Once again she had shared too much and disappointed Isaac. Yes, he was old in intellect, but emotionally he was far younger than eight.

“You’re right.” Tilly swelled with love. Sometimes just looking at Isaac made her chest heave with the imagined horror of a thousand what-ifs. “I’m sorry. I’m a little lost today.”

“That’s okay, Mom. I have lost days, too. Hey, I need to pee. Want me to do it by the cold frame to keep the deer away?”

“Please. But watch your aim.” Tilly turned toward the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

“Mommy?”

“Isaac?” She spun around.

Pajama pants shoved to his knees, he was clutching his penis. “I have a tick. Near my willy.” His free hand agitated as if he were shaking a maraca. “It’s latched on.”

“Piff. I can get that sucker off.” Finally, a problem she could fix.

A groan of thunder tumbled toward them as the edge of the forest retreated into darkness. How had she failed to notice the towering storm cloud banked over the upper canopy? The sky exploded with a boom that rattled through the window casements and through Tilly. She jerked back into spider thread, the kind you never saw, and then blam! You were wrapped in goo, snared by a teeny-tiny, almost invisible, arachnid.

* * *

An arm slipped around her waist, breath tickled her neck and familiar fingers teased the sensitive spot above her hipbone. The blades of the fan sliced through the bedroom air, and tree frogs serenaded with the noises of the night. “I love you,” David whispered in the soft mid-Atlantic accent that masked his Brooklyn roots.

Tilly tried to turn and touch the ridge of scar on his right cheek, but her limbs remained weighted to the mattress. The mockingbird shrilled from its nest, and David’s arms retreated.

Don’t go, my love, don’t go. It can’t hurt you. It’s just a bird.

Tilly jolted upright in bed, her heart thumping. She glanced at the ceiling, but there was no creak from the room above to suggest that Isaac, who slept on the edge of his bed in deference to his plush lizards and snakes, had, yet again, fallen out.

Dawn was creeping around the blinds, sneaking into her bedroom with a fresh reminder that she was welcoming another day as a widow. And her phone was ringing at—she squinted toward David’s space-age alarm clock—6:00 a.m.? It better not be James Nealy again, unless…dear God, no. No. Her breath quickened; her mind swirled in memories. Was it four o’clock on a black November morning with rain pounding the deck, the air crackling with a late-season thunderstorm, and her mother’s voice, quiet but solid, “Your father’s fading. Come home”? Or was it 12:01 on a balmy May night with spring peepers jingling in the forest and one of David’s inner-circle graduate students crying as she whispered, “David’s been rushed to hospital”? Why did life boil down to phone calls in the middle of the night? Who this time? Her mother, one of her sisters, Rowena?

Tilly yanked the phone from its base. “Yes?” Her voice raced out with her breath.

“Oh, you’re there. Thank the Lord.”

“Mum? Why are you calling at this hour?”

“I woke you, didn’t I? I’m terribly sorry, darling.” This was not the voice of a woman who had spent forty years drilling English history into teenage girls at a small private school. Nor was it the voice of a woman who had lost two babies to crib death, but scuppered fear and grief to see two more pregnancies to term. This was the voice of a woman who, the summer after her husband died, hid in a family heirloom.

The nearly forgotten image stirred: her mother crouched against grief in the Victorian wardrobe, refusing to come out for anyone but Tilly, the daughter who lived an ocean away.

“Wake me?” Tilly rubbed her eyes. “You know me, up with the larks. Bright and chirpy at—” she glanced at the clock again. Six bloody a.m.? “—six a.m.”

“Darling, is something wrong?”

“Shouldn’t I be asking that question?”

Tilly scooted across David’s side of the bed and swung her legs to the hardwood floor. She used to dream of a rug in the bedroom, but David liked his floors smooth, bare and refinished every three years. Maybe this winter she would splurge, buy a rug. Or maybe not.

“Bit out of sorts,” her mother said. “Fancied a chat.”

Tilly gnawed off a hangnail. “Did something happen, Mum?”

Half a day away, her mother heaved out the biggest sigh Tilly had ever heard.

“Mum? You’re scaring me.” Tilly twisted the phone cord around her wrist, then untwisted it. Oh God, was her mother’s voice muffled? Was she hiding in the wardrobe again? Tilly drummed her toes on the floor. Where were her flip-flops? Where?

“Now you’re not to fuss. I’m absolutely fine. I’ve had a bit of a fall and broken my leg. Of all the ridiculous things. And I have five stitches in my left hand. Where Monty bit me.”

“He what?” Tilly shot up. Her mother’s springer spaniel, named after a British World War II general, was a wack job.

“Don’t yell, darling. It was an accident. He was aiming for the hedgehog.”

“Hedgehog?”

“It’s all rather embarrassing.”

“I’m coming home, right now.” As soon as I find my flip-flops. Tilly dived under the bed. Well, lookie here—the overdue library books and the breast health pamphlet she’d been searching for. And wow, how about all those dust bunnies?

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are not coming home.” Thank God, her mother was using her teacher’s voice, the one that had enforced zero tolerance in the classroom long before American educators adopted the phrase. “I’m perfectly fine. Feeling a tad foolish is all. I called to commiserate, not cause worry. It’s perfect gardening weather, and I’m confined to the drawing room with my feet up. My list for today included tying back the sweet peas.”

Typical, her mother was upset by the disruption, not the accident. Apart from the summer of her breakdown, Mrs. Virginia Haddington lived a neat life, greeting each day with a list written in specially ordered blue fountain pen ink. Oh God. In the ten years since her father’s death, Tilly had been the gatekeeper of her mother’s mental health, making sure she was taking time to garden, to read, to enjoy a social life. But in all those years, Tilly had never once worried about her mother’s physical well-being. Sure, she was only seventy, but her mother had never broken a bone before.

Mrs. Haddington gave a sniff. “It’s that blasted muntjac’s fault, the one that treats my vegetable garden as an all-night buffet. I’m at my wit’s end, Tilly. My broad beans are gone. Simply gone. When I was up at the Hall the other day, trying to persuade Rowena to join the rota for the church flowers—”

Tilly snorted. Her mother had to be joking. Rowena could barely tell the difference between a stinging nettle and a rose. And she had no interest in learning otherwise.

Her mother ignored the interruption and kept going. “I bumped into the gamekeeper and asked if I could borrow his shotgun, but the blighter refused to lend it to me.”

Tilly rolled her eyes. Her mother had known the gamekeeper for thirty years, but still refused to call him John. Of course, the only person in the village who used his real name was Rowena, his boss. The Roxtons, Rowena’s family, had owned and managed the three thousand acres of woods and farmland surrounding the village for generations. But on Rowena’s thirtieth birthday, Lord and Lady Roxton gifted the property to their only child and skipped off to a new life on Crete. A dumbfounded Rowena, left only with a vague reassurance that she wouldn’t be clobbered with inheritance tax provided Lord Roxton outlived the gift by seven years, had quit a successful career in the London art world to save her ailing inheritance: the Bramwell Chase estate and Bramwell Hall. As the new lady of the manor, she had hired contract farmers, financed a roof for her crumbling historic mansion by renting it to a movie crew, and had just scraped past the seven-year marker. Considering she was mining a financial dinosaur, Ro was holding her own, but no thanks to her parents.

“Wait a minute,” Tilly said. “You were planning to shoot Bambi?” She imagined a new version of the Daddy game. What would Grammy do about the copperhead? Easy-peasy. Bash in the snake’s head with the hoe and then put the kettle on for tea. “You’ve never fired a gun.”

“Nonsense. I was a dab hand with your uncle’s air rifle. Deer are large rodents, Tilly, and one should treat them as such. When I have rats, I pay the rat catcher to kill them. Why is shooting a deer any different?”

Tilly chewed her lip, determined not to swallow the bait. Her mother and Rowena had collaborated many times to accuse anti-beagling, anti-fox-hunting, anti-pheasant-shooting Tilly of being a namby-pamby country dweller.

“I’m sorry, Mum. My head’s spinning, and I’m barely awake.” Although her heart, galloping every which way, suggested otherwise. “How did we get from hedgehogs to deer?”

“A hedgehog. Singular.”

Tilly rolled her eyes and silently renewed her vow never to be a mother who grasped every teachable moment and strode forth with it.

“Well, since the gamekeeper wouldn’t help, I came up with my own solution. Very creative, too. When I took Monty out for his bedtime turn around the garden, I brought along that giant water blaster Rowena gave Isaac. Thought I’d soak the muntjac if I saw him. Works with next door’s Lab when he bursts through the hedge to attack poor Monty.”