He had wanted to hate the island.
When Leslie had returned from her mother’s funeral with news of the inheritance, he’d been sure she was messing with him. For weeks after, at night she whispered in his ear, her hand wrapped around his dick, tugging slow, slower, up and down. Is this good, baby? Is this how you like it? Like she didn’t know. After sex, his fingers and mouth smelling and tasting of her, they lay together, the city clamor knocking around on the street outside their apartment, and he listened as she described the Castle. She called it that—not a hint of irony—and slapped at him when he called her Princess Leslie.
She described the gardens. Acres of fern-carpeted forest (she knew he was a sucker for ferns). The fragrant salt-spray roses that blanketed the dunes of Singing Beach. It sure sounded like a fairy-tale castle, a make-believe island. Impossible to believe in, and yet he couldn’t stop hoping it was real and came to want it so bad that he’d shoved her away, begged her to quit, this Scheherazade scheming, luring him away from his city, his home, to an island rotten with white conservatives. Military born and bred. Shit, Leslie, he’d shouted once, waking Eva, they’re natural born killers!
He had wanted to hate Avalon, to feel the same disgust he’d reserved for her parents, who lived as if Jules were dead and his children never born. When Brooks began mentioning the island during family dinners, Jules had wanted to hate Leslie, who, as usual, had recruited their son to her agenda, the boy who wanted so badly to believe in something that he’d believe in anything. UFOs, God, world peace—it seemed like Brooks was obsessed with a new cause every week. Like mother, like son, Jules thought but didn’t dare say aloud. It seemed a challenge these days to go a week without Leslie or Brooks getting pissed at him. Their brooding combined, forget about it. Brooks, like Leslie, had a knack for holding grudges, and could go days without speaking to him. Making Jules feel invisible.
Then he visited the island for the first time, just he and Leslie—the kids left behind in the city under the care of Mrs. Umansky. Jules fell in love the moment their city-dinged station wagon rolled onto the causeway under clouds so thick they seemed painted. The white-capped waves rocked against the boulders lining the narrow road and he felt the trembling in his chest. They drove into a forest so dense the trees joined in a lush canopy overhead, and, on each side of the paved road, reached in for a verdant hug, making it hard to see where the asphalt ended and the woods began.
He’d let the car slow to a crawl, wanting to watch the sunlight flicker through the trees, catch the birdsong, to feel the ocean breeze sifting the leaves. It was just as Leslie had promised. Like America before the white man arrived. Virgin land. No stoplights, no stop signs. No telephone poles—the islanders had paid through the nose to have the wires buried so as not to spoil the view.
He had no language to describe the Castle then. It took a few days for the archaic terms he had studied in required architectural courses at Harvard to return to him. Turrets and finials and gables. But studying glossy photos in a textbook was nothing like the real thing. Of course Leslie’s parents had named it the Castle. It was the stuff of fairy tales, a white marble palace rising out of the trees, built to protect a royal clan from marauding villagers and pillaging hordes. From war. From the undesirables—what his pops had called the kids in their ’hood who spent their days slinging dope, lounging on stoops like the sun had melted them there.
It looked to Jules more like a fortress than a home with its four rounded spired towers, one at each corner of the three-story square-shaped main house. The front portico with its domed ceiling, and carriage porch (la porte-cochère, Jules remembered) reminded him of the White House.
The bronze French baroque front doors were as tall as the two-story city row house that had been Jules’s childhood home. Leslie claimed they weighed a ton each. An oval medallion with ornately wrought initials decorated each door. H. M. for Hieronymus Marshall. Admiral, former Grudder president, warmonger, bigot, father to Jules’s beloved.
Leslie had told him the story. The Castle was built after her father returned from a company golfing retreat to France, where he and a group of the higher-ups from the factory, most ex-military like Admiral Marshall, had stayed at a sixteenth-century castle turned luxury resort. At the souvenir shop, the admiral had bought a set of laminated place mats—the castle’s stony beauty depicted in watercolor. Once stateside, he’d hired an architect and had given him orders to copy every detail, stopping short of building the moat.
If there had been a chance left for him to hate the island, to refuse Leslie’s and Brooks’s demands that they move, it died when Jules entered the maze that led to the Castle’s gardens. Leslie, not one to keep anything under wraps, had managed to keep it a surprise, and as Jules ran into the maze, ignoring Leslie’s cries, “Wait, you’ll get lost! You need the directions!” there was nothing he wanted more than to lose himself in the tall (at least eight or nine feet, he guessed) fragrant corridors. It was his personal amusement park—the funny mirror glass replaced with living, breathing, oxygen-releasing walls.
He knew gardeners who hated boxwood, claimed it smelled like cat piss, but Jules inhaled deeply as he ran through the shaded lanes, reveling in the sour scent. He wished Leslie had followed him in—they could run together, until breathless, and he would tell her everything he knew about Buxus. Way back when, the ancient Egyptians were filling the gaps in their gardens with boxwood, just as the ladies of East Avalon did today. Pharaoh Kufu, that perfectionist, insisted the base of the Great Pyramid be lined with thousands of the trees. Imagine that—the audacity—planting hundreds of thousands of thirsty boxwoods and commanding them to rise in the desert!
He hit a dead end, almost ran face first into the evergreen. He retraced his steps, or at least he thought he had, but he ran into another dead end. He laughed aloud. Leslie’s birdlike voice sounded in the distance.
“I told you, you big fool. You’ll be sorry you didn’t listen to me!”
“I don’t care,” he shouted. “I’m never coming out!”
He lay on his back in the grass. The sun blocked by the tall hedges, the sweat on his face cooled, and he thought of the city and its steel and glass skyscrapers. He’d happily trade those man-made walls for this.
The sky above the labyrinth had turned a predusk apricot by the time he emerged. Not from the entrance he’d run into like an impatient child, but from the exit, and what he saw stopped him short so he skidded across the dew-damp lawn, landing flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him.
Leslie was there, waiting, and the sight of him prone kicked her into giggles. She’d always had the humor of a ten-year-old boy, Jules thought. A sucker for physical comedy, especially if it was Jules tripping, falling, walking straight-on into a screened door.
“Oh my,” Leslie gasped midlaugh, “it was just like in the cartoons! You know when they slip on the…”
He interrupted her, groaning as he sat up, “I know, I know. On a banana.”
There it was. His garden. His second chance. They stood at the top of the wide stone stairs overlooking the gardens that unfolded like a gold and green tapestry, and, for a moment, instead of feeling grateful to Leslie, he felt only hot humiliation. He’d been so naïve. She (Scheherazade, he thought again) had known all along how this seduction would go down. Known he’d never be able to say no. Not to this. The garden that would replace all he’d lost last year when that nor’easter gobbled up Hurricane Grace, creating what meteorologists called the Perfect Storm (and with a manic glee that had made Jules want to throw something at the TV). A fifteen-foot storm surge had rolled over their neighborhood, the lowest point in the city, a hook-shaped peninsula sticking out in the sea. Asking for it. The community garden he and Leslie had created a decade back, named Our Garden with naïve optimism, destroyed. Even when the water had rolled back out to sea, the salt left behind strangled the few plants that had put up a good fight. His life’s work, dead.
But now there was this. The Castle. The rolling lawn as wide as the city botanical gardens he had fled to as a boy, an escape from his father sitting slumped in front of the radio listening to ball games and smelling of cigarette smoke and despair, and from the kids on his block who kicked his ass every weekend for being a foo-foo private-school boy whose mama ironed his jeans so he looked spick-and-span even on Saturdays.
Beyond the lawn, the sea glittered. The view so damn perfect he had to blink away the sense that it was a painting. He’d only ever seen such perfection in the west wing galleries of the city museum, where the French Impressionists hung in gilded frames. The rosebushes were newly blooming—They were waiting for you—in every shade of red, white, yellow, pink, even purple. He recognized a few of his favorite hybrids. The soft pink Heritage; the fragrant Madame Plantier; and what had been his mother’s favorite—he’d planted it outside her bedroom window her final spring so she could watch it unfurl—the Double Delight, with its creamy center and cherry-red edges she’d compared to a lady’s painted parasol, the kind of image she’d only ever seen in movies and romance novels.
The garden was a mess, no doubt. The roses hadn’t been cut back in who knows how long and the long branches had bent to the ground, most of the blooms resting on the earth, the petals brown with rot. Overgrown meandering paths had sprouted weeds as tall as Eva, encircling a pond so thick with green algae and lily pads it could’ve been a set for a horror film.
Jules knew he could return the garden to its glory. He buzzed with faith.
“Well,” Leslie had sang cutely, her thin arm woven through his, “What do you think? Will it do?” She laughed, startling a bird from a nearby tree. A male cardinal like a spot of fresh blood against the cloudless sky. “It’s your own secret garden.”
And it did feel as if the garden had been made for him, plucked straight from his dreams. Circling the pond were cottage flowers elbowing one another for room—the same flowers he’d have picked himself. Bellflower. Foxglove. The regal delphinium. Ox-eyed daisies, sweet Williams, hollyhocks, peonies, and spikes of silvery-blue lavender. There were fruit trees, apple, pear, flowering cherry, and purple-leaf plum. And a long row of Cherokee Brave dogwoods, their pink blossoms so plentiful it looked like the buds perched on their thin branches. The flowerbeds, lily and iris and overgrown hydrangea in Easter-egg colors, reached into the perimeter of downy fern, and beyond it lay the woods, so it seemed as if there was no beginning or end to the greenery.
Who had created such a garden? Could Leslie’s mother, a woman Jules had never met but had despised, be his kindred spirit? It was an old-fashioned country design with uneven rows and closely planted flowers. It felt authentic. Unpretentious. Of course, he knew that, just like the salon-coiffed and tennis-toned women of Avalon Island, the garden’s messy irregularity was intended. He’d be careful, he promised himself (and his garden, he was already thinking of it as his); he wouldn’t overprune, only cut back what was necessary. He wouldn’t spoil the duality of its design—casual yet carefully constructed—an exquisite contradiction that had, for years, made Jules long to see the English and European gardens he’d visited only in the pages of books. Because they’d never had the money. Not since Leslie had gone to her parents seventeen years ago, told them she was carrying a black man’s child, and lost her allowance, and, until her mother, in the final stages of uterine cancer had changed her will, her inheritance. Still, he reminded himself how, seventeen years ago, when Leslie had returned to their one-room city apartment after confessing to her parents, Brooks in her womb just starting to show—a miracle after so many miscarriages—she had chosen Jules (him!) over her parents. He had never loved her more.
They took her back, of course—not him, or the children—only their golden-haired daughter, whom they gave an allowance. A pittance of what she would’ve inherited, he’d heard Leslie explain with an eye roll to her mostly white bohemian friends—self-declared artists and writers and thespians, who, he guessed, also lived off allowances. Every few months, Leslie slipped on one of the pastel Chanel suits she kept draped in plastic at the back of the closet. She straightened her hair with a hot iron so the white-blond curtained the back of her long patrician neck. She dabbed creamy cover-up on her freckled nose. The freckles he adored. Kissed. Photographed. Her father’s car picked her up and drove her to the island, where she walked through the Castle doors as if frozen in time. To collect her check. To be their Leslie. Leslie in a bottle. A lie.
Three months after his first visit to the island, he’d finally given up on resurrecting their sea-ravaged garden—Our Garden—it still stung to think of the name arching over the iron entrance in rainbow-colored letters he’d repainted every spring. He caved to Leslie’s (and Brooks’s) demands, stuffed their earthly possessions, including the kids, into a U-Haul, and made the move. Leslie had convinced him to abandon the few surviving plants—a lilac tree turned powdery white with mildew; a dozen hostas, their elephant-ear leaves cracked; and a peony bush whose blush-colored flowers looked as immaculate as before the storm. It was a fresh start, she’d promised.
It rained the morning they moved and the island air was thick with the fecund scent of damp earth, low tide and spring blossoms, and something sweet and familiar—pine needles that had sat all winter.
And so Jules rolled down the windows of the U-Haul and ordered his family to “Breathe!” gulping air until Leslie and Eva were giggling. Brooks complained, of course, calling Jules a “total dork,” but soon even Brooks was laughing and Jules’s head spun from all that oxygen. He knew that dizzy feeling was happiness.
When they reached the gates of the Castle, the U-Haul screeching to a halt, and Jules saw the pair of marble eagles guarding the entrance like Rottweilers, his first thought was he’d gone and brought his family—his son—to a prison. Leslie unlocked the salt-rusted chain, and from the driver’s seat, with the sun behind them, he could see through her sheer skirt the V where her thighs met. She skipped back to the car and, once inside, the car jerking forward and onto the long graveled driveway, she’d kissed him, engulfing him in the scent that was hers alone. Almonds. Jasmine oil. The sugar that sits at the bottom of a cup of coffee. That last delicious sip.
He parked at the end of the drive. His family sat in silence, staring up at the Castle, the sun shining her brightest (like she knew they were coming) so the white marble sparkled with sugary light.
Eva poked her head between the front two seats and whispered, “Do a king and queen live there?”
Jules looked at Leslie, who gazed up at the Castle, chewing her lower lip.
“They do now,” he said. “And you can be our princess.”
“Barf,” Brooks groaned from the backseat.
Jules turned just in time to see Leslie roll her eyes in Brooks’s direction, as in Your dad is such a cheeseball. Jules wouldn’t let their ganging up on him like usual bust his sunny mood. He was high on sea breeze, on honeysuckle.
“Um, Mom? Is that, like, an iron gate on the front door?”
His son’s voice shook and Jules was grateful when Leslie spoke.
“Actually, it’s bronze,” she said. “Forged on this very island, in the Ironworks. Don’t worry, sweetie, we’ll always leave it unlocked. Cross my heart.”
“Unless you miss curfew, young man,” Jules added. “Psych!”
“Ha-ha, hilarious,” Brooks said. Then added, “Not.”
“We’ll be living in the cottage next door anyway,” Leslie said, turning around in her seat and chucking Brooks under his newly defined chin. “Just until I fix up the old place.”
The cottage was a short walk through the hedge maze. Jules was excited, and a bit nervous, to show the kids the maze—what if little Eva got lost? He explained to Brooks how to navigate the labyrinth.
“There are two types of non-unicursal, or puzzle, mazes.” Jules had spent hours researching mazes at the city library, brushing up on general info he’d absorbed way back in grad school. “Branching and island mazes. This one is a branching, which is pretty cool, since it’s the older kind.”
Brooks puffed out a sigh.
“Dad, can you just, like, get on with it? I don’t need a plant lesson. Just the directions.”
It stung, his son’s rejection, even more so, Brooks’s sudden loathing for anything green. Leslie had tried to comfort Jules with some psychobabble about the son having to reject his father to become his own person, but still.
“Fine,” Jules said, struggling to keep calm when he wanted to shout at Brooks, call him a spoiled brat, “keep your hand—doesn’t matter which one—on the same wall. When you hit a dead end, move your hand around the end of the path. You’ll retrace your steps and end up where you started.” He added, “That simple enough for you?”
Leslie had taught Jules the series of turns—a long combination of rights and lefts—for each route through the maze. The first path was from the front of the Castle to the cottage, and the second, the front of the Castle to the gardens. Jules had tried his best to memorize both but flubbed them each time Leslie tested him.
They made a game out of it for little Eva using the tune of “Heigh-Ho” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Jules and Leslie sang as their family marched through the maze. Jules played the clown—his arms pumping and legs lifting like a manic soldier. Right, right … Left, right … Right, left, left, right … Eva giggled, Brooks rolled his eyes again, and Leslie smiled. Maybe they were home, Jules hoped.
* * *
He had promised Leslie he would go to the party with her. An apology of sorts for what she called his overreaction to the fight at the fair.
“I wouldn’t even call it a fight,” Leslie had said. “More like a tussle.”
“White boys will be white boys,” he had said in the high-pitched voice of his aunt Lorraine, which he often used to tease Leslie. She’d swatted him. Pursed her lips thoughtfully, “A rumble? A spat?”
There had been a gun. He’d sworn to her he’d seen it on one of those heavy-metal kids. But Leslie had only nodded like he was little Eva complaining about the bogeyman under her bed.
He showered in the cottage’s narrow bathroom stall, scrubbing the dirt from his nails with a wooden brush. God forbid he should offend any more of Avalon’s blue-haired ladies, he thought.
“What are you laughing at?” Leslie asked.
“Just wondering if Orchid Lady will be there tonight.”
“You are a troublemaker,” Leslie said, smiling. “And if she is who I think she is, you better watch that sweet ass of yours. Mrs. Hennessey is infamous for her roving fingers. The busboys at the club can attest.”
“You trying to turn me on?”
“Can you blame her?” she said. “I was watching you work in the garden. Looking all sexy out there with no shirt. All sweaty. Wood chips stuck to your muscles.”
This woman, he thought. Her words alone made his soap-lathered penis grow hard.
Leslie let out a frustrated groan.
“What’s the matter?” He slid the shower curtain open and it rattled on rusted rings.
She stood in front of the vanity mirror wiggling into the control-top panty hose he’d only seen her wear when visiting her parents.
“You’re wearing those?”
He toweled himself with a raggedy thing that smelled like mildew. Leslie had yet to abandon her rule forbidding living in the Castle and so they were stuck with the portable washing machine that hooked up to the cottage kitchen sink. The clothes and towels were hung out to dry on a clothesline out back and returned with a damp, fishy odor.
“I thought you said panty hose were sexist torture devices? Invented to keep women from moving fast enough to achieve their goals. I’m just paraphrasing, of course.”
“When in Rome,” Leslie grumbled as she hopped up and down trying to scoot the flesh-toned elastic fabric over her pale ass. “And don’t mess with a woman shoving herself into Spandex, Julius. She just might murder you.”
Jules looked out the bathroom window and spotted Brooks heading down the driveway. His skateboard was tucked under an arm and his backpack hung low like it was full and heavy. Maybe with beer, Jules guessed, and reminded himself to give Brooks another talk about getting in cars with drunk teen drivers—a new concern out here in the country.
“Where’s he going?” Jules stopped himself from running out the cottage door in his towel to tell Brooks to be careful. To watch his back. The kind of thing Jules’s father would’ve done.
“I don’t know. Out,” Leslie called from the bedroom. “I put your new suit on the bed. But you’ll have to wear your old loafers. Maybe we can get a pair in town tomorrow. Ooh, and I want to get my hair blown out.”
Leslie had been spending money like it grew on the rosebushes he’d pruned in the garden that morning. Boxes of new clothes she brought home from town. Shiny new items that seemed to pop up daily. A red tricycle for Eva. And for Brooks, a new stereo and turntables and speakers as tall as Eva. But Leslie had promised Jules, thanks to her inheritance, there was enough money in their bank account to buy a dozen speakers. He had considered going to the bank in town himself to make sure but knew he needed to trust her.
She had made an excuse about having to replace all they’d left behind and he wanted to remind her of all the stuff still boxed up in the Castle’s six-car garage, including their books—books Leslie had given him soon after they’d met. Copies of Invisible Man and Native Son and James Baldwin’s collected works. The essays he had read again and again so the pages were creased and yellowed; the covers softened. He and Leslie had spent hours on snowy days way back when, in Cambridge, in bed, naked, smoking joints and sipping hot cocoa, debating what Baldwin meant when he wrote: The really terrible thing, old buddy (and, God, didn’t Jules feel like Baldwin was talking straight at him, right up in his face), is that you must accept them … For these innocent people have no other hope. Innocent whites? How could Baldwin write with such outrage, quote God cursing Noah with utter destruction—No more water, the fire next time!—and blame not the bigots and lynchers but their innocence? Decades later, he was still trying to figure out what Baldwin was getting at and, sometimes, he felt close. But since they’d moved to the island, well, he figured it was time for a refresher.
He had wanted to reject Leslie’s gifts. The absurdity—a rich white girl giving him a bag of books about the black experience. It should’ve been his pops who handed him those books tracing the history of the black man from slave to free man, but his father had been too stuffed with bitterness to find redemption on paper. Jules’s teachers at Dalton, his mostly white private high school, had assigned plenty of books about struggle—The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick. Sure, they’d read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that was a whole other story. Leslie’s gifts, shopping bags full of used books, had reflected Jules back at himself like a mirror. She’d given him the words to understand and explain himself.
Now they were trapped in cardboard boxes in the garage. He’d considered bringing them into the cottage, creating his own impenetrable walls with stacks of books. Along with the forgotten FREE SOUTH AFRICA and END APARTHEID posters they’d brought home from an antiwar rally two decades back—their first purchase together. The posters had traveled with them from Cambridge to New York City, had hung on the walls of half a dozen studio apartments until they were frayed at the edges.
“Who’s going to watch the baby tonight?” Jules asked. “While we go to the dinner thing?”
“The Wilson girl. Completely reliable.”
“We could bring Eva with us,” Jules said, trying not to betray his fear of letting a stranger watch his little girl. “Ooh, lawd,” he crooned in the voice he’d been using more and more since they’d moved to the island, an amalgamation of all the dialects he’d heard actors use in movies about slavery. He knew Leslie couldn’t stand it. She’d even accused him of being racist, which only made him lay it on thicker. “How all the white missuses will be squealing over our sweet little pickaninny!”
“Like I said,” Leslie said, “you are a troublemaker.”
She struck a femme-fatale pose in the doorway, one naked arm stretched above her head, a hand on her hip. She wore a sheer, vanilla silk gown. It tied at the neck and clung to her like liquid. With her blond hair swept to one side, she was a bona fide bombshell and made him think of Veronica Lake. Made him want to tear the dress off.
“I decided to screw the panty hose and go au naturel.”
He kissed her and let his towel fall from his waist.
“Screw me instead, baby.”
“Well, that didn’t take much.” She wrapped her fingers around his penis. Then pushed him away. “Jules, you’re all wet! I paid a fortune for this dress at Saks. Good thing it wasn’t my fortune.”
He laughed along but didn’t like the way she spoke of her mother’s money like it was a big joke, making it out like they were crooks.
She tiptoed to the second bedroom—they’d decided Brooks should have his own room, but Eva took her naps in there. Leslie listened, her ear pressed to the closed door.
“Come with me,” she said. “I have a surprise.”
He felt that familiar tugging in his abdomen when she hooked her fingers in his and he saw the quilt folded under her arm.
“But the baby.”
“She’s fast asleep.”
“I don’t know.” He was worried about Eva waking, getting lost in the serpentine maze.
Leslie kissed him, the tip of her tongue pushing his lips apart and entering his mouth. Ending the conversation. He grew hard so fast it hurt. Two decades they’d been together and she could still make him feel that. What a fool he’d been to think he’d could say no to her. About moving to the island. About anything.
They ran through the hedge maze. The tang of fresh-trimmed wood filled the green corridors. She tugged him forward at every turn, which made the towel slip from his waist until he was using it only to shield his penis, his ass bared.
“Pop quiz!” Leslie shouted. “What’s the code to get back to the cottage?”
Jules sang the “Heigh-Ho” tune, “Right, left, right, right, left, right.”
“Good boy!” Leslie cheered. “But there’s another code if you want to get to the secret garden tucked in the heart of the maze.”
“Oooh, a secret garden,” Jules teased. “I ain’t no naïve little boy falling for your tricks, Ms. Leslie Marshall.”
Her laugh was like coins tumbling from the blue sky.
“You’ll see,” she said. “Listen up. ’Cause I’m only going to tell you the code two times. You ready?”
“Yessiree, ma’am!”
She slapped his bare ass and he whooped. They ran faster.
“Left, right,” she said. “Left, left, right, left.”
“Left, right,” he repeated. “Left, right…”
“No! Repeat after me, you big dummy.”
“Shit, girl, it took me three tries to memorize the way to the cottage. I’m a science man, not a math man.”
They chanted the code and then they were running down sun-toasty stone steps and into what Jules could only describe as a room. Made with living walls. He knew they must be close to the big garden—he smelled the grass he’d cut that morning and the tree sap oozing from the trees he’d downed. He ran his hands across the eastern wall knowing that, on the other side, his precious garden waited for him.
“I cut the grass myself,” Leslie said as she unfolded the quilt, lifting it so the fabric ballooned before settling on the chopped grass.
“With what?” Jules said. “Scissors?”
“Shut up.” She giggled. “It was hard. I had to use the hand mower so it would stay a surprise.”
She shimmied out of her silk dress. She was naked underneath and the revelation made his breath catch. He threw his towel aside. She hung her dress by its thin straps on a twig sticking out of the wall, and then she lay on the quilt, her body still and pale as marble. His Aphrodite.
She filled her mouth with him and the square of grass became a green undulating sea. Her body shimmered in the late sunshine, the sky above striated pink and orange, and as she rode him, his hips bucking to match her time, it was as if she was made of light.
She moaned, “We’re home.”
The quilt grew wet under his back, with dew and come, and after they were done, a stain the shape of his long body stretched across the quilt.
How had he gone so long, he wondered, without the scent of dew in his life?