64

In the weeks that followed I spent hours in the sun.

Nona joined me, shading her eyes as she watched me work in the garden. I planted an herb garden of myrtle, lavender germander, and sage. I trimmed the copper beech hedge, the beet-dark leaves scattering about to be raked. And I raked, shoveled, trimmed, and turned over the soil for a wild garden of purely native plants, wild radish, wild iris, lupine, and California poppy.

Nona said that she liked watching me work. I suggested videos, books, tapes, but she laughed. “You’re more entertaining,” she said.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Stratton Fields, comic gardener.”

“Not comic, exactly. You look strong, digging and shaking the clods off the pitchfork like that.”

“Someone for the gardener decathalon?” I said.

“I was thinking something a little sexier than that.”

I gazed at her, a woman in a lawn chair and a large sunhat. “I thought sick people didn’t have amorous intentions.”

“I’m not sick. Anyway, they do. And it’s called ‘sex drive,’ not amorous intentions.”

“I belong to some other era,” I said, only half seriously. “One that never existed.”

“You look so intent,” she said. “You hold up that clod of dirt like its going to talk to you.”

“Anything to entertain,” I said.

I worked for awhile.

“You are right about angels,” said Nona.

Her words startled me.

She read my expression, and added, “You said once that if an angel came to talk to someone, it would be in a place like this.”

“But you didn’t mean to say that there are such things?”

Nona settled back in her chair, with an expression that said: I won’t talk about them anymore.

She sipped from a blue cup. I had asked Collie to bring Nona whatever she wanted, and Nona ate a selection of cakes, biscuits, meringues, and sorbets, all accompanied by a beverage of milk and honey, laced with an underflavoring of black tea.

“We could live like this forever,” said Nona.

Given world enough, I wanted to say, and time. I worked hard, laboring in the garden to put Rick to rest, to lay my father even deeper into the past, where he belonged. Earthworms spasmed. Roots struggled, and gave way under the plunge of my spade.

“We’ll have breakfast every day over there, under that—what is it called?”

“The camperdown elm,” I said. “You can have breakfast anywhere you want.”

She gazed at me from under her hat, the straw brim sprinkling her face with light and shadow. “With you,” she said.

The gingko tree shaded the back garden. All of its branches were full of leaf. There was something about this that continued to trouble me. The presence of this resurrected tree reminded me of something I wanted to forget.

I worked in the hothouse, too, and Nona enjoyed the smell of the place, and the new small jungle that erupted around her. I showed her how to savor a ginger blossom like honeysuckle, and there were many flowers to pick, both white and yellow ginger, because that plant, a lovely tropical weed, was as yet the most prominent in the hothouse, although the heliconia and the anthuriums were in full leaf. They promised to blossom soon.

“Does your mother know about your brother?” asked Nona one morning as I opened a new bag of potting soil.

I breathed the fragrance of the mulch. I knew that, in a gentle way, Nona was testing me. She wanted to see what I was able to talk about. “It’s hard to know what she understands. I went up while you were in the hospital and told her.”

Anticipating the visit had been very grim, but the actual telling, aided by Dr. Ahn, had been a peculiar experience. My mother had insisted that Rick had died years ago, in an accident on the way home from a party. I did not have to suggest to anyone that, in a sense, she was right.

Nona had prescribed medication for me, and I took it. It had a striking effect on me at first, slowing me down and making my hands tremble. Nona remained out of touch with events at the hospital, although daily she was plainly closer to going back to work. She cut pictures out of magazines, and read storybooks, marking favorite pages, anticipating her return.

One Sunday afternoon Nona called to me. I leaned on my shovel and looked back to see her pointing.

“An old friend,” she said.

The white cat paused at the edge of Nona’s shadow, looking across the green lawn. It was happy to stay near Nona for the moment, accepting a caress. But when it began stalking a squirrel, creeping toward the gingko tree, I laughed and told it that we had already rescued it from that very tree once before.

The tree.

It was fully alive, and wore the deep green of a tree in its prime.

The day Nona returned to work at the hospital, I was in the hothouse, rolling up the hose. The brass nozzle trailed along the gravel and the moss-edged steppingstones.

The hose was wound into circles, and hung on its frame, when I stopped moving.

The air in the hothouse is warm, but it is also thick, a world apart from the other, thin-aired diaspora. No kitchen, no desk, only shelves of plants, those remorseless stalks and leaves. Sometimes when I was in that artificial environment I would be certain that someone was approaching, and I would cock my head to listen.

The glazed windows of the place played tricks on me, I knew. But I had the sensation that I was about to have a visitor, and I prayed that it might be a human, ordinary everyday sort of messenger, and not the other kind.