17

VALERIE FELT MESMERIZED by that seaman’s watch of Robert’s. The act of remembering was trancelike, in its rhythmic to-and-fro. Needing fresh air, she stepped outside into Marguerite’s garden, into its dazzle of sunlight, its tidy rows of staked tomatoes, fresh lettuce, green beans trailing across a latticework of poles and string. Inside Marguerite’s soul she stood – within her gardener’s precise and measured way of looking at the world, its practical mix of rigour and beauty.

Finding a basket, she crouched down and began to pick a few tomatoes. The fruit was lustrous, ripe with the pungent scent of sun and warm earth. Tomato-ness, as James would say. There simply is no other word for it, and he’d contemplate that ripe fruit in his hands like a king admiring a jewelled orb of the world. The thought comforted her.

She herself made a good living cultivating frivolous plants — lupines, delphiniums, roses and hollyhocks, cascades of beauty that came and went. Her mother, who’d loved flowers, preferred to leave them alone. Chicory and Queen-Anne’s-lace had crowded her garden, choked out by black-eyed-Susans and the chill of autumn. Her wildflowers found their own order, their own patterns of colour and form. From their vitality, Valerie had shaped her idea of a cultivated garden. It was Matt who’d loved the wildness.

He’d come to visit, sitting beside her on the old wooden bench, his gaze intent, plucking daisies, threading them through her thick plaits, kissing her on the lips. He would never have believed that someone could crash a plane into a building. I’ve come to understand that we are better than our own worst acts, he’d written to her as a priest. I guess we’ll have to revise that script, she thought. Look at these beans. She snapped a small one off the vine and bit into it. It tasted green. The best time to harvest and to eat was always right now, in all its sweetness. She snapped off a second bean, enjoying its crunch, its taste.

Matt wasn’t hopeful as a young man. Fair and slim with pale blue eyes, passion trapped inside of them like a hiss of flame in a kerosene lantern — he was the neighbourhood kid who loved her, who was troubled because the world was tipping over on its side like a derailed freight car with a toxic leak; because in spite of his father’s sacrifice in the war, thugs of every stripe tossed matches into flammable villages in Vietnam; because in New York City in 1970, anarchists in the Village made a fatal blunder and dynamited their own house, endangering everyone on the block and killing themselves in the bargain; because a few weeks before that, terrorists in Switzerland (of all places) had bombed the luggage bay of a passenger plane, blowing it out of the sky.

***

Yesterday — before the attacks and the onslaught of memory —

Valerie had plopped beans down into the bushel, joined by an acorn squash or two. There were squash-flowers on the vines that needed to be plucked. It was too late for them to set fruit, but the blossoms were luminous, huge and golden, too lovely to discard. She’d decided to bring one inside, to float it in a bowl of water. Cupping her hands around a bloom, she could feel it humming. A bee was drinking nectar from the pistil, carrying pollen on its hairs, stopping to refuel as it moved from flower to flower with its strange, erratic pattern of flight. What stillness, what mastery of the impossible, she thought — the zigzag movement of bees was an aerodynamic mystery, a path that belonged to their fullness of life, to the scents of her mother’s garden, to Matt drifting toward her, wrapped in silence.

They were both eighteen when he took her hands in his and asked her, “What do you want in life?”

“Love and music,” Valerie replied. “Children.”

His face got the look of a ragged sky, a dark cloud in its grip.

“You want to bring children into this world?” he asked.

“I’m not going to raise them on the moon,” she said.

Matt didn’t answer.

***

Years later, Valerie wondered how love had come to them. Yet now it seemed to her that each had managed to get lost in the other’s imaginings, that the carved wooden bird and the wild clocks had enticed her with their strangeness, and that likewise, her love of flowers and her singing in the dark woods had become for Matt both a solace and a dwelling-place. Together they were building a home of beautiful conjurings, a place of nurture and so, she believed, a place that was meant for a child. It had troubled her, that Matt would question this.

***

Valerie went back inside, eyeing the garden from the kitchen window, the leafy outdoors merging with the intensity of colour on the windowsill. On it sat the golden flower picked from the squash vine, its beautiful trumpet floating in a glass bowl. It was joined by a blue-edged coleus, a glossy philodendron, the striped cascading of a spider plant. Valerie watered each of them, feeling the glaze of light on each leaf, light sinking into every pore, buttery light into her skin, the warmth of human touch, Gerard’s. You are welcome to my home, he’d said. His French accent struck her ear like a brisk wave hitting sand. I hope you will enjoy Toronto.

Unlike her mother, he kept his garden at the front of the house. Purple gentians and lupines stood against a brick wall in the late-noon sun — flowers that appeared tidy and masculine, even the white hollyhocks that cupped the light and spilled it into the lengthening day. I have not much time for this, he said, meaning the garden, and he eyed the flowers with the pensive look of his youth. I hope you will find them calming. His eyes looked concerned, their gaze resting on Matt’s hand, the weight of it on her shoulder.

A day or two later he asked her, are you happy to be here?

Her stomach tugged at the question. It clenched its fist of a life.

I’ll be even happier if things go my way, she thought.

Of course, she said aloud.

***

That clutch of life inside her was Matt’s child, and she wanted children, and she was all of twenty, almost through with college, but the world was in trouble, or so Matt thought, and in a year’s time, he’d be in Vietnam. Not for him, dodging the draft, not even for his own child. Think of what that would do to my father, he told her. Telling him he was a sucker, to suffer what he did. Valerie said it’s your child, too, but he begged her to understand. He said, If I don’t make it back, it won’t have a dad, and Valerie had wept and said, Please don’t go, we can get married and run away to Canada. But he kept saying he couldn’t let his father down, and if she quit college, she’d let her mother down, and her mom would kill both of them if she found out what had happened.

I love you, sweetie, he whispered. He ran his finger over her lips. It felt like a warning.

They’ve changed the law in New York State, he said. You can have the procedure here, but Valerie had friends in nurses’ training, her Aunt Ann was a nurse, and she was worried her mother would find out. Distressed, she confided in her sister Karen, who had a friend in Toronto, a nurse named Rita who could help her. Matt’s right, she remarked. It’s a new world. You’re still in college, your whole life is ahead of you. Even so, Valerie felt grieved. She realized that motherhood was the life she’d wanted, the life she had ahead of her.

As she thought about the plan, her mood brightened. It seemed that Rita’s house was a haven for Americans fleeing the draft, a place where runaways could rent space from a congenial landlord until they and their partners got settled. Valerie hoped that a kind and supportive atmosphere might inch Matt away from the tangle of guilt he carried for his father’s suffering. She hoped he’d come to love their unborn child.

How hard it was now, fearing for her son, praying he’d escaped a fiery disaster, his heart beating in hers, as close as breath. Breathe, she told herself, her heart racing. Even as she watered the plants, that moment of light had vanished.