2

Mary Lewis waited in her garden. Only the roses still had flowers, and these were loose-petaled and huge, edged with brown. One or two were nearly perfect, though, she discovered as she felt among the thorns. The gardener did good work, and she must compliment him.

It had been raining, and it would rain again, soon. She crossed her arms, wishing for a sweater. And wishing for much more than that, she realized. Wishing that she could remake her entire life. Undo everything she had ever done. Why she had waited so long, she could not guess.

A sprinkler head oozed water. A finch paused on it, but fled immediately as Sandy stepped across the patio and announced the visitor, the guest, she supposed he was, but he was scarcely here on a social visit.

She was disappointed in the doctor. She had hoped they would send someone mature, robust and slightly gray, someone who looked wise.

“I hope you don’t mind if we talk out here. I know it’s cool, and I expect rain any minute. But I feel more at ease here.”

“I don’t mind at all,” said the thin young doctor. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you. I don’t think it’s like any other garden in San Francisco. My father designed it. From the street, you aren’t aware that it is here at all.”

“You certainly aren’t.” The young man accepted coffee, and she repeated his name as if to test whether he responded to it. “Dr. Kirby?”

He said that, yes, he would like sugar, and used the silver tongs to select a cube.

“It’s what you would call a hidden garden. You can’t see it from the street, or from any of the surrounding houses. I think no one really knows it’s here. It uses land that does not seem to be here at all.”

She waited for him to respond, but he was hesitating over Sandy’s petits fours.

“My father was fascinated by secret places,” she continued. “I have often wondered if perhaps he had them build a secret room into this house. He could have, and no one would know it.”

“Do you think he did?” asked Dr. Kirby, dabbing at his lips with linen that kept its folds even when shaken open, like the map of a totally empty countryside.

His interest was amusing, and made him seem, briefly, charming. “My late husband wondered. He even thumped walls and made measurements.” Decrepit creature that he became, he had never been stupid. She collected herself. “He decided that every square inch of the house is present and accounted for. There is only this garden, this beautiful secret.”

Dr. Kirby chewed, and sipped coffee.

“But you will wonder why I asked you here.”

“Is there anything we can help you with, Mrs. Lewis?” asked the young man, setting aside his cup and saucer, adjusting the napkin beside him as if it hid a rabbit.

She could not begin to talk about it. After all these years of silence. It was simply too difficult. She could simply announce that she was going to give yet another grant to the hospital, so they could build a new wing for hydrotherapy, or plan a parking lot so their outpatients could park their BMWs closer to the magnolia trees.

But this was not why he was here. To plug the silence, she said, “I don’t even know how to begin.”

“Start anywhere you like. At the beginning.”

She saw that he was used to people who had trouble talking. He was experienced in spite of his appearance, his off-the-rack polyblend, and his tattered knit tie. His eyes took her in, and she was pleased that she was looking especially good today. Her hair only slightly gray, and her figure still slim enough to draw attention, quite a bit of it. In her youth, she had been pretty without being beautiful. Now, on her best days, she was a little bit—dare she suggest it to herself?—beautiful. Classical, at least.

She studied her manicure. “The beginning.”

He smiled helpfully.

“Do things have beginnings? Lives do, but lives are altered by things that happened long ago.” She could continue in this vein for a long while. Dr. Kirby would never do anything but fidget. She could bore people, and waste their time, and they would resemble Egyptian masks of the dead, patient and cheerful, and interested in the void that surely—there was no doubt—was filled with promise, like passengers on a plane to Paris. She never bored people, except deliberately.

“We can choose to call a certain event a beginning,” suggested Dr. Kirby.

“My family has always craved secrecy.”

The roses across the lawn swayed in a brief gust.

“My father would be in pain,” she continued, “and no one could tell. My mother kept her silence, no matter how she disapproved. And I carry on the tradition. Being a somewhat prominent family in society made us keep to ourselves. We hungered for a secret life. To avoid scandal, of course. But more than that. To have something no one knew about, something powerful because it was secret.”

Dr. Kirby smiled, as if he knew all about secrets. An exterminator would smile in this way if told about roaches.

Under her beauty, if that’s what it was, she was a sick woman. She knew it. She had enough sanity to admit that. She was not raving; she was not dangerous.

Except to one person.

“I am,” she said, “very concerned about my son.”

Sick. She should have gotten help long ago.

Dr. Kirby folded his hands. He seemed unwilling to interrupt her silence. “It’s really too cold to be sitting out here,” she said at last.

He did not move, but offered, “Shall we go inside?”

“No. Everything else in the house these days reminds me of my husband. He was”—she had never expressed it plainly before—“a drunk.”

Dr. Kirby’s pleasant face waited for her to continue.

“I married him because he reminded me of my father.” That should tell him everything, she thought, but it won’t.

“Your son,” he suggested gently.

“Yes. My son.” She watched a black bird listen for worms. How loud the surge of worm through soil must be to a bird. The bird stabbed, and came up empty. “To me this garden has always seemed like the center of the universe.”

“It’s very pretty.” Said as if he did not really care for gardens.

“It’s not pretty,” she said. “Pretty is superficial. It’s beautiful.”

In which case, she realized, she herself could not really be beautiful.

“Did your son enjoy the garden?”

“He spent his entire life here.”

He smiled blandly, not comprehending. Why hadn’t they sent someone perceptive? Why did she have to spell everything out? She wanted someone who would see her, see this place, and immediately know her.

“I mean he lived here until he was an adult, and never left this house, this garden.”

“Never?”

“Virtually.” She said the word carefully, wishing she could wrap it around Dr. Kirby’s neck. “I mean, and forgive me if I am vague, that this house and this hidden garden were his life.”

He looked around at it through new eyes. He still did not seem concerned. He frowned, though, looking across at the pale roses, and touched the saucer beside him. “So that he never had much contact with the world outside?”

“The outside world,” she corrected. “Because this is a world, too. A small world, but complete. In its way,” she added.

“An inside world.”

“Precisely.”

“And you are telling me that your family had many inside worlds.”

She was impressed. He was paying attention. She continued, “But I am not seeking help for myself.”

“You are worried about your son.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Where is your son now?”

She whispered: “I don’t know.”

“You’re no longer in contact with him?”

She blinked her eyes clear. “To put it very mildly.”

“What makes you think something is wrong?”

She couldn’t tell him about the dream. She couldn’t tell him about the locked boxes. She couldn’t tell him about the one other sort of help she knew well, the services of a locksmith.

She couldn’t tell him how her father, dead for years, had seemed alive in this house, night after night.

She couldn’t tell him the truth about Len.