22

He drives their blue minivan north without stopping for anything but gas, coffee, and a Little Debbie cinnamon roll, the pastry stuck to the clear wrapper with white sugar glaze. After a couple of bites, he drops the rest into the garbage can next to the pumps. The bonsai nursery Lisa Christianson runs with her husband is a little less than 200 miles northwest of New York City. To get there, Will follows the MapQuest directions he got off the Internet, pulling off I-87 onto a poorly paved road through short, forested hills, where evergreens give way to pockets of deciduous trees, naked now, their branches bare. A light snow is falling.

The greenhouses, eight of them, are in a small valley, each one vast and filled with steaming life. So much condensation runs down the inside surface of the glass panes that the plants within look blurred, like an Impressionist painting.

Will pulls the minivan off the narrow access road and parks where he won’t block anyone’s way. When he gets out, a small pack of lap dogs comes tearing out from behind one of the glass structures, barking and jumping at him. The most aggressive is a Yorkshire terrier that seems as if it may actually bite him or at least take hold of his pant leg, and despite the foolish aspect of retreating from so small a foe, he’s just getting back into his car when a woman in a khaki barn coat emerges from one of the far greenhouses. She calls the dogs off with a whistle, the kind requiring two fingers under the tongue, a trick that many times he’d tried and failed to teach Luke. The woman in the khaki coat approaches.

“Hello,” Will says. She looks different than he expected.

“Hello,” the woman says. She stands with her hands shoved in her coat pockets. Either she’s changed in some way he can’t identify, or he can’t remember her twenty-one-year-old self well enough to make a match with the woman standing before him, and this disturbs Will; it makes him feel as if he can’t be sure he’s arrived at the right place after all. He has to fight his desire to ask all the questions that were already answered during their e-mail correspondence. Is she the Lisa Christianson who double-majored in economics and art history? Whose sister had lupus? Who slept with him for a couple of months the summer between junior and senior year?

“I have some work I have to finish,” she says. “Maybe we could visit while I . . . I guess what I’m saying is I’d be more relaxed if we could talk while I work.”

“Of course,” Will says, and he follows her back to the greenhouse.

“I have a couple gross of trees to prune and train, and others to pack for trucking. Sean’s over at his brother’s, and both our workers are out with some flu thing.”

The little trees, each planted in a glazed, black ceramic dish, are grouped along a huge trestle table, its surface pitted and stained. To one side are shelves filled with unassembled cartons and stacks of Styrofoam inserts sized to fit inside the cartons.

“We move a lot of plants during the holidays,” she says, and Will reaches out to touch the dark, shiny green leaves on a tiny, gnarled tree. “That’s a Fukien tea tree. Subtropical. All the ones inside are subtropical. The evergreens and deciduous—maples mostly, but we do some birch and crab apple—they stay outside through the winter.”

“Do you sell them to florists?” Will asks. “Or to, I don’t know, garden centers?”

“More and more, we sell them online and ship them via UPS. The rest go to retailers closer to the city.”

“It must be—I imagine you have to harden yourself to the idea that a lot of the trees that thrived under your care die after you sell them,” he says. Lisa looks at Will as if he’s said something strange.

“So,” she says, turning toward a table whose surface holds an array of small clippers and spools of wire. “You didn’t come here to talk about horticulture, did you?”

“No. I came because”—I’m going through a midlife crisis, he almost says, a tempting if radical abridgment of the truth. But if he wants her to be forthcoming with him, then he has to be honest himself. “I need to talk to you about something. For the past fifteen years or so I’ve been estranged from my brother. I think you may have known that I had—have—a—”

“Mitch,” she says, nodding. “Except that now he’s the renowned Mitchell Moreland.”

“Right.”

“Estranged?” She tilts her head to one side in a questioning gesture. “How come?”

“I’m not sure,” he says. “I don’t have . . . what I’m going to ask you—your answer, I mean—I hope it may illuminate something.” As if he were a teenager again and trying to get up the nerve to ask a girl on a date, Will feels his heart accelerate, that funny, dizzy headache he associates with standing up too quickly.

Lisa Christianson shifts her attention away from him to the tiny spruce in front of her. She turns it around and around on the table, considering its shape before taking off one branch, and then, after another revolution, a second. She bends one of the remaining limbs, wires it, and bends it further, until it assumes the asymmetry she wants. She looks up at Will. “What do you want to know?” she asks. The tone of her voice strikes him as wary, or is this his imagination?

“This is awkward, but I’m wondering . . . did Mitch . . .” Will stops, silently rehearses his question and then blurts it out. “Were you ever sexually involved with my brother?”

Lisa sets the little clippers on the plank table. Rather than looking at him, she addresses a spot over his left shoulder. “I guess I thought you knew that,” she says.

Will closes his eyes briefly, feeling the adrenaline wash through his body from somewhere in his chest, all the purely physical responses it provokes, pulse climbing, arms tingling.

“Do you . . . I drank a lot of coffee on the road,” he says. “I should have asked to use the men’s room before we began talking.”

“There’s a, well, it’s not a men’s room. More like a porta-potty.” She points through the wet glass to a green blot. “Back over by that last greenhouse.” She looks at him again, as if she’s trying to figure something out.

The porta-potty must be for the hired hands, he guesses, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell of disinfectant with its undertow of human waste. He stands for a moment before going out the green plastic door, trying to collect his thoughts.

“Are you all right?” Lisa says when he returns, not very promptly. “I, um, I do have enough time for us to go inside for a bit. Have a cup of tea or something.”

“I’m fine,” Will says, manufacturing an expression to go with the words.

“Well.” She stands up. “I think I’d like to go in.”

He follows her into the house, which conforms to his idea of a dwelling occupied by a pair of bonsai experts. Sleek, modern furniture, blank white walls—not one picture—a long, narrow table holding six bonsai in red dishes.

“No kids?” he says, not so much a question as an observation prompted by the absence of stains and clutter, the temerity of owning a pair of white sofas.

“Nope.” She slips out of her yellow rubber work clogs. “Tea?”

“Water’s fine.”

“So I take it you didn’t have any arrangement with your brother, any of those weird twin things, where you conspire to have some fun with a girl who’s good-natured enough not to take it too hard when she discovers herself in flagrante with the other brother, rather than the one she thought she was with?”

Will shakes his head slowly. “No,” he says. She sits on the sofa across from the one he’s chosen, puts her hands together and clamps them between her knees, studies his face.

“Do you not feel well?” she asks him.

“I’ve felt better.”

“Yeah, I guess you would have.” She bites her lower lip. “I’m . . . I’m sorry. But—”

“You’re not at fault.”

“Couldn’t I get you something? Seltzer maybe? I think we have ginger ale.”

“All right. Yes.” Will closes his eyes, unable to determine if he feels suddenly sick, really sick, or if he’s felt this way for weeks now and his ability to deny it has been disabled without warning. When he opens them, she’s standing in front of him, glass in one hand, coaster in the other. “Thank you,” he says. “Perhaps I’ll just wash my hands?”

She points at a hallway. “Second door,” she says.

At least it’s just bile, he thinks. And no carpet. Thank God, no carpet. He’s turned the bathtub taps on in an attempt to mask the sounds of his vomiting, doesn’t even know if the tears coming out of his eyes are a response to all the stomach acid he’s forced up into his sinuses or if he’s really crying. It requires a focused, almost impossible act of will to stop retching, and then, sitting back on his heels, he’s subject to convulsive aftershocks, like the residual heaves of sobbing.

He leans on the side of the tub and turns off both taps, looks around himself.

He’s on hands and knees, hunting for splatters and wiping them up with toilet paper, when he hears just what he’s been praying he wouldn’t hear, a hesitant knock on the door.

“Yes?” he says, surprised by the normal tone of his voice.

“I just . . . nothing.”

“I’ll be out in a moment.”

He washes his hands, his face, rinses his mouth, checks his shirt, his trousers. He feels awful but he looks all right. Back in the living room he sits carefully in the spot he’d chosen before. The couch is upholstered in a suedelike fabric, very soft.

“Look,” Lisa says after a silence. “Am I supposed to, what, pretend that you weren’t just violently ill?” Will returns her stare.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” he says.

She tilts her head up, her face toward the ceiling. Hands folded in her lap, she remains in this posture for what seems to Will a long time. Her shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath she takes through her nose, a relaxation technique maybe. He wonders if this might be a gesture of dismissal, if she’s going to remain like that, her face averted until he gets up to leave, when she looks back at him. “Okay,” she says, “so.” She claps her hands together, and the sound they make is a crisp snap, like that of a wet towel. “Do you want to know anything more?”

“More?” he says stupidly.

“Yes. I assume that after driving all this way you might want more than . . . than, well, just more, that’s all.”

He nods. “How many times?” he asks.

“How many times did he . . . did we—”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.” She lifts and drops one hand. “How long were you and I involved? July, then August? So, two months times a couple, maybe three, times a week. What does that come out to? Twenty? Twenty-five?”

“And after the first time, after that you knew? He revealed himself the first time?”

“Yes. You—no, not you, it was his idea, but I thought it was yours, or what I mean is, I thought he was you. He said for us to meet in my dad’s milking parlor at one. One in the morning. So I go there to wait, and he—but I think it’s you, right? I don’t know it’s your brother—he sneaks up behind me and says, ‘Close your eyes.’ Then he blindfolds me and says he’s going to take me to a special place. Have I ever been skinny dipping? he wants to know. We end up at the quarry, where he asks, have I ever done it in the water? Have I ever had sex in the water? ‘Making love’ was probably how he put it. And of course I hadn’t. I was, what? A kid. A girl with an overbite from upstate New York.”

“I knew there was something,” Will says. “I was trying to figure out what was different about you.”

“Yeah.” She touches her mouth, a reflexive gesture. In it, all the polish she’s acquired evaporates. “I got them fixed when I could afford it. My folks never did have that kind of money. They just, you know, we were dairy farmers. They didn’t have money to spend on stuff like braces. But as soon as Sean and I were in the black, I got them. Anyway.” She sits up straight, once again someone other than a dairy farmer’s daughter.

“So Mitch took you blindfolded to the quarry for submarine sex?”

She smiles, self-conscious. “I know it’s silly. When I think back, I do see that it was dumb. But then I was dumb. What did I know? I was a kid. Undiscerning. Nervous. Easily impressed. I’m sure I must have thought it was going to be romantic. When we got there, it was so dark, pitch-black, that even without the blindfold I couldn’t see a thing, practically. I still didn’t know it wasn’t you.

“Anyway, well, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, but it’s not that easy having . . . doing it in water, even under the best of circumstances. And do you remember the quarry? All that slime underfoot? It was hard to keep your footing. As for the sex itself, it’s not like everything glides into place. The water, somehow water just does not help. It wasn’t how I imagined it would be. We couldn’t even . . . in the end, we had to get out before he could even, you know, get inside me.

“He had this blanket thing spread on the ground and, this is going to make me sound, I don’t know, dumb or superficial or something, but I was getting eaten alive by bugs. I counted, honestly, over a hundred mosquito bites the next day. So by the time I figured out it was him instead of you, I think I barely reacted. I was just begging him to hurry up so we could put on our clothes and get out of there.

“And it wasn’t until I was back home that I thought about how strange it was, the whole night. On the drive back I just sat there like a lump. I don’t remember thinking a single thing. I wanted to go home, that’s all. And the next morning, gosh, my parents and my sister were mystified by the welts all over my arms and my back, everywhere. They asked all these questions. Did I take the screen off my bedroom window? Did I sleep without pajamas?” She pauses. “I didn’t say anything in the e-mails, but Margie died.”

“She did? I’m so sorry. When did she?” Will tries to picture Lisa’s pale sister, who stayed inside all the time because the sun aggravated her lupus and gave her rashes.

“The fall of ’ninety-nine. Just before Thanksgiving.”

“I’m, I’m very sorry. How old was she?”

“Thirty-eight. It pretty much destroyed my folks.”

“I’m so sorry,” Will says again.

“Yeah. Thanks. Me, too. Anyway”—she shakes her head as if to clear it—“later, after the bites stopped itching so much, I told myself I had to talk to you, or to Mitch. Sort of sort it all out. I mean, I just didn’t know what to think. Or even how to feel.”

Will slouches down in order to rest his head on the low sofa back. Without raising his head he asks her what she thinks about it now.

She snorts. “Well, obviously, it didn’t have much to do with me. Whatever it was, was between you two. I was just the chump.”

“By why didn’t you ever talk to me?” He tilts his head to see her face. “How could it have gone on for six or eight or however many weeks without my knowing about it?”

“Because when I went to your house to talk to you, your brother was there, and he made me promise never to bring it up. He told me it was this thing the two of you had, you and him, and the deal was that talking about it, even mentioning it, wasn’t allowed. He said that if it ever came up, everything would be over between us—all three of us. Not a bad idea, right? But the thing is, I was scared. Scared of Mitch. He seemed—not that he was ever violent or abusive, he wasn’t—but I could tell he had that capacity. He never yelled at me or punched walls or anything direct like that. He just had this . . . this . . . I don’t know. This concealed rage. Except every once in a while I’d catch a glimpse of it. He’d overreact or something, you know?”

“Yes,” Will says. “I do. I do know.”

“Over and over, I almost said something to you, but then . . . I just couldn’t. I thought maybe you knew. And I was afraid you might be angry, too. And remember how I had plans for that August? I was going to go down to Virginia, where my mom’s sister lived. But then Uncle Rob had a fall, broke his leg, and I ended up staying home. So it wasn’t over when I told myself it would be, but then there was only a few weeks left before school, and I, I just went through the motions, you know?”

“Did you go on dates together? Movies? Out to dinner?”

“No, that was only with you. With Mitch it was always just sex. Sex at night. Late.” She shakes her head, frowning. “Weird, I know. Like I had this boyfriend who was split into two halves, one who took me out for ice cream or whatever and one I had sex with.”

“But,” Will can’t help saying, “but we had sex, too.”

“Of course, of course. I didn’t mean we didn’t. Just that—”

“Just that it wasn’t sexy sex. Sort of comfortable and safe, like a back rub or an old armchair.”

“No. That’s not what I meant.”

“My brother, the demon lover.”

“Will.” She says it with two syllables. Wi-ill. “Come on, you can’t not know it was all about his face. Anyway, I wouldn’t have been so passive if I’d been older. But it’s hard for girls—you can’t know. As a man, you don’t realize that there are a lot of things girls feel they have no choice about.”

“No,” says Will. “I do get that.” He closes his eyes, and for a while neither of them speaks. It’s so quiet in her house that he can hear the faint buzz of an appliance in another room, a clothes dryer, maybe.

“Hey,” she says. “I’m alone here today. Like I said, Sean’s gone to pick up some stuff, and I have no help.” She brings her hands together in another little clap, an awkward, hearty gesture. “So I have to get back to work. But you can . . . I think it would be a good idea for you to take a nap or even just a rest before you get back on the road.”

“Yes,” Will says. “I should do that.”

“You stay there.” Lisa stands up. “I’ll get you a blanket.”