The Unfinished Garden Read online

  “Instinct,” she said.

  “Fine. I’ll pay $50,000 for your instinct.”

  She would laugh, but the heat had siphoned off her energy.

  “Mr. Nealy.” Tilly leaned toward James and gave what she hoped was a firm smile, like opening your door a crack to a stranger but not letting him inside. “I appreciate your willingness to pay such a large sum for my instinct. But Sari told me that you’re building a house.” Tilly pulled back. “You should be searching for a landscaper, not a nursery owner.”

  James picked a single, dark hair from his black T-shirt. Was he even listening? Mind you, offering to double his payment without so much as a peeved expression suggested more money than sense. According to Sari, he had made appointments with every local business listed in the yellow pages under landscape architects, landscape designers, landscape contractors and nurseries. That was beyond thorough and not the behavior of someone she wanted to work for…if she were wavering in her decision, which she wasn’t.

  “I don’t have the right qualifications for this job,” Tilly said. “My answer has to be no.”

  His hand shot to his hair, then jerked down to massage his shoulder awkwardly. “You have a gift, and I’m willing to pay for it. How are career definitions relevant?”

  Tilly swiped sweat from her hairline. No perspiration rolled down his face, no damp splodges marred his slim-fitting T-shirt. She had no eye for fashion, but Tilly understood cut and fabric. That simple black T-shirt probably cost more than her weekly grocery shop. Certainly more than today’s red tank top, which was one dollar’s worth of the thrift store’s finest.

  James cracked open his checkbook.

  “People don’t say no to you very often. Do they?”

  “I need this garden.” He clicked the top of his pen then repeated the gesture.

  Interesting. Need and garden in the same sentence. Now he was talking her language.

  “I need this garden.” He grew still like the eye of a storm.

  “Yes, I rather gathered that. Shame it’s not for sale.”

  Tilly caught the scent of gardenia, that finicky little bugger she had come to love for its determination to survive. She braced for an outburst, but James surprised her with a smile. A warm smile that softened his face of angles and shadows and touched her in a way his handshake had not. If he were some fellow shopper queuing next to her in a checkout line and he threw her that smile, she might be tempted to give him the once-over. Not that she eyed up men anymore.

  “I’m sorry.” Tilly flicked a dribble of sweat from her pitiful cleavage. “This heat is making me cranky, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t help you.”

  “You prefer rain to this interminable heat?” James scrutinized the sky.

  “God, yes. I’m a rain freak. How did you know?”

  “English accent.”

  The hawk drifted overhead, and Tilly watched it disappear into the forest. “People tend to guess Australian, since my accent’s such a hybrid. English lilt, American terminology, although I swear in English. I’m not sure my voice knows where it belongs.” And what did she hope to achieve by confessing that?

  “The rest of you feels the same way?” James studied her.

  The polite response would be a shrug. The impolite response would be to say, “None of your business.” Tilly chose neither. Longing stabbed her, longing for Bramwell Chase, the Northamptonshire village that anchored her life. Longing for Woodend, the four-hundred-year-old house that breathed her history. Haddington history, from before she was Mrs. Silverberg.

  “Some days.” Bugger. Why did she have to cripple herself with honesty? Other people told juicy little fibs and fat whoppers of deceit all the time. But with one baby truth, she had shoved the conversation in a direction she had no desire to follow. “You’re clearly comfortable, though, sweltering in the nineties.” Her mouth was dry, her throat scratchy. She swept her tongue over her gums to find moisture. It didn’t help.

  “I’m familiar, not comfortable, with this weather.” James returned the checkbook and pen to his backpack, but Tilly sensed he was regrouping, not conceding. “It reminds me of childhood summers, and childhoods have a powerful hold over us. I’m sure you agree.”

  Tilly didn’t trust herself to answer. A thrush trilled from the mimosa tree, but she imagined the music of the blackbird’s lullaby at Woodend. She pictured the paddock rolling toward fields dotted with clumps of bracken and the ancient trees of The Chase, the medieval hunting woods, looming beyond. If she closed her eyes, she might even smell her mother’s lavender. Tilly wasn’t aware of starting to walk, but she and James were sauntering toward the forest. Anyone watching might have assumed they were friends out for a stroll, which proved a person should trust with her heart, not with her eyes.

  “Where’s your childhood home?” Marvelous. She meant to terminate the conversation, not prolong it. But when was the last time she had a bona fide I’ll–tell-you-mine-if-you’ll-tell-me-yours chat with anyone? Just last week, Rowena, Tilly’s best friend since they were four years old, had written a snarky email that started, “Answer this or I’m giving you the boot.” And yet Tilly had discovered an amazing truth in the last few years: the further you drifted away from others, the easier it was to keep going.

  Had James not heard her question? “Where—”

  “Rural Illinois,” he said.

  Aha! That was why he wasn’t sweating. “Farming stock?”

  “I’ve tried hard not to be.”

  Tilly fished the remaining shard of ice from her gin and tonic and crunched it between her teeth, dampening the crescendo of cicada buzz. “Look, I’m melting faster than the ice in my gin, and I have to start supper. I apologize for wasting your time. I should have made it clear to Sari that I had no intention of taking the business in a different direction.” Actually, she had stated it every which way and then some. Sari, a dean’s wife with a master’s degree in communications, had understood just fine.

  “If I took you on as a client, I would be rushing helter-skelter into something new, something I can’t handle right now. I appreciate your interest in my work, but I can’t help you. We all need things, Mr. Nealy. We rarely get them.”

  “I’m curious. What is it that you need?”

  Tilly rubbed her left hand across her mouth, jabbing her thumb into her jawbone. “Peace,” she replied.

  “In the Middle East?” He dipped toward her as if to catch her words.

  “Peace from others.” She held his gaze and felt the remnants of her bonhomie sizzle up in the heat. “I need the world to bugger off and leave me alone with my thoughts.” And my guilt.

  Sinew jutted from his neck. “That’s a dangerous place to be, alone with your thoughts.”

  Tilly gulped back why, because she didn’t want to know. Her thoughts were like tender perennials in a greenhouse, and she didn’t need some stranger to crack the glass.

  He blinked rapidly, and his mottled eyes filled with an expression she recognized. She hit a fawn once, driving along Creeping Cedars at dusk. Sprawled on the verge, the poor animal lay mangled and broken, its quivering eyes speaking to Tilly of the desire to bolt, hampered by the knowledge that there was no escape. The same fear she saw now in James.

  Vulnerability, the one thing she could never resist.

  A burst of sunlight caught on James’s small, black ear stud. A black pearl?

  “Please,” James said. “Please show me your garden.”

&n
bsp; She would have agreed even without the second please. “On two conditions.” She slugged her gin. “You understand that I’m not agreeing to take you on. And I fix you a drink while I freshen up mine.”

  But James didn’t answer. He was wandering along Tilly’s woodland trail, his index finger tapping against his thigh.

  Chapter 2

  Faster. James floored the gas pedal, even though faster was never fast enough. Twenty-five years ago, he would have been tearing across farm tracks on his Kawasaki H2, a motorbike that had earned its nickname of Widowmaker. Tonight he was racing along some county road in his Alfa Romeo Spider with the top down and the Gipsy Kings blaring. He conjured up his favorite scene from Weekend at Bernie’s in which a corpse water-skied into a buoy, but couldn’t even rustle up a smile. Movie slapstick was his happy pill, although obviously not this evening.

  He glimpsed his reflection in the rearview mirror. God Almighty, some stranger could zip past the Alfa right now and have no inkling of the horror festering inside its driver. At worst, he looked like a guy trapped in a killer hangover and the black-only fashion dictum of the eighties. No one would guess that he was, quite simply, a man trapped. James had read somewhere that life was about how you lived in the present moment, which might be true for millions of people without obsessive-compulsive disorder. But for James, living in the moment was hell. And he never got so much as a day pass.

  Would he ever find peace, or would he always be that kid terrified of the boogeyman hiding in his own psyche?

  He could feel germs mutating in the soil. Soil Tilly had transferred to him. Why, why had he shaken hands?

  The Alfa screeched onto the gravel in front of an abandoned gas station and James leaped from the car, leaving the engine running. He grabbed one of six bottles of Purell from the glove compartment and emptied it over his hands, shaking out every last drop. Terrific. Now his palms were sticky as well as contaminated. Cringing, he rubbed them together until they throbbed.

  A squirrel shot in front of him, rustling dried-up leaves as it disappeared into the forest, squawking. Smart little rodent. I’d run from me, too, if I could, buddy.

  Shaking his hands dry, James glanced up. He needed big sky, Illinois sky, not this wimpy patch of cerulean obscured by trees. Even in Chicago, he could see more sky than he could in Chapel Hill, where the forest closed in from every angle. And at night, the roads were dark like pitch, trapping him, blind, in purgatory.

  Was it too late to reconsider this whole move? Yes, it was. He had started down this path the only way he knew how—with absolute commitment. There could be no running back to Illinois. He had made sure of that by selling everything—the farm, the business, his apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Everything but the Widowmaker and the Alfa.

  He had moved south with one purpose: to be part of the exposure therapy trials at Duke University, and finally, finally learn how to reclaim his life from fear.

  A rusty white pickup truck lurched down the road, an animal crate on its flatbed rattling against restraints. His father had offered to cage him once—a drunken joke that wasn’t remotely funny. Regret rose in his gut, and James hardened himself against it. Back then no one, not even James, had understood that his bizarre behavior and repetitive thoughts were caused by an anxiety disorder. And his dad? His dad died believing that his only kid was damaged beyond repair. But James was going to prove him wrong. Hell, yes. He was going to prove his dad wrong. OCD had nearly destroyed James’s life once. And he would do whatever it took to become that guy, that normal guy, who could shrug and say, “You know what? Once is enough.”

  The original plan had derailed, but he wouldn’t turn back. Not that he could even if he wanted to, since he’d never been able to walk away from anything. OCD was behind that, too. It was the root cause of every success, every failure, every gesture, every desire, every thought…every thought.

  This was his amended plan, 1b. No! 2a. Odd numbers tingled through him like slow-working poison and jinxed everything. This plan held the promise of freedom—freedom from the nightly window and door checks, freedom to sleep past the 4:30-a.m. treadmill call. Freedom to expose himself to the minefield of unallocated time. Doing nothing was akin to unrolling the welcome mat for every funky ritual his short-circuiting brain could sling at him. It was beautifully, impossibly straightforward, his plan: face his fear. And not just any fear, but the mother lode. The biggest fucking fear of all. Dirt.

  James’s pulse sped up, and his heart became a jackhammer pounding into his ribs. He swallowed hard and tasted panic, metallic as if his throat were lined with copper. The voice inside his head that wasn’t his own drowned out everything as it chanted over and over, “You’re going to die, die from disease in the soil.” He started rocking. Movement, he needed movement. The voice told him to twist his hair, told him if he didn’t, he would catch cancer from the soil and die. But he didn’t have to listen! This wasn’t a real thought. This was brain trash, right?

  Or he could just twist his hair twice. Then twice again and twice again. Six was a wonderful number. Soft and round and calm. But rituals were cheap fixes. Compulsions only fed the OCD monster. It would return, stronger, unless he fought back.

  He thumped his fists into his thigh. Don’t cave, don’t twist your hair. If you can fight for ten minutes, the urge will pass. He counted to forty and stopped. Ten minutes? Hell, he couldn’t make it to one.

  Was he crazy to retire at forty-five and abandon work, the only distraction that restrained fear? There would be no more relabeling irrational anxiety as the stress of running a successful software company. No, those days were over. Now he was free to follow the lead of his faulty brain wherever it led.

  Me and my fucked-up shadow.

  James tapped his lucky watch. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

  Now he’d contaminated his watch.

  Panic gnawed at his stomach. Germs were mutating in the soil, breeding like bunny fucking rabbits, but he was not going to twist his hair. James sucked in a breath to the count of four. He held it for two seconds then exhaled. One, two, three, four. Repeat, James, repeat. Slow the breath, and the heart and mind will follow.

  Everything would be okay if he could just hire a landscaper—Tilly Silverberg—under the pretext of beautifying his new ten-acre property, when really, he would watch and learn from a professional. She’d made it clear no amount of money would change her mind, which was intriguing. Not that he was cynical, but money talked. There had to be another way. Did that bring him to plan 2b?

  James concentrated on slowing down his breath, winding down his fear, and reliving the moment he had seen her garden on the edge of the woods. His pulse had slowed, his thoughts had fallen silent, and he’d known, just known: whatever lay at the end of that driveway held the key to his plan.

  Piedmont Perennials had been his final appointment at 6:00 p.m. Six, a sign that everything would be okay, except for that god-awful honking. James glanced up as a skein of geese flew over in textbook formation—an imperfect, imbalanced V with one side longer than the other. Symmetry soothed his fractured mind, but the lack of it….

  James jerked around, searching for a focal point, a diversion, anything.

  Stop. Please, just stop. And a picture of Tilly dropped into his mind. She moved with the elegance of a prima ballerina, albeit one in a scarlet top and frayed cutoffs. Scarlet, she was a woman of bright colors who could spin through life laughing, gin in hand. But there was a sadness in those huge, pale ey
es. Yes, she was beautiful, but beauty held no meaning for him. He was attracted only to women who were as screwed up as he was, even if they hid it better. Fuck. Not good, not good. Eighteen months celibate and focused on one thing—fixing himself. Fighting terror sucked up enough emotional energy. How could he salvage any for the mess of love and desire? Besides, being alone was his default button. Best for others, best for him. And yet…Tilly had made him smile.

  His insides were heaving with fear, and she made him smile.

  Her feet, poised for a pirouette, were so small, so vulnerable—so bare. Bare and dirty. And covered in soil. Soil on her feet, soil on her hands, soil she’d transferred to him. Soil poisoning her, poisoning him.

  Boss back the thought, James. Boss it back.

  Bossing back, the most basic weapon in the cognitive-behavioral therapy arsenal, sounded as easy as flipping on the turn signal. Don’t want that thought? Toss it and change direction. And yet summoning those three short words, boss it back, demanded enough focus to cripple him.

  Why, why had he shaken hands with a gardener, a woman with dirt under her thumbnail? He must get to the rental apartment and throw everything, even his Pumas in the washing machine. Scour himself clean and then scrub the car inside and out.

  Lose himself in time-consuming routine, his comfort and his curse.

  But first, vomit.

  Chapter 3

  The ache in her right shoulder blade, an old symptom of her scoliosis, continued to throb to the cacophony of spring peepers. Or had they already become bog-standard tree frogs by early June? One of those Southern things Tilly could never figure out. Read-aloud time, that most precious part of the day, had slipped by unnoticed, so she’d promised Isaac he could come back outside in his jammies to catch fireflies.

  The phone rang and Tilly picked it up on the first ring. “Piedmont Perennials.” She swallowed a yawn.