The Unfinished Garden Read online

  “Tilly? James Nealy.” His voice was deeper on the phone. Or did she mean sexier?

  Bugger it. She really must start checking caller ID. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” He paused. “Listen, I realize you’re probably doing bedtime with your son.”

  At least he was aware of that fact. Half a Brownie point in his favor.

  “And I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I know I took up enough of your time yesterday evening, and you’ve made your position perfectly clear. Perfectly clear. But I’m—” he hesitated “—obsessed with your garden, and sadly for you, that won’t change. Name your price and conditions. I’ll agree to anything.”

  “How about agreeing to find someone else?”

  “Not an option.” In the forest, a blue jay jeered. “It has to be you. Your garden speaks to me.”

  She laughed. She had a gardening groupie? Was this how David had felt every time a grad student drooled over one of his lectures? Not a bad sensation, really. “Are you always this sure?”

  “I have good intuition, Tilly. I wouldn’t be retired at forty-five if I didn’t.”

  “Lucky you, because mine is crap.” One irreversible mistake, that’s all it had taken to dull her intuition into nonexistence. Tilly shivered, despite the clawing humidity. For a second she was back in the cold, white hospital room. Some days she wasn’t sure she’d ever left.

  A carpenter bee looped past, searching for a place to burrow. It would, no doubt, drill a pretty little hole in her cedar railing. One bee, one hole, meant nothing, but small things had a nasty habit of becoming big things. And she didn’t want to think about the damage a colony of bees could inflict.

  “So there is a chance for me?” James said.

  Obviously, she hadn’t mastered no quite as well as she’d thought. “You know, I really, really want to dislike you.”

  “Yes, I can have that effect on people. Although they tend to skip the want part.”

  Tilly smiled. If he kept this up, she might have to change her mind. “It’s late, and you’re right. I’m in the middle of bedtime.”

  “Can I call tomorrow?”

  “You’re pushing it.”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  “Do you always apologize this much?”

  “It’s one of my more annoying habits.”

  “You might want to work on that.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone line. “I’m trying.” His voice was lower, quieter.

  “Good night,” Tilly said, and hit the off button before James could reply.

  She scuffed up a dusting of red clay with her gardening clog and imagined rain. English summer rain that pattered and pinged and smelled fresh, clean and cool. James’s talk of childhoods the day before had unsettled her, left her with an aftertaste she couldn’t nix. A quick fantasy blindsided her—running home to her mother, her twin sisters, Caitlin and Bree, and of course, Rowena. Tilly may have changed her name and citizenship, but she was English at heart, just as she would always be a Haddington.

  Isaac, who had been searching the edge of one of her shade beds for who-knew-which disgusting creepy-crawly, rose and yanked up his pajama bottoms. “Thinking of Daddy?”

  “Nope.” Her eyes followed a vapor trail toward the stratosphere.

  “England?”

  “Busted.” Bugger, she was a pitifully easy read. Thank God she never had secrets to keep. “I was remembering gloriously wet summers when I was your age. Snakeless, too.”

  Isaac recoiled as if she’d driven over skunk roadkill with the truck’s windows open. “Are you going to drag us back?”

  “Wow. Why would you ask that?” Avoidance, smart move.

  “You think everything’s better in England.” Isaac twisted his foot, and a hunk of guilt constricted in her stomach. “But I want to live here, in our house, for ever and ever.”

  “I know, my love. I used to feel the same way about Woodend.”

  “Do you still?”

  Not a fair question. Woodend was the place that caught her when she fell from life, and it always would be. Isaac continued to wait for an answer, but a sugarcoated one she couldn’t give.

  “Woodend is a place of memories. I was born there. I met Daddy there….” Tilly stared at the dogwood tree they had planted on the sixth-month anniversary of David’s death.

  “This is a place of memories, too, Mom. Yours and mine and Daddy’s.”

  But the memories here were polluted with grief. Once again she had shared too much and disappointed Isaac. Yes, he was old in intellect, but emotionally he was far younger than eight.

  “You’re right.” Tilly swelled with love. Sometimes just looking at Isaac made her chest heave with the imagined horror of a thousand what-ifs. “I’m sorry. I’m a little lost today.”

  “That’s okay, Mom. I have lost days, too. Hey, I need to pee. Want me to do it by the cold frame to keep the deer away?”

  “Please. But watch your aim.” Tilly turned toward the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

  “Mommy?”

  “Isaac?” She spun around.

  Pajama pants shoved to his knees, he was clutching his penis. “I have a tick. Near my willy.” His free hand agitated as if he were shaking a maraca. “It’s latched on.”

  “Piff. I can get that sucker off.” Finally, a problem she could fix.

  A groan of thunder tumbled toward them as the edge of the forest retreated into darkness. How had she failed to notice the towering storm cloud banked over the upper canopy? The sky exploded with a boom that rattled through the window casements and through Tilly. She jerked back into spider thread, the kind you never saw, and then blam! You were wrapped in goo, snared by a teeny-tiny, almost invisible, arachnid.

  * * *

  An arm slipped around her waist, breath tickled her neck and familiar fingers teased the sensitive spot above her hipbone. The blades of the fan sliced through the bedroom air, and tree frogs serenaded with the noises of the night. “I love you,” David whispered in the soft mid-Atlantic accent that masked his Brooklyn roots.

  Tilly tried to turn and touch the ridge of scar on his right cheek, but her limbs remained weighted to the mattress. The mockingbird shrilled from its nest, and David’s arms retreated.

  Don’t go, my love, don’t go. It can’t hurt you. It’s just a bird.

  Tilly jolted upright in bed, her heart thumping. She glanced at the ceiling, but there was no creak from the room above to suggest that Isaac, who slept on the edge of his bed in deference to his plush lizards and snakes, had, yet again, fallen out.

  Dawn was creeping around the blinds, sneaking into her bedroom with a fresh reminder that she was welcoming another day as a widow. And her phone was ringing at—she squinted toward David’s space-age alarm clock—6:00 a.m.? It better not be James Nealy again, unless…dear God, no. No. Her breath quickened; her mind swirled in memories. Was it four o’clock on a black November morning with rain pounding the deck, the air crackling with a late-season thunderstorm, and her mother’s voice, quiet but solid, “Your father’s fading. Come home”? Or was it 12:01 on a balmy May night with spring peepers jingling in the forest and one of David’s inner-circle graduate students crying as she whispered, “David’s been rushed to hospital”? Why did life boil down to phone calls in the middle of the night? Who this time? Her mother, one of her sisters, Rowena?

  Tilly yanked the phone from its base. “Yes?” Her voic
e raced out with her breath.

  “Oh, you’re there. Thank the Lord.”

  “Mum? Why are you calling at this hour?”

  “I woke you, didn’t I? I’m terribly sorry, darling.” This was not the voice of a woman who had spent forty years drilling English history into teenage girls at a small private school. Nor was it the voice of a woman who had lost two babies to crib death, but scuppered fear and grief to see two more pregnancies to term. This was the voice of a woman who, the summer after her husband died, hid in a family heirloom.

  The nearly forgotten image stirred: her mother crouched against grief in the Victorian wardrobe, refusing to come out for anyone but Tilly, the daughter who lived an ocean away.

  “Wake me?” Tilly rubbed her eyes. “You know me, up with the larks. Bright and chirpy at—” she glanced at the clock again. Six bloody a.m.? “—six a.m.”

  “Darling, is something wrong?”

  “Shouldn’t I be asking that question?”

  Tilly scooted across David’s side of the bed and swung her legs to the hardwood floor. She used to dream of a rug in the bedroom, but David liked his floors smooth, bare and refinished every three years. Maybe this winter she would splurge, buy a rug. Or maybe not.

  “Bit out of sorts,” her mother said. “Fancied a chat.”

  Tilly gnawed off a hangnail. “Did something happen, Mum?”

  Half a day away, her mother heaved out the biggest sigh Tilly had ever heard.

  “Mum? You’re scaring me.” Tilly twisted the phone cord around her wrist, then untwisted it. Oh God, was her mother’s voice muffled? Was she hiding in the wardrobe again? Tilly drummed her toes on the floor. Where were her flip-flops? Where?

  “Now you’re not to fuss. I’m absolutely fine. I’ve had a bit of a fall and broken my leg. Of all the ridiculous things. And I have five stitches in my left hand. Where Monty bit me.”

  “He what?” Tilly shot up. Her mother’s springer spaniel, named after a British World War II general, was a wack job.

  “Don’t yell, darling. It was an accident. He was aiming for the hedgehog.”

  “Hedgehog?”

  “It’s all rather embarrassing.”

  “I’m coming home, right now.” As soon as I find my flip-flops. Tilly dived under the bed. Well, lookie here—the overdue library books and the breast health pamphlet she’d been searching for. And wow, how about all those dust bunnies?

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You are not coming home.” Thank God, her mother was using her teacher’s voice, the one that had enforced zero tolerance in the classroom long before American educators adopted the phrase. “I’m perfectly fine. Feeling a tad foolish is all. I called to commiserate, not cause worry. It’s perfect gardening weather, and I’m confined to the drawing room with my feet up. My list for today included tying back the sweet peas.”

  Typical, her mother was upset by the disruption, not the accident. Apart from the summer of her breakdown, Mrs. Virginia Haddington lived a neat life, greeting each day with a list written in specially ordered blue fountain pen ink. Oh God. In the ten years since her father’s death, Tilly had been the gatekeeper of her mother’s mental health, making sure she was taking time to garden, to read, to enjoy a social life. But in all those years, Tilly had never once worried about her mother’s physical well-being. Sure, she was only seventy, but her mother had never broken a bone before.

  Mrs. Haddington gave a sniff. “It’s that blasted muntjac’s fault, the one that treats my vegetable garden as an all-night buffet. I’m at my wit’s end, Tilly. My broad beans are gone. Simply gone. When I was up at the Hall the other day, trying to persuade Rowena to join the rota for the church flowers—”

  Tilly snorted. Her mother had to be joking. Rowena could barely tell the difference between a stinging nettle and a rose. And she had no interest in learning otherwise.

  Her mother ignored the interruption and kept going. “I bumped into the gamekeeper and asked if I could borrow his shotgun, but the blighter refused to lend it to me.”

  Tilly rolled her eyes. Her mother had known the gamekeeper for thirty years, but still refused to call him John. Of course, the only person in the village who used his real name was Rowena, his boss. The Roxtons, Rowena’s family, had owned and managed the three thousand acres of woods and farmland surrounding the village for generations. But on Rowena’s thirtieth birthday, Lord and Lady Roxton gifted the property to their only child and skipped off to a new life on Crete. A dumbfounded Rowena, left only with a vague reassurance that she wouldn’t be clobbered with inheritance tax provided Lord Roxton outlived the gift by seven years, had quit a successful career in the London art world to save her ailing inheritance: the Bramwell Chase estate and Bramwell Hall. As the new lady of the manor, she had hired contract farmers, financed a roof for her crumbling historic mansion by renting it to a movie crew, and had just scraped past the seven-year marker. Considering she was mining a financial dinosaur, Ro was holding her own, but no thanks to her parents.

  “Wait a minute,” Tilly said. “You were planning to shoot Bambi?” She imagined a new version of the Daddy game. What would Grammy do about the copperhead? Easy-peasy. Bash in the snake’s head with the hoe and then put the kettle on for tea. “You’ve never fired a gun.”

  “Nonsense. I was a dab hand with your uncle’s air rifle. Deer are large rodents, Tilly, and one should treat them as such. When I have rats, I pay the rat catcher to kill them. Why is shooting a deer any different?”

  Tilly chewed her lip, determined not to swallow the bait. Her mother and Rowena had collaborated many times to accuse anti-beagling, anti-fox-hunting, anti-pheasant-shooting Tilly of being a namby-pamby country dweller.

  “I’m sorry, Mum. My head’s spinning, and I’m barely awake.” Although her heart, galloping every which way, suggested otherwise. “How did we get from hedgehogs to deer?”

  “A hedgehog. Singular.”

  Tilly rolled her eyes and silently renewed her vow never to be a mother who grasped every teachable moment and strode forth with it.

  “Well, since the gamekeeper wouldn’t help, I came up with my own solution. Very creative, too. When I took Monty out for his bedtime turn around the garden, I brought along that giant water blaster Rowena gave Isaac. Thought I’d soak the muntjac if I saw him. Works with next door’s Lab when he bursts through the hedge to attack poor Monty.”

  Poor was hardly an adjective to describe her mother’s dog. Not since he’d mauled a baby rabbit to death and terrorized the window cleaner with the carcass.

  “What a ridiculous gift that water gun was. If only Rowena would settle down with a nice man, start a family….”

  “The deer, Mum?”

  “The deer? Oh, right. The deer.”

  Anxiety returned in waves. When she and Isaac were home at Christmas, Tilly had noticed her mother developing a new habit of becoming lost in her speech, as if she couldn’t retain her thoughts. Was this early-onset dementia, history about to repeat itself, or wet brain from decades of drinking gin?

  “It’s quite simple really. Instead of a deer, Monty found a hedgehog. I tripped over the blessed thing in the dark, and then everything degenerated into a Dad’s Army sketch.”

  Tilly laughed, remembering her’s father favorite television sitcom, but stopped when she heard only silence from her mother. “How long till the plaster comes off?”

  “Eight weeks.”

  “Eight weeks! Who’s going to help you bath
e, get dressed, walk Monty?”

  “I’ll muddle through. The twins don’t leave for Australia for two weeks, which is an absolute stroke of luck. And Marigold’s rallied my support system. Bless her, she does have a tendency towards drama.” That was an understatement. Marigold, her mother’s bosom pal of forty years, could create drama out of a downed washing line. “Trust me, darling—” Mrs. Haddington lowered her voice and sounded so far away “—this is nothing like before.”

  “You’ve had another panic attack,” Tilly said. “Haven’t you?”

  Her mother hesitated for a second too long. “It was nothing.”

  “Right, we’ll arrive after the twins leave and stay until the plaster comes off. Can you spring for the tickets? I’m strapped for cash since the electrics went on my truck.”

  If the panic attacks had returned, what choice did Tilly have? She had safeguarded her mother’s secrets once. If need be, she would do so again.

  “Darling, don’t be rash. What will happen to the nursery if you leave for six weeks during the peak season?”

  “Sari’ll happen. She can take over.” Bummer, she couldn’t fire Sari after all.

  The night before, Tilly had found the phone message explaining Sari’s impromptu beach getaway and how, in the excitement, she had misplaced James’s number and been unable to cancel his appointment. Right, that made sense. Clearly, Sari had forgotten blabbing about her terror of oceans—despite her love of sleeping with a sound machine set to play waves. Tilly had ignored the confession as an attempt at girl bonding. Besides, once you understood someone’s fears, you were trapped in her world.

  Could she trust the daily grind of the nursery to a person who had lied so blatantly? An employee who couldn’t sit still for ten minutes let alone direct nothing but a hose for five hours a day? But Tilly felt oddly disconnected, aware only of Woodend lit up ahead, waiting for her.

  “Besides, how can I miss seeing you recline the summer away like Lady Muck?”