The Unfinished Garden Read online

  Tilly loved her mother’s bawdy laugh, so unexpected for a petite woman who came down to cook breakfast every morning wearing red lipstick and Chanel No. 5 eau de parfum. But the laughter ended. “There’s another reason you might not want to come home.”

  “The village cut off with foot and mouth again? More mad cow disease?”

  “Rowena has a new tenant at Manor Farm.” Her mother took a deep breath. “Tilly, it’s Sebastian. He’s living in Bramwell Chase.”

  Tilly dropped the phone.

  Chapter 4

  James slid from Warrior I to Warrior II and deepened the stretch. The warrior poses are about strength and endurance. The muscles in his calf tightened as a warm current of energy flowed through his body and into the ground, rooting him, making him strong. Defective, but strong. His thoughts became clouds floating away, and he concentrated on the rhythm of his breathing, trying to ignore the feeling that picked at the back of his mind. A feeling he must not acknowledge. A distraction he could not afford. Not if he was going to kick-start his plan.

  He found his focal point—the edge of his yoga mat—and shifted his balance forward, raising his right leg and his arms behind him. If he held the pose for six breaths, he would relax into Downward-Facing Dog and then treat himself to a headstand. When he was upside down, everything was in sync. His mind and body aligned.

  One, two, three, four—he began to quaver—five…no, there it was again, that swell of desire. Let it drift by, James. He tried hard, so hard, to push it away but couldn’t. And with a resigned sigh, he toppled.

  Lying on his yoga mat, James stared up at the ceiling. Was that a stain in the corner? He sat up. A stain he hadn’t noticed before? Mold? He stood. Anthrax?

  Don’t go psycho on me, James. A stain is often just a stain.

  It was getting harder to find his own thoughts. The voice was gaining strength, feeding off his lack of sleep, feeding off the stress of the move, feeding off his attraction to Tilly.

  Two days. It had been two days and she hadn’t returned his call. What if her answering machine was broken? What if she wouldn’t call unless he moved his coffee mug to the right of the phone? He always put his mug on the right. Always. And this morning he’d put it on the left, which proved he had messed with his routine, dallied on the wild side with those who put their coffee mugs wherever the hell they pleased. See what progress he was making?

  Why hadn’t she returned his call?

  He was running out of time and options. Tomorrow she and Isaac flew to England, which he only knew because Isaac had told him when he’d called last week. Isaac said his mom was rushing around like a crazed squirrel and it was best not to disturb her. He’d promised to give her the message, but had he? What if he hadn’t given her the message? What if her answering machine was broken? What if that stain really was anthrax?

  Why hadn’t she returned his call?

  Only two things had slowed the swarming gnats of anxiety in the past two weeks: Tilly’s garden and Tilly’s smile. And he needed to see both.

  * * *

  James glanced at the fogged-up shower and tried not to think about previous tenants, about the dead skin cells they’d sloughed off, about the dirt they’d tracked in. He hadn’t lived in rented accommodations since he was a student. And then he’d been too fucked-up to think about anything. He rubbed condensation from the mirror and tossed the damp bath sheet into the shower. The laundry would have to wait. He tried to hold on to that thought, but it slipped away and doubt crept back in, roaming his gut, searching for a hold, second-guessing the decision he had made ten minutes earlier.

  Decision-making was exhausting, a haze of uncertainty entwining one consequence around another. And there would be consequences for what he was about to do, but it was a risk worth taking. Tilly could help him—he knew it. And if the thought of seeing her again gave him a hit of pure desire, that was an inconvenience he could overcome.

  The psychologist in Chicago had told him obsessions and compulsions were like wild mushrooms popping up constantly. That he needed to stay vigilant, always mindful of situations that could trigger his OCD, which didn’t help when he was attracted to a woman who lived her life in dirt. A woman who didn’t seem to care that the flatbed of her truck resembled a bag lady’s shopping cart. If Tilly agreed to work for him, would she let him clean out her truck?

  James admired the small tattoo of a coiled, black snake on his right hip, his constant reminder that when it came to snakes, he was phobia-free. Possibly even brave. And he was lucky—might as well monopolize on this good mood—that his body had aged well. On the other hand, that wasn’t so much luck as a freakish amount of exercise. Was fear behind that, too, a determination to control his body if not his mind?

  James stretched and enjoyed the air caressing his skin. Naked, he was released from fabrics that itched and scratched. Labels were the worst offenders. But then again, none of his clothes had labels for long. He amputated every one.

  If he didn’t know better, he might say he was relaxed, which was not an adjective he ever used to describe himself. James didn’t do relaxed. Volted-up was how Sam, his best friend of forty-two years, described James. He liked that analogy. Besides, nervous energy had its uses. No to-do list was a match for James.

  He leaned forward, the edge of the vanity cutting into his stomach. Retirement was playing havoc with his grooming. His hair hadn’t been this long since grad school and the beard still threw him. He barely recognized the face staring back. Or was that the point. If he changed the outside, would the inside follow?

  Humming “Straight to Hell” by The Clash, James walked into the bedroom and slid open the closet door with his elbow. He reached into a rack of black, long-sleeved shirts and pulled his lucky Vivienne Westwood off its cedar hanger. Why not? He had nothing to lose except his pride, and that had never stopped him when a woman was concerned.

  Chapter 5

  You had to admire a middle-aged woman, even one as invasive as evening primrose, who accentuated her large breasts and rolls of stomach flesh with Lycra. No hiding behind plus-size smocks for Sari. Although her puce wedgies, adorned with large plastic flowers that flapped like dying lunar moths, pushed the limits of taste.

  Bucking through a sneeze, Sari tripped over an exposed tree root. “Gesundheit,” she said.

  What, she doesn’t trust me to bless her? Tilly continued marching toward the greenhouse.

  “Time to fix the driveway, hon.” Sari trotted to keep up.

  If you didn’t barrel down my driveway five mornings a week, screeching a duet with Bruce Springsteen and kicking up gravel, it wouldn’t need fixing. Tilly bit back the retort. Speedy-Sari-bumps, that’s what Isaac called the craters Sari’s tires had gouged into the driveway. Potholes and noise, Sari had brought both into Tilly’s life.

  “You still pissed about the James thing? Is that why you don’t want a lift to the airport tomorrow?” Sari smiled, but the gesture was laced with menace. Her challenge might have worked three years earlier, before guilt became a constant companion. But now? Hey, good luck on that one.

  “Sari, you’ll be too busy here to drive us to the airport.” Tilly’s voice dragged in the heat. “And ignore James if he calls.” Just as I’m ignoring my memories of Sebastian. But there he was again: her first love, taking up space in her mind.

  “James is…loaded.” Sari increased her pace with a pant. “I…looked him up on Google.”

  Sari ra
bbited on, sharing details of her Google search. James had invented an interactive web game that millions of people were addicted to, including Sari’s two teenage boys. She dismissed the game as having to do with accumulating assets and dominating the world. As always, it was the bottom line that interested Sari: James had made enough money to sell his software company in Chicago and retire to North Carolina at forty-five.

  Sari batted away a mosquito. “Tils, you need to step outside your comfort zone, discover the world of clients rich and ready for the taking.”

  Tils. A lazy word that slid from the side of Sari’s mouth, an abbreviation of an already abbreviated name. Tilly shook back her hair, forgetting she’d lopped it off a few weeks earlier with the kitchen scissors. Something clicked and scrunched in her head. Her brain rusting up in the heat? She shook her head again. Click, scrunch. What depressing sounds to come from the center of your consciousness.

  “You have zilch vision,” Sari said.

  “Yup. Visionless and proud of it.” There was no point disagreeing. Tilly didn’t want vision, she wanted survival—hers and Isaac’s. The jury was still debating the survival of Piedmont Perennials, a business that had sprung out of the infertility of grief. Her secret fantasy niggled, the one in which the business folded and she and Isaac retreated to England. Of course, Issac would be devastated, which made her daydream his nightmare. No, Piedmont Perennials had to survive, and for that Tilly needed the woman she longed to fire.

  “Come on, hon. Look around you.” Sari circled her arms as if she were an overweight swimmer flailing in a rubber ring. “You’ve created five acres of landscaped heaven out of jungle. You know a thing or two about landscape design.”

  How had Sari sneaked into Tilly’s life? Was it the tricolor cookies? She had already disarmed Tilly with a nasally slide of vowels and dropped r’s that screamed “Brooklyn!” before dumping the pièce de résistance: Sari grew up two blocks from David’s childhood home in Sheepshead Bay and still bought tricolors, moist and rich with raspberry, almond and semisweet chocolate, from the bakery in David’s old neighborhood. She even had a box in her freezer and had promised to share. The tricolors, when Sari finally brought them over, were stale.

  The pileated woodpecker hammered into a tree then flapped away. He was the reason Tilly hadn’t hacked down the decapitated pine that, as Sari loved to point out, leaned over the propane tank. See? Sari was clued in. All would be fine, just fine.

  “Sari, you’ve been a godsend.” True, until the James debacle. “If you didn’t load up my truck and not return till every shrub was sold, I’d be donating plants to the Salvation Army.” True again. “But you want to rush around corners and see what’s next, and I want to poodle along. Wholesale customers are easy. They demand x, y, z on such a date and I, or rather you, deliver. But design clients?” Tilly shuddered. “They’d suck up all my make-nice happy juices.”

  Sari harrumphed, and they trudged on.

  Be nice, Tilly. Or at least fake it. “Look. My business is thriving, so why gamble? You have to dig in, hold on, because in twenty-four hours your whole life can come crashing down. One afternoon you’re plowing along I-40, late for school pickup, when your husband draws alongside in his MGB, laughs—” Tilly stumbled over her most precious memory “—blows you a kiss and speeds out of your life. Twelve hours later you’re watching him die from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a hereditary heart condition no one in his family has heard of.”

  Not just watching him die, letting him die.

  Tilly ground her fist into the pain spiking out across her forehead. Silence, rare in the forest, followed.

  They had reached the greenhouse and next to it, the studio, David’s office and hallowed lair. The thick, sweet scent of wild honeysuckle hit Tilly like a sugar rush, but it also brought the familiar letdown, the sinking in her stomach. This place should resonate with David’s presence. Standing here, she wanted to believe some essence of him watched her, that if she swung around she could catch him as easily as Isaac caught fireflies. But despite the tommyrot she encouraged their son to believe, David was nowhere. Death led to nothing.

  Through the trees, a pair of turkey vultures tugged at the guts of a groundhog splattered across Creeping Cedars Road. At least in nature death led to some great, cosmic recycling of life. Roadkill became a feast, fallen leaves nourished new growth and rotting logs became bug suburbia. Tilly stared up at the giant oak, now a mutant thanks to the limbs the tree surgeon had removed from one side. Despite his dire prediction that the tree was dying, it was still home to a spectacular trumpet vine; and she would never give permission to fell such a magnificent piece of living history. The oak was safe on her watch, because she was just as mulish as David had been.

  Tilly smiled at her Piss Off I’m Working sign and swung open the greenhouse door. Usually once she stepped inside, the greenhouse worked its calming magic. With a membrane of opaque plastic that let in only light, it was as if nothing else existed. But today, Sari followed, filling Tilly’s hidey-hole with the powdery odor of department store makeup halls.

  Tilly grabbed the edge of the potting sink and breathed through her mouth.

  “Jesus.” Sari gagged. “If I were in charge, I’d rip off the plastic and put in glass. Open the place up. I feel like I’m simmering in a Crock-Pot.”

  Tilly carved out a dirt angel with her foot. Please, God, protect my nursery from this woman. Sari didn’t have to like this part of the job, but she did have to come in here every day for the next six weeks. Tilly appraised her artwork and smiled.

  “What?” Sari said. “You think it’s funny this place freaks me out?”

  “Of course not.” Tilly looked up. “Although it’s hard to imagine you scared of anything.”

  “You don’t think everyone has fears?”

  Tilly picked up a bundle of white plastic plant labels and put them back down. “Okay, then. What’s the deal with you and oceans?”

  “I nearly drowned as a kid. Would’ve, too, if some stranger hadn’t jumped in while my dad stood on the beach yelling, ‘Kick your legs.’ And afterward all he said was, ‘You need to listen.’ Pretty rich since the bastard couldn’t swim.”

  Bastard, never a word Tilly would use to describe her own father, who had taught her to swim in the freezing ocean off the Cornish Coast, his hands floating beneath her. Whole weeks went by and she didn’t think of him, but there would always be a gap in her life where he had stood. And, inexplicably, she thought of James Nealy’s comment about childhoods.

  “I’m gonna get some quotes on a watering system while you’re off playing happy families,” Sari said. “I mean, c’mon. How cost effective can manual watering be?”

  Tilly sighed; Sari had blown the moment.

  “We’ve been over this, Sari. The electric bills would tear into my profits.”

  “Yeah? What about your time? Is it better to spend five hours a day watching a hose piss or five hours a day potting up saleable plants?”

  “Watering systems fail, but the worst thing a hose does is leak. Besides, if I can feel the water flow, I know the job’s being done.”

  “Jesus, Tils. Lighten up. You wanna spend your life worrying about what might happen?”

  If they were friends, Tilly would point out how ludicrous that question was. After all, the thing she had dreaded most had happened. What did a person have left to worry about after that? The mister system whooshed on, spraying a film of water over the newly rooted cuttings. Th
e paddles of the fan whirred into action, and a belt of hot air walloped Tilly across the face.

  “This is why you have to check the greenhouse every day.” Tilly pointed at the fan and then drew a diagonal line through the air with her finger. “See how the fan blows the mist away from this flat? These cuttings will die if you don’t watch that.”

  “Understood. That it?”

  “No. See this mister up here?” Tilly poked a spluttering nozzle, and tepid water drizzled down her arm. “It gets clogged. Then these cuttings will die.”

  “Yup. Cuttings die, excellent. I’m outta here. See ya up at the house.” Sari tugged the door open, and a pale vehicle, probably the FedEx van, flashed past. At least Sari could sign for a package without killing anything.

  Sod it. Tilly gave the mister head another poke. She was tempting disaster, but if the nursery went belly-up, so be it. She and Isaac would have to stay in Bramwell Chase. Or maybe not, now that Sebastian had decided to nest there. Tilly pinched absentmindedly at her left breast. What was he up to? Bramwell Chase had never been his home. Sebastian was a Yorkshire lad, and according to his mother’s last letter, happily ensconced in Hong Kong.

  At fourteen, Sebastian was her life. By nineteen, he was her ex-lover, and even though they drifted through two reunions and a near miss before she met David, Sebastian remained part of her life. When her father was dying, Tilly flew home alone, insisting David fulfill his commitment to a well-paid lecture in Montreal. (If he had ever balanced the checkbook, he would have known how desperately they needed the money.) Tilly had swept in, determined to take care of everything, but the magnitude of family grief had nearly crushed her. Until Sebastian had stepped forward to handle the practical side of death, freeing Tilly to console her mother and sisters. After that, their friendship was sealed. Or so she thought.