When It Happens to You (4 page)

She asked after the designer now, not because she cared a bit about her but because it would be so lovely to hear Greta admit, for once, that it was a mistake.

“Oh . . .” Greta said vaguely, “I don't want to bother Lindsay with this. It's just something I'm doing on my own.”

Annoyed, Ilse stamped her foot and felt something lodge itself in her shoe. Holding on to the edge of a container made of reclaimed wood, Ilse removed her shoe and shook out the offending pebble.

Greta lingered by a small white flower entwined on a trellis. “You know, I think ‘cactuses' is correct, too. Like ‘octopuses.' It just sounds wrong.”

“Oh for heaven's sake,” her mother muttered under her breath.

“What's this?” Greta took hold of a glossy leaf and rubbed it gently between her fingers.

“Stephanotis. Wedding flower,” Ilse said, slipping her shoe back on. “Always tried to grow that one but never figured out a way to overwinter it. It would grow for you nicely in this climate.”

Greta immediately released the flower and stepped away. The mention of the word “wedding” sickened her. It was four months now since she and Phillip had separated, four months since the revelation of his infidelity and deception and, inadvertently, the commencement of her own painful duplicity. Phillip had begged Greta to withhold the information from everyone until they made a definitive decision regarding their fate, and while Greta had agreed that this was best, the ache of concealment was all-consuming. Watching and judging her every sentence while at the same time studying to see if her duplicity managed to go undetected was an exhausting and insidious exercise. If she failed, she risked harming her daughter's sense of well-being and would be forced to make a decision she was not yet prepared to make. And if she succeeded, she had the dubious satisfaction of knowing that she could lie just as well as her husband, a quality for which she continued to malign him on a daily basis.

Her mother, whom she had tried without success to deceive as a teenager, took every lie now without question. Was it the distraction of Milo that kept her from questioning the signs? Phillip's protracted absences, the wedding pictures removed from the frames—even Charlotte noticed the missing pictures almost immediately. Scrambling to come up with a suitable lie, Greta told her daughter that they were ready for their annual cleaning; otherwise they wouldn't survive. Greta consoled herself that in a way what she was saying was true, if the photographs could be looked at as emblems of their marriage. Charlotte seemed to take this explanation willingly, even gratefully. Of course, Greta understood, she didn't want her world to end. Watching her skip away, believing the lie, was the bitterest triumph of all. At six years old, already her daughter was learning the art of deception as self-preservation. It was times such as these when Greta's hatred of the only man she had ever loved reached its zenith. An enmity so fierce and jagged she could almost feel it cutting her body from the inside, as if she had swallowed a handful of broken glass and the shards were struggling to work their way out.

She looked up just as Ilse disappeared around the bend. With the sounds of the ocean and the freeway on the one side and the camel-colored mountains on the other, Greta had the pleasant feeling of wandering down a secret garden path. So far they had encountered no one and Greta was increasingly unsure if she even wanted to. As the trees gave way to flowering shrub hedges and potted false cypresses, Greta found her mother staring at a vine with variegated heart-shaped leaves. Balancing on the stem, a peculiar brown flower resembled a small sea creature.

“What
is
that?” Greta asked. “It's amazing.”

Ilse stared at the plant, frowning. She pressed her finger up to her forehead, as though the pressure would somehow retrieve the memory. She knew this plant—had even planted it and made cuttings of it for her friends—but now the name of it stubbornly eluded her.

“I don't know,” she muttered.

“What do you mean you don't know?” Greta kneeled down and looked around for a label. “You know everything, Mama.”

Ilse shook her head and walked on, defeated by her failing memory. Aging was an insult, any way you looked at it. It was God giving you the raspberry.

“Hang on!” Greta held up her phone and aimed it at the plant. “I'll Google it when I get home.”

“Well, if you could do that, what do you need me for?”

When Greta caught up to her mother again, she was anxiously winding her old Timex watch. “What time do you have? I can't be late to the clinic.”

“We have hours, Mama.”

“Just want to make sure we aren't late, is all. Milo hasn't had anyone to depend on for most of his life. He needs to know that he can depend on me.”

“And how is Dad with Milo moving in with you?”

Greta tried to sound casual, merely curious, but her mother bristled. “What do you mean, how is he with this? He's fine. He knows it's what we have to do.”

Greta considered dropping it, but then she remembered her father's high blood pressure, the heart-attack scare years earlier, and all of the agonizing months they spent as he recuperated. The thought of her parents spending their twilight years taking in an addict who had done little to aid in his own recovery made her alternately frustrated and scared. Surely it could come to no good. It would only endanger the health of her father.

“Well . . . you don't really have to,” Greta persevered. “There are places for kids like Milo. He could go to a halfway house. Someplace where there are other kids who are struggling with the same issues—”

“So when he relapses, he'll have a buddy right there to do it with?” Ilse said. “No, thank you. We are family. This is what family does.” She pointed to a hanging plant whose leaves resembled the horns of an animal. “Did you say this was a sun or shade garden?”

“I didn't say.” It was clear to Greta that her mother was changing the subject. And if she had learned anything, she would be wise to just let it go. Her mother's mind was made up, and nothing—not Greta, not Greta's father's health, not even Ilse's own better judgment—would change her mind.

“Shade,” Greta said, resigned. “Mostly shade, I guess.”

They walked farther down the path, talking little, as Ilse pointed at the flora and commented and Greta dutifully took notes.

“Ficuses don't like to be moved. They will go in decline and die. . . . Spice bush has red flowers that smell like red wine. . . . Most people seem to think Sticky monkey-flowers require full shade, but it will flower for you more in partial shade. . . .”

It was pleasant for Ilse to watch Greta transcribe her words as if they mattered. Greta had been an assiduous student from the time she had entered the Presbyterian preschool. She would sit with pictureless books in her little lap before she even knew how to read, studying the writing as though all of the mystery and wonder of the world were contained in the strange indecipherable symbols. Her academic achievements were legion, and Ilse often found herself marveling at the natural depth of her daughter's intellect. Greta sailed through middle school and high school, and though she secured a full scholarship to the state school, Ilse and Graham scraped together whatever they could to send her to the Ivy League school of her choice.

Greta met Phillip her first year of Stanford, and although Ilse liked him, there was something about the relationship that galled her. Her daughter no longer seemed driven to succeed, preferring instead to rally behind Phillip's achievements.

Gradually it seemed not to matter to her at all—like the language of a country she no longer lived in. She ceased being at the top of her class in college, and her postgraduate career existed only until Phillip completed his MBA and started to earn a hefty salary. Then Greta set her sights on homemaking and, later, on mothering, with the same intensity that she had once possessed for her studies.

“Changing hydrangeas from pink to blue requires aluminum in the soil,” Greta repeated, scribbling in her notebook. As her dark blond hair fell in her face, she tucked it behind her ear with her pencil. It was a gesture Ilse had seen her daughter make thousands of times, but Ilse noticed that there was something different about it. The change was almost indiscernible, and she set about trying to locate its origin. Greta's face had grown fuller in recent years, due to those fertility drugs she was taking Ilse supposed, but now her face was back to normal. In fact, it was a little gaunt. Had she stopped them? Could she be pregnant? Surely Greta would have told her . . . but then again, Greta had become more and more secretive over time. Ilse considered asking her daughter if she was pregnant, but she resented once again having to fish for information. Besides, upon closer examination, Greta wasn't pregnant. She just looked . . . worn. Greta, though never a great beauty, always seemed to have a light that illuminated her from the inside. And now, for the first time, it was dimmed.

“Are you eating enough?” Ilse blurted out.

Greta looked up, startled to see her mother's inscrutable gaze focused on her.

“Eating? Yes, I'm eating.” She threw her notebook into her shoulder bag and wheeled around, turning her back to Ilse. For a moment, as she felt the adrenaline coursing through her veins, Greta made a quick conversational inventory in her mind, attempting to locate the misstep. Reviewing their short conversation, she decided that she had said nothing that would have raised suspicion. Her body had simply betrayed her. Quitting the fertility drugs upon discovering Phillip's affair, combined with her inability to keep almost anything down for what seemed like weeks, had made her skinnier than she had been in high school. And the lack of sleep from lying in bed at night trying not to imagine him mounting Theresa had given her eyes a haunted look. She had tried makeup to compensate for the dullness that had settled on her face like dust on a painting in a junk shop, but this only made it worse. Whatever beauty she thought she might have possessed she realized had only been through her husband's assessment of her. The shock of his infidelity was matched only by the pain of no longer seeing herself through his eyes. Now she saw herself as cruelly as he must have seen her.

How foolish Greta had been to think that she could have held him in her thrall, that he would be immune to beauty. The object of his desire had been as fluid as molten glass—not yet formed, ready to bend to his will. Theresa was truly something blooming. Greta could see that, and yet somehow stupidly she never once considered the possibility. She wanted him, he told Greta in one of the most raggedly honest moments of their marriage, during the brief pause before she closed her heart to him. The girl wanted him and that had been enough. A man who had only just begun to suspect that he would never rise above the ordinary. It would have taken a god not to heed the siren's call.

 

Ocean mist traveled over the tops of the trees and shrubs and enshrouded the limbs of the two silently advancing women. Ilse was curious as to how long the path would go on, and even though walking had become more difficult these past couple of years, she forged ahead. Greta trailed behind her, moody and restless. The sunlight that filtered through the trees cast a light that looked to Ilse like needle lace, the kind her mother had specialized in. If she hadn't been caught up in the memory of this, the boy wouldn't have taken her by surprise.

“Oh!” Ilse cried out, staggering backward. She reached out to the trunk of a coral-barked maple for balance.

A faded tattoo of an ornate crucifix covered one side of the boy's neck, and both arms were covered with other religious imagery and Spanish writing. He was bending down, tinkering with the plastic tubing from an automatic watering system. When he stood, he seemed as surprised to see Ilse as she was to see him. He jutted out his chin slightly in a quick gesture of recognition and then crouched down again.

Greta rushed forward to help her mother, but Ilse just brushed her away with embarrassment. “
Hola,
” Greta said to the boy, demonstrating the extent of her Spanish.

“Hello, Missus,” the boy said in accented English. “Is closed today. Tomorrow is open.” He smiled, and his teeth shone against his brown skin. He was a beautiful young man, in his late teens or early twenties, Greta guessed. It might have been the proximity of age, or the strong healthy air of the boy that caused Ilse to hurry back in the direction from which they had come.

“Wait!” Greta called after her.

But Ilse didn't slow down. Greta hurried to catch up to her. When she did, she grabbed her by the elbow, and her mother instinctively jerked her arm away.

“What are you doing?”

Ilse kept walking. “I don't want to be late picking up Milo. I told you that.”

“And I told you that you won't be.”

“You don't know that. I'd rather get there early and wait than—”

“Than spend any more time with me than you have to?”

Ilse glanced at Greta with a withering expression of annoyance. Greta had seen it many times over the years when she resorted to sarcasm.

“I came here for Milo,” Ilse said. “I want to get him home safely. I want to take him home before he changes his mind.”

“And what makes you think that he won't change his mind when you get him there? You're just going to bring a heroin addict into your house? How are you going to feel when you wake up in the morning and find everything of value gone? Your jewelry? Or Dad's models. Think about that, Mama. He shoots heroin, and has since he was fifteen—”

“He wants to stop,” Ilse said, her voice rising.

“Yeah, what he wants and what he's capable of are two different things.”

Ilse raised her hands to the side of her face. “What can I do, Greta? Milo is my grandson. My only grandson. You expect me to lie down and not do everything in my power to save him?” She shook her head. “I don't expect you to understand this.”