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.
“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 voice 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.