“I waited for thirty minutes, spent fifteen minutes walking from Bramwell Hall to Woodend, twenty minutes having coffee with your mother and another—” James consulted his bright plastic watch “—twenty-five minutes making my way up here. You’ve been AWOL for ninety minutes. Would you care to explain?”
“I hate Tuesdays?” Tilly swung her legs like a recalcitrant child.
“Funny. Except that I’m not laughing.”
“I noticed. No one ever kept you waiting before?”
He tapped his watch twice. “Not for ninety minutes.”
Blimey, he was grumpy today. She sighed, a long sigh that leaked out and took the urge to fight with it. “I started walking and just kept going.” She jumped to the ground, stumbling as she landed on a sunbaked rut. “How did you find me?”
“I did the same.” He gave her a measured look and Tilly turned away. Without the beard there was less to distract her from those huge eyes. “Is it my imagination,” he said, “or does the dog reek of rotten eggs?”
“He went swimming in the cesspit formally known as the duck pond.” Normally, she put Monty on the lead when they entered this field to prevent him from dashing for the stinky sludge behind the rushes. But this morning she was two strides from the pond before she realized where she was.
“And this was how long ago?” James said.
Tilly glanced down at the dog asleep in the clover. His pink tongue lolled between his teeth and his legs twitched as he chased through a dream; dried pond slime was matted into his fur. “A while.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
Why did he make it sound like a bad thing? “Pretty much.”
James stepped under the shade of the beech tree at the edge of The Chase, its branches laden with beechnuts the color of toffee apples. One limb dipped so low that she and Isaac had turned it into a swing at Christmas. What a different visit that had been. How could so much change in six months? Exhaustion overwhelmed her, a sudden need to stall out from life.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Tilly said. “Hide with you in the walled garden. I need to run, but I don’t know where to go. I want to yell, but I don’t know what to say. Tell me how to fight fear, tell me more about this cognitive-behavioral therapy.”
“Tilly, there’s no point.”
She glared at him. He didn’t accept defeat; why should she?
“There’s no point—” James softened his voice “—because your fear is real.”
She squinted into the sunlight. What had she been thinking, sitting out here without a hat? She sighed and joined James to stand in the shade. “Fear is still fear. Tell me anyway.”
James stretched out a foot and rubbed at the only patch of Monty’s flank not encrusted with muck. “If you’re fighting a compulsion, you change the structure of it, reverse it, or better still, delay it. If you can postpone a ritual for ten minutes, the impulse passes. At least that’s the theory. If it’s a nasty image—embrace it, don’t deny it. Doctor it, try and make it ridiculous, or focus on it until your mind becomes bored and wanders. As for fighting obsessions, you have three choices. Counter with logic—what are the chances. Cultivate detachment—I’m going to let that thought float away. Or boss it back—fuck-off-you-fucker. And if you’re desperate, all of the above. That’s cognitive-behavioral therapy, the précis.”
His smile hinted at years of failure. She wanted to hug him, but didn’t dare. If she put her arms around him, how would she know where to stop?
“Harder than it sounds?” Tilly batted away a horsefly.
“Like pausing mid-drown to teach yourself to swim.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “What were you frightened of, as a child?”
“Snakes and exams. I still get exam nightmares.”
“How did the fear manifest itself—before an exam?”
She squeezed out the memory. “My adrenaline pumped, my pulse raced, and just as I thought I would throw up my Marmite toast breakfast, I hit this plateau of calm. I remember the feeling as wide-awake sleepwalking. Very surreal.”
“In other words, you confronted the fear, which means the panic crested and subsided. I’m not an expert on psychology. But you’re out here, alone, for a reason.” He grabbed her wrist and held on so tightly that the tips of her fingers tingled with constricted blood. “Look at your fingers—chewed raw.” He let go. “Yesterday I deadheaded every knautia plant, and you didn’t notice. The day before your T-shirt was inside out. Have you considered allowing yourself to crumble and fall?”
A dandelion clock blew between them and twirled up into the sky.
Tilly flexed her fingers. “So you’re telling me to throw up my hands and say, ‘Take me now, fear’? That’s not an option.”
“Why not? I don’t understand.”
A group of ramblers processed toward The Chase, and two children on ponies clopped along the estate road that led to Manor Farm.
Tilly’s eyes followed the children, rising and falling to the trot. “Because I’m a mother.”
“This isn’t about Isaac, Tilly. This is about you.”
“I don’t handle parenting advice well. You might want to back off.”
A kestrel hovered above them. How wonderful, to be able to drift on air currents, to float over everything and hear nothing below.
“I read this book once about kids and grief—” incredible, did he not understand the core of social interaction, the follow-the-lead-of-your-audience approach? “—the essence of which was this—secure your own oxygen mask before attempting to help your kid put on his. That’s a philosophy to live by, don’t you agree? How can you help others if you can’t help yourself?”
“Sounds like you’re telling me to be selfish.”
“Then you’re choosing to misinterpret me.”
She glared at him, but he merely cocked an eyebrow.
“Maybe,” James said, “you should ask, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’”
“I die, which is kinda sucky.”
“I know it’s not death that terrifies you.”
“Then you don’t need to ask the question, do you?” Why did he have to bring this up again? She’d warned him off once; once should be enough.
“Kids survive. My son is evidence of that.” Monty gave a sneeze and jerked awake. “The best thing you can do is prepare for the worst-case scenario. For example, what provisions have you made for legal guardianship?”
“That if anything happens to me, Isaac lives with my mother.” In Woodend. So much for mapping out the future. “Now that she’s downsizing, I suppose I’ll ask Rowena.”
“What about David’s family?”
“My in-laws adore Isaac, but they live in a retirement community in Florida. And his sister skipped the maternal gene.” Tilly squatted down and began easing sticky Willy seeds from Monty’s fur. “Besides, she lives in Manhattan, and skyscrapers terrify Isaac. He thinks they’re going to fall on him.”
“Smart kid. I have the same fear.” James rubbed his chin and looked momentarily surprised, as if he’d forgotten how it felt to be clean-shaven. “What about a living will?”
“Whoa, time out.” She stood and put her hands on her hips. Now he’d gone too far.
“This is what it means, Tilly, to fight fear. You can’t withhold the punches.”
“You don’t know how to quit, do you?”
“Unless I’m having an out-of-body experience, you asked for my advice. I’m giving it the only way I know how—as an obsess
ive-compulsive, not as Mister Rogers.” He flashed a smile, but his eyes darkened again. Tilly stood and inched toward the edge of the shade. Sebastian was right. She didn’t know enough about this man. “My tribe isn’t exactly filled with people who look on the bright side of life, Tilly.”
What the hell was she doing, baring her soul to someone she’d known for what, a little over a month? “How long have we known each other?”
“Six weeks, but I don’t see the relevance. You and Isaac became part of my life the moment we met.”
Was he really that naive?
“Come on, boy,” James said. Monty shot up, wagging his tail. “Time to go home.”
“That’s it? You’re taking the dog and buggering off, leaving me in a field?”
“You chose the setting.” James walked away but stopped and turned. “I suggest you scream and cry. Works for me. And while you do that, Isaac and I are going to design a tree house for the magnificent oak in the paddock.”
“You know how to build a tree house?”
James tossed back his hair and grinned. He was wearing two silver hoops and two small diamond earrings today. The stud in his left ear sparkled in the sun, dazzling Tilly. “You’d be amazed what a farm boy can do with a pile of boards and planks.”
Monty and James started down the hill, heading for Woodend. “Put on your oxygen mask,” he called over his shoulder. “And don’t scare the wildlife.”
Even as she watched him walk away, Tilly screamed a silent Come back! How could you miss a person you could still see?
She stared at a flattened skeleton of a hare, half-hidden in the long grass at the edge of the path. This whole exploit was pointless. Being out here with Monty she could pretend they were resting midwalk. Without a dog she felt silly, and too damn hot. Heat in England was awkward—holiday weather that belonged in another country. Although it didn’t appear to bother the birds in The Chase, who were as noisy as the birds at Creeping Cedars. She should buy a tape of birdsong when they returned to the States, learn to identify more of the natives back home.
Tilly jerked up, disturbed by the thought that had dropped, unbidden, into her mind. Unbelievable, while she was distracted by something as banal as the weather, her mind had coshed her with a hard little fact: The sounds of home came not from finches and blackbirds, but from the cries of hawks and the chitters of hummingbirds. What else did she miss? The fireflies, definitely! Her gardens? Omigod, yes!
Did that mean that her heart could belong to two places, despite her determination to force it into an either-or choice?
As she clambered back onto the stile, her mind flitted to James stepping on every other dandelion at Maple View Farm and to the view she loved just as much as the one laid out before her. This scene hadn’t changed in thirty years and would still be here in another thirty years, whether she was part of it or not. Whether she lived or died. James was right—Isaac’s guardianship should be her priority. Isaac should be with someone who had shared her past and could carry those memories into his future. Rowena was the obvious choice.
And suppose…just suppose she were dying. What about a living will? Damn you, James, for planting the seed. If she knew that Isaac would be the center of someone else’s universe, should she plan for the swiftest death possible? Would that be less painful for him? Eight years ago, when she had refused to discuss the issue with David, her world had been spinning in a different direction. Eight years ago, she could afford ideals. But hadn’t grief revealed that one-size-fits-all was a lousy doctrine?
James had talked about falling apart so you could put yourself back together. Could that simple philosophy save Isaac if she died? When he was a rambunctious three-year-old, she encouraged him to bend his knees if he fell: don’t hit the ground rigid, or you’ll shatter like Humpty Dumpty. Rigid, that was a good adjective to describe Tilly. But how else could you cling on, stop yourself from tipping into blackness? Or, sometimes, did you have to let go?
She closed her eyes against the vista, against the birdsong, and remembered the hidden hours after David’s death, when she had allowed herself to mourn. Allowed herself to crumble and fall.
Chapter 19
For the first time in twenty-two hours and thirty-eight minutes, he was alone with her. The agony of caring this much was crushing him. Every hour, every minute, every second, James thought of Tilly. He could no longer separate her pain from his, her needs from his. And he knew what she expected of him, but he couldn’t deliver. Why did his OCD have to flare up this morning when he was trying so hard to be the person Tilly could depend on, not screwed-up James with the misfiring brain?
They had to leave now or they’d be late. Late was never an option, but he couldn’t do what she was asking of him. He couldn’t. Ominous clouds loitered behind the Hall and humidity stacked up in his lungs. A storm was rolling in.
“I’m sorry, Tilly. I’m sorry.” They faced each other across the hood of the Yaris. “I can’t drive. I can’t.”
“But you’re the one who offered to take me, remember?”
He’d rankled her. He could hear it in her tone.
Rowena had said Tilly craved space. In the past two days, James had done everything he could to provide it, coercing Isaac, Virginia, even the psycho dog, into helping with the tree house, leaving Tilly wide-open to shut out the world, which she’d done, packing away family memorabilia to a borrowed soundtrack. His borrowed soundtrack, from his new iPod classic. For once, the scorpion pit of sharing had been worth the anguish. Watching her sashay around humming the Gipsy Kings had affected him in his heart, in his gut and in his groin. And pelted him with images of Sebastian. Sebastian, who had held her and made love to her.
She doesn’t love you, she loves Sebastian.
Which rival haunted him more—the dead husband or the very much alive ex-lover, the stand-up guy who was in London all week to be with his kids for their end-of-school festivities? How could you hate someone that decent?
Tilly doesn’t need you, she needs Sebastian.
James let the thoughts tumble, too tired to resist. He hadn’t slept in two nights. Rowena was away at the Great Yorkshire Agricultural Show, and he’d fallen into a new ritual of checking every door and every window every night. The Hall freaked him out. What choice did he have?
She doesn’t love you, she loves Sebastian.
“Tilly, when I said I would take you, I meant accompany you to the clinic. I cannot, cannot, drive on the left-hand side of this arcane road system with signs bearing down on us that read Warning—kill your speed, Warning—police radar, Warning—red route, thirty-eight fatalities in three years. If I drive, we won’t make it to the breast clinic alive.” He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the doves flapping and cooing in the dovecote. It didn’t work. “I have images—” he opened his eyes “—of you and me trapped under a semi. In flames.”
“Fine. I’ll drive the death trap,” Tilly said, and slammed the door. Then waited for him to squash into the passenger seat before they sped off, tires grinding through the gravel.
* * *
They passed the second memorial of plastic flowers marking the death of someone’s husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter, on a road too narrow and twisty for modern traffic, and still, she didn’t speak. Since she was pissed at him, he might as was tell her about David, get it over with. A week ago he had decided she must never know, but that was before his childish alter ego jumped into the arena
. Before he felt abandoned. In the past two days Tilly had withdrawn—at his suggestion, but then he’d never operated on the same field of logic as everyone else—and now he burned with the need to haul her back into his confidence, to make her understand that fate had brought them together. At least he hoped she would believe it was fate and not really shitty karma.
God Almighty, he felt ridiculous jammed into this toy car with his legs jutting up. Whether he was inside or out, England was a cramped, Lilliputian world. Even parking spaces were smaller.
He practiced two yoga breaths, then two more.
“When are you going to say, ‘Told you so’ about the road?” Tilly said.
“I’m not. But since you are talking to me again, I would like to ask you a question.” He snapped open the strap of his Alessi watch, the watch he always wore for good luck. Then he snapped it shut. Open, shut. Open—Tilly reached across and stopped him.
“If you want to drive,” she said, “the answer’s yes.”
James scratched through his hair. “I can assure you I would rather take my own life.”
She glanced at him. “You could do that, take your own life?”
“It was a joke.”
But she didn’t laugh. “You could, couldn’t you? I believe that of you.”
“Tilly, I won’t lie to you. I’ve visited some dark places. But the past is the past.” Please God, she believed that sentence. “I did want to ask, though—”
“You tried to kill yourself?”
Was it his imagination, or did she jerk away from him? Keep going, James. Keep going.
“There have been moments in my life—” one related to your husband “—when I’ve understood the hopelessness that drags you down to the point where life seems worthless. And I believe that each person has the right to choose his threshold for pain, whether of the body or of the mind.”
“I can’t imagine,” she said quietly, “deciding that life is not worth living.”
The Unfinished Garden Page 21