Warm Wuinter's Garden

by Neil Hetzner

  Peter parked the car just past the sign designating the weedy area as land held by the Clarke’s Cove Homeowners’ Association. He slowly made his way out onto the sandy spit until he look down the shore to his parents’ dock and picnic house.

  He had been flown back wrapped in plaster. An arm and collarbone. Peter found a small comfort in staring at the silver gray hulk of the picnic table a thousand feet away, even though it was not the same one that he had eaten from when he first had come home. He had been told in the Philippines that his injuries weren’t serious. Nothing complicated. Just a bad concussion, contusions and two shattered bones.

  Peter felt the force, which had propelled him from Provincetown and along New York’s aching streets, well back up in him.

  Broken bones and bad memories and worse dreams. And the mucilage of remorse.

  Go on.

  He couldn’t.

  He thought of Bett in a darkened room. Deciding whether to fight or give in. Deciding whether to leave her leg on an operating table so she could get on with the rest of her life. Sorting out and sorting through. Measuring out and measuring up. Adding.

  And subtracting.

  As he had done. Subtract Ray. As he had done. But, he really hadn’t. Ray was long gone but he had kept him in the equation. Every day he had ciphered through what was past and what would come. But, he hadn’t solved the problem. He had only made it worse. He had been so sure he could figure out what it meant. Why Ray was gone and he was left.

  In the days of jungle, he had become so caught up in the meaning, knowing that it must have meaning, that he had come to know it as a bowl of portents. Ray had gone so that he could stay. If he could read the signs and be careful.

  And he had been. After the counting of the days and hours and after the packing and repacking of his kit, he had spent his time working and being aware. Keeping a vigil for his return to safety. He had watched children and known their hate soon must outgrow their small frames. He had fixed cripples with a desperate stare knowing they waited patiently for a lax moment to scuttle close on hollowed limbs filled full with the powder of revenge. Death waited, waited patiently for a second’s inattention.

  Brennan said see the sky. He looked. A child ran from a brown dog in the ditch. He twisted the wheel. Smashed through the threat. Went in the ditch. Rolled the jeep.

  And…

  Broke his arm and collar bone.

  And…

  He looked down.

  Peter looked down the shore for strength.

  And…

  Broke Brennan’s neck.

  And…

  Severed the boy’s leg.

  And…

  Peter sat on the beach with his fingers plowing small furrows in the sand. Was the boy dead now, or sleeping on a sidewalk, or forcing open restaurant doors to take a favorite seat? Where were Brennan’s folks? How had a moment’s inattention changed their path? Where was Adele? What had Ray’s death done to her?

  Brennan had lost his life and the boy a leg and he his life and wife and family. Years and years. And, then, each day, as cameras showed bombs hunt for prey, and khaki colored soldiers spoke of duty and prayed for peace, as life and death and danger and safety wove their random plaids on the sere backdrop of desert dun, as errant missiles killed civilians and soldiers slept secure, as friendly fire abruptly subtracted lives and made lingering victims of those who fired, haunting things had come back.

  Peter saw a small figure make its hobbling way past the picnic table and out to the end of the dock.

  Heat rolled up out of his stomach.

  How could the crippled laugh? He had watched them in fear, had known with a twenty year old knowledge that they must strike out. Had known a hurt that big must swing free. Had known with surety that a second’s more passing of that pain and they must clear the tables with their crutches.

  But, they hadn’t. They had laughed and talked and eaten gobs of steaming noodles.

  Peter stared at his mother leaning against the last piling of the dock. His chest heaved a dozen times, huge soundless strangling hiccoughs, breaths too sharp to hold. Ray had died. A bad luck dance. Ray had died. Fear had found him ten thousand miles from home. An unspeakable anger had wound through his fear. Mistakes had been made. Terrible mistakes. Brennan was gone and a boy’s leg and Gaby and five, six, seven thousand days. And seven thousand nights. Of holding tight. Staying on the path. No more mistakes. Tires strictly straight. No more mistakes. No looking at the sky. No looking out at all. Just down. At boiling pots and grease skittering skillets and smooth sheathed tomatoes and the slick skinned legs of butchered chickens. Throughout it all, he had kept his eyes down and his voice calm and had hoped, with an energy sapping hope, that his anger wouldn’t kill yet another man nor his remorse kill himself. He had hoped and held on. He had lashed the things of a normal life wife, children, home and job onto his own inexplicable life and had hoped the grafts would take. They hadn’t. Not really. But, their strange fruit had helped to hold things off. For a while. For a long while. Until Gaby left and took the boys. And friends and customers slow motioned their AID-ed way out toward Ray. With just as little meaning and almost as much regret. And a victim’s disease grafted itself onto his mother. And held her tight. Despite her goodness and all her courage and her life long magical inoculation against mistakes. And hot smart bombs flew down Iraqi chimneys and brought the most surprising gifts.

  Peter ground sand crusted knuckles into his eyes. His throat made a soft sound, but he couldn’t tell what it was trying to say.

  It was dark and his mother was gone before his noises ceased. Something was gone and in its place was a flickering image of a frail screen door held open by a crutch and two sallow skinned, gaunt faced men pushing clumsily, noisily, laughingly through the door.

  Peter limped along the sand and then drove down the ill lighted lane to his old home.

  Chapter 24

  Driving south on Route 95, past Attleboro and into Rhode Island, past the fusty sprawl of Pawtucket and through the writhing curves that bisected Providence, Nita kept being surprised at how relaxed she was. That morning, as she cleaned up office details, she had warned herself to be alert to her own recriminations. Without frequent monitoring and admonishments, she had expected to be in frequent disputes with herself for leaving work. Now, alone in the speeding car, sixty miles south of her office, she was pleasantly surprised at her own self-graciousness.

  It was mid-afternoon on a Wednesday in early spring. As air was sucked into the slightly opened window, Nita thought it felt as warm and smelled as good as June. Along the highway many of the grasses were already bright green. In the lowlands the willows’ cold weather dun was lightened with the palest tinge of new leaf yellow. Winter’s lowering leaden sky had arched its back and re-painted itself a deep blue. The sky was so high Nita thought gravity itself must have weakened. After months of being mashed down and cowering under winter’s low, dark ceiling, having a huge open vault about her exhilarated her.

  While driving along the nearly lightly trafficked highway, Nita studied the delicate balance that held between the seasons. The south sides of the hills were greener than the north. The tops of hills were brown and barren, but in the low spots, protected from the winds and able to hold the sun’s nascent warmth, the ground was green with newly synthesized chlorophyll and, in several places, splotches of bright color. Against the white, life-giving mirrors of building walls and bridge abutments, in Easter bonnet pinks and yellows, forsythia and azaleas were coming into bloom.

  Nita took her eyes from the countryside to look at the car phone. She had only the faintest desire to call her office. After Nita had decided just the day before to visit Bett, her secretary Leann had spent the afternoon shifting appointments while Nita herself had made the necessary phone calls to opposing attorneys, court clerks and clients to ask for continuances for the three court appearances she had been scheduled for during the remainder of the week. Nita had been pleased at how accommoda
ting everyone had been, but she had remained wary of reproach from the person least likely to accept her unexpected change of plans—Attorney Nita Koster.

  So far, more than an hour into her trip, the charges—irresponsibility, laziness, breach of duty—had not been forthcoming. Again, Nita thanked that unexpected side of herself for its tolerance before shifting her thoughts to Bett.

  The last months had been so hard. Her phone calls to her mother had grown ever shorter. Long questions about Bett’s health had been countered with short, spare answers. When she had tried to discover the particulars of the tumor in her mother’s leg, she had heard the same hollowness as when she’d examine a reluctant witness. Nita had been sure her mother wasn’t lying to her, but she also knew that Bett wasn’t being forthcoming. It made Nita angry that her mother was holding back, but each time it happened, her professional training kept the anger under wraps. She would move the conversation away from the cancer to the war, or siblings, or her father, or even to herself. She would try to reassure the witness with a series of quotidian questions before circling back to something sharper and, to her, more relevant.

  Nita assumed if her mother wasn’t sharing with her, given their connectedness from the years of watchful waiting with the DES, then she probably wasn’t opening herself to anyone in the family. It hurt to think of her mother’s isolation, but it hurt much more when her father finally confessed that anger and depression had been holding Bett to her bed.

  A staccato honk made Nita aware she had become so engrossed in her thinking that she had allowed the car’s speed to drift down to forty miles an hour. She accelerated to sixty-five, set the cruise control, and returned to her thoughts.

  Isolation. Nita had tried to do that, too. She had pulled herself back and in. It had seemed to her then that the more she could retreat within herself, the fewer the surfaces there would be for the pain to dance upon. Reliving her retreat, Nita began to understand and, as grudgingly as her mother once had been with her, accept Bett’s reluctance to discuss her condition.

  The signs of spring became ever more evident until she drew close to the water. In the final miles to Clarke’s Cove the land went back to limbo. She remembered how the water dearly held onto summer but stingily held back spring.

  Nita was surprised to find Bett in the small pantry which long ago had been converted to a nursery for her mother’s plants. Nita realized she had been picturing her mother still trapped in bed. Bett was leaning back against a stool. On the roughened workbench in front of her were a mound of vermiculite, an opened bag of potting soil, sphagnum moss, pots and a stack of black and green plastic planting flats.

  “Hi, I didn’t knock. Thought you might be napping.”

  “Hi, honey.”

  Showing the tips of her fingers to be blackened with dirt, Bett held her hands up and away from herself, as a surgeon might after scrubbing, before tilting a cheek to present to Nita for kissing.

  “Mind the wig.”

  “Is that a question or statement? Declaration or interrogation?”

  “Be careful of. Declarative.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be very careful.

  “You look great in here.”

  “Do I? I wonder why?”

  “I don’t know. Earth mother, I guess. You’re so enough to pay attention to the seasons. Sometimes I think I must be adopted. If I’m really your daughter, why am I so stupid as to miss most of your most valuable lessons? Driving down here, instead of plotting and planning the next thing and next thing and next thing I have to do, I actually looked at the countryside. Things are changing. It’s spring, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s certainly trying to be.”

  “Somehow, it seems too early.”

  “It is. But, the winter was so warm. I’m not enough of a garden club Anglophile to keep a garden diary, but, if my memory serves, it’s the earliest I’ve ever seen the tulips or hyacinths down here. I’m way behind. As you can see.”

  Bett searched for Nita’s eyes.

  “I was so foolish. I lost all that time.”

  Nita just barely shook her head. She didn’t want to hear her mother apologize.

  “So, now, I’m trying to catch up.”

  Bett waved her hands over the bowl of chocolate potting soil coconutted with pure white vermiculite.

  As she drizzled soil through her fingers, Nita said, “I’ll bet a lot of people are about where you are. I think the war threw everything off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “January and February, unless you’re a skier, always seem to be full of days that just have to be endured. Plodded from one to another. But, this year, the war distracted everyone. From the weather, their bills, the post-holiday letdown, cabin fever. And probably their seed catalogs.”

  Bett considered whether she should accept her daughter’s explanation. She wanted to tell Nita how overwhelmed she had been. How she had been so riddled with fear, blanched of faith, pushed toward a horrible corruption of herself and then, beyond, into a yawning nothingness. She wanted to apologize for allowing the cancer its weeks of victory. She wanted to shrive herself. But, Nita’s face said no. Don’t do that.

  “You might be right. You probably are. The war and the warm weather confused us all.”

  “One hundred thousand lives seems a big price for our distraction.”

  “It may save more lives in the end.”

  “Like Pete’s?”

  Bett’s voice held gratitude.

  “Yes. Like Pete’s. Oh, honey, that was such a terrible day. It was so easy to imagine such terrible things.”

  “Because you knew things were bad?”

  “No, not really. We had talked several times, but he had been very closemouthed about everything. Lise had told me that Gaby had called her because she was so worried about how he was being affected. After that, when we talked, I broached the war a couple of times, but he changed the subject to the boys, the restaurant or…”

  “You?”

  “Yes, I suppose, me.”

  “Let me make a wild guess. Then, you changed the subject to Dad, the weather, or just about anything else.”

  Bett stared hard at Nita for a second before turning back to the potting soil.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Kind of like two people fighting over a dial. Like men in a bar arguing over which game to watch. Remember the Templetons?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You know. When they got a TV that had a remote how they’d fight for control of it. The, they bought a second remote and each constantly changed what the other wanted to watch. Or, fiddled with the volume.”

  Bett’s face clouded over with pain.

  “I’m just teasing, Mom. When I was driving down here today I was thinking about how when I was sick I always felt better when I pushed everybody away. Even you. Remember?”

  “Did it feel like I was pushing you away?”

  “Yes, actually, it did, and, if we’re being honest, it still does. Like a few minutes ago when you agreed it was the war that has delayed your planting. But it’s okay. I know it’s not really a push. It’s more the opposite. You’re pulling in. To conserve yourself.”

  Bett turned to say something, but Nita continued before her mother could begin.

  “It’s okay, Mom. It’s your battle. You fight it the way you have to fight it.”

  “It has not been easy figuring out how to do that.”

  Nita remained quiet. She moved next to her mother and began to fill the holes of a flat with soil. She recognized a situation she had seen in court several times when a witness became so entwined in the magnitude of his thoughts he forgot that he was testifying before an audience.

  “It’s hard to know what to do. It’s hard to know how hard to fight. I gave up a breast. That was easy, really. I knew I was doing the right thing. It wasn’t vital.ﾁIt wasn’t exactly superfluous. But, somehow, it wasn’t vital. It was a price, a reasonable price, to have
to pay for my health. A leg is vital. Losing a leg changes me. Changes what I can do. Changes who I am. Losing a leg cripples me. I’ve thought about it so much. A leg must be about twenty percent of me. Of my weight. My…my… My displacement. My displacement will be less. My space would be smaller. But, it’s a price that I can think about. And actually think about easily if I can make myself believe that my leg would be the full price. But, if it’s not… If there’s more to pay… If my leg is just a down payment for a few more months and, then, another payment is due… It’s very hard to figure out. I can’t even figure out how to think about it. I’ve always felt that I’ve known how to think about things. Things have always kind of arranged themselves in my mind. But, not now. However I look at it, it seems like I leave something out. Neil, money, pain, hope. That strange word that I keep hearing myself think—dignity. Something. I look around here and see all the thoughtless shaping that I’ve done. Everywhere I look, I see something I’ve trimmed or shaped or pruned to my notion of what its life should be. The grapefruit trees used to be seven feet tall, now they’re four feet. They used to be scraggly. Now, they’re nicely pollarded. Is that how God works? He looks at me. ‘She’s ungainly. Snip this. Lop that. That’s better. Now she better suits my purpose. Now, she’s more pleasing to my eye.’ Is that what’s going on? It’s hard to know. Does God want me to prune myself? Am I to fight and fight and fight for life? Or, am I supposed to stop fighting and go on to whatever is next? Am I supposed to be a victim to this horrid disease or am I supposed to be a victim of foolishness, self-will and determination and science as I try to fight it? Or, am I to become a victim to anger and bitterness? That certainly would be ironic. I get to keep my leg or my life, but the price is that I become filled with bitterness.”

  Bett decided she would take up Nita’s challenge.

  “Nita, lying in that bed was a black pleasure. The blackest of pleasures. There was something so frighteningly seductive about staying in that room and filling it with the meanest of thoughts. Some of the things that I said to your father. I savored them both before and after I said them and the only regret I had was that I had no film of the hurt on his face to look at over and over. I don’t know what would have happened if Peter’s disappearance hadn’t jolted me out of it. I never knew that much about sin or evil. I don’t know why, but it just never had much attraction for me. I’d see people do mean-spirited things and I could never fathom the reward or pleasure they got from it. Now, I know. And, now, I have some understanding of the effort some, maybe many, people have to make to be good.