“What kind of shit you pulling?” Anger rode Nona’s voice, yes, that and something more, something that wished their marriage healed. She slinked toward her cigarette, retrieved it, took a drag so deep it pitted her chin, let it out like fire.
“Just be here tomorrow night, honey,” he said. “Wait one more night. You’ll see. You’re going to like what I have to offer.” He knew Nona was off the rag. No pads in the wicker wastebasket in their bathroom all week.
She stared at him, took another drag and blew it out those soft red lips of hers. “Jimmy, you’re one grade-A weirdo motherfucker, you know that? I swear to God.”
He smiled at her. She’d change her tune tomorrow, no doubt in his mind. “Just be here and make sure your sexy body’s primed for the best loving it’s ever had, ‘cause I aim to give it to you.”
“Right. You and whose brother?”
“You’ll see, honey.”
“Right. Hey, I’m going to watch the tube. You want anything out of the fridge?”
He shook his head. “Nah, go ahead.”
“Suit yourself.” She walked out of the room, Queenie brushing against her kissable legs. He imagined his hands on those legs, snaking up inside the legholes of her tight shorts, coming around and meeting in the middle where her hair-pie was. Shit, she turned him on.
He’d have Nona tomorrow night for sure. And for all the tomorrows on the calendar. Would-be Nona-humpers like big-boy attorney Franklin Tanner would have to be content with lying on top of their own wives and dreaming it was Nona they were plugging, not the Karins they’d married instead. Come to think of it, wouldn’t be bad at all to snake your way into Karin Tanner. Meek, obedient earth goddess bent to water her garden, sweet legs, stacked deck on top, broad-brimmed hat on her curly blond head. Yeah, maybe her good friend Jimmy and his everlasting gobstopper would toss the covers over his exhausted Nona, smiles of contentment on her lush lips, and leap the fence into that lovely lady’s backyard; yes, turn the tables on all those gamecocks who’d strutted their way into his backyard.
Jimmy patted his limp penis, then lifted the paper to his eyes. Karin Tanner. Choice morsel.
***
Frank sat at his desk—the door to the study slightly ajar so he could feel not entirely cut off from Karin—and tried to get Nona Gallagher out of his mind. Wasn’t easy. He could still smell her scent, still see the taut stretch of skin from below her tubed-in breasts to just above the top of her shorts. He sniffed the back of his hand, then castigated himself for it and tried to focus on his notes for the Malloy trial.
Wouldn’t work.
Karin passed his door, moving from the hallway into their bedroom to tend the houseplants there. He could hear her speak softly to them. He imagined her fingers lightly massaging their leaves and petals, her nose and lips moving into their beauty. This house—her house, not his—had once been a place of violence. The array of swords at his back were a mute reminder of that, nearly invisible to him now but an annoyance he’d have to get rid of soon. He’d remodeled a little, done some repainting, replaced furniture, trying to change the character of the house, to turn Karin’s tormentor out. Her attempt to do likewise had brought her garden inside, a healing tongue of greenery so pervasive it was difficult to walk around without toppling one plant or another.
And she’d gotten better, more self-reliant, less of a clinging vine than she’d been when he first met her. But the houseplants had become an obsession, a way of avoiding contact with him. And her visits to Danny Daniels’ grave were, he felt, the height of perversity. He had tried to cajole her out of them, but she took it as a challenge to her newfound independence and simply dug in deeper.
He loved Karin. He had adopted a stance of patience, hoping his love would draw her back to him, but wanting to give her room to work things out for herself. But in the last many months, things had solidified, grown worse, not better, and he’d begun to wonder for the first time if his marriage had been a mistake.
He was thirty, a rising star in the firm of Scithers, Thancher, & Wilde, tight, trim, attractive to all sorts of lovely women. Not just Nona. There was Jeannine, the new admin assistant: short, pert, long auburn hair, a tad too much makeup, and depths of intelligence behind those large burnt-almond eyes—just the type Frank the eligible single would have loved to know better. But a guy got married—“did the awful deed,” as Archer Wilde had once joked in that bittersweet way of his—and suddenly what had been natural urges were supposed to be denied, shut off, no longer acted upon.
Some cheated. Just today, Ethan Bell, another junior partner, had wangled out of Frank the keys to the cabin at Chiquita Lake for the weekend. Ethan had a scorching hot rendezvous with a Sac State coed named Marcie something or other, while poor Susan Bell stayed home with the twins, thinking her husband was attending a legal conference in San Francisco. Only seminar Ethan would be attending was a marathon meeting between the sheets.
But cheating wasn’t Frank’s style. He’d promised to forsake all others, to love, honor, and obey only Karin, and he was a man who kept his promises. His father had harped constantly on that theme, how too many lawyers—but not him, and not, by God, any son of his—made promises that were only as good as the water they were written on. Too many men of all stripes, he’d say. But it was by God especially heinous—how Frank’s father loved to say that word and how Frank loved to hear him say it—for men sworn to uphold the law, by God it was heinous beyond heinosity for them to speak one way and act another.
Karin knocked and the door eased further open on its hinges. “Plant run,” she said, avoiding his eyes. Still miffed at her missed visit.
“No problem,” he replied, as he always replied. She breezed past him and headed for the shelf of devil’s ivy, mother-in-law’s tongue, ficus, and cyperus by the window. He pretended to be buried in his notes, but he could feel the tension between them and he wanted to say something to bring back the early days, their passion, the promise of a beautiful life together. But the courtroom—where he was at home, where his honed eloquence in a good cause brought him and his listeners to satisfying conclusions, where he had played a major part in winning Karin’s acquittal—the courtroom was one place and this accursed house was quite another.
He didn’t know why he’d lost his assertiveness with Karin, but he had. At the beginning, he supposed he had been especially gentle with her because of what she’d been through with men, as if any interaction were like touching a wound. He held back so that she might venture forth and find her long-buried self. He had played the white knight it seemed too well. Gone along with her wishes regarding selling neither the house nor the cabin, the friendly if steady invasion of plants, the visits—at first a drip, then a drizzle, now a steady downpour—to the graveyard. And now, though his voice rang out before one jury after another, though his control on the tennis court was near complete, he felt paralyzed and helpless around his wife, incapable of doing or saying anything that would revivify their lives together.
He looked over to where Karin knelt on the rug before a fiddle leaf fig, her cheek brushing lightly against its woman-hipped leaves, her fingertips moving along the thin stiff stem from which the leaves rose. He looked at her and loved her, wanting to tell her so, but feeling the time, the circumstances, were not right. They were never right these days.
“Karin, I’m really sorry about spoiling your plans for the afternoon.”
She moved her head slightly as if she were going to look at him but changed her mind. “It’s okay,” she said.
But it wasn’t.
THREE
UNWILTING
Wednesday dawned with its sky overcast and troubled, and Karin felt restless all day, as antsy as a smoker with nicotine withdrawal. Rain threatened but never fell, not one drop. Still, the air was just this side of cool, and Karin wore drawstring pants and an old flannel workshirt into the garden for her watering and weeding that morning, replacing the flannel shirt with a cotton blouse when she returned early th
at afternoon to replenish her basket.
She kept glancing at her watch as she worked, unable to believe how slowly the day moved, how much of her heart was already at Danny’s grave. I’ve got to break out of this, she thought. This isn’t normal, Danny is dead, I really don’t need to feel apologetic. But those were idle thoughts. She knew there was something inside her which demanded she do penance, that at some point she would have offered enough flowers to suffice. On that day, she would be able to walk away from the man who had adored her and abused her with such unholy vehemence, walk away and let her life take what direction it would, whether with Frank Tanner or without him. But until that day, all she could do was grow flowers, gather them, offer them to his buried corpse, cry over them and caress them, talking to her dead husband to assuage the pain in her own heart.
Since ten days past, when Daylight Savings Time had kicked in, sunset didn’t arrive until after seven-thirty, so Karin usually left the house around five-thirty, which gave her a good hour and a half to be with Danny and watch the daylight die. But on this day, when she’d planned on spending an extra thirty minutes at the gravesite, she was so fidgety that by the time her watch said 4:15, she’d had enough of waiting. Fifteen minutes later, she was on the road, a basket of jonquils, veronicas, blue flax, pansies, orange pinwheels, and assorted singles beside her.
When she arrived, Mister Romano was not on his porch. She saw him off in the distance through a stand of cypress trees, walking with an elderly man and woman and gesturing toward where a newer part of the cemetery climbed a slight rise. They had their backs to her and were distant enough that she doubted they had heard her drive in.
The tops of the trees swayed and rustled in the wind. It was only when Karin saw Betsy Trillin’s grave that she realized she’d forgotten to clip a sprig of baby’s breath for her. She felt terrible. She knew the missed day had distracted her but she hadn’t realized how much until this moment. She drew forth a bright yellow Missouri primrose, set it on the tiny grave, and retrieved the withered sprig she’d laid two days before. “Sorry, little darling,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring two sprigs, I promise.”
Danny’s grave lay just ahead and her heart fell when she saw the shriveled flowers. Funny. It had only been the end of March that her visits had become daily instead of every other day. Even so, a sight she’d been used to then now horrified her. Windflowers and wakerobins set out on Monday lay limp and puckered on his grave. Blooms she had revived a bit on Sunday were far beyond the pale: shriveled, withered, on their way to desiccation.
Karin knelt and lifted a wilted coreopsis.
“Forgive me, Danny,” she said. Nervously she stroked the brittle yellow puff, now brown at the edges. The name cut into his simple stone, DANIEL ARTHUR DANIELS, seemed chiseled with reproach. Danny’d hated his last name, the sound of it reminding him of spaniel tails and of Henry Daniell from The Bodysnatcher, whose face was mean and doglike. Still caressing the dead flower, she glanced away from his name and down at the plot. “His car konked out. I had to pick him up and drive him home. The call came after five, I couldn’t have reached you before the gates closed.” She heard the rising tone in her voice, knew how absurd her whining sounded, yet felt the tight knot—so familiar from her final months with him—in her stomach. Her ears stung then from Danny’s yelling at her close up. Glimpses of his wolfish face, twisted in hate, the mouth moving strangely around hard angled words, came rushing at her. “I’m sorry, Danny, I’m sorry.”
Her thumb moved over the coreopsis like wind rippling through fields of wheat, a troubled wind keening over the cool crimped softness of its bloom.
Softness.
She stopped stroking, stopped the unconscious rocking her body had been about. She stared down at the brilliant yellow flower cupped in her left hand. No hint of brown, no wilt. Her thumb resumed its motion and she brought her other fingers into play. The flower seemed to reach for them, to respond like a yearning lover, as they caressed and left each tightly bunched petal. Karin blinked, not believing what she was seeing. The bloom, limp and dry when she lifted it—or could she have been mistaken?—now felt like cool misted tissue paper, drawn tight in rings of thin yellow mouths around the central hub.
Lifting it to her nose, she inhaled a strange mix of fragrance and mortality that both revolted and attracted her. She set it down on Danny’s grave. It looked oddly out of place among the dead and dying blooms, alive again and yet with a glaze of razor-thin ice, a sheen, a patina that announced its apartness even from the freshly picked flowers in her basket.
Leaves rustled above, the wind wafted by her cheeks. The old couple still conferred with Mister Romano in the distance. Karin felt a twinge of guilt, as if she were doing something that ran counter to the rules. She idled an index finger around the outside of the coreopsis bloom, then eased down the stem, slowly, pushing the love of this flower, the love of life, into it. It was like stroking the green spine of an invisible lizard, a straight line almost like a crack in the earth. Her finger made love to the planet through this thin wire quivering with revival. She could feel it caressing her brain, she almost imagined she saw it swell with moisture, drawing it out of the air to feed the brilliant yellow bloom she’d brought back from the dead.
Now her hands began to stray left and right over the grave, tentative in their touch, feeling how far gone each flower was, feeling the distinct nature of each vegetative death—and feeling the urge again to push. She fixed on a Southern Belle hibiscus, its ten-inch bloom of deep red looking like a collapsed hat, a fallen soufflé of blood and pastry dough. With all ten fingers, she touched its red wrinkle, treadling and moving about, massaging lightly the troubled ruffles. She could feel the power-of-the-coreopsis, as she thought of it, building in her like a static charge; but she let it out slowly now, a slow push, nothing fast or violent, learning what it was she had hold of here, learning by exercising, by stretching, by feeling the hibiscus bloom come back under her fingers. It cooed, it curled, it purred, and death relaxed its grip to allow life abundant to seep back into the flower.
“If Granny Eva could only see me now,” she said. The old woman’s face came back, then faded, but its look spoke clearly to Karin for the first time. Though she could not now remember specific things her grandmother had told her, she felt for the first time a deeper connection to Granny Eva, beyond kinship, beyond gratitude for the refuge she’d provided back then, beyond even the common bond of their womanhood—something whose roots sank deep into the core of the earth. This was a power her granny had known, had enjoyed, though perhaps not as intensely as Karin.
Shame seized her. In the joy of her discovery, she had forgotten where she was, why she was here. “Oh Danny, forgive me. I’ve been bringing these flowers back without a thought to you. They were cut for you, brought for you, laid here above your murdered body. Let me give each one of them the life they’ve lost and leave them here for you, once more a plea for forgiveness.” Where her hands roved, she saw colors unfade and deepen, felt limp stems stiffen, shriveled petals take on the starch and moisture of light. “If only I could bring you back to me as easily as these flowers—”
—(drunken Danny, beer fumes reeking off his clothes, tugging on her arms, calling her a fucking slutbitch of a wife, yanking jolts of hurt out of her sockets, squeezing her shoulders tight enough to stress bone, hurtling her backward onto the bed)—
“—the loving half only, all hurt left in the grave.” She beat back the memory. Her heart pounded in her chest. Its pulse quickened through her, the blood pumping even to the fingertips that gave a windflower a sudden push toward life. She could almost hear it yelp with the violence of her still nascent talents. “You loved me in the beginning I know you did and there was none of that . . . nothing to get in its way. My life was nowhere. You anchored me for two solid years, said you loved me every day, many times a day, showed it to me in so many ways.” He’d swept her out from behind that dimestore counter, brought her completely into his life,
shared his hopes, his dreams, juggernauted her into bed that first evening, overwhelmed every inch of her nakedness with love, his taut muscular body pistoning into her after he’d drenched her in the sweat and lushness of her own orgasms, nothing of the cautious fastidiousness of Frank, no, this was Danny, who’d married her and bought her the house and the cabin and tried for two years to get a son on her and then, when the doctor told him he was not capable of fathering a child, had begun to stay out later, to drink more, to let cracks open in the sleek simple love he had for her, cracks where demons of doubt and betrayal and resentment seeped in and began to grow.
Karin brought three hollyhock clusters—copper, pink, and white—back from oblivion where they lay together over her husband’s heart. The stems plumped out, and the grass beneath them, matted like Danny’s chest hair, seemed to do the same, even appearing to grow taller under the touch of her fingertips. She closed her eyes as her fingers roved, moving between flowers and grass, pretending that this was indeed his hairy torso, this green shield of a grave mound, and that she was coming up behind him, her breasts at his back, her hands moving upon his chest, at his nipples, one hand moving lower into a riot of thicker hair, seeking the hot stiffness of his love—
—(Danny insane with jealousy, his betrayal of her with Nona causing him to invent lovers for her, tearing her clothing off, trying to find love bites or crusted stains on her skin, a telltale glint in her eye, beating at her face and breasts, raising bruises where his fists fell, collapsing upon her body, sobbing in drunkenness, begging her forgiveness, and then, when he had it from her, fiercely loving her with all his heart and mind and body)—
—she jolted her eyes open. “No!” she said, feeling it as a shout inside, but only whispering it. Her hands clutched at the grass. From between her fingers a small cautious insect crept, an insect of the same sort as the one whose dead carapace she’d seen among the spare blades of grass just where her hand now lay. But the grass was not spare any more. It was thick and twisted, not a riot of growth, but enough to convince her she had somehow been the cause of it. The whole bed of grass she’d been laying her hands on appeared likewise, and the flowers shone like new upon it, glazed blooms on green coconut over a barely visible frosting of dark chocolate.
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