by Alix Ohlin
“Here,” she said, “look at this.”
On her tiptoes, she pulled a shoebox off a shelf, then sat down on her bed and balanced it on her lap. He sat down next to her, and she opened it with a ceremonial gesture that made clear it was the most important thing in the room.
“What’s this?”
“This,” she whispered, “is the rainy day.”
He couldn’t tell, at first, what it was; it looked like a box of litter and dirt, with some paper envelopes and tiny, shriveled objects nested in tissue.
She took things out one by one and placed them in his hand. “These are seeds for forget-me-nots. These are seeds for daisies. This is a tulip bulb. This is an iris. This is freesia. This is clematis.”
“You’ve got a whole flower garden in here.”
“No. These are just the seeds and bulbs,” she said impatiently. “I save my allowance and buy them from a catalog. Next spring we’re going to plant them in the back. We were going to do it last year but I didn’t have enough money yet. Since my birthday I have enough. And there’s more in the bank. In the summer we can get live plants.”
His hands were overflowing with bulbs and envelopes. She put the box in his lap, and he started placing them carefully back inside.
Then she jumped up off the bed and opened a photo album. “This is what it’s going to look like,” she said, her voice hushed to a stage whisper. “The secret garden.”
There were no photographs inside, just pages cut from magazines, construction-paper drawings, collages, seed catalogs with prices circled. Each page was an explosion of yellow and purple and pink. She had all the names memorized; she wanted to put the daisies next to the irises and the daffodils. She had arranged the garden a thousand times in her mind, she explained, as she flipped the pages for him.
“How did you get so interested in flowers?” he said.
She cocked her head. He thought she was seriously considering how to answer, but it turned out that she was just deciding to ignore the question. After going through all the pages, she put the album away, took the shoebox from him, and replaced it carefully on the shelf.
Then she came back to the bed and scrunched herself up against the wall, with a pillow in her lap. “This is the story,” she said. “There’s a girl, and her parents die, and she has to go live in a big house that belongs to her uncle. But he’s not there. And she finds the key to a secret garden in the back of the house, and she unlocks it and makes all the flowers grow again. And there’s a crippled boy named Colin, and she brings him outside and he learns to walk and the uncle comes back and everybody’s happy and it’s all because of the garden.”
“So that’s why you want to have a garden too?” Mitch said.
Sarah shrugged. “It’s just a notion of mine,” she said.
She came out with these words, these shrugging, adult phrases so out of sync with her age. He supposed it was because she read so much. But it gave her a quality of otherness that, despite her cute blond looks and her obvious intelligence, wasn’t exactly charming. Both she and Grace were a little internal, and together they seemed a closed circle, walled off from everybody else. A secret garden. It made him want to pull them out of the apartment and into the world, make them laugh and run around. Help them be messier. Sillier.
“Think fast!” he said, and grabbed the pillow from her lap.
She reached for it, laughing, craning her arms to get to where he held it, up behind his head. “Give it back!”
“You have to come get it,” he said, holding it higher.
She was bouncing on her bed now, reaching around him, shrieking with laughter and excitement, the seeds and bulbs forgotten now. At last she crawled over his lap, and he let her grab the pillow and hit him over the head with it.
“Oh, you got me,” he said. “You’re too fast.”
“That’s true,” she said modestly, and smiled. “I’m extremely fast.” Then she jumped off the bed and ran out of the room.
An hour or so later, bundling themselves into jackets and hats, they went off to the park. Sarah almost immediately ran into a friend and went off to the swing set with her. But instead of playing on it, they each sat down in a swing and fell deep into conversation.
Grace watched them, her hands stuck deep in her pockets. “They’re already adolescent at ten,” she said. “God help me.”
The other mother, a young woman with long curly hair and dangly earrings, nodded vigorously. “It’s only going to get worse, too,” she said. “She’s asking me for makeup.”
“Oh, no,” Grace said.
The two of them went back and forth, trading dark forecasts about the future, while their girls gossiped together not fifty feet away. The wind picked up. Mitch stared longingly at a group of guys playing Frisbee at the other end of the park. There seemed no reason why all this static talking had to take place outside. Women, he thought.
Everyone else in the park was on the move: people throwing sticks for their dogs, toddlers careening around wildly while their parents chased after them, couples with their hands in each other’s pockets. A Peruvian band was unpacking their flutes and drums. Despite the clouds, the atmosphere was festive and happy.
An extremely pretty young woman walked by. She was under-dressed for the weather, wearing jeans and a sweater, no hat, and her long blond hair was flapping around her like a flag. High-heeled boots gave her walk a sexy, rolling sway. She passed them with a glance, but Mitch didn’t think much of it, other than to note her beauty. But then she turned around and came back toward them. Mitch ran his hand through his hair before he could stop himself. She obviously wasn’t looking at him—he was old enough to be her father—but her attention was blatant.
The young woman was staring at Grace. As she got closer, Mitch thought she looked familiar, though so faintly that he couldn’t have said where he knew her from. Grace barely noticed. Her eyes flickered over the girl, pausing uncertainly for a second, and then she turned back to her friend. They were discussing how to introduce new foods to kids who were picky eaters.
“I try to tell her it’s good for her,” Grace was saying, “but she doesn’t want to listen.”
The young woman walked by, making no secret of her staring, then crossed the street and was gone.
The three of them headed back to the apartment.
“God, it’s great to be able to walk,” Grace said, smiling. She stretched her hands out on either side, reveling in her health. Her pinched posture was uncurling, her shoulders squared, and the wind had reddened her cheeks. Mitch could still see the memory of pain in the shadows under her eyes, in the care she took when stepping off the sidewalk; it colored the happiness she was feeling, gave it form and weight. She and Sarah were holding hands.
His thoughts shifted to Martine and Mathieu, and then, reluctantly, to Thomasie. He had been doing his best not to think about any of these people, and spending time with Grace and Sarah had helped to distract him, but of course they were always there, alert soldiers standing forever at attention in the back of his mind. He looked at Sarah and thought that the life Grace was giving her was, despite its recent rockiness and the lack of a father, bright and secure, and it was impossible not to contrast this with the wan, difficult lives of others he had known whom he had abandoned or been abandoned by.
All these presences and absences. A child enters the world; a child exits the world. He felt heavy with responsibility and regret.
Sometimes he hated himself simply because he was alive when others were not, and he wanted to wipe out the memories of every patient he’d had, every problem he’d caused or heard about or failed to alleviate. Other times he thought he would never forget any of these things and that it was important not to, perhaps the most important task of his life. Witnessing the pain of others is the very least you can do in this world. It’s how you know that when your own turn comes, someone will be there with you.
Sarah was telling her mother a story about a magician who flew all aroun
d the world, making waterfalls stop, making trees grow. He couldn’t tell whether it was from a book she’d read or a movie she’d seen or if she’d made it up herself. She was a fanciful girl who didn’t seem to always distinguish between fiction and reality; perhaps Grace indulged her too much in this.
Back at the apartment, Grace ordered a pizza and asked Mitch if he wanted to stay. He shook his head. Sarah had gone off into her room.
The two of them were alone. Though they had spent a fair number of hours together over the past few months, today was somehow different, more awkward, probably because he hadn’t come over to help; he had just come over. The whole time, at the apartment and the park, he had felt distant from the two of them, a separate entity, a hanger-on. He guessed that their time together had reached its logical end; their lives would go on, on divergent tracks, as they had already done for so many years.
Grace was puttering around the kitchen, putting dishes away, wiping down the counters. She had accepted his help so silently, so willingly, then hid it from Azra. She’d taken what was expedient and left the rest. The only thing he’d wanted out of the situation was not to feel ashamed of what he was doing, but now he did, and that was Grace’s fault. He stood there silently fuming.
Sensing his mood, Grace turned around and leaned back against the counter, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Azra told me she ran into you the other day,” she said.
“Yes, outside. I didn’t realize my coming around was a secret, Grace.”
She was courteous enough to blush. “It’s not.” She crossed her arms. “She just didn’t understand.”
“She was the one who asked me to help in the first place.”
“To bring in the mail, water the plants. She thought it was weird that you’d be so involved.”
“It’s not that weird, Grace. I mean, yes, a little. But not impossibly weird, or I wouldn’t have done it.”
“I know,” she said. “Of course. But Azra worries about me, when it comes to men. She thinks I live too much in the past already.”
“This is about Sarah’s dad, I guess?”
That same faraway expression stole over her face.
“Don’t say it’s a long story,” he said.
She laughed. “It’s not that long. I really threw myself overboard when I met him. I wanted that feeling, whether or not it was real. The feeling of totally giving yourself over to something. Of not looking back.”
“And then what?”
Tears were glimmering in her eyes. “Now I can hardly remember his face,” she said. “I grieve for that.”
He reached out for her hand, his right clasping her left, like some secret reverse handshake. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded and withdrew it, the heat of her palm lingering for a second in his. “Maybe you shouldn’t come around so much.”
“Okay,” he said, and then: “That’s it?”
She didn’t answer, and they stood there in the kitchen. It had been a strange collision, this time they’d had together. He wondered when or if they’d see each other again. Somehow the word good-bye seemed too final, so he didn’t say it, and neither did she.
In the nights to come Mitch lost the ability to sleep. He watched old movies in the middle of the night, spent hours with the Weather Channel. He went to work and got through the group-therapy sessions on autopilot; he listened intensely to the participants’ stories but forgot them immediately; when writing up his notes he couldn’t remember much of what they’d said, and his scrawled observations seemed like the thoughts of a stranger. He called no one. He ran five miles a day, his skin flooded with warmth against the increasingly cold air. In November, a freezing rainstorm encased the leafless trees in ice, the salt on sidewalks crunching beneath his feet. The Habs lost to the Maple Leafs. His fantasy picks were a shambles.
He didn’t take up drinking; he didn’t miss a day of work. He wasn’t even sure that other people could see the numbness inside him, the mechanical nature of his commitment to his own life.
There came a time when, without quite noticing at first, he was sleeping through the night. The running helped, and so did work. He wouldn’t have said that his spirits, for lack of anything else to do, were rising; he wouldn’t have wanted to admit that. He would have said that he came from a family where each person had a talent. Their mother’s was to take care of them. Malcolm’s was to be happy. His was to let things go.
When the card came in the mail, a thick white envelope with a Christmas-tree stamp, he recognized Grace’s handwriting with a mix of pleasure, guilt, and regret. She had always loved holidays, every one of them—she gave gifts at Valentine’s Day, Easter, even Memorial Day—and none more than Christmas. She started shopping in September, stashing the presents under her bed. Mitch smiled, thinking of it now. We’re doing great, the card said. Thanks again for your help this year. Love to your family, Grace and Sarah. The card was a picture of the two of them in red sweaters, a blond head and a dark one smiling at the camera. Grace’s eyes were lined and tired, but she looked less frazzled; with her arms around her daughter, she seemed purposeful and amused.
Love to your family, he read again.
He called her, and when she picked up the phone she sounded breathless.
“Oh, Mitch,” she said. “This time of year is always so crazy, isn’t it?”
It was the day before Christmas Eve. He had the following week off, and would spend Christmas itself with Malcolm and his family, returning the next day. It wasn’t, for him, an especially hectic season, but he knew that for others it was.
“Thanks for the card,” he said. “How’s everything?”
“We’re getting by. Leaving tomorrow for Christmas in Vancouver. I don’t know what possessed me to travel. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Vancouver will be nice,” he said. “Warm.”
“I’m sure it’ll be great once we get there. Now I have ten thousand things to get before we go, and no sitter for Sarah. The usual insanity.”
Mitch paused, but only for a second. “Can I help?” he said.
He thought this might provoke an awkward moment, but Grace seized upon the offer.
“That would be amazing,” she said. “Can you come by in an hour and pick us up? My car’s having issues, by the way. It’s that kind of holiday season.”
“You got it,” Mitch said.
He put on his coat, grabbed his wallet and keys, and turned off the lights, finding himself humming. He could have stopped to tidy things up in his apartment before leaving, but he didn’t have to. Everything was already in order. He didn’t have a single thing to arrange.
He drove them downtown, heading along Sainte-Catherine so Sarah could see the Christmas displays at Ogilvy’s, and parked in a lot on de Maisonneuve. As they walked, the winter air bit their cheeks and noses. He followed Grace and Sarah into the stone church facade at Promenades Cathédrale, descending down the long escalators into the underground city. The neon-lit stores stretched endlessly, each a riot of shoppers, the air hot and close. From every store blasted a new carol. Christmas is coming, the Payolas sang wearily, it’s been a long year. Roving packs of teenagers were jostling around the kiosks. One of them, a boy, almost knocked Sarah over and when Mitch yelled at him he spun instantly away, muttering something. “It’s okay,” Grace said, “let it go.”
Sarah waded through the crowds with her coat unzipped, pointing at the decorations, the gaudy trees, the robot snowman waving his arms and nodding his head, the children lined up to see Santa. After a while she started to get cranky, so Mitch took her to the food court for some ice cream while Grace ran around picking up various purchases.
“What do you think?” she asked Mitch when she came back with a sweater for her uncle. He suspected the man would prefer not to receive a sweater at all, but didn’t say so. He felt a headache coming on and related more to Sarah’s exhaustion—the girl was listing sideways, trawling her plastic spoon through a pool of chocolate sauce
—than to Grace’s stress over choosing the right present.
“Listen,” she said, folding the sweater back into its bag. She sat down across from him and put her arms around Sarah, who leaned against her. “I’m sorry about how we left things.”
“It’s okay, Grace. You were right. It was weird.”
She smiled at him. Her coat was open and beneath it she was wearing jeans and an old McGill sweatshirt. She still moved slowly, stepping gingerly as though she were wearing high heels instead of solid, fur-lined, rubber-soled boots. Despite this lingering air of fragility, though, she looked good. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, and her long hair fell to her shoulders in smooth waves.
“So how are you?” she said.
“I’m good,” he said.
“Are you going to Mississauga for Christmas?”
“Sure. I have to teach Malcolm’s kids new bad habits for 2007.”
Grace cocked her head. “I’m glad. You’re alone too much, I think.”
He let this pass.
“I feel like I never thanked you enough for helping me out.”
“You thanked me plenty,” he said.
When they exited the stores, the day had fled and the streetlights picked out sparkles on the icy sidewalks. The three of them hurried to the car, backs hunched against the cold, the adults laden with presents they stuffed into the trunk. Mitch turned the heat on high, and within a few blocks Sarah fell asleep in the back, her face practically hidden by her hat and hood.
He drove west on Sherbrooke toward Grace’s neighborhood. Beyond the McGill campus, the rounded shadow of the mountain hulked on the horizon with its illuminated cross. Grace turned the dial to a classical music station, and the soft ripples of a piano concerto filled the car. They didn’t talk. Her face was turned away and she was looking out the window, which grew opaque with condensation. Like a child, she pulled off one of her gloves and with her fingertip wrote some illegible letters on it, then wiped it all away with the flat of her hand and put the glove back on. He kept taking his eyes off the road to glance at her, wondering at her silence, so notable after her animation in the mall. She was probably exhausted too. Drawn to the sight of her strong, thin frame in the passenger seat, her burgundy-colored hat, her dark hair spilling out from underneath, he felt a flicker of unaccustomed energy shiver across his skin. He’d missed her.
