by Dan Noble
Isn’t it obvious? To check if she’d emerge, now, when I need her. But she couldn’t. I know that. Not anymore. Not after what I’ve done.
Unsurprisingly, all I see is a pile of dusty, smelly books. I shake my head. She won’t show. I know why. And that’s why I must dig right now. To know what’s what. Once and for all. But my eye catches the spine of Truth and Art. I carefully slide it out from the middle of the pile, trying not to disturb the arrangement too much.
I leaf through until I come once again to the remnants of the torn page. I run my finger over the drops of my blood on the surrounding page edges. The old anger comes hurtling back. I think of how liberated I felt tearing her book. I think of her running away. It felt wonderful. Powerful. Her fear. It’s when my plans first began to incubate.
I turn from the books to monitor our bedroom window for signs of Kennedy’s waking. There’s an ancient full-moon childhood nightlight of his in our bedroom, which I keep on in the evenings since Rose’s early days. It casts hulking, but incredibly crisp shadows onto the walls and ceilings with every slight move in that room, and has been the source of many sleepless nights’ soothing to watch, upon the ceiling, Kennedy’s political shadow puppet program. From out here, it’s a peeping tom’s dream: movements to his dark silhouette are visible from even the slight motion of Kennedy’s deep breath. If he’s deceiving me, I should hate him, but I can’t quite bring myself to. The thought of losing him to Kancer overpowers that instinct. He’s my whole world. How many times has he said that! “I love being your whole world.” And I loved it, too. But now it strikes me as an odd way to put it.
I retie my shorty robe over my bump and make my way to the rhododendron, where—in a self-preserving bout of psychologist-guided energy, I’d done my burying all those years ago. The lantern I use to light the way is old and heavy with D batteries. My father had bought it in the days when he tried to get Mother interested in things.
The earth is unrelenting. I never thought I’d go back to that time. If I did, I knew it would be the end for me, for this carefully constructed history I’ve written myself. This is the only way, I assure myself, and—ignoring the pounding in my chest—continue. But the dirt is solid, uncooperative, like unshakeable evidence. Turn away, it’s saying. You are only asking for more trouble.
After five minutes of chipping away with little result, I pause to catch my breath and check over my shoulder at Kennedy’s window. The circle flare of soft light is undisturbed. I eye the rhodo. Amazing how my mind retraces the path to Mother’s nickname for the bush. The feel of the word shape in my mind transforms my perspective. Is my preconscious at play here? There was a time she was my whole world. When I treasured words like preconscious.
The bush is lopsided from the crash and has lost a fair amount of petals, but it’s still sneering, putting me in my place. Within seconds I’m hunched over, retching from its root beer smell that could still catapult me back to Mother’s bloodied suicide attempt in the Gremlin, and all that followed. She was a terrible, selfish mother.
When I regain composure, breathing as best I can through my mouth, I recall something. The smell. The garden. Mother always had those rhododendrons in her office. Vases full of them. I think for the first time in a long time of my quelque chose entries. Rhodo, I’d written on there.
I glove up and redouble my efforts, swinging with everything I have. Finally, the dry shards give way to softer, though packed, earth. And once I reach this threshold, my spade scoops seem to come from a force outside myself. The furrow grows. I look up at the bedroom, my heart beginning to race with the idea of being so close to uncovering the truth, after so much time.
The tip strikes something solid, the stunted energy jolting my joints. The sound of steel on steel. I kneel and use my gloved hands to rub clear a circle of the tackle box in which I’d buried Pinocchio’s bag.
I set to digging at the dirt surrounding the box. My heart races. Looking around, guilty, I step onto the spade’s base, and bearing down with all my weight, jump the tip into the earth. Inch by inch, I stamp the end of the shovel into the compressed dirt, bear down on the base, and then wedge the earth loose.
When the box begins to budge I kneel and hike it out with two hands. The full moon of the bedroom nightlight shifts. Startled, I turn around to see the shadow of Kennedy’s arms stretch, framed by the curtains. I have to leave it. Quick as I can, I lower the box back into the ground and frantically try to push the dirt in. Within minutes, the hole is plugged, but there is no covering the fact that the earth has been disturbed.
I think of covering the dark, loosened spot with a chair or a tarp, but decide that would just look more conspicuous and scurry to the shed and place the shovel beside the pile of books, behind the afghan. I bolt back to the kitchen, trying to appear natural at the sink, filling the kettle like I do on sleepless nights. I hear Kennedy’s footsteps overhead, then the sound of water through the pipes. I hold my breath as the bathroom door squeaks and the light fixture above my head trembles slightly, and I pray he’ll go back to bed.
But I know better. He can’t get back to bed if he isn’t sure I’m okay. I glance outside at the spot, trying to gauge if it’s noticeable from here, and try to slow my breath.
Just as he rounds the steps to the landing, I catch my reflection and swipe with a tea towel at the mud stain on my chin.
“Whatchya doing up all alone?” Kennedy sounds like hell; his voice has none of the buoyancy.
“You know me, living on the edge.”
Kennedy pulls out two mugs.
“Yeah.” The timbre is too thoughtful, hangs like a bell peal. He reaches for that pill bottle. “Don’t forget your Clomid,” he says, palming one to me. He fills a glass from the tap and hands that over, too.
I do as I’m told. Reality feels softer than ever. But I’m pulled toward the idea of action, something I can do. Just meters away that tackle box hums with an energy I feel from here, and that’s where my thoughts are—with the contents and why I’m so sure I shouldn’t share them with him.
After our tea, I wait for him to fall into sleep shudders, breathe deeper. But I can tell he’s only pretending to sleep, the normal rhythm of it is missing; it appears he’s waiting up to see what I will do next. Though we keep up the act, neither of us sleeps a wink.
21
KENNEDY
“Thought I’d make us all some breakfast,” I say the next morning, pulling on track pants and a tee shirt, ignoring the hurt or possibly frightened look in her eye. It’s not that I want her to feel desperate, but she cannot know about everything her father wants to say, all the terrible things. My cancer is a metaphor for everything that’s been festering. It’s all tearing us apart, been silently doing so all this time.
Downstairs, I turn on news radio, yank an egg carton from the fridge and go about collecting cheese, onions, ham. I will miss ham, I think, when I am dead. Cheese, too. For a second, I freeze, staring at the two mugs in the sink. I don’t want to think about what she was doing up last night. I don’t like sleeping when she’s not there.
I don’t have much time to contemplate before I hear the patter of little feet down the stairs. Covering my tracks has become second nature. I busy myself with cracking the eggs before Rose emerges—as if merely standing in the kitchen might look suspicious.
Rosie looks shy, which she sometimes does in the morning. Though I suspect it’s a bit of a put on, I can’t say I’ve got any defenses against it.
“It’s nice to be needed,” Millie always says to me, and she’s right. But how could I have indulged myself in this emotion when all this time there was a chance I might not be around for the needs? I hold my arms out and Rose runs my way. This is our thing. Despite myself, my heart swells at her breathy hug, the static electricity attracting her sticky-uppy hair to my shirt. Against my chest, she views the breakfast preparations. I did it because I’m such a damned good liar that even I believed there was nothing wrong with me.
“O
melet?” she asks. “Oscar makes an Omelet.” She sings the book title the way Millie does for her when she reads this beloved book. I can’t believe our kid is three. Will I see her get to four?
She takes after me in many ways, but without Millie’s kind of thinking, Rosie wouldn’t have sidled up to the counter singing that adorable rendition of Supercalifradgilistic, would she? Crispy salad oceans! You would never think something like that could make you so deliriously happy. Not where I grew up.
“It’s expialidocious, Kennedy,” my mother would have said. “Practice.” Pulling out the nonsense syllables like they weren’t nonsense, but a scientific phrase I would be tested on in order to get into college.
Millie’s a beacon of innocence. Her methods are unorthodox, and with her blackouts back again she’s slightly dangerous, her thinking confused, but her intention is pure. As pure as anything I’ve ever encountered. What her mother did to her! God, I hated that woman. But Millie’s the opposite; she protects Rose at all the scary bits of stories and life, making up angels and cozy couches in the clouds for anything that might otherwise hurt. Is that something an evil, bad person would do? How can her father think these things of her? I know how, but again, my powers of persuasion have had everyone—myself included—fooled.
My daughter tucks her fuzzy head into the crook of my neck. It’s with Rosie—this Dora the Explorer night-gowned girl with the crayons in her handbag and the penchant for humming mid-career Madonna songs (if it wasn’t for Millie, she wouldn’t have mastered that parlor trick either. Yes, I’m guilty of pulling out the video footage every now and again after a few beers. Beers, I will miss those too)—that I feel most helpless about the cancer. In a way, it is for the best that we lost the pregnancy. Nobody official is going to allow for Millie to care for a child alone if Mr. Burns gets talking.
I must be imagining it, but Rosie looks at me as if she knows something I don’t. I try to talk myself out of it but then I realize I’m just being soft on myself. There are real consequences to our actions. And Rose’s well-being is one of them. She clearly knows something is odd. I had her lie to her mother, she’s been barricaded in her room, and after that stunt, she’s going to be seeing a lot more of me.
“What kind of omelet does Oscar make?” I ask, looking out the window to the garden. Last month, I fixed the loose stones, hammered in the uneven nails on the fence boards, and chopped away the precarious weeds that looked poisonous. With Rose, here, now, it seems almost welcoming—the apples jostling merrily on the wind.
“Tomato that reeks,” she says.
“Tomato with leeks,” I correct her.
“Whenever.”
“Whatever.”
“Dad, why does it have to be right?”
“Because—” I begin but I don’t know how to finish. It doesn’t. Wasn’t I just regretting this about my own mother? I am always needing to be right. That’s probably down to my mother, too.
“Because what?”
I knew this day would come when I wouldn’t have the answers for our child, but I didn’t expect it so quickly. At a loss for an answer that balances the precarious differences between truth and correctness, ethics and honesty (which at this point, Rose only knows as a Billy Joel song), I change course. “Are there any reeks out there?”
Rose shakes her head. “Mom does herbs, but she doesn’t permit veggies.” Like the Aussies, my daughter pronounces the hard h in herbs. Good on her. I once told her we were half Australian. Why not?
“Why not?” I ask now about the veggies. My wife is the kindest woman in the world, a world that mostly doesn’t deserve her. She calls our yard a garden for the sake of her mother, who didn’t deserve her either. It would kill Millie if I tore the whole thing up without her permission, the way I’d been feeling out with the pool idea. But what if it wasn’t a pool? What if it was a first-rate garden, something to be proud of, where Rose could pretend she was riding a unicorn all day long with no idea what was underneath the ground? Perhaps it’s just a distraction, but it’s a good one if I have to be home babysitting Rose so her mother doesn’t accidentally lock her in a room, and something good I can do for my kid. Maybe Millie could let loose and I’ll even plant her some reeks.
I get a kick out of the funny drain noise she gurgles out, thinking it’s a unicorn’s neigh as she attempts to skip (more like the chicken dance). In moments like this, I know everything I’d done was worth it.
Despite myself, I swell with the connotations of a gardening project: renewal, control over life, sowing seeds. God, cancer makes me such a pussy. You’d swear I’d been drinking the Burns’ Kool-Aid.
“She says it’s for the future. She’s saving it for the future,” Rose says. “I asked her ‘who’s the future?’ and she said, ‘we don’t know, Rose.’”
“That’s because that’s my job, Rose. I control the future. Me and the future are thick as thieves.” In that moment I can almost believe it.
“Thieves,” she repeats.
“Damn thieves.”
“Damn thieves,” she says.
My eyes bug and I place a finger to my lips. “Don’t say that,” I say, but I assume the authority is undermined when we’re both laughing. This is life. This is what it’s all about.
An hour later, I’m pushing an oversize steel cart around the nursery, Rose standing on the back.
But now I was here the idea began deflating: what was my planting veggies going to do? Make the world a better place, even though our politics were going to shit? Even though our culture was growing more and more selfish and silo’d every single day? Like I could fix the future for my child by growing my own vegetables. Rubbish. The logic was already busting at the seams.
All the same, walking the aisles, I choose carrots, reeks, tomatoes, pumpkin, and cucumber, among a number of lettuces. Remembering summer weekends with my dad—quietly observing what it meant to be a man—I pile slabs of manure and soil onto the bottom rack and don’t skimp on the good stuff. There’s something undeniably promising about all this green, all this fresh earth. Fertilizer!
Why can’t humans have something like that? Apply every two weeks for healthy growth. No, we’re too busy inventing new ways to cook bacon in the microwave. As I shimmy the last bag into place, someone taps my shoulder. I turn. This young kid in his baseball cap could have been me at twenty-one, around the time I traveled to Sydney.
“Sir, got a look at your haul and wondered if you knew this isn’t the right time to plant those veggies?”
“Oh yeah?” I say, not giving any cards away, like maybe I’m a farmer pulling an experiment. I grab another tomato plant from the half-off stand next to us.
The kid’s oblivious though. He’s got that do-good look like he wouldn’t let anyone walk out of here with the wrong thing, and I don’t know if it’s that I want to quash before it bites him in the ass, or the questionable future of all the unplanted veggies, the unwanted veggies, the misfit fucking veggies that have no future, won’t do anything to affect this unredeemable world’s future, which makes me double my order.
If nature wants to try to fuck me, I’ll show nature who’s boss. If I have to build my own fucking greenhouse, that’s what I’ll do. It’s me who handles the future. It’s always been me. Now? Well, I’ll have to fucking work something out. And I’m taking these veggies with me.
On the way out, I add a boatload of pretty flowers, just to make the whole thing smell better.
22
KENNEDY
The planting is satisfying, physical, cathartic. I tear out a whole section caddy-corner to the shed, going at it with an axe, a spade, my bare hands. In a couple hours, I’m turning over dirt and pouring fresh earth. It smells amazing. Why haven’t I done this before? Grew up in an apartment dreaming of things like this. Our vacation home’s yard was “landscaped,” and we weren’t allowed to touch it, not that my brothers and I didn’t mess around in there when no one was looking.
I squeeze the plants out of their pla
stic holders and gently bury them, patting over the root balls. There’s no denying the hope and anticipation of the venture. I ignore the obvious symbolism—life! Because it’s too cliché. I don’t do symbols. I do action, consequence, results. But cancer doesn’t want to play that game.
In no time at all, there are four rows of veggies—everything we could need to make salads, side dishes, soups, and more for freezing. It’s so simply sustaining. Why do we make life so difficult, the clean, vibrant plant rows seem to say as I spray them with the hose, their boughs bouncing?
At the end of the rows, I stand back to admire my work. I pull the shovel toward me, digging its tip into the dirt. But it hits something solid, with a thud. Lifting the handle, I lower the end and tap again. There’s definitely something there. In fact, it looks like the three feet or so past this end has already been dug up by someone else. The dirt’s been replaced, but it’s clear it’s been disturbed, the surface is fresh, deeper in color, just like the earth I’ve dug up in the path leading here. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to palm the dirt away from the object and see there’s something beneath there.
It could be sinister. Or not. Rose would love this, I think. Buried treasure! Maybe she and Millie planned this for me because they knew I’d be planting out here. I should go grab her, make a big show of it. I’m feeling more positive now, like everything just might be okay, and this discovery, now, feels almost fated: look at me talking like Millie!
My mind takes the buried treasure idea to an intersection with Rose and I realize it wouldn’t be responsible to call her out here without checking into it first. What if it’s not been put here by them, but instead, it’s something dangerous? A land mine? Just as I’m thinking this, Millie appears from the kitchen with iced tea. I place my foot on the patch of the object I’ve unearthed. Her hand is trembling. I shouldn’t be out here; I’m stressing her more. What was I thinking?
