“What was that?” he whispered, stunned. “What just happened?”
I had never told anyone but my family about my gift, had never shared myself fully in that way with anyone else. But I loved Jack, and I knew he loved me. I trusted him, and so I told him the truth.
“The flowers that I grow… their scents can return you to the past, to a memory you’ve forgotten.”
For a moment, Jack just stared at me. I watched as an agony I did not understand slowly darkened his face. “What are talking about, Lucy? You’re… you’re crazy!” he said at last, his voice rising. “A memory? No. No! That… that wasn’t real,” he stammered furiously, but he looked at me like he knew itwasreal, and that I was responsible for what he had seen.
What had he seen?
“Jack, please,” I whispered, stepping toward him.
What had I done? Why hadn’t I listened to my mother?
Jack looked at me as thoughIwere the one who had transformed—I had become someone he didn’t know, a stranger, a witch. He stumbled backward, away from me, as though repelled, crushing my flowers below his sneakers. I felt myself flinch. The sensitive, lost Jack I knew was replaced by someone consumed by anger and fear.
“You’re crazy!” he shouted again and again. “Stay away from me!”
I had never heard him shout before. His words sank into me, sharp as thorns.
“Wait,” I said, reaching for him again. “Please—”
But he turned and stormed away, leaving a path of ruined flowers in his wake.
It would turn out to be the last time I ever spoke to him.
He would not return my calls. At school, he ignored me. He looked like he was not sleeping; there were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin took on a sallow tint. I knew that he drank occasionally, but now it seemed that every time I passed him in the hallway, the acrid scent of alcohol followed him like a shadow.
And then, one week after I told him to breathe in the scent of the tuberose flowers in my garden, Jack Harris drank himself blind and drove his car into a tree.
Chapter Eleven
FITZ
From Fitz’s window, the sky and the ocean look like stripes on a gray woolen blanket. Neither will appear blue until the sun rises over the ridge to the west of the home. Sunrises are unimpressive from his apartment, and this is fine by him. Being held in awe of nature feels to Fitz like being ensnared by contemplation. A beautiful sunrise is a trap. One minute you’re admiring the sky, and the next you’re not only revisiting the twists and turns of your life, but wondering how many you might have left.
Fitz suspects that gardens, too, can become sinkholes of contemplation if you aren’t careful. He has watched that girl Lucy’s progress over the last couple of days, and has been begrudgingly impressed with the way she has cleared the paths, neatened the hedges, and shaped the lemon trees. It’s difficult to find fault in a hard worker. But she could single-handedly repave those paths with gold and stillFitz would have no intention of walking on them. Why would he? What would be the point?
Hehadbeen interested to see that giant tan-and-black dog following her around. He’s still puzzling over what kind it is. A mastiff maybe. Or a Newfoundland.
Fitz peers down into the garden. No, they haven’t arrived yet, the girl and her dog. Not that he cares.
His stomach rumbles. He didn’t feel much like eating when he woke up. Marjorie Swenson’s bullhorn voice usually propelled him from bed in the morning, but today the sound of her speaking to her grandson at an ungodly hour had only made him sink his head deeper into his pillow.
What, he wonders, not for the first time, could Marjorie and her grandson possibly find to talk about every single day? Fitz himself has no talent for conversation. He knows this. Unless it was related to his work at the brokerage firm, he had never said or done the right thing. He’d had a sharp eye when it came to the stock market, but in his own life he’d managed to make the ruinous choice each and every time.
If he has learned anything, it is this: life is easier when you sit in your little apartment with your newspaper and your magnifying glass and you keep your door firmly closed against your neighbors. It’s a relief to know that he is no longer the fool he was in his youth. When he thinks back to the person he was when he first met his wife, it’s like remembering a stranger.
The first time he laid eyes on her, she was sitting in the middle of a group of girls at a corner table in the diner near his office where he went for lunch a few days each week. As he stepped inside thediner, all of the lights seemed dim except the one above her. The sounds of the restaurant were low and fuzzy, like a radio dial stuck between stations, but amid the blur of chatter,hervoice was as clear as a song in his ear. She asked the waitress for a glass of ice water with a slice of lemon. Fitz hadn’t realized he’d stopped and stared until she shifted her eyes from the waitress to him, and held his gaze as she smiled. He had to fight an overwhelming urge to stride into the kitchen and slice the lemon himself.
“Fitz? Hello, Fitz? You coming?” his coworker Eugene asked, looking over his shoulder and grinning.
Fitz felt a stab of anger when he realized that Eugene was already headed toward the counter and now Fitz would have to sit there, too, with his back to the girl in the booth. He rushed them through lunch, making up a story about a pressing matter back at the firm. When they left the restaurant, they made it halfway down the block before Fitz patted his pockets and announced he’d left his wallet on the counter.
“Go on ahead,” he told Eugene. “I’ll catch up.”
He jogged back to the restaurant as though he were being pulled toward it. Through the window, he saw that she was still at the table. He opened the door and walked up to her as though he did this sort of thing all the time, when in fact he’d never before done anything remotely like it.
“Hello,” he said, ignoring her giggling, wide-eyed friends.
