“Just do what you were hired to do!” Jill interrupts. “Focus on your work and only your work. Trust me on this.”
After a long moment, I nod. In the end, Jill’s right: Iwashired for a job. And despite her mood swings and secrets, I sense that Jill cares deeply for the residents here and wants what is best for them. Whatever her reasons are for discouraging me to interact with them, I can’t begin to guess.
Jill wasn’t there when Adele remembered that moment in time with her husband, or when Marjorie and Cynthia reminisced on the terrace, or when Fitz planted himself on that bench and told me about his wife. Maybe she simply doesn’t have any idea how much these gardens mean, and could continue to mean, to the residents.
I’ll just have to show her.
That night, I ask my dad if he’ll go to the movies with me.
“Oh, Lucy,” he says tiredly. “I’d really rather not.”
Even with the house now stocked with food, even with the meals I’ve been making for him, there is a hollowness to his cheeks that is echoed in his eyes.
“When’s the last time you went into town?” I ask.
“I’m comfortable,” he says, shrugging. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
“But what about your friends? Don’t you want to make plans tosee anyone?” My father has always been content to spend a quiet night at home, but he never used to be a hermit.
“Tell me aboutyourfriends,” he says. “We never hear about your friends. Your relationships. Only your work.”
I flinch to hear him use the word “we.” It’s still a reflex for him.
He’s right, though. I have not made a new friend in years. I don’t allow myself time in any one place to put down roots. This has suited me for a long time, but with my mother gone, nothing feels the same. There was enough love, enough friendship, in my life when she was alive. Her voice, her humor and optimism, were always just a phone call away, and we spoke almost daily. We sent each other books we loved. I told her about my gardens; she told me about her students.
Without her—what will I do? It’s difficult for me to open my heart to others, to allow others to truly know me. The last time I did so ended disastrously. I’ll never be rid of the regret that I feel for what I did to Jack. That sorrow will live within me forever.
Now, though… I think of Adele breathing in the scent of lavender, her face filled not with recrimination or fear, but with wonder and delight. I don’t know quite how to wrap my mind around the fact that I might have been wrong all these years.
“You’re right,” I tell my father. “How about this. If I work on making friends, will you go into town to pick up breakfast with me this weekend?”
I sense that he feels he has backed himself into a corner. Eventually, expression resigned, he nods.
Chapter Fourteen
FITZ
The next morning, Fitz looks down from his apartment window and sees only pale, precisely crisscrossing paths, small trees shaped into perfect spheres, geometric beds dotted with purple flowers, and the long blue gash of the empty pool. There is no sign of the gardener. Or her dog.
He frowns.
He decides to head to breakfast before Isobel or any of the other caregivers has a chance to bother him. When he enters the dining room, something seems off. He can’t put his finger on the change and frankly doesn’t care all that much. He sits at the table in the corner that he prefers and has scrambled eggs and buttered toast. He doesn’t touch the fruit salad that someone has optimistically put on his plate.
As he’s finishing his meal, he senses it again, that feeling that something is different. He narrows his eyes and scans the room.There is dignified Vikram Neel, the once-famous pastry chef of the once-famous Jackson Place, with his hollow cheeks and tortured expression, sitting at his usual seat near the entrance to the kitchen, staring darkly into his untouched plate of food with his arthritic hands curled in his lap. Fitz has heard rumblings that Vikram is on a hunger strike, that he has no interest in living if he can’t bake, which seems among the dumber things that Fitz has heard in his long life.
And there’s Fitz’s awful neighbor Marjorie Swenson, with her hair done up and her lipstick and her red glasses and her big earrings, carrying on her usual one-sided conversation with her silent friend Cynthia looking like a cardboard cutout beside her. They used to be quite the pair, Fitz seems to recall, with Cynthia as loud and attention-demanding as Marjorie, who now seems to have taken on the work of both.
Fitz’s assessment of the room stops when his eyes reach the wall of windows. One set of the long, heavy curtains that hangs there, mostly blocking the light that might have fallen into the room, moves slightly. Someone has opened the window. That’s new.
But that’s not all. The tiny, posh-looking woman, Adele, who usually sits silently in a wheelchair in front of that exact window, instead sits in a dining chair, and she’s chatting with the large, solid man whom Fitz calls Louis the Lump. She has a funny new glow about her, a glow that supposedly—if the whispers around the home were to be believed—she acquired after talking to the gardener. Fitz had watched Lucy and Adele from his seat on the tucked-away bench, but he hadn’t been able to make out their words. It appeared to him that one minute, Adele was her usual, limp self, blinking out at the world from her fancy wheelchair, and the next she wasstrolling around, smiling, bending over to caress the flowers like she owned the place.
Louis the Lump, it seems to Fitz, is listening closely to whatever it is Adele is yapping on about. He seems agitated, restless. He keeps drumming the table with his meaty fingers. Every few minutes, he gives a brief response. Fitz has never seen them sit together before and wonders what they could possibly have to say to each other. He thinks he hears them mention Lucy—but then again, it seems as though her name is flitting in the air all around him these days, as irritating as an insect.
So that’s that, the big new changes in the Oceanview Home’s dining room: an open window and Adele Abrams in a dining chair cornering old Louis the Lump into conversation.
Fitz sighs. Breakfast eaten, he has no interest in lingering. He stands and grips his walker. Without giving it much thought, he makes his way out of the dining room, down the hall, through the whooshing automatic doors, and onto the terrace. A light breeze sweeps over his skin. His heartbeat steadies as he walks down the ramp. The air is cool, the sun still making its way over the soaring roof of the home, the light in the garden sleepy and soft. He’s relieved to be free of the walls of the home, free of all the company he’d rather be without. His chest swells with a feeling of independence. He is, he thinks, in his natural, most preferred state when he is alone.
Now where is that gardener and her dog?
