Is this what Millie would have been like in her old age?The thought creeps up on Fitz stealthily. It’s easy to envision Millie as a pleasure-seeking octogenarian. Keeping up her appearance as Marjorie does, with her lipsticks and red glasses and colorful blouses. Smiles for anyone and everyone. Moving on so easily, without a thought for those left behind.
Fitz feels his entire body grow hot. Anger burns his stomachand then his chest, and then he roars. He hardly comprehends the sound, but he knows it comes from him because it’s accompanied by a searing, raw feeling in his throat.
He shoves his walker toward the door, and then he is in the hall, banging his fist against Marjorie’s door.
In an instant, she throws open the door, her eyes wide with panic, her cell phone pressed to her chest. Her fearful expression relaxes when she sees Fitz. She lifts the phone to her ear.
“Adam, Fitz is here. I’ll talk to you later. Goodbye, dear.” She peers at the phone, presses a button, and drops it into the pocket of her fluffy pink robe. She looks up at Fitz again, at last. “To what do I owe—”
“You are TOO LOUD!” Fitz thunders. “Do you know that I wake up to the sound of your voice every single morning? I can hear every word you say! I’ve asked to switch apartments, to no avail.” He shakes his walker, his grip so tight on the handles that his hands ache. “I am stuck withyou! EVERY. GODDAMN. MORNING!”
A gasp escapes from Marjorie’s lips. “Please calm down. If you had simply let me know—”
“It’s too much!” Fitz goes on, spit flying from his lips. “Youare too much! You glide through life as though it’s all some entertaining game. You have the brightest clothes and the brightest smile and you become the sun that everyone is pulled toward and you make it utterly impossible to live a quiet life! YOU MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE!”
Fitz feels as though the wind has been knocked out of him. He closes his eyes and sucks in air, slumping over his walker. He has not yelled like this in decades, not since—
“Fitz,” he hears. The voice is sympathetic. “Fitz.”
He opens his eyes. There is Marjorie, standing in her doorframe in her pink robe. She has every right to be angry, or frightened, or at the very least aghast, but instead her dark eyes are full of compassion.
“Oh,” says Fitz. He can hardly bring himself to look at her. “I’m… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”
“Would you like to come in for a moment?” she asks softly. “Sit down?”
Fitz blinks. His eyes sting. “No. I—I think I’ll go for a walk.”
“Well, hang on a second and let me get dressed. I’ll come with you—”
“No.” Fitz is already backing away and turning his walker, banging it against the wall in the process. His skin feels prickly with shame. This woman who just lost her best friend… He cannot stand another moment of her kindness. He makes his way toward the elevator. The hallway is longer than it has ever been before, and he is sure he feels Marjorie’s sympathetic gaze searing into his back with every step he takes. He steps into the elevator and stares down at the carpet until the doors at last take pity on him and close.
There is a new safety system in place. Isobel looks him up and down and silently hands him one of the medical alert device things that hang from hooks in the sunroom. She watches him place it around his neck. Only then does she open the door to the terrace.
Fitz steps outside. He is grateful, for once, to have the walkerso sure and solid in his shaking hands. It is still early enough in the morning that the terrace is empty, and he’s grateful for that, too. He takes big gulps of the damp sea air and tries to steady his racing heart. With no greater plan in place than simply knowing he must keep moving, must keep placing one foot in front of the other, he makes his way down the ramp.
He walks along a path hugged by low hedges, glancing up now and then at the neatly trimmed lemon trees that stretch up from beds of purple flowers. When he reaches the reflecting pool, he stops and looks down to see a startlingly old man staring with recrimination back at him. He is sure that if he turns around, he will see the eyes of all the residents of the Oceanview Home looking down at him in the same way. He straightens and, keeping his gaze pinned to the ground, makes his way toward an open gate.
The woodland garden is dark and quiet, a place for secrets. Curling ferns and flowers form a soft carpet below a grove of leafy trees. Fitz exhales deeply. He walks on, more slowly now, following the turns of the path. When he comes upon a wooden bench, he sits. He feels protected here among the shadows, shielded from the windows of the Oceanview Home and even his own reflection.
Why did he behave that way, yelling at Marjorie the way he did? Well, he knows why, but he barely wants to prod the reality with his toe. It’s no use: the facts flood him. For a moment there, maybe more than one, he had convinced himself that he was speaking once again to Millie. Not speaking. Yelling. Yelling in a way he had promised himself he would never yell again. His behavior was atrocious. He thinks of how Marjorie’s normally bright smilesettled into a small, concerned line. Unlike Millie, she was the forgiving type.
He owes Marjorie a true apology—not the stammering, red-faced one he delivered in the hallway, but a real, hat-in-hands apology with eye contact and forethought and humility. Deciding this, he feels a measure calmer. Perhaps, he thinks begrudgingly, he is under the influence of the garden. For so much of his life, he surrounded himself with San Francisco’s bustling streets and tall buildings and concrete tightropes of sidewalks. It is only now, in the final stretch of his life, that he lives for the first time with flowers beyond his window.
Fitz stands. He’ll find Marjorie and apologize. Maybe he’ll tell her about Millie. Maybe he’ll tell her everything. Why he has no visitors—save that one, so many months ago. Why he is alone.
But instead of making his way back to the home, Fitz finds himself walking through an open gate and into the rose garden. He walks slowly under the long, arched trellis draped with those dramatic, darkening pink roses, blinking as the petals flutter down around him. He stops beside a shrub laden with ruffled, pale blossoms. If he had a pair of scissors he might clip off a stem to present to Marjorie. But he doesn’t have scissors, and he’d have to ready another apology—this time for Lucy—if he attempted to wrestle the flowers from the bush with his hands.
Lucy.
Fitz peers at the flowers, thinking. Weren’t these the flowers that Lucy wanted him to smell?
Theyarebeautiful. Extraordinary, really. Large and round, likeswirls of cotton candy. Lucy told him the name of the rose, but he’s already forgotten it.
It’s one of his least favorite feelings, not knowing something he once knew.
Without another thought, he leans over his walker, and then farther still, stretching until his nose grazes a soft blossom.
And then, at last, Fitz breathes in.
