Page 124 of Meet Me in the Garden

“What does that mean?”

“I lost my motivation, lost my usual energy. I could barely stand to take a shower or eat a meal. Mary Beth and Pascal—my flatmates—they helped me through it. They know what to look out for. I took some time off work, saw my doctors. It passed.”

“How did you meet Mary Beth and Pascal?”

“When I first got to San Francisco, I stayed in a little room in North Beach. We spent a lot of time at the same cafés there. Went to the same poetry readings and art shows, became good friends. We’re all interested in dreams, we start our mornings by sharing them. None of us have other family. We became each other’s.”

A burning in my chest. I don’t know where to rest my eyes. I turn to my coffee, lift it to my mouth. It’s so strong it hurts my teeth.

She shifts in her seat. “What about you?” she says. “Are you in love?”

Ginny must be asleep now, in our bed. She’ll be waiting for me when I get home. I find my voice again. “Yes,” I say. “We live together.”

“A woman?”

“Yes. Ginny.”

Delphine smiles, full of tenderness. After what she did to me.

“Youthreatenedme,” I say. “I never would have done that to you. Never.”

“I’ve loved you, always. My best friend. No one has ever been the same.”

Each of her words, a stab. “Thenwhy?”

“I was desperate. And I had a feeling, in the hospital, like you weren’t actually you. You were a replica. And when you talked about Nathalie,I felt like she was a replica, too. But by the time I was better, I knew I’d given you to each other. That I’d made the right choice.”

“We could haveallhad each other,” I say. “I’ve tried to piece it together, why you didn’t call me for help, I still can’t make any sense of it.”

She closes her eyes, brows drawing together, like she might cry. After a few moments, she opens them again. “There was a logic to it. Just like the trees. But there’s no way I could explain it now.” She puts her hands on the table. Her nails are buffed, evenly rounded. “I’ve had to put it in a box,” she says. “Those years. My love for her. My love for you. Pascal, Mary Beth, the other people in my life who are close to me, they know about it. I’m not pretending it didn’t happen, or that the two of you don’t exist, or that it isn’t painful.” She starts to say something. Stops herself. Says it anyway: “It might sound strange, but there’s a woman I see sometimes. She’s from back home, actually. Much older than us. She has a little upstairs room above a clothing store and she practices the healing arts. Spells and rituals.”

“Voodoo?” I ask, remembering the women from back home, the roots and herbs, the drums and candles and gris-gris dolls and statuettes of Jesus and Mary. Maman always pulled us away from them, kept us from looking too closely.

“Some voodoo, yes. Some Tarot and other things like that. I take it all with a grain of salt. But she really does seem to know what I need. When I’m especially heartbroken, I go to her.” She cocks her head, thinking. “It’s a little like psychotherapy, but at the same time the complete opposite. On Nathalie’s twentieth birthday I woke up, gripped by worry. That’s the age when they started for me. The delusions. So on her birthday I went to my woman, the healer, and she did the usual ceremony, only it didn’t work. We could both tell, when it was over, I was just as distressed as when it started. So I knew that the worry and sadness weren’t things I could just accept and tuck away again. I had to reach out to you, to make contact, so that I could know that Nathalie was okay, or help her if she wasn’t.” She wears a ring on her right index finger. I watch as she turns it around and around. “It can be genetic,” she says. “I’m not sure if youknow that. Have you noticed anything in her? Anything that concerns you?”

“She feels things deeply,” I say. “She can have a temper.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.” We look at each other across the table. I say, “It might turn out fine for her. Papa struggled, and I’ve been okay.”

“If you do ever notice anything, please call me right away. I know the right places to go. We would need to take her in at the very start of anything. It makes a world of difference, to check yourself in instead of being taken somewhere against your will.”

“All right.”

She stares at me hard, like she’s trying to make sure she can believe me.

“At any sign of anything,” I say. “I promise. I’ll call you.”

She takes a deep breath, satisfied, moves her hands back into her lap. “I did threaten you. I had to make sure she was safe,” she says. “I would have done absolutely anything.”

I wait for her to say that she’s sorry. Or to ask what it cost me. Or to tell me she hopes we can be close again. But she doesn’t. We sit, her cup empty, my coffee growing cold.

She says, “Last week we had a rainstorm. It pounded the windows until it felt like we were underwater. Do you remember, back when we were children and a storm was coming, we’d make sure we were both either at your house or mine so that we could wait it out together? We’d help our parents pull the shutters closed and latch them, and we’d burn candle after candle until the wax dripped all the way down and hardened on the tables and the windowsills, and we’d read and tell stories and listen to the wind and the rain.”

“I remember.”

She’s quiet for a little while, and then she says, “Remember how there was so much color back home? All the houses were different—blues and pinks and greens and purples and yellows—and we’d play a game where we chose a house on each block to have as our own when we grew up. If we chose the same house, we would flip a coin to see who got it.”