Page 43 of Meet Me in the Garden

Lionel invites me for a drink, so I follow him home in my car. He has several birds now. They’re a few steps away, peaceful in their coop as he unlocks the side door to his kitchen. He opens the refrigerator and closes it. A cabinet and closes it. “Nothing to drink,” he says. “Sorry. Just had to get you out of there.”

A memory’s been pressing against me: Delphine, taking my hand, guiding it to her stomach. Her pink, swollen eyelids, but also her gladness, holding my hand against the firm curve of her belly. I tell Lionel.

“It seems wrong to me, honestly,” he says. “Your sisters, assuming that Nathalie will go to Claire. They didn’t even ask you?”

“Adele brought it up with me. But an unmarried woman can’t adopt a child.”

“Is thatalwaystrue?”

“I can’t even open a bank account. Also, the social worker told Adele.”

“Still feels like it warrants a conversation.”

“It’s hard,” I say. “But it’s probably for the best. Soon Clément and I won’t even live there anymore.He’ll be fine, living with only me in the apartment. It’ll be an adventure to him—”

“Little man loves an adventure.”

I smile. “Nathalie’s going to need a lot more support, though. Claire and Adele together—they’ll be able to do it.”

He narrows his eyes at me, scrutinizing. “If you say so.”

“I’m not saying it feelsgoodto me.” Flare in my chest again. I blink tears back.

“Nothing about this feels good,” Lionel says. “I know.”

A couple weeks pass, Nathalie gradually adjusting to her life here. Claire picks the children up from school each day, takes notice of the foods Nathalie likes, the games she likes, the right temperature for her baths and the songs she sings along to. “She has a way with music,” she says one night as we’re washing up. “Learns the lyrics quickly. Sings perfectly on key. Maybe lessons would be good.” She thinks it’s best that Nathalie stays where she is for now—Nathalie and Clément have grown closer, and while she ignores Rudy most of the time, she acts as a big sister to the twins, helping them with small favors, being the finder when they ask to play Hide-and-Seek. “Nothing’s for certain,” Claire says. “And she’s finally happy here, with all of us. Let’s not disrupt her life again until it’s really time.” Nathalie still tantrums sometimes, and when Claire gets caught in the crossfire, she freezes, or she storms out. After, I find her reading Dr. Spock, marking the pages with notes. When I’m home during one of Nathalie’s rages, I stay and wait it out, and then she comes to me, her body limp and exhausted and collapsing into mine. “Show me how you do it,” Claire says. So one Saturday we stay together on the grass as Nathalie screams and thrashes, and I shush Claire each time she tries to comfort or rationalize, pull her back each time she goes to caress or restrain.

“I’m afraid she’s going to hurt herself,” Claire whispers.

“She won’t,” I say. “Let’s just wait. If she looks at us, we can hold out our arms.”

She does, and we do, and she crashes into both of us, splaying across our laps. Claire pets her head, holds her, kisses her cheek.

Before Claire leaves that night, she says, “Sometimes I worry thatyoushould be her mother.”

“No,” I say. “I’m her auntie. It’s what I would have been all along if Delphine hadn’t disappeared. It’s what I was meant to be.” She nods, convincing herself, and walks out the door.

Finally, in late October, the hospital lets me visit. Sixty-five miles, over two hours driving through greens and yellows and low hills and sagebrush, my heart in my throat the whole time. Then Camarillo comes into view: sprawling buildings, hacienda-style with red clay roofs and white stucco. There must be thousands of patients inside. I’m directed to a far building, terrified I’ll get lost on the grounds and miss the visiting hour altogether, terrified of wandering into the wrong place and seeing too much. But I find the right building, and here she is. Painful to look. She’s seated in a chair, shoulders slumped, eyes on her hands in her lap. Her hair is unwashed, pulled into a low ponytail. I take the chair across from her and her gaze travels from my shoes to my knees to my waist. Stops there. Her lips are cracked and white. She’s dressed in pajamas, threadbare slippers on her feet.

“Are they treating you all right?” I ask her. After a long stretch of quiet, her shoulders rise in the tiniest shrug.

“Is there anything I can do? Or bring you?” The sound of my voice—like I’m talking to a child. I hate it. I don’t know how to be.

She shakes her head.

I take her hand in mine, hold it in silence. At first it’s forced, she feels like a stranger, but after a couple minutes I start seeing us in different places. Next to each other at Saint Peter Claver in a pew near the front. On an iron bench, ferns all around us. In the blue house at the dinner table. Window-shopping on Magazine Street. Sipping iced tea on her old porch swing and watching the people go by. Ten minutes have passed with us sitting this way. I want to talk the way we used to, I want to understand each other.

“Delphine,” I say. “After I saw you in the street that day, I went looking for you. I went to your old house, the one on North Harper.” She blinks. I can’t tell if she remembers seeing me in the street at all, if she’s followingwhat I’m saying. “Your old neighbors told me some things. They let me know that you were going through something very hard, and that you were all alone. I can’t imagine how frightening it must have been.”

Her eyes dart to my face. “Did you see the tree?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear it? The tapping?” Her scratchy voice, the hope in her question. I wish I could lie to her.

“No. But I’d like to know what it was like for you, if you’ll tell me.” I can see us in the garden again, sharing secrets. I wait and hope but nothing comes. “I’m sorry if I’m saying the wrong things. I’m here and I want to help you. When you’re all better, I’ll take you home with me. You won’t have to be alone again.”

“I wasn’t alone. I had Nathalie.”