The water turned pink over my ankles.
He shouldn’t have been there, Contreras. Didn’t mean he deserved it. And the strength! I knew I had anger, but not the swinging ability to kill a man with it. Girl versus man—how many urban nightmares pitted the two against each other, a hundred-pound Daphne in diamond heels versus sniggering Dennis with bowling pin arms. How was it supposed to go?
And Contreras had broken like an orange.
The citrus mist of him clung to my face. By now he’d fill the pores and darken me. Skin was not so different from earth.
Next year the marigolds would rise like knuckles of lava.
Mr. Contreras with the mail again. Did he not see the shit on my gloves?
I took the fan of bills between my forearms. “That’s kind of you.”
Hideously kind. Contreras dipped at the waist. He looked like a chickadee.
He made me hate birds.
“How’s your father?” he asked.
“Good.”
He frowned in condolence. “Tell him I said hello.”
That’s just what Dad wanted, the neighbor’s hello.
“That means a lot,” I said, supersaturating. “You’re too kind.”
“They’re looking great,” he smiled.
Please stop.
The marigolds were mine. I wanted people to envy them, naturally, but for Contreras to kick his size eight Sketchers around my garden and offer congratulations felt like defilement. Even if he was the better person. He meant well, and I preferred plants to people, a shortcoming apparently; but I did not have to appreciate the twitchy position he put me in, a misanthrope with shit on her hands. He did make me wonder, however: whose compliments might I enjoy?
After a boxstep of courtesies, complete in his generosity, he moseyed on up the rise of our road, the tick of his walking/ski poles—the bottoms unscrewed for such versatility, he told me—ebbing to the huff and puff exacted by the incline.
Finally.
The mail slapped and scattered on the asphalt as I carried on spreading fertilizer. The marigolds were sprouting so nicely that I found myself in an agony of maternal anxieties. I wanted to protect them, but the deer never came after the marigold bed. They preferred hostas, or hunger. And even a fine net would sparkle and stunt the flowers. It wouldn’t do.
I did not like their going unprotected. But how else could they bloom?
When I thought of water, I thought of blood. Since I was twelve water has seemed to me a devourer.
Imagine morning over a pond. Evergreens surround the shore, and silver sunlight blows threads through their green fingers. A doe shivers into the open. It emerges like a thought from the forest, spreading you drowsy as milk. Time wastes, but you wouldn’t leave this pond. This memory.
This was how I found Lourdes, or how I felt in her company. Precious and fleeting, yet serene.
Gardeners were grim people, to a social eye. They did not radiate the still calm associated with social functionality. They fidgeted indoors. They doted over dirt. They tended towards quiet, or they rambled, and those of a lifetime habit often resembled trees, slim and bent.
I loved our customers as they came slouching and starved of conversation through the curvy paths of the nursery. They went easy in like company, sharing tips and enthusiasms. Irma’s Flower Farm was that one place and paradox where we introverts collected with assurance and pride. The wet soil air made us comrades.
I used to detour through the nursery on my way home from school. I’d sit on a flipped terra cotta bucket and chase the curve and quiver of the pansies in my sketchbook, until Irma caught me on her rounds, with a friendly swat of her broom. She had arthritis now. I pushed the broom.
Working the shop was my least favorite shift. The greenhouse stifled, but the shop depressed. Its refrigerated cool and overwrought Flower! stench rather suited a mortuary—although, in my experience, those were tired and dingey and smelled of yellow paper and dill. What I hated most, and most naturally, about the shop was that it was inside. I liked my plants green and wild with the elements, not cut and wrapped in a refrigerator. I liked to work on hands and knees, rain or shine, to nurture something real and precious. Not punch numbers on an oily keyboard. This was not real. This, with the bell over the door, was retail. The pungent rubber of gardening tools, the carnations we got off a truck, and the stinking damp of money tested my patience. A day at the register could well unhinge me.
Why do you garden? she had asked.
I was a humble accessory to ancient cycles. Some seasons I made no difference. Paid in blossom or blight, what were my intentions to the immensity of the earth? I could help raise plants, but nothing was granted, tamed, or done. I was not God. I could only pour my energies, physical and sacred, into my garden and in doing so find the splendid release of self transcended and self destroyed.
It is debatable whether this destruction had already, irrevocably, occurred. It would have been the summer of the boat.
Dad chartered a power boat to go from New Bedford to Cuttyhunk, a forgettable island where we’d spend the last week in August eating pancakes and clam chowder by the beach. The heat that day made us restless for a rush of wind, so we figured we’d make our own. We zoomed over the waves, shrieking into the deepening blue, when we hit a funny one and my brother Halpin, seven at the time, flew over the rail.
He came out in foam.
Blood, hair, vinyl. The life jacket had held him up as the boat skimmed him over, keeping him close as the double engine sawed his head. The blades made a funny noise and turned our snakeskin wake dark.
The coast guard salvaged most of him. They laid a tarp in the main boat to collect parts. Much of the body remained intact, but the head had taken water when it snapped off. The left arm, too, eluded the divers. Fifteen minutes it swam on its own. They found it waving from a lobster pot, the head nearby. They lifted it from the water, at which precise moment the grown-ups remembered I was there. A firm hand hurried me around, but I had seen Halpin’s face. It was unzipped.
No one turned Mom away. She was the one steering. They must have thought she deserved to see.
It was all misdirected, however, because I was the one who shouted faster.
They would try her for child endangerment and manslaughter. In the weeks leading up to her court appearance, her behavior grew erratic. She didn’t sleep. She made brunch. She cried at the piano. She repapered the study. She broke her hand. She laughed about it. I remembered the sound and the spray. She slammed it in the car door during pickup. What made her laugh was her own ridiculousness, that she had slammed it at school and not at home. Could she not have waited, at least, for the children to clear? No, this was better. The clinic was nearby. They gave her the pills before the cast. We got home late and when she kissed me goodnight, she looked normal. It must have been the calm of her will because she went to bed and slept and was cold the next morning.
Mom had gotten a green cast. Seventies green, like the dentist’s chair or an old ski jacket. I signed it Love, Kirstie.
I did not care to learn the science of decaying bodies, so I always wondered whether the cast preserved her hand after the rest of her peeled. Within the casket, among the bones, would be her fingers and my name—a burial by proxy. I felt dead anyway, and I belonged there.
Maybe that’s what started me on gardening. The earth grew and consumed. Its magic would catch under my fingernails when I tended my marigolds and remind me of those that turned into the great, dark depths, so that I might prepare…
Not that I was planning my death. I was a shining young pupil at Oblin Community College, General Studies. I hadn’t wanted a degree, but it made Dad happy and gave me something to spend my nursery money on. I should have counted myself lucky to have the promise of a diploma and the decades of debt ahead. Then I might be salvaged before the middle-aged gossips who whispered how damaged, piteous, lazy or stunted I was.
They didn’t know certain things lost their sparkle when you looked a loved one in their waterlogged eyes.
After I finished my last four credits, henceforth educated and empowered, I would keep working at Irma’s. She needed a financial advisor (and a runic linguist) to overhaul the books. That, of course, would place me in the shop much of the day. But, for the flowers, it was worth it.
The real flowers, not the carnations. Those could rot in the truck.
The drawer stuck again. I banged the side of the register.
“Are you hurting my machine?”
Trust the woman to hear, of all things, the thump of the register’s paisley-carved side.
“Don’t worry,” I said, trying keys at random.
“It’s antique.”
“Precisely the problem. No, don’t—”
Irma was already up. She lumbered over and shooed me from the desk. With a tender touch, she pressed the zero key and sprang the drawer.
Sorcery.
“You need me,” she grinned, returning to her paperhole. Irma had that old lady talent of making you feel at once cherished and stupid. At least she trusted me to count. I started with the bills. It was only midday, but the shop had its dead spells and it never hurt to check the cash against the receipts every so often.
Well, on slow days, it stung.
“Good afternoon.”
I hurried the money away and greeted the woman. She had a light step to have snuck up on me, although her heart-shaped face held none of the smug amusement of the usual creepwalker. She wasn’t here to play. With her long cardigan and boots, she looked like one of the housewives who stopped for orchids on their way home from Costco. As if Mark would notice the new centerpiece.
The woman slid me a packet of seeds—begonia, red-orange and pouting in the picture—and gardening shears. The blue rubber grips squeaked over the counter.
I flapped some air into a paper bag. “Ten fifty.”
She handed me her credit card.
“There’s a processing fee,” I said, wearing the conciliatory wince.
“That’s fine,” she said.
I hadn’t specified the fee. Must have been Mark’s card. I started punching the numbers.
The machine stuttered. Error.
Cue the real wince as I had to start over.
“That’s fine,” she said again, remarkably unrushed for an Oblin housewife. What, no gelato in the trunk? I glanced at her. She had amber eyes, solid and bare. They held mine without blinking.
I stapled the sales slip and returned her card. Lourdes Aronov. I didn’t recognize the name.
“Do you know a good mechanic?” Lourdes asked.
Recalibrating. “Doug’s is good,” I said. “At—”
“Oblin Auto.”
“You’ve been?”
The woman defied a reading.
“Not personally,” she said, twisting her ring. It was amethyst, not diamond, and dark as rain on a night iris. “My husband took care of that stuff.” Her voice was thick with tightly reined grief.
I could have reached into the gulf between us. It gets better, I would have said. Actually, it hurts. Then one day you forget to hurt, and you hate yourself.
Instead I handed her her bag. “Doug’s is good.”
She wrote his name on her wrist and thanked me as she left. I did not expect to see her again. I almost forgot about her.
“You’re a hard one to find.”
I visored my eyes to see the shape of a woman against the sun. It shined fire through her dark hair, which fell like a veil to her waist. When my eyes adjusted, I was surprised to see her. Not that it was her—the hair and the voice could only belong to her—but that she had come back.
“Begonia, right?” I stood up. “How are they?”
“Needy.”
“You must be getting the hang of it,” I offered. Why else return?
“If I don’t kill them,” she smiled, “something will.”
There was an edge to her humor. Should I laugh at the widow’s death joke?
She had come for something to fend off the deer. I walked her to a display of netting, mesh, and chicken wire, modeled as discreetly as possible over black plastic boxes of young aster and zinnia. They looked like prisoners, daft ones, pressing through their confines as if to tease the herbivore for shits and giggles.
Lourdes mulled over the different coverings, running a finger over the stray flower petals. “Do you like it here?” she said finally. Her ring caught the sun, glittering with fortune and bloodlines.
“I like plants,” I said. “They feel real to me.”
“They remind you to be human.”
She understood perfectly. Kneeling together over the aster, we seemed of one mind. It made sense we should carry on and I should find myself in her backyard, staking nets over the pale begonia buds.
“My husband didn’t concern himself with the yard. He redid the whole house—he was neurotic, down to the grout—but he never seemed to care for the weeds or the crabgrass. Every winter when things got grim, as he’d say, he would look into landscapers. But spring would come, and we took the green for granted until it overran us.
“I don’t usually talk about him. It feels impolite. Like people will think I’m soliciting tears.”
“Are you?”
Lourdes laughed. “I don’t want condolences. I lost my husband. Now you want me to thank you for an expression of grief which couldn’t scratch the surface of mine? You want me to cry so you can feel helpful? People expect that,” she reflected, “but I’m not always sad. He was my life; he’s a part of my language. When I see our friends, I imagine what he’d say to them. When I look at a bird, I remember how much he hated them, the shrill ones. When I hear a song, I imagine him singing it over the stove.
“And you?” She looked at me, room in her eyes. “Who do you imagine?”
I told her. I trusted Lourdes like a dear friend, or a stranger of valueless opinion, though she was neither. But we were similar and lonely, slouched over the dirt like kids in a sandbox.
She listened. She did not make faces of concern or horror as I told of the waves, the life jacket, the tarp. She dignified my brother’s death. He was a boy, after all. Not a spook.
We had moved inside for drinks. The house was modern, windows and granite, with gray cabinets. I sipped a glass of water while Lourdes took a grapefruit from the fridge. She plunged the slant end of a metal straw into the fruit and sipped.
“Fresh,” she said, licking her teeth. “Wakes me up from the sun.”
It had drained me stupid. From working at the nursery to unburdening my soul, I felt warm and sleepy on Lourdes’s couch.
With a quiet laugh, she took my glass before I could spill it. Her touch was cool and soft as I sank into the cushions.
Before I knew it, she was nudging me awake. We were home. She had driven me—I vaguely recalled pointing out the street—and now she reached across me to open my door.
“So this is your handiwork,” she said, surveying the property through the dappled windshield: the rock garden and spruce trees, daffodils and rhododendron. She smiled when she saw the marigolds by the mailbox. “They’re lovely.”
I unbuckled and got out, covering the heat in my cheeks. “Good luck with the deer,” I mumbled. “Or, good luck to them.”
“I’ll let you know how we fare,” she grinned, reversing into the road.
Neck burning, hand frigid. Watering sucked. What bothered most, though, was that something so cold could come from the deep earth. Mom would want her mink.
She passed me a stemless glass of rosé and watched me sip.
It was mild enough, and sticky. “It’s nice.”
“You don’t have to lie,” she said. “What’s your poison?”
“I’m more of a tea drinker, to be honest.”
Her eyes lit at the word honest. A commentary: were we not usually honest? “You just haven’t found the right drink. When you do, it will grip you every taste and gut you when it’s gone.”
Were we still talking about beverages?
“Not that it matters,” she continued, “if you’re comfortable as is.”
Comfortable. I drank the rosé, deeper this time. She took my wrist between her forefinger and thumb and eased the glass away, finishing for me. Her lips left no traces. Mom always left lipstick on the rim. It would look classy the first sip. Then the glass would get turned and sipped and marked all over until the entire circumference was smudged and smelled of teeth.
“Forgive me,” Lourdes said, dabbing the corner of her lip. “I couldn’t sit by.”
“Good intentions are just excuses,” I parried.
She laughed.
I wished for half her self-assurance. She was mesmerizing in her dark green pedicure and black satin pants. I was under no illusions as to why I was here, but she wore her loneliness like an ermine stole, fitting the slow and profound heave of her chest as she dared to laugh beneath the pall of loss.
Did we have to dare? Were we really monsters for wanting happiness?
Does the assurance come with age? I wanted to ask.
She would say, It comes with a succession of humiliations and disappointments that shape us to complicity. We’ve made jewels of Stockholm syndrome.
Something like that. Grand and silencing, if a little ridiculous.
She rolled off the couch to pour herself a proper glass. In her absence I sniffed the rim of mine and tasted the sweetness of longing.
“I never asked,” she said as the microwave hummed to life. “Why marigolds? Are they your flower?” She cocked her head at the face I made. “Come on. Every woman has a flower. If not for taste or symbolism, then because some man decides he’s a poet and compares you to one.”
I squirmed. What man? Even when I fancied eyes on me, that was my own desire for attention. Anyone with a grain of intuition would know I was empty and unworthy and incapable of his desire, the thought of which guilted me and pissed me off because a good man could never love me more than the looks of it. He might hold the door or ask me my name, but he did so because he too was self-conscious. A gentleman must do such things to retain his status. He would be seen and lauded for doting on me, which had nothing fundamentally to do with me.
I didn’t care to explain. As if Lourdes, with her shapely legs and medieval maiden’s hair, would understand.
With merciful timing, the microwave dinged.
Lourdes pulled out a mug of tea, chamomile. She brought it to me and watched me drink. It was hot enough to feel going down.
“Marigolds suit you,” she said, and left it at that.
I didn’t tell Lourdes, or anyone for that matter, that I planted them for Mom. Their color and movement reminded me of her, though she probably had no idea what a marigold looked like. As long as she got roses on Valentine’s Day, flowers made her no difference. But to me, the yellow-orange globes were her big hair and tireless cheer. The way they tossed to the passage of cars was her excitement in a crowd, or her indignation at others’ recklessness. She was the neighborhood champion of helmets and speed limits. When people heard of the accident, they didn’t believe she was the one steering.
I did not mean to recall her memory, only to ruin it with the one lapse in judgment that had killed her son beyond semblance of a son—but she was not at fault, was she?
Faster!
And as she sped into the waves, the wind flattening her hair, I dared Halpin to let go of the rail.
He, too, was involved in the marigolds. Their shape recalled his round, boyish face. They bobbed in the wind as he had bobbed on the water.
“Haven’t heard of her,” he said, waving for the bread.
I passed him the half baguette, warm and buttered in foil, and watched for any hint of reaction. “She’s on the other side of town. But you might know of her late husband. Something Aranov.”
He shrugged. Dad edited our local paper, The Weekly. If he hadn’t heard of Lourdes’s husband, he might have come across the obituary. Then again, might not.
“Well—” He tore a slice from the rest of the loaf and cut a square of butter for himself— “I’m glad something’s come out of your work.” Catching my eyeroll, he abandoned the butter. “Something more than the work.”
“I’m happy there,” I said. Even if you’re not.
College should have put an end to these conversations. But Dad wasn’t done wanting things for me, things I didn’t care for because I was…
Comfortable.
He read my mind. “I thought when you started your classes, you’d meet people. But you go from school to work to sulking in your room.”
“I said I’m happy.”
“I don’t care if you’re happy,” he snapped. Without looking at me, he reached across the table and put his great red hand over mine. “I want you to be okay.”
I couldn’t sit while he begged and broke my heart.
I cleared my place.
Between earth and paradise was a house of air. Its queen plied her subjects with fruit and wine and they lived in comfort. By the height of their windows and the cool of the queen’s shadow, they fancied themselves angels. In fact they were, but they had forgotten their wings. Why fly from the queen’s house?
I woke sour-mouthed and giddy, my limbs light as straw. I needed to eat. Or vomit. The thought of breakfast turned my stomach. With babying movements, I dressed and went out. Rallying with the fear of being late to lecture, I rolled down the driveway and—
The marigolds were gone.
All that remained were headless stalks and tossed dirt.
The deer must have done it. They didn’t eat marigolds, or so I had thought. But I had forgotten the brute law of nature, kill or be killed, in cultivating this perfect, now decimated, bed.
I stepped out of the car, keys in hand.
Some of the stalks had frazzled edges as if bitten and torn, but some were clean. A swift clip of shears could have done it. A swift clip could take away anything.
“Kirsten?”
Mr. Contreras stood by the mailbox, his face a hideous pantomime of horror and sympathy.
My skull thumped to the beat of my pulse, ratcheting like the whirr of a terrible engine.
Mr. Contreras hurried toward me. Kindness and vanity. Who might have been watching between their curtains? He must hasten to show his devotion and sympathy, poison ivying his loneliness onto mine. He placed a hand on my shoulder, assuming my sadness.
And then he was down.
Coughing among the broken stalks, his neck hot and hoary, pouring fatly over my hands. I had never grabbed a man’s neck like this. Death was intimate. He made a clogged sound like a laugh. He was in on it now, the sick joke of living, as the light of his eyes retracted.
With a slash of the jagged end, I raked my keys across his neck. The dirt sparkled with blood, darkening.
“Let go.”
Lourdes grabbed my arm. Her Lexus blocked the driveway. The door was open and the headlights were on. What was she doing here?
“Get up.”
She hauled me to my feet as if I were indeed straw.
“Go inside.”
She pushed me toward the house, hard enough to knock me down. My palms stung getting up.
Inside. Upstairs. The bathroom was the safest room. I ran the water and climbed in the tub. Wet denim. Bleeding hands. Dark rings in the water.
My vision flickered and browned, and I laid my head on the rail. The bathmat looked soft. I always hated the color. Seventies green, dentist-chair green, seafoam green. It had red dots today—if not an improvement, then a memory.
Warm clouds and tugging cirrus—
One sleep was not enough. The queen of air dispelled, and I was sunken in bed, bone-tired and damp. Whatever had woken me would not let go. The dread made me sick.
I leaned over my knees, blinking red ants from my vision. When they dispersed and I could stand without fainting, I went to the window. The sun rose a drowsy vapor from all the green. Outside was dreaming. The daffodils glowed and the rhododendron tossed bees between them.
The flowerbed by the mailbox was ruined. Someone had ripped my marigolds, that much came back to me. A meddling man—no, he was innocent. He was sticky…
What did I dream?
And what did I do?
“How did you—Never mind. Lay down.”
The couch sank me. I felt so heavy and weak. How both at once? And how did I make it here without killing anyone?
Anyone else.
She brought me a cup of water. No time for tea when a man’s murder hung between us.
“What happened?” I asked her, the limp, yellow version of: What now?
“You tell me,” she said. “Nobody saw but myself. Am I next?”
Her humor stung. “I’m not a murderer.”
“You wouldn’t mean to kill me,” she said, as if that made all the difference. “You wouldn’t know you were doing it until I was dead. I saw you with Contreras. It looked like impulse.
“I knew you were hiding something from the first time I saw you. This was before you rang me up, back when Manu was still alive—barely. I wanted flowers for his bedside, so I went to the nursery. You didn’t see me. You were outside the shop, pruning the window boxes. You took care with the healthy bulbs, but the brown ones…” She snapped her fingers in a scissoring motion. “How long have you been crazy?”
She was enjoying herself, craning over me.
“Since your brother’s death?”
I could smell the perfume on her neck.
“Your mother’s?”
I shrank into the cushions. She bore down on me, leering and expanding like a cobra.
Then she eased up, woman again, and went into the kitchen. “I don’t expect an answer.”
I did. “What did you do with Mr. Contreras?”
She spoke from behind the refrigerator door. “The begonia were beginning to sag.”
I looked through the sliding door to her garden. The fuchsia buds bent around a sizeable shape in their midst, marked on one end by two white protrusions. The tops of his walking shoes.
“An old trick. When the pagans made sacrifices, anointing their fields with goat’s blood, it was not the gods who brought them plenty.”
Her head loomed suddenly over the side of the sofa, floating above the ivory cushions. She gazed down her long nose at what lay twitching and pathetic under her. “Drink,” she said, tipping my cup over my lips. I sputtered. She didn’t stop until the cup was empty and the excess water ran down my face. Then she ran her knuckles down my cheek. “Don’t be afraid.”
“You killed him,” I whispered. “Your husband. You killed him, didn’t you?”
She laughed. “Don’t be stupid. The chemo took his manhood, and with it his will to live. He took a nice, warm nap in the car.”
I shivered. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Yes, you might have understood. We can never be honest without being guilty. We should have known, right? But we shouldn’t be held to the decisions of others—granted, others of sound mind. Manu taught me that. Mind makes all the difference in questions of culpability. Even, love.” Her voice dropped to a murmur. “We’re more cerebral than romantic. We reason and decide what to feel, and for whom. We convince ourselves of our attractions. The mind reins the heart.”
What did she think of me?
Her hand slid over the back of the sofa. In it she held the fruit straw. It reflected my face, skinny and monstrous from the soft end to the slanted edge.
I staggered to my feet, bumping the coffee table on the way to the kitchen. Find the knife drawer. I pulled each one open. Lourdes laughed from the living room, taking her time to close the distance between us.
Napkins. Spatula. Utensils.
I turned around, blade up.
Lourdes was unfazed. She stepped against it, daring me to open her throat. I had done so before. She showed me her teeth.
I sliced.
A hideous necklace opened and seeped dark chains down her breast. She should have clutched the wound and staggered, but she maintained her slow, grinning advance.
My knees buckled. I groped my way back toward the living room. The sliding door might be open. Before I could make it, she took me down.
The side of my face cracked the edge of the coffee table. The iron frame shaved my temple, filling my eye with hot, stinging blood as I landed on my stomach, gasping under her weight. I scrabbled onto my elbows and caught a glimpse of her through my bloody eye. She bristled with hunger. Lourdes held the straw high.
She pushed me back down, and I felt it cold and thick through the skin below my shoulder blade. Shock turned to pain and then sickness as an immense pressure tugged my flesh. Above me, Lourdes slurped.
I screamed.
“Ingrate,” she sneered. “You have family waiting.”
She flipped me so I could see the lust in her eyes before sinking her teeth into my throat. The chemical cool of her rasping tongue sank me through layers of red and brown, numbing with the darkness, until I floated over a sudden sea with vast horizons.
What did I dream? What did I do?
The sun buttered the shears. Nodding them aside, I saw the spread of my garden in wondrous bloom. The marigolds tossed beside the skylit driveway. We were safe.
And the house smelled of pancakes. Halpin shook the railing as he ran down the stairs. I had better go before he ate everything.
My hand sparkled as I pulled away from the window. Catching the light, an amethyst ring.
What did I dream?
What's Your Real 