Garden Spells (17 page)

Everything about Claire screamed fate. And everything that had brought him here to Bascom, following dreams that never came true, led him to this.

The one dream that did.

The next morning, Claire felt a swish of air and heard a thud echo in her ear, coming from the ground beside her.

She opened her eyes, and there was a small apple about six inches from her face. Another thud, and another apple appeared beside it.

She’d fallen asleep outside again. She’d done it so many times before that she didn’t even think. She just sat up, shaking dirt out of her hair, and automatically reached for her gardening tools.

But something wasn’t right. First of all, the ground she used to leverage herself up was soft and warm. And the air seemed to feel a little cooler on her skin. She felt a little…

She looked down and gasped.

She was naked!

And that soft warm ground beside her was Tyler!

His eyes were open, and he was smiling. “Good morning.”

Everything came back to her, every humiliating, cathartic, erotic thing he’d done to her. But then she realized she was sitting there naked, staring at him like an idiot. She slapped an arm over her bare breasts and looked around for her nightgown. Tyler was lying on it. She tugged on it and he sat up.

She pulled the gown over her head, relishing the brief time she could hide her face behind the fabric. Oh, God. Where was her underwear? She saw them by her feet and snatched them up. “Don’t say anything,” she said as she stood. “You promised me you would forget everything. Don’t say a word about this.”

He rubbed at his eyes sleepily, still smiling. “Okay.”

She stared at him again. He had dirt and thyme in his hair. He still had on his shorts, but his chest was bare. He had red splotches all over his skin, burn marks from her, and yet he didn’t seem to mind. Not then, not now. How could he do that, all that last night, for no pleasure on his part, just for her?

She turned and started walking down the pathway, but stopped when he said, “You’re welcome.”

For some reason, that made her feel better. He was being an asshole. He expected her to thank him. She turned around. “Excuse me?”

He pointed to the ground beside him. “You wrote it, here.”

Curious, she walked back to him and looked. There on the ground were the words
Thank You
, raised in the dirt, as if written from underneath.

She let out a growl of frustration and picked up one of the apples. She threw it as hard as she could at the tree.

“I didn’t write that,” she said, and stormed away. Fat raindrops began to fall as she ran out of the garden. By the time she’d reached the house, the sky had opened up and it was pouring.

Fred drove home in the rain that evening, thinking about James. He was always alone when he let himself think of him, afraid that someone might see him and know what he was doing.

Fred had always known he was gay, but when he met James his freshman year at Chapel Hill University, he thought he finally understood why. Because he was meant to be with James. Fred’s mother had died in her bed when he was fifteen; his father died at the kitchen table when Fred was in college. That’s when Fred had to drop out and leave James, to come home and take over the store. He thought it was his father’s final punch, to take Fred away from something that finally brought him joy regardless of what people thought.

But after a tearful good-bye at school, to Fred’s surprise, James showed up in Bascom three weeks later.

Eventually, with time on his hands, James took classes at Orion while Fred ran the store. He got his degree in finance and a commuter job in Hickory. Over the years he encouraged Fred to get rid of everything that reminded Fred of his father and his cruelly withheld approval. It was James who said, “Let’s go out to eat. Let’s go to the movies. Let’s dare the people of this town to say something.”

And what was once youthful indiscretion, two twenty-one-year-olds quitting school and moving in together, finally answerable to no one, turned into more than thirty years of companionship. To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn’t what he expected. He wished he had paid more attention to the story.

He wished he’d paid more attention to the storyteller.

He drove to Evanelle’s house. He’d forgotten his umbrella, so he had to run to the porch in the rain. He stopped at the door to take off his wet jacket and shoes. He didn’t want to get water all over her nice floors.

When he walked in, he didn’t see Evanelle anywhere, so he called out her name.

“I’m up here,” she said, and he followed her voice to the attic.

Evanelle was trying to sweep the sawdust that the workers had produced that day, but it was like trying to sweep tiny birds who flew away in a flurry when you touched them. She was wearing a white face mask, because every sweep of her broom sent the sawdust birds into the air, making the entire space beige and smoky.

“Please don’t do this. I don’t want you to wear yourself out,” Fred said, walking over to her and taking her broom. Being left makes you doubt your ability to keep people, even friends. He wanted Evanelle to be happy he was there, to do all he could for her. He couldn’t bear to lose her too. “The workers will clean up when they’re done.”

Evanelle still had on the mask, but the skin around her eyes crinkled in a smile. “It’s coming along real nice up here, don’t you think?”

“It looks great,” he said. “It’s going to be great.” As soon as he moved his things in, that is. But that involved going back to his house, something he’d been avoiding.

“What’s the matter?” Evanelle asked, sliding the mask up and resting it on the top of her head like a beanie.

“I had some bag boys drop off boxes at my house today. I’m finally going over there to do some packing. I was thinking of renting out the house. What do you think?” he asked, eager for her opinion.

She nodded. “I think it’s a fine idea. You know you can stay here with me as long as you want. I love having you.”

He let out a wet laugh, full of sudden tears in the back of his throat. “You love having a fool with a broken heart around?”

“Some of the best people I know are fools,” Evanelle said. “The strongest people I know.”

“I don’t know how strong I’m being.”

“Trust me. Even Phineas Young would be in awe. Want me to go with you to your house?”

He nodded. He wanted that more than he could say.

It was the first time since James had taken his things out that Fred had been in the house. He looked around the living room. It felt strange to be here now, and he didn’t want to linger. This place wasn’t home without James, it was just a lot of bad memories of Fred’s father.

Evanelle walked into the living room behind him, her shoes squeaking on the hardwood floors. “Whoa,” she said. “This place sure looks better than the last time I saw it. It was right after your mother died. God rest her soul, she sure did like her pictures of Jesus.” She reached over and rubbed the back of the soft leather reading chair. “You’ve got some nice stuff.”

“I’m sorry I never invited you here, Evanelle. I left that all up to James.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t get invited places. It’s just a fact.”

“You should,” Fred said, looking at her curiously. “You’re a good person.”

“Nothing I can do about it now. It all started in 1953. I tried to fight it, but you have to understand, when I have to give someone something,
I have to do it
. Drives me crazy if I don’t.”

“What happened?”

“I had to give Luanna Clark condoms. And you couldn’t get condoms in Bascom in 1953. I had to go all the way to Raleigh to get them. My husband drove me there, and he kept telling me it was a bad idea. I couldn’t help it, though.”

Fred found himself laughing. “Even in 1953, giving someone condoms wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“It wasn’t the what, it was the who. I told Luanna that I had something to give her in church the next day. I was trying to do it private. She was with her friends and said, real uppity-like, ‘Well, give it to me, Evanelle.’ Like it was her due. You know Clarks and Waverleys have never gotten along. Anyway, I gave them to her, right there in front of her friends. Oh, I’m leaving out the most important part. Luanna’s husband lost his private parts in the war. My name was Mud, but it got even worse when Luanna got pregnant a year later. She should have used those condoms. After that, everyone got this look when I was around them, like I was going to tell their secrets. Not the sort you invite to dinner. I didn’t really mind so much, until my husband died.”

This old woman was his hero, no doubt about it. You are who you are, whether you like it or not, so why not like it? Fred walked up to her and extended his elbow. “I would be honored, Evanelle, to make you dinner tonight. An invitation-only affair.”

With a laugh she put her arm in his. “Well, aren’t you the one.”

CHAPTER

11

I
f you need us, Bay and Henry and I are going to be at Lunsford’s Reservoir. His housekeeper stays with his grandfather until only five o’clock, so he’ll be dropping us off before then. No later than five o’clock,” Sydney said, as if trying to calm Claire down. “We’ll be back.”

Claire closed the lid to the picnic basket, raised the handles, and handed it to Sydney. She must have really scared Sydney that night a week ago. But as long as Claire pretended it was all okay, maybe it really was. Sydney and Henry had spent a lot of time together this past week, dinners with Bay, mostly. On Sunday they went to the movies. Claire tried to tell herself that it was a good thing. She used that time alone to can and weed the garden and catch up on paperwork, all secure and routine things. She needed that. Those were her constants.

“Will you be okay there?” Claire asked, following Sydney out of the kitchen.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”

“It’s pretty far out and you’ll be all alone.”

Sydney laughed and set the basket by the front door. “We’ll be lucky if we find a place to eat our lunch. The reservoir is always crowded in the summer.”

“Even on a Monday?”

“Even on a Monday.”

“Oh,” Claire said, embarrassed. “I didn’t know. I’ve never been there.”

“So come with us!” Sydney said, just as she’d said every time she went out this past week.

“What? No.”

“Yes!” Sydney grabbed Claire’s hands. “Please? You have to stop saying no to me. It will be fun. You’ve lived here most all your life and you’ve never been to the reservoir. Everyone goes to the reservoir at some point. Come on. Please?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I really want you to come,” Sydney said, squeezing Claire’s hands hopefully.

Claire felt a familiar anxiousness, or maybe it was a learned anxiousness. It was how her grandmother always acted at the thought of doing something purely social, as if she wanted to curl up like a cutworm until the threat passed. Work was fine. Claire didn’t socialize when she worked—she communicated. She said what needed to be said or she didn’t say anything at all. Unfortunately, this didn’t translate well into a social setting. It made her seem rude and standoffish, when it was only a sincere and desperate effort not to do or say anything foolish. “I’m sure you and Henry want this time together.”

“No, we don’t,” Sydney said, suddenly serious. “We’re just friends. We’ve always been friends. That’s what I like about him. This is for Bay. You packed the picnic, at least come eat it. Hurry, go change.”

Claire couldn’t believe she was actually considering it. She looked down at her white capris and sleeveless shirt. “Change into what?”

“Shorts. Or a swimsuit if you want to go swimming.”

“I don’t know how to swim.”

Sydney smiled, like she already knew that. “Want me to teach you?”

“No!” Claire said immediately. “I mean, no, thank you. I’m not a fan of large bodies of water. Does Bay know how to swim?”

Sydney went into the sitting room, where she’d left two quilts and a beach bag full of towels. She carried them to the foyer and set them by the picnic basket. “Yes, she had lessons in Seattle.”

Claire instantly perked up. “Seattle?”

Sydney took a deep breath and nodded. That tidbit of information hadn’t just slipped out. Sydney had told her on purpose. A first step. “Seattle. That’s where Bay was born.”

So far she’d mentioned New York and Boise and Seattle. They were cities farther north than the ones their mother had traveled to. Lorelei had gone due west after leaving Bascom. Claire herself had been born in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Maybe bad things had happened to Sydney and Bay, bad things Sydney still didn’t want to tell Claire about, but Bay’s welfare had been, and still was, a priority to Sydney. She had signed Bay up for swimming lessons, after all. That alone made Sydney a better mother than Lorelei had ever been.

There was a honk outside and Sydney called, “Come on, Bay!”

Bay came running down the stairs. She was wearing a bathing suit under a yellow sundress. “Finally!” she said as she shot out the door.

“Okay, don’t change.” Sydney took a pink canvas sun hat out of her bag and put it on Claire’s head. “Perfect. Let’s go.”

She dragged Claire out of the house. Henry took Claire’s addition to their party gracefully. Sydney said that they were just friends, but Claire wasn’t sure if Henry felt the same way. There were times when he looked at her sister and his whole body seemed to go transparent, losing himself in her.

He had it bad.

Claire and Bay had climbed into the backseat of the king cab and Sydney was about to lift herself into the front seat when Claire heard her sister call, “Hi, Tyler!”

Claire immediately turned in her seat to see Tyler getting out of his Jeep in front of his house. He was wearing cargo shorts and a crazy Hawaiian shirt. This was the first time since the garden that she’d seen him, and her breath caught. How did people act after something like that? How on earth did people live and function after intimacy? It was like telling a secret to someone, then immediately regretting that they knew. The thought of actually talking to him now made her face chili-pepper hot.

“We’re going to the reservoir for a picnic; want to come?” Sydney asked him.

“Sydney, what are you doing?” Claire demanded, and Henry looked at her in the rearview mirror curiously. She felt a little ashamed that he could be so gracious about inviting people along and she couldn’t.

“I’m teaching you to swim,” Sydney answered cryptically.

“I have a night class tonight,” Tyler called.

“We’ll be back in time.”

“Then sure. I’m in,” Tyler said, and walked toward them.

When Claire saw that Sydney was going to open the back door, she nearly hurt herself climbing over Bay so Bay would be in the middle, a kiddie buffer between her and Tyler. But she felt ridiculous when Tyler started to climb in and saw her.

“Claire!” he said, stopping short. “I didn’t know you were going too.”

When she finally got the nerve to meet his eyes, she didn’t find anything hidden there, no telltale sign that he was thinking of her secret. He was just Tyler. Should that be a relief, or should that make her more worried?

As soon as they were off, Tyler asked Claire, “So what’s this reservoir?”

Claire tried to think of something normal to say. She couldn’t casually mention that she’d been there before. She couldn’t even say that she’d ever been to a picnic that she didn’t cater. But Claire not knowing what she was doing could come as no surprise to him, of all the people in the truck. She’d been nothing but a contradiction since she met him—go away, come closer; I know enough, I know so little; I can handle anything, look how easily I break. “I’ve never been there,” she finally admitted. “Ask Sydney, our social director.”

Sydney turned in her seat. “It’s a popular swimming hole. Lots of teenagers and families with young kids go there in the summer. And at night it’s something of a lovers’ lane.”

“And how do
you
know that?” Tyler asked.

Sydney grinned and wagged her eyebrows.

“You went out there at night?” Claire asked. “Did Grandma know what you were doing?”

“Are you kidding? She said she used to go out there at night all the time when she was a teenager.”

“She never told me that.”

“She probably worried about all the flies zooming into your wide-open mouth.”

Claire snapped her mouth shut. “I didn’t think she did things like that.”

“Everyone does something like that at least once in their lives.” Sydney shrugged. “She was young once.”

Claire snuck a look at Tyler. He was smiling. He’d been young once too.

Claire had always wondered what that felt like.

Lunsford’s Reservoir was located in the ninety acres of thick woods passed down through a long line of lazy Lunsfords. It was too much trouble to try to keep people away from the reservoir, and the maintenance would be too much hassle if they turned it into a park. And this was the rural South, so they’d be damned if they sold their family land or, worse, gave it to the government. So they posted
NO TRESPASSING
signs everyone ignored, and left it at that.

There was a trail about a half mile long from the gravel parking lot to the reservoir. Tyler walked behind Claire all the way there, and she felt very conscious of her body, of what he knew of it, things about her no one else knew. She thought she could feel his eyes on her, but when she looked over her shoulder, his eyes were always elsewhere. Maybe she felt them there because she wanted them there. Maybe
this
was how people coped after intimacy. When you tell a secret to someone, embarrassing or not, it forms a connection. That person means something to you simply by virtue of what he knows.

Finally, the path opened and the noise swelled. The reservoir itself was a forest lake with a natural beach on one side and a high promontory of southern yellow pines on the other side that kids climbed up in order to dive into the water. It was indeed as crowded as Sydney said it would be, but they found a place toward the back of the beach and spread the quilts.

Claire had made avocado and chicken wraps and fried peach pies, and Sydney had packed Cheetos and Coke. They sat and ate and chatted, and a surprising number of people came by to say hello. Clients of Sydney’s mostly, who came by to tell Sydney that their new haircuts gave them more confidence, that their husbands noticed them more, and their mechanics were unable to shyste them on their car repairs. Claire was unspeakably proud of her.

As soon as Bay was finished eating, she wanted to go swimming, so Henry and Sydney walked with her to the water.

Which left Claire and Tyler alone.

“All right, get ready. I’m going to tell you a story,” Tyler said, stretching back on the quilt and putting his hands behind his head.

Claire was sitting on a separate quilt, but she was close enough to be able to look down at him. This was a secret she knew about
him
, she realized. She knew what he looked like under her. “What makes you think I want to hear a story?”

“It’s either that or talk to me. I’m guessing you would rather hear the story.”

“Tyler, it’s just that—”

“Here’s the story. When I was a teenager, going to the local pool was a big deal, particularly to the kids in the colony, because we were a good ten miles from town and pretty secluded. There was a girl I knew from school named Gina Paretti. When she developed, the boys were never the same. She would pass us in the hallways and literally take our words. We couldn’t talk for days. Gina spent every day at the pool in the summer, so when I was sixteen I went every day I could, just to stare at her in her bikini. It was toward the end of the summer when I decided to go for it. I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d fantasized about her for months. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I had to talk to her. I jumped into the pool and did some laps in front of her, manly stuff, before I got out and walked over to her. So there I was, standing in front of her, deliberately blocking out the sun and dripping on her, because I was still young enough to think that annoying a girl was a legitimate way of telling her I liked her. She finally opened her eyes and looked up at me…
and screamed
. It seems my shorts had fallen waaaaay past my hips when I had pulled myself out of the water. So I was standing there, flashing her. I was almost arrested.”

Claire wasn’t expecting that, and she laughed. It felt good to laugh—strange, but good. “That must have been horrible.”

“Not really. Three days later, she asked me out. Come to think of it, after that I received a lot of attention from girls who had been at the pool that day,” he said, preening.

“Is that true?”

He winked at her. “Does it matter?”

She laughed again. “Thank you for that.”

“My humiliations are yours for the asking.”

“Humiliating or not, it was a normal thing. You were a normal teenager. You spent your summers at a pool. You’ve probably even been to a lovers’ lane. You and Sydney would have gotten along.”

“You weren’t a normal teenager?”

“No,” she said simply, and it couldn’t have come as a surprise to him. “Henry was the same way. We were the kids who embraced our legacies young.”

Tyler sat up on his elbows, his eyes going to the edge of the water where Henry and Sydney were watching Bay. Someone on the beach called to Sydney. Sydney said something to Henry and he nodded, then she walked to a nearby gathering of women to talk. “Do you mind your sister dating him?”

“She’s not dating him. But why would I mind?” She said this almost defensively, not wanting him to know how much she was still struggling with Sydney spending so much time with Henry. That night in the garden was weakness. She was stronger than that.

“I guess I just don’t want you to be disappointed. It’s a difficult position, being interested in someone not interested in you.”

“Oh,” Claire said, realizing she’d misunderstood what he meant. “I’m not interested in Henry.”