The Garden of Last Days (65 page)

She didn’t need the money. Again, it was to fill the awful silence of the house.

April’s face as she sat beside Jean under the mango. She hadn’t worked in weeks and was darker than ever from their mornings at
the beach, but she looked tired, her eyes missing something that had been there before, a kind of confidence. Franny was inside watching a movie, its bright blues and reds reflecting off the window.

“Do you miss working, April?”

“I miss the money. But I can’t go back to that.”

“Good.”

“I just can’t separate it anymore.”

“What?”

“Me by day and me by night.”

“What’re you going to do?”

She shrugged and ran her fingers back through her hair, not knowing that in only days her mother would call from New Hampshire, her true mother, the one who’d raised her and was Franny’s grandmother. She would call to say she was moving to a condo. Did April want to buy the house for cheap?

Jean still had the letters and Franny’s drawings, the ones she’d drawn here and the two she sent in the months after April drove her north. As a housewarming gift, Jean had sent flowers from her garden. She clipped hibiscus and frangipani, the red stars of ixora and the orange petals of her bougainvillea. She wrapped all this in damp leaves from her mango and jacaranda trees, and she bought baby’s breath and florist’s paper and bundled it all and boxed it and drove to the post office and mailed it off to New Hampshire, a place she’d never been.

She imagined mountains and farms, snow and pickup trucks.

Over a year ago, the last letter. In it April said she was working in a realtor’s office, that she met someone and was getting married. She included a school picture of Franny, this striking eight-year-old girl with long hair, the curls gone, the blond too. But her eyes were the
same, still bright, still warm, still so curious about the world and her place in it.

On the back was April’s handwriting:
Franny, 3rd grade, she still talks about you and the garden!

But did she? She’d been only three. Was it possible? Jean didn’t think so, but she hoped it was true.

Her room was as she’d left it. Some nights when Jean couldn’t sleep, when her breathing seemed to come with difficulty and she broke out in a sweat, she’d go into Franny’s room. She’d lie on her smaller bed and close her eyes and rest. She’d see their mornings together, hear Franny’s voice again as she talked about her dreams from the night before. Jean would see and hear other things—Harry smiling at her from behind his reading glasses, her father’s hand gripping the handles of his medical kit, that conscientious inspector, the way she stood in Jean’s room and studied her, searching for flaws when that’s all she’d ever been, a jumbled bundle of them.

Jean takes her newspaper and a glass of Shiraz, old Matisse following her outside. It’s sundown, early spring. In a week, God willing, she’ll turn seventy-seven. How had this happened? How had she outlived everyone she came from? She didn’t always feel well, but the attacks were over; if something terrible was going to happen, then there was very little you could do about it anyway. This she knew now. Why
wait
for it?

She sipped her wine. There was a photo in the paper she had to see again. She set her glass down and slipped on her reading glasses. His head was shaved and he wore the white-brimmed hat of the Marine Corps. She’d seen so many of these pictures, all of young men staring resolutely into the camera and their own fates, the Stars and Stripes behind them. But this one’s expression was neutral, as if he were lying in wait and did not want to be seen, not yet. And it was him. It was April’s polite bouncer, and Jean’s heart flattened out in her chest. Was he one of the thousands? There were the words “active duty” and
“past ties to the community.” Like so many, he’d enlisted because he wanted to
do
something, but he was one of those here who’d actually “brushed shoulders” with one of them and could not forget it.

And he had gone back for a third time.

She folded the paper and set it in her lap. Outside the walls a car drove by, one of Jean’s neighbors she didn’t know. She would work on that. She was sure good people lived here, as they did everywhere. If she opened her gate and invited them in, wouldn’t they come?

The wine spread out warmly in Jean’s chest. She breathed deeply. She could smell mango leaves and hibiscus, palmetto and hyacinth and trumpet vine. There was the damp soil of her new plantings, its dark scent indifferent and ancient and enduring.

She stared at her garden and tried not to think of anything. Just to see it. Its beauty here for as long as she was, as long as she cared for it.

A lizard flitted over the brickwork into the ferns. One of them trembled, then went still. The cat just stared after it as if she were through chasing things. Then another fern moved, and Jean’s cat shot into them and she couldn’t see her anymore, just heard her, her frantic search in the garden.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the following people who were most generous with their time and expertise: Professor Peter Whelan of Francis Marion University, Parkie Jones, Gale Brunault, Robin Pearson Cogan, Lieutenant Blair Waller of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Deptartment, Rema Badwan, Joel Gotler, Rick Taylor, Gunner Davis, Kerrie Clapp, my brother Jeb Dubus, Bill Cantwell, Stephen Haley, Jim Champoux, and Joseph Hurka; Pin Print technician Shannon Conrad, and JoEllyn Rackleff, press secretary at the Florida Department of Corrections.

I am deeply indebted to the Guggenheim Foundation for its support. And I thank my agent, Philip Spitzer, for his patience and good cheer, as well as my tenacious and persevering editor, Alane Salierno Mason. Finally, I thank my wife, Fontaine, for the gift of her faith.

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Copyright © Andre Dubus III 2008

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Collected Poems 1909–1962
copyright © 2002 by the Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by William Heinemann

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