The Unfinished Garden (20 page)

Chapter 19

For the first time in twenty-two hours and thirty-eight
minutes, he was alone with her. The agony of caring this much was crushing him.
Every hour, every minute, every second, James thought of Tilly. He could no
longer separate her pain from his, her needs from his. And he knew what she
expected of him, but he couldn’t deliver. Why did his OCD have to flare up this
morning when he was trying so hard to be the person Tilly could depend on, not
screwed-up James with the misfiring brain?

They had to leave now or they’d be late. Late was never an
option, but he couldn’t do what she was asking of him. He couldn’t. Ominous
clouds loitered behind the Hall and humidity stacked up in his lungs. A storm
was rolling in.

“I’m sorry, Tilly. I’m sorry.” They faced each other across the
hood of the Yaris. “I can’t drive. I can’t.”

“But you’re the one who offered to take me, remember?”

He’d rankled her. He could hear it in her tone.

Rowena had said Tilly craved space. In the past two days, James
had done everything he could to provide it, coercing Isaac, Virginia, even the
psycho dog, into helping with the tree house, leaving Tilly wide-open to shut
out the world, which she’d done, packing away family memorabilia to a borrowed
soundtrack.
His
borrowed soundtrack, from
his
new iPod classic. For once, the scorpion pit of
sharing had been worth the anguish. Watching her sashay around humming the Gipsy
Kings had affected him in his heart, in his gut and in his groin. And pelted him
with images of Sebastian. Sebastian, who had held her and made love to her.

She doesn’t love you, she loves
Sebastian.

Which rival haunted him more—the dead husband or the very much
alive ex-lover, the stand-up guy who was in London all week to be with his kids
for their end-of-school festivities? How could you hate someone that decent?

Tilly doesn’t need you, she needs
Sebastian.

James let the thoughts tumble, too tired to resist. He hadn’t
slept in two nights. Rowena was away at the Great Yorkshire Agricultural Show,
and he’d fallen into a new ritual of checking every door and every window every
night. The Hall freaked him out. What choice did he have?

She doesn’t love you, she loves
Sebastian.

“Tilly, when I said I would take you, I meant accompany you to
the clinic. I cannot, cannot, drive on the left-hand side of this arcane road
system with signs bearing down on us that read
Warning—kill
your speed, Warning—police radar, Warning—red route, thirty-eight fatalities
in three years.
If I drive, we won’t make it to the breast clinic
alive.” He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the doves flapping and
cooing in the dovecote. It didn’t work. “I have images—” he opened his eyes “—of
you and me trapped under a semi. In flames.”

“Fine. I’ll drive the death trap,” Tilly said, and slammed the
door. Then waited for him to squash into the passenger seat before they sped
off, tires grinding through the gravel.

* * *

They passed the second memorial of plastic flowers
marking the death of someone’s husband or wife, father or mother, son or
daughter, on a road too narrow and twisty for modern traffic, and still, she
didn’t speak. Since she was pissed at him, he might as was tell her about David,
get it over with. A week ago he had decided she must never know, but that was
before his childish alter ego jumped into the arena. Before he felt abandoned.
In the past two days Tilly had withdrawn—at his suggestion, but then he’d never
operated on the same field of logic as everyone else—and now he burned with the
need to haul her back into his confidence, to make her understand that fate had
brought them together. At least he hoped she would believe it was fate and not
really shitty karma.

God Almighty, he felt ridiculous jammed into this toy car with
his legs jutting up. Whether he was inside or out, England was a cramped,
Lilliputian world. Even parking spaces were smaller.

He practiced two yoga breaths, then two more.

“When are you going to say, ‘Told you so’ about the road?”
Tilly said.

“I’m not. But since you are talking to me again, I would like
to ask you a question.” He snapped open the strap of his Alessi watch, the watch
he always wore for good luck. Then he snapped it shut. Open, shut. Open—Tilly
reached across and stopped him.

“If you want to drive,” she said, “the answer’s yes.”

James scratched through his hair. “I can assure you I would
rather take my own life.”

She glanced at him. “You could do that, take your own
life?”

“It was a joke.”

But she didn’t laugh. “You could, couldn’t you? I believe that
of you.”

“Tilly, I won’t lie to you. I’ve visited some dark places. But
the past is the past.” Please God, she believed
that
sentence. “I did want to ask, though—”

“You tried to kill yourself?”

Was it his imagination, or did she jerk away from him?
Keep going, James. Keep going.

“There have been moments in my life—”
one
related to your husband
“—when I’ve understood the hopelessness that
drags you down to the point where life seems worthless. And I believe that each
person has the right to choose his threshold for pain, whether of the body or of
the mind.”

“I can’t imagine,” she said quietly, “deciding that life is not
worth living.”

“And yet thousands of people do. I’m lucky; I’ve always come
back from dark places, because I’m a survivor. As are you.” The acrid taste of
bile hit the back of his throat. Enough preamble. “Did David have a scar on his
right cheek?”

“How do you know about his scar?”

He squeezed sideways to face her and almost lost resolve. In
profile she looked so girlish, so vulnerable. Everything about her was delicate:
her pale skin, her button nose, her blond eyebrows. He wanted to draw her close
and protect her, which was crazy. She was tougher than he was. Just how tough,
he was about to find out.

James placed a finger over his lips and considered his answer.
But really, what else could he say? “I gave it to him.”

An empty supermarket bag tumbled along the sidewalk, whipped up
in their backdraft. It joined a flattened McDonald’s Happy Meal box and a ripped
packet of condoms under the spindly hedge by the edge of the road. Tilly slammed
on the brake. James jerked forward, the seat belt whipping across his torso.
Ouff,
that wasn’t so bad, even if the car had
stopped in the middle of a divided highway, ten feet from a roundabout.

“You were the crazy grad student with the bar stool?” Her voice
was unnaturally high.

“That would be me.”

“You were at the University of Chicago with my husband?”

So far, so good. She hadn’t thrown him out of the car, not yet.
“David was new to the Ph.D. program, and I dropped out shortly after the
incident. It was the only time we met.”

“You left grad school because of my husband?”

“No.” He felt strangely calm. Who would have imagined full
disclosure could be so cathartic? “I left graduate school because I have no
patience. Academia moves too slowly for me. I didn’t mind the work, just the
time it takes to reach the top. Although I assume David made a meteoric rise. I
enjoyed his book, by the way.”

A car honked and James swiveled around. “I hate to be a
backseat driver, but there’s a line behind us. You might want to pull
forward.”

“And why, exactly, did you attack my husband with a bar stool?”
She fed the steering wheel through her hands as they curved onto the roundabout,
then hit the gas pedal and they shot across two lanes of traffic.

James clutched at his door. Shit. Was she going to kill him
after all?

A white van tore past, honking, and the driver flicked two
fingers at Tilly.

“Sorry,” she mouthed and slowed down.

James relaxed his arm but kept both eyes on the wheel. “Your
husband slept with the woman I loved. Although, had I paused to think, I would
have realized that he was blameless. She was a repeat offender, you see, but I
loved her beyond reason. And yes, before you ask, that was the time I considered
suicide.” He paused, waiting for a reaction she didn’t give. “I had to see the
affair through to its bitter end. Fortunately, that turned out to be David,
since it was the run-in with your husband that led me to therapy, not the
struggles with ritualized behaviors and obsessive thoughts. I realized I was
spinning too fast, responding to everything with anger.” James fiddled with one
of his diamond stud earrings. “I had a temper like a twister in those days.”

“You and my husband fought over the same woman?” Tilly sounded
cautious, but not angry. Would this be okay? Would she forgive him as her
husband had done?

“David was blameless, Tilly. I stormed into the bar, picked up
the stool and charged him. He stumbled, backing away from me. A logical
response. Perfectly logical. Unfortunately, he took the table with him and
landed on a broken glass.” James dug his hands deep into his hair and thrust
back his head. Suddenly, the memory was fresh. He had dragged David up to pummel
every last breath from his body and seen so much blood. “The blood jolted me
back to reality. Although—” he paused, waiting for what? Reassurance? “—I was
more shocked by it than he was. I took him to the hospital, paid his bill and
drove him home. We had, of course, made peace before then. He had no idea that
Isha was involved with another guy. And he was extremely gracious. He could have
pressed charges, but he didn’t. If anything, he understood. I’ve always been
grateful for that.”
Now what?
He waited.

She exhaled. “Thank you.”

Of all the responses, he would never have anticipated that one.
“For what?”

“A gift from the grave.” Tilly glanced up in the rearview
mirror, then clicked on her turn signal. “I always felt there was a piece of his
story missing. Now I understand why. He was ashamed that he’d slept with another
man’s girlfriend. David’s ego might have filled the East Coast, but honor was a
merit badge for him.” They rolled toward a red traffic light. “And yes, he
would’ve understood. He was drawn to people in crisis, people who needed him. I
think it made him less insecure.”

The light turned to amber, then to green. James liked that
about English traffic lights, that they gave you more time. In America you had
to go from stop to start with nothing in between, but James could never have
enough transition time.

She flashed a smile at him. Thank God. He’d been right to tell
her.

* * *

What a blessing truth could be! How it lent perspective!
Now she knew, one hundred and one percent, that she could never fall for James.
His revelation had leveled the space between them, put their relationship on a
plane she understood—finally. After all, no way could she fall for the man who’d
disfigured her dead husband.

I mean, come on, how much guilt can one
person carry?

“If David were drawn to underdogs,” James said, “I fail to see
how you fit in.”

“I kept his life uncluttered so he could produce brilliance. I
was the subservient partner.”

“Your theory’s off.”

He’d lost her, totally. “Excuse me?”

“If David relied on you to shore up his life, then you were the
power behind the throne, not the handmaid. Don’t sell yourself short, Tilly.
You’re a strong, capable woman who created a successful business out of
tragedy.”

Interesting, she’d never looked at it that way, but that didn’t
mean James was right. She appreciated his “Go, Tilly” speech, but really, he had
no clue. “It wasn’t deliberate, James. I was clinging to the life David and I
had created, keeping our world the same for Isaac’s sake. Since my business
allowed me to do that, it was a means to an end. Enjoying the work was a
bonus.”

Tilly braked and they crawled into another traffic jam. She
felt a pang of longing for swaths of empty roadways that cut through Carolina
forest, for dodging turkey vultures picking at roadkill, for stopping to rescue
turtles. She glanced at a tiny roadside garden spilling over with pastel colors
and longed to see her sun border vibrating with hot tones.

They started moving again, and as they turned left toward the
hospital carpark, a memory jarred from four months before David died. They were
camped out in the basement following an ice storm, with no power and no running
water. She could hear David’s retort to her suggestion that they invest in a
generator: “Forget it, babe. We won’t be here long enough to make a generator
cost-effective.” And to prove his point, once phone service was restored, he
floated the word that he was for hire. After five days of struggling to burn
frozen logs and melt ice to flush the lavatory, David announced he was done with
country living. And once David made decrees, he didn’t back down. But Tilly had
her garden, her friends, a world of her making she couldn’t relinquish. Wasn’t
that why she’d used the leftover life insurance money to put in the generator
David deemed so pointless?

Had guilt enabled her to edit the past, erase the bits she
didn’t like? Yes, she always knew North Carolina was little more than a career
pit stop for David, that he was using it as a rung on his career ladder. But the
ice storm had sped up his desire to head back to civilization—his words, not
hers. And that—Tilly pulled into the hospital parking lot—would have led them
into a head-on collision.

The car spluttered into silence, and Tilly reached into the
back for her rucksack. Okay, then. Time to meet her future. But the future was
only safe when you knew where you were heading. And a triple assessment at the
breast clinic was an unmarked detour. And so, a hidden voice hinted, was the man
sitting next to her. The one she could never fall for. Tilly flung open the car
door, and her stomach did some weird hula dance.