After You (18 page)

33

I
am in paradise, and paradise smells like jasmine. Tight pink buds and bluebells line the stone walls, and a canopied walkway splits the garden in halves. The morning light is cut by a roof of pink roses braided with overgrown ivy perched above the path—a narrow corridor from one end to the other. The garden, while not quite secret—the walls are only about five feet high—is nonetheless sacred ground. I understand now why this has been turned into a retirement home. One of the few places I’ve been where I imagine innocence can be re-earned.

Lucy would hate it here. One look around and she’d be bothered by its gnawing perfection, the pinks and the blues and the greens too exact and sentimental. Like an old English painting of a garden, only worse, because the flickering of the leaves renders the sunlight just slightly out of focus. A canvas you’d find leaning against a fence at an amateur art fair.

Sorry, L, it’s just too pretty to be interesting
, I can hear her saying.

I disagree. I can’t stop looking, at the tiny shoots of hot pink that are growing in the seams of the stone wall. At the sheer abundance of
bloom
. A line from the book repeats in my head:
I want to see all the things that grow in England
.

“Which ones do you think are crocuses? What about snowdrops and daffodils like Mary finds in the book? Which are which?” Sophie asks me. She is walking the perimeter with Inderpal, letting her fingers run along the warmed stone. Her jaw is slack with awe, her expression so naked, it’s a parody of wonder. There is so much to be explored. Sophie is just getting started.

“I wish I knew,” I say.

“I think those may be crocuses. My mum has them at home,” Inderpal says, and points to a small group of flowers in the far corner. They are little cups of pale pink, with a dab of yellow in their center.

“Those are happy flowers,” Sophie says, and manages to speak out loud exactly the same two words I had been thinking. My mind has slowed here, my thoughts simplified:
happy flowers
.

“So which tree do you think is the one that killed Colin’s mum?” Sophie asks, looking from one tree to another, as if to find a culprit. I had forgotten about that part of the book: The garden is locked away because it is the place where Colin’s saintly mother died.

“You know the book is fiction, right? It’s made up. No one died here. No one has ever died here,” I say.

“Of course I know it’s
fiction
. I was just wondering what tree Frances imagined Colin’s mum falling out of.” Sophie and I are now both on a first-name basis with Frances Hodgson Burnett. When we’re being silly, we call her Frannie.

“That one,” Inderpal says, and points to the biggest and grandest tree in the garden. Too tall and old and proud to be ignored. I’m sure it has been here for hundreds of years. “Just look at it. Right there. That’s where Colin’s mum died.”

Sophie and Inderpal wander off on their own to explore a line of ants climbing into a flower bed, examining them with Inderpal’s magnifying glass. They use their hands to shield the insects from the light, so there will be no accidental cooking. I seek shelter under the canopy; summer has reemerged today, hot and sunny. The smell of flowers and trees and rich overturned earth fills my nose, and I taste the thin film of sugar left behind from my yellow-starred cupcake overdose, and next thing I know I am on the brick path, head between my knees, fighting nausea. I cannot—I will not—throw up in the Secret Garden. That would be sacrilegious.

“You okay?” Mikey asks, unlinking arms with Claire to come to my side. I wait a moment to answer, bite down hard, hoping the rush up the back of my throat will back down, and it does.

“Yeah, just ate too much. I’m fine.”

“I think bringing her here was a good idea,” he says, motioning over to Sophie and Inderpal playing entomologist in the corner.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’re really good with her.” My head drops a little lower. “Hey, you sure you’re okay?”

“I think so,” I say, except for the fact that I’m not. The vertigo has passed, but I still feel unrooted, floating above myself in the one place I thought, like Sophie did, that I might feel better. “I mean, besides the fact that I lost my best friend and my husband in the course of a summer. And that I clearly haven’t yet learned basic portion control.”

“Well, there is that. Remember when we went to Sizzler that one time when we were little and you ate so much of the cubed ham that you threw up on the car ride home?”

My family loves that story, even told it at my wedding.

“For the record, I got sick on bacon bits, not ham. And they were undercooked. Mikey, seriously, though? I have no idea what the hell I’m doing here. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this lost.”

“Look at her.” He points again at Sophie. “You made this happen today. Honestly, I think you seem much less lost than you’ve been in a while.”

“But I just feel so powerless. I can’t bring Lucy back, and that’s what Sophie really needs. Her actual mother. And I’m living in this godforsaken country. I am so tired of having wet feet and eating everything with mayonnaise.”

“You need to get some wellies. They’ll change your life.” I don’t hear him. Apparently I have started something and I can’t stop. Finger out of dam, camel crushed under the weight of its straw, egg will never be whole again. I forget where I am, that the sky is actually a piercing blue all the way until it meets ground, an idyllic summer day, and I am wearing sunglasses. The garden is as beautiful as it was in my imagination, flowers bursting forth as if freshly born. We are in a land far, far away.

“I bet Phillip already has a new girlfriend. Please tell me she’s not twenty-two and blond and hot. And precocious too. I hate that type. I really hate that type.”

“Actually, he just called me yesterday. Said that since he dumped my sister, he’s found himself ‘a nice piece of ass.’”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m kidding. Phillip would never say ‘nice piece of ass.’ Tail, maybe, but not ass.”

“Mikey.”

“Sorry. Bad joke. Go on. What are you freaking out about?”

“We are all such messes. Mom is jilting Dad,
again
, and there is nothing we can do about any of it. And you know what? I haven’t waxed my eyebrows since I got here. I look like a freaking wildebeest. No wonder my husband doesn’t want to stay married to me. Who wants to be married to a freaking wildebeest?”

“Phillip mentioned that to me. Said he was divorcing you over the ‘eyebrow issue.’” Mikey uses ridiculous air quotes.

“I’m serious. I feel like I’m losing my shit. Phillip left me. For real.”

“I know.” There is something new and tender in his voice, he’s finally stopped joking, and the fact that it feels like something to latch on to causes me to break—that point in a meltdown where I feel my body surrender to the hysteria, surrender the ability to harness or control anything. My emotions, my fear, my guilt, my bladder all under the power of the wildebeest within.

I now have tears streaming out of my eyes and snot pouring from my nose. I need to run away, to the other end of the globe, but I have already run, I am three thousand miles from home, and it seems to have gotten me nowhere.

Mikey steers me by the elbow out of my stone-walled paradise—better yet, out of eyeshot and earshot of the rest of the group—to another garden just beyond, this one with a water fountain. The water collects and gets pumped to the top, just to be dribbled down again for our amusement. It is spectacular. Because of Mikey, my fit will only have a single witness, and when I realize this, how my little brother has come to my rescue, saved me from letting the rest of our party see me fall apart, I want to weep in gratitude. The switch from desolation to sentimental weepiness happens so quickly, I have trouble keeping up.

“Sit here, just take a breath,” he says.

“Okay.” The humiliation rises in my gut with the three cupcakes and the Ribena juice box I called breakfast this morning.

Somehow, Mikey knows what’s next, and he jumps out of the way before I even see what is happening. My head opens, and I throw up. Some of the frosting stars are still intact, and I have managed to produce perfect constellational vomit.

Mikey looks at me, and I look at him, and now he grins at me; he can’t help it.

“Oh, shit,” I say, because I have been here before, have felt this all before, though last time it ended too soon, like in a horror movie where you think there may still be time for the dead to be resurrected but there isn’t. Last time it ended with a black-and-white photograph taken off the fridge. “Oh, no. Shit, shit, shit. I can’t be. I mean, it’s not really possible.”

But sure it is. Possible. If Lucy can be butchered in an alley at eight a.m. on a random Thursday morning, just before she was planning to run away to Paris with her also-married lover—if life can be that bloody messy—then I can be pregnant from a one-night stand with my estranged husband while I am playing godmother to a motherless lamb.

I put my head in my hands, too nauseous and shocked to use the muscles in the back of my neck to support my cranium. I flop like a newborn. The terror is pointed and sharp and painful. A spinal tap.

Mikey is still grinning. My Jerry Springer life is hilarious to my staid brother. This kind of stuff never happens in his carrel at LSE.

“Well, I have to say, Ellie, things just got a little bit interesting.”

About twenty minutes later, I have collected myself enough to return to the group, resigned to the fact that there will be no answers while I’m gallivanting around Kent with this multigenerational birthday party. There will be no sneaking off and buying a pregnancy test and peeing on a stick in a porta-potty off the M25. Nope, the word
baby
will be tucked away safely inside the deep scars in my brain, nestled there where I have been cracked for so long that my memory sometimes can’t stretch back to the before. I will smile at Sophie playing in the dirt, smile at the love pheromones wafting between Claire and Mikey, smile at Greg watching his child in wonder—
I created that
, he’s thinking. I’ll smile, smile, smile, hold down my position, and fix it in time.

Maybe things are different in the Secret Garden—maybe things do grow here. Barren, scorched landscapes turn lush; flower buds replace cacti. Pinned butterflies pump back to life, flutter out of an airless box.

“You okay?” Greg asks, when I join him next to the grand tree. He looks at its deep roots, a circular web around the trunk.

“Yup. You?”

“Yeah. Today is one of the good days.” Sophie and Inderpal sit on the wet grass about ten feet away, not caring that their pants’ bottoms are soaked through. They are now interested in the dirt, in worms in particular, and the adults are occasionally summoned over to inspect.

I cannot think about what happens next, about what it means if my recent display was what I think it was, where that will lead me. I cannot think about Phillip. About Lucy’s choice to leave, my recent commitment to stay, my mother fleeing the best thing that has ever happened to her, again and again.

“Sophie asked me the other day about how you lost a baby,” Greg says, his tone gentle, and it’s clear he can tell my mind keeps drifting far away from here.

“Really? Sophie knows about Oliver?”

“Yup, I guess Lucy must have told her at some point.”

“Lucy always had a big mouth,” I say, my tone jokey. Lucy’s big mouth was one of my favorite things about her. And suddenly the missing-her part hits me, the constant steamroll of grief. I am flattened and lost without my best friend.
Lucy, what would you do?
And the next question, the new one:
Would I do what you would do?
She was always braver than I was, more reckless, and at the same time, so much more alive. If I could have picked who to be, me or her, I would have picked her every single time. Even now, even knowing she was going to walk away, even knowing how it all ended.

But I am not her and never will be.

“You know, having been through something like that, losing Oliver, I don’t think I could ever do it again. I really don’t think I could survive it twice,” I say, and look at Greg, but from the way his mouth is drawn tight, I can tell he knows that I am lying.

The truth is, I didn’t really survive it the first time.

34

W
hen Oliver died, I didn’t cry at first. I was eight months pregnant, and then I was told I wasn’t anymore, as if pregnancy was merely a stop on the way to a potential and I hadn’t fulfilled mine. Oliver was deemed
unviable
, a cruel word, a sentence, an even crueler verdict; the doctor seemed to prefer it to
dead
, though, as if this medical euphemism would make any of us feel better.

Oliver was removed via a lifeless C-section so that my own baby couldn’t poison me. Not only was Oliver unviable, he was suddenly dangerous. He was only eleven inches long. Less than a foot. I still did not cry.

Instead, in an advanced state of denial, I asked if they could keep him inside me a little longer, let me surround him a little longer, let us be one thing a little longer, but the doctor wouldn’t allow it. For medical reasons, we had to cleave off the dead, before it could render me the same.

Based on the reaction, a flinching chorus, it seemed my request was a first; I found out later that most women upon discovering they have lost the nine-month race, want their baby out. Out for me meant lost, and I wasn’t ready to make the switch that quickly. Less than twenty-four hours earlier we were debating the benefits of an overpriced stroller and a wipes warmer, whether I’d be able to slug through the delivery without an epidural. Now, the word of the day was
removal
, not
birth
. We weren’t going to have a welcoming party—connected letters across the mantel,
It’s a boy!
No, the event had turned ugly, surgical, a cutting.

“Death is contagious,” they had said. And they were right.

I held my baby for a minute, sixty seconds, thirty of my own breaths taken in and out, almost mocking his stillness, and then they took him away. Phillip watched but couldn’t touch. That would be crossing a line into making Oliver real, and Oliver couldn’t be real now that he was gone. He touched me, though, and then I did the exact wrong thing, a reflex that later morphed into habit. I shrugged his hand away.

One of my biggest regrets in life, one of the cruelest things I have ever done: that first flinch. I still see Phillip’s face just then. The horror and the fear and the loneliness. In that moment I violated the basic tenet of our marriage; what happened to me happened to him, and vice versa, and here I was, refusing to share. I often wonder where we would be if I had let him touch me, if I’d absorbed whatever comfort his warm hands could impart and hadn’t made visible the invisible line between us. Who would we be now?

A coffin was picked out, a baby-sized coffin—they actually have those, one of the many things in this world that shouldn’t exist but does, one of the many things that if you let yourself think about in the morning, you would never get out of bed—and Phillip and I still don’t know who did the choosing. It wasn’t us; we were too drugged, too caught in the undertow, to make something like a decision. Come to think of it, I bet it was my mother, who did what a mother should never have to do for her daughter but in this world she sometimes does. We had a funeral with just the family and Lucy, who flew in and stocked our fridge with soup and macaroni and cheese and other thick and fatty comfort foods and packed up the half-finished nursery. She hid the mobile Phillip and I had spent hours picking out: dancing monkeys. I remember we had fun in the store, taking turns dangling it over each other’s faces, deciding what we had wanted our baby to see each night before he closed his eyes and again each morning when he opened them.

“Definitely the monkeys,” Phillip said, when we had narrowed it down to two. “For some reason, I just love their purple pants.”

I’m sure some thought having a funeral was melodramatic, unnecessary. How can you send off a life that never actually made it into the world, never took a single breath on the outside? What can you say? He had baby hands, and baby feet, and a tiny baby mouth? He looked like a doll? We didn’t know if he was smart, or funny, or if he would have turned into one of those angry teenagers who smuggles a gun into the school cafeteria. No anecdotes to share other than the fact that he gave me indigestion for eight months and had a preference for kicking the right side of my rib cage.

All we knew was that he was ours, and he was beautiful, as all babies are, alive or not. We knew I had failed him, we knew that, too, but no one said that out loud. The tears came, heavy and for weeks, and then months, and from the start I felt that the rest of the world saw my grief as overblown and indulgent. We had lost the potential of a baby, not a real baby, another universal thought shared but not said aloud by those who hadn’t lost a thing. Instead, the words stayed etched on their confused foreheads when time didn’t snap me back into Ellie Before. They were wrong, though, in their failed attempts at empathy, at the faux-enthusiasm and high voice usually reserved for dealing with sullen kids. They were wrong in thinking this some small setback.

I had held him. He existed before he didn’t. He was mine.

The guilt, too, came, in suffocating waves. The guilt that sometimes, still, late at night, when the raw edges of sleep are too far away and the reality of daylight not there to smooth out the irrational, consumes me and I imagine the hundred ways in which I failed him. Turns out when I had my nine-month shot, I was a terrible mother. I count the rules I broke. There was that cheese I ate, buried in a lasagna, that tasted so good I didn’t want to ask if it was pasteurized. I drank, too, a glass of wine here or there, feeling European and modern. Lucy had; I thought it was okay.

There was the time I tripped on the sidewalk—I shouldn’t have gone out, but I was antsy and bored and found myself flat-back in the snow. A teenage girl, hiding her face behind too long, too curly, too blond hair, offered a shy hand, no eye contact. I took it, and before I could say thank you, she ran away. I remember feeling bad about that, the not saying thank you to my good Samaritan, but I didn’t for a moment feel bad about not calling the doctor.

I didn’t want to be one of those crazy OCD mommies-to-be, who rendered the experience of pregnancy unbearable and without charm, who lectured the rest of us who hadn’t yet read all the books. My desire to be a certain kind of person—above the paranoia and the fear, to be cooler than the worriers—left Oliver exposed and unprotected. That’s who Ellie Before was, someone who felt immune to tragedy and loss, felt strong and invincible, if only because I had never before been tested.

The doctor attempted to soothe me with platitudes:
These things happen; they are nobody’s fault. I promise you, it wasn’t the lasagna or a glass of wine
. But I didn’t believe her. I had one job for those forty weeks, to create a snow-globe world for my baby, and I somehow shattered the glass. Some things can’t yet be answered with medical rationales. Perhaps one day a team of scientists will prove my theory—that ego, and doubt, and naïveté, and presumptuousness—those are the charged chemicals, the delicate pH balance, that can tilt your world upside down.

Now I find myself in the Secret Garden on this sunny afternoon, in charge of a child’s birthday party. We have lunch and then cake, bought at a fancy pastry shop in Notting Hill, unsecured from its box and decorated with nine candles. We all know and do exactly what we are supposed to do: We sing “Happy Birthday,” and Sophie closes her eyes, takes a moment, and blows. Her breath extinguishes the light to claps and cheers. I don’t ask about Sophie’s wish. Just a few days ago, she had a magic kit and a lock of her mother’s hair. There is only one thing she wants, and she won’t get it.

“I can’t believe you are nine. I am so jealous,” Inderpal says. “I still have to wait three months.”

“I can’t believe it either,” Greg says, and ruffles both kids’ hair. They swat his hand away, since they are too old for that. “My little girl is nine. One more year and you’ll be a decade. Double digits.”

“In only ninety-one more years, I’ll be a century. Triple digits,” Sophie says, and looks elated at the thought.

A hand tentatively touches my belly. My hand. My belly. No curve yet, at least no curves attributable to a zygote. I fight the grip of fear, Ellie After, knowing all that can unravel, minute by minute. Will there be more birthday parties in my future? A celebration, too, if a child comes out live and whole and breathing? And how do I lose the terror that accompanies the mere accumulation of days—if I’m even lucky enough to get that far—that something will turn, that my protection, even at its most vigilant, may not be enough? The sheer responsibility—no, the flip side of responsibility: The vulnerability of it paralyzes me. If something happened to my child, or to Sophie, too, since she now resides within the folds of me, there would be nothing left.

The group gathers on the grass in a semicircle around us, partially shaded by the large tree. Sophie is sitting in my lap; her thin legs perch over my knees and pin me in place. She feels less frail than she did when I first came here almost three months ago: a solid, real-life kid who can talk and walk and run circles around a garden. The book is already in her hands, the green tattered cover a testament to our overuse and abuse. I tune out the tsunami in my head and focus instead on the birthday girl.

“Chapter Twenty-Seven, ‘In the Garden,’” she announces, and does that thing she always does, her puppy reflex. I nod and smile and give her the pat on the head she needs, my best impression of Lucy, maybe, in her quieter, more indulgent moments. Sophie begins to read the last part of our book to the group.

As usual, I get lost in the words, caught up in the sentences, laid word by word toward our happy ending. Today, though, I see it being acted out in front of me, just beyond this semicircle of interested, or at the very least, humoring observers. Little Mary, all plumped up and rosy-cheeked, uses her trowel to dig up dirt. Dickon is playing the flute in the corner under a low-drooping tree. Colin, practicing the still-novel use of his legs, is running from wall to wall, slapping his bare palm across the stone, where it has already been warmed by the midday sun. I’m not sure if any of this is on the page, but that doesn’t matter.

“One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live,”
Sophie reads, slowly, making sure to get each word right, and I am drawn right back into the book again. This is why I love
The Secret Garden
—the self-help message so casually snuck into a children’s story, like putting vitamins in soda.

A flush of bliss passes through me. I feel the weight of Sophie in my lap, smell her hair—she uses baby shampoo, just like Lucy did because she once read in a magazine it was good for curls—hear the birds chirping in the distance, and all of it combines into a sedative. The anxious stirring that has kept me alert and stiff in the back since hearing about Lucy—amplified this morning—slows down and releases. Maybe I am exactly where I am supposed to be. Maybe this is what it means to be home. Real internal quiet, the voice in your head turned to mute, a momentary lapse in consciousness and expectation.

Right now I am free to play in dirt and run in circles. The burden of life—and that’s how I’ve thought about it these past two years, life as a burden, an awareness of the literal weight of my body as I schlepped from one place to another, the driving desire not to make a single mistake—has lifted, been replaced by nothing more than a peaceful lightness.

“Ellie?” Sophie brings me back to the here and now, to the garden, where my fictional characters are no longer putting on a show for my amusement.

“Yeah?”

“I said, ‘The End.’ You didn’t clap. Everyone else clapped, but you didn’t.” I look up at the semicircle of people, almost all strangers before Lucy, cheering for Sophie’s reading. Greg has gotten on his feet to give his daughter a standing ovation. The look on Inderpal’s face as he smiles at Sophie tells me that he, too, is relieved to have found a friend. My brother and Claire whistle their approval, their faces flush with new love, their happiness contagious.

“Sorry, sweetheart. Got caught up in the moment. You were wonderful,” I say, and beam at the girl in my lap. Nine years old now; just shy of ten years since I came here and talked Lucy off the ledge. Sophie was so tiny then, just a bundle of a baby.

“I’m sad we’ve finished it,” she says. “I wish we could start all over again.”

“We can.”

“It won’t be the same.” Sophie looks around the garden, as if she knows it is her last time here and she must soak it all up before her day wanes to a close.

“Of course it will be. We’ve done it loads of times. We’ll just turn the book over and read it again.” An edge of panic shades my voice. I am not ready to let go of our evenings tucked into her mini-bed, the green book in hand offering up an alternate universe. We have a routine, like the lamb kebabs. Headmistress Calthorp was wrong when she told Greg that Sophie needs consistency to deal with her grief; it’s we adults who do.