Twelve Rooms with a View (27 page)

Once I had the water going, I felt better, but every one of those moss beds was in serious trouble. Most of them had gone brown; the previously spongy soil was hard and even brittle in places, and water was now pooling in little brown puddles instead of soaking in gently the way it was supposed to. Len had all sorts of moss-sized gardening implements lined up on the open shelves above the sink, but I had no idea what to do with any of them; watering was pretty much the end of my restorative capabilities. Besides, I thought, where in the world is Len?

After I checked my phone again, I tried to call him, but he didn’t pick up, and his machine was turned off. So I went up to his landing and knocked on the door. For a moment, I thought I heard a vague rustle of movement, like someone was in there, so I pounded harder and yelled that the moss was in real trouble and he needed to come down and take a look at it. There was no response. So then I went down to the lobby.

“Hey, Frank! How’re you doing?” I asked.

“Yeah. Tina. Hi,” Frank said, with less enthusiasm than I was exhibiting. He was sorting through the mail and doing a crossword puzzle at the same time. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I’ve been kind of busy.”

“Good for you.”

It was a little troubling to have Frank bristle at me, but I was worried, so I got right to the point. “Hey, have you seen Len?”

“Not today,” he said, still not looking at me.

“Did you see him yesterday?”

“No, Tina, I didn’t.”

“Well, when was the last time you saw him?”

This conversation was obviously annoying the new, mean Frank. “It’s not my job to keep track of people, that is not my job description.”

“No, I know, I just—”

“And you don’t have any rights here.”

“What?” I said, surprised at how direct and horrible that statement sounded, coming from Frank. I was truly hurt. I guess my face must have made that clear, because he flushed a little, like he was privately ashamed for half a second, before the mean version of himself could take over again. It took the sting out of what came next.

“I just mean you’re staying here, okay, obviously no one can stop you from doing that, but it’s unclear what’s going to happen next. People want to make sure you are aware of that.”

“Of course I’m aware of that.”

“All right, then.”

“So like … what? Has the building been talking about us?”

Frank glanced up, then took a small step back, like he wanted to make sure he wasn’t too close to me. “Yeah, the building has been talking,” he said.

More than anything else, that little step smacked me in the heart, but there was nothing I could do about it. Frank worked for the building. I tried to remember why I had come down to speak to him.

“What about Len?” I said finally. “I really need to get hold of him, there’s something he needs to know, and I haven’t seen him for at least two weeks and now I can’t get him on the phone.”

Frank looked up at the ceiling as if he had to find the nerve to keep up the nasty edge, and it was hiding somewhere up there, in the corner maybe. “Like I said, it’s not my job—” he started, still bristling.

“Okay, I got it, Frank! If you see him, tell him I need to talk to him, and it’s
important,”
I hissed. Frank turned all red, like I had really hurt his
feelings. Like most nice people, he was terrible at being mean; he didn’t know how to pull it off and he also didn’t know how not to be hurt when someone was mean back. So of course I felt ashamed of myself immediately. It is no fun picking on nice people; I don’t know why anyone ever does it, honestly.

Back up in my apartment, with no idea what I was doing, I did my best to fertilize and feed the dying moss. In the corner of the kitchen, Len had stashed dozens of plant nutrients—potassium, nitrogen, magnesium, something with an oxidized-silicate formula, arsenic, and bromides—all of which had different functions. His main supply of plant foods came in little glass bottles with droppers, and you had to mix them up into various solutions before you poured them into a thing that looked like an IV lead, which fed into the water supply. It took me three hours of following the pictures on the backs of the boxes and putting that information together with what I had seen Len do the few times I had watched him work in there before I felt like I might be making progress. I couldn’t tell if I was giving any of the plants the right amount of these different versions of fertilizer, but since I still couldn’t find Len—his phone just rang and rang whenever I tried him—I was left with my own haphazard guesswork.

After two days of working on the moss with mixed results, I decided I’d better get help.

I took the express train from Seventy-second Street to Park Slope, where the Eastern Parkway stop lets you off right at the front gate of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. When I told the man in the ticket booth that I was looking for Charlotte Colbert, he didn’t even make me buy a ticket, he just directed me to the conservatory, where another cheerfully helpful employee pointed me toward a side room that held a subdivision of bonsai trees.

The bonsai room was bright and hot and full of light. Long wooden tables along the walls held a series of bonsai trees, each more surreal than the last. There was a tiny maple with a whorled trunk and perfect five-point leaves, a miniature stand of beech trees with whittled bark, a tiny juniper with elegantly twirling branches. An impossibly miniature dogwood gracefully presented fresh miniature pink blossoms. An ancient
bald cypress, I learned from the metal plaque on its base, was over three hundred years old. Even though there were no other visitors, it took me a moment to locate Len’s daughter, Charlie; she had drifted into a tiny alcove just off the main display area, her entire attention focused on a miniature pine tree, which she was pruning with extraordinary care. As Charlie looked up, in the same plant-induced daze I had seen on Len’s face, I realized that all of the trees in the room were growing in trays covered in moss.

“Can I help you?” she said, not recognizing me.

“Hi, I’m Tina, Tina Finn? I met you at your dad’s apartment.”

“My father?” She didn’t actually perk up at this; what she did was more the opposite. She set her pruning shears on the table and looked down as if trying to decide whether or not to say something she might regret. “What about him?”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Who are you again?” Charlie folded her arms over her chest. When I first met her in the foyer of Len’s apartment, she had struck me as a sort of friendly soldier. The friendly part of the equation had, unfortunately, evaporated.

“I live in his building, and he keeps his moss in my apartment, and I haven’t been able to get hold of him for, well, a while. Have you heard from him?”

Charlie continued to consider me like a piece of stinkgrass. “No,” she finally said, turning back to her miniature pine tree, as if that was all I could possibly expect out of her.

“Well, if you do hear from him, could you ask him to call me? Here, I can write my number down for you,” I offered, trying not to sound too desperate.

“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re doing with my father,” Charlie said, cutting me off. “But you’ve made a colossal mistake if you think I’m going to help you.”

“I’m not doing anything with your father. I’m just helping him with his moss.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard it called that,” she said with a sneer.

“Look,” I retorted. “There are plenty of people who have good reason
to be mad at me, but trust me, you are not one of them. I’m telling you the truth. Why would I make something like this up? The kitchen of my apartment is just covered with moss beds, and the moss is dying because he hasn’t shown up to take care of it for ages. I didn’t even notice at first, because I was not paying attention, but now, I’m telling you, the moss is
dying
. It’s dying and I don’t know how to take care of it and I can’t find Len. Did he go somewhere? Did he take a trip? Do you know where he is? And if you don’t know where he is, can you at least tell me what to
do
? There’s moss around all these little bonsai trees, and you clearly know what you’re doing. I don’t know
what
I am doing and the moss is going to
die
. My mother helped Len take care of the moss before she died. She was … she was a good person.” This statement came out of my mouth so unexpectedly that I suddenly felt overwhelmed. “She took care of his moss. I don’t want it to die.”

While Charlie did not seem impressed, she was at least listening. “So you’re not some sort of hooker?” she asked.

“Why does everyone think that?” I asked, pinching my eyes quickly so she couldn’t see that I was crying.

“I don’t know why other people think that, but the last time I saw you, you were hanging around my dad’s apartment and he handed you hundreds of dollars and then told you to get lost. That would be why
I
think that.”

“That was for the
moss,”
I said, trying not to get too defensive. “Are you going to help me save the stupid moss, or are we just going to let it die?”

Unlike Len, Charlie was not much of a talker. She didn’t say anything on the subway ride back to my apartment, and she didn’t say anything in the elevator, and she didn’t say anything even when I took her into the kitchen, flipped on the lights, and showed her the catastrophic mess that had once been a mossery. She took in the situation from the doorway for a moment, then took a step forward to consider each bed separately. She looked up and over, immediately spotting the open shelf with the itty-bitty gardening implements, as if she knew they would be there because that was the only logical place for them. She picked up a miniature trowel and turned back to the moss, gently pressing
it and her fingers into the edges of the soil, searching for some mysterious force under the surface that I would never understand. She did that for a full minute before I finally asked, “So can you fix this, or are they all going to die?”

“You fed them,” she observed, without answering the question.

“I tried.”

“Do you remember what you did?”

“I did whatever the plant food told me to do,” I said. I started pulling out all the different kinds of plant food and fertilizer from under the table and handing them to her. “He’s got the directions written on the top of the containers, so I tried to do what they said, but who knows? I didn’t know if I should be mixing everything up or putting it on top of the moss or underneath it, and he has these little spiky things, so I thought maybe I should dig holes in the beds and then put the food in the hole or something. I was kind of making it up as I went along.”

“Yes, I see,” Charlie said, opening one of the little plastic containers and rubbing the black stuff between her fingers. She held her finger up to her nose, breathing it in quietly, and then she tasted it with the tip of her tongue. She looked at another container in her hand, then glanced back at the moss. “Okay,” she said. “Can you get me a ham sandwich?”

“A ham sandwich?”

“Yeah, I’m kind of hungry. There’s got to be some sort of deli around here. I’d like a ham sandwich.”

“Oh. Sure. I’m just, I guess I assumed that people like you were vegetarians.”

“No,” she said, and went back to work.

Three hours later, I was lying on the little bed in my bedroom, reading a passably interesting mystery novel about some detective who was as screwed-up as the killers he was chasing. He drank too much and had trouble opening up to people, and he had a cynical weariness that came from seeing too much suffering, and he distrusted women, who all found him irresistibly sexy. In short, he was such a dead ringer for Pete Drinan that I could not help but wonder if they taught those specific qualities in detective school. I picked up one of the photo albums from the lost room and looked at the pictures of the young Pete and Doug when they were in
high school and grinning at the camera with all the money and good looks that New York privilege could buy. How could someone who grew up in the swankest apartment in New York and whose brother was some sort of big-deal egghead at the Dalton School end up in the NYPD?

“You’re all right for now,” Charlie announced, standing in the doorway.

I shoved the photo album back into its hiding place between the bed and the wall. Her eyes flickered as she watched me, but she didn’t comment. Like Len, she apparently was not interested in anything in that apartment except the moss. She took a half step into the room and held out a sheet of lined notebook paper with tidy rows of information neatly inscribed in tight handwriting. “You need to make sure there’s enough water in the pumps every morning and then add the minerals and fertilizers according to this schedule. You did a pretty good job faking your way through this.”

“Then you think we can save most of it?”

She shrugged; it was a stupid question, but she seemed used to dealing with people who didn’t understand plants. “Moss is pretty sturdy,” she explained. “It goes dormant when humidity or ground conditions become hostile to growth. How long was it, that the water was turned off?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe two weeks? Len always just came down and worked there every few days and then he … stopped.”

That was the information she was after. She folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb, acting like she didn’t give a shit, but her crazy eyes were thinking.

“And you tried to get hold of him.”

“I called him and I went up there and knocked on the door a bunch of times. I think he’s in there, but he didn’t answer. And he’s not answering the phone, obviously. I mean, I wouldn’t have come looking for you if he had. Is something going on with him?”

Charlie lifted her arms into the air, clasped them backward over her head, then let them float to her sides. It made her look really tall, like a tree spirit, standing in the doorway of my strange little room with the sunset on the wall and the stars and planets glued to the ceiling. Then she twisted swiftly back and forth at the waist and bent forward until her
hands touched the ground in front of her, doing a few yoga stretches while she considered how much to tell me.