After You (17 page)

31

M
y arm is finally set for liberation the week before Sophie’s birthday. She comes with me to the hospital, eager to see how they will manage to chop off the fiberglass without chopping off my limb.

“How will you know to stop?” she asks the doctor, who, within ten seconds of me sitting on the patient’s table, already has his blade out. “You know like how magicians saw people in half? Wouldn’t it be cool if you cut off Auntie Ellie’s arm but it wasn’t bloody or anything? And we could just take it home. I would take it everywhere, and be like, see, this is my Auntie Ellie’s arm. Want to shake it?”

Her excitement flows off her in waves, and she bounces in the pink high-topped Converse that she’s taken to wearing during this nonuniformed summer break. The doctor demonstrates how the blade can’t hurt me, that the cast will catch the safety before it can cut flesh; I still don’t like the idea of it being so close to my skin. I begin to sweat, and I make Sophie hold my other hand, the good hand, the one I will leave here with today, no matter what.

The doctor, a young Brit, with surprisingly perfect teeth and a wedding ring, powers up the saw. The noise is piercing. The dentist’s drill is nothing in comparison to this spinning blade, which is not much bigger than an electric toothbrush. It’s way too small to make so much noise.

“Stop!” I yell, to make myself heard above the churning engine. I don’t want that thing anywhere near me. “I think my arm needs more time to heal. It still hurts. Let’s leave the cast on. I want to leave it on.”

“Sit back and relax. I promise, I won’t chop off your arm,” the doctor says, polite enough not to laugh in my terrified face. Sophie squeezes my hand—she’s scared, too—and I realize suddenly that this may not have been a smart move, taking her here. “Just look at your beautiful little girl and concentrate on her instead.”

So I do, I look at Sophie and don’t bother to correct the doctor’s possessive. It happens too often these days, anyhow, to keep correcting. Even though she called me Auntie right in front of him, he wants to see a mother and daughter. Everyone seems to do that, fill in a parental relationship for the sake of convenience. Like we are one of those psychological tests where you can read the sentence even though most of the words are missing.

Sophie and I make eye contact, and I hold her gaze; neither of us watches as the saw spins and churns its way through the fiberglass.

Of course, the doctor doesn’t chop off my arm. Doesn’t even snag the skin. But the noise—like a scream, because it’s all I can hear—and the spinning blade, and the final cracking of the cast with something like reverse pliers, leaves me shaking and breathless. My arm, when it is finally rerevealed to the world, is shrunken, scaly, and heavy and light at the same time. A puny, useless thing, like a dead fish.

“Peeyooo, you stink!” Sophie says in glee, maybe even happier than I am that I still have two arms. “It’s like your arm farted.”

“It’s from sweating under the cast. A quick shower will take care of that in no time.” The doctor is kind, a child himself, no more than twenty-five. He makes me clench my fist, wiggle my fingers. Puts my new X ray up on the light board.

“You see that fine white line,” he says to Sophie as much as to me. She’s much more interested in the medical side of all of this; I just want to take my arm and go. “That’s the fracture point. That line is going to be there for a while. Like an internal scar.”

“Why?” Sophie asks.

“The body needs to remember where it has been broken. Even though the bone has fused, it still needs time. Healing doesn’t happen overnight.”

“Well, unless you die, right? Then you heal immediately. You don’t go to heaven all bloody and scarred, do you? Do you?”

The doctor catches my eye above Sophie’s head, not the
save me
look Greg gave me over dinner the other day, but the alarm-bell look, the one that says
this kid better be in therapy
.

“Of course not, Soph,” I say, jumping in, because if the doctor isn’t careful about what he says here, we may be looking at nightmares for another two years. “That’s what’s so special about heaven. Everything is all better. No blood, or guts, or any of that gross stuff. No casts in heaven, or stinky arms for that matter.”

I move my arm toward her so she is forced to jump away to avoid smelling my sweaty flesh.

“Eewww, stop, please stop,” she says, laughing and holding her nose, her attention successfully averted.

The doctor runs through his tests and gives me a few exercises to strengthen my atrophied muscles. Sophie gets a gold-star sticker and a lollipop, “for being patient with the patient,” and the cast, too, because she wants to keep her drawings, and I get my arm back. I keep looking at it, like it’s a phantom limb. I still don’t recognize it as my own.

“Off you go,” the doctor says to us. “Almost as good as new.”
Almost, but not really
, I think, picturing the fine white line that if I could strip off my flesh would be visible to the naked eye. Everyone would be able to see the exact spot where I’ve been broken.

32

O
nly one chapter from the end of
The Secret Garden
. We will finish today and end this two-hundred-page project at the real Secret Garden, the actual place where Frances Hodgson Burnett once lived and later wrote the book about, when she was homesick while living across the pond in a house on Long Island. Greg and I have arranged for a private tour of the grounds in honor of Sophie’s birthday—no easy feat, considering the land is not open to the public. The manor house has been transformed into lush carpeted flats for retired aristocrats, who get the distinct pleasure of spending their final years puttering and rambling on the moors. But when I called and pled, the estate manager listened to my story—it turns out he had read about the “murdered American journalist” in the tabloids, a “tragedy,” he had said, “she was quite the looker,” he had said—and was moved by Sophie’s desire to see the place firsthand.

I explained that the book is no longer just a book to us, and he seemed to intuit that we were not mere tourists, looking for a fancy picnic spot. We were on a pilgrimage to the motherland, the novel having been elevated to biblical proportions, one-stop shopping for entertainment, philosophy, comfort, guidance. I didn’t tell him that in our free time we play “Secret Garden,” a game Sophie has designed, where we each pretend to be different characters and act out the scenes in the backyard.

“I get to be Mary this time,” Sophie said yesterday, when we took advantage of a bout of afternoon sun and wandered into the patch of grass behind the house.

“But you were Mary last time.”

“Yeah, but I’m the kid here.” She had a fair point.

“Fine. Then I’ll play Susan Sowerby, mother to fourteen beautiful children and wisest woman on the moor.”

“Which scene should we do? When Susan brings fresh bread and milk to the kids playing in the garden?”

“Sure. Just promise you won’t laugh at my Yorkshire accent. Aye, nowt, tha’ mun take it from tha’ top.”

Now it’s 0800 hours on Saturday—I have embraced the British use of military time—and Operation Perfect Birthday starts without a hitch. Sophie’s favorite people have been gathered: Greg, Mikey, Claire, and Inderpal (whose parents have become big fans of Greg’s since he stood up to the headmistress; based on their enthusiasm about today’s events, it seems like Inderpal gets invited to birthday parties about as often as Sophie). We are all buckled in and ready to go in this rented minivan, snacks and lunch packed and presents in the “boot;” Greg, in the front seat, chauffeuring; me next to him, as navigator. I feel in charge and in control, a supergodmother at the helm.

Sophie and Inderpal are in the first row, just behind us, and Claire and Mikey sit in the back, the two of them still at that stage where all their seams need to be in constant contact. Whenever they kiss, the kids—and, yes, sometimes Greg, and I—bring them back from oblivion with loud and immature heckling: “Gross!”

Now that the arrangements have been sorted—we will tour, then picnic and read—the anticipation is palpable and electric in the minivan; we are buzzing with
are we there yet?s
. When I told Sophie my plan for her birthday, she was equal parts excited and relieved: “Seriously? The real Secret Garden? And I can invite whoever I want? They don’t have to be kids? Are you having a laugh?” My mother would probably say I’m skirting the issue, that we should force Sophie to interact more with other children. Not sure what the “right thing” is here, I just know that if I were to stop time and freeze this shot, zoom in on Sophie in her front seat, she is smiling in anticipation and as far away as she can get from the looming darkness and trench-coated shadows.

And seeing, being in, the actual Secret Garden? I have no doubt there will be magic there, or Magic, as it is referred to in the book—what I have come to think of as a child’s word for God. The God I don’t believe in, but have no trouble summoning up and bargaining with when the need arises.

“So there’s this boy named Dickon, and he has this way with animals and people and birds and everything, and he is only thirteen but everyone loves him. And once Mary discovers the key to the garden, they become best friends, and he helps Mary make things grow,” Sophie says, with animation and delight, the look she always gets when we talk about our favorite book. “And guess what? No one has been in the garden for, like, ten years, since Colin’s mum died in there, which was really sad. And Colin, see, he’s Mary’s cousin, and he lives in the big house on the moor too. And he thinks he’s disabled and hunchbacked, and he never gets to leave his room. But then—”

Sophie stops, dramatic pause, an effect I have no doubt she learned from her mother. Lucy told a mean story, every encounter spun into comedy or tragedy, the learned narrator’s punctuation of desperate beats and cheap punch lines.

“Then he meets Mary, and she takes him to the Secret Garden. And they all get fresh air and gain back their appetites and become like children again,” Sophie says.

“And the wheelchair,” Inderpal cuts in, apparently well versed in this classic as well. “Remember, they call Colin a rajah because he acts all like an Indian prince and stuff. That’s what they called princes in India. Rajahs.”

“Right. But Colin doesn’t need a wheelchair. He’s just convinced himself that he does, because he’s been told all his life he’s sick. He’s not, though! He’s not! He’s perfectly fine. He’s a perfectly fine little boy. Like everyone else. That’s the best part, when they turn out to be just like everyone else. All they need is food and fresh air and some time in the garden.”

Sophie looks over to me in the front passenger seat, for approval. I give her a big grin.

“Exactly, Soph. Great summary.”

“And Mary actually gets pretty from doing all that good stuff for her. She starts out all sad and sickly and ugly, but then she gets a little fatter and stuff, and by the end she’s a pretty little girl.” Sophie takes off her glasses and cleans them with her T-shirt. “And my favorite thing is, she makes friends. People stop not liking her.”

We drive through Kent, a region called the “Garden of England,” and stare out the window at the rolling green fields that cause a hush after breaking free of London’s sprawling metropolis. This is the other England, the England of those BBC miniseries Phillip always makes fun of me for watching on PBS, ninety-five percent of which are adaptations of Jane Austen novels. I imagine all of the women here wearing late-eighteenth-century gowns, their busts bound and blooming, spending their evenings twirling away at neighborhood balls, sizing up potential husbands in a choreographed dance. Hands meet, palms barely touching, and the rest of the candlelit room blurs away. No matter that she has a measly dowry and he’s a rich nobleman. By the final scene, they’ll figure it out.

I do understand that this world has been updated—I even saw a woman walking by wearing 7 For All Mankind jeans and designer wellies—yet still I imagine life here is somehow better. I can picture myself living in one of the tiny stone cottages, with an antique four-pronged chimney—chimneys are as much a part of the landscape here as the monochromatic grass—and roaming my impossibly green farm. I’d befriend the horses and cows and sheep. Become an animal whisperer. Someone, too, who could have a long conversation about the growth of my anemones and the best fertilizers.

“Look, Dad, sheeps!” Sophie exclaims, as we pass a farm with about fifty roaming fluff balls. I grab my camera and take a picture. They look placed there for our amusement, a postcard image of what the English countryside is supposed to look like. “What are those numbers on their sides?” Sophie’s eyes are already filled with water, waiting.

“Just to keep track of them, love. So another neighboring farm can’t steal them,” Greg says.

“They aren’t going to become, you know, food, are they?” she asks, her optimism willing her tears to retreat.

“Of course not,” Greg says. “They shave them for wool, that’s all.”

I try to catch his eye, to see if he is lying. Are these the animals that go into my lamb kebabs? Greg refuses to look me in the eye, though, and that tells me everything I need to know.

At 1100 hours we pull off a windy country road and arrive at Great Maytham Hall, which is what the Brits call, in typical understated style, a manor house and what I would call a mansion. Enormous and made of faded red brick, the place unfolds on both sides, giving the impression that it has been extended from the center building twice, construction that must have happened about a century ago. The driveway stretches across the expanse of the front lawn straight to the middle of the house, and as we get closer and closer, the building grows in front of us until we are right there, parked at the mammoth front door. I feel dwarfed by the scale.

We start the festivities on the front lawn, enjoying the cupcakes I brought as a mid-morning snack, a resting moment that only heightens the anticipation for what’s next. I have three, fast and in a row, stopping only to admire how pretty they are—pink tops, yellow stars. My speed and nervous hunger just outpace my dizziness from the intestinal country roads.

“Auntie Ellie?” Sophie walks up next to me and takes my hand. “Do you think things will be better in there?”

She points to the house—which has, at first count, at least ten chimneys and thirty windows in masterly symmetry and too belongs in a BBC miniseries. Sophie, though, means just beyond: our garden out back.

“Like, do you reckon being in the garden will make us feel better?” she asks.

“What do you mean?” But I know exactly what she means. She is hoping to find some answers and some peace among the four ivied walls and the rosebushes. She wants to know how she can stare down evil every single night in her dreams and yet pretend to be a normal kid during the day. How she can wake up every morning to a world without her mother and still get dressed and brush her teeth and eat Weetabix. Or maybe she’s asking the universal question that’s reflexive when the world seems too heavy for our given pair of slim shoulders:
Why me?

I hope she is not asking for something more: that her mother will somehow reappear in the garden. If Colin can walk out of his wheelchair, surely people can rise from the dead there, re-souled and blood-filled, resurrected and ready to resume the reins of parenthood. Has Sophie been led astray by the false hopes of magic? The world is full of happy tricks—quarters hidden behind ears, flowers tucked into sleeves, love, love, love—but there will be no miracles here today. The Virgin Mary will not be etched in the mold of our sandwiches. I don’t know how old you have to be to understand that when mothers or babies die, they stay that way. Worse, that those left behind don’t get their shot at redemption, no matter how hard we reach for it. No matter how many oceans we cross.

Nine is too young. So is thirty-five.

In fact, I would love to be finally rid of all of my empty promises and my fake God-bartering. I am exhausted by my pile of empty vows.

I’ll do anything if you’ll bring Lucy back to Sophie
.

Empty, nonsensical promises of sacrifice that echo ones I made, but never kept, almost two years earlier.

I promise to die if you’ll bring Oliver back
.

I promise to do anything you want if you’ll bring Oliver back
.

Take me. Not him. Take anyone else but him. Please, please
.

Last week I found Sophie on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by a photograph of her mother taken by me three Fourth of Julys ago, a credit-card receipt with Lucy’s signature, and an old hairbrush, Lucy’s strands pulled out and collected in a small heap. Sophie’s magic kit was open, and she was circling her black cardboard wand above the pile of junk—or now, in the wake of loss, Sophie’s salvaged treasure.

I had been in the exact same spot once before. Two days after Oliver died, Phillip found me in our living room, surrounded by one hundred chain letters addressed to our wedding invite list. I was guaranteed, somewhere in the not-so-fine print, that if I mailed the note one hundred times,
all of my wishes would come true
. One hundred first-class stamps, one hundred copies at Kinko’s, the embarrassment and shame of having one hundred of our closest friends and family open up a chain letter from me, seemed a small price to pay for a shot at my wish. I didn’t even need
all
of them granted. Just the one. A sucker is born every day out of grief.

When Phillip asked what I was doing, I lied, even though I knew he already knew. I could see it in the line between his eyebrows, a line now permanently etched there. The body needs to remember where it has been broken, the doctor said.

So when Sophie asks her question, do I think things will be better in our Secret Garden, I don’t need to Google to know what I should say. I give her the truth, even though my answer will make Frances Hodgson Burnett turn over in her grave on Long Island.

“I don’t think so, Soph. It’s just going to be, you know, a garden. Nothing more.”