Joy For Beginners (15 page)

ON HER WAY BACK to the hotel Sara spotted an Internet cafe and went inside. Settling into a chair, surrounded by the warmth of the room and the gentle clacking of the keyboards around her, she addressed an email to her father.

She paused for a moment and then smiled.
I have an idea,
she wrote.

Then she clicked “send” and walked out into the rest of her trip.

H
adley’s house was small, bought almost four years before with the money from her husband’s life insurance policy, the one that listed “automobile accident” but never told you about the red of a car slamming out of its lane, the way life couldn’t be insured, only paid for. The way the future could become a bank of clouds you couldn’t fly over.

The real estate agent had shown her the house, nonchalant in her certainty that Hadley would say no. The house had, to be sure, seen better days, and even from the outside the shape suggested that the original architect had perhaps not been one at all. But for Hadley the house had been perfect, its main entrance a side one, hidden by an arbor drenched in climbing roses. Loneliness would look for a front door, Hadley thought, might not track her down the narrow bark-covered path, might get lost among the unruly green, the whispered distractions of sweet white scents. She’d paint the door, her door, a quiet blue, she decided, even before she opened it and saw inside the house.

It was a house too small for ceremony, marriage or otherwise. A side porch just big enough for taking off gardening boots, and then instantly the kitchen with its old milk-paint cupboards rising to the ceiling and an ancient apron sink with rust marking the well-worn path of water dripping from faucet to drain. An afterthought of a table with one chair nestled into a corner next to a 1930s range. A checkerboard floor of faded red-and-white linoleum, the edges of the tiles catching gently on the soles of Hadley’s shoes. Beyond that, a child-sized living room looking out to a tangled mass of garden, a footnote of a bathroom, and a bedroom with a twin bed pushed against the wall to make space for a tiny dresser.

“It doesn’t even fit a real bed,” the real estate agent had said, shaking her head in disbelief.

Sean had been tall; a queen bed was the smallest size they could ever consider. Hadley had spent her three hundred and sixty-three married nights entangled in his limbs as his long legs reached across the mattress, searching for space like vines stretching for the sun. After the funeral Hadley had begun sleeping with pillows packed around her; it kept her from moving, waking into the recognition of his absence.

“A twin bed is fine,” Hadley answered, ignoring the curiosity on her agent’s face. Her agent was young—not even thirty, her bed still a playground, Hadley thought. No need to tell her it could be otherwise. No need to realize that they were likely the same age.

But as Hadley looked around the house, she found she was drawn to its diminutive proportions, the way each piece of furniture fit into a nook like the living quarters of a sailboat. A safe place, out of the weather. You could even pretend you were sailing forward.

“Are you seriously interested?” the agent asked.

“Let’s see the garden,” Hadley responded, as she headed back through the kitchen. But she already knew.

 

HADLEY’S FRIENDS AT WORK had thought it strange that she bought a house. It seemed so conservative and grown-up, inconsistent with the fun-loving Hadley they had known who worked in marketing and went kayaking and biking with her boyfriend, then husband, on the weekends. It seemed odd for a woman to settle down and buy a house after her husband died. In their universe, the order was usually reversed, and preferably with a long lag time between one and the other.

But for Hadley it had all been perfectly clear. When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order simply to move forward through their days. If that suspension faltered, if you truly understood, even if only for a moment, that human beings were made of bones and blood that broke and sprayed with the slightest provocation, and that provocation was everywhere—in street curbs and dangling tree limbs, bicycles and pencils—well, you would fly for the first nest in a tree, run flat-out for the first burrow you saw.

But her friends still saw everything the old way; they crossed streets against the lights, ate hot dogs from the corner vendor who everybody knew didn’t throw out his unsold product at the end of the day. It was more than Hadley could bear, to watch them. More than she could bear to sit at her desk and remember the woman who used to sit there, the woman who had a husband and who kayaked and biked on the weekends. When her boss called her into his office to offer her a leave of absence, she agreed, except she made it a permanent one. She had money saved up, for the trip she and Sean had been planning to South America. And there was more left from the insurance; the house was small, not expensive. She didn’t need much. She wasn’t planning on doing anything. One more move and she could be done.

 

SEAN’S MOTHER HAD COME to the apartment, sobbing, to take whatever of his childhood Hadley hadn’t hidden in the back of dresser drawers, in the cabinet above the refrigerator.

“I know you loved him, honey,” her mother-in-law said, her voice made greedy by loss, “but surely you can’t want these things from when he was little. When he was my boy.”

And Hadley, looking at her mother-in-law’s raw and jagged grief, couldn’t say yes, she did. Couldn’t tell her about the nights when she had worn Sean’s high school track and field letter jacket and nothing else, Sean laughing at how very much of her it covered, making hopelessly awful jokes about hurdles and endurance and pole vaulting as he undid the snaps, one by one. Couldn’t say she wanted Sean’s silver baby cup for the child that would not be conceived.

In the end, however, there had been relatively few things that Hadley brought with her to the new house. After her mother-in-law had left and the apartment returned to silence it seemed as if each object Hadley picked up was suddenly freighted with the heaviness of hidden fists, ready to sucker punch. A toothbrush, its bristles splayed with use. A magazine with the corner of a page turned down. The bowls, red when all the rest of their plates were white, because Sean said cereal deserved a happy color. After she had answered the phone that evening when everything changed, she’d tried to eliminate the reminders. She took the black T-shirt and jeans she had been wearing and convinced the funeral home director to sneak them in with Sean’s body just before the cremation. She stayed far away from the smells of roasting chicken and lemons, smashed the dinner plates that had been set out on the table, dropping them extravagantly from the third-floor apartment window until the landlord agreed that it might be best if she were allowed to break her lease as well.

But it had turned out that reminders were like dandelions; yanking one out only seemed to grow dozens, and Hadley had found herself putting one item after another out on the curb in front of her apartment building. They were always gone by morning.

SHE HAD MOVED into her new house, bought plates and a twin bed at a garage sale, borrowing other people’s lives, and sat on the couch in the living room for months, drinking tea and watching the garden encroach, welcoming the feeling that she was surrounded, getting smaller, buried like an acorn under the leaves.

A friend from college passed through town.

“Dear Lord, darling,” she said, looking out the living room window at the garden. “They’re going to need the Jaws of Life to get you out of here.” A Freudian slip. It was astonishing how often they showed up, Hadley thought, as if Sean’s death was an uneven step people couldn’t help tripping on.

But Hadley didn’t mind the unruly nature of her garden. She was safe; there wasn’t a car in the world that could blast through that wall of green. She could feel the garden reaching out its arms to protect her.

 

HADLEY HAD BEEN MAKING toast one Saturday morning in early summer when she heard a van grumbling up the driveway next door. The house had been built on speculation, the freshly laid sod around it as plain as her own garden was overgrown.

Hadley stepped out the kitchen door and heard the sound of a young boy’s voice, muffled at first by the closed windows of a car, then let loose into the world.

“Mom, look! It’s a secret garden!”

And within a moment, she heard the sounds of something large and heavy being dragged across the yard and landing hard against her fence.

“Tyler!” a woman’s voice called out. “What are you doing?”

“Looking!”

Hadley heard the boy’s voice muttering as the object shifted against the fence, and then a head popped over the top of the boards. The face looked to be about six years old, towheaded, both hair and skin showing the remains of a peanut butter sandwich. The boy stared at Hadley, who stared back.

“I live here now,” the boy said, finally.

“So do I,” replied Hadley.

The boy looked about. “I think there are fairies in your garden.”

“Maybe.” Hadley had to admit there had been times she’d had the same thought, usually late at night, when a scent she couldn’t identify floated in the open kitchen door.

“I’m sorry.” A woman’s head joined the boy’s, a newborn cradled against her shoulder. “Is he bothering you?” she said, nodding toward her son.

“Not at all,” replied Hadley, feeling the wheel of politeness creak slowly into motion.

The woman’s smile was relieved.

“I’m Sara,” she said. “The ringmaster of this traveling circus. This is my son Tyler, and that’s my husband, Dan.” She nodded across the yard toward the house, where a young man, another baby in his arms, was trying to open the front door of the house for the movers.

“We thought we’d be in the house before the twins came,” Sara said, a bit apologetically, but whether the apology was to Hadley or the babies, Hadley couldn’t tell.

 

ONE MORNING, about a week after Sara and Dan moved in, Hadley had been trying to muscle open a reluctant living room window when she heard the babies crying next door, first one, and then both. Hadley went outside and looked over the fence. Across her neighbor’s yard, she saw Sara through the curtainless living room window, walking in her bathrobe, holding a nursing baby in one arm, while attempting to balance the other on her shoulder. Hadley started to draw back from the intimacy of the scene but she saw Tyler at the window, looking out toward Hadley’s house. He spotted her and waved.

Hadley found herself walking across the grass in Sara’s yard, the damp blades cool against the soles of her bare feet. Tyler came and opened the back door.

“The babies have been awake forever,” he said simply.

Hadley entered the living room; Sara saw her and merely nodded, any personal need to apologize for the bedlam of her household long gone in the fog of her exhaustion.

Hadley crossed the room and took the extra baby—the boy, she figured, seeing the blue sleeper-suit. She brought the small body up to her shoulder, patting his back. He smelled soft and warm, like flour that had been left in the sun. She could feel the waves of his sobs as the sound blasted near her ear. Instinctively, she took him outside, where the fresh air startled him momentarily into stillness.

“That’s a good boy,” Hadley said, rubbing his back. “See how nice it is.”

Tyler followed her and stood, his hand touching her elbow.

“That’s Max,” he commented. “The other one’s Hillary. They cry a lot.”

“Well,” Hadley responded, thinking about it. “It must be hard not to be able to talk. Do you remember what that was like?”

Tyler shook his head.

“Me neither,” said Hadley. “But I bet it’s lousy.”

She moved her feet gently, back and forth in rhythm with the breeze outside. The baby burrowed into the warmth of her body, settling against her chest, his head resting on her shoulder. Every once in a while the shudder of an almost-forgotten sob ruffled his body and she would press her hand against his back, letting his movement sink into her body.

“I’m going to check on Mom. I’ll tell her you’re okay,” Tyler said, his voice grown-up and companionable.

Hadley walked the baby over to her yard. The roses cascaded off the wooden arbor in huge curtains of white. She opened the gate and walked inside the garden, over to an old blue garden chair that was just barely holding its own against the overgrowth of ivy. Holding the baby firmly with one arm, she bent over and swept off a layer of dried leaves and sat down, sinking into the deep embrace of the chair. The garden was quiet; soft, forgotten scents filtered down from the arbor and up through the overgrowth around her. The baby relaxed, his body lowering into sleep. She could feel the heat of his body against her chest as he sank deeper, the way the warmth seemed to open her ribs, leave room for her lungs.