The Best I Could (20 page)

She shrugged.

Dipping my head, I caught her eyes. “But
that’s not the only reason, huh?”

She returned to the weeds. “I’ve got work to
do.”

Setting the coffee mug on the lawn, I bent
next to her. “I don’t know shit about this kind of stuff, but tell
me what to do, and I’ll help.”

She glanced at me. “And if I don’t want your
help?”

“Then I’ll just start pulling up the
bushes.”

She snorted, her lips pressed together in an
attempt to suppress her laughter. “I’m having a hard time picturing
you gardening. I see you as the dark bars and women type.”

“That’s me back in Atlanta. You get the
‘forced into the country’ Eli. It’s still the same church no matter
where you visit it.”

Her laugh escaped, full, throaty, and loud.
“Do women really fall for the church line?”

“I’ve only tried it on you, but I have no
doubt they would. Now,” I nodded at the bushes, “what do I do?”

Holding up a stringy-looking plant, she told
me, “You want to pull these up, being extra careful the closer you
get to the azaleas. Try pulling the weeds up first, but if that
doesn’t work, there’s a trowel near the stairs to get to the roots.
There are gloves, too. Sometimes I use them when the weeds are too
prickly. It’s best to do any weeding when it’s wet, so the rain
last night made this an ideal day to do it. Remove any old leaves
or mulch, too, when you see it.”

As she talked, her face grew animated,
glowing beneath the darkening sunburn. She was definitely going to
peel.

“You really like this stuff, huh?” I
asked.

“Yeah.” She leaned over, threw some shriveled
leaves out of the flower bed, and said, “Don’t ask me why. I don’t
really know. It calms me, I guess. I see the dirt and the leaves
and the flowers, and I start to think about the earth, about how
this entire planet is just really one big garden—the parts that
aren’t covered by water—and I suddenly feel connected to people
everywhere, to life, to this idea that the more beautiful we make
things, the better everyone is, you know?”

Water soaked into the knees of my jeans as I
sank to the ground, my hands joining hers in the flower bed.
Tugging, pulling, and digging. “I can see that.”

Her shoulders sagged. “The past few years,
especially lately, I feel like I’m playing tug of war with the
world. Like I’m drawing things and people into my life, and then
shoving them away.”

I thought about the way she straddled me the
other night in the orchard compared to the offhand way she looked
at me this morning. “I hadn’t noticed.”

She elbowed me. “I’m not trying to be that
way.”

“I’ve got nothing against it, roof girl. It’s
habit for you. I get that. I push people away all of the time. The
whole jerkitude thing, remember? After a while, you just don’t
realize you’re doing it anymore.”

We worked in silence, the words hanging
between us. The pile of weeds grew, and I suddenly saw them the way
Tansy did. With each weed, we yanked the bad stuff out of the
garden. The garbage away from the pretty.

“This is about as far as you can get from a
bar, huh?” she asked on a laugh.

Not missing the insinuating joke, I
stiffened. “I’m not an alcoholic.”

She paused, her gaze settling on my face.
“That conversation you had with your mother and Mandy last night …
you said they were the reason you’ve been in treatment for alcohol
twice?”

Sitting back, I let my gaze meet hers. “My
mother has some emotional issues. I’m sure you’ve noticed. She sees
therapists when we can get her to go. She cries a lot. She needs
people to see her all of the time, to notice everything about her,
to pamper her, to tell her how beautiful she is, and to put her
above any other problems they might have because hers is more
important.” I glanced at the house. “She had just broken up with
one of her boyfriends late one night—she’s always in a
relationship—and she called me crying. ‘I need you, Eli,’ she said.
I’d had a few beers, told her I didn’t need to drive, but she
insisted. I wasn’t drunk, but I’d had enough I didn’t want to get
caught on the roads. It was late, and there was a road block.”

I shook my head. “The second time, I was at a
party when a guy I knew called to tell me he’d seen my girlfriend
making out with some guy. At the time, I didn’t know it was my
cousin. I was supposed to crash at my friend’s place, but after the
call, I wanted to get home. Again, I’d had a few beers, and I was
speeding.”

A breath huffed out of me. “I deserved to get
pulled over both times. I get that, but I’m not an alcoholic. A
drinker? Sure. Smoker? Yeah. Alcoholic? No. And I’m not in denial.
I really don’t drink that often.”

“Just unlucky, huh?” Tansy asked. “And it
gives you more of a reason to dislike women.”

“Not to trust them,” I corrected, my gaze
falling back to hers. “I like them fine.”

“I can see that,” she replied, throwing my
words back at me, a smile playing along her lips. “I think I like
you better for it.”

I laughed, startled. “What?”

“As much as I hate that you were done the way
you were, it shows you have the capacity to be hurt. It means you
had enough in you to care in the first place.”

I stared. “You’re a weird one, roof
girl.”

She pulled a face. “That’s not a new
description of me.” She waved her hand at the garden. “There’s a
lot to do.”

My gaze caught on her dirt-covered hand, and
I squinted. “Hey,” I said, catching her wrist. She tried pulling
away from me, but I held on and flipped her hand over. There, in
the center of her palm, was a shallow wound, red and covered in
soil. “What happened?”

Face flaming, she jerked her wrist out of my
grip. “Nothing. I’m clumsy.”

Being a boxer, I’d seen a lot of wounds over
the years. This wound, being in the center of her palm and a
perfect circle, was methodical.

“What are you doing, Tansy?”

Standing, she glared at me. “Thank you for
your help, but I think I have it from here.”

“Tansy?”

“Leave it, Eli.”

I stood. “Did you do that to yourself?”

She cringed, silence separating us, and then,
“If I told you I did, what would you think?”

My chest tightened, my gaze falling to her
hand, the fist now clenched against her stomach. “I’d ask you if
you’ve done it before.”

“And if I told you I hadn’t? Not like that
anyway.”

My eyes rose to hers. “I’d ask you what made
you start.”

She stumbled away from me. “I can do the rest
of this myself.” Her cold, matter-of-fact voice hit me like a
bucket of frigid water.

“Tansy—”

“Stop,” she insisted, her voice full of tears
that wouldn’t come.

In that moment, that
exact
moment, I broke. I
realized with startling clarity why I shouldn’t have gotten out of
my car that night at the animal rescue, why I shouldn’t have walked
over to the girl in the empty lot and invited her into my life, but
I’d done it. Now I was here, in this moment, and even though I knew
I shouldn’t have let her in, I found I couldn’t regret it. For the
first time, I wasn’t looking at a girl because I wanted to fuck and
leave. I wanted to help a friend, to understand her pain. I wanted
to blame it on being in the country, on boredom and having nothing
to do, but truth was, I liked Tansy.

My hands rose, surrendering. “Hey, we won’t
talk, okay?” I promised. “I’ll just help you pull weeds. No
conversation. Nothing.”

Tansy froze, her kohl-lined eyes staring at
me, wide and suspicious. “No talking?”

“None.”

After a moment, she walked past me, stooped,
and dug in the soil around the azaleas. Birds called to each other.
Bugs buzzed. Wind rattled the leaves.

Slowly, I joined her, keeping a fair distance
between us, my fingers in the soil. The earth spoke in smells and
touch, and even though I didn’t really understand the appeal
gardening had for Tansy, I understood what she meant by the
connection it gave people. Each time she touched the ground a few
feet away from me, I felt it, too. Not physically. Emotionally.

“We all walk on it, you know?” she asked an
hour later.

We’d moved down the side of the house,
pulling weeds from adjoining flower beds.

“The dirt,” she explained. “We walk on it, we
live on it, we die on it, and eventually, we’re buried under
it.”

My mouth remained shut because she was
talking, and I was afraid if I said anything, she’d stop. Tansy
wasn’t weak, but somehow she wasn’t strong either. She wasn’t the
spit and fire personality her sister was, but she was just as angry
as Deena in her own way even if she couldn’t admit it to herself.
She’d turned her anger into something quiet and dangerous.

“My mother was this really loud personality.
So loud that she sort of filled up a space when she was in it,
filled it up so much that if you were inside a room with her, it
felt like the room couldn’t hold her. Like the walls would explode
if they tried to accommodate her,” Tansy continued, glancing at me
and then away. “Our house was like a choir. Mom was the director,
the one conducting the music, and the rest of us sang when she told
us to.”

She inhaled, exhaled, and said, “The choir
fell apart when she left. We became this really terrible group of
people, all of us. But I was the worst.”

Tansy stood, ran her soiled
hands down the back of her shorts, and cringed. “I’ve accused them
all of being like Dad. Jet and Deena … but it was never
them.
I
was the one
like Dad. Like him, I gave up everything when Mom died. Little by
little. My life, my friends, school … just like him. I blamed it on
everyone else. Especially Dad. It was easy to blame it on him, you
know? Because he gave up, and so it was nothing to say he needed me
when really we were both hiding.”

She looked at me, and I stood, slow and
cautious. “Okay … so you hid,” I agreed. “And now? Are you still
hiding?”

“I don’t know,” she
answered. “I don’t think I remember how
not
to hide.”

“You stopped living.”

Her body stiffened, and before she could push
me away again, I rushed to say, “Make up for that now. Live, and
then decide after you start living whether or not you hate it.”

Her eyes met mine. “I’ll make you a deal,
roof boy. I’ll start trying to live if you confront your
mother.”

I winced. “How about I promise to quit
avoiding her?”

She gave that some thought. “Okay.”

Brushing my hands together, I grinned. “How
about we go do some of that living thing now?”

“I have work to do,” she protested, taking a
step away.

Rushing forward, I grabbed her arm, bending
so that my lips rested near her ear. “Come on, roof girl. Blame it
all on me.” Walking, I urged her away from the house to the lane
leading into the orchard. “Remember that pond you saw when you were
here the other day?”

She nodded.

“Let’s go see it.”

Tansy

Life in the city had been about fast moments.
Even locked away in our house after Mom’s death, time flew. Stress
and uncertainty had replaced chaos, but life remained fast. From
one frame of living to the next in a blink. Each blink a new frame.
Like at the theatre when the person upstairs forgets to change the
movie reel, and the screen suddenly becomes a skipping mess of
black and white before going out completely. I kept waiting for
that moment in my life, the one where the black and white appears
right before the end.

I hadn’t counted on slow moments.

Following Eli through the trees, I glanced
back at the house, and asked, “What’s at the pond?”

Eli’s fingers had fallen from my arm to my
hand, holding it as he led me through the orchard. It was the hand
with the wound, the mark throbbing against the heat of his skin.
Sweat pooled between us. If he noticed it, he didn’t care. Rain
from the night before slid down leaves, dripping onto our
heads.

“Remember how I told you I like boats?”

I gazed at the back of his head, at the way
the wind sifted through his brown hair. He had nice hair, just long
enough to run his fingers through it.

“I vaguely remember ticking off a list of
maritime disasters,” I told him.

He snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of
the water.”

We climbed a hill, stopping briefly at the
top. My gaze swept over the valley below, over the sparkling pond
and circling roads.

A tug by Eli, and we were walking, sliding,
and panting forward, the pond growing closer and closer, the heat
making the water look increasingly appealing.

“And if I were afraid of the water?” I
asked.

Eli glanced back at me. “Get ready to face
your fear.”

We walked forever, or so it seemed. Heat,
especially summer heat, made time seem longer than it was,
stretching it with each gasping breath. The closer we got, the more
I noticed. How the grass had browned in places before the rain
came; how much quieter everything was out here than it was back in
the city. My thoughts were too loud here. Maybe that’s what
prompted me to do it, to mark myself in an attempt to release the
pain.

“Look,” Eli said, pointing.

We came around a bend, and the pond opened
up. On the hill, parts of it had been hidden by a copse of trees,
the thick foliage camouflaging the long pier which came into view,
but here we could see everything. On the shore next to the pier, an
old rowboat rested.

We stumbled on, stopping finally at the edge
of the water.

“Is this all your grandfather’s?” I
panted.

Releasing me, Eli knelt, dipped his hands
into the water, cupped the liquid, and then splashed what he
collected over the back of his neck and head.