The Do-Over (27 page)

She felt his whole body stiffen and chose optimism. It couldn’t be just his shoulders, back, and butt that stiffened. Surely, the seductive me-and-my-shadow move worked. She could tell by his discomfort, but he wasn’t giving anything away. He moved sideways to free himself and reached for the towel. “Home. Our bed.”

She remembered the circus-sex conversation that had ended with
come home, blah, blah, blah.
Maybe her sexual mistake, and
sexual mistake
sounded good, was that she never made much of anything that had
sexual
as its prefix. The mistake had been her lack of pursuit of Dan. He’d found her in college, asked her out, and moved the relationship along. She hadn’t known right away that he’d been reeling from heartbreak, but when she did and took a step back, he’d proposed, hadn’t he? And wasn’t it time she proposed something? 

She’d waited for him with good intentions… a push up bra, perfume, the occasional suggestive comment. What she hadn’t done was really initiate. He’d always been the one pursuing when there’d been pursuit, and now it was her turn, her turn to do some hand work.

He moved past her, drawing himself away as if afraid of touching her. “We had this conversation, remember?”

She ran her tongue around her coral cha cha lips. “That was before I was Demi Moore.”

“You make a good Demi.” Celia stood on the stool behind them and curved over, capturing, Mara hoped, a sexy hand photo.

The picture of the three of them, if it could be taken from across the loft, probably looked more awkward than sexy. She sat at the wheel, her hands tilted at odd angles from her body since her shoulders had blocked the light, and she’d needed to shift them. Dan hunched over her back, his own hands over the top of hers, mucked in the clay and requiring an arm position that had to hurt. “A good Demi? Thank you, Celia. I’ve never been known for my hand work, but there are horizons to explore.”

He jerked away from her hands and a wad of clay flew onto the floor.

“Whoa.” Celia put a steadying hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into position. “Don’t move yet.” Celia pulled her hand back and seemed to notice the clay from Dan’s shirt on her hand. She set down the camera and headed for the kitchen sink. “Stay there. I’m not quite done.”

Mara turned her face, inches away from Dan’s and whispered. “Yeah, don’t go anywhere. I’m not done yet either.”

But Dan, the pushy Dan she’d only encountered in Canada, didn’t back down from the threat. “I’ll meet you at our house. Bedroom’s second one on the right. I’ll let you practice your hand work until dawn.”

“Are you bossing me or flirting?”

“Darlin’, I can do both.”

Flirting. He was definitely flirting, and he was good at it. He’d been good at it in college, for a college guy at any rate. Once, outside her dorm room door, he’d left her a beer with a rose duct taped to the side of it. Red rose. Imported beer. She’d forgotten that, how she’d felt getting ready for a date, her twenty-year-old face smiling back at her in the mirror, a rose propped up in a plastic tumbler. Could she still see some of that in herself? In Dan?

Celia stepped onto the stool again, the legs scritching against the floor. “Mara move your pinky up just a little. There.”

It was Celia’s turn to be twenty. That was the way of the world, but maybe Mara would find a beer, and maybe, she felt Dan’s warmth behind her, a glimpse of the man who’d duct-taped a rose.

The door clicked behind Celia, and Dan shot across the room and had his hand on the doorknob before Mara could stop him. “I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

“Dan…”

“We’ll go to the VanDusen Botanical Garden.” He opened the door and backed into the hallway. “The VanDusen Botanical Garden. You really like botanical gardens.”

“Listen,” she tried to narrow the gap between them without seeming to move. He was a darter.

He kept his hand on the door, but it looked less like he was hesitant to leave and more like he wanted to be able to slam the door quickly. “In the morning. It’ll be great. The VanDusen Botanical Garden.”

“Yeah, I got that part. Does the garden have you on the payroll, Dan?” If he said VanDusen Botanical Garden again, she was going to staple his lips to the floor. “I don’t want to see ferns. I want to—”

Then he did it. He slammed the door, slammed it, and she was the darter. She crossed the room to chase him down, but when she hit the edge of her loft, she just didn’t have any more energy for the hunt. She knocked her forehead against the wood, a tap, tap, tap that made her wonder what exactly she’d figured out in eighteen days, and what she could possibly accomplish in the twelve that remained.

Janie had never been a mumbler, but Mara discovered she enjoyed it.

Dan paid the well-heeled volunteer, a patroness of the VanDusen Botanical Garden who was clearly a fern lover. Opera, ferns, prunes. Dan handed the woman more money than Mara had spent on food in days. Of course, she’d mumbled, “coulda paid me for sex.”

Dan, heading out to the gardens, stopped mid-way through the silver-toothed turnstile. “What?”

She smiled, waited for him to give up, and followed him out of the exit and into the green.

VanDusen Botanical sounded stuffy, with static beds labeled in brass plaques and Latin. But in the first pond, water lilies bloomed fuchsia and the carp looked big enough to chomp a man’s hand off. Both the color and the possible danger for Dan cheered her.

They walked along in silence, partly out of wisdom. Why start trouble? And partly out of the need to let the brain work on the visuals. There were so many images soaking in. Weeping willows cascaded over a plant with leaves large enough to lie down on, like frilly edged rugs. Elephant ear maybe. She’d seen a house plant called that, and this undomesticated one had dozens of elephant-sized ears that shaded the edge of a lake. Geese, dwarfed on the banks below it, pecked in the thin grasses.

She took in the rest of the acreage visible from where they stood. Astilbe. She knew those, but not in the shocking shades of red that looked hot enough to make her long to touch them. They were even brighter next to the white ones, maybe the same kind she’d planted when they’d first bought their house. They were similar, but the ones in front of her had grown as tall as trees.

They continued walking the grassy path but didn’t enter the Zen garden. Who would they be kidding stepping in there? Oooh, a rock. Sand. Would she suddenly turn to Dan and assure him she was one with the universe and could peacefully go home and, with her consciousness raised, happily buy facial tissue again.

She studied the stone arch out of the corner of her eye as they moved. Dark curved wood topped the entrance and bore the mark of two Chinese symbols, flowing and lovely in red. She’d once heard that the sign for
crisis
had two characters. Danger and opportunity. She didn’t even know if that was true. The two red slashes on the arch looked gentle and uplifting, but probably held harsh ancient wisdom like
buck up
or
fuck you
or maybe asked an eternal question like
what the?!

Dan slowed his pace, and she realized they’d reached the formal gardens. He’d be thinking, she was sure, that the geometry of green hedge dotted with white roses clustered in threes, would call to her. But tidy didn’t float her boat in a foreign country. In Canada, chilly perfection was not her thing. She brushed her hands along a strip of lavender on her way by, breathed in, but kept moving by the purples and blues of hydrangeas, the chameleons of the garden.

He pointed to a series of wooden trellises ahead, the first marked with one word. It wasn’t in Chinese but was a construction the Egyptians brought back to Greece by way of an ancient traveler. God she hated that she knew that.

“It’s a maze.” He took her hand and walked her down the gravelly path and around the corner to the half-a-city-block of hedge, planted and trimmed into a labyrinth. Its double entrance, an entrance and exit she supposed, wasn’t anything she was going in. She stopped, and their hands jerked apart as Dan kept moving.

He looked back, “what?”

“Why?”

He gave her the
what?
face but didn’t repeat the question.

She walked away from the maze and mounted a set of stone stairs to get a better view. She could tell he waited with a patient expression and a tense body. But it just wasn’t a game she wanted to play. She shielded her eyes from the sun and squinted. “I just think that even if you try really hard to find your way and not get screwed up, sometimes you do, so why would you do it on purpose?”

He sighed, nodded toward the opening. “C’mon.”

She studied the ten foot emerald hedge with its sharp turns. It’d be dark in there. If you were lucky, you’d locate the giant evergreen shooting out of the center. And then you’d know you were officially as lost as you could be.

“It’ll be fun.” He smiled like he wanted to think it would be.

She looked down on him. “What I’m saying is, why the fuck get lost on purpose?”

He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and took out a fifty dollar bill. The pretty pinks and the nice man who needed his eyebrows trimmed motivated her to at least consider it. He waved the money for extra incentive. “Not for sex, but I will pay you to accompany me through the maze because it will, goddammit, be fun.”

She shook her head but smiled. He’d been listening after all, and she could really use the money. She trotted down the stairs, plucked the bill out of his hand, and headed down the narrow corridor of green like it was her idea.

For several turns she heard him behind her, then nothing. When the darkness of clipped green hedge and decision making got to her, she stopped and looked up, the sky so white the brightness made her eyes tear. “Marco!”

She waited and heard a muffled. “Polo.”

“Marco!” She closed her eyes to the sky and heard the direction the next polo came from. “Marco! Marco! Marco!”

He popped into her corridor. “Polo already.” He laughed, and it sounded so much like Logan, she laughed, and put her arms around his neck, an unexpected embrace he held her tightly in response to. They separated, his arm still around her as they stood, shoulders touching the maze walls, looking down to the next corner.

She sighed. “We’re lost.”

He nodded. “It’s a fucking maze.”

She agreed with a snort and studied the options ahead of them. She leaned to the side to get a better view of the turns ahead and felt the give of the hedge beside her. She turned to face the wall and worked her hands into a gap between the narrow branches. She eyeballed the next corridor over. It had promise.

“Isn’t that cheating?”

“Isn’t the goal to find your way?”

He moved down the gravel path toward the set choices ahead, but she stood where she was. “We can follow the rules.” She tipped her head to the gap in the hedge. “Or we can turn left and get out.”

He stopped, body straight ahead, but she passed him, turned left, and felt him follow behind her.

Silence worked for them, she decided, as they headed in the general direction of the garden’s exit. Dan kept an arm lightly across her shoulder, and she relaxed with her arm around his waist. They knew how to walk together.

She wondered if they’d always had the same pace. It might have been why they’d first hit it off, one of those unconscious things that causes daters to believe in love. Or maybe, over time, his stride shortened to match hers, or she’d lengthened her step in adjustment. Maybe they’d both compromised over the years until the past could never be untangled.

Along the path, dark purple spikes, low crawling along the edge of the walkway, kept her eye. The occasional airy fern broke up the burgundy darkness. She’d been right about those. Like an ancient map of the world, the garden was marked,
here there be ferns
.

She sensed the movement of a bird circling overhead and glanced up, but before her eyes reached the sky, she stopped at the giant fronds towering ten feet over them. She forgot about the flight above and studied the plant. Plant, she assumed, even though it did have a short thick trunk, like a palm tree’s but smoother. Six fronds rose out of its crown, all green centered and evenly lined like corduroy, the outer edges ringed in a stunning purple. It looked like a tropical feather duster. Uprooted, it could flutter through the jungle and tidy up every mote and speck of disorder. She got as close as the path allowed. “I love that plant.”

He stayed on the path, studied the plant’s neighbors. There were dusty green aloes, flashy in their spikes right next to the one she was admiring. “No.”

She stepped onto the soil, carefully avoiding any small sprouts. “I do.”

He pointed across the green acreage. “There were roses. You love roses.”

“I love this.” She looked at the plaque, brass naturally, but at least in English. “Banana plant.”

His eyebrows came together in concentration. “They had those white things we have at home.”

“Astilbe.” She touched the edge of the lowest dipping frond. “I love the banana plant.”

“But it’s so…”

“Banana plant.”

“But the…”

“Banana,” she patted its smooth trunk, “plant.”

He sighed. “Maybe we should just walk.” She sighed in response and realized the sounds matched just as their strides had. She stepped back but took a moment to look skyward through the fronds and catch a glimpse of flight.

“I just said that curry would be nice.” She straightened the map, satisfied by the paper snap it made.

His hands squeezed the steering wheel at three o’clock and nine o’clock. “Have you oriented the map to North?”

“We’re in Canada. Everything’s North.”

He let out a loud, slow breath, and she felt the need to settle him down. “I’m kidding.” She turned the map further to the right. “The Punjabi Market is between Main and Victoria and thirty-third and forty-ninth.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

She gave up trying to settle him down and waved the map in his direction, but like any safe driver, he refused to divert his eyes from the road. “I’m just saying that the address you’re asking me to drive to is a multiple block area.”