Winter Garden (12 page)

Her eye went straight to the stroganoff and homemade noodles.

Comfort food. Exactly what they needed. She put some water on to boil for the noodles and popped the sauce in the microwave to thaw it. She was about to set the table when a blast of sunlight caught her attention. At the window, she looked down and saw the orchard in full bloom.

She ran for her camera bag, chose one, and went outside, where she immediately lost herself in the choices presented. She took pictures of everything, the trees, the blossoms, the smudge pots, and with every click of the shutter, she thought of her dad and how much he loved this time of year. When she finished, she covered her lens and walked idly back toward the house, passing her mother’s so-called winter garden.

On this surprisingly sunny day, the garden was a riot of white blossoms upheld by lush green stems and leaves. Something sweet-smelling was in bloom and its perfume mixed with the fecund smell of fertile soil. She sat down on the ironwork bench. She’d always thought of this garden as solely her mother’s domain, but just now, with the apple trees blooming all around her, she felt her father’s presence as keenly as if he were sitting beside her.

She picked up her camera again and began taking pictures: a pair of ants on a green leaf, a flawless, pearlescent magnolia blossom, the copper column that had always been center stage in this garden, with its blue-green patina—

Nina lowered the camera.

There were two columns now. The new one was bright, shiny copper, with an elegant scroll stamped into it.

She brought the camera to her eye again and focused on the new column. In the upper half there was an ornate etching. Scrollwork. Leaves, ivy, flowers.

And the letter E.

She turned slightly and faced the other column. Pushing the vines and flowers aside, she studied the scrollwork.

She’d seen it dozens of times in her life, but now, for the first time, she studied it closely. There were Russian letters entwined in the scrollwork. An A and what appeared to be the P symbol, a circle—which might be an O—and something that looked like a spider. There were also a few she didn’t recognize.

She was just about to reach for it when she remembered the water she’d put on to boil.

“Shit.” Nina grabbed her camera and ran for the house.

Meredith came up with a plan and stuck to it. She’d decided that two afternoons and an evening with Mom would be enough time for Nina to understand the nursing home decision. Yes, Mom had gotten better in the past few weeks, but Meredith didn’t believe for a second that she was well enough to care for herself yet.

And it was important—crucial, even—that Nina understood the situation. Meredith didn’t want to carry the burden of this decision alone any longer. Mom had been in the home for almost six weeks and her ankle was fully healed. Soon a permanent choice would have to be made, and Meredith refused to do it alone.

At four-thirty, she left the office and drove to the nursing home. Once there, she waved at Sue Ellen, the receptionist, and sailed past, her head held high, her keys in one hand, her handbag in the other. At Mom’s room, she paused just long enough to tell herself she didn’t really have a headache, and then she opened the door.

Inside, a pair of blue-coverall-clad men were cleaning: one was mopping the floor, the other was wiping down the window. All of Mom’s personal items were gone. On the bed, instead of the brand-new bedding Meredith had bought, there was a plain blue mattress.

“Where’s Mrs. Whitson?”

“She moved out,” one of the men said without looking up. “Didn’t give us much warning.”

Meredith blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Moved out.”

Meredith spun on her heel and walked back to the front desk. “Sue Ellen,” she said, pressing two fingertips to her left temple. “Where is my mother?”

“She left with Nina. Moved out, just like that. No notice or nothing.”

“Well. This is a mistake. My mother will be back—”

“There’s no room now, Meredith. Mrs. McGutcheon is taking her place. We never know for sure, of course, but we don’t expect to have a room available again until after July.”

Meredith was too mad to be polite. Saying nothing, she marched out of the building and got in her car. For the first time in her life, she didn’t give a shit about the posted speed limit, and in twelve minutes she was at Belye Nochi and out of her car.

Inside, the whole house reeked of smoke. In the kitchen, she found dirty plates piled in the sink and an open pizza box on the counter. More than half of the pizza was left in the box.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

A misshapen pot sat slumped over the front burner. Meredith didn’t need to reach for it to know that it had melted to the burner.

She was about to charge up the stairs when she glanced out at the side yard. Through the wood-paned French doors, she saw them: Mom and Nina were sitting together on the iron bench.

Meredith opened one of the French doors so hard it clattered against the wall.

As she crossed the yard, she heard her mother’s familiar story voice, and knew immediately that the bouts of confusion weren’t over.

“. . . she mourns the loss of her father, who is imprisoned in the red tower by the Black Knight, but life goes on. This is a terrible, terrible lesson that every girl must learn. There are still swans to be fed in the ponds of the castle garden, and white summer nights when the lords and ladies meet at two in the morning to stroll the riverbanks. She doesn’t know how hard one winter can be, how roses can freeze in an instant and fall to the ground, how girls can learn to hold fire in their pale white hands—”

“That’s enough of the story, Mom,” Meredith said, trying not to sound as pissed off as she was. “Let’s go inside.”

“Don’t stop her—” Nina said.

“You’re an idiot,” Meredith said to Nina, helping Mom to her feet, leading her into the house and up the stairs, where she got her settled in the rocker with her knitting.

Back downstairs, she found Nina in the kitchen. “What in the hell were you thinking?”

“Did you hear the story?”

“What?”

“The story. Was that the peasant girl and the prince? Do you remem—”

Meredith took her sister by the wrist and pulled her into the dining room, switching on the lights.

It looked exactly as it had on the day Mom fell off the chair. Strips of wallpaper were gone; the blank valleys looked like old wounds next to the vibrant color of what remained. Here and there, reddish black smears stained both the wallpaper and the vacant strips.

Outside, somewhere in the fields, a truck backfired.

Meredith turned to Nina, but before she could say anything, she heard footsteps thundering down the stairs.

Mom ran into the kitchen, carrying a huge coat. “Did you hear the guns? Downstairs! Now!”

Meredith took her mother by the arm, hoping her touch would help. “That was just a truck backfiring, Mom. Everything is fine.”

“My lion is crying,” Mom said, her eyes glassy and unfocused. “He’s hungry.”

“There’s no hungry lion here, Mom,” Meredith said in an even, soothing voice. “Do you want some soup?” she asked quietly.

Mom looked at her. “We have soup?”

“Lots of it. And bread and butter and kasha. No one is hungry here.” Meredith gently took the coat from her mother. Tucked inside the pocket, she found four bottles of glue.

The confusion left as quickly as it had come. Mom straightened, looked at her daughters, and then walked out of the kitchen.

Nina turned to Meredith. “What the fuck?”

“You see?” Meredith said. “She goes . . . crazy sometimes. That’s why she needs to be someplace safe.”

“You’re wrong,” Nina said, still staring at the doorway through which Mom had just passed.

“You’re so much smarter than I am, Nina. So tell me, what am I wrong about?”

“That wasn’t nuts.”

“Oh, really? And just what was it?”

Nina finally faced her. “Fear.”

Nina was hardly surprised when Meredith started cleaning the kitchen, and with a martyr’s zeal. She knew her sister was pissed. She should have cared about that, but she couldn’t.

Instead, she thought about the promise she’d made to her father.

Make her tell you the story of the peasant girl and the prince.

At the time it had seemed pointless, really; impossible. A dying man’s last desperate hope to make three women sit down together.

But Mom was falling apart without him. He’d been right about that. And he’d thought the fairy tale could help her.

Meredith banged a pot down on one of the remaining burners and then swore. “We can’t use the damn stove until we can get rid of this pot you melted.”

“Use the micro,” Nina said distractedly.

Meredith spun around. “That’s your answer? Use the micro. That’s all you have to say?”

“Dad made me promise—”

Meredith dried her hands on a towel and threw it on the counter. “Oh, for God’s sake. We aren’t going to help her by making her tell us fables. We’ll help her by keeping her safe.”

“You want to lock her away again. Why? So you can have lunch with the girls?”

“How dare you say that to me? You.” Meredith moved closer, her voice lowering. “He used to pore through magazines, looking for his ‘little girl’s’ pictures. Did you know that? And he checked the mail and messages every day for calls that hardly ever came. So don’t you dare call me selfish.”

“Enough.”

Mom was standing in the doorway, dressed in her nightgown, with her hair uncharacteristically unbound. Her collarbone stuck out prominently beneath her veiny skin; a small three-tiered Russian-style cross hung from a thin gold strand coiled around her neck. With all that pallor—white hair, pale skin, white gown—she looked almost translucent. Except for those amazing blue eyes. Now they were alight with anger. “Is this how you honor him, by fighting?”

“We’re not fighting,” Meredith said, sighing. “We’re just worried about you.”

“You think I have gone crazy,” Mom said.

“I don’t,” Nina said, looking up. “I noticed the new column in the winter garden, Mom. I saw the letters.”

“What letters?” Meredith demanded.

“It is nothing,” Mom said.

“It’s something,” Nina said.

Her mother made no sign of having heard. No sigh. No flinch. No looking away. She simply walked over to the kitchen table and sat down.

“We don’t know anything about you,” Nina said.

“The past does not matter.”

“It’s what you’ve always said, and we let you. Or maybe we didn’t care. But now I do,” Nina answered.

Mom looked up slowly, and this time there was no mistaking the clarity in her eyes, nor the sadness. “You will keep asking me, won’t you? Of course you will. Meredith will try to stop you because she is afraid, but there is no stopping you.”

“Dad made me promise. He wanted us to hear one of your fairy tales all the way to the end. I can’t let him down.”

“I know better than to make promises to the dying. Now you have learned this lesson, too.” She stood up, her shoulders only a little stooped. “It would break your father’s heart to hear you two fighting. You are lucky to have each other. Act like it.” Then she walked out of the room.

They heard her door slam shut upstairs.

“Look, Nina,” Meredith said after a long silence. “I don’t give a shit about her fairy tales. I’ll take care of her because I promised Dad and because it’s the right thing to do. But what you’re talking about—trying to get to know her—it’s a kamikaze mission and I’ve crashed once too often. Count me out.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Nina said. “I’m your sister. I know how hard you tried with her.”

Meredith turned abruptly back to the stove, attacking the melted pot as if treasure lay beneath it.

Nina got up and went to her sister. “I understand why you put her in that terrible place.”

Meredith turned. “You do?”

“Sure. You thought she was going looney tunes.”

“She is looney tunes.”

Nina didn’t know what to say, how even to frame her opinion so that it made sense. All she knew was that she’d lost some essential piece of herself lately, and maybe fulfilling the promise to her father would help her get it back. “I’m going to get her to tell me that fairy tale—all of it—or die trying.”

“Do what you want,” Meredith said finally, sighing. “You always do.”

At work, Meredith tried to lose herself in the everyday minutiae of running the orchard and the warehouses, but nothing she did was right. It felt as if there were a valve in her chest tightening with every breath she took. The pressure building up behind it was going to blow any minute. After the third time she yelled at an employee, she gave up and left before she could do more damage. She tossed a packet of papers on Daisy’s desk, said tensely, “File this, please,” and walked away before Daisy could ask a question.

She got in her car and just drove. At first she had no idea where she was going; somewhere along the way, she found herself following an old forgotten road. In some ways, it led back to her youth.

She parked in front of the Belye Nochi gift shop. It was a lovely little building set back from the highway and ringed by ancient, flowering apple trees.

Long ago, it had been a roadside fruit stand; here, Meredith had spent some of the best summers of her life, selling their ripe, perfect apples to tourists.

She stared through the windshield at the white clapboard building, its eaves strung with white lights. Come summer, there would be flowers everywhere—in planters by the door, in baskets on the porch, twined up the fence line.

It had been her idea to convert this fruit stand into a gift shop. She still remembered the day she’d approached Dad with the plan. She’d been a young mother with a baby on each hip.

It’ll be great, Dad. Tourists will love it.

That’s a killer idea, Meredoodle. You’re going to be my shining star. . . .

She’d poured her heart and soul into this place, choosing every item they sold with exquisite care. And it had been a rousing success, so much so that they’d added on twice and still they didn’t have enough room to sell all the beautiful souvenirs and crafts made in this valley.

When she’d quit the gift shop and moved into the warehouse, it had been to make her father happy.

Looking back on it now, that was when it had begun, this life of hers that seemed to be about everyone else. . . .

She put the car in reverse and drove away, wishing vaguely that she hadn’t stopped by. For the next hour, she just drove, seeing the changes spring had made on the landscape. By the time she pulled into her own driveway, it was dusk, and the view was slowly darkening.

Inside the house, she fed the dogs and started dinner and then took a bath, lying in the water so long it grew cold.

She was still so confused and upset by today’s events that she didn’t know what to do or what to want. All she really knew for sure was that Nina was screwing everything up, making Meredith’s life harder. And there was no doubt in her mind that it would all collapse into a big fat mess that Meredith would have to clean up.

She was sick to death of being where the buck stopped.

She dried off and slipped into a pair of comfortable sweats and left the bathroom. As she was toweling off her hair, she glanced at the big king-sized bed along the far wall.

She remembered, with a sharp longing, the day she and Jeff had bought that bed. It had been too expensive, but they’d laughed about the expense and paid for it with a credit card. When the bed had been delivered, they’d come home from work early and fallen onto it, laughing and kissing, and christening it with their passion.

That was what she needed now: passion.

She needed to rip off her clothes and fall into bed and forget all about Nina and Mom and nursing homes and fairy tales.

The second she had the thought, it calcified into a plan. Feeling excited for the first time in months, she changed into a sexy nightgown and went downstairs, where she made a fire and poured herself a glass of wine and waited for Jeff to get home from work.

At eleven o’clock that night, she was still waiting. And that sense of excitement had slowly melted into anger.

Where in the hell was he?

By the time he finally walked into the living room, she’d had three glasses of wine and dinner was ruined.

“Where the hell have you been?” she said, rising.

He frowned. “What?”