Bleeding Heart (3 page)

“That’s incredibly generous of you,” I said.

“Maybe. But I also think it’s probably the only way I’m going to persuade you to work for me.”

I stared up at him, suddenly unsure of myself. How could I turn
down such a magnanimous offer? I could already think of half a dozen historic—and now neglected—gardens in the area that could be resurrected by an infusion of cash from Mackenzie’s charity.

But who was this man? All I knew for certain was that he had somehow recognized in me what I’d come to believe about myself: I had a natural talent for what I did. In fact, deep down I knew that I was capable of far more than most of my traditional-minded clients wanted. Oh, to create something truly original! And to have all the money in the world to implement it! Mackenzie was right: getting this commission would establish my professional reputation. But what a huge project it was going to be. For the first time, I wondered if Mackenzie wasn’t perhaps putting too much faith in me. What if it was misplaced? What if I couldn’t come up with a design as spectacular as the one he envisioned? The most beautiful garden in the Berkshires? All of a sudden it seemed an impossible challenge.

It was then, of course, that I realized I’d already decided to take it on.

I
first met Gwen Boyland at a sleep-away camp in western Massachusetts when we were both thirteen years old. Though my family summered in Woodhaven, we were essentially city folk. Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was my backyard. The closest I’d ever come to a run-in with wildlife was a neighbor’s German shepherd that had somehow slipped the leash. So the weekend we went on a “wilderness trek” up on the mountain, foraging for kindling and cooking out over an open fire, felt like high adventure to me. For Gwen, who’d been raised on a farm in the Berkshires and had once helped pull a calf feetfirst out of a breech birth, a couple of nights in a tent was pretty tame stuff.

Up until then I’d had no direct contact with Gwen, though I’d been keenly aware of her existence. It was hard not to be. She was starting to develop physically, and she thought nothing of walking around our cabin stark naked, her enviable breasts roosting like little doves between her upper arms. She had older sisters and seemed to know everything there was to know about things that remained painful mysteries to the slow starter I was at that time:
the difference between Tampax and Kotex, French-kissing, and how to tell when a boy had a hard-on.

“He puts his hands in his pockets,” she whispered to the circle of girls who’d inched their sleeping bags around her after lights-out. Our counselors were still sitting beside the fire, luxuriating in some much-needed adult time. “And he kind of balls up his fists so the front of his pants puff out. It’s a dead giveaway.”

“Has a boy ever done that to you?” Ada Sawyers asked in an awestruck tone. A year younger than us, Ada followed Gwen around like a puppy.

“No, but I’ve seen it a million times with my sisters’ boyfriends,” Gwen said.

“Quiet in there!” one of the counselors called from outside. “Not another word out of any of you until morning.”

I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. I wasn’t accustomed to curling up on the bare ground. It was chilly and lumpy and it felt odd not having a bed or bunk to help demarcate my space from that of my fellow campers. Ada, who was a restless sleeper, kept turning over and falling against me. At one point, her flailing right arm landed like a dead branch in my lap.

“Hey!” I hissed, giving her a little shove.

“You awake?” Gwen whispered next to me in the dark.

“Yeah,” I said. “Are you?”

“What do
you
think?” Gwen said, though not unkindly. I’d noticed that for all her worldliness and bravado, she never acted mean or superior. “I got to pee so bad my teeth ache.”

“Me, too,” I said, realizing for the first time that that was another reason I hadn’t been able to drift off. We’d carried canteens with us on the hike up to the campsite and had stopped frequently to swill the warm, metallic-tasting water. We’d had lemonade with dinner and hot cocoa with dessert. One of the counselors had left
a plastic bucket by the tent’s entry flap for us to relieve ourselves in during the night, but, for me at least, the very idea of piddling away in front of everybody was mortifying. I’d rather die first.

“Come on,” Gwen said, sitting up in her sleeping bag. “I’m going outside.”

“But—” We’d been instructed to stay in the tent, I was going to remind her. We were out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilization and emergency medical care. But before I had a chance to put any of these worries into words, Gwen had already slipped out into the night. My bursting bladder won out over my better judgment, and I followed her.

The cooking fire had burned down to embers, and the campground was awash in a ghostly sheen. The sliver of moon that hung like a stage prop above the tree line was outshone by the main attraction of the evening—a brilliant, dancing panoply of stars. Gwen and I stopped and stared up into the night sky for a minute or two as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. The woods were alive with sound. Insects hummed like an old refrigerator. And there was something else—a low, rough, raggedy roar—that sent a shiver through me.

“Did you hear
that
?” I whispered urgently to Gwen.

“That,” she said, grabbing a handful of napkins from the picnic table that was stacked with our supplies, “is the sound of somebody snoring.”

We followed the hiking trail back down the mountain about fifteen yards before squatting a few feet apart in the underbrush. Brambles pulled at my nightgown and weeds tickled my backside, but I was finally able to pee.

“You okay?” Gwen asked as I rejoined her with my nightgown bunched up around my waist.

“I’m not a very good aim.”

“Let’s find some paper towels,” Gwen said, heading back up the path again. It was only when we started to rummage around on the supply table that we noticed someone had been there before us. Boxes of cereal had been torn apart and Cheerios scattered on the ground like confetti. Bags of corn chips had been slashed open and pulverized. Our super-saver plastic tub of trail mix was gone.

“What—?” Gwen said, looking up from the mess and around the campsite. Neither one of us had seen the bear earlier because he was so big and black and quietly preoccupied. He was sitting on the ground not far from our tent, the tub of trail mix between his legs, shoveling the stuff into his mouth with both paws. A low, rough—and now I realized—contented growl escaped from his maw between bites.

“Oh, God!” I cried. “Oh, my God!”

The bear looked up from his little picnic.

“Shhhhh!” Gwen hissed, holding my arm as I tried to bolt. “Don’t move a muscle. Don’t say another word.”

“What’s going on?” one of the counselors called out.

“Stay where you are!” Gwen called. “There’s a bear out here. He’s feeding. If we leave him alone, he’ll go away when he’s done.”

Like the rest of us, the counselors seemed to hold Gwen in special regard. They quickly came to realize that she knew as much, if not more, than they did about the wild. Just that afternoon, one of them had asked her if a group of mushrooms we’d passed was edible, and Gwen had responded after quick examination: “Only if you want to kill yourself.” So now, though we could hear a certain amount of stirring from inside the tents, no one emerged. And Gwen and I stood stock-still, watching the bear devour the tub of trail mix for what seemed like hours.

He’d ripped a hole in the hard plastic and was getting at the nuts and seeds through the side of the tub. When it was almost
empty, he turned the thing upside down and dumped the remaining mix into his mouth, his enormous pink tongue lapping around the raggedy hole searching for one last sunflower seed or chocolate-covered raisin. Then, with a sigh of regret, he tossed the empty tub into the bushes and lumbered to his feet. He started toward us. At the time he looked about ten feet tall, though I later learned he couldn’t have been more than six.

“Oh, God!” I cried.

“Be quiet and put your hands in the air,” Gwen said matter-of-factly.

“Is he going to eat us?” I whimpered.

“Bears are herbivores,” Gwen whispered back. “He’s probably just after more trail mix. We’re slowly—very slowly—going to start to back away from the picnic table, okay? Keep your hands above your head and your mouth shut. Just do what I do.”

Perhaps it was Gwen’s calm and seemingly disinterested response to the bear’s approach, or maybe he remembered that he’d already pillaged the best of our goodies. In any case, he stopped in his tracks as we began our forward-facing retreat. He sniffed the air, turning his head slowly from side to side, let out a huge yawn, and then, with almost balletic grace, pirouetted around and lumbered off into the woods.

Questions were raised about what we were doing outside when we’d been expressly told not to leave our tent, but Gwen’s level-headed handling of the bear “attack”—as it quickly became known—mitigated any disciplinary action. Somehow, undeservedly, my star rose with Gwen’s after the incident. Upon our return to the main camp, word spread quickly about our adventure. Older girls who’d looked right through me until then suddenly knew my name. And, most important and wonderful for me, Gwen Boyland and I became friends.

Initially, I worried that she was too sophisticated and popular for our closeness to last for very long. But I learned over the course of the next few weeks that Gwen, too, had her weaknesses. Ones that, happily for me, tended to be counterbalanced by my strengths. Where she was impulsive, I was strategic. When she tended to get bored or restless, I demonstrated inner resources and initiative. We helped smooth each other’s unfinished edges. And our backgrounds were different enough for each of us to consider the other special and somewhat exotic. For the next half a dozen summers we were inseparable. The Boyland Dairy farm was only three miles outside of Woodhaven, so we saw each other whenever my family was in “the country.”

College changed all that. I went to Brown. Gwen spent half a semester at Berkshire Community College before dropping out to marry a high school basketball star. It lasted less than a year and turned out to be one of her more enduring romances. The brashness that had helped her face down our bear ended up undermining her increasingly less-concerted efforts to forge any permanent relationships, just as the timidity that gripped me that same night made the security and routine of marriage so appealing. We remained friends, though, getting together whenever we could to catch up.

Things changed even more when I became a mother. I remember visiting Gwen at an apartment she was renting in Lee—in a chopped-up Victorian in desperate need of a paint job and rewiring—with Olivia in diapers and Franny in my arms. Gwen was still smoking then, and the place smelled of cigarettes and beer. The shower was running when she opened the door, and a few minutes after we’d gotten settled in the living room a man walked through with a towel wrapped around his waist.

“Behave!” Gwen had told him after he did a little jig in front of my daughters.

“You first,” he shot back.

What bothered me most about the visit was not that Gwen seemed at such loose ends—I think she was working part-time for an insurance adjuster then—but that she showed so little interest in my exceptionally adorable offspring. Or my handsome, loving, and increasingly successful husband. Though, as always, she did seem to care about me.

“You still working on that horticultural degree?” she asked me when the conversation started to lag. I was having a hard time concentrating because I had to keep restraining Olivia—who was teething—from gnawing on the many inappropriate objects within her reach.

“With all of this?” I asked, exasperated as Franny began to whimper. When I was pregnant with Olivia, I’d started taking classes at the New York Botanical Garden with the hope of getting a certificate in landscape design. I remember telling Gwen at the time how excited I was by the courses—how I felt I’d finally found my calling. “No, it’s just not feasible now. But I can always go back.”

“Always doesn’t actually last forever,” she said. “Don’t forget it’s your life, too, Alice.” I remember thinking how presumptuous it was for Gwen—who was rotating through men on a semiannual basis and changing jobs almost as often—to offer me advice. Still, despite our different lives and personalities, something kept us close. Some instinct made us reach out to each other whenever we needed to really talk and, more important, when we needed someone who would really listen.

That was the thing about Gwen. She never stopped believing in me. When everybody else was viewing me with suspicion or turning their backs, she stood firm. The moment the news hit and it became clear just how bad things were, she dropped everything in Woodhaven and came down to help me ride out the storm. It was
a time when I learned all too quickly who my real friends were, and the sad truth is that most of them disappeared into the woodwork.

“Like cockroaches,” Gwen had observed acidly at the height of the publicity. “Running from the glare.”

Shortly after that, it was Gwen who reminded me of what I had put aside twenty years before. It was Gwen who suggested I start again. And it was she who wouldn’t take no for an answer.