Warm Wuinter's Garden (43 page)

Although he had been frustrated when Nita had
failed to understand him, now that her look indicated that she
finally did, Bill felt more fear than relief. He tried to shrink
himself around his pain better to withstand whatever attack she
might make. He brushed the tears from his eyes so that he could
watch hers more carefully.

After what to Bill seemed like a very long
intermission, Nita finally found her voice.

“I’m glad you did. There’re tissues in the
top left drawer. Are you okay in that chair? There’s the sofa in
the reception room. Or you could come to my place and lie
down.”

Nita looked at Bill’s body twisted tight
against the potential surprise of pain, like something horrible
jumping out from a closet, and thought of how many times she had
sat there in the same situation. She had a strong urge to leave her
chair, to go round behind her desk, and to put her arms around this
strange, inarticulate, naive man.

“Do you feel okay? Does it hurt?”

“Pretty tender. A lot of swelling. They kept
me iced for four hours.”

Nita laughed.

“That’s short compared to what Dilly’s
probably going to do.”

Bill was too surprised at Nita’s levity to be
hurt by it.

“She’s going to be ripped.”

Nita now understood why Bill had come to her.
He had wanted to test the reception of his action upon one of the
Koster sisters before presenting it to another.

“Actually I can’t guess what she’ll do. I
guess I knew she wanted another kid. I think Mom told me. But I
figured it was one of her passing fancies. Like with diet things.
She’s pretty scattered. This is a tough one though. What you did is
very confrontational. You might have been better off telling her,
‘The discussion is ended. This is what I’m going to do.’ Plus it’s
tougher because of Mom. Of all of us, I think Dilly is the most
upset about Mom. Having a baby, being pregnant, might have been her
way of pushing back her fears.

“I hear a lot of stories sitting over there
where you are. A lot of reasons why people have babies. A lot of
couples start a baby to try to save a marriage. Some have one to
prolong their lives or to make their lives more valuable, more
meaningful. Just a few months ago I had a couple in here with a
Down’s Syndrome baby that had just turned three. The parents were
thinking of having a second kid so the first would have a guardian
when they died. They wanted to know whether there was anything they
could do legally with a will or trust to be sure the younger kid
took care of the other one.

“God, Bill, what do you think she’s going to
do?”

Bill looked down at the hands in his lap
which were tightly clasped together as if in supplication.

“I don’t know. When I thought about the
operation, I’d try to think about what her response would be, but I
couldn’t get my thinking far enough along that anything became
clear. Very angry?”

“Maybe, betrayed?”

“Yes, I guess, maybe, betrayed. But one of
the reasons I did it secretly was I was afraid that she’d betray
me.”

“How?”

“By getting pregnant. By getting off the pill
and not telling me.”

“You really think Dilly would do that?”

“Yes, I do. I did. Don’t you?”

Nita knew Bill could be right. Dilly drove
decisively toward those things that she considered right, which
just happened, almost always, to be things that served her own
interests. After a few seconds thought, it was easy for Nita to
agree that Dilly might secretly stop taking her contraceptives.
What was more difficult was to guess how she might respond to the
vasectomy.

“Did you consider that you two might end up
divorced over this?”

“A little, but I couldn’t see how she could
support herself. I figured she’d have to stay, and after a while
we’d work it out. We’re just making it on what I earn. Even if a
judge gave her half, she couldn’t make the house payments.”

The tenderness that Nita had felt for Bill
was instantly replaced with anger.

“Let me clue you in on something, Bill. A
half-drunk shambly Irish lawyer could get more than half. Plus,
given the MBA you’re getting and your work habits, there’s a good
chance that you could be making substantially more in three to five
years. Right? Isn’t that why you work so hard? Because you think
it’s going to lead to something?”

“Yes.”

“I’d ballpark you’re making close to sixty.
Even if the courts gave her only thirty, that’s enough to live on
with a good chance there’d be more soon.”

Bill’s face expressed disbelief.

“How?”

“How? Shit, who knows how. I haven’t had to
do it, so I don’t know how. What I do know is I’ve had dozens and
dozens of single mothers in here with a couple of kids living on
less than twenty grand a year. I said earlier Dilly is very
scattered. She is. But if she decides to make something happen,
it’s close to a sure bet it’s going to happen.”

Nita’s irritation pushed her out of the
chair. She began to reshape the piles of paper on the credenza.

“Look, Bill. I feel for you. You work hard,
very hard. You’ve tried to make a good life for Dilly and the kids.
I can understand why you’d like some assurances that your hard work
is going to pay off, not just for your wife and kids, but also for
you. It’s easy to imagine you driving home in heavy traffic and
trying to keep the aggravation away by thinking, ‘Some day.’ Some
day, something. What? Who knows. A cottage on Winnepausaukee, or a
place on the Cape, or bass fishing in Florida, or a trip to Europe
or the islands or, maybe, just a trip down to the basement to have
a quiet morning playing with a saw and drill. I know all about
that.

“From fifteen to twenty-five I kept saying,
‘Someday. Something.’ You’ve already probably done it for ten
years, and you seem to have accepted that you’re going to have to
do it for another twenty. That’s admirable.

“But having you say you think Dilly couldn’t
leave because of money rips me. Men get so arrogant about the power
of their pay. They think that check gives them carte blanche.
They’re very wrong. My job is to prove that to them. Just let me
warn you that regardless of what you make, it is not sufficient or
insufficient enough to hold Dilly against her will. If what you’ve
done today is so big a deception that she can’t absorb it, she can
have you cleaned, dried and put on a shelf in less time than it
takes to have a baby. Don’t blind yourself, Bill.

“There. That’s out. I’m done. Let’s go to my
house. You can lie down and put some ice on it.”

Bill was too scared not to nod his head in
agreement.

* * *

It was after midnight before Bill turned off
the ignition and coasted the car toward the black maw beyond the
open garage door. Except for the porch light, the house was dark.
His groin protested as he climbed the steps to the back door. Bill
stood in the rare comfort of a quiet kitchen as he tried to decide
what to do next. His original plan had been to announce his actions
to Dilly as they prepared for bed. He had envisioned her looking up
from a book to see him walking toward the bed with a garish bruise
rising over the top of his new white briefs. She would ask and he
would tell her that he had taken decisive action to gain control of
his, their, future. She would be shocked into silence. He would
enter the bed, coolly comfort her, and go to sleep her master. That
plan, which had felt so good, had been declared a fool’s dream by
Nita. It was gone. It had been replaced with nothing beyond a
strong, brain-constricting sense of incumbent danger.

Bill stood shoeless in the kitchen’s black
wishing his mind would formulate a plan. Nothing came. Afraid to
mount the stairs, he made up a nest in the family room from couch,
coat and coverlet. Insistent fear and persistent discomfort from
both the surgery and trying to sleep on the too-short couch kept
him awake. He had been awake for almost an hour when Dilly quietly
padded down the stairs. Her worried look switched off as he told
her where he had been and what he had done. His groin curled itself
tight against her anger, but it need not have done so as she stood
listening with a blank face and an inert body.

When Bill had finished his jumbled
recitation, Dilly asked him three questions. Did he need ice? Did
he want to come to bed? Was he planning on going to work in the
morning? A confused but relieved Bill said yes to all three.

In the morning, even though Bill was careful
to lock the door, as he cautiously washed his tender flesh, he
wished that the shower curtain were clear so that nothing could
surprise him.

Ellen had just brought Bett home from the
Ek’s Garden Center. After Ellen pulled away, Bett put a pot of
water on for tea. She had a decision to make. The Japanese black
pines, which had been planted all along the Rhode Island coast,
were dying. In the same way as the blight which had destroyed the
American chestnut trees at the turn of the century and the Dutch
elm disease which had killed millions and millions of trees in the
1950s and 1960s, an incurable disease was wiping out the
long-needled, fantastically twisted pines. Greg, the arborist at
Eks, had told Bett there was a palliative treatment which would, at
best, keep an infected tree alive for one more year. Three of the
more than two dozen trees around the house were already showing the
yellowing needles that indicated their sickness. Bett had to decide
whether to nurse the sick trees or take them down and hope that
that would delay the disease’s spread to the other trees.

As she stood in the kitchen waiting for her
tea water to boil, Bett looked at one of the victims. The firework
bursts of needles at the end of the top branches were yellow. In
some of the lower branches there were patches where all of the
needles were brown. Under the tree were more fallen needles than
would be expected after a mild winter. Bett tried to picture the
tree with all of its needles gone. The tree rose almost forty feet
from four ten inch round boles. Five feet from the ground one of
the boles had a limb as big as itself growing out at a right angle.
That bough went straight out for fifteen feet before sending a
smaller branch straight up into the air. Another trunk had an
equal-sized branch loop down to the ground in a huge horseshoe,
where it had rooted itself, before continuing on its erratic way.
It was if the tree hadn’t been able to decide if it wanted more
sunlight or earth. The third bole had matching branches extending
in outstretched arms. The fourth trunk rose up twenty feet before
it branched. Bett smiled as she remembered Ellen saying that she
liked black pines because they did as they pleased.

When the disease first appeared at Clarke’s
Cove, most of the neighbors who had sick trees simply had cut them
down. The trees were stumped and replaced with something else. The
Lockwards, however, had chopped off the top and most of the
branches until they had ended with a human shape, not much bigger
than a tall man, with arms outstretched in longing. In the winter a
birdfeeder hung from the end of each handless arm. In the summer
the two stumps held hanging pots of geraniums. After the Lockwards
example, the Pelottis had left eight feet of the main trunk and one
large horseshoed limb to use as a holder for feeders in the winter
and as a frame for a rope hammock in the summer. As Bette tried to
see under the growth which would soon fall, she thought that the
four naked boles might resemble some frozen anguished moment in a
modern dance.

When it was ready, Bett stepped outside to
sip her tea. As she stared at the branches, imagining the impact of
different prunings, she appreciated Lise’s wonderment at science.
Science could guide an explosives-laden missile down the airshaft
of a building. It could measure the heat of a sand-buried tank from
a satellite. It could grow a baby in a stranger’s womb. But, so
far, it couldn’t keep Pete’s customers from dying of AIDS, or these
strange trees from yellowing and growing bare. And with her…

After guiding some strange unseen energy made
from pieces of atoms vibrating a billion times a second. And after
adding chemical compounds so wise that they knew to search
throughout her body and only harm the fastest growing cells. After
that, and after all the good that did. After all the sophisticated
chemical and radiation targeting that seemed so similar to shooting
a missile down a chimney or locating the motor heat of a tank from
space, science got so simple. It wanted to do what Greg had
suggested she do to the pines. Take a saw. Bett stared hard at the
sick tree, imagined its naked shape, and when the form was firmly
fixed inside her mind, she added herself to the picture on a dry
autumn day, months hence, putting up a feeder while balancing on
one leg and a pink, plastic piece of very simple science.

The trees could wait, but the doctors wanted
her decision about amputating her leg the day after tomorrow.

“Dad?”

“Nita, honey, how are you?”

“Have you got a cold?”

“No. Do I sound like I do?”

“No, I guess not. You just sounded different
for a minute.”

Nita tried to inflect her voice so her father
would be compelled to answer truthfully.

“How are you doing?”

Neil’s laugh was a small, dry sound.

“Fine.”

Nita waited for several seconds before she
asked, “Are you ready for the invasion?”

“Looking forward to it. When are you getting
here?”

“I’ll be early.”

“Good.”

“Mom’ll be okay with all of us around?”

“Oh, sure. She can’t wait. She says it will
be the first normal thing that’s happened to us in awhile.”

Without the slightest warning tears slid down
Nita’s cheeks.