“Oh—sorry. I have a lousy name recall. Faces, too. What I remember is energy. Anyway, you can wait in here, Lennon, and—”
“My girlfriend wants me to come in with her. She’s a little freaked out.”
“I am not freaked out,” Stacey counters. “I’m just . . .”
“First reading?”
“I guess you are psychic.”
Lisa returns her smile. “So do you want our friend Lennon to come in?”
Emphasis on the you.
“Sure. It’s fine.”
It isn’t that she doesn’t want him there. It’s more that she doesn’t want to be here.
He puts his arm around her as they cross into a tiny, cluttered kitchen that smells like cat food. Lisa shoves the bag into the fridge and leaves the cup on the counter, then opens a door, steps back, and waves them inside.
The room is so different from the rest of the apartment that it might as well be in another building, inhabited by someone else.
Parquet floors, white walls and ceiling. A chair faces a couch, across a low table. Not castle furniture, not IKEA, all of it beige and rectangular. The table holds a pad and pen, a candle, and a box of tissues. No crystal ball.
Sunlight streams through the lone window, overlooking a brick wall. Lisa draws the shades and the room is dim. She lights the candle and asks them to sit on the couch.
“I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I work,” she says, sinking into the chair and looking at Stacey. “And then we’ll get started. Okay?”
She hesitates, then nods. “Okay.”
Nora
Back in the shed, Nora picks up a large bag of flower bulbs—daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and crocuses.
Teddy had suggested that she plant a spring garden.
Just like you did when you came home that first year after . . .
Teddy hadn’t needed to finish the sentence.
The murders.
Came home—such an innocuous way to describe her escape from the nightmare in New York.
Her father, Victor Montgomery, was the only person in the world she’d ever trusted. But for her, there was no going home. By then he’d sold the modest bungalow where she’d lived with both her parents in what seemed like another lifetime. By January 1994 Dad was remarried and living in his new wife’s Spanish Colonial Hollywood mansion. The first time he escorted her over the threshold, he mentioned that the place was nearly a hundred years old and had once belonged to a silent film star.
“I hate old houses,” she snapped, thinking of the one on Glover Street.
She hated her new stepmother, too, long before they met. Despised the very idea of her father embarking on a new journey that had nothing to do with her.
Even though you did the same thing to him?
But she’d had no choice.
Her father had made a conscious decision to marry the utterly inappropriate Theodora Maria Gonzales, twenty years younger and an independently wealthy free spirit.
She was barefoot the first time Nora met her, wearing cutoffs and a tank top that revealed tanned skin, ample cleavage, and a small pink hibiscus tattoo on her shoulder. Her long dark hair was untamed, her pretty face free of makeup and worry lines.
“Call me Teddy,” she said with a welcoming smile. “Do you want me to call you—”
“Call her Nora,” Dad told her. “That’s what she’s chosen.”
Yes. A derivative of Eleanor, so that she’d never forget . . .
As if she could ever, ever forget.
Teddy nodded. “Nora it is, then. That’s beautiful.”
No, Ellie was beautiful. Nora was a part of the lie she’ll live with for the rest of her life.
She stared down at her shoes, still covered in Brooklyn mud.
“I lost my mom young, too, so I’m here for you if you need me,” Teddy said. “But if you want me to leave, don’t be afraid to say it.”
“You mean you’ll go away if I tell you to?”
Teddy threw back her dark head and laughed. “I mean if you need some space or some time alone with your dad, just say the word. I’m always happy to head outside and play in the dirt for a while.”
“Play in the dirt?”
“She’s a gardener,” Dad explained.
“Gardener by hobby, horticulturalist by profession. I was drawn to it when I was a little younger than you,” Teddy told Nora. “I’d lost my parents and a couple of good friends. Making things live and grow was cathartic. If you want, you can come play in the dirt with me sometime.”
“No, thanks. But if you want to go do that . . . I’m saying the word.”
It wasn’t long before Teddy won her over—not just with her garden, but with acceptance, affection, advice, and assistance in building a new life. She helped Nora with admission and tuition at USC, her own alma mater. She helped her move into an off-campus apartment, furnished it, and paid the rent. She inspired Nora to follow in her own footsteps, majoring in horticulture. She listened when Nora needed to talk.
Most importantly, because of Teddy, they were a family again. For a few years, anyway.
Daddy’s diagnosis came shortly after Nora’s 1999 graduation from USC. He vowed he’d survive into the new millennium, and he did, just barely.
In a cruel twist of fate, Victor Montgomery died in January and was buried on the sixth anniversary of the murders.
The Southern California weather that day was warm and sunny. As Nora stood in the cemetery watching his casket lowered into a yawning grave, she was back in New York on a sleety winter night.
And now . . .
Now she really is back. It’s not winter, but it will be. And she’s supposed to be planting a spring garden to keep busy and give herself something to look forward to.
“Put it where you’ll be able to see it from the kitchen window,” Teddy advised. “When those green shoots sprout up in March, you’ll feel like a new person.”
“Again?” Nora asked, and they laughed.
She grabs a shovel and scouts for a place to dig. She rules out a shady spot where the spreading roots of a neighboring tree will interfere, and settles on a sunny patch around the butterfly bush. Graceful tiger swallowtails and monarchs flit among the fragrant purple cone-shaped blossoms.
She pokes the tip of the shovel into the soil.
Here we go round . . . the butterfly bush . . .
Once again, the damned monkey is chasing the weasel through her head and back, back in time. Not far enough, though, to release the nebulous memory that prods at her every time the tune pops up.
Every shovelful of dirt plummets her deeper into the sorrowful year that followed her father’s death.
Bonded in grief, she and her stepmother had done their best to stay busy. Nora landed a job with a sustainable landscaping company and moved into a garden apartment in West Hollywood. Teddy threw herself into volunteerism for Al Gore’s presidential campaign, with environmental protection an issue that was close to her heart.
When he lost, following an epic and drawn-out postelection battle, Teddy did some serious soul-searching. One day, she broke some news that Nora probably should have seen coming, but it blindsided her.