He interrupted her, groaning as he sat up, “I know, I know. On a banana.”
There it was. His garden. His second chance. They stood at the top of the wide stone stairs overlooking the gardens that unfolded like a gold and green tapestry, and, for a moment, instead of feeling grateful to Leslie, he felt only hot humiliation. He’d been so na?ve. She (Scheherazade, he thought again) had known all along how this seduction would go down. Known he’d never be able to say no. Not to this. The garden that would replace all he’d lost last year when that nor’easter gobbled up Hurricane Grace, creating what meteorologists called the Perfect Storm (and with a manic glee that had made Jules want to throw something at the TV). A fifteen-foot storm surge had rolled over their neighborhood, the lowest point in the city, a hook-shaped peninsula sticking out in the sea. Asking for it. The community garden he and Leslie had created a decade back, named Our Garden with na?ve optimism, destroyed. Even when the water had rolled back out to sea, the salt left behind strangled the few plants that had put up a good fight. His life’s work, dead.
But now there was this. The Castle. The rolling lawn as wide as the city botanical gardens he had fled to as a boy, an escape from his father sitting slumped in front of the radio listening to ball games and smelling of cigarette smoke and despair, and from the kids on his block who kicked his ass every weekend for being a foo-foo private-school boy whose mama ironed his jeans so he looked spick-and-span even on Saturdays.
Beyond the lawn, the sea glittered. The view so damn perfect he had to blink away the sense that it was a painting. He’d only ever seen such perfection in the west wing galleries of the city museum, where the French Impressionists hung in gilded frames. The rosebushes were newly blooming—They were waiting for you—in every shade of red, white, yellow, pink, even purple. He recognized a few of his favorite hybrids. The soft pink Heritage; the fragrant Madame Plantier; and what had been his mother’s favorite—he’d planted it outside her bedroom window her final spring so she could watch it unfurl—the Double Delight, with its creamy center and cherry-red edges she’d compared to a lady’s painted parasol, the kind of image she’d only ever seen in movies and romance novels.
The garden was a mess, no doubt. The roses hadn’t been cut back in who knows how long and the long branches had bent to the ground, most of the blooms resting on the earth, the petals brown with rot. Overgrown meandering paths had sprouted weeds as tall as Eva, encircling a pond so thick with green algae and lily pads it could’ve been a set for a horror film.
Jules knew he could return the garden to its glory. He buzzed with faith.
“Well,” Leslie had sang cutely, her thin arm woven through his, “What do you think? Will it do?” She laughed, startling a bird from a nearby tree. A male cardinal like a spot of fresh blood against the cloudless sky. “It’s your own secret garden.”
And it did feel as if the garden had been made for him, plucked straight from his dreams. Circling the pond were cottage flowers elbowing one another for room—the same flowers he’d have picked himself. Bellflower. Foxglove. The regal delphinium. Ox-eyed daisies, sweet Williams, hollyhocks, peonies, and spikes of silvery-blue lavender. There were fruit trees, apple, pear, flowering cherry, and purple-leaf plum. And a long row of Cherokee Brave dogwoods, their pink blossoms so plentiful it looked like the buds perched on their thin branches. The flowerbeds, lily and iris and overgrown hydrangea in Easter-egg colors, reached into the perimeter of downy fern, and beyond it lay the woods, so it seemed as if there was no beginning or end to the greenery.
Who had created such a garden? Could Leslie’s mother, a woman Jules had never met but had despised, be his kindred spirit? It was an old-fashioned country design with uneven rows and closely planted flowers. It felt authentic. Unpretentious. Of course, he knew that, just like the salon-coiffed and tennis-toned women of Avalon Island, the garden’s messy irregularity was intended. He’d be careful, he promised himself (and his garden, he was already thinking of it as his); he wouldn’t overprune, only cut back what was necessary. He wouldn’t spoil the duality of its design—casual yet carefully constructed—an exquisite contradiction that had, for years, made Jules long to see the English and European gardens he’d visited only in the pages of books. Because they’d never had the money. Not since Leslie had gone to her parents seventeen years ago, told them she was carrying a black man’s child, and lost her allowance, and, until her mother, in the final stages of uterine cancer had changed her will, her inheritance. Still, he reminded himself how, seventeen years ago, when Leslie had returned to their one-room city apartment after confessing to her parents, Brooks in her womb just starting to show—a miracle after so many miscarriages—she had chosen Jules (him!) over her parents. He had never loved her more.
They took her back, of course—not him, or the children—only their golden-haired daughter, whom they gave an allowance. A pittance of what she would’ve inherited, he’d heard Leslie explain with an eye roll to her mostly white bohemian friends—self-declared artists and writers and thespians, who, he guessed, also lived off allowances. Every few months, Leslie slipped on one of the pastel Chanel suits she kept draped in plastic at the back of the closet. She straightened her hair with a hot iron so the white-blond curtained the back of her long patrician neck. She dabbed creamy cover-up on her freckled nose. The freckles he adored. Kissed. Photographed. Her father’s car picked her up and drove her to the island, where she walked through the Castle doors as if frozen in time. To collect her check. To be their Leslie. Leslie in a bottle. A lie.
Three months after his first visit to the island, he’d finally given up on resurrecting their sea-ravaged garden—Our Garden—it still stung to think of the name arching over the iron entrance in rainbow-colored letters he’d repainted every spring. He caved to Leslie’s (and Brooks’s) demands, stuffed their earthly possessions, including the kids, into a U-Haul, and made the move. Leslie had convinced him to abandon the few surviving plants—a lilac tree turned powdery white with mildew; a dozen hostas, their elephant-ear leaves cracked; and a peony bush whose blush-colored flowers looked as immaculate as before the storm. It was a fresh start, she’d promised.
It rained the morning they moved and the island air was thick with the fecund scent of damp earth, low tide and spring blossoms, and something sweet and familiar—pine needles that had sat all winter.