Jacob pulls me close. I wait until he snores, and then I slide out of his arms. I can’t sleep at all. I go into the garage and pull my scuba suit off the wall. Our tanks and equipment gather dust on a shelf. What happened on the dive?
I put on the scuba mask, listen to my own loud breathing. Attach the cylinder to the BCD, Jacob says in my mind.
I’m trying, I say.
Attach the regulator to the cylinder valve. Then open the cylinder valve. He’s patient, but I’m frustrated. I can’t do this so quickly and easily. Diving is new to me. But not for him. He’s experienced. He’s logged thousands of hours in training.
So why did we put ourselves at risk diving in the pass? He told me to stay close, not to stray. I would be okay if I just stayed behind him. Did I? Or did I break the rules?
*
Jacob picks up a pot of beet plants to put in our shopping basket. He has driven me east across the island to Mystic Nursery, hidden on an acre of lush forest.
“I’m not a big fan of beets,” I say, eyeing the plant in the basket.
“I love them,” Jacob says. “But get what you want.”
Carrots, parsnips, globe onions, cauliflower. I choose a variety of root crops and leaf crops to plant in the fall. They’ll mature in the spring. Jacob chooses his own plants, and when we get back to the house, we cart them all out to his mother’s old garden. This corner of the property feels haunted, as if his mother still wanders through her overgrown series of weedy, raised beds, the stone borders thick with moss. “How long has it been?” I say, pulling up my hood in the spitting rain.
Jacob looks around the garden and smiles. “After I stopped coming out to the island, long after my dad died, she still came out to tend the garden now and then. Before she got sick. She was here maybe . . . fifteen years ago? She died twelve years ago.”
“I’m so sorry. This garden must have been special to her.”
“It was the only place my dad wouldn’t follow her,” he says. “He was allergic to lavender.” He points to the thick lavender bushes still thriving in two of the raised beds.
“So the garden was her sanctuary,” I say.
Jacob nods sadly. In the few images of her in his photo albums, she’s at the water’s edge, wearing a headscarf and waving from a distance, or seated at a restaurant across from Jacob, wearing huge sunglasses.
He brought his camera out to the garden, and he snaps a photograph of me digging a spade into the ground, turning over the damp soil.
“Hey, come on,” I say. “I’m a mess.”
“A beautiful mess.” He snaps another shot.
“I’m not a gardener.”
“You started digging here last summer. But we didn’t have time to plant anything. We were on vacation.”
It’s therapeutic to get down on my hands and knees, digging in the soil, making room for new life. We work in tandem, digging holes, dropping the plants inside, and adding new, organic soil. I uncover a faded, handwritten plant marker that reads, Thymus citriodorus “Aureus.” I hand the marker to Jacob. “Is this your mother’s writing?”
“Yeah,” he says, sitting back on his heels. His eyes cloud over with sadness. “This was her favorite plant ever.”
“Thymus citriodorus?” I say.
“Lemon thyme. I looked everywhere at the nursery, but I couldn’t find any. She loved lemon thyme lotion, the smell of lemon. Everything had to be lemon thyme with her. I wish I could’ve found some in her honor.” He presses the marker into the soil behind the plant.
“We can keep looking,” I say. A few minutes later, I find another marker. Allium schoenoprasum. Chives.
“Wow, I can’t believe I missed these,” he says.
I find no more markers. We plant such a variety of herbs and vegetables, tilling up the soil as we go, that the raised beds look transformed when we’ve finished. The garden takes on a cheery, hopeful demeanor, waiting for the sunshine and rains of spring.
“Do you think the plants will survive?” I say.
“My mother knew where to put them,” he says, as we head back through the yard. I’m pleasantly tired. When we reach the house, I remember a flash from last summer. That’s your mother’s old garden? I said. So many raised beds.
She spent a lot of time out there, Jacob said to me. She had a green thumb. Sometimes I feel her here, like she’s watching me.
Like a ghost? I said.
Not exactly, he said with his signature touch of suppressed irritation. Like a mother watching over her son.
I’m riding my bicycle down to see Van on his boat. He came home from the hospital this morning and went straight back to work. He’s anchored a mile south of the harbor in a secluded bay. I follow a narrow dirt road down to the water’s edge. The fields and forests race by, autumn clouds tumbling across the sky. Driftwood litters the beach, and tethered to a weathered dock, Van’s boat gently bobs on the waves—a large dive and salvage vessel painted in red and gray. There are no other boats, no houses anywhere in sight, nobody on the narrow beach.
Van emerges from the cabin in a striped sweater, knit cap, jeans, and boots, squinting although the sky is not bright. “Kyra!”
“Van.” I’m gripping the handlebars so tightly, my fingers hurt. I loosen my grip and walk my bike the rest of the way on the dock.