Brown, Carrie - Rose's Garden by Brown Carrie

Author:Brown, Carrie [Brown, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1998-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Eight

CONRAD RETURNED HOME from Mt. Olive and pulled Sleepy Hollow close to the French doors. He leaned forward, staring out into the darkness. He wondered if Lemuel would ever appear again. He rubbed his eyes, tried to fashion from the melting darkness the semblance of Rose herself moving toward him. Maybe the whole garden, the house clinging to it by a trailing root, would be lifted from its place on the ground, swung skyward like a floating island. He remembered Rose, her hands brimming with pebbles, clearing the ground for the first small plot they had tilled. “Lightening the soil,” she had said. She never visited the garden without filling the pockets of her apron with stones.

Despite his desire to be vigilant, he fell asleep at last. Hero’s voice lingered in his ears, a sound from a dream that one struggles to answer, fighting the paralysis of the body and the clamped jaw.

He woke sometime in the middle of the night, chilled and mournful. He sat upright and looked out the window. Next door, May Brown’s lights were ablaze, though it must have been two or three in the morning. Ever since her husband had died, peacefully in his sleep at her side a few years before, May had been afraid of the dark.

Conrad had come across Rose and May sitting in the garden one morning shortly after Paul’s death.

“I’m so afraid, Rose,” May had been saying, her hands gripped around a teacup, her back bent, her head dropped toward her lap. “I’m so afraid.”

Rose had leaned toward her friend, touched her gently on the shoulder. “Why not leave the lights on?” she suggested. “There’s no law says you have to turn the lights out, is there?”

And May had glanced up at her. “No,” she’d said. “No, I suppose there’s not.”

Conrad looked out at May’s bright windows a moment, then climbed the stairs and lay down on the bed. He wasn’t afraid of the dark. That wasn’t it. He remembered Rose’s body beside him, his arm draped over her hip, his hand under the pillow holding her wrist. They had always slept like that, even at the end, when her body had become so light, so insubstantial, that Conrad had been terrified to lie down beside her. She was disappearing, molecule by molecule, under his hands. One day, he imagined, he would wake and simply find her gone, the bed empty, a death so thorough that not a trace of her would be left.

It still seemed impossible to him that just two days before she died he had helped her to the bath, folded her limbs into the warmth. She had looked up at him with grateful eyes, her white shape underwater shattered like something seen through wet glass, through ice.

“You want to come in?” she had asked, smiling at him, breathing hard, and reached out to touch his knee as he sat beside her. “Remember?”

And he had remembered, of course, the baths they had taken together at her parents’

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