The Unfinished Garden. Barbara White Claypole
No! 2a. Odd numbers tingled through him like slow-working poison and jinxed everything. This plan held the promise of freedom—freedom from the nightly window and door checks, freedom to sleep past the 4:30-a.m. treadmill call. Freedom to expose himself to the minefield of unallocated time. Doing nothing was akin to unrolling the welcome mat for every funky ritual his short-circuiting brain could sling at him. It was beautifully, impossibly straightforward, his plan: face his fear. And not just any fear, but the mother lode. The biggest fucking fear of all. Dirt.
James’s pulse sped up, and his heart became a jackhammer pounding into his ribs. He swallowed hard and tasted panic, metallic as if his throat were lined with copper. The voice inside his head that wasn’t his own drowned out everything as it chanted over and over, “You’re going to die, die from disease in the soil.” He started rocking. Movement, he needed movement. The voice told him to twist his hair, told him if he didn’t, he would catch cancer from the soil and die. But he didn’t have to listen! This wasn’t a real thought. This was brain trash, right?
Or he could just twist his hair twice. Then twice again and twice again. Six was a wonderful number. Soft and round and calm. But rituals were cheap fixes. Compulsions only fed the OCD monster. It would return, stronger, unless he fought back.
He thumped his fists into his thigh. Don’t cave, don’t twist your hair. If you can fight for ten minutes, the urge will pass. He counted to forty and stopped. Ten minutes? Hell, he couldn’t make it to one.
Was he crazy to retire at forty-five and abandon work, the only distraction that restrained fear? There would be no more relabeling irrational anxiety as the stress of running a successful software company. No, those days were over. Now he was free to follow the lead of his faulty brain wherever it led.
Me and my fucked-up shadow.
James tapped his lucky watch. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Now he’d contaminated his watch.
Panic gnawed at his stomach. Germs were mutating in the soil, breeding like bunny fucking rabbits, but he was not going to twist his hair. James sucked in a breath to the count of four. He held it for two seconds then exhaled. One, two, three, four. Repeat, James, repeat. Slow the breath, and the heart and mind will follow.
Everything would be okay if he could just hire a landscaper—Tilly Silverberg—under the pretext of beautifying his new ten-acre property, when really, he would watch and learn from a professional. She’d made it clear no amount of money would change her mind, which was intriguing. Not that he was cynical, but money talked. There had to be another way. Did that bring him to plan 2b?
James concentrated on slowing down his breath, winding down his fear, and reliving the moment he had seen her garden on the edge of the woods. His pulse had slowed, his thoughts had fallen silent, and he’d known, just known: whatever lay at the end of that driveway held the key to his plan.
Piedmont Perennials had been his final appointment at 6:00 p.m. Six, a sign that everything would be okay, except for that god-awful honking. James glanced up as a skein of geese flew over in textbook formation—an imperfect, imbalanced V with one side longer than the other. Symmetry soothed his fractured mind, but the lack of it….
James jerked around, searching for a focal point, a diversion, anything.
Stop. Please, just stop. And a picture of Tilly dropped into his mind. She moved with the elegance of a prima ballerina, albeit one in a scarlet top and frayed cutoffs. Scarlet, she was a woman of bright colors who could spin through life laughing, gin in hand. But there was a sadness in those huge, pale eyes. Yes, she was beautiful, but beauty held no meaning for him. He was attracted only to women who were as screwed up as he was, even if they hid it better. Fuck. Not good, not good. Eighteen months celibate and focused on one thing—fixing himself. Fighting terror sucked up enough emotional energy. How could he salvage any for the mess of love and desire? Besides, being alone was his default button. Best for others, best for him. And yet…Tilly had made him smile.
His insides were heaving with fear, and she made him smile.
Her feet, poised for a pirouette, were so small, so vulnerable—so bare. Bare and dirty. And covered in soil. Soil on her feet, soil on her hands, soil she’d transferred to him. Soil poisoning her, poisoning him.
Boss back the thought, James. Boss it back.
Bossing back, the most basic weapon in the cognitive-behavioral therapy arsenal, sounded as easy as flipping on the turn signal. Don’t want that thought? Toss it and change direction. And yet summoning those three short words, boss it back, demanded enough focus to cripple him.
Why, why had he shaken hands with a gardener, a woman with dirt under her thumbnail? He must get to the rental apartment and throw everything, even his Pumas in the washing machine. Scour himself clean and then scrub the car inside and out.
Lose himself in time-consuming routine, his comfort and his curse.
But first, vomit.
Chapter 3
The ache in her right shoulder blade, an old symptom of her scoliosis, continued to throb to the cacophony of spring peepers. Or had they already become bog-standard tree frogs by early June? One of those Southern things Tilly could never figure out. Read-aloud time, that most precious part of the day, had slipped by unnoticed, so she’d promised Isaac he could come back outside in his jammies to catch fireflies.
The phone rang and Tilly picked it up on the first ring. “Piedmont Perennials.” She swallowed a yawn.
“Tilly? James Nealy.” His voice was deeper on the phone. Or did she mean sexier?
Bugger it. She really must start checking caller ID. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” He paused. “Listen, I realize you’re probably doing bedtime with your son.”
At least he was aware of that fact. Half a Brownie point in his favor.
“And I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I know I took up enough of your time yesterday evening, and you’ve made your position perfectly clear. Perfectly clear. But I’m—” he hesitated “—obsessed with your garden, and sadly for you, that won’t change. Name your price and conditions. I’ll agree to anything.”
“How about agreeing to find someone else?”
“Not an option.” In the forest, a blue jay jeered. “It has to be you. Your garden speaks to me.”
She laughed. She had a gardening groupie? Was this how David had felt every time a grad student drooled over one of his lectures? Not a bad sensation, really. “Are you always this sure?”
“I have good intuition, Tilly. I wouldn’t be retired at forty-five if I didn’t.”
“Lucky you, because mine is crap.” One irreversible mistake, that’s all it had taken to dull her intuition into nonexistence. Tilly shivered, despite the clawing humidity. For a second she was back in the cold, white hospital room. Some days she wasn’t sure she’d ever left.
A carpenter bee looped past, searching for a place to burrow. It would, no doubt, drill a pretty little hole in her cedar railing. One bee, one hole, meant nothing, but small things had a nasty habit of becoming big things. And she didn’t want to think about the damage a colony of bees could inflict.
“So there is a chance for me?” James said.
Obviously, she hadn’t mastered no quite as well as she’d thought. “You know, I really, really want to dislike you.”
“Yes, I can have that effect on people. Although they tend to skip the want part.”
Tilly smiled. If he kept this up, she might have to change her mind. “It’s late, and you’re right. I’m in the middle of bedtime.”
“Can I call tomorrow?”
“You’re pushing it.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“Do