Gardens, Not Law
Over breakfast the next morning, Saskia caught her father up on Oxford, travels around Europe, and her current internship at the Broad Institute, in their new research building on Kendall Square.
“How many years left at Oxford?” Liko asked.
“Two,” she said, licking strawberry jam off her knife. “I might be able to squeeze it out in one though.”
“You can’t rush genius,” Dane said.
Liko peeled a clementine. “You’ll graduate with a…?”
“PhD in mathematics.”
“Then she’ll be Dr. Hasen-Strong,” Dane said.
“What’s your thesis?” Liko asked, as if he were well-versed in the philosophy of math when he’d barely scraped by in high school trig.
“Algebraic coding theory and symmetric block designs. More specifically, combinatorics and applications of representation theory to coding theory.”
“I have on matching socks,” Liko said, and glanced under the table to be sure. “Tell me about your internship?”
“Right now I’m learning to catalogue the genomic alterations responsible for cancer, using genome sequencing and bioinformatics.”
“Now she’s used up all my memorized buzzwords,” Dane said. He reached and lovingly jostled Saskia. “I need a crib sheet to brag about her properly.”
“You do all right, Deddy. Just don’t call me a mathmagician.”
Dane winked at Liko. “She still mixes up D5W and WD-40.”
Saskia gasped. “Bitch, that was a secret.”
They took the last of their coffee into the den to do the next clue of the Green Man Chamber.
“I haven’t done this in years,” Saskia said. “Go from the beginning.”
Liko did, feeling dumb as he demonstrated his little gaming quest in front of a Rhodes scholar, but Saskia beamed as if they were watching home movies.
“You know, I’m in this chamber,” she said. “Do you see me?”
“You?” Liko peered. “No. But I’m sure I’m missing the obvious.”
She got up and walked toward the screen, pointing to the windows behind the Green Man’s altar. Between two of the arched frames, a large knife hung on the wall.
“Saskia means knife.”
“That’s right,” Liko said. “Dane told me. A kiss A.”
“Look at you anagramming like a champ.”
“You do not want to play Scrabble with this one,” Dane said, flipping a thumb toward his daughter.
Liko rearranged Tinner Wheeled to Helen deWinter, which turned the ceiling motif in the other direction and woke up the sleeping dog.
Liko paused the game. “I always wondered why the dog isn’t an actual Great Dane.”
“You ever meet a Great Dane?” Dane asked.
“No.”
“They’re the worst.”
“Harsh, Dad,” Saskia said.
“Sorry. Many people adore them. I do not. They’re big and slobbery and not my kind of dog at all. That dog is Parker.”
“May he rest in peace,” Saskia said.
Liko resumed the game. The dog stretched, yawned again and walked away from his blanket, which lifted off the floor like a flying carpet. It rotated to fill the screen, revealing itself to be a map of the Danelaw. A replica of the one that hung in the front hall of the farmhouse.
“This part of the game is a little simplistic,” Dane said absently. “To me, anyway. I think Ethan anticipated me and Nomi getting frustrated if the puzzles tried to be too clever. It’s a love note, after all. He wanted to please us, not show off.”
“Your whole voice changes when you forget to be mad at him,” Liko said.
“Right?” Saskia said, laughing.
“You two aren’t allowed to be friends,” Dane muttered, pulling his ball cap lower.
Across the top of the map, letter tiles spelled out Danelaw Strong. Across the bottom, thirteen blank squares waited for their anagram.
“Do you have a middle name?” Liko asked.
“No,” Dane said.
“As you’ll soon see,” Saskia said, “Dad having a middle name would’ve ruined everything.”
Dane dumped out the bag of Scrabble tiles. “I’ll do it on the table. Liko can have the honors on screen. Now gird your loins, Greenman. If you thought tinner wheeled was fucked up, wait until you see this.”
He spelled out his name first. Then Saskia came to lean on his shoulder and together they rearranged the letters into three new words.
“Stop,” Liko said.
“Bananas, right?” Saskia said.
Dane turned up his palms. “I’m the scion of a legal family. But my destiny is gardens, not law.”
“You could’ve been named something else and had a whole different life,” Liko said. “No, not a different life. A different destiny?”
“I like to think so. Most people won’t be onboard with the idea but I believe in it. So…” He gestured to the TV. “Anagram me, baby.”
Liko started moving letters. “You make it sound so dirty.”
“Get a room,” Saskia murmured.
As the phrase Gardens, not law locked into place, the drawn lands of the Danelaw began to burgeon with growth, life and harvest. Animated crops sectioned off the map into patches of green and gold.
Grains. Wheat. Corn. Fruit trees exploded with blossom, then drooped from boughs weighted with bounty.
The produce accumulated until it fell off the map.
The game perspective pulled back to show the cornucopia piling up on the floor of the Green Man Chamber.
Parker the not-Great Dane circled around it, barking and wagging.
The caramel-colored duck, who up until now had done nothing in the game, followed behind him, sniffing with interest at the mound of fruits and vegetables.
Above the horn of plenty hovered the expected letter tiles, spelling out Naomi Misteria.
“I have to tap out here or I’ll get all weepy,” Saskia said. “Plus I need to hit the road, but not until I raid the veggie garden. Liko, I hear you’ve adopted a duck?”
Liko closed the laptop and bolted off the couch. “You can’t leave until you’ve met my duck…”
Liko had never been good friends with August. He’d always found it an oppressive month of extremes, from the weather to the psychological end of summer.
He could never get completely comfortable, either sweating through his clothes or shivering from overzealous air conditioning.
His mind wanted to be on vacation while his soul was bracing for back to school.
This August was magical, rolling by in long weeks of hard work, beautiful weather and Dane. Being at home together, being raunchy at the Pub, profound on the porch, electric in bed.
Dane was a powerful lover, which was a revelation Liko couldn’t quite understand because what had he been expecting?
Get in, get off, get out, he answered. That’s the only way you knew with men. Clumsily flinging yourself into the moment any which way, having a grand old time, but you didn’t think about it too much. Didn’t dial into what he was getting out of it. Didn’t linger afterward.
The dog days became wolfish nights when the moon blushed at the howling coming from the master bedroom.
Dane could do things with his hands and mouth Liko never dreamed.
To go from a smartass who smugly thought he was the more experienced, to a humbled wreck thinking that last orgasm caused irreparable brain damage, was a humbling journey he hoped would never end.
“God, don’t let this end,” he whispered to the dark of Dane’s bedroom, the words almost soundless.
His heart immense. His body inside-out. Dane’s hair falling through his fingers, Dane’s head lolling by his thigh, Dane’s throat humming against his cock, Dane’s tongue stud getting the sweet spot and his fingers finding sweeter spots.
Knees wide, heels digging furrows in the mattress, Liko died a thousand little deaths, then resurrected and resolved to keep living.
He still grieved. He still battled the words and argued with clients.
He still had indescribably bad days. But God, at least the steady endorphin stream from consistent sex kept him from crouching on the bottom of the pool, wondering if he could drown himself.
“How are you?” kind friends still asked.
“Hanging in there,” he’d answer, thinking I’m bouncing.
I’m just awful, but I’m not alone.
He’s awful too, and we’re in it together.
He’s my best friend and we get each other.
Some days suck out loud, but being with him doesn’t suck.
This little life at Schoenfeld’s does not suck.
The farm work was in panic mode, with produce rolling off the fields. Cora was making flatbreads out of everything. Dane sent Liko frantic texts every morning: Pick the zucchini before it turns into a porn star.
The kitchen garden was a jungle of green beans, herbs and cucumber vines, plus one rogue melon plant in a shocking relationship with the cherry tomatoes.
Dane introduced Liko to standing salad, which meant a lunch break on their feet, eating straight off the plants.
Folding lettuce leaves into their mouths, popping tomatoes and matchstick beans, crunching cucumbers down to the stems, finishing with a sprig of parsley and a drink from the garden hose.
Such lunches gave Cora’s fibrous temptations a run for their money.
September rolled around. Liko finished William Shepherd’s book and started another. He glanced out the study window one morning and saw a school bus ambling down Oak Hill Road, flashing red lights as it stopped for a pick-up.
This would have been Kyle’s senior year.
It was a hard, suck-ass day. But Dane was around. Dane would come back to the house. Dane would listen. Dane would know.
Dane would hold him all night.