Chapter 5
I walk the leftover daffodil bulbs to Joel’s, pretending I’m a good neighbor.
It’s Saturday, and Dee has taken Ella to the library with the goal of interesting her in any early-reader book that isn’t Libby and the Garden Gate, a short and soothingly uneventful story that is so far the only book Ella will open.
Joel probably won’t even be home.
But he’s getting out of his car, and it’s like I willed him to appear at this exact moment, wearing cornily sexy green scrubs like we’re in a porn scene.
“Tempest!” he says, happy.
Black-eyed Susans bloom in a yellow riot at the weedy border of his property, spilling over from a neighbor’s pollinator habitat garden. The maples that line the street are an undecided mix of green and yellow.
I command myself with desperate ferocity not to let my gaze move from Joel’s face. Although on second thought, his face is maybe the most dangerous place to leave my eyes unchaperoned.
“I was just going to drop these. . . .” I start weakly, making a motion toward doing that.
“Hold on.” He’s suddenly right there, taking the basket from me. “Do you have a minute? Their lives may depend on it.”
I don’t mean to smile, and then I don’t mean to watch his mouth smile back.
“Just give me a second to change,” he says, and he disappears inside.
I wait on the front path, feeling oddly exposed without Ella.
A child like a shield. Me, a terrorist. I’ve never been tempted like this.
Even Adam was still a choice. This feels more like an addiction, and I’m a sudden junkie, risking everything, Joel’s life included, just to spend a few more seconds in his presence.
What is it about him?
Everything, my brain tells me. Even though I don’t know him at all. I don’t even know what everything is.
And then he’s back, now in adorable sweatpants and a green henley shirt that agrees enthusiastically with at least one of the colors in his eyes.
He’s close to me as we walk around the back of the house together, cheerful and unfazed by our abrupt and colossal aloneness, and I breathe shallowly, trying not to take in too much of his scent, trying to memorize it: that clean, sun-soaked black-tea musk.
It’s a cool, overcast day and the air is soft with moisture.
The pine tree by the fence has a moody northern look.
There isn’t much of a secret to planting the bulbs.
Just digging (he finds a spade) and patting the earth down, then watering.
I like that he doesn’t care about kneeling on the ground, getting soil on his knees and under his nails.
His arm ends up very near mine once or twice, and the sun slips out to get in his hair like it’s also obsessed and can’t keep its rays off him.
I try to evaluate the situation clinically: Is his neck objectively attractive?
What about his chin, with that hint of a scar, maybe from teenage acne?
Why is he still single? He’s too good-natured and successful—what’s the catch?
He might be a sociopath. They’re supposed to be really likable at first. He might have a gambling problem.
He has a weird fetish? No guessing! I command myself.
He’s a dom, I can see it. Mmm. Friendly and gentle in public, relentless control in bed.
“. . . zucchini?” he’s saying, and I scramble to catch up to the conversation. “And then I’m pretty much homesteading,” he finishes, gesturing around his little yard with the weatherworn blue shed and slightly shaggy grass. “Off the grid.”
I smile. “You realize these will grow flowers, not food, right? You’re going to be pretty hungry over the winter.”
“It’s okay, I’ll just make a bow and arrows out of . . .” He points vaguely toward the house, maybe at one of the neglected-looking chairs on the modest stone patio.
“The cello?” I suggest.
He shrugs, cutely feigning macho indifference. “If it comes to that. Gotta hunt.”
“You seem like you could bring down . . . an elk.” Shit, am I blatantly flirting now? Does anyone mention elk while flirting? “Or at least, I don’t know, a raccoon.”
“I don’t want to brag,” he says. “But you probably haven’t seen a lot of raccoons around here.”
I stifle a laugh, trying to stay deadpan. “Well, it’s also daytime.” I fight a wince. Hanging out constantly with a seven-year-old can make a person annoyingly literal.
“Well, yeah. But come back any night.”
We’re smiling at each other, and I have a swooping sensation, a Ferris-wheel sense of lifting into the sky, of everything being sickeningly perfect, the world falling away until it’s miniature.
Is he also feeling it?
What a girly, irrelevant question. It doesn’t matter what he’s feeling, what I think I maybe see in his eyes—an unfolding, a softness.
I blurt, “So tell me about being a doctor. You might need to keep that job, in case the homestead doesn’t work out.” There. I’m investigating! Like Grub told me to. I can write off this whole gardening escapade as a business expense.
“What do you want to know?” Joel goes to unwind the hose from the side of the house, pulls it toward the nascent garden, his biceps pleasingly evident.
I swallow. “Apparently you have some kind of magic, lifesaving touch.” I get right to the point, like a detective. “One of the nurses told me.” Or maybe detectives are more subtle.
But instead of taking the opportunity to talk about a strange, wondrous track record of medical miracles, Joel brushes off the claim entirely and starts talking about his private practice.
He loves family medicine—getting to treat patients over long periods of time, at every stage of life.
He describes a family under his care, the grandparents as well as the new baby, named—mysteriously—Gertrude.
He gives the impression of liking people generally.
And then, like someone who feels he’s talked too long about himself even though he’s only been speaking for a minute, he asks about my doula work.
And instead of cleverly interrogating him, I tell him about the pearl-wearing, old-money woman who blared a labor playlist of gangsta rap.
About the classic fainting husband at the twin birth.
I tell him how it feels to learn clients’ secret fears, to cook their favorite foods when they’re depleted after birth.
The way he listens makes me want to keep talking and talking. So, like a weak-willed ghoul, I do.
“What a gift,” he says quietly, “to get to be there for all of that.” We’re standing together near the patio, having finished watering. His arms are lightly crossed, and he gives the impression of a farmer-scholar, with such solid elbows.
“My brother, Adam,” he says, like it’s God speaking through him, smiting me for my sinful thoughts, “I took care of him. At the end of his life.”
A sharp ache unzips along my spine.
He adjusts his glasses, rubs the side of his nose. “What you’re saying, about being there for those moments that no one else sees—It means a lot to me, that I was there with him then.”
He glances up, self-conscious, exposed.
“I’m glad you were,” I say with too much feeling. But he looks at me gratefully, his eyes momentarily exhausted. Like he wishes he could climb out of his life and sit down beside it in the void.
I also wish that. In fact, I am wishing so hard in this moment that there’s nothing except wish left in me.
“I’m really sorry about your brother,” I manage to say. He will never know the cataclysmic extent of this.
His lips shift toward a smile. “Thank you. I miss him.” His voice goes husky. His suffering is right below the surface, muscles moving under skin.
Now I want, urgently, to put my hand on his arm. I want to reach out and touch him the way I would touch Alice or a client, or any other man who needed comfort. (I can touch men from the general population, by the way, just not men I want to touch.)
A headache bursts behind my eye, spreads through my skull. A bubble rises in my throat. In it are the words for telling him that I knew Adam, that I cared about him, even if briefly. I swallow, popping it. The words ooze down, lost.
* * *
Stay for dinner next time? Joel texts me a few days later. I promise I won’t serve raccoon meat.
I make myself come twice as I read and reread this message and imagine his hands on my shoulders, on my back, on my hips, kind and demanding at the same time.
Right after, I flash to Arlo, the little dark hairs on his soft belly when I pulled up his shirt with my ignorant teenage fingers.
To Omar. The realization that it was me.
I had killed him. I had killed all of them.
The darkness twists in me, strangling, festering.
No, I text back in my mind. No, sorry. Mondays don’t work anymore.
Yes, I text back in real life.