18. Karlie
— ? —
Karlie
He’s been out there for eleven days.
I have stopped pretending I don’t watch.
The window seat in my bedroom has a direct view of my mother’s garden, which means it has a direct view of William, and every morning he’s there by seven, and every evening he leaves at dark, and in between, the impossible happens in increments: the dead canes come out, the collapsed beds get rebuilt, the soil turns from gray to black, truckload by wheelbarrow load, all of it moved by one man who three weeks ago had a staff of forty and hands that had never held anything heavier than a pen.
I know the shape of his days now, which is its own confession.
He arrives as the staff breakfast is ending.
He works the beds left to right, following some plan he keeps folded in a plastic sleeve and consults like scripture.
He eats whatever Gerald has taken to leaving on the wall at noon, standing up, looking at what’s left to do rather than what’s done.
And at dark he gathers every tool, wipes them down, lines them up in the shed like soldiers, and leaves without once approaching the house.
He’s terrible at the actual gardening, though.
That’s the part that undoes me, honestly.
I’ve watched him plant a rose upside down and have to dig it back out.
I’ve watched him fight a wheelbarrow like it owed him money.
I’ve watched him stand in the rain squinting at his phone, then at a hole, then at his phone, a man worth billions being personally defeated by a diagram.
Mrs. Potts reports from the kitchen, where the staff have a betting pool going, that he refuses all help, all coffee, all offers of gloves that fit.
He shows up, he ruins his hands, he does it wrong, he does it over, and he comes back the next morning and does it again.
“He asked Gerald what mulch is,” Mrs. Potts tells me at lunch, delivering it like a war dispatch. “Gerald says he wrote it down.”
She has appointed herself chief correspondent of the garden campaign, and her reports arrive with every meal.
Day four, he planted six roses and dug five of them back up before dark.
Day six, it rained all morning and he worked through it, and Gerald left a thermos on the wall, unrequested, and it came back empty and rinsed.
Day eight, a delivery truck brought proper tools and he tipped the driver enough that the driver came back to make sure it wasn’t a mistake.
Day nine, I stood too long at my window and he looked up, straight at me, no wave, no performance, just looked, and I stepped back behind the curtain with my heart going like I was nineteen, and I have not forgiven myself yet.
“He’s doing the far bed wrong,” my father observed two nights ago, at dinner, apropos of nothing, having apparently also been watching from windows. “Lily always said that corner needed shade stock.” A pause. “He’ll figure it out.”
It was the closest thing to approval I have ever heard my father give another man.
Eleven days. My ribs barely pull now on the stairs. The bruises have faded through their whole ugly rainbow and gone. The body, it turns out, insists on healing whether or not the rest of you has decided what it’s healing for.
Today the sky has been stacking gray since noon, and the wind is up, and any sensible person can read the storm coming.
William keeps working.
I watch from the window as the first fat drops start, watch him look up at the sky and then simply, visibly, decide it isn’t happening, and go back to setting a rose into a hole.
His shirtsleeves are rolled and ruined. He gave up on the new work jacket days ago.
Even from here I can see the way he favors his left hand now, the careful way he grips, and Mrs. Potts told me why yesterday, because Gerald told her: his hands are wrecked.
Blisters gone open, gone bandaged, gone open again, because the man refuses to stop and refuses gloves that fit and has never once in his gilded life had a callus.
The rain arrives properly. It comes in gray and sideways, flattening what’s left of the afternoon, and the sensible world goes indoors.
He keeps working. He sets the rose. He firms the soil around it with his ruined hands, in the pouring rain, with the unbearable patience of a man who has decided that weather is not on the list of things that get a vote, and I stand at my window watching him and I am suddenly, blazingly furious.
“Stubborn idiot,” I say, out loud, to nobody.
I make it four more minutes. Then I’m up, and down the stairs, and grabbing the first-aid kit from the pantry while Mrs. Potts watches me with an expression of profound, insufferable satisfaction, and I’m out the kitchen door into the rain with a fury I don’t fully understand riding my chest.
He straightens up when he sees me coming. Rain-soaked, mud to his forearms, a smear of dirt along his jaw where he wiped it, and at the sight of me marching across the lawn in the rain his whole face opens up in a way that makes my fury double, because he has no right to look at me like that, none.
“You’re bleeding on my mother’s roses,” I snap.
He looks down at his hands. Water and watered-down red, running off his knuckles into the bed he’s building.
“It’s mostly rain,” he says.
“That was not a diagnosis, William. Get inside. Kitchen. Now.”
“The stock needs to be in before the temperature…”
“The stock has survived four years of neglect. It will survive your lunch break.” I point at the house with the first-aid kit, dripping. “Kitchen.”
He looks at me for a moment through the rain, mud-streaked and soaked through and bleeding, and the corner of his mouth moves, the almost-smile, the first one I’ve seen since the morning we left for the weekend, and my chest does a complicated thing I refuse to examine on the lawn in a downpour.
I don’t wait to see if he follows. Of course he follows.
Mrs. Potts has evaporated from the kitchen with a tact so loud it echoes, leaving towels on the table that were not there four minutes ago.
I point William into a chair, and he sits, dripping, and I sit across from him and grab his wrist and turn his palm up, and my breath comes out through my teeth.
“You tore up the divorce papers,” I say, because somebody has to say something and apparently it’s going to be me, and apparently it’s going to be that.
“I did.”
“My lawyer printed more.”
“I assumed she would.” He sits there, dripping, entirely unbothered. “I have a shredder at the office and nothing but time.”
I should be angry. I am angry, somewhere, in a filing cabinet I can’t currently locate.
He smells like rain and turned earth, which is not a combination I had opinions about until approximately now.
His hands are a disaster. Both of them. Blisters torn and re-torn across both palms, raw at the base of every finger, one knuckle split, everything waterlogged and angry, the hands of a laborer grafted onto a man whose watch costs more than the truck he’s been unloading.
“These need actual attention. A doctor. Possibly a priest.”
“They’re fine.”
“They’re infected in two places.”
“Then they’re mostly fine.”
“You absolute idiot,” I say, and reach for the antiseptic. “You could have worn proper gloves. You could have stopped. You could have hired forty people, you can hire literally anyone on earth.”
“Your father said no crews.”
“My father said…” I stop. I look up at him. “You talked to my father?”
“I asked his permission.” Rain drips off his hair onto the table. He doesn’t move while I clean the first palm, though I know exactly how much it stings. “For the garden. It was the only thing I could think of that was worth asking for.”
“Why?”
“Because you told me once it was the last place you were happy. Here, I mean. In your whole childhood.” His voice stays level, quiet, while I work.
“Second year, some dinner party, you’d had two glasses of wine and you pointed at the window and said, that used to be my mother’s rose garden, I was happy there once.
You thought I wasn’t listening. I was always listening, Karlie.
That’s the terrible part. I heard everything and did nothing with any of it.
” He watches my hands wrap his. “I can’t give you back three years.
I can’t undo the window I walked past. So I’m starting with the garden.
It’s not a gesture. Gestures end. I’m going to be out there until it blooms, and then I’m going to be out there keeping it blooming, and you never have to say one word to me about it.
It’s yours either way. It was always supposed to be yours. ”
Somewhere in the middle of his speech I switched to the second hand without noticing, working on autopilot, gauze and tape, and his eyes never left my face once.
I could feel them the whole time. Now the second hand is done and I am still holding it, my thumb resting on the clean white bandage over his palm, and there is no medical reason left for any of this.
His gaze drops, once, briefly, to my left hand where it holds his. To the bare finger. He doesn’t say anything about it. His jaw does something complicated, and his eyes come back up carrying weather, and he says nothing at all.
My hands have stopped wrapping.
I’m holding his ruined hand in both of mine, in my father’s kitchen, with the rain hammering the windows and the antiseptic sharp in the air, and I make the mistake of looking up.
He’s already looking at me. He’s always already looking at me, that’s the thing I forgot, in the wreckage of everything, that being looked at by William Hunt with his full attention is like standing in front of a furnace with the door open, and it’s aimed at me from two feet away with rain still in his lashes and nothing left in his face but the truth.
“Karlie,” he says, very quietly.
“Don’t.” It comes out as a whisper, which is not how I meant it to come out.
His thumb moves. Just barely. A slow stroke across the inside of my wrist, over the pulse point, and my pulse betrays me instantly, leaps against his thumb where he can feel it, and I watch him feel it, watch his eyes darken with the knowing of it, and there is nowhere to hide from a man who is holding your heartbeat in his bandaged hand, watch his breath change, and neither of us has moved and the two feet between us has somehow become six inches, close enough to share air, close enough that I can see the rain drying at his temple and the exact moment his eyes drop to my mouth.
Six inches. Three years and a car crash and eleven days of ruined hands, and it comes down to six inches of kitchen air, and I can’t remember a single one of my excellent reasons, and his hand turns carefully inside mine until our fingers are almost woven, and I am leaning, God help me, I am leaning…
Headlights sweep across the kitchen window.
We both freeze. The light rakes the wall, swings, steadies, an engine coming up the drive through the rain, fast, sure of its welcome.
I know that car. I have watched it pull up to my house, his office, his parents’ door, every disaster of the last four months. I would know that car in the dark at the bottom of the sea.
Helen’s.