Chapter 14
The trowel stopped in Maris’s hand the moment she looked up and saw Garrick crouching down beside her son. Just like that she was back in her kitchen on Saturday night with his mouth on hers and her legs around his waist and her sensible life coming apart against a cabinet.
She’d been thinking about it ever since.
She’d thought about it dividing perennials and she’d thought about it taking a shower and she’d thought about it lying in the dark long after Toby was asleep.
The memory arrived with such vivid, specific heat that she’d had to press the heels of her hands against her eyes and mutter too fast, I told him too fast, I meant it.
She had meant it. She’d also spent the last day and a half wanting to take it back.
And this morning she’d walked the long way around the block, pushing the wheelbarrow through Stonehaven’s front gates, and she’d been listening for him the whole way.
She’d half-expected his enormous body to come around the box hedge.
He hadn’t. She’d knelt down in the roses and gotten to work and told herself, firmly, with dirt already under her nails, that she was not disappointed.
She was a terrible liar, even to herself. Especially to herself.
Now here he was, crouched down small as he could make himself, which was not small at all, his grey wings settling behind him like folded sails.
Toby stood as straight as a soldier with his hands clasped politely in front of him.
The two of them were looking at each other with such grave mutual respect that something in her chest twisted, sweet and painful all at once.
“—who wakes you up?” Toby was saying.
And Garrick didn’t answer.
She heard the silence stretch. She saw it, too.
The way his jaw set, the way his grey eyes fixed on some point past the boy’s shoulder and his big shoulders stiffened.
A male holding a weight he wouldn’t name.
Her throat closed on nothing. Who wakes you up.
She thought of finding him in the garden that day, grey and still and cold, and the lurch of fear she’d felt before he’d opened his eyes.
She thought of all the dark windows in that great house.
She opened her mouth, though she didn’t know what she meant to say, some rescue, some redirection—
Garrick got there first.
“That gate,” he said. His voice had shifted back up to its usual low register, economical, decided.
The voice of a male closing one door and opening another because he’d rather build than dwell.
He rose out of the crouch in one smooth movement, all that height unfolding, and looked towards the far wall where the old iron gate hung under its curtain of vines.
“The one in the wall. We should open it. There’s no need to go all the way around the block with a loaded wheelbarrow. ”
She pushed her hair back with her wrist. “I like the walk.”
“You don’t.”
She didn’t, particularly. The block was long and the wheelbarrow was heavy and by the second trip her shoulders were singing. “It’s not that far.”
“It’s a hundred and forty yards each way that you don’t need to walk.
” He said it in a calm, reasonable voice, laying out the loads and the stresses.
And she recognized it now for what it was.
Garrick solving a problem. Garrick offering her something dressed up as practical, because practical was the only language he knew how to use.
“I’ll clear the gate and rehang it so it swings properly.
Your nursery is directly behind that wall.
You’d step through and be in the roses.” A pause.
“It makes more sense than the alternative.”
She turned it over, looking for the catch, the way she always looked for the catch.
Looking for the moment his generosity would tip over into what her in-laws used to do, throwing money and fixes at her to remind her, gently and endlessly, that she couldn’t manage on her own.
She didn’t find it. He wasn’t offering to build her a gate.
He was offering to open one. To take something that already existed and had fallen into ruin and make it work again, which was the single most Garrick thing he could possibly do.
“Fine,” she said, and heard how briskly it came out, and tried to soften it. “It is practical. I’ll grant you that.” She pointed the trowel at him. “But I’m not letting you replace the whole gate with some grand wrought-iron thing. The old one’s good. It just needs—”
“It needs cleaning, oiling, and one new hinge pin.” The half-smile threatened to appear. “I know how you feel about replacing things, little thorn. I wasn’t going to touch it.”
The nickname landed low in her stomach the way it always did. She looked back down at her plants so he wouldn’t see her face do whatever it was doing.
“Can I help?”
Both of them looked down. Toby had come to the edge of the bed, and his careful reserve had cracked wide open around the edges.
His eyes went up to Garrick’s face, then over at the gate, then back.
He wanted it so badly he could barely hold still, and he was concentrating with all his small might on holding still anyway, both hands fisted in the hem of his shirt, chin up.
“Yes,” Garrick said immediately, without any hesitation at all.
Then—and this was what broke her—he caught himself. His gaze lifted to hers, and he added, “If your mother says it’s all right.”
He’d asked her. He hadn’t decided for Toby and he hadn’t decided for her.
She thought of all the times her father-in-law had made plans for Toby over her head, checkbooks and schools and what’s best for the boy, Maris.
And this enormous stone male with claws that could open a car door like a tin can had just, without any apparent effort, done the exact opposite.
And now they were both looking at her with two sets of hopeful eyes. Toby’s wide and pleading and up on tiptoe, and Garrick’s, which he’d never in a thousand years admit were hopeful, gone that warm gold at the edges, waiting.
She didn’t stand a chance and she knew it.
“He has to do exactly what you tell him,” she said to Garrick. “And he has to stay out of the way of anything heavy.”
“He will.”
“I will, Mama.”
“Then all right.” She waved the trowel at the pair of them. “Go on. Fix the gate.”
Toby made a small delighted sound, quickly stifled. Garrick looked down at him, and something passed over the big angular face that she was fairly sure counted as a smile. “Come on,” he said. “You’ll need a hard hat.”
“I don’t have a hard hat.”
“I do.”
He led the boy off towards the former carriage house he used for his tools. He matched his long stride to Toby’s short quick one without seeming to think about it. She knelt in the roses and watched them go and bit her lip to keep from making a noise that would have embarrassed everyone.
They came back a few minutes later, and she had to press her dirty glove against her mouth.
Garrick had found Toby a hard hat, a real one in bright safety yellow, sized for a grown man’s head.
It sat so far down over Toby’s ears and eyebrows that her son had to tip his whole head back to see out from under the brim.
He looked ridiculous. He looked, from the set of his small shoulders, like the most important and consequential man alive.
He’d put his hands behind his back, in the posture of a foreman surveying a site rather than a child minding his manners.
He trotted along beside Garrick’s thigh with the hat wobbling and his chin held high.
“Mama, look.” He pointed at the hat with both hands, as if she might have missed it.
“I see it. Very official.”
“Mr. Garrick said I have to wear it because of the falling things.”
“There aren’t any falling things,” she said.
“There could be,” said Toby, with immense seriousness, and Garrick, behind him, met her eyes over the yellow brim, absolutely deadpan, and she had to look away.
She meant to keep working. There was real work to do.
The whole east border wanted dividing before the frost came, and she had a planting plan for the terrace beds she still hadn’t settled.
She was a professional, she reminded herself.
She was being paid. And the fact that the male paying her had had his hand up her thigh two nights ago was something she was going to be disciplined about.
She managed about four minutes.
Then Toby’s voice floated over from the wall—“like this?”—and Garrick’s low rumble answered him, patient and unhurried.
She found the trowel had stopped again and she was just kneeling there in the dirt listening.
She couldn’t help it. She’d almost never heard her son talk this much.
With most adults Toby went quiet and polite and careful, and here he was chattering like he did with her, asking Garrick what the tool was called, and why the hinge went there, and whether stone was heavy for him or whether it was heavy for people but not for him.
And Garrick answered every single one of them like it was a question worth answering, like Toby was a colleague and not a five-year-old in an enormous hat.
He never once talked down to him, and he let a silence be a silence when her son needed one.
This was going to be what killed her, and she knew it already.
Not the shoulders. Not the wings. Not the mouth against hers in the dark kitchen.
This is worse.
She kept working. She split a clump of asters and shook the soil off the roots and worked them into fresh holes. The whole time she was tuned to that happy voice across the garden like a plant turned to light. She stopped pretending she was disappointed about anything at all.
“Mama! Mama, come and look!”
She got up, brushing her knees, and crossed the garden to the wall.
The gate stood open. Actually open, swung wide on its old hinges, the vines pulled back and tied off to one side, the fallen pin replaced with a bright new one.
The whole thing cleaned of decades of rust and grime so the good iron showed through, black and simple and still exactly the gate it had always been.
Beyond it she could see straight through into the back of her own nursery, the greenhouses, the rows of pots, and the shed.
Everything that had been a hundred and forty yards and a whole block away now sat a single step through the wall.
Two places she loved, joined by a door that swung.
Toby was beside himself.
He ran through the gate. He ran back. He stood in the exact middle of the opening, one foot in Garrick’s garden and one foot on the threshold of hers, hat wobbling, and announced, “I’m in both places.
” Then he ran through again to prove it.
Back and forth, back and forth, the yellow hat bobbing, and he was laughing.
Actually laughing, out loud, unselfconscious, a sound she heard so rarely from him that it caught her under the ribs.
“It swings,” she said. She’d meant to say something clever. That was all that came out.
“It swings.” Garrick stood beside her, wiping his hands on a rag, watching the boy tear back and forth through the wall. He’d left the gate itself untouched, exactly as she’d asked—just made it work. Just opened it.
She looked at the gate, and the boy, and him, and the two gardens made into one, and she found her throat had gone tight.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
He didn’t answer right away. He folded the rag once and set it aside.
Then he put his arm around her, slowly and carefully, giving her every chance to avoid it.
It was the same way he handed decisions back to her.
It settled heavy and warm across her shoulders, and he drew her in against the solid grey bulk of his side.
She leaned into him before she’d decided whether she was going to.
Toby ran through the gate again, into the nursery, out of sight for a heartbeat, and then his hat came bobbing back into view.
“There’s a caterpillar on your pepper plants!
” he shouted, and vanished again to go and inspect it.
And she leaned into the warmth of the enormous, quiet, impossible male beside her, his arm heavy across her back, and watched her son run laughing through a wall that had stood between two worlds for a hundred years.
Too fast, she’d told him.
Standing there in the roses with his arm around her and the gate swinging open and the boy’s bright hat flashing through the gap, she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she’d been so afraid of.
Too fast seemed like something that had happened to someone else, a long time ago, on the far side of a wall that no longer had anything in the way of it.