Chapter Eleven
FITZ
From Fitz’s window, the sky and the ocean look like stripes on a gray woolen blanket.
Neither will appear blue until the sun rises over the ridge to the west of the home.
Sunrises are unimpressive from his apartment, and this is fine by him.
Being held in awe of nature feels to Fitz like being ensnared by contemplation.
A beautiful sunrise is a trap. One minute you’re admiring the sky, and the next you’re not only revisiting the twists and turns of your life, but wondering how many you might have left.
Fitz suspects that gardens, too, can become sinkholes of contemplation if you aren’t careful.
He has watched that girl Lucy’s progress over the last couple of days, and has been begrudgingly impressed with the way she has cleared the paths, neatened the hedges, and shaped the lemon trees.
It’s difficult to find fault in a hard worker.
But she could single-handedly repave those paths with gold and still Fitz would have no intention of walking on them. Why would he? What would be the point?
He had been interested to see that giant tan-and-black dog following her around. He’s still puzzling over what kind it is. A mastiff maybe. Or a Newfoundland.
Fitz peers down into the garden. No, they haven’t arrived yet, the girl and her dog. Not that he cares.
His stomach rumbles. He didn’t feel much like eating when he woke up. Marjorie Swenson’s bullhorn voice usually propelled him from bed in the morning, but today the sound of her speaking to her grandson at an ungodly hour had only made him sink his head deeper into his pillow.
What, he wonders, not for the first time, could Marjorie and her grandson possibly find to talk about every single day?
Fitz himself has no talent for conversation.
He knows this. Unless it was related to his work at the brokerage firm, he had never said or done the right thing.
He’d had a sharp eye when it came to the stock market, but in his own life he’d managed to make the ruinous choice each and every time.
If he has learned anything, it is this: life is easier when you sit in your little apartment with your newspaper and your magnifying glass and you keep your door firmly closed against your neighbors.
It’s a relief to know that he is no longer the fool he was in his youth.
When he thinks back to the person he was when he first met his wife, it’s like remembering a stranger.
The first time he laid eyes on her, she was sitting in the middle of a group of girls at a corner table in the diner near his office where he went for lunch a few days each week.
As he stepped inside the diner, all of the lights seemed dim except the one above her.
The sounds of the restaurant were low and fuzzy, like a radio dial stuck between stations, but amid the blur of chatter, her voice was as clear as a song in his ear.
She asked the waitress for a glass of ice water with a slice of lemon.
Fitz hadn’t realized he’d stopped and stared until she shifted her eyes from the waitress to him, and held his gaze as she smiled.
He had to fight an overwhelming urge to stride into the kitchen and slice the lemon himself.
“Fitz? Hello, Fitz? You coming?” his coworker Eugene asked, looking over his shoulder and grinning.
Fitz felt a stab of anger when he realized that Eugene was already headed toward the counter and now Fitz would have to sit there, too, with his back to the girl in the booth.
He rushed them through lunch, making up a story about a pressing matter back at the firm.
When they left the restaurant, they made it halfway down the block before Fitz patted his pockets and announced he’d left his wallet on the counter.
“Go on ahead,” he told Eugene. “I’ll catch up.”
He jogged back to the restaurant as though he were being pulled toward it. Through the window, he saw that she was still at the table. He opened the door and walked up to her as though he did this sort of thing all the time, when in fact he’d never before done anything remotely like it.
“Hello,” he said, ignoring her giggling, wide-eyed friends.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Millie.”
Millie. The other girls wore pins in their stiff, shoulder-length hair, but Millie’s chestnut hair was short. It swept across her forehead and curled around her ears like a choppy sea.
A choppy sea.
Fitz was startled by the poetic turn of his thoughts. But everything about her made him react strangely. He didn’t believe in love at first sight—and yet what was this if not that? There was no other explanation for how he felt, or for how he behaved in the weeks and months and years to come.
Really, Fitz should have known better—after all, he came from a line of men who did inane things in the name of love. It was a curse the men in his family could not seem to shake, a curse they all took pride in even as they lamented it.
Fitz’s uncle used to laugh about the millions he’d let slip through his fingers when he’d left his first girlfriend, a shipping heiress, for the daughter of the neighborhood grocer. Couldn’t help it, he’d say, laughing and throwing his arm around Aunt Margaret, I’d do anything for this one.
Fitz’s own father had liked to boast about how he’d sold a little plot of land that he’d inherited in order to buy his wife, Fitz’s mother, a white convertible that she’d once—once!
—mentioned she admired. That car’s value plummeted the moment his mother wrapped her hands around the steering wheel, but the real estate?
It drove Fitz crazy to think of what it would have been worth if his father had held on to it.
The men in his family were bankers, traders, developers. Smart, practical money men. And yet, to a person, love turned them inside out. It made them do the most reckless, destructive things.
Fitz had always vowed to himself that he would not follow in their footsteps, but then he laid eyes on Millie and found himself stupidly drowning heart-deep within the family curse.
Why couldn’t the damned lights in that restaurant have brightened over one of Millie’s friends, one of those girls with the movie-star hair, instead of her?
Why did he have to fall like a ton of bricks for the girl who was different from everyone else?
The girl with the laughing eyes, who couldn’t go a day without having a bit of fun?
Who needed attention the way Fitz needed coffee?
The way she had smiled across the restaurant at him! He should have known then what sort of girl she was, the trouble she would cause, the chaos she would bring to his life, the way she would drive him mad.
But she was a delicious cake that he couldn’t get enough of, even when he knew it wasn’t good for him to crave her so. To want her all of the time. To so loathe the idea of sharing her.
Even now when he thinks of her, those old possessive feelings gain heat within him, filling him with a mix of anger and shame. He does not like to think of the path where that love had led him. He does not like to think of Millie at all. About their life together. How it ended.
What he did.
A knock on the door yanks Fitz from his thoughts.
He blinks. For a moment, he is utterly lost. The Oceanview Home, he remembers at last, looking down at the garden. The present floods around him, and he bobs to the surface of himself.
There’s another knock.
“What?” he barks.
One of the nurses—Fitz doesn’t know if they’re all nurses, or if any of them are, but this is the short one who wears her black hair in a tight ponytail—sticks her head into his room.
“Good morning,” she says in her no-nonsense sort of voice.
Fitz finds all of the nurses annoying, but this one annoys him the least of the bunch.
She doesn’t carry on like a preschool teacher, punctuating her sentences with exclamation points.
She isn’t even particularly patient, which is fine by him.
There is enough patience at the Oceanview Home to make his ears bleed.
Isobel. That’s her name.
“I’m not dead,” he tells her. She can check him off on the Alive List and carry on with her day.
“What a relief,” she says dryly, and steps into his apartment.
She glances around at his blank walls and decently neatened bed.
Her eyes rests for a moment on the photograph of his dog, Tad, that is propped on his dresser and then on the bag of black licorice that he’s had for eons, rationing out one to himself every day. Then she looks at him again.
“Mr. Fitz, you haven’t come down for breakfast.”
“And? Is the headmistress very angry?”
Isobel’s arched eyebrows are as dark and severe as her ponytail. She looks Fitz up and down.
“Well,” he says. “How do I look?”
“Fiercely handsome and clever,” she responds. “Like a lone wolf.”
Her wit comes as a surprise. It’s a struggle to not crack a smile, but Fitz has a lifetime of practice under his belt.
“Hungry like a wolf, too,” she goes on. “Why don’t I bring up something for you? An egg? Or a muffin?”
Fitz shakes his head. “No.”
“How about a walk down to the card room? Some of the residents are setting up for rummy.”
“God, no.”
Isobel’s eyebrows draw together. “Hmm. Well, you’ll call down if you change your mind?”
Fitz gives a noncommittal shrug and opens the newspaper. A moment later, he hears the door close.
Immediately he leans toward the window and looks down.
And there she is! The gardener. Lucy. He sucks in his breath.
Up close, she did not actually look much like Millie.
Thank God for small favors. It’s only when he sees her from afar, when she stands among the flowers and the light seems to gather so unusually around her, highlighting her chestnut hair and bright, pretty face, that she looks so much like Fitz’s wife that those long-familiar, icy fingers of shame wrap around his neck.
Oh! And there he is! That dog that looks more like a small bear, trailing after her along the path.
Fitz feels a strange thudding in his chest.
For a long time, he watches the pair. The gardener is very kind to that big, slow dog. Even from Fitz’s apartment three stories up, he can see that they have an ease with each other—that mostly unspoken language of dog people and their dogs.
It has been years since his Tad died, but Fitz remembers just how the dog’s fur felt below his hand, and the exact weight of the dog’s snout on his knee.
Fitz does not like people, but dogs—dogs he likes.
He doesn’t mind admitting it. And Tad liked him very much.
That’s the thing about dogs—they’re too loyal or dependent or just plain simple in the very best way to care about all of the awful things you’ve done in your life.
Fitz’s stomach groans again. He runs his hand over his face and turns, at last, from the window.
Maybe he will go downstairs after all and hunt down that egg.
And then later, if he feels like it, he supposes he might see if he can get a closer look at that gardener’s giant dog.