Chapter Fourteen
FITZ
The next morning, Fitz looks down from his apartment window and sees only pale, precisely crisscrossing paths, small trees shaped into perfect spheres, geometric beds dotted with purple flowers, and the long blue gash of the empty pool. There is no sign of the gardener. Or her dog.
He frowns.
He decides to head to breakfast before Isobel or any of the other caregivers has a chance to bother him.
When he enters the dining room, something seems off.
He can’t put his finger on the change and frankly doesn’t care all that much.
He sits at the table in the corner that he prefers and has scrambled eggs and buttered toast. He doesn’t touch the fruit salad that someone has optimistically put on his plate.
As he’s finishing his meal, he senses it again, that feeling that something is different.
He narrows his eyes and scans the room. There is dignified Vikram Neel, the once-famous pastry chef of the once-famous Jackson Place, with his hollow cheeks and tortured expression, sitting at his usual seat near the entrance to the kitchen, staring darkly into his untouched plate of food with his arthritic hands curled in his lap.
Fitz has heard rumblings that Vikram is on a hunger strike, that he has no interest in living if he can’t bake, which seems among the dumber things that Fitz has heard in his long life.
And there’s Fitz’s awful neighbor Marjorie Swenson, with her hair done up and her lipstick and her red glasses and her big earrings, carrying on her usual one-sided conversation with her silent friend Cynthia looking like a cardboard cutout beside her.
They used to be quite the pair, Fitz seems to recall, with Cynthia as loud and attention-demanding as Marjorie, who now seems to have taken on the work of both.
Fitz’s assessment of the room stops when his eyes reach the wall of windows. One set of the long, heavy curtains that hangs there, mostly blocking the light that might have fallen into the room, moves slightly. Someone has opened the window. That’s new.
But that’s not all. The tiny, posh-looking woman, Adele, who usually sits silently in a wheelchair in front of that exact window, instead sits in a dining chair, and she’s chatting with the large, solid man whom Fitz calls Louis the Lump.
She has a funny new glow about her, a glow that supposedly—if the whispers around the home were to be believed—she acquired after talking to the gardener.
Fitz had watched Lucy and Adele from his seat on the tucked-away bench, but he hadn’t been able to make out their words.
It appeared to him that one minute, Adele was her usual, limp self, blinking out at the world from her fancy wheelchair, and the next she was strolling around, smiling, bending over to caress the flowers like she owned the place.
Louis the Lump, it seems to Fitz, is listening closely to whatever it is Adele is yapping on about.
He seems agitated, restless. He keeps drumming the table with his meaty fingers.
Every few minutes, he gives a brief response.
Fitz has never seen them sit together before and wonders what they could possibly have to say to each other.
He thinks he hears them mention Lucy—but then again, it seems as though her name is flitting in the air all around him these days, as irritating as an insect.
So that’s that, the big new changes in the Oceanview Home’s dining room: an open window and Adele Abrams in a dining chair cornering old Louis the Lump into conversation.
Fitz sighs. Breakfast eaten, he has no interest in lingering.
He stands and grips his walker. Without giving it much thought, he makes his way out of the dining room, down the hall, through the whooshing automatic doors, and onto the terrace.
A light breeze sweeps over his skin. His heartbeat steadies as he walks down the ramp.
The air is cool, the sun still making its way over the soaring roof of the home, the light in the garden sleepy and soft.
He’s relieved to be free of the walls of the home, free of all the company he’d rather be without.
His chest swells with a feeling of independence.
He is, he thinks, in his natural, most preferred state when he is alone.
Now where is that gardener and her dog?
The flower beds are squared away, fragrant and neat as a pin. And then he notices it: the opening in one of the ivy-covered walls. He pauses, head cocked, listening carefully. Then he points his walker toward the wall.
When he steps through the opening, he arrives in an entirely different world, this one dark and lush and green. He remembers it from years earlier, but only vaguely, like a long-ago dream. His dog, Tad, had liked the cool shade provided by the birch trees.
Freshly pulled weeds are piled along the sides of the stone path that curves through the garden. Just as Fitz notices the weeds, Gully rounds a corner and comes into view, wagging his big tail so heartily that it sends the long feathers of nearby ferns waving, too.
“There you are.” Fitz maneuvers his walker so he can pet the giant dog. “Hello, boy. Yes, yes. It’s nice to see you, too.”
After a good long pet, the dog turns and walks back the way he came. A few steps on, he stops and looks over his shoulder at Fitz.
“I’m supposed to come with you? Bossy this morning, eh? Fine.” Fitz’s walker bumps over the path’s stones. He turns around a bend and has to duck below a branch. It feels like trekking through the .
“Good morning.”
Ahead, his wife kneels on the path, her beautiful, inquisitive face tilted up at him. Fitz’s mouth goes dry.
“Mr. Fitz?”
Her voice becomes soft, concerned, and Fitz blinks hard and sees that she is the gardener—of course she is!
—not Millie. His wife’s eyes had been a luxurious shade of brown, like the pelt of a mink, and this girl’s eyes are a deep, true cornflower blue.
She has paused from her work ripping weeds from between the stones to give him a welcoming, if wary, smile.
“Lucy,” Fitz says, finding his voice and nodding curtly. “I see you have found a new garden to lick into shape.”
“Isn’t it dreamy? I just started working in here so the path is still a mess. Please be careful.”
Fitz doesn’t need the warning—he has eyes—but he appreciates that she doesn’t try to stop him as he pushes past her.
The path ahead is tricky, and he feels a little sheen of sweat form on his forehead as he shoves his walker over clumps of weeds and uneven stones.
Just out of view of the gardener, he notices a large mound off the side of the path that, as he nears it, turns out to be a bench overtaken by ivy.
Fitz considers for a moment, then lets go of his walker.
He grabs a fistful of ivy and tugs. A flutter of satisfaction moves through him as he rips the vine from the bench.
Within a few minutes, he has cleared enough space to sit down with a sigh of earned pleasure.
Gully reappears and lumbers right up to him and somehow tucks himself into a ball so close to Fitz’s feet that Fitz can feel the dog’s warm, slow breaths through his shoe leather.
Fitz looks out into the overgrowth. Here and there, light streams through the birch trees’ leaves. Pink and purple flowers dot the shades of green. Within the shadows, white butterflies seem to appear and disappear, though he knows that isn’t possible. They’re still there. He just can’t see them.
Why does he keep thinking he sees Millie? He has never believed in ghosts, never bought into anything supernatural, anything inexplicable. It’s not in his nature to do so. He is rational, sane, grounded.
He worries he is losing hold of himself.
Regret can haunt you. Shame can. Guilt. This, he knows.
But an actual person, long dead? No. It is impossible.
It’s only Lucy, who might look a bit like Millie from a distance, or in the shadows of a garden, but who has a depth of kindness in her cornflower-blue eyes that Millie never had.
Lucy speaks easily with everyone, but her voice is warm and sincere—it doesn’t have an ounce of the artificial quality of Millie’s brittle banter.
And she is clearly comfortable with the sort of contemplative silence from which Millie always ran.
Fitz has the sense that Lucy is beloved here at the home already.
She’s probably never done one terrible, unforgivable thing in her short life—and she probably never would.
Not like Fitz had.
He isn’t sure how long he’s been sitting there when he hears voices.
Lucy has worked her way along the path and is just in sight now, and she’s been joined by Isobel, the caregiver that Fitz dislikes the least, and Vikram Neel, who looks like a walking skeleton.
Gully hoists himself up, casts one of his all-knowing glances over his shoulder at Fitz, and then meanders toward the newcomers.
Fitz leans farther back into the greenery, hoping to go unnoticed—or at least undisturbed.
He hears Isobel introduce herself to Lucy. “And this is Vikram Neel,” she says.
“It’s so nice to meet you both,” Lucy says. “My parents were big fans of yours, Mr. Neel. They loved your restaurant, Jackson Place.”
Fitz rolls his eyes. Does the girl not realize that she’s bringing up a sore subject? Is she unaware that the poor man can’t cook anymore? That he’s so distressed about it that he stopped eating? Despite himself, Fitz leans forward just a little, curious about how this conversation will unfold.
To his surprise, Vikram offers Lucy a gentlemanly, if weak, smile. “Thank you,” he says. “It was my pleasure to cook for them. And please, call me Vikram.”
He sounds exhausted. What was Isobel thinking dragging him out here? Fitz thinks she should either figure out how to get Vikram to eat, or leave the man to wither away in peace.