The bay turned to thunder under a sudden rain that soon whispered along drooping Douglas firs. Wind pulled water off drenched Queen Elizabeth roses ringing a stone fountain -- puddles in a cherub's cupped hands shivered.
You've got to love a good, soaking rain, she said. Heavy drops gathered and fell from her brim. it's good for the plants, she said. Around her were bursts of yellow, glossy pink, and sparks of blue. Day lilies, tea roses, and a sea of forget-me-nots drank up from between stones. Pure, undiluted water is good for us too, she said.
I can't think of today and its jumble of confusion, so I think of then -- when I was in Long Island in a summer storm with Patricia. We hurried to pack our edgers and spades, cover the peat moss, and find the last set of shears. My rusty old pick-up was just getting rustier, but it was mine. Every day I dug, planted, watered and watched. Each morning I used my left hand to open the clenched fingers on my right. Hard work made them that way, and I was glad.
The driver's door flew open one day as I made a hard left turn on Sunrise Highway, leaving Southampton in the rear view and heading toward Montauk. With my right hand on the column shift I dragged it into second gear and jammed my knee under the steering wheel. With my left hand briefly free I reach out and yanked the door shut so hard that it never opened again. I spent at least a year hopping in and out of the window, but it was mine and I drove it until the tie rods snapped.
I would get home seconds before dusk's gray smudges in the sky turned black and drag myself and a beer into the crappy plastic shower stall at the cottage I rented. I watched the overhead spray rinse dirt from my skin. I imagined Patricia's voice: it's not dirt, it's soil. If I lit a Marlboro and blew smoke through the Impatiens she would ask, who is smoking that delicious cigarette?
I didn't know what was coming. I couldn't see the future. Had I picked a direction or formed even a tiny plan I might have been better in the end, but in less than two years I would crash. Heartache and sadness were bad enough, but being adrift in life without friends or a clue did me in.
My heartache: I would see him sometimes and wonder why he did not love me anymore. I never waved. I always looked at a shop window, the sunset, my feet, but never at him. I never knew if he saw me. As much as I reinvented and perfected my life in my head, I never gave any thought my life in the world. Goodbye, I should have said to my reflection, because I sank.
I lived by time told on the hands of a wind-up clock. I looked forward to coffee in the morning and a beer before bed. I had no phone and no one to call anyway. I didn't care. I wanted a few bucks for the bar on Friday and enough stashed in the truck's ashtray to buy a few new books by Saturday. I listened to Cat Stevens all summer and must have planted more than a thousand roses, hundreds of hydrangeas, and tore through one old walkway with a pickax because the woman absolutely had to have those aromatic lilacs right there beneath the kitchen window.
I learned to love the rewards of exhausting work that robbed my mind of worry and brought more immediate things into focus, like my shitty boots. These water-bogged things were trash even before I laced them up and ruined them.
I had no demons then. Bad dreams and an invasive sadness were usual, but demons didn't come until later, when I would see myself in my head but the shadow beside me on the ground was not mine. I told a friend months ago that I was haunted, and I meant it.
