Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Turtle walked the North Star aisles on shady, foggy spring days bundled up in wool with her hands tucked into her armpits, moving among the now familiar tables and picking up plants to put in her red wagon, something that had never lost its wonderfulness and which was slowly replacing the pleasures of novelty with the pleasures of the familiar, and she kept searching on the clear, warm days of summer, dressed in short sleeves and Carhartts, with Anna waiting in a deck chair reading The Captive & The Fugitive , part of her project of “Big Reads” that had eluded her through college, when she’d mostly been busy, she said, with white-water kayaking and with boys. She’d read War and Peace , Moby-Dick , Infinite Jest , The Brothers Karamazov , and she’d started Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time . Anna had no patience for the writers she called the “dude boys,” which meant Hemingway and Faulkner. Abutting the nursery, there was a kind of slough with a small green island and murky water covered in weeds and beyond that a tangle of trees, and sometimes Turtle would draw her red wagon of plants up to the edge of the nursery’s gate and stand looking out at the wild, run-down plot of woods and her whole body would fill with a feeling that she could not name, her dread and her wonder mixed with the sunshine and the aisles of plants and the crunch of the gravel, with her new life here among these people, with Anna sitting in her deck chair reading Proust.

When Anna was too overworked, Turtle would walk through the redwoods to Sarah’s house, which she and her husband had built in the late seventies, and knock on the door and Sarah would let her in and Turtle would sit at the counter in the dark kitchen—Sarah’s house was also off the grid, and they used as little electricity as they could—and Turtle would crack walnuts from a large woven seaweed basket and Sarah would talk to her about the Mendocino school board or about the runoff election for the vacant position on the Mendocino water board, and Turtle would listen without talking, just watching the way the woman tromped around her home, energetic, unstoppable, with her shock of prematurely white hair and her replaced hip, and when Sarah was done cleaning, or baking, she would lean on the counter and say, “Well, honey, you probably want to go to the nursery,” and Turtle would nod and they’d get into the car and Sarah would drive them into Fort Bragg and stand beside the gate talking to anyone she met about the Mendocino school board, or about global warming, or about how to run your house off solar, all with a kind of unstoppable vigor, and Turtle would pull her red wagon down the aisles of plants and look at them, and think, yes, yes.

Sometimes watching Sarah cross-armed and holding forth, or watching Anna turning a page, Turtle felt that she was looking up at these people through a tossing hoop of quicksilver water, and all she wanted in the world was to crawl up through it and she did not know how. She would wake in her little lofted bedroom in the middle of the night and feel her way along the window in disbelief, stunned, not understanding and thinking, this is not my bedroom, and then she would think, he is coming for Cayenne, I have to get to her, I have to find her, and Jacob, and Brett, and she’d feel her way along the wall, forgetting the flashlights Anna put by her bed, blind with panic and thinking, I have to get out of here, they need me, they need me, and trying to keep it together as she groped along the paneling for anything familiar, telling herself this, keep it together, Turtle, keep it together, and then she would find the light switch and sit crouched against the wall sobbing and she would be unable to get to sleep, panting and terrified and thinking, what is wrong with you, why are you afraid, you are in Comptche, you are at Anna’s, and you are safe, and Cayenne is back in Yakima with her aunt, and Brett is not far from here, he is on Flynn Creek Road with Caroline, and Jacob is in Ten Mile, asleep in his mahogany sleigh bed with the sound of the estuary coming in through his windows, and you are here, trying to get better. Martin is dead and you are alive. During the day, she feels very far from these nighttime terrors, she feels very far away from it and from any belief that Martin might still be alive, and yet she isn’t in Mendocino, either, isn’t on Buckhorn Hill, isn’t fully back home, not yet, and the closest she gets to it is with the plants in their plastic trays, and when she cuts them out of the plastic and the soil is loose about the tender coil of white roots.

Six months after she’d been released from the hospital, and two months since she’d started her garden, Turtle had the surgery to reverse the ileostomy. The doctors felt that they could try reconnecting Turtle’s intestines, and because she was young, and because she was strong, they had high hopes that it would take, and it did. Dr. Russell reminded her to chew her food. “Chew and chew and chew ,” he said, sitting by her bed and looking at her in that wondering way he had, impressed and concerned and a little delighted, rubbing thumb and forefinger together, and finally saying, “Well, Turtle, I’d love to see you again, but I’d hate to see you back here ,” and she returned from Stanford University’s pediatric hospital to find that everything was dead and the soil was choked solid with redwood roots. It had been happening for months, but it must have come on very fast at the end. She dismantled the planters, and the earth in the beds had been so knitted with roots that it held its shape, even after the boards were removed, and Turtle had to chop it up with a pick mattock. The soil and compost, yards and yards of it, had not been salvageable.

Her solution had been to rebuild the planters on raised concrete slabs with augered drain holes. She’d built the molds, mixed and poured the concrete, put hardware cloth over the drains, and crocked the bottoms of the beds. Then she’d had soil trucked in at seventy dollars a yard plus sixty dollars delivery, which she then had to wheelbarrow from its delivery heap into her new planters. She’d been so sure that it would work this time. She was building her little garden and this would be it, and for a while, it was.

Tuesday was Turtle’s day in town. She would drive in with Anna at 4:30 in the morning, when Anna liked to get out onto the beach, and Turtle would go in to Lipinski’s Juice Joint while Anna surfed, and there she would drink green tea and sit at a funky, hand-painted wooden table, and then at 8:00 she would walk to the Independent Study office, a low redwood building on a rarely visited part of the school, across the field from the auditorium. There she met with Ted Holloway, a quiet guy who grew his own wheat and oats and ground them himself and baked his own bread. He was patient and soft-spoken. Turtle would sit with him in his office, which looked out at the always vacant, always gopher-warrened, always rain-sodden field and they would talk and go over her workbooks and he would assess her progress. He treated her like she was anybody else, and she liked that, wanted to be taken like she was. She and Ted met every Tuesday from 8:00 until 9:00, but their conversations often went on much longer. Turtle was careful to leave before 11:30, because Jacob often came over at lunch to work on his Independent Study Attic Greek, and she did not want to meet him and she didn’t want him to see her. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, couldn’t articulate it and couldn’t think about it, not closely, and still the thought of seeing him was unbearable, the thought of all she could lose, unbearable, because she felt she had lost him already, had lost so much and wouldn’t know what it would look like for Jacob to keep his faith in her, and she thinks, to see Jacob would just make it sure, how much she had lost.