Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

For Ted’s birthday, she brought him a Country Living grain mill with stone burrs. It was in the basement of her house, and she was not using it, and she liked her talks with him. The mill was expensive, and at first he refused to accept it, but in the end, he took it. After her meeting with Ted, she had a four-hour private session of Shotokan karate at a dojo in town and from there, Turtle would walk up Little Lake and meet Anna at her car. All the while, her squash plants grew enormous and prehistoric-looking, thick green star-shaped stalks covered in bristly hairs.

Now, in the clearing, Turtle begins to shovel dirt out of the ruined planter onto the tarp. She works steadily without stopping and she is careful with the soil and careful not to scar the insides of the planter. The deeper she goes, the more roots she finds. Six inches down, she has to use the adze. The roots have spread artery-like across the bottom of the planter. After the first, unraised planters had succumbed, Turtle had been so sure, so certain that raising the planters off the ground would work. The concrete slabs had seemed like such a solid, permanent solution. Now she walks to the next planter, gets on her knees, and looks beneath it. She can see a forest of roots heaved up from the earth, long brown trunks snaking through the drain holes, chinking every gap. She sits down, leans against the side of the bed. Shit, she thinks. The beds are a loss. They all need to be emptied and replanted and she will need to check each planter for roots from now on. She just wants the garden to work. She just wants to build a garden and water it and have everything grow and everything stay alive and she does not want to feel besieged . She wants a solution that feels like a solution, a solution that will stick. This is all she wants. She wants garden beds in an unfenced sunny plot near the cottage and she would like to plant peas, squash, green beans, garlic, onions, potatoes, lettuce, and artichokes.

On the fence post, Zaki turns her head and Turtle looks up and hears it, the rusty screel of the Forest Service gate. Then the Saturn coming down the rutted road past the pump house. Turtle stands up and walks to the driveway to meet Anna, and Anna gets out, exhausted, and leans against the car and rubs her eyes with an unpleasant squelching noise. Strands of hair hang in front of her face and she purses her lips and blows the errant strands away. Turtle smiles for her, also tiredly, and opens the back door and takes out a bankers box of papers. Tonight is the homecoming dance, almost the one-year anniversary of the shooting, and Turtle knows Mendocino will be filled with high school students getting ready. Anna tilts her head toward the house, and they go on together. In the front yard, there is a deck with a small outdoor shower and an awning where surfboards and kayaks lean up against the wall. Turtle puts the bankers box on her hip and opens the front door for Anna, and then carries the box in through the living room with its big south-facing windows and into the office. The walls are painted blue with sponged-on clouds and there is a hobbit chair with a sheepskin throw and a big oak desk, a SurfGirl calendar on the wall. Turtle sets the box down and comes out into the living room. Anna is lying on the green velvet couch as if thrown there, and she gives Turtle a deeply humorous, exhausted look. Zaki bolts in with the flip-flap of the cat door and scurries across the room and takes her position on the corner of the couch. She looks from one to the other of them and then lids her eyes approvingly.

“Dinner?” Turtle says. She has a throaty voice.

“Dinner,” Anna says.

Turtle goes into the kitchen and turns on the avocado-colored gas range, which clicks several times before sparking to life. She sets some quinoa to cooking before starting a skillet with butternut squash and olive oil. She stands watching the squash griddle. She breaks open a pomegranate and when she runs the water to fill a basin, she hears Zaki, who is for whatever reason fascinated by water, leap off the couch and come first clicking across the tile, then fishtailing around the corner, a sound like gallop gallop gallop——Screeeeeeeeech!——–gallop gallop gallop .

Zaki vaults up onto the counter and wraps her tail around her feet and stares at the running water. Turtle submerges a colander in the basin and begins breaking the ruby-red pomegranate rind and the heavy white pith apart with her hands. Zaki yawns hugely and drops off the counter and parades away, tail upright, the very end flicking this way and that. From the other room, Anna sighs. Then sighs again and gets up and pads into the kitchen and pulls up a screw-top five-gallon bucket of brown rice and sits on it. They buy their food in bulk and use the three- and five-gallon buckets like furniture. Turtle gets Anna out an Atrea Old Soul Red, pours her a glass, and Anna takes it and smiles. She swirls her wine, and Turtle stirs the skillet, cuts up kale, and measures out handfuls of pumpkin seeds.

Anna says, “So how did your day go?”

Turtle looks down into the frying pan and then chews on her lip and says, “The roots are into one of the planters.”

“But they’re on risers,” Anna says.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, baby,” Anna says.

“I don’t know what to do,” Turtle says. She is beginning to cry and flushes with annoyance. Anything can make her cry now. A week ago, she’d been in the living room doing her independent study reading when Anna screamed from the shower. The blood had drained out of Turtle, run out of her face and out of her guts and down to her feet and left her cold and, somehow, with no memory of crossing the intervening space, Turtle had been at the door and the door had been locked, and Anna had yelled from the other side, “Stop! Turtle, it’s fine! It’s fine!” and Turtle had stepped back and thought, you have to get through this door, and the doorjamb tore away and then she was in the steam-filled bathroom, Anna leaning around the shower curtain saying, “Turtle, it was just a spider. It was just a spider, it startled me,” and Turtle had leaned back against the wall and cried then, too, her heart hammering and hammering, and Anna had come out of the shower, dripping everywhere, and she’d knelt down beside Turtle and put her head against Turtle’s head and said over and over again, “It’s okay, Turtle. It’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” and Turtle had been unable to say anything, couldn’t even say what she was worried about, had wanted to say, I know, I know nobody’s going to hurt me, but she’d been unable to stop crying.

Now, in the kitchen, Anna takes Turtle in her arms and knocks her forehead against Turtle’s and she says, “Turtle, we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out, okay? I’m sorry about the garden bed, but there’s a solution, and this one, this one is easy.” Turtle is already shaking her head, grinding against Anna’s forehead, saying, “There’s no solution. There’s no solution. How can you say that?” It feels like Anna is lying to her, because how can Anna, who has seen Turtle’s life, how can she say that things will work out? The truth is that things do not work out, that there are no solutions, and you can go a year, a whole year, and be no better, no more healed, maybe even worse, be so skittish that if you’re walking down the street with Anna, and if someone opens a car door and gets out and slams the door you turn around, honest-to-god ready to kill them, turn around so fast that Anna, who knows what is happening, cannot even open her mouth in time and then you’re standing there, crying, and there’s some guy in a leather jacket and a fedora getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit staring at you like, is this girl all right? and you want to be like, this girl is not all right, this girl will never be all right.