was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone line. “I’m trying.” His voice was lower, quieter.
“Good night,” Tilly said, and hit the off button before James could reply.
She scuffed up a dusting of red clay with her gardening clog and imagined rain. English summer rain that pattered and pinged and smelled fresh, clean and cool. James’s talk of childhoods the day before had unsettled her, left her with an aftertaste she couldn’t nix. A quick fantasy blindsided her—running home to her mother, her twin sisters, Caitlin and Bree, and of course, Rowena. Tilly may have changed her name and citizenship, but she was English at heart, just as she would always be a Haddington.
Isaac, who had been searching the edge of one of her shade beds for who-knew-which disgusting creepy-crawly, rose and yanked up his pajama bottoms. “Thinking of Daddy?”
“Nope.” Her eyes followed a vapor trail toward the stratosphere.
“England?”
“Busted.” Bugger, she was a pitifully easy read. Thank God she never had secrets to keep. “I was remembering gloriously wet summers when I was your age. Snakeless, too.”
Isaac recoiled as if she’d driven over skunk roadkill with the truck’s windows open. “Are you going to drag us back?”
“Wow. Why would you ask that?” Avoidance, smart move.
“You think everything’s better in England.” Isaac twisted his foot, and a hunk of guilt constricted in her stomach. “But I want to live here, in our house, for ever and ever.”
“I know, my love. I used to feel the same way about Woodend.”
“Do you still?”
Not a fair question. Woodend was the place that caught her when she fell from life, and it always would be. Isaac continued to wait for an answer, but a sugarcoated one she couldn’t give.
“Woodend is a place of memories. I was born there. I met Daddy there….” Tilly stared at the dogwood tree they had planted on the sixth-month anniversary of David’s death.
“This is a place of memories, too, Mom. Yours and mine and Daddy’s.”
But the memories here were polluted with grief. Once again she had shared too much and disappointed Isaac. Yes, he was old in intellect, but emotionally he was far younger than eight.
“You’re right.” Tilly swelled with love. Sometimes just looking at Isaac made her chest heave with the imagined horror of a thousand what-ifs. “I’m sorry. I’m a little lost today.”
“That’s okay, Mom. I have lost days, too. Hey, I need to pee. Want me to do it by the cold frame to keep the deer away?”
“Please. But watch your aim.” Tilly turned toward the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.
“Mommy?”
“Isaac?” She spun around.
Pajama pants shoved to his knees, he was clutching his penis. “I have a tick. Near my willy.” His free hand agitated as if he were shaking a maraca. “It’s latched on.”
“Piff. I can get that sucker off.” Finally, a problem she could fix.
A groan of thunder tumbled toward them as the edge of the forest retreated into darkness. How had she failed to notice the towering storm cloud banked over the upper canopy? The sky exploded with a boom that rattled through the window casements and through Tilly. She jerked back into spider thread, the kind you never saw, and then blam! You were wrapped in goo, snared by a teeny-tiny, almost invisible, arachnid.
* * *
An arm slipped around her waist, breath tickled her neck and familiar fingers teased the sensitive spot above her hipbone. The blades of the fan sliced through the bedroom air, and tree frogs serenaded with the noises of the night. “I love you,” David whispered in the soft mid-Atlantic accent that masked his Brooklyn roots.
Tilly tried to turn and touch the ridge of scar on his right cheek, but her limbs remained weighted to the mattress. The mockingbird shrilled from its nest, and David’s arms retreated.
Don’t go, my love, don’t go. It can’t hurt you. It’s just a bird.
Tilly jolted upright in bed, her heart thumping. She glanced at the ceiling, but there was no creak from the room above to suggest that Isaac, who slept on the edge of his bed in deference to his plush lizards and snakes, had, yet again, fallen out.
Dawn was creeping around the blinds, sneaking into her bedroom with a fresh reminder that she was welcoming another day as a widow. And her phone was ringing at—she squinted toward David’s space-age alarm clock—6:00 a.m.? It better not be James Nealy again, unless…dear God, no. No. Her breath quickened; her mind swirled in memories. Was it four o’clock on a black November morning with rain pounding the deck, the air crackling with a late-season thunderstorm, and her mother’s voice, quiet but solid, “Your father’s fading. Come home”? Or was it 12:01 on a balmy May night with spring peepers jingling in the forest and one of David’s inner-circle graduate students crying as she whispered, “David’s been rushed to hospital”? Why did life boil down to phone calls in the middle of the night? Who this time? Her mother, one of her sisters, Rowena?
Tilly yanked the phone from its base. “Yes?” Her voice raced out with her breath.
“Oh, you’re there. Thank the Lord.”
“Mum? Why are you calling at this hour?”
“I woke you, didn’t I? I’m terribly sorry, darling.” This was not the voice of a woman who had spent forty years drilling English history into teenage girls at a small private school. Nor was it the voice of a woman who had lost two babies to crib death, but scuppered fear and grief to see two more pregnancies to term. This was the voice of a woman who, the summer after her husband died, hid in a family heirloom.
The nearly forgotten image stirred: her mother crouched against grief in the Victorian wardrobe, refusing to come out for anyone but Tilly, the daughter who lived an ocean away.
“Wake me?” Tilly rubbed her eyes. “You know me, up with the larks. Bright and chirpy at—” she glanced at the clock again. Six bloody a.m.? “—six a.m.”
“Darling, is something wrong?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking that question?”
Tilly scooted across David’s side of the bed and swung her legs to the hardwood floor. She used to dream of a rug in the bedroom, but David liked his floors smooth, bare and refinished every three years. Maybe this winter she would splurge, buy a rug. Or maybe not.
“Bit out of sorts,” her mother said. “Fancied a chat.”
Tilly gnawed off a hangnail. “Did something happen, Mum?”
Half a day away, her mother heaved out the biggest sigh Tilly had ever heard.
“Mum? You’re scaring me.” Tilly twisted the phone cord around her wrist, then untwisted it. Oh God, was her mother’s voice muffled? Was she hiding in the wardrobe again? Tilly drummed her toes on the floor. Where were her flip-flops? Where?
“Now you’re not to fuss. I’m absolutely fine. I’ve had a bit of a fall and broken my leg. Of all the ridiculous things. And I have five stitches in my left hand. Where Monty bit me.”
“He what?” Tilly shot up. Her mother’s springer spaniel, named after a British World War II general, was a wack job.
“Don’t yell, darling. It was an accident. He was aiming for the hedgehog.”
“Hedgehog?”
“It’s all rather embarrassing.”
“I’m coming home, right now.” As soon as I find my flip-flops. Tilly dived under the bed. Well, lookie here—the overdue library books and the breast health pamphlet