when his was the small hand struggling to control a recalcitrant branch, and Abe’s the larger reaching over and with a single deft touch putting things to right.
If only Ellen weren’t acting like the Her Untouchable Highness, the Queen of the May.
They broke at noon, and after lunch-superbly cooked and served up by Linda, who had managed to make second-day turkey taste like a rare treat-the kids stayed inside. Ellen’s three began arguing almost immediately about the PlayStation. Anna and Elizabeth settled themselves onto the couch and began leafing through old picture albums Grandma Mattie had accumulated over fifty or sixty years. Jay could remember thumbing through them himself on rainy days when he was a child. The adults returned outside. This time Mitch deigned to join.
“Still a lot to do,” Mitch said judiciously, as he surveyed the line of fifteen or so brown bags, stuffed to the top, secured with metal twist-ties, and set waiting to be hauled out for the garbage on Monday. They had already arranged for a neighbor boy to take care of the bags, since neither Mitch nor Jay could stay beyond Saturday evening.
“Looks like everything he planted died.”
It was a simple statement, but it took Jay by surprise. Thus far, in spite of his initial impressions as he had arrived the other day, he had been working on the assumption that they were essentially cleaning up old growth. But Mitch’s words forced Jay to look again, more closely.
Mitch was an arrogant, self-centered, conceited blowhard most of the time, but this time he was right. Abe’s place was a graveyard of unburied plants. Everything Jay saw was dead or dying. The branches of a two-or three- year dwarf peach standing forlornly in one corner were brittle and shattered when he bent them to test for sap. Roses, wisteria, pyracantha, even two palms set out at the far corners of the patio-everything was dead. Along the foundation, not even the hardiest weeds survived. Jay knelt and pulled up handfuls of dry, flaking Bermuda grass. The roots-usually almost impossible to remove from the soil-ripped up in brown, rotting masses.
Without saying anything more to either Ellen or Mitch, Jay made a circuit of the place, front yard as well as back. He wasn’t a professional gardener or horticulturist or anything-at home, he barely touched his own place, relying on the twice monthly services of a Japanese gardener who worked diligently and competently and could speak no English and write little more than the date and amount due in the appropriate spaces on the bill he slipped once a month into Jay’s screen door. But even with his narrow expertise, Jay knew enough from his childhood to know that something was wrong.
Nothing seemed alive.
He wondered worriedly what the house must have looked like during the spring and summer, when every other house on the street would have been a riot of Southern California colors-the vibrant scarlets and oranges and purples of bougainvillea, the delicate lavenders of wisteria and jacaranda and blue hibiscus, the fluorescent pinks and violets of geraniums. But here, at the house on the top of the hill, there would only have been brown and grey and the dingy black of dead and dying vegetation. Even the elm overhanging the corner of the yard looked diseased and rotted, its trunk seamed and twisted.
“What’s going on here?” Jay asked himself as he crumbled dry leaves between his fingers. It looked like more than just neglect contingent upon failing health. It looked as if Abe had deliberately poisoned every plant in the place.
Jay started for the garage, intending to pull out a shovel and test the hard-pack soil in the front yard when a shriek from inside the house drove any such ideas from his mind.
Elizabeth!
He recognized her voice, recognized her cry as one of pain and fear, not just the petulance of a ten year old. He slammed through the front door. Elizabeth stood in the center of the family room. One hand cupped her chin, from which blood was flowing in a steady stream.
“She’s dying, she’s dying,” Anna whimpered from her corner on the couch. Jay took in the scene at once. Thad was not in the room. Thirteen-year-old Josh stood defiantly with his back to the television screen, on which an electronic Mario whistled and burbled unnoticed. A heavy glass ashtray was clenched in his fist. One edge was starred and stained with deep red.
“Shit!” Jay said, “Now what.” Even as spoke he was lifting Elizabeth and rushing her down the hall to the front bathroom. He heard the back door slam as he disappeared around the corner-that would be Linda and Ellen and Mitch. They could take care of the kids in the family room.
He set Elizabeth on the toilet seat and gently pried her fingers away from her chin. The skin was sliced, shallowly and neatly, for perhaps an inch just to the right of her mouth. Jay dabbed at it with a hand cloth from the rack next to the sink. It was bleeding heavily, but it looked like the blood was more superficial than serious.
A hand touched his shoulder. It was Linda.
“How is she?” Linda did not try to keep the fear from her voice.
“All right, I think,” he answered. He held a clean hand cloth to the cut and pressed. Elizabeth winced but didn’t say anything. Her eyes were still clouded with tears, but she was no longer screaming.
“More frightened than anything.”
“Let me see,” Linda said. Jay gently released the pressure on the cut. He pulled the cloth away. The wound was now a thin red line, oozing lightly but no longer flowing.
“Where are the band-aids?” Linda asked.
“Up there,” Jay said, motioning with his head toward the medicine cabinet. Linda opened the mirrored door and rummaged for a few seconds in the depths. She took out a box of band-aids and small pair of scissors. With the deftness honed by years of motherhood and family crises she snipped at the band-aid until it was butterfly shaped.
“Move a minute.”
Jay shifted away from Elizabeth. Linda carefully positioned the butterfly band-aid on the cut, then lifted Elizabeth and sat down on the toilet seat, her daughter securely on her lap.
“It’s all right, honey,” Linda murmured. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
Jay reached out and touched his daughter’s forehead. As he moved, he noticed that Abe was standing in the hallway, watching the proceedings intently.
“She’s fine, Dad,” Jay said in an attempt to reassure the old man. “Just an accident.”
“Huh-uh,” Elizabeth said. “Josh hit me.”
“What!” Jay swung his attention back to the small, pale face pressed against his wife’s shoulder.
“Josh hit me.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to play. With the video game. He didn’t want me to, and he grabbed that glass thing and hit me.”
Jay surged to his feet. Linda grabbed his arm and held him tightly.
“Jay, please, try to stay calm and find out what happened.”
“Calm! Stay calm! That little bastard nearly kills your daughter and you tell me to stay calm.”
Linda blanched at the anger in his voice, then her face flushed red and hot.
Jay was out the door in an instant. He shouldered past his father, not noticing the distanced, glazed expression in the old man’s eyes, not noticing that as he passed his father Jay almost knocked him off balance. The old man slumped against the wall. Already Jay was in the family room yelling. But Mitch was there also, running interference, hunched aggressively between his son and Jay.
Jay accused. Mitch defended. Josh burst into tears and threw the glass ashtray. It spun in the bright winter light, catching sunlight and refracting it in rainbow spirals as it shattered the family room window and disappeared into the dead yard.
The crash of glass startled both Mitch and Jay, enough at any rate for the nearly crazed fathers to catch their breaths. They stared at each other, realizing with a unanimity that was itself breathtaking how close they had come to blows. Mitch’s fists were clenched at his sides. Jay’s breath was ragged and shallow, and his voice shook as he spoke.
“Anna, come here.” She came. Without a word, she slipped across the room and stood behind her father. Jay took her by the hand and led her down the hall. As he passed the bathroom, he looked in at Linda and Elizabeth.
“We’re leaving. Now,” he announced. “Anna, pack your things and Elizabeth’s.”
“Yes, Daddy.” She disappeared into the bedroom the girls had shared.
