Page 13 of Meet Me in the Garden

“My cousins’.” He opens a door and sets our suitcases in the closet. “They said to pretend they aren’t even there.”

I close myself in the bathroom. Rose petals in a little gauze bag balance on the edge of the tub. Stripped of romance, they barely make sense. The bathroom is dim, I don’t bother turning the light on. I wash my body with a hand towel. Stare at myself in the mirror.Who are you?When I turn the knob it comes at me with force: my dream life of white curtains in the breeze, Hattie in my bed. Instead, Cyril’s rummaging through abag, pulling out a bottle of scotch. He steps into the last of the light. My husband.

I don’t mind the sex. It’s easier than conversation. Whenever he tries to talk to me, I go blank, afraid I’ll give something away. When we kiss, I close my eyes and focus on the sensation. I don’t mind his broad hands around my waist or his mouth on my breasts or, after the initial pain of it, the sensation of him inside of me. Hattie wasn’t lying when she told me he was sweet. But still, at times it seems like the three days will last forever and the guesthouse resembles a locked room and he asks me what’s the matter and I don’t know what to say.

On our last night, we have dinner in a little Creole restaurant. The owners congratulate us, light a red candle in the center of our table. We order étouffée with crab and thick slices of French bread, and when the waiter leaves, Cyril leans forward, a flicker of candlelight across his face, and says, “Odette, I’m a little nervous to go to war.” I shift in my chair. When Al came home, he stayed closed in the bedroom a month, pulled the covers over his head whenever anyone passed through on their way to the kitchen. Bernard drifts off midsentence sometimes, lost to us. Still, what do I say to Cyril? That nervousness is insufficient, he should be terrified instead?

I take his hand. The waiter sets our bowls and plates on the table. We don’t speak of what’s to come. Walking back to the guesthouse, he says, “Overseas, whenever I’m frightened or lonely, I’ll picture meeting you in California when you least expect it. Showing up there in my uniform on your front steps.”

Back at the Laurent house, late at night, Cyril and I sharing his narrow childhood bed, I stare into the dark, unable to sleep, listening to the moan of water running through the house’s pipes until even that is over and all is hushed. After a time, I slip off the covers, step over Cyril’s bag carefully packed with the few items he’s permitted to bring to Shreveportin the morning, and walk into the hallway. I’ll drink a glass of water in the kitchen. One small thing I can do to pass the time. But at the end of the hall the bathroom door swings open and here’s Hattie, smelling of jasmine from her bath.

It’s the first time I’ve seen her hair wet.

We’re face-to-face, hope knocking me breathless. She’s going to reach out and touch me. She must want to. But she averts her eyes, steps aside. “Sorry. I hope you weren’t waiting long.” She says it as though she doesn’t know me.

I’m frozen. The faint click of her bedroom locking. I follow the steam from her bath. I take off my clothes and lay my body where hers just was, the tub empty and hard against my spine. I stay until it hurts less.

When I go back to Cyril’s bed, he spoons me. I fall asleep hard, and in seconds it’s morning, Cyril’s head inches from mine on the same pillow, tears pooling at the bridge of his nose. I smooth them away with my index finger. He cries harder and I slip my hand under his cheek. He turns his face into my palm. In just two hours he’ll be boarding the bus to Shreveport. Terrible as it is, I’ll be relieved when he’s gone.

That night Hattie says she has something to show me. “Come,” she says, and leads me down the stairs and to her sewing room door. We step in together, nearly a year’s worth of Thursday afternoons burning between us. “Here. I hope you like it. I hope it gives you the space you need to work.”

On the far side of her studio, she’s set up a table under a window. There’s a stack of paper, a jar of pencils, a tin of paints, a set of brushes. “Thank you,” I say.

It isn’t what I wanted. She’s moved the changing screen, pulled it open as far as it can go, and placed it between her workspace and mine.

Alone in Cyril’s room, I try to write Delphine a letter. So much I can’t say. It would be reckless to put it in writing and I wouldn’t know where to start anyway. I draw her a picture of Cyril’s twin bed with its rumpled sheets. Below the drawing I write,I married Cyril Laurent on Saturday morning, January 6. When I see you, I’ll tell you everything.I tell her that I’m writing to her from Cyril’s little bedroomdesk that he used for his schoolwork when he was a boy. That on it is a brass paperweight engraved with his initials. That he still seemed like a boy this morning, boarding the bus with his bag, waving as he went. I tell her I’m afraid for him. For myself, too, though she’s the only person I’d admit that to.

I get a letter back ten days later. She tells me they found a house, lovely, with an apricot façade and shaded backyard with stepping stones and a fountain. She can’t believe it’s hers.On to you now, she writes. I picture her stuck like I was, not knowing what to say if she isn’t able to say everything. Frowning like she does, barefoot and pacing, a hand through her hair, slipping into her chair again, writing the only thing that’s true enough:Maybe we can’t have all the wild things we dream of without some punishment for taking them.

SIX

MY SISTERS TELL MEHOWto be a wife while Cyril’s away. Write letters, they say, at least one a week but more is better. Fill them with details of home. So I write to Cyril about what his mother cooked for dinner, which of his father’s backyard vegetable crops are thriving.

It’s the end of January when I get another letter from Delphine. I sit in the winter sun on the front porch and tear open the seal. I can tell by the first line, something’s wrong. There’s news she doesn’t know how to tell me. I’m afraid it’s about the baby, skim to understand, but there isn’t language to latch on to. I start again, slower this time. She says she’s gotten herself into something. She can’t find her way out of it. She says the house they bought is in a white neighborhood, but I thought there was no such thing in Los Angeles. She says Bill asked around at the studios, found out none of them employ colored people for any of their high-level positions, and didn’t dare ask about the employment prospects of white men with colored wives. I still don’t understand what she’s trying to tell me. Until I get to the part where she says she’s let Bill convince her to pass.I have to become white now. A woman with no family besides my own little one. It’s the only way to do it and not get caught.I’m not to contacther when we get to Los Angeles. She says she’s sorry. She says it three times.

I take the letter to my sisters. They stand in the pink living room with their shoulders touching, reading it. Reading it again. Numb, all of us. None of us speaking.

Back at the Laurent house, in Cyril’s room, I sit on his bed and look at the long strip of wallpaper between the ceiling and the picture rail. It’s a child’s wallpaper, of trains passing through forests and tunnels, and I don’t know if it’s meant to be the same train—a progression through time—or different trains, at various places in their journeys.

I don’t recognize my life.

I imagine Delphine and me holding separate ends of a very long string.

I imagine us singing the same song in different rooms.

I wake in the morning, my dream from the night before still vivid. The first since Papa died. Flowers and a snake and a pool of clear water, a full moon so low it skims the ground. I reach for the stationery before I remember.

After three weeks in the Laurent house, the phone rings early in the morning. Hattie knocks on Cyril’s bedroom door. “It’s Claire for you,” she says.

Mama and Papa Laurent are in the kitchen, fixing breakfast. I take the phone.

“Lionel’s in trouble,” Claire says. “We need you to come over.”

I dress quickly, Mama Laurent handing me coffee at the bedroom door. Drink it down, set the mug in the sink, hurry through the streets to the blue house. Rudy, fussing, lifts his arms when I walk through the door. I scoop him up. Adele’s watching out the window. “What’s going on?” I ask her.

“Al’s coming from the police station now, bringing Lionel with him. He says it’s never been as bad as this and we have to go.”

Bernard, leaning forward on the sofa, rubbing his forehead, says,“We’re so close. If we can stay for just two more weeks, we’ll be able to get the payment.”