Chapter 9 - The Garden on the Canal
Six months later, the May sun came over the Cascade Mountains and washed the salt flats of the Shilshole Bay in long, golden sheets of light that smelled of wild lilac, wet cedar, and the clean, cold melting of winter snow.
The garden behind the house on the Magnolia bluff had been cleared of the dead rhododendrons.
In their place were three terraces of dark, loam-rich earth, held back by dry-stone walls of gray river basalt that had been laid by two masons from Whidbey Island.
Three small wheelbarrows of red painted tin stood near the potting shed.
Beatrix was industriously hauling three pine cones toward the compost heap, her small knees covered in dark garden soil, her tongue caught between her teeth in that terrible, familiar expression of Sterling concentration.
Maeve was sitting on the grass, systematically pulling the petals off a yellow dandelion, presenting each one to a massive, nine-month-old Irish wolfhound that lay on its side in the clover, its great tail thumping against the lawn with a slow, benevolent rhythm.
Evelyn stood at the potting bench, a pair of rusted sheep shears in her right hand.
She was pruning the dead canes from the climbing roses that covered the south wall of the stable. Her hair had grown three inches; it curled softly around the titanium scar behind her ear, no longer hidden, no longer hacked away with kitchen shears, but shining dark and thick in the midday sun.
Behind her, the gravel path crunched under heavy boots.
Adrienne walked down the terrace steps.
He was not wearing his charcoal coat. He wore an unbuttoned linen shirt of faded blue, his forearms bare and brown from three weeks of working the rigging on the new schooner he had bought for the harbor trust.
In his hand, he carried a wooden box filled with small, square packets of French seeds: sweet peas, winter kale, and the dark, fragrant lavender that grew on the cliffs of Brittany.
He set the box on the bench beside her shears.
"The court in Vancouver filed the final papers this morning," he said.
Evelyn didn't stop her work. The shears went snip-snip-snip through the dry wood. "And?"
"The trust has been dissolved," Adrienne said, leaning his hip against the bench, watching her fingers move among the thorns. "Arthur’s shares were sold at auction to the longshoremen's pension fund for forty cents on the dollar. The south slip now belongs to the men who work the cranes."
"And Arthur?"
"He has a room in a boarding house in Ketchikan," Adrienne replied. His voice was level, calm, completely drained of the poison that had inhabited it for two years. "He works the fish scales at the cold-storage plant for six hours a day. Mikhail says he spends his evenings sitting on the dock with an old radio, listening to the maritime weather reports from Seattle."
Evelyn turned from the rose canes.
She wiped a smudge of black soil from her cheek with the back of her forearm, leaving a streak that looked like war paint across her high cheekbone.
"Does he have his watch?" she asked.
"No," Adrienne said.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the gold pocket watch with the three herons.
He laid it on the potting bench between the seed packets and the shears.
With a single, effortless motion, Evelyn picked up the heavy iron pruning hammer that lay beside the twine, raised it three feet above her shoulder, and brought it down on the crystal face of the watch.
The glass shattered into a thousand tiny, sparkling diamonds.
The gold case collapsed with a dull, leaden crunch, the seventeen jewels and the delicate steel balance wheel popping from the movement and skittering across the cedar bench into the clover below.
The ticking stopped.
The only sound left on the bluff was the wind in the Douglas firs, the thumping of the wolfhound's tail on the turf, and the clear, high laughter of Beatrix as her wheelbarrow tipped over into the strawberry bed.
Adrienne looked down at the crushed gold.
Then he looked up at his wife.
The ice had gone from his eyes; the slate had vanished. What remained was the deep, quiet gray of the sea when the tide is full and the wind has died before the evening star.
He reached out, his fingers catching her by the chin—not with the iron grip of the executioner at The Gilded Cage, but with the slow, reverent tenderness of a man touching something that had been pulled from the fire and found unbroken.
"You have dirt on your nose, Mrs. Sterling," he murmured.
"Then kiss it off, Mr. Sterling," she said.
He did.
And as his mouth found hers in the warm May sun, three tiny voices rose from the strawberry bed, shouting together in that perfect, unblemished unison that had once broken the silence of a dark room:
May you like
“Mama! The dog ate the wheelbarrow!”
Evelyn laughed—a full, clear, beautiful sound that echoed across the water of the sound, carrying out past the green light of West Point, past the ship canal, past the memory of the fire and the lead in the earth, until there was nothing left of the dark except the long, golden afternoon that had finally come home to stay.
