Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Of growth. Combined with the end of so many little lives, and none of them came to a good end. There is such a thing, in case you have wondered. An end that is good. I have seen it myself, on more than one occasion. But none of these is that. It is almost more than I can take.

Then it becomes more than I can take. And just when I think I will break with the saturation of it all, the coverage begins to wane. There has been no further activity, so some other story jumps to the top of the news cycle and it seems as though Atwater’s five minutes have expired. Again.

For a few days, I am unexpectedly bereft. Watching everything about the story and surfing news channels for mentions of him and his poor lost garden had become my life for a short time. And now it is over. There is suddenly nothing left to do.

I make the trek into town and go to a garden center, buy half a dozen healthy little lavender plants and a few medium-sized rosemary bushes. I’ve done some research. They would survive when nothing else would. They are drought and deer resistant. They should be safe, even from me.

Touching the earth. Planting. Growing towards healing. As I pat the earth around the last plant, I start to weep. What was this now? Soon sitting, hands laced around knees, allowing a torrent to overtake me. Allowing myself to be swept away by it. An overcast day, wisps of sun fighting through clouds, a feeling in my chest of complete and utter despair and surrender.

I can’t imagine anything that is more than this. I can’t imagine, even, a reason to lift my head.

After a while, the crying falls out of me and I lie down next to my plantings and just breathe. I press my cheek to the soil and inhale, trying not to think of Atwater’s garden. Focusing instead on my own newly broken soil. Garden. I want to reclaim the thought of that word from the dark. It is difficult. For now, anyway. The word is tainted. Stolen.

Another part of me wants to join those poor children. For the first time, maybe in my life, the fight has been leached out of me and I think about what it would be to die right here, on my own little patch of earth. Lavender growing on one side. Rosemary taking root on the other. To die and let the sun rise higher in the sky. To warm me after I could no longer be made warm, sun kissing my stiffening limbs and blood cooling in my veins. I can almost feel it.

As time passes, mercifully, the thinking stops. I lie there still. I am listening to the sound of the wind in the trees. The faint “whirr, whirr, whirr” of a distant helicopter, nothing to do with me. Infrequently, I hear the sound of a car on the country road that snakes past the house. I feel a bug walking over my arm. I let it walk there, undisturbed. It is likely harmless. And if it is not? What then? Something interesting to take beyond. A closing door to end my time here.

Time passes. The pale sun sinks. Dusk and then darkness come, night falling, like a corpse. I remain with my cheek pressed to the earth, the scent of newly turned soil rich in my nostrils. I am feeling something like ennui, but more. Feeling for a while that there could be nothing beyond this. What more, in any case, is required?

When it starts to rain, I don’t go in right away, though the irony of water falling from the sky, the sheer unlikely ridiculousness of it, does not escape me. Rain when I hadn’t seen any here for weeks. I lie here still, in the darkness, the soil now turning to mud. It isn’t long before I can’t take it anymore—the muddy wet. I laugh as I pick myself up. Not a heartfelt laugh, but still. It is perfectly nice to be dramatic on a fine summer’s evening, that’s what I’m thinking. Quite something else to do it when the rain comes. “Fair weather ennui,” I chide myself as I go inside, step into a hot shower intended to wash off the mud, and perhaps something else. Wash away something unseeable. Unknowable. Wanting to wash things away.

I don’t remember getting into bed. I am only aware of waking and finding myself naked on top of my covers, as though I’d collapsed into bed in a sodden heap after the shower. Drunk on pain and soaked with emotion. And all of it was enough.

More than enough.

Something has ended. I don’t know if that’s good.

CHAPTER THIRTY

ALMOST THE FIRST thing I do when I get out of bed is check my phone. There is a text. I regret the impulse that made looking at it a priority.

“Fuck,” I say out loud as I thumb-type the required reply. The last thing I want is to catch a job right now. Really, all I want is to sleep some more. I don’t feel like crying anymore. That, at least, has stopped. All I want is to be left alone.

Still.

It turns out the job is in New York City. That represents enough of a change of venue that I think it might be solid diversion. I realize that maybe I can use one of those right now. Too many more sodden nights in the dark and I’ll perish; that’s what I’m thinking. I need to get away from possible sodden nights in the dark.

And then my thinking changes as I grapple with what is real.

I toy for a ridiculous moment with the idea of taking in a show while in the City, but discard it in favor of a nice hotel room in midtown where I can recline in posh anonymity while recovering from the trigger I am required to pull, and never mind whatever