INVASIVE SPECIES by Jacob M. Appel
While her daughter practices for the afterlife–Celeste’s tumor-frayed body waiting rigid inside the case of the grandfather clock– Meredith watches their new neighbor hacking at the undergrowth with a machete. This is the fifth morning in a row that the lanky, white-haired retiree has been lopping the heads off vines, slaughtering some plants and sparing others according to an algorithm Meredith can’t decipher. At first, she’d mistaken the knife for a scythe. In his dungarees and black hooded sweatshirt, the long-faced man looks like the Grim Reaper on his day off. But also handsome, in an odd way. So when he waves a gloved hand at Meredith over the azalea hedge, and then strolls toward her across the unkempt yard, she feels a genuine twinge of nervous anticipation. Immediately, she stifles these thoughts: This man is old enough to have diapered her. And her daughter is dying. Imminently! What business does she have imagining a romantic life beyond her mourning?
The man climbs the patio stairs slowly, bracing himself against the iron railing. A brutal wince crosses his face, but quickly vanishes. “I’m Cohan. Scotch-Irish, not Jewish,” he says. “I thought I’d take a breather and say hello.”
“Well, hello,” says Meredith. She smiles, but trains her gaze on the ice cube in her lemonade glass. “I’m Meredith Eycke. Jewish, Irish, German, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian and Lord-knows-what-else. Probably kangaroo and flamingo mixed in.”
“Kangaroo and flamingo,” echoes Cohan. “Kangamingo.”
Meredith looks up at him from the chaise lounge. His large dark eyes glisten with insight, or possibly mischief, and his voice carries a hint of the ocean. He lights a pipe, and the sweet tobacco scent floats on the moist autumn air.
“You’re fighting the woods,” says Meredith.
“Invasive species,” he answers. “Chinese wisteria, periwinkle, garlic mustard. If George Washington rode across the Virginia of today, he’d hardly recognize the place.” Cohan pauses, as though any mention of President Washington warrants reverence. He gazes toward the densely-forested hillside. “That’s why I bought out here. I can’t bring back the entire pre-Columbian habitat, but the least I can do is restore an acre and a half. When you reach my age, you can’t help think about these things. About your legacy.”
This is how a man should be, she thinks. Effortlessly confident. Knowledgeable of history and the natural world. Yet also quixotic, in an endearing way, about his occasional backyard project. She glances at the clock, unsure whether she should retrieve her daughter. Her legacy. Celeste has been playing dead for more than an hour.
“All of our ecosystems are out of whack,” explains Cohan. “That’s what my generation has done. In Guam, non-native tree snakes cause daily power outages; coqui frogs on Hawaii produce infestations louder than jumbo jets–.” He cuts himself off abruptly. “I’m sorry. I get carried away.”
“No, I was interested,” says Meredith. “It’s amazing how much is going on in the world that I know nothing about.”
Their eyes meet–and look for a twinkling. An acknowledgement, maybe, that this visit is more than neighborly. That Cohan of the Scotch-Irish Cohans will drop by again. Then he grins sheepishly, as though he has just remembered an off-color joke, and his gaze darts across the patio. The clock stands beside the bay windows, beneath an overhanging eave, but its trunk is plastered with damp yellow leaves. “Interesting place for a clock,” observes Cohan with a forced offhandedness. “I suppose your husband refurbishes antiques.”
“Oh. I don’t have a husband,” she answers. Too zealously. “My daughter likes hiding in there, so I thought I’d bring it outside. To get her some fresh air . . . I know that sounds even crazier than it is.”
“Not at all. I used to be a kid shrink.” Now that he has discovered that she’s unmarried, Cohan allows his eyes to linger over her body–on her ample, forty-seven-year-old breasts, and her fleshy, childbearing hips. It has been many years since anybody has looked at Meredith with such blatant appetite. Cohan takes an indulgent drag on his pipe, breathes out a plume of smoke, and ambles to the door of the clock. “May I?”
Meredith nods.
The clock is oak cross-banded with mahogony, an eighteenth century masterpiece by Gillett of Manchester. Its trunk is large enough to fit an entire family. Meredith often hid beneath the pendulum as a child. So when she sold off the inventory from her father’s shop–six decades of expertise reduced to an overstuffed showroom on a neglected Richmond side street–this was the one treasure she’d kept.
Cohan stands nearly as tall as the swan necks atop the frame, and he has to stoop to pull on the tiny brass door handle. Inside, Celeste sits in self-imposed rigor mortis: eyes clenched, fists balled, teeth locked in a ghoulish grin. She is bundled into a wool sweater– a single, hard-fought concession to the exigencies of being alive. The late afternoon sun makes her pale, hairless scalp appear practically translucent, exposing the latticework of slender blood vessels that carry the metastases through her body like a miniature plumbing system.
Cohan is clearly surprised by her daughter’s appearance, but he doesn’t betray any discomfort. “Do you live in here, young lady?” he asks, neither patronizing nor ironic. Just intensely sincere. Meredith decides she could love this man.
“You can’t come in,” says Celeste. “This is only for dead people.”
“Are you dead?” asks Cohan.
“Nope. But I will be soon, so I’m practicing. Protesilaus is showing me how.”
“Protesilaus?”
“He’s my friend. He was killed in Ancient Greece.”
“Ancient Greece,” says Cohan–his voice filling with awe. “Is Protesilaus real?”
“Uh-huh,” says Celeste, nodding vigorously. “He’s a very good teacher.”
“Are you sure he’s real?”
“Okay, he’s not really real,” whispers Celeste. “But don’t tell him, or you’ll hurt his feelings.”
***
The next morning, Celeste announces that she wants to learn how to tell time. This is obviously a fruitless exercise–the child will be dead in a month or two–but Meredith is ecstatic. Not since they called off the chemo has her daughter shown enthusiasm for anything other than “death practice.” So if the girl wants to learn how to read a watch–or a sundial–how can she not be grateful?
But the prospect isn’t without its ghosts. When Meredith was a child, she yearned to unlock the mysteries of analog time the way her older brother hankered for the keys to the family Plymouth. Each birthday passed with increasing responsibilities: removing and polishing the delicate wooden birds that nested in the cuckoo clocks, tightening the mainspring of the Willard lighthouse model with its silver-and-ruby-handled winding key. On Meredith’s eighth birth-day, her mother revealed to her the rudiments of hours and minutes on a well-worn banjo-style clock-front that had been severed from its internal gears. Thelma Eycke called it “a face without a brain.” But that night, Mrs. Eycke choked to death on a lamb chop during a Chamber of Commerce dinner, and so it was Meredith’s narcoleptic grand-aunt who eventually taught her how brief moments combine into lengthy intervals: on a plastic toy purchased at Woolworth’s.
This week, unfortunately, the local stores don’t have any toy timepieces in stock. It seems there has been a run on plastic watches and owl-shaped clock faces–maybe in conjunction with the time-telling portion of the third grade curriculum. Meredith phones everyone she knows within driving distance in search of the proper device. This is not many people. She works from home, designing schedules for professional sports leagues and concert venues. Her older brother is dead. Her nieces and nephews have scattered. Eventually, another mother from her pediatric cancer support group, whose twin eleven-year-old boys both suffer from neuroblastomas, offers her a talking clock-telephone combo. The contraption is manufactured by Walt Disney, so the six and twelve on the face are cartoons of Donald Duck and Pluto. When you set the time, the console rings. When you pick up the receiver, a mechanized voice announces the hour and minute. Celeste is a swift learner, and soon she imitates the voice with impressive accuracy.
“You’re a natural time-teller,” says Meredith. “Grandpa would be proud.”
“That’s why I’m learning,” answers Celeste. “To show Grandpa. I asked him to teach me how last night, but he said he’d forgotten. It’s hard to remember how clocks work when you’re dead.”
“You saw your grandfather yesterday?” This is not so much a question as an acknowledgement. Meredith remains unsure how far to indulge her daughter’s make-believe afterlife. According to the oncologist, such highly-developed delusions are rare–even as a coping mechanism. But what harm can they do, right?
“Grandpa said to say hi,” says Celeste. “He misses you.”
“I miss him too,” says Meredith.
“In heaven, he’s married to Helen of Troy.”
Several months earlier, before she’d left school, Celeste had come home from “reading hour” at the library with a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology for children. All of her afterlife fantasies now featured heroes of antiquity.
“What about Grandma?” asks Meredith–a bit defensively.
This puzzles the girl, at first. She squints and purses her lips, but then laughs. “He’s married to Grandma, too,” says Celeste. “It’s okay, Mama. The rules are different in heaven.”
Meredith does not believe in heaven. She believes life is a one-way trip from naught to oblivion. If there were an afterlife–if there were a God–the sperm they’d given her at the fertility center would have been pristine as mountain snow, not tainted with a roadmap for galloping tumors. Ever since she has driven out to Petersburg to retrieve the talking clock, she has been thinking about the mother of the twins. What will the woman feel if one survives, but the other does not. Will she be thankful? Devastated? Merely bewildered? Where Meredith’s father had come from–Jewish Rotterdam, before the war–a mother was lucky to have one of two children survive to adulthood.
Celeste slides the minute hand over the hour hand, so that both face downward. “What time is it?” she asks. It is unclear whether she means the artificial time of the toy clock, or the real time of the living world.
“Six thirty,” says Meredith.
“Exactly?”
“Exactly.”
“How many seconds?”
The toy clock has no second hand. This sounds like one of those mind-taunting questions that fascinate children and philosophers: Do the seconds exist, if there is no tool to measure them? Meredith knows that a father couldn’t solve these mysteries any better than she can, but still–! Instinctively, she looks for Cohan out at the fringe of their yards, where exurban civilization meets the modern wilderness, but either he has taken an early lunch break or he has immersed himself fully in the undergrowth.
“It’s hard to measure seconds,” says Meredith. “They go by too quickly.”
“Nine seconds,” says Celeste. “Six thirty and nine seconds. Protesilaus predicted that would be the time when I asked.”
“Nine seconds, then,” agrees Meredith.
“Protesilaus was killed in the Trojan War. Because he was brave and got off his warship first,” explains Celeste. “His wife, Laodamia, was allowed to visit him. But for just three hours. She was the only mortal ever allowed to visit a dead person.”
Meredith hears Cohan before she sees him. He has climbed up the side stairs of the patio, carrying a ripe pumpkin as large as a horse’s head. The narrow, oblong shape of the pumpkin makes it appear unhappy. “What about Orpheus?” Cohan asks. “Didn’t Orpheus go to Hades to visit Eurydice?”
Celeste considers this. “Maybe he did,” she says. “And maybe he didn’t.”
“That’s a fair answer,” agrees Cohan. He sets the pumpkin down on the picnic table. “Do you think Protesilaus would like to help carve a jack-o-lantern?”
“I’ll ask him,” says Celeste, “next time I see him.”
“Would you like to carve a jack-o-lantern?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she answers.
Cohan reaches into the pocket of his parka–like a magician rummaging for a rabbit–and retrieves a black felt-tipped marker. He follows this up with an eight-piece set of carving tools bound in a worn leather case. They are heirlooms, he explains. A Christmas present from his own father. Celeste draws matching faces–one joyful, one sad–on either side of the pumpkin. “It’s Janus, the doorway god,” she says. With Cohan’s help, she cuts round eyes, then both square and triangular teeth.
While he supervises Celeste’s carving, Cohan talks to Meredith about the ecology of species introduction. “Today, we’ve come to view invasives as a threat, but that hasn’t always been the case. A hundred years ago, acclimation societies intentionally transplanted European fauna to America. House sparrows, pigeons. One group with a literary bent tried to bring over all the birds in Shakespeare’s plays.” Cohan steers Celeste’s hand while he speaks, showing the girl to chisel away from her body. A flock of songbirds settles in the crabapple branches overhead. “Speaking of the devil,” says Cohan. “Those are the starlings that are out-competing our native bluebirds.”
“You know an awful lot about invasive species,” says Meredith.
“I guess I do,” he answers. Clearly delighted. “Life leads a man down strange paths. As recently as March of last year, believe it or not, I didn’t know the first thing about ecology. I hardly knew the difference between a flamingo and a kangaroo . . . I didn’t become serious about invasives until my wife passed on . . .”
“I’m sorry,” says Meredith.
But she is also pleased. That he is a widower. That he has not abandoned the mother of his children, or grown old and peculiar in bachelordom.
“I’m sorry too,” says Cohan. “She was a true gem of a woman.”
He cups his chin and stares absently toward the far end of the patio–past the skeletons of forsythia and honeysuckle, beyond the mail-order Langstroth hives, where Meredith’s other neighbor, Dr. Seward, has taken up beekeeping. Celeste peels away an eyebrow of pumpkin skin. “What did your wife look like?” she asks.
A hush descends on the patio, broken only by the honk of distant geese. Cohan looks at Celeste with wonder, blinking, as though he has discovered a new species.
“Darlene? Honestly, she looked like an exotic vase,” he finally answers. “She had the most perfect slender neck, and a waist so slim I could wrap my arm all the way around it.”
“If I meet her when I’m dead,” Celeste offers, “I’ll say hi for you.”
Cohan stands up on his stiff knees. “When Darlene took sick,” he says to Meredith, “I found it very helpful to slash up unwanted vegetation. To let loose. If you ever want to join me, there are enough invasives out there for both of us.”
“I’ll think about it,” she agrees.
“It would be a help, in fact. I’d like to clear the place out before Thanksgiving.”
He walks to the edge of the flagstone deck and Meredith follows, though it almost feels as though he is drawing her with him. When he reaches the stairs, he pauses on the first step and turns around. They are now the same height. An ideal height to embrace or rub noses. Instead, he places his arm on her shoulder with great tenderness. “I know this isn’t my business,” he asks, “but have you made any plans?”
She knows exactly what he means.
“I promised her she’d stay at home,” says Meredith. “We have a nurse coming. We’ll have a morphine drip up in her bedroom.”
“That’s good,” says Cohan. “Home is always good.”
“It’s very kind of you to take such an interest in Celeste,” says Meredith. “I wish I could thank you.”
“You’re assuming I don’t have an ulterior motive,” says Cohan.
The widower doesn’t give Meredith an opportunity to respond. (And she is grateful for this, because she’s sure she’d have said the wrong thing.) Instead, he brushes the side of her upper sleeve with his fingertips, like a Near Eastern merchant examining a rare fabric, and then vanishes under the wisteria arbor and around the side of his gardening shed.
Celeste, meanwhile, has completed her carving. She lugs the jack-o-lantern to Meredith–hugging it in her frail, wasted arms. “I lied to Mr. Cohan about Protesilaus not being real,” the girl says, as though she has been thinking over this confession all day long. “That’s called humoring.”
***
The need for the visiting nurse arrives much sooner than Meredith expects. That evening, Celeste is too fatigued to help set the dinner table. She pokes at her lasagna, running her fork through the marinara sauce like a plow. Meredith toasts her daughter a Pop-Tart, hoping this will tempt her, but Celeste pushes away the plate. Meredith considers bribing her to eat–she’d give anything she had if the girl would just swallow one thin slice of banana–but what can one offer an eight-year-old girl with only weeks to live? By the following morning, the child is so worn down that she needs assistance putting on her overalls. She denies being in pain, but Meredith doesn’t believe her. Her nearly perpetual smile begins to look more like a grimace.
“I’m going to call for the nurse,” Meredith says.
“Can you carry me downstairs first?” Celeste asks. “I want to practice.”
“I don’t know how good an idea that is, darling,” she objects. “It’s getting awfully chilly out.”
“But there’s no temperature when you’re dead,” Celeste explains. Her tone is something between bemused and frustrated–like a teenager arguing with a parent who doesn’t get it. Who never gets it. “I need to practice, Mama. It will be much harder to be dead if I’m unprepared.”
So Meredith swaddles her daughter in a heavy hand-knit quilt– so snug that only her sunken eyes show–and lifts the child into her arms. Outside, the air has turned much cooler; a brisk wind rattles the birdfeeders and slaps a maple branch against the aluminum siding. When Meredith places the child’s paper-light body into the trunk of the clock, it feels as though she’s lowering an infant into a coffin. But what choice does she have? “It’s good practice for you too, Mama,” says Celeste. “This way you won’t be so lonely when I leave. You can just pretend I’m in the clock.”
The visiting nurse, Maricel, doesn’t see it that way, of course. She’s a round-faced Filipino woman, somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, with a double-chin and wisps of coarse dark hair around her ears. Her Celtic cross pendant is set with a tiny red garnet. When she shuffles through the house, she moans softly with each step as though her shoes don’t fit properly. Meredith wonders if the woman has children of her own, but that’s a hard question past a certain age.
“She’ll have to come inside, Mrs. Eycke,” says Maricel. “I can’t look after a girl locked in a cabinet.”
“Is it such a big deal?” asks Meredith. “She’s happy out there.”
Meredith is tempted to add: Odysseus and Agamemnon live in the clock. But she realizes this is not something the nurse will understand. Having a stranger in the house makes her nervous. It has been nearly a year since she has had company. Nearly a year since Celeste’s diagnosis. Dishes are piled high in the sink. Odds and ends are strewn across the kitchen table: a half-pack of birthday candles, a Phillips-head screwdriver, old shower curtain rings. Dust balls fringe the chair legs in the dining room. While she negotiates with the nurse, Meredith straightens picture frames and Windexes down the refrigerator door. As though this is all part of her daily housework routine. Deep down, she knows Maricel is an employee. Not a social caller. But Meredith has never before had an employee–the very idea makes her neck sweat–so she offers the nurse tea and Irish soda bread. She serves on her mother’s good china, the hand-painted porcelain tea cups with the pinkie-sized handles.
“You’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses?” asks the nurse.
“I don’t know what we are,” says Meredith. “But we’re not that.”
Maricel pours another packet of Sweet’N Low into her tea. She has also added nearly a cow’s-worth of milk, topping off the cup after each sip. “I’ve looked after Witness children a couple of times. It’s always an adventure,” she says. “I figured that might be why you have the girl in the clock. Something wacky-religious.”
“She wants to sit in the clock,” says Meredith defensively. The possibility crosses her mind, for the first time, that this woman could report her for neglect. Abuse. How would it sound explaining to a family court judge why she’d abandoned a terminally-ill eight-year-old to the November frost? Meredith glances out the window: snowflakes are falling like tiny artificial feathers.
“She doesn’t know what she wants. She’s eight years old,” says Maricel confidently. “She needs to be told what she wants.”
So together they retrieve Celeste from the clock. Meredith’s daughter is more animated than she was earlier, red-faced and almost energetic, but now she admits that her back hurts. And her abdomen. And the base of her skull. The pain is so severe that sometimes it blocks out her thoughts. She’s perfectly willing to lean on her mother’s arm and walk to her bedroom.
Maricel tucks the girl under the covers, then deftly hooks her right arm up to the I.V. Meredith holds her daughter’s opposite hand. She looks away as the needle slides in, but she smells the sharpness of the rubbing alcohol. Once the line has taken, the nurse gives the girl a second injection.
“Tell Mr. Cohan that his wife sends him a humungous hug,” says Celeste. She closes her eyes. “Mrs. Cohan is very pretty. But you’re prettier, Mama.”
“Thank you,” says Meredith.
“That should knock her out for a few hours,” says the nurse. “I always start off with a strong dose. Sometimes that catches the pain by surprise.”
“This is all happening faster than I expected,” says Meredith.
“Sometimes if you surprise the pain, it goes into hiding,” explains the nurse, nodding and fussing with Celeste’s pillows. “Maybe you’d like to lie down too, Mrs. Eycke? So you’ll be awake when your daughter is . . .”
“Maybe,” agrees Meredith.
She wanders into the hallway, but doesn’t take a nap. Instead, she sits at the kitchen table, staring through the glass door at the Gillett of Manchester. A film of snow has settled over the antique wood. Meredith remembers the first time she wound the grandfather clock–how she turned the giant key, then hid inside the base and listened to the grind and thump of the gears. Already, at the age of eight, she knew the truth about clocks: How they pretend that time goes on forever, when it really stops abruptly. All it takes is a lamb chop, or one small cell gone haywire.
She senses the doorbell has rung several times, before she’s aware enough to answer it. Hours have gone by; it’s nearly nightfall. Cohan is standing on the back steps, wearing a bright-orange knit cap with a tassel and a matching scarf. He carries a brown paper bag under one arm–like a suitor presenting a bottle of wine on a first date. When Meredith opens the door, an icy blast gusts into the kitchen and billows under the drapes.
Cohan steps into the house and dusts the flurries off his shoulders.
“How’s the patient?” he asks.
Meredith smiles. Cohan’s hat makes him look goofy, but loveable. “She’s calm,” says Meredith. “Calmer than I am.”
“I didn’t see you outside,” says Cohan. “I figured . . .”
She nods. “I’m bad with the nurse. I don’t think she likes me.”
“You’re just paranoid,” says Cohan. “How could anybody not like you?”
Three days, thinks Meredith. I’ve known you three days. But Cohan speaks as though they’ve been close friends since childhood.
“I could be paranoid and she could still not like me,” says Meredith. “I read something like that once on a T-shirt.”
Cohan grins–but she senses it is a false grin.
“Look,” he says. His voice is serious now. “I’ve brought you something.”
He hands her the bag. It’s very light. Not a bottle of champagne.
“This is an invasive weed from Thailand. It’s for the end–it will make things go quicker, if you want that. Better than morphine.” Cohan stuffs his empty hands into his trouser pockets. He appears less sure of himself–like a schoolboy second-guessing a prank. “All you do is boil the root in hot water and have her drink the extract.”
“Oh, Jesus,” says Meredith.
“Only if you want it,” repeats Cohan.
“Okay,” says Meredith.
“And when you’re ready,” he adds, “you come outside and we’ll hack some invasives together. Sound good?”
“Okay,” she says again.
Meredith clutches the paper bag to her chest while Cohan backs his way out the door and into the night. Instinctively, she conceals the package from the nurse.
“I heard a visitor,” says Maricel. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”
Meredith wonders how long this woman has been listening.
“He’s a very handsome man,” says the nurse. “He looks like a doctor.”
“He was a doctor,” says Meredith.
Maricel clicks her tongue against her palate in disapproval. “When I lecture to the nursing students, that’s the most important lesson I teach them: Never trust a good-looking doctor. He’s bound to be your undoing.”
Is this a warning? A threat? Meredith and the nurse stare at each other across the dimly lit kitchen. Then Maricel laughs–a warm, raucous laugh. “It’s certainly been my undoing,” she says. “And let me tell you: I wouldn’t mind being undone again.”
***
At first, she isn’t sure whether to be appreciative or angry. He’s a peculiar man, this Arthur Cohan, who devotes his golden years to eradicating knapweed and chinaberries. And he has given her a lethal herb for her daughter–knowing full well that she could turn him in to the authorities, placing his own future entirely in her power. Not that she will ever use the poison. Of course not. But Meredith admits there is a solace in knowing it exists, stashed on a back shelf in the pantry behind a tin that once held imported Danish cookies. She checks on the root several times a day. To make sure it is there. Maybe because it keeps her from going out into the yard.
Cohan pays her no more visits. She can see him through the window of her daughter’s bedroom. He looks smaller from the second story, more a part of the landscape, like a Russian peasant in one of those nineteenth century novels. He has traded in his machete for a shovel, and he digs at assorted roots. A metallic object catches the sunlight in the nearby grass, and Meredith realizes this is a second shovel. Cohan is waiting for her to join him. But she knows what this means, because as irrational as it is, the man has planted the idea in her head: If she goes to work beside her neighbor, she’ll have to accept that her daughter really will die.
Celeste drifts in and out of consciousness. On a particularly lucid morning, she asks, “When I’m dead, will you have more daughters?”
“Of course not,” says Meredith. “That’s silly.”
“If you do,” says Celeste. “Tell someone old like Mr. Cohan. That way, when he dies, he can tell me all about my new sister.”
“Oh, darling,” says Meredith. “I love you too much to have any other children.”
“Really?”
“I promise.”
But Meredith doesn’t like the thought that Arthur Cohan will likely die sooner than she will, although this is biologically obvious. Sometimes, she catches him looking up at the house. Maybe he is ashamed about the toxic root. Or–and she has learned to be cynical about romance–maybe he is cleverly biding his time. But to what end? The truth is, that if her daughter were healthy, Meredith would be swooning over this man.
One evening, apropos of nothing, Maricel reveals that she has no children. “When I was eight years old, all I wanted were babies,” she says. “To play house with. To dress up in fancy silks. But I’m too selfish to have children.”
“You never know,” says Meredith. “You seem like you’d make a great mother.”
“I make a great nurse. There’s a difference,” says the nurse. “Say, honey, that man’s going to stare a hole through the window.”
“What man?” asks Meredith.
Maricel says nothing.
“He just wants me to help him with his gardening. He’s trying to restore the land to what it was like in Revolutionary times.”
“Uh-huh,” says the nurse. “If you say so.”
“I do say so,” answers Meredith.
“Fine by me. But when a man wants help gardening, he usually hires a gardener.”
The nurse hums to herself in knowing amusement. This is too much to bear.
Meredith crosses to the bed and feels her daughter’s forehead. She does this mechanically, even though the girl is not feverish. Just doped up and dying. She kisses her daughter’s bony wrist. Then she heads down the back steps and onto the frost-hardened yard.
Three-quarters of a moon rests low in the late afternoon sky. A flock of songbirds are black outlines perched along the power lines. Cohan’s face is blotchy and plastered with perspiration. He hands her the second shovel. “Most of this is kudzu,” he says. “Some raspberries are mixed in–you can tell by the thorns–but I think they may have to be sacrificed. We can replant in the spring.”
“Kudzu,” she says. “It sounds like a Japanese curse.”
“It is, in a way,” says Cohan.
After that, they work side by side in silence. But Meredith is ever aware of her neighbor’s presence, of his sturdy shoulders muscling through soil. She chops at the dead vines as best she can–and this does make her feel better. Or at least foggy. Cohan labors like a man paid by the weight of his crop. He clears fifty square yards in a matter of hours, driving his blade into the stony earth, undaunted by cold or wind. Meredith’s entire body feels numb, but she doesn’t dare complain. When the last of the sunlight fades over the crest of the hill, Cohan tosses his shovel into a mound of uprooted vines.
“I’m glad you came out here,” he says.
He walks toward her and puts his arms around her waist. And this time he does kiss her–though, to her own surprise, she does not kiss back. She tries, but she keeps thinking of her daughter. She looks over Cohan’s shoulder–at the dark square on the darker silhouette that is the window of Celeste’s bedroom–and she breaks away.
***
The house is still and silent and chilly when Meredith enters. It reminds her of the other empty houses that she once visited with realtors–always thinking of the future possibilities, not the previous owners and their losses. All of the downstairs lights have been turned off, and in the upstairs corridor, both bulbs have burned out. In her daughter’s bedroom, the blinds are drawn shut. The nurse has dozed off in a rocking chair. Celeste has tucked the sheets under the mattress and folded the afghan into a perfect rectangle. She has fastened the I.V. shut with a metal clip. Slow Poke, the girl’s stuffed tortoise, sits alone atop the neatly layered bedding. Somehow, none of this surprises Meredith. She senses that the end is near–that her daughter is hiding in the clock. For the first time in months, she knows what she must do.
In the kitchen, she pours water into a pot and sets it on the gas range. Then she retrieves the toxic root from the pantry. Its pulp is deathly white. When she dunks it into the boiling water, it falls to the bottom with a thud. The liquid extract appears soapy. Meredith pours it into a cocktail glass. Like a fine liqueur.
Outside, Art Cohan stands at the far end of the lawn. He is still staring up at her house. Leaning on his shovel. He looks so solid, so invincible. The sort of man who would have made General Washington proud.
Meredith opens the clock cabinet and steps over the threshold, pulling the light oak doors shut behind her. It has been many years since she has been inside this compartment. At first, the ceiling seems low and tight. The aroma of damp wood is nearly overpowering. But gradually, her eyes adjust to the darkness.
She wades deeper into the belly of the clock. She passes through the widening corridors, increasingly bright, past Odysseus and Agamemnon and Helen of Troy. There is Darlene Cohan, swanlike, watering a geranium. And her own father, polishing his gold pocket watch. And Mama! Dear, dear Mama! Decked out to the nines on her way to the Chamber of Commerce dinner. They call out for her to stop, but she keeps going.
Celeste is only yards ahead of her, still carrying the toy talking clock. Meredith shouts out her daughter’s name, and the girl turns around, surprised, like Orpheus caught off guard by Eurydice. She is wearing a long white gown. A pale jonquil is pinned into her intricately-coiffed hair.
“What are you doing, Mama?” she cries. “You don’t belong here.”
And the girl keeps protesting, but with increasingly less vigor, while Meredith hugs her in her arms and squeezes tight.
Jacob M. Appel’s stories have appeared in Agni, Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, and North American Review.