Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [80]
“Is that it?” Angie wants to know.
“That’s it.”
“Okay. Let’s get you into the bathtub.”
“I’m gonna stay out here for a bit, Mom.”
“Alice . . .”
Alice looks at her mom; she notices that her hair is plastered to her neck. Then she looks out over the dark mass of the garden.
“Sometimes I can hear him,” she says. “Not like in a crazy way or anything. I can hear the things he’s said to me. How to do things and stuff.”
“It’s really cold, honey.”
“We’d always just sit here for a few minutes when we finished planting.”
Alice picks up the lantern and wipes the rain off the stool for her mom. Angie hesitates and then sits. Alice sets the lantern down and then kneels in the dirt. She pulls a Snickers bar out of the jacket pocket, unwraps it, and hands half to her mom.
“Snickers?”
“Dad’s favorite.”
“Really?”
“You didn’t know that?”
“Nope.”
They eat the Snickers.
“Normally, when Dad and I would do this the sun would be shining and some birds would be singing and . . .”
“I know, I know . . .”
“And you’d just sort of feel things beginning and things continuing . . . the way some things get to continue . . . because it’s the same things that are beginning every spring . . . and it’s like . . . so full of hope, you know? To put those seeds in the ground every year.”
Alice hasn’t said this many words in a row to her mother in a long time. She wonders if it’s the dark that is letting her talk like this. Or the fact that Angie has entered Alice’s world for a change.
“Can you smell that smell?”
Angie sniffs, skeptical and dubious that there could be something out here she would actually like to smell. Because while she may like big animals and barns and farmers and farmers’ wives, she does not, in any way, shape, or form, like dirt.
“Which smell?”
“All of them.”
“Honey, the garden isn’t really—”
“Ellie told me a new word today. Petrichor. The loamy smell that rises from the ground after rain. Isn’t it cool that there’s a word for that?”
“Ellie and her dictionary.”
“It’s there. Just like she said. It’s there.”
Water is now dripping from Angie’s neck down Angie’s back and she is wishing she could enter into the spirit of all of this with Alice a bit more fully, that she could just inhale petrichor like a really good sport, but just as fervently she is wishing she could get inside her nice, dry house.
“So . . . is that enough communing with nature for one night?”
Alice laughs.
“You go in. I’ll put the tools away.”
Angie picks up her umbrella and heads back to the house. She’s washing her hands at the kitchen sink and looks up to see that Alice is still in the garden, still kneeling in the dirt. The light from the lantern barely illuminates her. Angie turns out the kitchen light and returns to the window, thinking she might be able to see a little better. What is she waiting for? Her father’s voice? A miracle? Is she praying?
Angie realizes that she has no idea what Alice is thinking and she suddenly sees just how hard it is to know anyone, ever. But is there anything more difficult than trying to know your adolescent daughter? No one warned her that you can go from feeling like a really good mother to a really clueless and crappy mother the minute your daughter turns twelve. Or was it eleven?
Alice stands and stretches and picks up the lantern to walk the six rows, making sure everything is as it should be. Just the way her dad does it.
Alice is taller, Angie realizes, she suddenly looks more like Matt than ever; she has even started to move with Matt’s easy grace and confidence.
Angie watches her, sees her care and her competence and the threads that connect her to Matt. Each string stretched tight over each row, each careful furrow, each seed in the dark earth