Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [61]
As I went out of the bedroom I held my breath and took a look down at the rug under my feet, by the door. There was a small burnt circle as if someone had dropped a cigarette, alongside some dark brownish flecks like gravy spots on a shirtfront. Part of the circle, and no doubt some of the gravy spots, were missing where a sample had been cut from the Berber carpeting, exposing an isosceles triangle of pale green pad underneath. I poked at the blackened spot with the tip of my shoe for a moment, then went down to see Sara, in her garden, to let her know what the Pittsburgh police lab technician was going to report.
Sara’s garden was rather small, some thirty feet by twenty, enclosed on all four sides by a low fence of white pickets backed with chicken wire. There were eight or nine beds, full of rich black humus, bordered by irregular red bricks set in rows half buried in the ground. Among the beds ran paths of the same brick, set into an underlayer of fine gravel, in a herringbone pattern. An uncle of Sara’s, one of her father’s brothers, had salvaged the bricks from the demolition of Forbes Field. The beds had been cleared out and plowed under last fall. The vines on the spindly trellises were thin and skeletal, the spigots had been wrapped with plastic and taped against frost, and the roses that ran along either side of the central alley had been cut back severely. There were a few prunish apples dangling from the apple tree, and I thought I saw the collapsed black remains of a pumpkin in one corner. Although I knew Sara had already done some spring planting, the garden looked empty and dead to me.
I walked along the brick path to the little glass building, swallowing, clearing my throat, my heart ringing hard against my breastbone. I felt certain that when I left Sara’s greenhouse, having told her what I had brought myself here to say, I would never be coming back. The greenhouse was a miniature palace of glass, speckled with dew, fifteen or twenty feet tall. It was built on the plan of a Greek cross and had a high central atrium, with a peaked, hipped roof like a glass steeple. The framework was metal and wood, painted the dark green of an outfield wall. The windows were fogged but I could make out a dozen shades of green within.
I tapped on the door and it rattled under my hand.
“Sara? It’s Grady.”
I heard her say something that after a moment I reconstructed as a terse invitation to enter.
A jet of cool air carried me through the door, as though the greenhouse were breathing me in. The floor was gravel and my footsteps crunched and echoed off the high glass ceiling. It was so warm inside that I immediately began to sweat, and so fragrant as to be almost malodorous. I smelled potting soil and freesias, basil and rainwater, rotten wood, rubber hoses, moss, and a faint chlorine tang like an indoor pool. A thousand plants stretched out into all four arms of the greenhouse, spread across low benches, in orderly rows, sporting all manner of fronds, tendrils, and bracts, from cacti and miniature roses in pots to boxes full of tiny seedlings to a big round gardenia bush in a Mexican urn. The back part of the greenhouse was hung with fluorescent lights that cast their wide spectra over planters