Free The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels Page B

things he knew how to cook. We ate in silence at that little red-and-white kitchen table, and everything tasted terrible. We listened to each other chewing and swallowing. Everything looked the same, the little square bumpy salt-and-pepper cellars with their red plastic caps, and the little bit of lace under the butter dish. But suddenly it was a different house, a replica of the house I knew, and when we left to take the flowers to my mother after lunch, I started to cry. And then my father started to cry too and he had to stop the car by the side of the road.
    Avery could feel her tears through his shirt.
    – There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to learn this, like a child who suddenly realizes for the first time that the ball he threw over the fence has not disappeared. I used to sit with my mother in Grandmother Escher's Cambridgeshire garden and we would feel that strong wind from the Ural Mountains on our faces. The wind is invisible, but the Ural Mountains are not! Yet why should we believe in the Ural Mountains that we can't see when we're sitting in a garden in Cambridgeshire and not believe in other things, an inner knowledge we feel just as keenly? Nothing exists independently. Not a single molecule, not a thought.
    – ‘A garden must have a path,’ my mother used to say, and she was right. A path that has worn its way into the earth, sunken cobbles, grass beginning to grow through the cracks, said Jean, a path that has been set into the earth through constant use. The way stone stairs over centuries hollow out in the middle. Imagine mere boots being able to wear away stone – the way some stories bend in the middle after centuries of telling. The ground knows where we have walked …
    At night instead of a bedtime story sometimes my mother and I would look at seed catalogues. She sent to England for some of them, just to dream, and she would whisper a garden for me. I would imagine it with her, every detail, the ivy, the bench beneath the willow, the snow of blossoms in the warm spring air. Until I fell asleep.
    Avery stroked Jean's face. He leaned down and took off her sandals and drew the sheet up her bare legs.
    – Let me tell you a garden story, said Avery, a bedtime story.
    Jean closed her eyes.
    – Each spring, said Avery, when my father was a boy, he waited for the sparrows to return to that garden in Cambridgeshire. By March he was brimming with impatience. Day after day, he faithfully threw the tea crumbs into the ivy. Finally, one morning, the wall began to sing.
    Avery had already imagined, in those first months with Jean, what the chance to grow old with her would mean: not regret at how her body would change, but the private knowledge of all she'd been. Sometimes, his ache so keen, Avery felt that only in old age would he finally have full possession of her youthful flesh. It would be his secret, forged in all the nights next to each other.
    In the flat on Clarendon, when Avery couldn't sleep, Jean whispered to him while he stroked her arm. She recited a list of all the native Ontario plants she could think of: hair grass, arrow leaved aster, the heath aster, swamp aster, long-leaved bluets, foxglove, side-oats grama, the compass plant whose leaves always align on the north-south axis. The sand dropseed, turtlehead, great St. John's wort, sneezeweed, balsam ragwort, fox sedge, umbrella sedge, the little bluestem … and then sleep grew farther away still and he began to touch her with purpose.

    The desert heat would not leave Jean; above the yellow sand the air was a shimmering liquid, a palpable transparency; by early morning forty-five degrees Celsius in the shade. Even during the frigid night Jean felt her bones baking, even when the surface of her skin was cool.
    On the deck of the houseboat she stood in her clothes and poured night