Free The Mother Garden by Robin Romm Page B

the bedrooms. He’s not ignoring her. He’s learned to live with all of this silently, but if I reached out to put my hand on his shoulder right now, he would feel as tense as a snake drawing back to bite.
    The whole scene is wrong. It’s been wrong from the beginning. When Nick was twelve and his father, Gray, left his mother for Anna—that was wrong. It was wrong that Nick’s mother had to live alone in that run-down rental on the outskirts of town, drowning the noise of the neighbors with her radio, while Gray and Anna woke to views of rolling hills. The world has continued to spin like this, tilted poorly on its axis, and it’s worn a lopsided groove in the universe.
    Despite the sun streaming through the skylights and the white, clean walls, there’s no peace here. The door to Milo’s bedroom is shut, but I know that if we opened it, the bed would be unmade, the snowboarding poster would still hang on the wall above it. Anna will not allow the room to be emptied or cleaned; it’s a battle she’s been winning for years.
    The windows in Nick’s room open to the garden. The air is cool, spring, eastern wood air—the sweet smell of old leaves and new buds. It’s a tiny room. There’s hardly anything in here—an antique dresser with an old porcelain pitcher on it and a stiff-backed chair next to the bed. No trace of Nick as a child. Milo, age seven or eight, grins from a speckled silver frame. On the wall hangs a framed crayon drawing—Milo’s, certainly.
    â€œWhat do you want to do today?” Nick asks. He wriggles out of his thick brown sweater. It’s not really warm enough to be without a sweater, but I admire his optimism. The trees outside shine in the brightness of the day. In the distance, you can hear the bleating of the sheep, occasionally, the squawk of a chicken.
    Nick and I used to come up to this big house on long weekends, but I haven’t been back in the three years since Milo’s funeral. That day, we came up to this room, climbed into bed, blind with shock and exhaustion, and Nick told me that someday he would really understand love, but that he didn’t think he did then, he didn’t think he ever really had—at least not with me. Under the thick quilt his body altered, became solid and separate in a way I hadn’t known before. His knees were sharp, his legs selfish. Inside my own body—which was already still with grief—a deeper silence landed. I closed my eyes and the darkness was particulate, full of spinning shards and gyrating orbs, but my blood and heart had stopped moving.
    Nick waits for me to say something. He leans against the dresser, crossing his arms. His eyes are the impossible green of old Coke bottles and shine with a cool, glassy clarity. I could walk across the room and put my lips against his neck and he would put his hand on my back absently and I would stand there breathing the soapy smell of his skin.
    The mattress sags when Nick sits. We’ve only been back together six months. Nick got a job in San Francisco, heading the archival sound department at the public library. He called me once he took the job. We met in Golden Gate Park, went to a bar, then back to his apartment with the futon on the floor and his clothes in low crates. We drank hot toddies and I wouldn’t let him touch me. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You have to believe me.” And I haven’t forgotten about the way he left me, the girls he plugged the absence with until I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, until whatever passed between us just felt like a joke, some adolescent clinging we never should have engaged in.
    â€œHow long does Anna do that for?” I ask. Nick sits up straighter.
    â€œOh, Becca,” he says, putting a hand over his eyes. “Let’s not get into this now.”
    â€œWe’re not getting into anything. I’m just asking a