Free Attachment by Isabel Fonseca

outward from the patch on which the island’s first governor had laid his vegetable plot. But according to Jean’s guidebook the botanical garden had been the dream of a Belgian, two Frenchmen, and then a Scot, each of whom had brought some new dimension to the enterprise. After that, under the authority of the newly created Department of Agriculture, nothing more had been added; or, Jean understood, the spirit of invention turned as murky and stagnant as the lily ponds.
    She stopped reading to look around her. Of course a garden had to be the projection of a single mind, or at least a succession of single minds. Unlike a marriage, she thought, even if marriage was often likened to a garden—a private district. What the Belgian and the Frenchmen and the Scot had in common was this: they’d dared to shape paradise on an island that could easily have won the bid for Eden just as they found it. “For these men,” she ventured out loud, auditioning a sentence for use in print, “nothing they found could compare with what they could make. ” Phyllis was squinting at a hand-painted map of the gardens.
    “What did you find, honey?”
    Jean was just warming up and didn’t really want, just yet, to explain her free associations, these thoughts that ran from plants to persons and other imports. Ideas percolating, voiced aloud—this was a familiar, delicate process signaling the start of a column, just a nibble, nothing more, usually accompanied by a disproportionate surge of euphoria: the glow of being useful. Since Giovana, Jean was overcome with a desire to do good, like her lawyer-dad, in fact like both her parents, as if only this could turn everything around.
    Anyway, the next week’s column was now solved. Forget the properties of individual plants; it was digging in the dirt that rejuvenated (and that explained the rarity of the teenage gardener). A commonplace? Or was weeding salutary only in contrast to her recent life of stunting imposture and filth?
    “Well, what a perfect place for a party,” Phyllis said, inspecting a hothouse of ferns, orchids, begonias, and anthuriums. They came through juniper and Indian walnut trees, past a great banyan with exposed roots hanging like hair, to a massive mahogany and, irresistibly placed before it, a bench. “You know what I wish?” Phyllis said, plonking herself down.
    “What do you wish, Mom?” Jean sat beside her.
    “That instead of scattering the ashes we’d buried them under a big, beautiful tree. So we could sit with him. I hate to think of him swilling around out there in that freezing ocean.”
    Jean was accustomed to her mother starting this conversation in the middle, the thought never far from any of their minds. Billy, her older—and now much younger—brother, was killed at fifteen by a drunk driver in the winter of 1970. They’d scattered his ashes at sea; in fact, in New York Harbor, below a snow-cloaked Statue of Liberty.
    “Hmm,” Jean said. In a way her mother was right—he was still out there. Matter remained, forever. “Maybe we should bury something else of Billy’s under a big beautiful tree. Like that yellow ski hat. Whatever happened to that thing anyway?”
    Phyllis laughed. “Oh, I have it.” For a whole year, his last year, Billy had worn his stupid ski hat, during the day when he could get away with it and every single night, in an effort to mat down his wild wiry hair.
    “Do you ever worry that you’re forgetting him?” Jean asked.
    “Never. I think about him all the time.” One more way, Jean thought, grief was different for the mother, who was accustomed from the start to tracking her child’s constantly changing form. Maybe, for her, Billy’s deathly shape was only a “phase”; his being dead now, swilling around out there in the dark deep, this was just the next thing and not any kind of end to his story. Jean had worried that he was fading—his laugh was less distinct, though not, for some reason, his croaky,