“But I’m here now. I’m here in Sydney and I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying at the house, at Darling House, and everything is perfect, just as you like it.”
“I’ve looked after her.”
“I know you have. The Christmas arrangements are marvelous and the garden is thriving. Everything is waiting for you to get better and come home.”
Nora closed her eyes. Her cheeks were damp and glistening, and Jess reached to wipe them gently with her thumb. Nora’s breathing was growing deeper, but her face muscles flickered every so often, as if a wayward thought had crossed her mind and caused her trouble.
The doctor might think Nora wasn’t ready to leave the hospital, but Jess knew otherwise. Nora needed to be back in her Pimpernel-papered room with its bed beneath the window. She liked to say that the view from her bedroom was all the religion she needed. “I cannot tell you the satisfaction one gets from having planted and loved a garden,” she’d declare. “To be able to leave even a small patch of this earth more beautiful and bountiful than it was when one arrived.”
The northwestern escarpment at Darling House had been a formal and rather staid series of rose beds originally, but after her parents died and the property came to her, Nora had committed herself to making it something new. She’d envisaged a very different sort of garden—wilder, more profuse and tangled, with natives and introduced species combined—and had planted and tended it over decades with the utmost love and care. The result was a place of utterjoy and wonder. It had even been featured in a segment onGardening Australiasome years before.
Jess had seen the old episode a number of times because Nora had videotaped it when it aired on TV and still took it out periodically to watch. She loved to narrate as she and the host walked through the clematis-and-jasmine-entwined arbor and into the native-bee haven, where he commented with genuine awe at the vision she must have had, the awesome scope of the undertaking. Nora was less fond of the end of the episode, when she and the host were sitting in the wisteria-clad rotunda, and he produced a series of black-and-white “before” photos that he’d unearthed.
“Oh, turn it off now,” she always said when the episode reached that point. “I look such a fool.”
But Jess would never oblige. “You do not!” she’d say. “I love this bit. You were perfectly imperious.”
And Nora would shake her head and sometimes even cover her eyes with a hand, but she’d allow the tape to keep rolling, as the camera zoomed in closer on the pair of them in the rotunda and the host said, with a grin, “I have a bit of a surprise,” before flourishing the photos, and Nora, who most emphatically did not like surprises, appeared to shudder.
“I’ve never been a lover of roses,” she told him, recovering herself. “The fragrance, the blooms, the godforsaken thorns. It was the one rule I had when I set out to redesign my garden: there wasn’t to be a rose in sight.”
“But they’re the flower of love.”
“So people say,” Nora answered, before bestowing on the young host a flirtatious smile. “But I’ve certainly never suffered a lack in that regard.”
The monitor began to beep, and Jess looked up sharply. The jagged lines were moving faster, and a new light was flashing on the screen.
She noticed that Nora’s lips were trembling. Her breathing was labored.
The beeping noise was getting faster, louder.
Jess found the call button on the end of the bed and pressed it.
Nora’s eyes opened and she reached out, her fingernails scratching Jess’s wrist. She was trying to say something.
“I’m here,” said Jess. “I’m here, Nora.”
“The pages.”
Jess couldn’t be sure that she’d heard the words correctly. “Which pages?” She looked up sharply as the monitor began to sound an intermittent alarm. She could feel panic rising in her chest. “Please, Nora, it’s okay. Everything’s okay.”
A nurse hurried around the corner, and Jess let go of her grandmother’s hand. She took a few steps back, closer to the window, trying to stay out of the way. “Is she all right?”
The nurse didn’t answer. She was reading the machine, checking Nora’s drip, counting the pulse in her wrist.
“Please...” Nora’s voice was a rasp. “Jessy, help me.”
“We’re going to help you,” said the nurse. “Never mind about that.”
“He’s going to take her from me...”
“No one’s going to do any such thing,” said the nurse matter-of-factly. “You can rest assured of that.”
Jess watched uneasily as her grandmother closed her eyes. The nurse was working quickly, and a change was coming over Nora’s face already. She was drifting to another place—whether of peace or oblivion, it was difficult to say.
“There you are now,” said the nurse at last, as the beeps began to slow. “That’s better.”
Jess moved to retake her grandmother’s hand. She held it tighter than she should, the only way she had of expressing all the worry and love that she was feeling.
