It wasn’t as though I had forgotten the note. It had been there, writing itself over and over in my mind as I’d eaten breakfast and tried to think of other things. I’d managed to ward off any new thoughts about it in that time, but being close to it again, not even looking at it directly, just at the envelopes and papers I’d hidden it under, I could feel my heart swell and pound again. Oh, Magda. May you rest in peace, I said to her in my mind. What else can you do about a dead person than to wish them well? What more could have been expected of me in the situation? The note wasn’t any kind of summons or proposition. It was a note of acknowledgment, not an invitation. Still, it left so much unexplained. Nobody will ever know . . . Such certainty. Nobody will ever . . . It was odd, his assurance. It occurred to me then, there might be more in the note than met the eye. Maybe I ought to be reading between the lines. Her name was Magda. . . .
Charlie licked my hand, interrupting my darkening reverie. Outside, the sun was shining. The garden called. No, I didn’t have to read the note again. I could proceed with life. I would. I had to. I put my sun hat on, knotting the nylon strings under my throat. Anyway, who was I to ask questions? I was just a little old lady, peacefully waiting out the rest of my life, disturbing no one, and responsible for no one but myself and my dog.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Charlie bounded out past me as soon as I opened the door. I watched as he scampered across the gravel path and down the slight slope toward the lake. He pawed the wet dirt there and splashed a bit in the shallow waters. It was still too cold for me to go swimming, but Charlie was impervious to the cold. Even in the winter, when the thermostat on the kitchen window read in the single digits, he’d frolic out there in the snow until his paws and belly were raw and red, then come back huffing and puffing and curl up on the rug in front of the fireplace. He was so dear. He was so human sometimes, rolling his eyes and yawning like Walter would when I was uneasy after dinner, as though to say, “Come relax here with me on the couch, let my body soothe you, it’s all right.” I could hear Charlie prancing around while I worked in the garden. He disappeared out there for long jags, chasing squirrels through the thick of the pines, looping back to me once in a while for a kiss and a little pet, for my sake, it seemed. He didn’t need me. Now that it was spring, he spent most of his time outdoors. I had to coax him in with treats and whistles when I wanted his company during the day. I never worried that he’d run away. By then I knew, he was mine. There were no greener pastures. He would always come when I called. He was like a teenager, confident and naive, exploring his world as though he owned it. His spirit was joyful and unworried. It seemed to me that he’d forgotten his early trauma with his siblings in the duffel bag, those poor sweet creatures. And how nice it was to know that one could forget such things. We are resilient. We suffer, heal, and proceed. Proceed, proceed, I told myself, taking up the trowel.
The dirt was cool and gritty, and though I’d never learned much about planting and nursing, giving life to much of anything, I felt that my work in the garden was productive, sprinkling seeds and covering them, raking the unbroken ground, sifting through the clumps, and so forth.
Besides the weekly book reviewer on public radio, the radio in Levant was all Christian sermons, or pop music, or dark rock ’n’ roll played on the station broadcast from the community college a few towns over. Late at night, if I couldn’t sleep, I’d listen to the Christian call-in hotline. People would ask questions about Scripture, and occasionally for advice about how to handle some difficult situation in their lives in a good Christian way. It fascinated me that strangers would trust “Pastor Jimmy” with such serious matters, had no qualms about airing their dirty laundry over the radio waves. Some of them even gave their last names and the towns they lived in. “This is Patricia Fisher from New Ashford.” “My name is Reynold Owens, and I live out here in Goshen Hills.” “Yes, hello. This is Lacey Gardner calling in from Amity. I think you know my husband?”
“Mrs. Gardner, hello. How is Kenneth? How is his health these days?”
Maybe one night I’d hear Blake call in. “You don’t know me,” he’d say. “But I have a problem. It’s Magda. She’s dead. Nobody will ever know . . .”
“Magda, what a strange name,” Pastor Jimmy would say.
My name was also strange. All my life people had asked me, “What kind of name is Vesta Gul?”
“Vesta is an old family name. My mother’s mother,” I would tell them. “People call me Vi sometimes. My friends do. And Gul was my husband’s name. It means ‘rose’ in Turkish. But he was from Germany.”
“Is that your accent? It’s a German accent?” asked the woman at the bank in Bethsmane. Walter did have a German accent, but I had none. I’d grown up in Horseneck. I was a normal person. I was like everybody else. If I had any accent, it was the accent of having no accent. Most people in Levant spoke with a rural drawl, sometimes so thick I could hardly parse out the strains of conversation I overheard now and then in town, or at the gas station where I filled up once a month. My Monday morning trips into town put me in touch with just a few shop clerks, the checkout girls at the grocery store, the gentle old man at the bakery. “Plain or glazed, today?” he’d ask.
“Plain, please,” and “yes,” and “thank you” were all I had to say. At the library, it was easy to be silent. Just a nod here, a smile there. Charlie was the one I talked to, and much of the time we were silent together, just sharing the mind space between us, feeling things back and forth.
Her name was Magda. Magda had an odd, rubbery ring to it, like magma, or madman. Thick and unguent and unruly. Or magnum, a word that for me conjured up a smoking gun, or a box of prophylactics, things I would never think about. Her name was Magda. Magda was just her nickname, I surmised. Blake must have known her well. Why else would he feel moved to attend to her dead body? He must have loved her. But he hadn’t loved her enough to make a big stink over her death. The only stink Blake had made had been for me.
I took off my gardening gloves and tore open the packet of forget-me-not seeds. They were surprisingly big, the size of small ticks, shaped like raindrops but prickly, like burs. I pinched a few between my fingers and dropped them in a hole I’d poked into the dirt with my finger. It seemed unbelievable that these tiny things would someday bloom into little blue flowers, according to the package. The label said simply that they grow in average soil, need little attention, and take a week or two to germinate. How long would it take for the flowers to bloom? I wondered. Could I wait that long? I imagined the next two weeks, waiting anxiously for the little green stems to sprout out of the ground. It might drive me mad to sit there and stare. I’d manage somehow. I’d think of something to keep me busy. A wave of impatience came over me. It was new, this feeling. Somehow it had eluded me all winter. I’d fallen into a kind of dreamland while the world had frozen over and grown thin, days so short they vanished as soon as the coffee was made. My mind had become eerily gray and peaceful, as if I’d been hibernating from November through April. But the days were growing longer now. Dawn was earlier, dusk was later. There was more time to be up and alive. A tide of passion was rising. Before Walter had died, I’d taken pills to soothe my nerves. But when he’d died, I felt it was disrespectful to try to numb away my grief, so I’d flushed them down the toilet. In the garden, I momentarily regretted that. Lorazepam was the name. If I wanted any now, I’d have to go beg some Bethsmane clinician. You can imagine how he’d look at me. No, I couldn’t bear to put up with that kind of humiliation. I would brave my nerves on my own.