Bleeding Heart Read online

  4

  “Marmy! Marmy!” Danny shouted happily as he dragged the heavy-duty tape measure behind him up the hill. Mara had locked the mechanism before handing it over to her son to play with while we investigated the birch grove farther up the incline. But Danny had somehow managed to release it, and now a long aluminum tail rattled behind him, the yellow plastic case bouncing around at the end like a pull toy.

  “Be careful, Danny!” I cried without thinking. The tape was sharp as a razor. I’d nicked myself on it often enough. He stopped in his tracks, his wide grin suddenly uncertain. I realized as soon as I said it that I shouldn’t have intervened. I’d asked Mara as a favor if she could help me make a rough survey of Mackenzie’s property that chilly Saturday afternoon in late March, and she’d agreed to do so if she could bring Danny along. Though she seemed so young and inexperienced, I’d come to realize that she was a super-protective and self-sufficient mother. She didn’t want my advice. She’d made it pretty clear to me in the past that Danny was her business. Period. No trespassing.

  “It’s okay,” Mara said as Danny’s mouth began to quiver, “you’re unbreakable. Right, bud? But your nose is totally disgusting. Get up here.” Mara squatted down as Danny ran into her arms. She pulled a package of Kleenex from her parka pocket. “Blow!” she said, hugging him to her as she covered the lower half of his face with the tissue.

  I enjoyed watching the two of them together. They had the same dark brown hair, in Mara’s case cropped into a raggedy cap that fell slightly askew across her high, round forehead. Danny’s hadn’t been cut yet and it curled, cherublike, to his shoulders. When Mara was around her son, her defensive and closed-off attitude disappeared—as did the carefully maintained noncommittal expression. Seeing her with him allowed me a glimpse of a very different person—someone spontaneous and fun. I felt sad that she wouldn’t allow herself to be that way around me or anyone else she came into contact with at Green Acres. Clearly, something had happened to her—a bad early marriage or relationship, I suspected—that made her such a standoffish and solitary young woman.

  “Hello, down there!” Eleanor called, waving to us from the side deck. The housekeeper had greeted us cordially when we arrived and invited us in for cookies and a cup of tea when we’d finished our work. “Warm brownies just out of the oven, if anyone’s interested.”

  “Yes!” Danny said, his face brightening again.

  “You guys go ahead,” I told Mara. We’d been at it for more than an hour, and the temperature was starting to drop off as the afternoon lengthened. I still had a lot of ground to cover, but Mackenzie had given me permission to walk the property whenever I wished. And I already knew that I’d need several additional visits to get all the readings I wanted. “I’m going to take some more photos before the light goes. I’ll see you up there.”

  I watched them climb the hill, hand in hand, Danny galloping along beside his mom, obviously excited by the prospect of what awaited him in the enormous house above. I reached down to pick up the measuring tape that Danny had left on the ground. When I stood up again, I felt a rush of vertigo. The world wavered. Clouds scudding above the mountains in the distance looked suddenly ominous. A front was coming through—the forecast called for temperatures to be twenty degrees warmer by daybreak. Good news, really. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to explain my sudden uneasiness. I’d grown accustomed to being on my own outdoors. In fact, I usually cherished it. So what was this about? I wondered. But the sun was fading, and I didn’t have time to chase shadows. I forced myself to shake off the willies and keep moving.

  I worked quickly, framing different shots of Mackenzie’s property in my viewfinder, seeing the many possibilities—and problems—that the land presented. For the most part, the gradient was at least twenty degrees, with just a few places where the slope leveled off. It began to occur to me that I was going to literally have to move the earth to create my own flat surfaces. Just how large those man-made terraces could be and how many the hillside could support would depend, I knew, on a number of variables, including underlying drainage and soil composition. I would have to bring in a landscape contractor for advice—and an environmental expert. Eventually, I’d need to consult with the EPA. I began to make a mental list of all the calls I was going to have to make on Monday morning.

  By the time I started up to the house, a plan had begun to take shape in my mind. It was nothing I could even put down on paper yet. Just a sense of movement and form—like a flow of water over rock. A visual echo of the rolling mountains in the distance and the meandering course of the river through the valley.

  I entered the house from the flight of stairs that led up to the side deck, and followed the sound of voices down a long hall and into a brightly lit kitchen gleaming with brushed aluminum appliances and copper utensils suspended above a butcher block island. The walls were sunflower yellow, the counters thick blue slate. The floor was covered with glazed terra-cotta tile. Despite its size and elegance, it was a working kitchen, with open shelving lined with spices and mixing bowls. At the far end of the room, a long wooden table paralleled a large fireplace. Mara was sitting on a bench facing me. Eleanor was kitty-corner to her at the end of the table with Danny on her lap. Mara and Eleanor were leaning toward each other, obviously intent on whatever they were discussing.

  “. . . be happy to check it out for you,” Mara was saying.

  “That would be great, and maybe next time we can . . . ,” Eleanor began, but then, seeing me approach across the room, dropped her voice to a whisper. It struck me that the two women—who’d met for the first time that afternoon—appeared to be remarkably familiar and comfortable with each other. Especially considering that one of them was Mara. I was surprised and, yes, more than a little hurt that Danny—whom I’d yet to steal a hug from—was permitted to sit on Eleanor’s lap. On the other hand, I was pleased that Mara seemed to be able to loosen up and enjoy someone else’s company besides her son’s.

  I gladly accepted the cup of tea that Eleanor offered and took a seat opposite Mara and in front of the plate of brownies. But my presence seemed to put a damper on the easygoing atmosphere. Eleanor asked politely after my progress.

  “Well, I think we managed to get a good start this afternoon. Wouldn’t you say, Mara?” I asked, smiling across the table at her.

  “Maybe,” she said with her usual shrug.

  “Mr. M told me you should have the run of the place,” Eleanor said. “I’m here from nine to six or so every day but Sunday. You don’t even need to check in with me, of course. But I’m happy to make you lunch or tea, if you give me a little warning.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” I said. Eleanor had a soothing, melodious voice, tinged with the singsong lilt of the Caribbean. She emanated warmth. It was hardly surprising that Mara and Danny had taken to her so quickly. I sometimes forget how formidable I can be these days. Clipped, focused, no-nonsense.

  “Oh, I love to cook! As I’m sure you can tell,” Eleanor said with a laugh, looking down at the gentle swells under her apron. “And I feel at such loose ends when Mr. M’s away on business.”

  “He’s away now?” I asked, though I really didn’t need to. I could feel the lack of his presence in the house.

  “In Europe. Then South America. The man has more frequent-flier miles than Santa Claus.”

  “I love Santa,” Danny announced, reaching for another brownie.

  “No way!” Mara said, grabbing his wrist as she swung her legs around the side of the bench. She stood up from the table. “We gotta get going.”

  “Let me make you and Danny a goodie bag first,” Eleanor said, lifting the little guy into his mother’s arms.

  “You really don’t—”

  “You’ll be doing me a favor, dearie,” Eleanor replied. “Lead me not into temptation!”

  I made a concerted effort to be more open and engaging with Mara after that. Fo
r one thing, I needed her help—now more than ever. We’d started spring cleanup and were fielding the usual calls about improvements from our regular customers. A row of red maples down the driveway. A fenced-in vegetable garden with raised beds. A rose arbor by the pool. It suddenly seemed that all our clients had a list of things they hoped Green Acres could get to that spring. For the first time, I let Mara handle some of these inquiries while I worked at my computer on the plans for Mackenzie, my desk stacked with gardening books, magazines, and horticultural references.

  I also wanted to push Mara a little. She needed to build a future for herself and her son, but she wasn’t going to get anywhere if she didn’t start to learn how to interact with other people first. I knew she was naturally bright and intuitive. She’d mastered the accounting software—which had taken me weeks to learn—within a couple of days of being hired. And she understood the basics of horticulture in a way that I think is unusual for most girls of her age. I knew that my own well-educated daughters, now both in their twenties, couldn’t begin to tell the difference between a hemlock and a white pine. Or the best weed-and-feed for lawns in our area. Or when to prune back woody shrubs. Mara did. Some of this, it’s true, she’d picked up from working at Green Acres for the last year—but by no means all. Typically, she deflected any of my questions about how she had come by such—at least for this day and age—specialized knowledge.

  “That’s going to have to wait,” I heard her tell one client a week or two after our first site visit to Mackenzie’s. “No, not because we’re too busy. You gotta plant spring flowering bulbs in the fall. Yeah, that’s just the way it is.”

  “You could have handled that with a little more finesse,” I told her when she’d finished the call.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sugarcoat things a little,” I said, taking off my reading glasses. “Rather than saying ‘That’s the way it is,’ you could have said something like ‘We’ll be happy to put this on the top of our list for you in the fall. Bulbs are a wonderful idea!’”

  “That’s not the way you talk,” Mara said. “You don’t sugarcoat anything.”

  “Yes, but—,” I started to say, but then I had to laugh. She was right. In fact, when I thought about it, Mara sounded a lot like me on the phone. “I guess I’ve earned the right to be blunt. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Do what I say—not what I do’?”

  “Yeah,” Mara replied.

  “Well, try it, okay?” I said. “By the way—what you said was absolutely correct, as you know. And that’s what matters most in this business. But a nicer bedside manner couldn’t hurt.”

  I was working halfway into the night most days now, making endless notes, drafting ideas. I contacted Phil Welling, a site contractor I’d used on other projects and had come to like and trust. We walked the Mackenzie property together as I told him about the plan that was beginning to take shape in my mind.

  “It’ll be a bitch to get done,” he said. “But you’re right. It’s the only way I can see you laying in gardens without eventually losing everything to soil erosion. But how are you planning to connect the different levels?”

  “Retaining walls. Stone steps with wrought-iron railings. I’m visualizing a lot of custom-made ornamentation.”

  “Even more reason to make sure you’ve built up strong, level foundations. I’m pretty sure I can make it work, but just to be safe I’d like to do some perk tests first.”

  “Phil—I’m on spec at this point. I can’t pay you.”

  “Yes, I know. But the word’s out that you’re Mackenzie’s only candidate. It’s a huge score for you, Alice. It’ll be the same for me if it happens—worth investing some money in up front.”

  It was early enough in the season for me to concentrate on the Mackenzie plans and pay Mara to pick up the slack. She contacted our regular part-timers and worked out their weekly schedules for the season. She estimated most of the special requests and sent out quotes. She was putting in a lot of overtime and bringing Danny with her on weekends. One unusually warm Saturday in early April when I had an office window cracked open, I heard their voices floating across from the greenhouse where Mara was hosing down the walls and cleaning out the seedling trays. We grew our own annuals and some of the perennials from seed that I special-ordered from heritage growers. It not only saved on cost, I found, but also cut down on disease and insect infestation.

  “Do you want to see something magic?” Mara asked her son. I didn’t hear his response, but it didn’t take much imagination to guess what it was.

  “I want you to drop this sunflower seed into that hole in the dirt. That’s right. Pat it down so it’s all safe and warm inside. Now sprinkle a little of this water on top. Not too much—that’s good. Now, do you know what’s going to happen?”

  “Magic?”

  “Yes, but it’s not going to happen overnight. In another couple of weeks that seed is going to sprout—and it’s going to start to grow just the way you are. It’s going to grow all through the summer—and by the end of August it’s going to be even taller than me.”

  “Wow.”

  “And you know the best part? It’s going to turn into this enormous sunflower that will be made out of hundreds and hundreds of seeds just like the one you planted.”

  Mara was still sullen and abrupt around me most of the time. I didn’t care. In many ways, I preferred that to someone who nattered on about things that meant nothing to me. She was taking on more and more, and handling the workload well. We were alike in many ways, I was beginning to realize. That afternoon, as I listened to Mara talk to Danny, I realized—not for the first time—how much I longed to have children around me again. I missed my family. Oh, Olivia and Franny never failed to call me once or twice a week, but they were both so caught up in their own worlds— young, newly married, commuting from the suburbs to the city and their important, demanding jobs. Sometimes I suspected that they took turns checking up on me. I knew they still worried about me. And blamed me, too. Though they’d never admit that, maybe not even to themselves.

  An hour or so later, I got up from my computer to stretch and walked across the backyard to the greenhouse, where Mara and Danny were bent over the utility sink, washing their hands. The seedling trays were full. I asked Danny to show me which of the sunflowers he’d planted. He looked at me nervously, worried perhaps that he’d done something wrong. Mara was constantly telling him to be quiet when he was around me in the office. I got the sense that I scared him to death. But he finally pointed to a chipped clay pot, set apart from the others in their plastic molded trays.

  “Do you want to take it home with you?” I asked him, picking it up.

  Danny looked from me to his mom, his gaze searching—and imploring.

  “Say thanks,” she told him with a nod.

  “Thank you,” he said gravely, taking the pot into his arms.

  “Make sure it gets plenty of water and sun, okay?” I said. “And don’t forget to give it a lot of love. That’s where the magic comes in.”

  5

  I thought about what Phil Welling had said. If I landed the Mackenzie project, it would be a “huge score” for him, too. The designs that were coming together in my imagination—and on the landscaping software program I was using—would require a number of subcontractors, including a stonemason and an ironworker. Why not share the spoils with artisans I liked and admired?

  I consulted Gwen’s cousin Nate LaSalle, a well-regarded master stonemason in the area, about the costs and feasibility of putting in the numerous walls and steps that were essential to my designs. During the last Harvest Festival at the Berkshire Botanical Garden I’d come across the unique wrought-iron work of Damon Fagels, who had a forge over in Chatham. I loved his fantastical tables and chairs with their animal feet and antlered arms, and candelabra shaped into branches and birds. He seemed excited about the prospect of creating the ha
nd railings, wall sconces, benches, and other garden ornaments my plans were calling for. Both Damon and Nate, though, were concerned about getting everything completed by the end of June.

  It was my biggest worry, too. By mid-April I had enough of my plan ready—if not finished to the last detail—to present to Mackenzie. But when I called Eleanor to arrange for a meeting, she told me he was still traveling. And not expected back for another couple of days. I was in a fix. I couldn’t start my work until Phil had built the terraces and Nate had laid in at least some of the steps. In order to get the best stock, I needed to start ordering specimen trees, shrubs, and perennials more or less immediately. And all of this was predicated on the assumption that Mackenzie would like and approve my designs. A week after I first called Eleanor, still not having heard anything from Mackenzie, I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic. What if he’d lost interest in the project? What if all my hard work was for nothing? And worse—what if I was never able to put in this garden that I’d come to love? The thought was so upsetting that I threw off the sheets, got out of bed, and went downstairs. I made myself a cup of tea in the kitchen and then wandered out to the living room and my laptop to click through my presentation one more time.

  It was good. No, it was better than good. Anyone who had a serious interest in landscape design would probably be able to spot my influences—most notably Beatrix Farrand and Gertrude Jekyll. Farrand had designed the gardens for The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in nearby Lenox, but it was Farrand’s plans for Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown that I turned to again and again when I was thinking through how best to handle Mackenzie’s sloping acres. She’d dealt with the same problem at Dumbarton Oaks, though to a lesser degree, and I studied her solution with care: leveled-off areas at different elevations that formed intimate garden rooms, each with its own unique character and focus: a fountain, a reflecting pool, a walkway covered with wisteria and climbing roses. In the end, what she’d created was an outdoor mansion—with a ceiling as high as the sky.