The First Gardener (37 page)

Dimples chased her as best she could, barely missing the wall. Berlyn was sitting on the steps with a child’s head resting on her large bosom. And Sandra was in the corner holding on to her purse. Bags of dirty laundry sat across the foyer from her, and every now and then she’d pat the running child on the head as if the girl were a porcupine.

“Yes,” Eugenia responded in a rather mild tone. She walked to Mackenzie’s side. “But it’s not for you to worry about. We’ve got it under control. So just go back to your room. And, well, me and the girls and Jessica—” she grabbed Jessica’s arm and pulled her toward the stairs—“will handle it. Just trying to help some people out here.”

Jessica looked at Mackenzie, her eyes pleading, as Eugenia dragged her down the stairs. Mackenzie watched as her mother hit the foyer and went into her familiar drill sergeant routine. Much more her style.

“So,” she said, “Rosa informs me we’ve got some time before dinner. That’ll give us time to get y’all settled.”

The mother took a step toward Eugenia. “If we’re going to be staying here for a little while, ma’am . . .” She seemed to hesitate. “Would you mind if me and my girls could wash up somewhere?”

Eugenia patted the woman’s arm. “Sure, honey. We’ll get you all taken care of.” She turned to her friends. “Dimples, why don’t you and Berlyn take the kids upstairs to the guest bathroom and get them all bathed.”

The littlest guest stopped in the middle of the foyer, studying the woman handing out bathing instructions. The look on her face made it evident that she had no interest in a bath. She raised her face to her mother. “Ma, do we have to?”

The mother patted the little one and leaned down to whisper in her ear. The little redhead’s shoulders slumped, but she started toward the stairs.

“Mother, I’m going to take you to the other guest bedroom, let you have some time all to yourself,” Eugenia said. Then hollered, “Rosa!”

Rosa came out of the kitchen.

“We need it big and bold and—” she stopped and gave Rosa that look—“preferably fried. And plenty of it.”

Rosa gave her a smile and disappeared behind the swinging wooden door.

“Joseph, make sure the table is set for dinner. And show Sandra where the upstairs laundry is.” She looked at Sandra. Sandra just glared at her but bent to gingerly pick up a bag. One of the housekeepers hurried over to help her.

Eugenia wasn’t through. “Berlyn, you and Dimples need to slather, smother, and cover these children. Make sure they scrub in places they didn’t even know they had. And be sure and use bubbles—kids like bubbles. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Berlyn stood and saluted, then leaned over to the oldest girl. “She always tells us what to do. She came out of the womb bossy.”

“You got it!” Dimples tried to clap her bony legs together, which only made the extra fabric of her baggy, celery-green pants seem to billow in the wind. The tops of her white socks showed as her black orthopedic shoes clomped together. She tried a salute but missed her head by an inch.

“Jessica!”

Jessica’s head turned hard toward Eugenia.

“You go do whatever it was you were doing. I’ve got this under control.”

Mackenzie could see Jessica’s twitch from upstairs. Eugenia took the mother’s arm, and in less than a minute, the busy foyer was silent again.

And that was how quickly it could happen. Mackenzie had seen it. One minute, life filled every crevice, and the next it was snatched away. Gone in an instant. Mackenzie stared at the empty space.

But this particular life had not gone away. It was heading up the stairs toward her. Mackenzie leaned back instinctively as they all trooped by. The children eyed her curiously as Berlyn scurried them to the bathroom.

“Grace, this is my daughter, Mackenzie.” Eugenia introduced the children’s mother. “Excuse us, darling. We’ll try not to disturb you.”

“Nice to meet you, Grace.” Mackenzie dredged up a smile, as much as she had given anyone in the past six weeks. She saw Sandra at the bottom of the stairs with an arm wrapped over her mouth, tugging a bag of laundry in one hand while the housekeeper waited behind her.

The commotion down the hall couldn’t be ignored. Mackenzie followed the noise to the guest bathroom. Berlyn was leaning over the tub, testing the water, her behind high enough in the air to prop a small child on. Dimples was entertaining the children—or horrifying them—by popping her teeth out and sucking them back in.

“What’s wrong with your eye?” one of them asked.

“Not a thing,” she answered. “God gave me two eyes that could move in opposite directions so I could keep better eyes on kids like you.”

One of the older children shrugged. One took a step back toward her sister.

Dimples started tugging a sleeve of the youngest, the child’s head caught somewhere in her dingy yellow long-sleeved T-shirt. Dimples yanked while the little one hollered, “Ow! You’re going to kill me in here.”

Mackenzie reached over and took the sleeve from Dimples’s hand, pulling the shirt up gently. Red curls popped out with a bounce, and big blue eyes were wild with animation.

“Thank goodness you showed up, lady.”

Mackenzie looked at the three sisters standing in a line. Three stair steps, each with wild, curly red hair and a grimy, freckled face. And in that moment something inside her shifted, turned, dislodged. Something small but key.

She knelt by the smallest one. “Hey, what’s your name?”

Wide blue eyes turned toward her, then looked at the floor and spoke softly. “Suzy.”

“That’s a beautiful name.”

The eyes popped back up. “I got it ’cause it’s my aunt’s name.”

“Really? Well, is she as beautiful as you?”

“Yeah.” Her head bobbed up and down. “And know what?”

“What?”

“She’s got red hair too.”

Mackenzie touched a bright-red curl. “Your hair is certainly beautiful.”

The child nodded as if she knew that too. “Yeah.”

The middle sister tugged at Suzy. “Hush,” she scolded.

Mackenzie studied her face. It was way too serious for one her age. She couldn’t be more than seven or eight. “It’s okay, honey. I was just asking her questions.”

The oldest turned around then. And something else turned over in Mackenzie’s soul. For one brief moment it wasn’t about death or loss or dying, not about the past or the bleak, endless future. It was about right now, in this moment. It was about three little girls and one woman who, more than anything in the world, loved taking care of little girls.

“How about you three come with me,” she said. “I’ve got another bathroom down the hall with a big ol’ tub that I bet you all could fit in at once.”

Suzy’s smile grew. The other two looked hesitant. Mackenzie stood and leaned toward the oldest. “It’s okay. This is my house.” She smiled at them and placed her hand on the oldest’s back. “Berlyn, I’m going to take them with me for a minute. I think they might like my bathroom more than this one.”

Berlyn raised a bubble-covered hand. “That’ll work. Me and Dimples here can go help Rosa with dinner.”

Dimples’s tongue ran across her lips at the mere mention of food. Mackenzie had no doubt they would enjoy those activities far more than the ones they had been ordered to handle. Whether Rosa enjoyed their help was a different matter. She steered the three girls out of the bathroom and down the hall.

“I ain’t never seen a house this huge before,” Suzy said.

“Don’t say
ain’t
,” the oldest sister scolded.

“What’s your name?” Mackenzie asked her.

“I’m Lily, and this here is Toby.” The mama of the bunch pointed to the middle sister.

“Our daddy wanted a boy,” Suzy announced.

Toby punched her. “I told you not to tell everyone that.”

Suzy rubbed her arm and furrowed her brow. “Still true.”

Mackenzie felt a bubble of laughter somewhere inside. It never escaped, but it existed. And it struck her as both foreign and beautiful. She took them into her bedroom, which they beheld with the wonder of children on Main Street at Walt Disney World.

Suzy ran straight for the window and looked out over the backyard. “Is that a pool?”

Mackenzie walked behind her. “It is.”

“You swim in it, lady?”

“You should ask her name,” Lily said.

Suzy shrugged. “What’s your name, lady?”

Mackenzie laid a hand on Suzy’s soft curls. “My name is Mackenzie.”

“You swim in it, Mackenzie?”

Lily joined them. “
Miz
Mackenzie.”

Suzy huffed. “Gee whiz.” She rolled her eyes before she was willing to obey. “You swim in it,
Miz
Mackenzie?” She emphasized it clearly for her sister’s sake.

Mackenzie felt the revelation rise hard in her throat. Suzy was like her Maddie. She was a little full of herself. She said whatever passed through her mind. And she was captivating. The girl couldn’t be any more than five herself. Looking at her was like staring at a strawberry version of Maddie’s chocolate. And Maddie had always wanted to swim in the reflecting pool too—they’d had to watch her like hawks when they first moved in.

Tears came to Mackenzie’s eyes before she could stop them. They clustered on her eyelashes and blurred her vision. The pool turned into a backyard of blue. “No, honey, we don’t really swim in that pool.”

Suzy looked at her and crinkled her nose. “You mean you got a pool out there like that and you ain’t swim in—” she looked at her sisters—“I mean, you don’t swim in it? That’s crazy.”

Mackenzie looked out the window. She blinked at the tears, and the beauty of what rested below suddenly seemed to pop out at her. The colors were greener, brighter, the water in the pool bluer. The clouds gleamed an impossible gold in the setting sun. “Yeah, kind of crazy, isn’t it, Suzy?” She continued to stare out for a moment until she felt Suzy fidget beside her. She looked down.

The child’s hand was between her legs. “I gotta go pee.”

“Oh yeah, sure. Let’s go.” Mackenzie led them into the bathroom and let Suzy take care of her business while she filled the bath to the brim with warm water full of bubbles. Just like Maddie always liked it.

While the three girls climbed in, Mackenzie went to the linen closet and opened it. A bottle of baby shampoo was still inside. She pulled it out and steadied herself as she walked toward the tub again. Reminders were everywhere.

She soaked the girls’ heads and began to scrub them with shampoo. As she scrubbed, it seemed that the adult weight that had been on the older two’s shoulders washed away with all the dirt that had been on their little bodies.

She got out some of Maddie’s bath toys from the cabinet too and sat on the floor as the girls talked and played and laughed and blew bubbles. At one point she turned on the whirlpool jets. Each of them was startled for a moment, until the whirling water began to make more bubbles fly to the surface. Then their amazement turned to delight.

“Miz Mackenzie, you got any babies?” Suzy asked through the bubble mustache she had made for herself.

Mackenzie’s stomach clenched, but she knew the question came from an innocent place. “No, sweetie, I don’t.”

“Don’t want any?”

She froze. She couldn’t talk about this. She had holed it up inside her, in the place where dead things dwelled. But blue eyes were looking at her. “Well, I had one,” she finally said. “A little girl, actually.”

The older two stopped playing. Suzy grabbed a handful of bubbles and blew them. The bubbles flew right to Mackenzie’s feet. “Where did you put her?”

“Well, God took her, I guess.” She hadn’t mentioned God’s name in many weeks.

“Suzy, don’t ask no more questions.” Lily’s maturity was quickly returning.

But Toby obviously thought the reprimand was for Suzy alone. She put her hands on the side of the tub. “Did she die?”

Suzy stopped all movement when Toby spoke. She came to the edge of the tub and put her hands over the side as well.

How did you ignore children? How did you explain to them that some questions in life were too personal, some pain too private? Granted, Mackenzie had invited them into her bathroom, but she hadn’t invited them into the private places of her heart.

She answered anyway. “Yes.”

Suzy’s eyes were big and wide. Mackenzie felt her heart snap. She let the words come out as they willed. “My little girl, Maddie, was about your age,” she said, nodding at Suzy. “And she was beautiful, just like you.” She rubbed the girl’s arm. And the next words that left her mouth were ones she had never before spoken, at least this way. “She was killed in a car accident.”

All three girls stared at her, their faces solemn, their blue eyes large and now old. “You miss her?” Suzy finally asked.

Mackenzie bit the inside of her lip to stop the tears. “Every day.”

Lily seemed to study her for a moment, then lowered her head and spoke softly. “I miss our dad.”

The other two heads snapped toward her, and pain registered immediately on their faces.

“Oh, honey, did your father die?” Mackenzie asked.

“No, ma’am. He’s in jail.”

“Shot a man and killed him.” Suzy said it so matter-of-factly, it was clear she really didn’t understand what it all meant.

“He had just gotten released from jail too,” Lily added. “Said he was going to help Mama take care of us the right way. But he couldn’t find a job. Looked and looked for a real long time. Then one night he got in a fight with Mama, beat her up real bad, and then went and robbed a gas station. He killed the man that was working there. So they put him back in jail.”

Instantly Mackenzie remembered. The prisoner release. It had been all over the papers for quite a while, and there was even a lawsuit, but she didn’t know what, if anything, had happened with it. And the children affected by this nightmare were soaking in her tub.

Mackenzie saw tears well up in Lily’s eyes. She watched her desperately try to fight them, but she couldn’t. Mackenzie reached through the bubbles and wrapped her arms around Lily. Toby hugged her sister too, and Suzy waded through the tub to get near them.

Lily spoke through her tears. “Daddy did all that and never got any money. And once Mama got out of the hospital, she lost her job too. Then we couldn’t pay our rent anymore or anything, so she had to bring us to the shelter so we could get food and someplace to sleep.”