Coming. Going.
Back and forth.
This passing of one season to the next.
How long does it last? But she has never had time to think about it before. She has never had time to sit in a purple Adirondack chair in the shad
e of a drooping elm and notice. She doesn’t know how long this holding on and letting go lasts.
“Here we are,” Opal calls across the yard. She carries a tray. Zoe sits up. It is awkward being served, a role she is not used to. She only came to the garden to explore, a time to wind down after tennis practice and see what lay behind the city of bird feeders. She followed the short path of broken flagstone to the canopy of elms with two purple Adirondacks resting beneath them. It looked like a shady hideaway and the thought made her smile—maybe it should be called Opal’s Lorelei Hideout. Opal had come bustling through with a small basket draping her arm, and when she saw Zoe, she squealed and said, “Perfect! Perfect! Sit! I’ll be right back! Sit, now! I knew this would happen!” And she hurried to the house. The words sounded like orders, but the tone was joy.
Zoe has been waiting for twenty minutes now—maybe more—but she doesn’t mind. The yard, the hideaway, is another world. Slow, apart, an atmosphere all its own. No grass grows below the trees, only a scattering of silver-tipped leaves at her feet. Thin shafts of light break through in half a dozen places, freezing particles of dust in their beams. Gravity doesn’t exist in Opal’s Lorelei Hideout.
Now Opal comes, full-faced with a smile and wrinkles, and Zoe notices the limp, an ever-so-slight heaviness to the right leg. I should get up, she thinks, but she stays. She is like a frozen particle, caught in Opal’s beam.
“This is it,” Opal says, setting the tray on a slatted table between them. “Last of the season! No more blackberry tea till next summer. I must’ve picked the last berry just as you walked up—just enough for two glasses. Fate, I think. You believe in fate, Zoe?”
She hands Zoe a droplet-covered glass filled with ice cubes and lavender tea.
“I don’t know,” Zoe answers. She is not even sure what fate is.
Opal lifts the other glass, and Zoe thinks Opal is lifting possibility as much as tea. She has come to read eyes, too—at least Opal’s—and they say as much as her words.
Zoe takes a sip. “It’s very good,” she says, and means it. She takes another sip. It is fragrant and light and delicately sweet, nothing like the tea at Murray’s. She settles back in the Adirondack and rests the glass on the wide arm. “What’s fate to you, Opal?” she asks.
Opal leans back, too. “Oh, lots of things. Lots and lots of things all pushed up against each other that make something else happen. So much pushing it just can’t happen any other way—unless you push back to make it not.”
“Not?”
“Not happen.”
“Oh,” Zoe says, but the sense of it is floating in and out of her reach, like a season deciding to come or not come.
They sit, enjoying the quiet, the tea, the purple Adirondacks curved just right to their backs, Zoe watching Opal cock her head to the side now and again when a bird takes up a song. Zoe’s eyes travel down the arm of the chair to Opal’s short leg and thick-soled shoe. What things pushed up against each other to make that happen? She watches Opal absently rubbing her thigh.
“Your leg bother you much?” Zoe asks, and then thinks it was a rude question. Rude to notice. A short leg. She should have looked away.
But Opal rolls right over the rudeness, eager to answer. “Just these later years now and again. Never bothered me before. I think it’s arthritis settling into the break. Heard that happens.”
“You broke your leg?”
“Oh sure, that’s what made it shorter in the first place. It broke in just the right—well, just the wrong place for an eight-year-old. It still grew after that, but not near as much as the other.”
“How did it happen?”
“I didn’t move fast enough or jump high enough to please my pap. Don’t remember the why of it so much as the how. He had a temper shorter than Count Basil’s tail and broke a two-by-four across my thigh. My ma joked later that if he had hit it over my head I would have been just fine. I did have a way about me, I suppose.”
“Your mother joked about it?”
Opal snorts and waves her hand like she is swatting at a fly. “Oh, years later. By then she had killed the old man, so it seemed all right to do.”
Zoe cannot find graceful words to respond, and the ones on the edge of her lips won’t do. It is too bizarre. Not so much the killing but how Opal speaks of it. Like she is speaking of someone else. Like she is so detached she can still be happy. How can she drink tea and smile at another birdsong in the same breath as the telling of her mother killing her father?
Opal sips more tea and shakes her head. “Seems like five lifetimes ago. I hardly think of it anymore.” A faint, dreamy smile crosses her face again, and Zoe wonders how such a memory could bring a smile. Or maybe the smile is having almost forgotten? Or just that it doesn’t matter so much anymore? Could something like that ever get so distant that it doesn’t matter? Or maybe the smile is just that she survived it? Is that it? Surviving? But Opal seems like she is doing much more than surviving. She seems to squeeze the most from every moment. Zoe thinks of Opal’s squeal at finding her in the garden and then hurrying away to make the tea. Every moment is the moment for Opal. Like she can’t let a single one get past her. Or maybe all these moments push out the others. Make up for the others. Push them as distant as five lifetimes.
New moments of Opal’s own making.
Zoe picks at an orange-yellow-purple indentation, seasons and seasons’ worth of distant painted-over moments, as far away as Opal needs them to be.