the sounds of his family below, and to the coo of mourning doves under the eaves. From his mother too much talking, from his father too little, his sister recalibrating the balance between them, as if that were the purpose of her life. His memory of the old country was of darkness. Not the place itself—so full of mountain light—but something else, vague and under lit.
He’d sat in the garden too late, Franco’s taunting words circling like angry flies. He told himself, “I should shoot him with my pistola.” He finally went to bed and had a vivid dream.
In the dream he lay trapped on the bed as malignant black crows flew through the open window. They had blood-red eyes and carried Elena’s jewelry out in their beaks. Beside him a very young Elena lifted herself off the bed. She moved toward the window, her silhouette obvious through a sheer nightgown, nipples two sharp points pushing through the fabric. At her bureau she pulled out lingerie, tossed shimmering panties and dark satin bras into the opened crow beaks. Able to move again, Emil ran to the window. The garden shifted to his mother’s from the old country. Elena leaned against a wall. The crows were now clumps of black grapes hanging low above her head. Franco sat on a stone bench looking at her, his gritty laughter carrying up to Emil in the window, looking down.
Dreams disturbed him with their irrationality. Elena said they were only the unconscious puffing smoke. “Or maybe something’s hidden in there. Why not analyze the dreams?” she’d say, tapping his forehead.
But he scoffed at that idea: “What should we do, slit open an eagle’s entrails and read the blood drippings, the feathers?”
“That would be omens, I think.”
“Either way.”
Emil said that to his wife, but he did try to replay his dreams, to grasp hold of them before they dispersed like morning mists, tantalizingly, as if they wanted to be chased. But it was impossible, like holding water in a cupped hand. And if a dream troubled his sleep and he emitted soft wounded-animal sounds, Elena would tap his head, saying, “Knock, knock!” He’d mumble, half awake, “Who’s there?” “Dream a little.” “Dream a little who?” And she’d sing, “‘But in your dreams, whatever they be, dream a little dream of me.’” And he’d feel easier because of her singing.
Monday, the start of the work week, but not for an ex-cop. He’d have stayed in bed, but a morning garden was chaste; its breath sweetest, the light a gentler wash. He was no good at lounging anyway. Not like Elena who could sleep for hours on end, lie in bed like a cat. He sometimes lingered with her on weekend or holiday mornings, but a sense of expectation—or suspicion—kept him alert.
He’d forced himself up and was in the garden earlier than usual, kneeling before the tomato plants. He concentrated on tying the last of the tall stems to a notched bamboo pole. Then, as he stood, his eyes fell on the empty dirt where the peppers had grown. He hadn’t meant to look, but the dead patch was impossible to avoid now that Franco was drumming it into him. Not even weeds grew there, as if a child’s grave had planted itself on that spot. Emil shifted his weight. A cloud skittered across the sun, dimming the light. Something is wrong, he told himself. “No,” he said aloud, sloughing off a gnawing uneasiness. He no longer had to pay attention to every passing cue. But how does a guy stop being a cop?
He returned to the tomatoes, two neat rows, four tidy plants in each. Insignificant yellow flowers already hinted at the little green balls, the ripe red tomatoes to come. He touched one lightly with his long fingers; there would be a plentiful crop this year. Tomatoes were a favorite, but he preferred flowers.
Elena wanted an apple tree. It started around the time of the pepper patch, he thought. Or, no, was it before the peppers? “An apple tree,” she said, “endures.”
“You want to tempt me, is that it?” he joked. “You could hold a strip of rotten herring in my face and I’d be tempted.” She wanted the apple tree smack in the middle of the garden. It made no sense. He remembered reading somewhere that flowers captured the smile of God. He’d told Elena this, hoping to amuse her, to deflect her from the wished-for tree.
But she’d said, “Atheists are the most religious people in the world!”
Would Adam and Eve have quarreled over a tree? Wouldn’t God have made all horticultural decisions? But then what were they supposed to do all day before they fell?
There had been an orchard at Elena’s father’s summer estate in Trieste. Emil thought she was reminiscing. He treated her wish as a friendly disagreement between them. Some mythical remnant from her girlhood, he told himself. But was he wrong? Had he dismissed her unfairly? Was he a man who could figure out a killer but not his own wife?
The snake tempted Eve first; she got to Adam, who, according to Emil, ended up looking pretty much like a sap. Couldn’t the snake just as easily have lured Adam first, in a very different narrative? Looking out, he saw there was barely room for an additional tulip bulb, never mind a tree. The garden was ripe and beautiful and almost perfect, and he was aware that he alone stood between this state of grace—a garden—and the chaos of Franco.
He walked the path over to Elena’s two robust lavender bushes. Their scent called up pleasurable memories, like sniffing postcards of forgotten places. Emil reached down to rub a branch between his palms. He felt in a lighter frame of mind. The morning gloom had lifted. It hadn’t been gloomy, only a few passing clouds and his mood, but the day was now wide open and deeply blue, and he responded to it. He was about to go back inside for another stab at the newspaper, empty the dishwasher, get some sort of day going, but he stopped again by the pepper patch. The dirt sifted through his fingers like sand. Could someone have tampered with the soil? Could there be an underground influence at work, some chemical poisoning?
He laughed at himself: Detective Emil Milosec—retired first class, cited with the department’s highest honors, and here he was thinking like an old maid. “Underground influences! Come on,” he said. If anything was wrong, that patch had been deliberately sabotaged, and the logical suspect would have to be Franco. Some plot between him and Elena to drive Emil mad. “I’m letting that bastard get to me,” he said, touching his head. “The man isn’t capable of plotting more than a can of beer.”
He brought his hands close to his face again to breathe in the soothing scent of lavender. He stood for several minutes. The bitter peppers used to grow up against the fence between his and Franco’s property. Why had he so despised their very presence? Was it Franco? He was Latino; didn’t they all like spicy food?
Back in the kitchen, he made himself a second cup of espresso and forced a look at the newspaper, but it was no good. Two years since Elena’s death, and then the peppers died. Swigging down the coffee and rinsing his cup under the tap, he dried his hands and headed for the garden door.
He marched straight to the narrow tool shed in back. Bands of gray-and-brown sparrows left off their incessant pickings, swept out of his path. The door to the shed stuck before pulling open. From within came the cold breath of the dark. Reaching in, his hand brushed against strings of spider webs. As a boy spiders had horrified him. In a recurring nightmare he’d be trapped by thousands of silver webs spun across his bedroom door. Today he ignored the sticky, sickening feel of the spider webs, pulled out a shovel, and slammed the door shut.
By the time Franco called to him from the other side of the high fence, Emil had already broken a sweat shoveling nearly two feet deep. “Amigo, that is some racket so early.”
Emil kept digging.
“Listen, man, you want a break? I’ll get us coffee, Bustelo. What do you say?” Emil shoved deeper into the earth. “Hombre, maybe you need a beer
