Raymond Stanford suppressed a gag. He hated the smell of dried milk. It was unfresh—like too many people on the subway. And just as difficult to escape. It fused itself insidiously to his skin and shirt cuffs and clumped in his sinuses. Disgusted, he lifted his wrists from the light brown puddle on his desk, watched the hot liquid sheeting off his watch face, and gagged. Full-throatedly this time.
It was in this minute—3:44 p.m., Tuesday—that the mess began to come into its own.
Thank God I'm leaving early today, Raymond thought. I can't deal with this smell for the rest of the afternoon. He couldn't for the life of him remember why he was cutting out, though. He had a nagging feeling it was something unpleasant. Wasn't it always. It couldn't be working outside, because that actually would be enjoyable. Raymond gathered his things and departed, giving his assistant Susan an unrequited curt nod on his way out.
When he got home, Raymond kissed his wife, Laura, as he came in through the front door.
"Hey baby," he said to her. "What's up?"
"Nothing. Just getting dinner going."
He launched into a breezy how-was-my-day rundown while Laura stood dutifully, if compulsorily, and listened, nodding and offering little comments as appropriate.
"What's for dinner?" he asked when he was finished. He kicked off his shoes, bouncing them expertly against the alcove wall so they landed neatly in the corner.
"Paella."
"Oh, right!" he said, smacking his forehead. "I must have forgotten. Wednesday special," he said with a grin. "Every Wednesday!"
Paella's a great dish, Raymond thought as he hung up his jacket. You had your rice, your fish, your shrimp, your whatever else. Nothing wrong with any of that. And Laura made a great paella. It was one of the few things she still cooked regularly from scratch, even though it was summer and she didn't have to see another day of work at the school office until September. But hey, what the hell do I know, thought Raymond. I'm just a high-level business executive.
"El especial de Miercoles!" said Laura, resurfacing through his thought balloons.
Raymond looked at her, paused, and then let out a chuckle.
"Yep!" he said, and began to work on his tie. "I tell you, though, I am ready to take a load off."
"But," she said, as Raymond's shoulders fell, "today we're going over to Dave and Ashley's house for Caitlin's second birthday party. Remember?"
"Crap!"
"What do you mean, crap?"
"Nothing, I just forgot about it. I guess I was hoping to relax."
"Oh," she said. "Well, we have to go. You don't have to stay long if you don't feel like you need to."
"It's not like that. I'll go."
"Well, I still have to finish the paella, so you have a little while."
After six years, you'd think you would've bought a new cookbook, Raymond wanted to say. Every Wednesday it was paella. Having people over? Paella. Special occasion of any kind? Paella. Feeling a little backed up? A spoonful of paella. Car won't start? Here—try some paella. Apparently it was a versatile dish.
"I'm going out back, honey," he said.
"Okay."
Raymond walked through the townhouse to the sliding glass door at the back. He went out onto the little screened-in patio, where he took a long, cleansing breath to smooth out the wrinkles in his lungs. Then he rose up in a long, dizzying full-body stretch. His head swam loopily for a moment, and a reflexive grin formed on his face as he savored this moment, on the edge of inevitable contentment.
Here he was.
At about 30 feet across and 15 feet deep, the Stanford backyard was a rather large patch by townhouse standards. It was a patch they paid extra for, at Raymond's insistence, when they bought the place. It began with a thick shag of dark Palmetto grass that blanketed the ground all the way from one side of the Redwood fence to the other. Raymond kept the grass meticulously trim despite its propensity for robust growth, prompting Laura to claim once, only half-jokingly, that Raymond could have tended golf courses. To further that correlation, Azalea bushes stippled with pink and white blossoms watched over the yard like plump, happy little nursemaids. They watched over delicate Ostrich and Leather Wood ferns that seemed to drip with tropical moisture, and the wildflowers Raymond himself had illegally picked in the woods and transplanted here—violets and partridge peas, bloodroot and blue-eyed grass—to splash the garden with natural color.
But the centerpiece of Raymond's place was the pond. The graceful, shimmering hourglass pond just a shade downstage of center garden. Eight feet long and three-and-a-half feet across at its wide points, ringed with authentic river-bottom flagstones and holding two feet of crystal clear water that rippled ever so gently from a small bubbly fountain in the middle. Broad-leaved manna grass and flowering rushes huddled at the pond's edges. And hardy pink water lilies, just beginning to fold for the evening, languished on the surface.
Under the shade of the waxy green lily pads, it was easy to see the final vibrant jewels in the crown of the water garden: six plump, darting Koi, big as trout and bright as tigers. Raymond doted on the fish and they were his pets. They were the denizens of the water garden, to Raymond's benevolent King. He liked to hand feed them because they came over to him and he could see them all. One by one they came up and crowded around him, making tiny blips on the surface to greet him.
"Hi fellas, ladies!" Raymond whispered. "How you guys doing? Huh? How's it going in there?" He chuckled and tossed in some food pellets.
It was impossible, for Raymond anyway, to see the garden and not see how many hours became mornings became days as the work was done to prepare it. It was with almost as much relish as he enjoyed the finished garden that he enjoyed the months he spent in toil, tilling the ground 18 inches down, churning it up, then removing the pebbles and stray roots. Eating six bananas a day so he could use the peels as compost. Testing the soil for just the right nutrient balance, then adding cottonseed meal for good measure. Helping the workers, against their wishes, to dig the Koi pond. A ton of work to be sure. But it was good. Man, was it ever good. Maybe the best thing Raymond had ever done.
Whenever he looked to the past, Raymond remembered and appreciated his father for both introducing him to horticulture and encouraging him to minor in the art in college, even though Raymond initially wanted it as a major. There was no future, no life, in horticulture, Dad told him. Dad had always been a kind of realist. And that logic had paved the way for his road to executivehood. But sometimes, for a second, when he was alone with the water garden, he wondered.
After the Koi were fed, Raymond unfurled the hose. Treading lightly on the grass, he pulled the nozzle to the middle of the garden and screwed it into an oscillating sprinkler head, then went back and turned the blue spigot handle and watched the water shoot up from the sprinkler's metal crossbar. Then he got his shears and took a slow, indulgent lap around the garden, taking visual stock of every element.
"Hey there." He touched a grayish azalea blossom delicately with his thumb. "Lace bugs," he declared, rubbing his chin. He made a mental note—get some insecticide, maybe some malathion. I'll take care of this, he promised the azaleas.
After the lap he eased into a green canvas lawn chair, closed his eyes, leaned back against the house, and let his mind dissolve down and away, into the ground and the fountain bubbles and the sweetness of the air. He laced his fingers over his belly and grew quiet until Laura's voice reminded him that, this Wednesday, they would have paella night out.
It was like waiting for the alarm to go off.
Raymond didn't know that much about the Wests. He knew they lived three townhouses down. He knew Ashley was Dave's second wife, and he had a kid, Nick, from the first one, in addition to baby Caitlin. Dave was in some aspect of finance and didn't seem to be around much. Ashley was younger, probably not too long out of college. She was from the West, Raymond seemed to recall, just like her married name. She was quite a looker. Very attractive. They seemed like decent enough folks on the whole, Raymond thought, although Nick didn't reflect so well on them, frankly. He was the headstrong teenager riding high on the driver license and gangster movies and that horrible music on the radio. Nick was the type to stare you down as he drove past in his black Jeep, forcing you to break your gaze with him. He had a bumper sticker that read "American Bad Ass" over a rippling Old Glory. He was getting excited about leaving home soon, as Laura told it, to some party school down South whose name Raymond couldn't remember. When Raymond saw Nick's Jeep rolling up the street, he made a point to occupy himself with some matter away from the road. And he hated that.
"Raymond, are you listening?" Laura elbowed his ribs.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Boy, you really are out of it today, aren't you?"
"Yeah. I'm just not in the mood for this, but that's fine."
"Well, just don't make it obvious." Her voice lowered. "Just be nice and you can leave in a little while, okay?"
A pink-ballooned sign on the Wests' mailbox directed guests around back. So the Stanfords went around back, where long, gray-legged church-social tables draped with white and pink tablecloths sat on slightly weedy grass in the fenceless backyard. Pitiful, Raymond thought.
Laura, who knew the Wests fairly well, immediately began to slalom through the tables and couples toward where Ashley, looking composed and beautiful, and the baby, looking confused and slightly dyspeptic, held court with a large group of people who seemed far too old to be the baby's friends, while a few of Caitlin's contemporaries desultorily orbited the group's edges like little grass-eating moons. Raymond tried to follow his wife into the human thicket, but she was soon gone, establishing her paella bowl beside a plate of pink cupcakes and beaming a toothy hello to mommy and baby. She doesn't do it on purpose, Raymond told himself. She's just excited to be here, at this stupid lame neighbor party.
Resigning himself to flying solo for the remainder of the evening at a party where he should know everybody but didn't, Raymond slowly walked to the end of the nearest table, away from the high-pitched party chatter, to where an open blue cooler held beer on ice. He pulled out a brown bottle and began to slowly wander the yard, as if contemplating the particulars of the weather and the party. He ticked off the many ways in which the water garden was superior to the Wests' jalopy of a backyard. Soon, he decided, he would have to work up the nerve to let people come in there.
Presently, Dave West emerged from the house, loaded down with a monstrous platter of steak and chicken parts. Dave unleashed an aimless overhead wave and handed out short greetings to the nearest guests, then turned his back to the crowd to fiddle with the grill. Raymond, now sauntering toward Dave almost involuntarily, found it odd that Dave hadn't said hello to Nick, Ashley, or the birthday girl. But like Laura, Ashley didn't seem to miss her husband a bit. Nick was by her side with his arm around her. They seemed quite close, as a line of people came up to pay their respects. Nick wore a crooked half-grin that told everyone how lucky they all were that he was not only in their midst, but actually in a good mood. Couple after couple strained to win Nick and Ashley's favor or attention, make them allies. Raymond noticed Nick regularly whispered things into Ashley's ear, and she would throw her head back and laugh or whisper back through cupped hands. Good for them, Raymond thought with self-surprising sincerity.
Raymond came up behind Dave, who had his shoulders bunched up, as if trying to block out the party noise.
"Dave." The man turned around. He was one of those graying lion types.
"Oh, hi, there," he said as if Raymond was selling scout cookies.
"Raymond Stanford, three houses down."
"Right, right, good to see you, Raymond, how you doing."
"Fine—looks like you're about to cook up some nice vittles, as they say."
"Sure am. Everyone loves a good steak."
"I'm sure the birthday girl is thrilled about it."
Dave's face darkened in a practiced way, like a warning sign that everyone around him was conditioned to heed.
"I'm just joshing you, Dave, it was a joke."
"I know, I know." Dave somehow managed an angry wink before turning back toward the grill. "I'll let everyone know when they're ready. There's plenty for everyone."
"Sounds great, Dave."
Sheesh, Raymond thought. Nice mood, buddy.
Raymond ambled away with as much nonchalance as he could muster. After some minutes and a few basic greetings as he wended back through the crowd, he planted himself at the farthest seat on the farthest table from the action.
Raymond sat and reasoned about being bored. It was almost a privilege for people to act bored at company functions, because it meant they were important enough to get away with it. And at corporate functions for the Mid-Atlantic branch of his company, Raymond had that kind of cache. But not here. The writing was on the wall. But either way, acting bored just wasn't an option. Be a kiss-ass, act all happy, or get lost.
Raymond soon found himself feeling harried by total stagnation and the nagging discomfort of social failure. He waited a long minute to catch Laura's eye, and when he finally did, he stood up and deliberately faced the street. She held his gaze for a second, lowered her head minutely, and turned away. Raymond left the party feeling foul, but realizing a consolation prize. No paella this week.
Upon his return to the house, Raymond fixed some tuna salad and took it out into the water garden. Once outside, the party began to wash easily away, collecting downstream in some distant mudpile as Raymond once again forgot himself in his beautiful panacea, the garden under the setting sun. He flicked bread crumbs to his Koi, making good-natured plays on the water for his attention.
After eating, he slowly went back inside for his daily constitutional. He went to the upstairs bathroom so he could watch the night come down over the water garden through its small open window. He sat, elbows on knees, running his feet through the shaggy pink bathmat. Eventually, he heard Laura come in through the front door. Raymond didn't think much of the splashing sound outside until it had gone on for nearly two minutes. Too irregular to be the fountain, Raymond thought. And the fence was locked tight. He finished, got up and looked out over the water garden. He heard and saw nothing, but it was getting pretty dark.
Forget it, he thought. Probably just a bird or something. He thought about what he must have just looked like, and laughed a little bit at the thought. He imagined what Laura would have said to him had she witnessed it. "You can't even take a dump without getting all OCD about that garden," she would say. That's what she always said to him—that he was all OCD about the water garden. Or about work, sometimes, if it was busy season.
"Nice exit there," Laura teased him from the couch upon his emergence. She had turned on the TV. "Luckily no one noticed you left."
"Yeah, whatever." He said teasingly, with a slight smile. Raymond passed the couch and went to the fridge, where they kept the wine. He poured himself a glass and stood with it in the kitchen, leaning one hand on the counter.
"Hey, don't hog the vino, honey!" Laura called from the couch.
"Okay, I'll pour you some in a minute. How was the rest of the party?"
The television stayed on, and Raymond and Laura watched their regular Wednesday programs. They commented on the characters and the actors and the actors' bodies and the actors' sex lives. Raymond and Laura cuddled and then wrestled playfully for a little while on the couch, but that night it took no romantic turns.
As he crawled into bed that night, he knew instantly he would have trouble sleeping. He lied with Laura until he could feel her breathing regularly, then he went downstairs and drank another glass of wine in front of the television before finally nodding off on the couch a couple of hours later.
Raymond started awake in the earliest part of the morning. He had had a bad dream, a terrible dream. Its physical remnants lingered, clinging to his chest and gut and hindering his breathing. His eyes were out of focus and he felt very distant from the room.
After a few moments, he regained his head and the gasps steadied out. He let himself calm completely before slowly sitting up, which took the edge off the tightness in his torso. The electric green numbers on the DVD player clock read 5:37. He heard the sounds of rain outside.
Raymond got up and tramped over to the bathroom. As he looked out the small window there he saw a clear day dawning—no rain or clouds at all.
He looked over into the water garden, and suddenly his sleep fell away. A pressure blasted up his spine. Adrenaline began to pour anew over his ribcage and flood his organs and constrict his lungs. His knees began to shake just a little. His brain screamed to the water garden, Oh my God! What happened?!?!
The fountain was on, and several flagstones had been scattered about the yard. Patches of grass were flattened and destroyed, wildflowers trampled and ripped up. A large chunk of one of the azalea bushes near the fence was cloven off. And although it was still dim, he could clearly see lily pads capsized in the water, and slick, lumpy stains in the grass where, unmistakably, a golden Koi lay crushed.
Many permutations of culprit ran through Raymond's head as he bolted for the back door. Dogs? Kids? Burglars? Deer? He had heard of several deer sightings recently in the community. Something would be held responsible. Once he was outside he turned the fountain off and stood, shaking in anger and the morning chill, surveying the damage. He went to the Koi, flattened and smeared apart on the ground, and knelt down in front of it, acquiescing to grief. After a time he stood up and walked around the garden, gently probing the damage, before falling back into the lawn chair.
Maybe I left the fountain on, he thought. Does that attract animals? He didn't remember ever reading about that one way or another. He sat for several minutes, stewing and turning it over in his mind as the sun came up to cast more light on the blighted garden. Eventually, he got up from the chair and stalked back inside. He had to start thinking about work.
In hopes that re-connecting with his normal ritual would calm him down a little, he turned on the TV news and started the coffee pot. He sat in a dining room chair and mashed some dry toast against the roof of his mouth. He glared out at the damage to his water garden, his mind a tangle of black shapes with rough, blurry edges.
As he sat, he weighed being out sick—proposals delayed, deadlines looming, face time lost. His stomach grew tight. But then when he looked at the water garden, it contracted like a foil ball. At 6:18, he went to the kitchen counter, picked up the phone, and called in sick.
After hanging up the phone he wrote Laura a note explaining that he didn't feel well, and lay down to feign sleep on the couch until she left for her morning errands, so she wouldn't harangue him about skipping work. As he heard her walking around preparing to leave, she gave no signs she didn't believe his story, or that she noticed the damage to the water garden. As he fake slept, however, he fell back into a real sleep—this one jangled and sweaty. His dreams again were nightmares.
When Raymond woke up for the second time, he roused almost instantly. He quickly dressed in shorts and a white T-shirt and headed to the garage for his rake, his hose, a bag of topsoil and his heavy-duty pruning clippers. The rake was getting old and was missing some teeth and the topsoil was a little dry, but the shears at least were shiny and new and wicked sharp. Their power emboldened him. He whacked at the air, and felt a little brighter. He marched out of the garage, instruments in hand, to the aid of his ailing water garden.
This weekend, I'll go to the hardware store, Raymond resolved. I'll fix the fence—electrify the damn thing. Even if I have to rig it myself with a car battery. Perhaps this is a good thing after all. You can never be too vigilant.
As he reached the patio, he was greeted by the sound of splashing water. The fountain had been turned back on.
He threw open the patio door. It rumbled down and crashed loudly when it hit the end of the track.
BOOOOM.
When he got out onto the porch, his hands slackened and the tools fell to the floor. Later on, when he tried to recall the moment for questioners, he never fully could. A nauseating static always washed up into his ears like bile. In the Palmetto shag, Ashley West and her stepson, Nick, lay tangled together, motionless now, in the grass. The clattering tools had alerted them to the presence of the garden keeper. And now, frantic and bleary, they began to disengage limb by limb. Ashley's wrist flapped up and down as she snatched for her clothing. Nick wiggled into his shorts and stood up. He extended an arm, palm facing out, toward Raymond.
"Hey, man," Nick mumbled druggily. "Thizis not what it looks like."
Raymond passed slowly through the screen door and out into the garden. As he approached, Ashley's widening blue eyes locked onto the fence as if trying to will her over it. Raymond stared at her, wondered, and stared. For one moment Ashley unintentionally caught his gaze.
"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God," she softly chanted.
"Iz not what you think, Mr. Stanford," Nick was saying. "We're a family, man! We weren't doin' nothin. We ain't crazy. So don't be sayin nothin', all right? Don't be sayin' nothing, and I won't be doin' nothin."
Raymond heard what Nick said and, strangely, his mind went to the grammatical errors, which only stirred the brew. His eyes scanned the ruined garden from one side to the next. They pinned down the two perpetrators like prison breakers caught at the wall. He could feel every inch, every ounce, of their transgression, their lack of regard or even understanding for him and for his place. He could smell their sweaty, hateful bodies. He could quantify the damage to the water garden, but not that of the violation. He perceived their sexual fluids pooling deep in his topsoil and corroding it like salt. His brain ground against itself.
A huge, acidic wave dashed against his foundations. He let it subside and crust over. Then, it bubbled up into a channeled, easy rage.
"There is trouble," Raymond said loudly, interrupting Nick's sloppily ongoing explanations. "There is trouble here! This is a problem!" His voice began to choke. "Look what you've done to my water garden!"
He looked at Ashley, swaying back and forth against the fence, and suddenly felt some thoughts in his head fall into line, like the tumblers in a lock.
"Nice birthday party for your baby daughter," Raymond said to Ashley.
"Oh my God, oh shit," she said.
"How long has this been going on?" he asked her.
"Hey, fuck you, man!" Nick shouted, puffing up. "Fuck you, you old bitch!"
"NO!" Raymond shot back. "Fuck you, you little disease! You're a disease in this neighborhood, you and everyone like you is a disease on the world. And you've infected my water garden! And you killed my Koi!"
"You what?"
"My Koi! My Koi, you stupid shit! My fish!"
"Hey, man, I don't care about your dumb-ass fish!"
Raymond's left hand streaked across his eyes and cuffed the boy across the face, almost before Raymond knew it was happening. And in that moment, the sun passed behind a cloud. None of them would ever forget that. All the little black shadows went away under a big grey one. Ashley gasped, clambered up and to the gate, threw it open and darted half-naked into the subdivision.
Nick took one backward step toward her but did not follow. He had a hand on his face. Raymond looked him up and down, then swung again and connected with his right. Nick's eyes took on a frenzied look. Raymond wondered what he himself looked like.
Nick swung at Raymond and caught him on the chin. Raymond, obeying pure spinal impulse, grabbed the punching arm before Nick could draw it back and used it to wrench Nick to the grass. Raymond sat down on Nick's chest, and pummeled him.
He thought of them poisoning his garden, violating it, violating him, and he kept hitting harder. As he hit he felt his insides closing up, like water lilies, only the leaves were very hard, and as they closed they forced out the delicate parts. A single tongue of red sponginess, spilling up and over and down the sides of the hard leaves and into the ground. The softest, most fertile parts of the gut, the best eating. Human topsoil, foaming up and over the folding leaves and out of him. Human topsoil. He felt it all being squeezed out of him as he punched Nick repeatedly in the face, making him bleed his regular red, human blood from all the openings in his loathsome destructive home-wrecking, life-wrecking face.
As his fists flew, he shouted. He grabbed the crisp, coiffed hair on the top of Nick's head and used it as leverage to pull Nick's head more effectively into his fist. Over the moments, the punching sounds grew progressively looser and wetter, like a hardboiled egg being tapped open on a counter top. He could hear the crunching sound when the nose went, and was sure he saw a little piece of bone fly out and bounce off the flagstones. The numerous, pressurized blood vessels of the face—so much like the delicate and complex root systems Nick had ravaged so thoughtlessly—began to rupture and pour into the tissues, or through the broken places in Nick's skin.
And Raymond continued to shout. But he couldn't hear what he was shouting. Let your fist go through him, he told himself—don't pull it back on impact. That's it. Remember all those times you turned away from the street when Nick drove past. Remember all those times out here in the water garden, this great garden, what did they do to me, can't just re-sod it, it's like that juice we left in the carpet growing mold and smell and infection, this ground you worked alone, for yourself, to get yourself right, all those happy times, like color, like the Koi that you killed, it was mine, this place was mine and you raped it.
Finally Nick combined his arm, torso, and upper leg muscles to dislodge Raymond from his chest. Then he squirmed away to safety, gurgling and listing on hands and knees through the gate, trailing threads of bloody mucous in the grass and crushed flowers behind him.
Raymond opened his mouth, then closed it again. He took a step toward the patio but toppled over into the grass. The red-black energy of the rage began to flush out of him, and his eyes went out of focus. He trembled in the bloody garden, listening to the fountain's soft music, which seemed to come from outer space. The sun had come back out. There was no other sound and his eyes were closed.
His eyes didn't open when he first heard the ambulance sirens—out away, in the distance. But they didn't concern him now. Maybe they never would. As Raymond's logic returned, that's what he began to hope. Incest Nick and his step-mother had less reason to squeal than he did. The ambulance sirens grew louder.
How long have I been lying here? he wondered. Unsure what to do, he opted to stay put. He would stay in this part of himself, the water garden, as its magic leaked away as if through a puncture in some sacred membrane. His soft insides seemed to have flown away on the breeze, flown out of him and gone who knows where and left him hollowed and massless. At least I made them pay, he thought. They won't violate a person like that again. But what—what the hell did I do?
What if they do call the cops? He wondered. I'm done for.
Apprehension and sickness began to root in his chest and flower sickeningly out into all the new hollow places that hung open limply in his insides. He opened his eyes, and started when a woman appeared, standing just inside the open garden gate. She wore a dark green full-length dress and had dark brown hair. Her face held a look of curiosity, and maybe empathy, but little if any fear. She seemed to shimmer slightly in his vision, as if through a sprinkler. But as he focused on her, his eyes cleared, more than they had in a long time, and everything but this shimmering woman was stark and bright.
"We'd all be pariahs if this stuff came out. They'll never say anything. Right?"
The woman gave a small, graceful shrug.
He raised himself up on his elbows and looked thickly down at his shirt. The blood on the front had mixed with sweat and turned pink. He looked back at the woman.
"The water garden should have been here forever and they took it. Those two worthless people. Not half the person I am, and they'll be higher up than me someday! Why? Because they're assholes."
She nodded.
"The one thing—the main thing—about this was that the more I worked on it, the more I loved it, the better it got. Simple as that. I got out exactly what I put in. All the mistakes could be corrected. It was the fairest relationship I've ever had in my life."
The woman leaned her head against a bloody fence post.
"When did all these worthless people become so powerful?"
The woman smiled a little bit. "I know what you mean, Raymond."
He looked around at the garden, damaged and corroded beyond repair, and a cleansing thought occurred to him. But his throat tightened and his eyes welled at the thought of it.
"Maybe I'll go away for a few days. A long weekend, maybe. Can you tell my wife something for me?"
"Of course," she said warmly, nodding.
"Tell her," Raymond's voice hitched. "Tell her to let the water garden die."
Raymond didn't talk again until the woman nodded again.
"It's like when someone breaks their leg but it heals badly. It's better just to bite the bullet and rebreak the thing, and reheal it. Hey—maybe this whole thing is a chance. There's really nothing—now—that I couldn't break with to reheal it."
Her nodding momentum ceased.
"Oh, and one more thing. Tell my wife I love her, too."
"Okay," the woman said. "I will, Raymond."
"Tell her no watering, no feeding, no nothing."
"Okay," she looked at him sadly.
"And, oh, I almost forgot. Tell her—yeah. Tell her I love her."
The woman's eyes seemed to be misting. But Raymond felt better. No matter the resulting breaks, he would work to heal correctly this time. He left the shimmering woman and gently closed his eyes, trying to locate the sirens again with his ears, letting his head loll back onto the grassy, darkening ground.