We walked into the house and by the nursery door, where she just leaned against the frame and looked inside. She stood there a long time, then wandered through the rest of the house, saw my drum on the mantel, read some of the letters from my students. Then she walked to the barn, sat down in the middle of Pinky's stall, and laughed for an hour while Pinky and twelve little pigs all vied for a scratch between the ears. It was glorious, smelly fun.
It didn't take me long to figure out that we were two people on two totally different schedules. She was used to sleeping twenty-four hours a day, and I had grown used to sleeping only three to four hours a night. I also found that she wanted to be near me, my hand on hers, hers on mine, asleep on my chest, whatever-she didn't let me out of her sight. And that was just fine with me.
MAGGIE HAD CREATED QUITE A STIR IN THE MEDIA WORLD. I held the reporters at bay, but sometime in the first week of February they found us. Tucked away in our seclusion and protective bubble, the media attention became pretty intense. Everybody wanted Maggie's story. Finally I called in Mr. Clean, aka Amos, and we brought all the reporters onto the back porch and gave a group interview that lasted about three hours.
Blue lay instinctively at Maggie's feet and bared his teeth while Amos controlled the crowd and questions. When Maggie got tired, I gave him the nod, and he started ushering people and cameras off the porch. Given the size of Amos's biceps and the way his shirt looked shrink-wrapped around his torso, nobody argued. That night we watched ourselves on the six o'clock news, and that weekend we watched an hour-long special in Amos's den along with Amanda-his wife-and Li'l Dylan, who had taken a liking to sitting in my lap.
The next morning, I left Maggie sleeping and drove up the road to the long-since-closed drive-in movie theater that was now home to our reclusive, multimillionaire neighbor, Bryce. I hadn't seen him for about a month, but that wasn't unusual. Bryce didn't keep time like everybody else.
Finding no sign of him, I picked up a paper in Walterboro, filled up the tank, and drove home. When I saw our picture on the front page of the lifestyle section, I shoved the paper below the seat and figured we'd had about enough of our own story. Maybe Maggie could use a few days at the ocean.
We drove to Charleston, where I rented a house on the water for a week. When the owner saw Maggie, his bottom jaw dropped. In a European accent I couldn't place, he said, "Momma, come quick."
An older, baggy woman came to the door, wrapped in a shawl and loose-fitting slippers. Her eyes grew wide, and she said, "Oh my, it's ... Miracle Maggie."
That was the first time we'd heard anyone call her that.
The people were so blown away by Maggie's story that they gave us the top-floor suite for free. Every morning when we woke, the owner would cook us eggs, toast, jam, and strong coffee. We stretched a week into a month, and between midnight walks on the beach and that woman's cooking, Maggie found her sea legs. By the time we left, her cane was collecting dust in the corner.
Our second week there, we went to a famous seafood restaurant not too far from the water. For decades all kinds of famous people had frequented the place, and when they did, the owner nailed a bronze tag at the seat to let later patrons know who had sat there before them. He put me in Pat Conroy's seat.
Just before we left, the owner approached us, held up a shiny bronze tag, and asked, "Do you mind?"
I smiled and shook my head, and we watched as he nailed MAGGIE STYLES into place. Eyeing his handiwork, he brushed it off, turned, and said, "Please come back."
We walked home through the historic district, returning to our room about midnight. Maggie propped one foot up on the sink and began painting her toenails.
I picked up a magazine. "You know, I'm pretty good at that."
She eyed her pinky toe. "Uh-huh."
I stepped out onto the balcony, reading by flashlight when something metal clamored into the sink, followed by a single scream. I poked my head in and found her leaning in close to the mirror, studying the top of her head. She frowned and dug through her hair with the tips of her fingers like a mother monkey with her young. Then she stopped dead, pulled apart her hair like a curtain, and looked at me. "Is that what I think it is?"
"What?"
She rolled her eyes upward. "That!"
I stepped toward the sink and looked at Maggie's hair under the light. "Ahhh . . . " I fingered out the single gray hair and plucked it.
"Ouch!" she said, eyes narrowing. I held up the hair and was about to say something cute, but she held up a finger and said, "Not one word, Dylan Styles."
Yes, ma'am.
For two more weeks, we strolled the streets, rode in horse drawn carriages, and somewhere in there began swaying to the same rhythm. Somewhere in there, we started walking in sync.
WHEN WE GOT HOME FROM THE OCEAN IN THE FIRST WEEK of March, we walked down to our son's grave site, and there we heard the pipes. Bryce appeared, decked out in full military regalia, and stood blowing till his face looked like a spark plug. Maggie walked over and kissed him on the cheek, and with tear stained freckles, he faded away down the riverside.
We walked back to the house, and parked in the drive sat a brand-new red Massey Ferguson tractor. We walked around it like it was a snake, then decided it wouldn't bite us, and better yet nobody would accuse us of stealing it. Somebody had tied a case's worth of empty Old Milwaukee cans to the back and hung a sign from the rear of the seat that read JUST WOKE Up. On the front, an airbrushed sign read MAGGIE LovEs DYLAN. Corny, yes, but who am I to change Bryce? We spent most of the next day on that tractor, and Maggie drove the entire time.
Life in Digger had returned to some sort of normalcy. That is, if anything in Digger was ever normal. Love had returned. Smiles cracked the faces of once-cold hearts. And me? I could smell gardenias even when they weren't blooming, and seldom a day passed that I didn't walk to the river and palm the acorns and dirt off my son's tombstone.
BY MID-MARCH, MUCH OF MAGGIE'S STRENGTH HAD returned. As had her green thumb. Propped up on the front porch swing, she spent an entire morning sketching an aerial view of the house and designing the yard layout. The next morning, with plan in hand, she tugged on my arm, batted those trademark eyes, and said, "I'd like to buy a few plants for the yard."
She flashed her design, and I knew instinctively that the next step in this parade would be an expensive one. I also knew occupying her hands would free up her mind, giving her time to work through two hurdles we had yet to address. The first was children, and whether or not we could ever have one of our own. The second was trying to explain to Maggie what I'd done for four and a half months while she lay sleeping.
I looked at the yard, where I'd let weeds take over, then back at Maggie. "A few plants?"
She arched her eyebrows and said with a sneaky smile, "Well, maybe more than a few."
She pulled on a tank top, stepped into an old pair of bib overalls, laced up her running shoes, and stuffed her hair under a baseball cap. When Blue and I got in the truck, she was unconsciously tapping her foot and making notes on her list.
We reached the nursery and grabbed two flatbed carts and the assistance of a young guy with a "Can I help you?" look pasted across his face. Midway through the first greenhouse, I had serious deja vu. Toward the end of the aisle, I figured it out. The wholesale baby outlet. Although this little trip promised to cost even more. And just as I had in the baby store, somewhere down the second aisle I quit counting and just said, "Honey, I think whatever that is looks great, and we probably need a couple of those."
She rolled her eyes, stuck her pencil up into her baseball cap, and put her hand on her hip. "You're not helping me."
To say she was task-oriented would be an understatement. Chances were good that if she kept at this current pace, we'd be putting plants in the ground by flashlight. And I didn't care. My grandfather had lived by a pretty simple philosophy that made good sense to me-Happy wife, happy life.
Sweat had begun to bead on her top lip, and an I
'm thinking wrinkle had creased the skin between her eyes. The ripple effects of the coma had been many, but it had done little to dampen her intensity.
I prodded her. "No, seriously, we probably need a few more of those."
She pointed a crooked, double-jointed finger in my face and said, "You want to end up on the couch?"
"Only if you're there."
She turned and kept counting flowers. "Don't get your hopes up."
"Yeah." I spread out my arms and yawned. "That whole snowangel thing probably wouldn't work too well on the couch."
She cracked a smirk, picked up a handful of dirt from a nearby pot, and threw it at me.
Unfazed, our young assistant smiled and held up every plant like a true professional. With each one, Maggie stuffed her pencil behind her ear and weighed the look of the plant, the color, the size, and the cost. Several times she put back a perfectly good plant because the price was too high.
I picked up on her process and sensed her growing disappointment at the expense. I could see the high prices were quickly diminishing her idea of what our yard would look like. She had come in here thinking Martha Stewart's garden and was walking out thinking Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. So I backtracked to pick up what she'd passed over. When I reappeared, she looked at me and whispered, "Dylan, we can't afford all that."
I looked at the cart. "You're right, but I'm married to a woman who spends twenty dollars on a Christmas tree and a hundred and fifty on lights."
Our assistant laughed and then, seeing we needed a minute alone, excused himself and disappeared toward a huge greenhouse at the back of the property.
"Maggs," I whispered, "I don't care what they cost, because-"
I looked at her. She had regained some of the muscle she'd lost in the hospital, and the chiseled tone in her face and jaw had returned. Her overalls were faded and baggy, but they couldn't hide her strong shoulders, lean arms, the way the sweat beaded on her temples and just in front of her ears, and the penetrating depth of her eyes. Maggie was still that complexity that found meaning and expression between extremes, and all that beauty was just starting to bubble back up to the surface. Like the flowers she tended, my wife was full of buds and on the verge of exploding with color.
"But, Dylan ..
Blue circled around us, wagging his tail.
"It's all right. Really."
"But how?"
"'Cause at the end of the day"-I held up my hands, dirty and green from loading pots-"we're living ... and life is thick."
Our assistant returned, leading an older man who wore a straw hat with a hole in the brim. "This is Mr. Wilson, my boss."
The man extended his hand. "Merle, all my customers call me Merle."
Maggie turned, tried to wipe her eyes without being seen, and stood behind me.
"Hello, sir. I'm Dylan, and this is my wife, Ma-"
"I know who you are. I seen the papers." He smiled and blinked several times, then pointed around the nursery. "Anything you want, at my cost. And if you'd like, come with me."
He led us to an enormous greenhouse out back where it looked as though he did his own seeding and potting. The place was overgrown with mature plants. "This is where I bring some of my best customers and those folks who really know and love plants."
Maggie stepped inside, eyed the rows of his well-kept secret, and sucked in a breath of air large enough for a woman three times her size. When her head and shoulders slowly lifted, it looked as if someone had shoved an air hose into her spine and filled her up.
I extended my hand. "Thank you, sir."
He nodded and stepped backward out the door. `Jes' holler, if'n you need anything."
We filled six carts that would later require four trips in my truck to haul it all back to the house. Eventually, Merle just let me borrow his mulch trailer, which on the last trip I had them fill with about eight cubic yards of potting soil and mulch. I returned the trailer, then found him at the register so I could pay our bill.
While he totaled it, I noticed a pink orchid stretched out across the counter. "How much for the orchid?"
He smiled, cleared out the calculator, spat a stream of dark juice into a can behind him, and said, "Follow me." We walked around the back of the property, and he led me into a humid greenhouse filled entirely with orchids. 'These are my favorites," he said. "I don't usually let customers in here, but ... again, at my cost whatever you want."
There must have been two hundred plants. As Merle explained the story behind several of them and told how to care for them, I made mental notes. When he finished, I bought fourteen. He totaled my order and laughed like a man who knew the pleasure of dirt beneath his fingernails. He followed me home in his van so the wind wouldn't damage the orchid buds, which were just days from opening.
I thanked him again, carried the orchids into the house, and then found Maggie out between the house and the barn surrounded by her plants. She was holding a watering hose set on high, and the spray spread out into a wide fan that was doing a pretty good job of soaking everything we'd just bought. I tipped back my hat and sat on the front porch steps, trying to estimate the number of planting hours I had coming.
She clamped the hose off and said, "Honey, how much did all this cost?"
I smiled and stuffed the receipt back into my pocket. "Let's just say we won't be going back to New York City anytime soon."
Her jaw dropped. "That much?" Then she smiled, looked at her plants, and said, "Well, this is better than Riverdance."
I scratched Blue's head and laughed. "Honey, you're weird."
She nodded, and then a sneaky look stole into her eyes. I tried to jump out of reach, but I slipped on the steps, tripped over Blue, and landed on the grass face-first. Maggie unclamped the hose and doused me in about three gallons of well water. By the time I wrestled myself free of Blue and out of the stream, Maggie was on top of me and showering my head with her fire hose. I grabbed her by the pant leg and wrestled the hose free.
When she realized she was about to get a taste of her own medicine, she howled, "Dylan Styles! I do not want to get wet!" But it was too late, and she didn't really mean it anyway. I held her by the bibs and poured ten seconds' worth of egg-smelling water down the back of her bibs. She squealed at the feel of cold water that had come up from almost six hundred feet belowground and was now spilling out the bottoms of her pant legs.
It took us the entire next day just to set the plants where she wanted them, and another three to get them in the ground. The day after we finished, I drove to the hardware store and had a bronze plaque made that read YARD OF THE YEAR.
AFTER TWO DAYS IN LABOR AND ONLY MOMENTS before delivering our son, Maggie's cheeks had become flushed as she lay in bed. She'd clenched my hand, watching the contractions under the haze of the epidural, and I watched her. I remember thinking that there in that place, draped in sweat, exhaustion, and the giddiness of expectation, Maggie had never seemed more alive.
Moments later she opened her soul and pushed for what seemed like hours. Physically spent, defying what I thought were the laws of physics, she did what only she could do, and then, as if his universe somehow collided with ours, he appeared. The doctor caught him, there was a gush of liquid, and the doctor never even hesitated. He rushed him to the table, spread him like a lab experiment, and started to work.
That's when the smile left Maggie's face. Blazing only seconds before, it drained out of her like light from a candle that had burned out its own wick. It dimmed, sputtered, and snuffed itself out. Only the trail of smoke and the threat of hot wax remained.
Maggie had never held him. She had never held her own son. Wide-eyed yet afraid to breathe, she'd watched as they failed to revive him. Then she watched as they pulled the sheet over his scrunched, blue head and recorded the time. That was one of the last images she'd seen before she went to sleep. The other was my face. When she woke up, he'd been in the ground for months.
For Maggie, the desire to have a child was like that.
It was like breathing. It was as hardwired into her DNA as the sound of her voice, the look in her eyes, and the touch of her skin. Take it out and you might as well take the Maggie out of Maggie. But it was that very desire that had put her in the coma in the first place. I wondered how she'd see it from the other side, but if anything, it seemed that the coma had made the desire that much stronger. If I'd thought she was on a mission the last time, I had another thing coming.
Toward the end of March-having conquered the weedswe returned to the hospital for her first female checkup.
Dr. Frank Palmer was a good man. Midforties, father of several kids himself, he was always running between soccer, basketball, or baseball games. His wife and his kids were his life. I liked him and admired him for the way he went about his doctoring. Let's face it, people's privates are private for a reason, but he spent his entire day invading other people's privacy. Somehow he managed to do it with class and respect for his patients. He treated Maggie like a niece or a cousin whom he was both comfortable with and protective of.
Following her exam, Dr. Frank pulled me aside while Maggie was getting dressed. He raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice. "You might want to exercise some caution for a while in what you two do together."
"Like?"
"Don't watch too many Hallmark movies, don't go to a baby store anytime soon, try to keep her away from anything that involves needing Kleenex, and-most importantly-try to keep her thoughts on the future, not the past."
I looked down the hall. "But I don't understand. She's not responsible."
He nodded. "We know that, but her emotions don't, and until they level out, no power on earth can reason with them."
Dr. Frank referred us to a reproductive specialist whom he'd heard was setting the world on fire. With referral in hand, we drove to Charleston and saw a female doctor with more degrees on the wall than anyone I'd ever met. Between medical school and residency, she'd been in training for twenty years. And judging from all the plaques and signed pictures of famous people, I knew we'd come to the right place.