Harriett had tried digging a hole for her disappointment as she had in the past, but this time, it refused to stay buried. Instead, it grew tendrils that wrapped around her and squeezed. By the beginning of October, she had found herself barely able to function. That’s when the pharmacy called to tell Harriett that her birth control prescription was ready for pickup—and she realized she hadn’t had a period in more than four months.
Already injured, Harriett found herself floored by the insult. She’d avoided pregnancy her entire life. For reasons she hadn’t shared with a soul, she’d never once contemplated procreating. Now Harriett’s husband was busy trying to knock up another woman—and her own traitorous body was ordering her to close up shop. It wasn’t as if she wanted her period back—and she still had no desire for children. But she wanted the fucking option, and now, in an epic act of cruelty, the universe had denied her even that.
The day after Max’s big announcement, Harriett bought two ounces of pot and declared she was taking a few weeks off. She had every intention of driving down to the Carolinas, where the beaches would be warm. Then she’d popped out to the garden to smoke a joint, and everything around her had come to a stop. Three weeks later, she still hadn’t left.
After she fired the landscapers in September, Harriett let the garden grow wild. Chase had always kept it clipped and pruned within an inch of its life. Now that Harriett was free, she figured the garden should be, too. The vegetation ran riot in no time, and she found she loved nothing more than to sit back and watch. No longer restrained, the dainty rosebushes around the perimeter revealed their true natures, redirecting their energy away from blooms and into extending their stems and taunting trespassers with their thorns. The pretty little perennials engineered to delight the human eye found their flower beds pillaged by hardier species to whom the earth truly belonged. Stoned, Harriett existed on the timescale of the plant world. Her companions were slow, but now she could see they were sentient, intelligent, and very much alive.
Once the sidewalk in front of the house had disappeared from view, she often heard passersby talking about her. Even when she was out of sight, she seemed to be very much on her neighbors’ minds.
“Has anyone checked on her lately?” she overheard a woman say.
“She’s lost her damn mind,” someone else diagnosed.
“Brendon Baker will get her all sorted out,” a man told a companion.
“Milo told me she’s gonna get eaten by cats,” a child weighed in another day.
Lying on a bed of soil, Harriett listened and wondered if they might be right. She wasn’t behaving as a woman in her late forties should. She’d maintained a steady high since that first joint in the garden, and put a serious dent in her dilettante ex’s collection of wine. Once morning glory vines had sewn up the last few gaps in the wall of foliage that surrounded the house, she’d taken to spreading out on a lawn chair in her underwear. Then those few strips of cloth disappeared, followed shortly by the lawn chair. This isn’t normal, Harriett often told herself. Then her eyes would latch onto a butterfly and follow it as it lazily looped across the sky.
For the first time in ages, she’d found a place that welcomed her—one where she felt she truly belonged. So much of the human world seemed designed to exclude her. There, men valued women for their youth and fertility. Those who could no longer procreate were cast aside. But now Harriett knew nature wasn’t prone to mistakes. Her grandparents had looked to the Bible for God’s word, never realizing it was written on the world all around them. That scripture was telling Harriett she was still around for a reason—and would be for decades. If she was going to spend those years in her garden, Harriett wanted to know more about it.
Deliveries arrived from rare bookstores across the country. Every evening, she’d bring in the boxes stacked in towering piles on her doorstep and rip them apart in a frenzy. She’d lost all interest in everything beyond her garden. There was so much to learn about the things she’d discovered within. She bought books to identify the new plants that had commandeered the flower beds and books that might hold the cure for the unusual rash on her leg. She ordered books on entomology and biochemistry to find out why the bugs never nibbled the mint and why thyme drove the bees wild. After a hawk dropped the corpse of a squirrel at her feet, she devoured a nineteenth-century tome on the ancient art of augury. She found a suggested dosage for jimsonweed seeds in the diary of a colonial-era cunning woman, then spent an entire night tracking the constellations as they sailed across the sky. She devoured the private journals of Catherine Monvoisin, the infamous poisoner, and chased them down with biographies of Agrippina the Younger and Lucrezia Borgia. She developed a recipe for a magnificent pesto.