I went inside without looking back. I already knew he was still watching.
* * *
Chapter 8: The Garden
I had a system for insomnia.
Most people approached it wrong, they lay in the dark fighting it, which was the surest way to lose. The trick was to stop treating wakefulness as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a condition to be managed. Get up. Do something deliberate. Let the body understand that the mind was occupied and would no longer be taking requests.
At five in the morning, four days into a new city and a new arrangement and a new version of my life, I got up.
I put on the clothes I'd left on the chair, jeans, a sweater, the automatic assembly of someone who didn't need light for the task. I didn't turn on the lamp. The dark was fine. I knew the room well enough by now that I could move through it without negotiating with my shins.
Downstairs, the house was quiet in the specific way of large old buildings at pre-dawn, a silence with texture to it, with the low sound of the house settling and the distant sound of the city that never fully stopped. I went to the kitchen, considered the coffee maker for a moment, and decided on water instead. I wasn't trying to stay awake. I was just trying to be somewhere that wasn't horizontal.
The door to the garden was unlocked.
I noticed this as I reached for the handle, noticed it as a new fact, since it had been locked on the two previous nights when I'd checked. I opened the door anyway.
The garden at five in the morning was a different thing than the garden at any other hour.
The darkness was retreating but not gone, that specific pre-dawn state where the sky had moved from black to a deep blue-gray and the shapes of things were visible without being fully defined. The magnolias were large dark presences against a slightly lighter dark. The garden lamp was off, which meant the stone bench at the edge of the formal section was barely visible, a pale shape in the dimness.
A pale shape beside which there was another shape, larger, that resolved, as I got closer, into a man.
Dominic was sitting on the bench.
He had a coffee cup in his right hand and his jacket was gone and his collar was open, and he was looking at the magnolias with the quality of attention you gave to things you had looked at many times and still found requiring attention. He heard me, or registered me in whatever way he registered things, which was not always audibly, and looked over as I came down the path, but said nothing.
I sat at the other end of the bench.
There was space between us. I left it there.
The city made its sounds: a distant car, somewhere, moving through the quiet streets; a dog, two blocks over, saying something to the dark and then stopping; the sound of the river, or what I imagined was the river, though I wasn't sure you could actually hear it from here. New Orleans at five in the morning was not silent, not exactly, it was in conversation with itself, low and continuous, the murmur of a city that never fully lost consciousness.
We sat in it for a long time without speaking.
I had expected this to be uncomfortable. Two people who barely knew each other in a garden before dawn, neither of them explaining themselves, I had expected the silence to demand filling, to create the particular social pressure that made people say things they hadn't intended in order to discharge the tension of not speaking.
It didn't.
The silence was simply the silence. It had the quality of something that had arrived and was being permitted to stay, not fought, not managed. He wasn't looking at me. I wasn't looking at him. We were both looking at the magnolias, which were becoming more defined as the sky continued its slow negotiation from dark to less dark, their large waxy leaves gaining first their shapes and then, gradually, their colors.
At some point he reached down and produced a small thermos from beside the bench. He filled his cup, then held the thermos up without looking at me. A question, framed without words.
I shook my head.
He set it back down. No comment. No adjustment of expression. As if the offer and the refusal were both equally acceptable outcomes.
I noted that I had expected him to ask why.
After ten minutes, I counted, not from restlessness but from habit, he spoke.
"My grandfather planted them." He didn't indicate which ones. There was no need; we were looking at the same things. "Every tree in this section. He had them brought from a nursery in Mississippi, specific variety, he was particular about the bloom. Spent six months on the placement."
I looked at the trees. Six months of placement had produced something that looked uncontrived, which was either the sign of very good planning or very good luck.
"He planted them himself?" I asked.