Page 113 of Meet Me in the Garden

A wildfire in my body. Burning, burning. Voice thick when I say, “None of this is how you think it is. Let me explain. Please.”

But Nathalie’s turned to Clément now. He’s been silent on the other end of the sofa. “Not you, though?” she’s asking. “Right? Not you.”

“No,” Clément says. “Of course I didn’t know.” And he stands and she goes to him. “Let’s get out of here,” he says.

My body goes cold. I’m frozen as they move to the door and put on their shoes and leave me. They don’t tell me where they’re going. They don’t spare me a glance. The room blurs, my heart thunders. No room in my lungs.

What if they can’t forgive me?

Hours pass, and I grow unforgivable in my own estimation. Remembering Nathalie’s purple lips after we threw the flower petals. Remembering everything I told her about her mother, each time I mentioned a likeness and left out the most important piece of information. I wish I’d told her that I lied to myself, too. I tricked myself, too. I climb into bed, sick in the dark until, past one, I hear them come in. They go straight to their room and shut the door. In the morning, I make them breakfast, pack their lunches. I hear murmurs from their room. Door opening, one set of footsteps. Clément’s. “Nathalie’s staying home,” he says. “I’d stay with her but I have a test and she says she’ll be fine if I go.”

I call in sick and wait and around noon she emerges. Standing in the doorway and looking past me. “Will you talk with me?” I ask. “Will you let me explain?”

She shakes her head. “I want to go to the moon room.”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“There was the laundromat.”

“Yes, on Figueroa.”

“We can start there,” she says.

I drive us the miles to Figueroa Street, where the laundromat stands, as though trapped in time. A sacredness to it. The place where we began. But I’m alone in the feeling. She’s furious. She circles the floor, stands still with her back to me, says, “I remember a stairwell and doors but that’s all.”

I don’t know what to do. She won’t meet my eye. But she could have borrowed my car and come here herself, could have asked Clément or one of her friends to go with her, and didn’t. “Should we walk around the block?” I ask. “See if something looks familiar?”

We circle around the front of the laundromat. Pass a Mexican restaurant and a manicurist, a shop selling paper goods, a notary. I slow in front of an apartment complex midblock. “Could this be it?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

We’re never going to find it. She was a child, all she remembers are stairs and doors. We reach the back of the buildings again, near my parked car, and I say, “I know you’re looking for answers. I can give you some, if you’ll let me.” Her jaw is clenched, her brow furrowed, her eyes piercing, scanning the backs of the buildings. I wish I could wrap my arms around her but she’s ready to strike.

“Look,” she says, and points. There’s a small skylight on the partially slanted roof of the laundromat. “That’s it,” she says. And laughs. “Of course. The same building. Doors and stairs, out to the street and back in.”

“There’s a sign with a phone number inside,” I say. Nathalie copies it down and we walk to a phone booth down the block. She steps into it by herself and I watch her talking, and I wait, the cars blowing past me, a sense I’ve lost control of everything. She comes out and tells me that Mr. Kim will meet us in the laundromat in twenty minutes.

There’s a diner across the street. I say, “Should we get something cold to drink while we’re waiting?”

“I’d rather go back. He might get there sooner.”

“All right.”

We go back in and she chooses the row of chairs we sat in when I firstmet her. I want to ask if she remembers but I don’t. She sits upright and very still. The detergent air is sticky and chemical and seeping into my skin. I wish we could wait outside but I don’t dare suggest it. Finally a man comes through the door—shiny black hair and a rumpled shirt; a giant ring, heavy with keys, attached to his belt—and Nathalie springs up. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she says. “I really appreciate you coming back and showing us.”

“It’s just an attic,” he says. “Nothing up there.”

“It’s just that, my mother died when I was a child. It’s the last place I ever was with her.”

He sighs. “Come,” he says, and heads toward the back.

As soon as we’re out of earshot she mutters, “I’m a good liar, too.” Meant to cut, and it does.

We climb a dark echoing stairway at the back of the building, built for utility or emergency, three floors up. “We’ve had trouble with squatters a few times over the years,” Mr. Kim says, fitting his key into the lock. He pushes open the door. A waft of stale air. “Turn the lock when you’re finished.” He leaves us, heavy footsteps fading out.

We hover in the stairwell. I look at Nathalie and she looks past me, inscrutable, and then strides into the attic as though she’s there to appraise it. It’s small, dusty. Dark but for the single skylight. The ceiling is just above my head when we walk in, slanting lower the farther we go. Crouching, I see a pile of discarded clothing in a corner, an old discolored pillow without a case, an empty beer bottle. Painful, to imagine Nathalie, five years old, helping to gather the laundry, carrying it down the stairs. Delphine, abandoned and frightened, losing her mind in this place.

Tree branches grow low over the skylight, filtering the sun, and along one edge, cut into the wooden window frame, is a series of gouges. I move closer, blood rushing, reaching to touch them, seized by their familiarity. A smaller version of the gouges in the tree from Delphine’s old yard on North Harper.