Page 107 of The Change
“Sure,” Jo said. She’d copied the phone number from Claude’s membership file into her contacts.
“Tell her to have someone meet me on Jackson Dunn’s dock at eight tomorrow morning.”
The Day Harriett Finally Opened Her Eyes
Harriett lay on her back in the garden, gazing up at the chaste tree. She’d watched it grow from a seedling, and earlier in the year, it had achieved a glorious adulthood. Only a few months before, it had worn a corona of lavender blossoms. Now those blooms had withered, fallen off, and returned to the soil. The berries had been harvested, and the tree had disrobed for the winter.
The air was warm for October, but a frost had settled over the garden the previous night, and the ground beneath her still held a chill. Her robe was close at hand, tossed over a nearby bush, but she never reached for it. Harriett liked nothing between her skin and the earth. That summer, she’d discovered that a different world lay beneath her. One busier than the city at rush hour, yet as tranquil and dark as the shore just before dawn. She could feel mycelium weaving a net just below the surface, the roots of the plants pushing ever deeper, and earthworms slipping like silk through the soil.
She’d purchased marijuana for the first time three weeks earlier. She’d smoked it with Chase many times in the past, but had never liked the way it slowed her down. Back then, she had enjoyed pot like a forced vacation—begrudgingly, one eye on the clock. But for the first time in decades, Harriett had nowhere to go and no one to meet. And all she wanted, more than anything, was to bring the world to a halt.
Harriett had pushed herself after Chase left in August. She figured she’d leaped higher hurdles than him in the past. She intended to throw herself into her work and make Max recognize her as the partner she’d long been. Then, before she could settle on the perfect words, the announcement was made. Max’s dream partner would soon be joining the agency. After months of pleading, he’d finally persuaded Chris Whitman to relocate to New York from London.
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 figuredthe 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 humanworld 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.
She was reading up on rootwork one evening when the doorbell rang. Without pulling her eyes from the book, she’d opened the door.
“Well, hello there!” The handsome deliveryman was standing on the other side of the threshold with three stuffed grocery bags in his arms and a shit-eating grin on his face.
A week had passed since his last visit, and during that time, Harriett had given up clothes. “So sorry!” She’d reached for a bag and used it to cover her shame, certain he could see through her skin to her shriveled, old ovaries.
“No apologies necessary,” he assured her. “I’m Eric, by the way.”
She’d come to think of herself as a hideous crone. But Eric certainly hadn’t seemed scarred by the sight. Maybe, she thought, she’d been mistaken. Maybe that wasn’t how it all really worked.
It was the last day of her three-week vacation, and Harriett was basking in the sunshine when she heard a car pull into her drive. The sound of the doorbell didn’t rouse her, and she managed to ignore the persistent knocking that followed.
“Harriett Osborne!” a man finally called out. “Are you back there? Can you hear me?”
The man’s brusque intrusion into her thoughts jolted Harriett upright. He’d given up at the front door. Now she could hear him prodding at the vegetation surrounding the garden, looking for a way past her defenses. She snatched up her robe and held it to her chest. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“It’s Colin Clarke!” A long pause followed as Harriett racked her brain for a clue to the man’s role in her life. “I’m the lawyer representing you in your divorce.” He sounded concerned, as though she’d forgotten the president’s name. The man was important. She should have known who he was.
“Of course!” Harriett jumped to her feet and wrapped the robe tightly around her, but somehow couldn’t figure out what her next step should be.
“My office has been trying to reach you for days,” he called through the plants.
