Read Online Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman - Free Book Online

wondered if Celeste had known he would be coming. It was the greeting of strangers, except that he could see her hands were shaking as they all sat down.
    Nana Oforiwaa poured lemonade from a jug. They drank, and things were said that didn’t mean a whole lot, and after a while Nana Oforiwaa suggested that her niece show him the gardens, which was a thing she was sure he had not seen before, so that she and the teacher could attend to issues that didn’t concern them.
    Nana Oforiwaa was right. He had never seen such a place before. Big and quiet, with its hills, filled with trees from around the world—so many that when the wind blew it sounded like a storm. Most were identified on small plaques, with names in Latin and English, and a brief description: fan palms from Guinea and Kenya, fishtail palms from Burma, spine palms from South America, with their toothpick fronds, cane palms from India, a Malagasy traveler’s tree.
    In the middle of the gardens was the rusting shell of a military helicopter, placed on a mound in a clearing, and used by the visiting children as a jungle gym. Its nose was split open like a pod, and birds and lizards the size of a person’s hand scurried round its carcass. Its shell was broken and peeling away, and its rotors were sagging, and its frozen hydraulics were cracked by the rust.
    Many of these things he saw for the first time that day, walking round the grounds with Celeste, over the hills, into the groves, past the destroyed helicopter. The garden was her backyard. It was where she’d grown up, and as they walked she talked of the time she’d spent here, and the memories it was filled with. A childhood fall near the southern gate that cut her chin. The grass where she’d played in the shade of the Japanese cypress as her aunt would sit reading. The carcass of the helicopter she knew better than her own closets. The silk cotton tree, where she’d read to herself, hidden in the tresses of its giant roots.
    It was, he realized, a childhood spent on her own. She mentioned no playmates. The only company she spoke of was her aunt’s. But she never was lonely, she said. She needed nothing else.
    “You must be close,” he said.
    “Yes,” she told him, “we have been.”
    He thought she was going to say something more, but when she spoke again it was to tell him the properties of the medicinal plants where he was standing, as the groundsmen had taught her many years before.
    So the afternoon passed. The light began to fade and though he was conscious of the time he sensed she was not. He said nothing, letting her take him on through the grounds, further and further from the rest house. The longer his walk, the more she’d say, and the more, he thought, she’d make herself his.
    And then, unexpectedly, they came round through a grove of treesand he realized they’d been returning all the while. A few paces off was the gate through the garden fence, exactly where they’d started a few hours before. Celeste moved to unfix the lock, which she’d left half-closed.
    “Well done,” he said.
    She opened the gate, and as he passed through, smiled.
    By the time they were back in the rest house night had already settled in. The lights in the restaurant hung down from the ceiling on wires, casting shadows round the verandah. Nana Oforiwaa was waiting for them. His untouched glass still stood on the uncleared table where they’d sat.
    “You two must have had a lot to say,” Nana Oforiwaa said. She had her reading glasses on.
    “Yes, Nana,” Celeste replied softly.
    The teacher had already gone, Nana Oforiwaa told them. “My driver will take you home,” she said to the boy.
    And then Celeste realized she’d forgotten the long-sleeve shirt she’d taken with her, and he remembered her draping it over the back of the bench close to the gate where they’d sat at some point in the afternoon. He offered to go get it back, and Nana Oforiwaa thanked him, and so he retraced his steps to the