Garden of Dreams Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Garden of Dreams

  “With the emotional suspense of The Pilot’s Wife, Leslie Gould writes of safe places in life: a garden, good friends, a loving marriage and family, a supportive fellowship, health. Then with the skill of a seasoned writer—though this is her first novel—she leads us through secrets and betrayals to discover the consequences of safe places when left untended by the grace of God. In her Garden, Leslie tackles the tough questions of faith and healing, forgiveness and love. I read every single word. A triumph of a story; a treasure of a storyteller.”

  —JANE KIRKPATRICK, best-selling and award-winning author of Every Fixed Star and All Together in One Place

  “Leslie Gould displays refreshing creativity in Garden of Dreams. Her characters feel vivid and authentic, like dear friends I have known. Her lifelike description builds a compelling tale of love and sorrow and acceptance. This beautiful story will touch your heart and remind you of what really matters. Great job, Leslie!”

  —MELODY CARLSON, award-winning author of Finding Alice, Angels in the Snow, and Armando’s Treasure

  “In her first novel, Leslie Gould perfectly captures the depth of love between women friends and the intense pain of a relationship threatened by terminal illness.”

  —BETTE NORDBERG, author of Thin Air and Encouraging Words for the First Hundred Days

  “Garden of Dreams is a treasured story of friendship, family, and the healing we find in love. Read this book and your heart will bloom.”

  —LYNNE HINTON, author of Friendship Cake

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Three

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This book is dedicated to my husband, Peter.

  You’ve given me so much.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Sally Quimby, R.N., and the nurses on the oncology floor at Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital, Portland, Oregon; Karol Waits, R.N., oncology floor at Rogue Valley Medical Center, Medford, Oregon; and Peggy Peterson, hospice nurse, for their medical expertise. My deep appreciation to Emily King and Donna Gabrielson for sharing their cancer-related stories.

  My gratitude to Libby and Chris Salter, Holly and Alfred Frakes, Kate Commerford, Cindy Monte, Laurie Snyder, Kathy Fink, Becky Berg, Val Bennett, Linda Hohonshelt, and Nancy Brannen for their friendships and insights. Special thanks to my book group and fellowship group members who have challenged me to grow in faith and love all these years. Much appreciation to my writing group members for adding clarity to these pages and to Stanley Baldwin and Nancy Ellen Row for much-valued editorial suggestions. Thanks to my editor, Erin Healy, for her excellent work and overall encouragement.

  My heart of thanks belongs to my husband, Peter, and our four children. God has blessed me beyond my dreams through you.

  Each friend represents a world in us,

  a world possibly not born until they arrive,

  and it is only by this meeting

  that a new world is born.

  ANAÏS NIN

  Wait for the LORD;

  be strong and take heart

  and wait for the LORD.

  PSALM 27:14

  1

  “Rob,” Jill said. She stretched an arm across the bed and patted her husband’s bare chest with the back of her hand. “Simon’s awake.”

  Rob rolled toward the wall.

  “Get the baby,” she said, turning to look at the clock: 6:15 A.M.

  She slapped at the monitor, dragging her finger along the switch, silencing the frantic wails and scratchy bursts of static.

  “If you get him now, Hudson and Liam might sleep longer. Let the dog out too, okay?”

  She heard Rob’s feet slap against the wood floor, one at a time. She heard him pull on his sport pants and make his way around the bed and out into the hall. She imagined him trudging up the open staircase to the boys’ room. He’d been out of town for the past two weeks—he’d forgotten how early Simon awoke.

  How many times had she been sick during the night? Four? Five? She remembered Rob getting up with her the last time at 4:30. “This is some nasty flu bug you have,” he’d said.

  She hoped it was just a flu bug.

  Jill pulled the violet floral duvet up to her chin, rubbed the soft cotton against her face, and rolled over on her side. The morning light illuminated the wall. The bureau was covered with black-and-white photos. Rob and Jill on the beach in Argentina, the Atlantic behind them, Rob’s surfboard between them. Hudson as a newborn. The three boys in Lithia Park. A best-friend picture of Jill and Caye hamming it up while on a cross-country ski trip at Lake of the Woods. Caye’s husband, Nathan, shot the photo while Rob broke trail across the frozen lake.

  On the wall, to the right of the bureau, hung Jill’s favorite painting. The figures were small and abstract. Two women on a porch. Children in the yard. A garden. It was her painting. Her house. Her life.

  She felt the urge to call Caye, but she wouldn’t. Not now. Not yet.

  Her lower back hurt. Her stomach roiled, turning the nausea up her throat churn by churn. She hated for Rob to miss work, but she couldn’t get to the doctor on her own. Not today.

  She knew Caye would take the boys. That, at least, was a given.

  Caye leaned over the yellow Formica counter, both hands wrapped around her coffee mug, and gazed out the kitchen window. The morning sun filled the backyard. The grass looked like a sheet of emerald. The just-open blooms of the white dogwood fluttered outside the window like a lace curtain in the breeze.

  She was dressed in a pair of old Levi’s with the knees ripped out and a blue sweatshirt splattered with white paint. Two gold clippies held her short reddish hair back from her face. Her yellow gardening clogs waited at the back door.

  Caye had just dropped seven-year-old Andrew off at school. Audrey sat at the breakfast-nook table and kicked the heels of her black rubber boots, inherited from her big brother, against the bench seat. Her plaid skirt stuck in bunches to her ivory tights. She pulled the Chutes and Ladders game board out of the box.

  Nathan had tilled the plot against the fence the evening before. Caye would plant zucchini, peppers, lettuce, spinach, carrots, and tomatoes. In the back, along the cedar fence, she would plant the sunflowers. The image of the flowers’ faces bowing gently in the summer heat made her smile.

  “Come play, Mama,” Audrey said, unfolding the board onto the table. She jerked her head from side to side; her chestnut pigtails brushed against her face.

  Caye stared at her daughter. Chutes and
Ladders wasn’t what she had in mind.

  Audrey’s fourth birthday was tomorrow. Caye added bake a cake; decorate like a daisy to her mental to-do list.

  “Mama!”

  “Just a minute, sweetie. I’m thinking about the garden,” Caye said, turning her head back to the window.

  “Pumpkins!” Audrey shouted, her brown eyes wide.

  Caye had forgotten the promise she’d made to Andrew and Audrey. By the end of August the far corner of her perfectly square yard would be a jungle of vines.

  “Right. Pumpkins.”

  Every year her best friend, Jill, teased her about the garden.

  “All those vegetables,”

  Jill would laugh. “You’d think we were at war.”

  Jill’s large Victorian home above the Boulevard had a yard twice the size of Caye’s. Jill grew only flowers and herbs. She bought her organic produce at the grocery store. Caye liked the idea of a victory garden. She imagined the Railroad District, where her bungalow was located, full of vegetable plots fifty-five years ago.

  Caye shifted her focus to the window box in front of her and the drooping red, orange, and yellow tulips. Jill had given her the bulbs last fall. Now the petals were fading and falling into a weak pile at the base of each stem. The black stamens were exposed and nearly naked.

  Caye planned to cut the waning flowers and tuck the leaves behind the red geraniums and white and blue lobelia that she would plant by noon.

  She took a sip of coffee and smiled. It was a perfect day.

  “Mama,” Audrey whined. She flicked the blue arrow of the game spinner and sent the piece of cardboard across the table.

  It was a perfect day, except that Audrey was driving her crazy.

  “I never imagined a four-year-old could talk so much,” Caye had complained to Nathan the night before. Andrew had never been a chatty child—he was a doer, building with LEGOs, drawing cowboys, turning his bedroom into a fort.

  “She was made to talk,” Nathan had answered. “That’s how her brain is wired. Besides,” he said with a chuckle, “she takes after you.”

  Caye hoped Audrey would busy herself playing in the sandbox while she planted the vegetables, took care of the window box, and cleaned out the leaves that had blown under the raspberry bushes during the winter. She would garden and then bake the cake, and continue, she knew, to obsess about the job, the paying job, that she had interviewed for yesterday.

  On any other warm spring day, she would have been on the phone with Jill planning a picnic in Lithia Park. They hadn’t waded in Ashland Creek yet this year; maybe today would have been the day. She imagined the kids jumping and yelling and scrambling up the cement steps from the dappled creek to the sunshine in the park.

  She would not call Jill until afternoon, late afternoon.

  Yesterday, after the interview, Caye had phoned Jill. Caye measured her enthusiasm as she talked about the position selling ads for a travel magazine. “That’s so not you,” Jill had blurted out. “If you feel like you need to go back to work, why don’t you go for what you really want to do?”

  They didn’t finish the conversation. Jill’s baby woke from his nap; Caye needed to pick up Andrew.

  As she pushed Audrey in the umbrella stroller to the school, Caye realized that she hadn’t asked Jill how she was feeling. Jill had been run-down since Simon was born ten months before. Her milk had recently stopped.

  “Awhile ago,” Jill had answered as they were sitting in her garden earlier in the week and Caye had asked when she’d stopped nursing Simon.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Not according to the test.”

  The sweet lullaby scent of the pink cherry blossoms dusted the air around them. Audrey, Hudson, and Liam stripped rusty-colored flowers off the camellia bush and flung them at each other, littering the brick walkway with the fading, curling petals. Jill’s black Lab puppy, Scout, jumped from falling flower to falling flower.

  The day had been overcast; Jill had worn sunglasses.

  “Allergies,” she’d said when Caye asked about that, too. “They’re really bad this year.”

  It’s the in-between year—this year 2000. Caye took another sip of coffee. The last year of one millennium or the first of another, depending on who was counting. It felt like a year hanging in time, a year of uncertainty for Caye—the year between staying home and going back to work. If not this job, then another by year’s end. They couldn’t keep scraping by on Nathan’s teaching salary.

  When Audrey was born, Caye had only intended to stay home a year. She never expected her leave would stretch into four years. Jill, quite honestly, was the reason she hadn’t gone back to work sooner.

  Audrey whined, “Mama, you never play with me!” She flicked two orange pawn holders off the table. Caye wanted to sweep the entire game into the garbage. She took a sip of cold coffee and gave Audrey “the look.”

  The phone rang.

  Audrey hurled three cardboard children to the floor. “Pick up the pieces,” Caye commanded as she headed to the phone.

  She checked the caller ID: Rob and Jill Rhone.

  Caye instantly forgot her thoughts of a moment ago. Maybe they would go to the park today. She would have a chance to explain to Jill why the job possibility really was a good thing.

  “Hi,” Caye said in her sunny-day voice.

  There was no greeting, just Rob’s hoarse voice asking, “Can you come get the boys? Jill’s sick.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s been throwing up all night. I have a call in to the doctor.”

  Caye hesitated, adjusted her plans again. No park. No gardening. A day—at least a morning—alone with four little children. “I’ll be right over.”

  Caye dumped the last swallow of coffee into the empty sink, rinsed the cup, and put it in the half-full dishwasher. “We’re going to get the boys,” she said to Audrey. Maybe Jill would get in to see the doctor right away.

  Audrey picked the pieces of the game off the floor and table, crammed them in the box, and slammed out the back screen door, boots flying down the steps, chasing Abra, Caye’s ancient calico cat.

  Caye drove up A Street to Oak in her old Toyota wagon, and then darted along the little overpass above the Plaza. Below stood the statue of the pioneer, the “tree of heaven,” and the entrance to the park. Just up the hill were the Shakespeare Festival theaters and the towering Mark Antony Hotel.

  The Plaza was the heart of Ashland; she saw it anew every time she drove through it or by it, even on this quiet Thursday morning, even though she had lived in Ashland for seventeen years. As she waited at the light to turn onto the Boulevard, she craned her neck, looking beyond the Plaza, and noted the clouds rolling in from the southwest, slipping over the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains, threatening the blue sky. The light turned green; she pushed on the gas and then turned left by Briscoe School, or “Not Andrew’s School” as the younger kids called it, and hurried up the hill.

  Jill sat on the edge of her bed with a cup of peppermint tea cradled in her hands. The duvet was wadded behind her, leaving the tired-looking lavender sheets exposed. Rob had poured the tea into one of her Royal Copenhagen blue china cups and brought it to her with no saucer. He’d also buttered the toast. The smell of the butter, even though the plate was on the dresser, made her throat thick.

  Jill’s dark wavy hair hung loosely around her face. The odor of vomit hung in her nose.

  “Caye’s on her way,” Rob said, poking his head into the room. “Do you think she’d keep the boys this afternoon? After we’re back from the doctor? So I can go into work?”

  Jill didn’t answer.

  Simon was at the door, wiggling his way through. “Ma-ma-mama,” he chanted as he quickly crawled across the floor; he grabbed the leg of Jill’s flannel pajamas with fierce determination and pulled himself to his feet.

  “Hey, you,” sh
e whispered, looking down.

  “Here, I’ll take the tea,” Rob said, reaching toward her.

  “No. The baby.”

  Rob slung Simon over his shoulder and headed out the door.

  Jill noted Rob’s irritation. She knew how much he hated it when she was sick. It wasn’t just the inconvenience. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know to hold her hair back, to give her a glass of water to rinse her mouth. He didn’t understand how hard it was for her to take care of Simon, how hard it was to keep trying to explain what needed to be done for all of them.

  After being coddled beyond reason by her mother when she was ill—and then practically ignored the rest of the time—Jill found Rob’s aversion to sympathy refreshing. Except when she really was sick.

  She stood and put the tea on the dresser, looked again at the toast, and headed down the hall to the bathroom.

  Caye let herself into Jill’s Victorian house, peering through the leaded glass window as she opened the door. Audrey slipped around Caye and planted herself in the middle of the living room and began kicking up her feet, showing off her boots to the three boys. The brothers wore matching blue-footed pajamas and looked like oversize stuffed toys. All three had blond hair and blue eyes—Hudson’s straight hair was beginning to darken, Liam was a towhead with loose curls, and Simon’s fuzz was nearly white. Hudson and Liam bounced on the living room sofa. Simon sat in the doorway to the hall—on the fringes of the burgundy Oriental runner—crying. Tears slid down his face, and drool cascaded around his two bottom teeth, over his lower lip.

  The dog came bounding into the living room from the hall, brushing past Simon, barking at Audrey. Caye hoped that Scout, at eight months, was done growing.

  Simon held up his arms; Caye picked him up and felt the wetness of his diaper against her arm as he leaned his compact body against her. He stopped crying. He smelled of sour spit-up and all-night urine. Caye ran her hand over his smooth head.

  “Hi, little guy,” she said. “Hi, to you big guys, too,” she added, signaling with a quick jerk of her thumb for Liam and Hudson to get off the couch.