A man sits in a garden with the sun slowly rising through the trees at the edge of his property. Still wearing his blue funeral suit beneath a flimsy overcoat, he’s cold but not quite freezing here on the last day of March. He’s spent the night in the garden, drifting in and out of consciousness, because he can’t face the silence awaiting him inside.

Rotating his stiff neck, Hal takes in the remains of all that they planted in the garden in the five years they were a couple. Both widowed, he and Alma found each other late, in their sixties, became inseparable. Then they’d found and fallen in love with this old boarding stable, especially Alma, an equestrienne in another life, although the horses were long gone. Despite their children’s objections, they’d cashed out some investments to buy the place and didn’t look back.

His gaze travels to the bare rose vines climbing the trellis. He’d always disliked their funereal scent, but they’d been Alma’s favorites. There were plenty of roses at her funeral yesterday, especially from her son Charles, who’d treated Hal as if he were somehow responsible for his mother’s death. Hal asked his own daughter, living in Ireland, not to come. 

He tilts his creaky neck, fixating on the Japanese maple he purchased for Alma’s seventieth. She’d adored its sharp auburn leaves, its compact size. In the dimness, he can barely make out its tight buds, though the branches are coming into focus with each advancing degree of the sun. How long until its warmth reaches him here on his chaise lounge beside her empty one, where they’d sat, hand in hand, the day of her diagnosis. Better to be numb—and dumb—a silent statue, a deformed gnome, in this place that, given another month, would erupt into chaotic beauty.

That might be as hard as facing the empty house had been last night. Several neighbors had volunteered to return with him, but he’d convinced them he’d be all right, promised to call if he wasn’t. A loss so large, he decided, made it perfectly permissible to lie. He and Alma never lied to each other, never denied they were old and wouldn’t live forever. But with his bad heart, he’d expected to go first. Oh Alma.

So many fine memories shared at the service. Shakily, he’d told how, when he’d proposed, standing beside her at Somerset Falls, she’d squeezed his hand. “There’s no need. Our souls were wed the first time we kissed—remember, on the elevator our first Valentine’s Day together?”

Her lips had been honey and velvet, her breathing quick, her scent floral, her hand behind his cap, smooshing it forward, blinding him. He silently begged the lift’s cables and gears to slow—but they sailed upward to the restaurant, along with his blood pressure. Their mouths were still melded when the door opened on the purple-haired teenage girl who grinned. “You two are so . . .” She waved her bangled wrist to catch the word. “Timeless.” They laughed before parting as friends.

Forever afterward, when they kissed—even a brief buss on the cheek—he’d whisper, “timeless,” and she’d smile, validating their unspoken vow.

Snapping back to the present with a bone-jolting jerk, he observes the sun has set ablaze the upper branches of the Osage orange at the edge of the field where horses formerly pastured. And, as often happened on mornings while he brewed Alma’s English Breakfast tea, a random song begins in his head. It’s George Harrison’s tune about winter’s surrender and melting ice.

Eventually the song segues into cardinals and robins trilling.

When he hears hooves pounding afar off, Hal at first thinks it’s just blood throbbing in his temples, product of sleeplessness and his grief hangover. Then, squinting, he discerns across the field a black-spotted Appaloosa with cream-colored flanks, thundering toward the woods. A voice, near his ear, whispers: “You’re riding through woods on your Appaloosa stallion . . . bluebells are out and the sky is clear blue.” Paul McCartney’s last words to his wife Linda before she passed. Hal had read them and wept just after his first wife’s passing; apparently, they’d become inscribed in his mind.

He closes his eyes against the dawn. When he opens them, the dream stallion is, of course, gone. But something’s changed. Why has he never witnessed their garden coming alive at sunrise before today? If he had, he’d’ve known that death doesn’t last here. Growth proliferates among weeds. Roses persist through ruin. Bulbs gestate like fetuses in underground wombs. Trees wait for sap to circulate.

Ghost horses gallop in the upper pasture.

Hal coaxes his cold fingers back to some semblance of life. Someday he’ll sink them again into the garden’s giving ground, despite—or even because of—death’s necessity, death’s hope. For now, he’ll stand, lean on the back of Alma’s lounger till his legs firm up, then amble inside, make himself breakfast and begin again.