He left a week after we signed the closing documents. I guess he couldn’t trust that it was worth it, after all—making a home together. Finding some solid ground to share.

Well, my bags were already packed. On the ferry ride from Seattle to the new place, alone in the wide gray expanse, I watched mountains careen up out of the mist like knees under a blanket and was glad for the salt and sting of the wind, glad to know there was, at least, a garden at the other end of all this. Not that I’ve ever really gardened, beyond the pots of mint and cilantro and basil I’d left wilting on the balcony that wasn’t ours anymore. He gave them to me early on, when he still thought I might learn to cook his mother’s dishes from back home, before that particular hope and all the others that had nothing to do with me began to sicken and fade.

Soon I was pulling up the drive, and there was my new old house crouching close against the earth, a spiderwebbed, lichen-frosted creature hunching to find anchorage during a quake, knees in the dirt, fingers braided into the grass. To one side, I could see the promised garden, a childish stone angel standing watch over one shoulder, and trees layered up in endless impasto brushstrokes behind that.

If I lived somewhere like this, he’d said, tipping his head back to look up, up, up at the green, green, green, instead of there, with all the concrete and grime. If I lived here, I’d want to go on living. This is the place.

I brought my things inside as the sky glimmered gold and a sharp curl of moon appeared. A chorus of frogs put up an echoey, unending drone, and I did not think about our old apartment, its comfortable contours and familiar nooks, now filled up by someone else’s life. I did not think about him, or about the fact that my period was exactly eight days late.

The next morning I woke, and it was as though my bones had been sucked dry, leaving me brittle. My phone buzzed—coworkers, my sister, his friends, all concerned, checking in. “Did you make it okay?” “Are you eating?” “Will we see you at the memorial, or not?”

I went outside, stepping a few paces into the trees as I traced the property’s edges, like I was trailing just the tips of my fingers through deep surrounding waters. I slipped between the cedars, itching to tear and crush their lacy, pungent needles by the handful, and I looked for the blackberry bushes I knew would be there, weedy and sprawling and constant. They wove through the tangle, ballasting every other plant, and I stooped to see small fetal nubs forming where delicate petals had peeled back and dropped away.

We would always pick blackberries together in the summer, seeking them out wherever they grew, which was everywhere, all the city’s wild forgotten edges: vacant lots, backroads, along railroad tracks. He’d scratch up his hands, I’d purple my mouth. If he was well, we’d laugh and flirt, lick juice from each other’s lips. If he wasn’t, we’d work quietly, and I’d tell him: Let’s put them in the freezer. That way, we can use them next week, next month, next year.

I returned, brought a pregnancy test into the bathroom with me, capped the dampened stick and let it sit. Studied the two pink lines for a long, long time, and then did nothing. Made no appointments, called no one. Suppressed a feeling of nonsensical joy. 

“I’d rather raise a kid here than anywhere else,” I said to the frog I found inside my shoe on the front step. It was my third day at the new place. I was taking a break from unpacking and held an unlit cigarette tight in my fist, a child with an unlicked lollipop. “I could make the extra bedroom into a nursery. It has that huge window, so I could put in some shelves on the opposite wall and fill it with plants. So the baby could, I dunno. Have really good, sweet air to breathe.”

The frog stared straight ahead, daring me to remember that I could neither install shelving nor keep houseplants alive, till I gave it a light nudge and sent it tumbling towards the trees.

Over the week that followed, I started planting my garden. My phone stayed off, gathered dust, became an immovable part of the background scenery. One evening as I worked on my knees beside the angel, I realized I had no faith at all that anything I’d planted would grow.

When I was small, I learned the life cycle of plants: seed to shoot to leaf to flower to fruit. I put sunflower seeds in paper cups, thrummed with excitement as the weird, pale little things began to wriggle up out of the chocolatey soil. I watched it happen again and again, but now I didn’t trust these seeds to do what they were made to do. I brushed off my hands and considered what I’d created—no rows marked, no packets kept. I wasn’t trying at all.

That summer was a forebodingly dry one, increasingly unremarkable in a land that was supposed to be a riot of drizzle and green. The nonstop sun bleached my hair toward gold. On my sixth morning there, clouds rolled in with distant rumbles, the wind picked up, there was a half-hearted pitter-patter like someone shaking water off their hands, and that was it. I went for the hose. As I watched the dirt darken, moisture seeping in, I remembered a time when he was low, as low as he’d ever been and ever would be, or so I thought, and there was a storm during the night. I woke up, my hair wet from the rain coming through the open window, and he was standing there looking at me.

Go back to sleep, he said. He closed the window against the thrashing outside. 

He couldn’t get out of bed the next morning; he hadn’t gotten out of bed for days, but he got up that night because he was always the one who closed the windows when it stormed.

But no, I realized, I was wrong. He’d been well, he’d been himself in that memory. That was before. Whenever he sank down into his darkness, and now, having dissolved into it for good, he no longer went around closing windows during storms. He no longer kept the rain out.

One night I woke up cramping and bleeding and found I couldn’t even cry. Instead, I walked outside, my hands pressed against the warmth and wet between my legs. I looked up, up, up at the cloud-smeared night sky, and I screamed.

Something rustled in the bushes. I could have sworn I felt his hand on my neck—I knew that hand. It had been my home for so long, through the sunshine and the shade. If I lived here, I’d want to go on living. This is the place.

I kept at it in my doomed garden all summer long. Shoots popped up here and there, and I heaped them with water and praise and eventually wound up with some scrappy lettuces, a robust mint plant, tiny carrots, baby beets. I hadn’t had the courage to plant much else, though the blackberries thrived all on their own. I ate them day after day, straight off the bramble, sitting in the cool, cupped palm of the earth for hours on end.

Next summer, I thought, it would get easier. Next summer, I would try again, and I would do better.

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Hallie Knox is a memoir ghostwriter and community garden manager living in Boise, Idaho with her big-hearted husband, three formidable children, and a menagerie of fuzzballs. Her work has been accepted for publication by Literary Mama and Paper Plane Press.