The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,49

climbing the play structure in his backyard, and now Samantha was running after turban man. In his dream Scott began to laugh at their antics, and the laughter shook him out of the dream and into the light of day. “Whoa, that was wild,” Scott said out loud, but there was no one to hear him: Maureen was in the shower and the first light of morning was squeezing through the blinds. As he rose to get dressed, something caught his eye, a series of odd shapes squeezing through the narrow spaces between the blinds: a collection of green tubes and triangles, and some sort of brown cloud. What could it be?

He pulled open the blinds to a strange apparition that, for a few moments, seemed to be a continuation of one of the dreams he had been having. The succulent garden, lit from behind by the first rays of morning light, pulsated in turquoise. The ocotillo stood proud just a few yards from his window, the exotic barbs of its branches leaving Scott with a nagging sense of dislocation, as if he were standing in a place that was not his bedroom, looking through the window into a backyard that belonged to someone else. He searched his bedroom for the familiar visual clues that indicated this was indeed the same room he had gone to sleep in—the bed with its wooden frame, the faux-vintage windup clock, which actually ran on batteries—then looked back at the succulent garden again. He gawked at the plants a few seconds longer until the phrase his wife had uttered the night before suddenly popped into his head and put everything into its proper place: yes, she had said something about the garden, hadn’t she?

“Hey,” he said to Maureen a minute or so later, as she stepped back into the bedroom, dressed and with a towel wrapped around her head. “We’ve got a new garden.”

“Pretty awesome, isn’t it?” Maureen said with a muted cheerfulness that masked her anxiety.

“Uh, yeah. But it’s huge.”

“I think there’s twenty or so different species of plants.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And how did you get all that stuff in here?”

“The landscapers did it.”

“Landscapers?”

“From the nursery.”

“Didn’t that cost a lot of money?”

“Yeah, it cost a bit, but we talked about that,” Maureen said, draping the towel over the doorknob, leaving it for Araceli to pick up later.

“We did?”

“Yes.”

Maureen casually walked toward the door. “But we won’t have to work on it anymore,” she said. “In the long run we’ll save money … I have to check on the baby.”

She left Scott alone in the room with this information, and after a few moments he decided to file it away in the archive of unexpected and unexplainable things that happen to a guy when he gets married: like coming home to discover your new wife has tossed out your old clothes; or suffering her jealousy when, after ten years of marriage, the name of an old girlfriend of yours comes up; or her suddenly insisting one day that you no longer eat red meat, and then a week later coming home to find she has prepared you steak fajitas for dinner. So now we have a desert in our backyard. First she wanted a jungle, now she wants a desert. “In the long run well save money,” she says. Maybe we should dig up the front lawn and make that like the Mojave too. It must have taken a helluva lot of work to get that in here. How much could it cost? He should probably ask her, but was certain the question would provoke another argument. And it did look pretty, in a gnarly and harsh sort of way, once you got used to it.

The boys were in the pool and Maureen sat in a chair playing lifeguard, while at the same time making sure Samantha didn’t stray into the desert garden. As she rubbed sunscreen on the back of the baby’s neck, she studied the barrel cactus and told herself not to worry so much about it, even though the ankle-high fence that surrounded it wasn’t a barrier that could keep Samantha away. Already the boys had tossed a ball into the garden, though they were sufficiently put off by the menacing barbs of the plants not to wander inside. Overall, she was pleased with herself for having removed that dying tropical blight from her home and bringing this property back in concert with the desert.

“Araceli, we have a new garden,” Maureen said with a