Bitter Leaves, Bitter Hearts

The first dead bush was a wedding gift. I remember kneeling in the wet earth the morning after our ceremony, Cal's grandmother's trowel in my hand, planting the cultivar that would carry our name. Camellia sinensis, the varietal known as Golden Needle. The old woman had pressed the root ball into my palms with papery fingers and said, "This land has been in the family for four generations. You'll be the fifth." That was three years ago. Now I stood at the edge of the eastern terrace with my breath fogging in the cold, staring at eleven skeletal shrubs that had turned brown overnight. Not overnight. Nothing in farming happens overnight. That was the first lie I'd told myself. The frost had come early this year, a hard freeze that rolled down from the coastal range and settled into the valley like a held breath. It should have killed everything. Instead, it had been selective, almost surgical. The Golden Needle varietals were gone, their leaves curled inward like small fists. But the hardier Assam bushes twenty feet downhill? Untouched. "You're up early." Cal's voice came from behind me, rough with sleep. I didn't turn around. "The eastern block is dead." "I saw." He stepped up beside me, close enough that I could smell the woodsmoke from the cottage, the coffee he must have poured before coming to find me. His hand settled on the small of my back. "We'll replant in spring. Golden Needle takes two years to establish, but we have the greenhouse stock--" "Eleven bushes, Cal." I finally looked at him. His jaw was shadowed with stubble, his dark hair standing up on one side. He was handsome in the way that still made me stupid if I wasn't careful. "Every single one of them. The frost didn't touch anything else." "The eastern terrace gets the wind. You know that." "The eastern terrace has a windbreak. Your father built it before we were married." Something flickered behind his eyes. It was there and gone before I could name it. He pulled his hand back and shoved it into his coat pocket. "Maybe the windbreak failed. We'll check it after breakfast." He turned toward the cottage, then stopped. "Mia wants to come by this afternoon. She has some ideas about the spring planting." His sister. Of course. "I'll be in the greenhouse," I said. The greenhouse was the only place on the property that still felt like mine. Six hundred square feet of glass and steel, humid and warm and smelling of damp soil. I had built it with my own hands the first summer, back when Cal still looked at me like I was the answer to a question he hadn't known he was asking. I spent the morning taking soil samples from each dead bush, labeling them with date and location, sealing them in separate bags. My hands knew the work without my brain having to think about it. That was a gift from my mother, who had taught me to read the land before I could read a book. She'd grown roses in the backyard of our apartment in Sacramento, coaxing color out of cracked clay and exhaust fumes. She used to say that plants didn't lie. They told you exactly what was wrong if you knew how to listen. The soil from the eastern terrace felt wrong in my fingers. Too alkaline. Chalky when it should have been loamy and dark. I sealed the last bag and set it on the workbench, then stared at the neat row of samples for a long time. Cal found me there an hour later. He was wearing the sweater I'd knitted him for Christmas, the one that was supposed to be dark green but had come out slightly gray. He'd never once complained about it. "Still out here?" He leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. "You missed breakfast." "I'm not hungry." "Marlowe." His voice softened. "It's eleven bushes. We have four hundred more. We'll be fine." I looked at him. Really looked. The lines around his eyes had deepened over the past year, but his smile was still easy, still warm. That smile had convinced me to leave my job at the university, to sell my half of the apartment in the city, to sink everything I had into this hillside and his family name. "The soil's alkaline," I said. "It shouldn't be. We've been mulching with pine needles for three years." "The rain. We had that dry spell in August." "Dry spells don't make soil alkaline." He uncrossed his arms and walked toward me, his boots loud on the concrete floor. When he reached me, he took my hands, soil and all, and held them against his chest. "You're exhausted. You've been working nonstop since the harvest." He pressed his lips to my forehead. "Let me handle this. I'll send samples to the lab in town, get a proper analysis. You focus on the new cultivars. That's what you're good at." That's what you're good at. It sounded like a compliment. It always did. "Fine," I said. "Send them." I let him take the samples. All of them. He slid them into a canvas bag and kissed me again, and I went back to the greenhouse and spent the afternoon propagating rootstock that wouldn't be ready for another eighteen months, because that was what I was good at. Mia arrived at three o'clock, her compact car crunching up the gravel drive like she was doing us a favor just by showing up. She was two years younger than Cal and had the same dark eyes, the same easy charm. She also had a trust fund from their grandmother that paid for her apartment in the city, her wardrobe, her "consulting business," which consisted of telling other people how to spend their money. I watched her from the greenhouse window as she hugged Cal, kissed his cheek, laughed at something he said. Then she looked toward the greenhouse, and her smile changed. It got sharper. She found me in the packing shed, where I was sorting through last year's harvest records. "Adeline." She never called me by my actual name. It was always Adeline, full and formal, like she was addressing a particularly slow student. "Cal tells me you lost some plants." "Frost." "Terrible luck." She perched on the edge of a worktable, crossing her ankles. She was wearing cream-colored trousers that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. "But it's early in the season. You'll have time to recover." "We'll see." She picked up one of the harvest logs, flipping through it with casual disinterest. "Cal says you're doing soil tests. Smart. Though I have to wonder..." She set the log down and looked at me. "Is this really the best use of your time? You were a botanist, right? Before?" "I have a doctorate in plant pathology." "Right, right. So you know all about this stuff." She waved a hand at the hillside. "But the business side, the marketing, the relationships with the distributors... that's always been Cal's strength. Maybe you should let him handle the science too." I set down my pen. "What are you actually here for, Mia?" She smiled. It was Cal's smile, but wrong. Hungrier. "Just checking in. Family does that." She slid off the table and smoothed her trousers. "I worry about him, you know. He's been carrying a lot. This place hasn't turned a profit in two years. Grandmother's trust only covers so much." "Your grandmother's trust belongs to Cal." "Does it?" She tilted her head. "The terms are... complicated. I'm sure he's told you." He hadn't. But I wasn't about to admit that to her. "I know exactly what the terms are," I said. Mia laughed. It was a bright, brittle sound. "Of course you do." She started toward the door, then paused. "Oh, Adeline? I heard from a friend at the state agriculture board. There's a blight going around the coastal tea growers. Something new. They're calling it root rot, but it presents as alkaline soil. Interesting, isn't it?" She left before I could respond. I sat in the packing shed for a long time after her car disappeared down the drive. Root rot. Alkaline soil. Eleven dead bushes in a pattern that followed no natural wind or frost line. That night, I waited until Cal was asleep. Then I went out to the eastern terrace with a flashlight and a pickaxe, and I started digging. Two feet down, beneath the root ball of the first dead bush, I found the plastic bag. It was small, the kind you use for soil amendments, and it was filled with a white powder that smelled faintly of lime. Quicklime. You could buy it at any garden center. It would leach into the soil, raise the pH, burn the roots from below. It would look exactly like frost damage to anyone who didn't know what they were looking at. I sat back on my heels, the bag in my hand, and stared at the cottage where my husband was sleeping. The windows were dark. The chimney was cold. I had one clear thought: I needed to know who had done this before I could decide what to do about it. I put the bag in my coat pocket and filled the hole back in. Then I went inside, washed my hands, and climbed into bed beside Cal. He stirred when I settled in, reaching for me without opening his eyes. "Cold," he murmured. "I know," I said. "Go back to sleep." He did. I lay awake until dawn, listening to him breathe, and by the time the sun rose, I had made a decision. I wasn't going to confront him. Not yet. I was going to gather evidence until I knew exactly how deep the betrayal went. Because I had another secret. One I hadn't told anyone, not even Cal. The soil samples he'd taken to town weren't the only ones I'd collected. Hidden in the greenhouse, under a loose floorboard beneath my workbench, I had eleven more bags of soil from those dead bushes, plus a smaller bag containing the quicklime I'd found. If Cal was behind this, I would prove it. And then I would destroy him.