Open Door

      ONE

      We should have known when we grew the baby that things would turn out the way they did. earl and I, we never should have thought we could get away with having any kind of baby, never mind a giant baby like the one we grew out in the garden. We never had any luck. Not in that garden of ours, at least. We planted tomatoes, and they turned into pomegranates. We planted corn, but the ears split and bloomed into cabbage leaves. And the carrots, oh, the carrots. Down in the ground we dug, and up came some of the longest and thickest cucumbers we'd ever seen.

      Sometimes I forget that things aren't the same for other people as they are for Earl and me. Sometimes I even forget that there are other people out there, that they exist. People who plant one thing and grow another. People who have no interest in seeds or don't even have a garden. I forget that there is anyone but earl and me now that the giant baby is gone. he was the one thing we grew that we had hope for.

      It wasn't that we didn't love the giant baby or think of him as ours, as belonging to us. he didn't grow inside me, the way most babies grow inside their mothers, but this is a new world we live in. Some babies grow in dishes in labs, and some in the bellies of other women who then give the baby they've grown to its mother. There are all kinds of ways that babies grow, and so what if the way we grew ours wasn't what you'd call “conventional”?

       So what?

      So what, we said, Earl and I. Who would possibly care that our baby was not grown inside a woman, but in the garden where we planted him?

      He grew in our yard near the raspberries that turned into radishes and the orange tree that collapsed under the weight of the pumpkins that sprouted among the leaves. Who would possibly care what we did in the privacy of our own yard? Who was anyone to say that what we did was wrong?

      We grew the baby in the yard. We grew him, Earl and I, and we loved him—I think we really did—like he was ours because he was ours.

      Until he wasn't anymore.

      TWO

      It all started with the toes.

      But I should explain. I have some explaining to do, just like Ricky used to say to Lucy on the old I Love Lucy show when Lucy got busted (always) for trying to find herself a part in one of Ricky's cabaret shows where he sang the “Babalu.” That Lucy, always getting caught with fruit piled on her head or grapes between her toes, trying to wind her way onstage with Ricky. And he caught her every time, and would say in that accent of his that she had some “'splaining to do.” But I didn't understand what there was to explain. Why didn't Ricky get it? All Lucy ever wanted was more time with Ricky.

      Earl and I were like Lucy and Ricky in that way, I guess. We were always trying to be together more, or more together somehow. I'd fallen in love with Earl the minute I'd heard his name.

      “The name's Earl,” he said to me that day at the vegetable stand, when he reached for a carton of cherry tomatoes at the same second I did. I looked down at his hand on top of mine, our two hands both covering the redness of the cherry tomatoes, and I blushed in a way I hadn't blushed for years.

      “Earl,” I said. “Earl.”

      I repeated the name to him as if I weren't sure I'd heard him right. I remember letting the name rest in my mouth as if I were tasting it. You don't meet many men named Earl anymore. I'd always wanted to meet a man named Earl, though I hadn't known it until the second he'd introduced himself. Earl, I thought, such a solid name. The kind of name you could count on. What had happened to all the solid names of the past? Short bursts of men's names like Chuck or Ed or Burt. Or Earl.

      I said to myself as I took the little basket of cherry tomatoes he handed to me, I'm going to fall in love with a man named Earl and grow a whole life with him someday.

      And that's just how it happened. We left that vegetable stand and have been together ever since. Even when Earl had to be away from me to work at the lumber yard, I could still feel him inside of me. I thought of that feeling as the “Essence of Earl,” and it was that feeling that we brought to the house we built and to the garden we grew together. Sometimes I thought that if I could open Earl up and climb my way inside of him and stay in there, in the innards of Earl, I would. At night when we slept, I'd curl up next to Earl and press my face into his back and whisper to myself, Oh, sweet Essence of Earl, let me get inside.

      And Earl would press his back harder against me, as if he could feel it, too, and wanted me in there, the two of us folded over each other, skin over skin and bone to bone, muscle and heart and blood that pumped.

      But that was before everything happened, when we were just Earl and Linda and no one else.

      Earl had gone to the garden that day without me, the way he sometimes would after he was fired from the lumberyard. Poor Earl had sold the wrong kind of wood to a couple who built a deck that collapsed after a party. A highly intoxicated and obese man had done a cannonball into the pool that the deck surrounded. There had been a lawsuit. The man—whom the lawyers always called obese instead of huge or fat and intoxicated instead of drunk—had splinters in places that splinters are never meant to prick through, Earl reported to me on the day he was let go.

      “The boss just looked at me and said, ‘Damn it, Earl, if you don't know the difference between cedar and untreated pine by now, may God save your sorry soul,’” Earl said as we stood at the window that overlooked the backyard. We stared out at the broken pumpkin tree.

      I told him that, to my mind, no obese drunken man should attempt a cannonball without thinking of the consequences beforehand.

      “Splinters or no splinters, that's just downright irresponsible,” I said, and Earl pulled me closer and pressed his nose into my hair.

      “Oh, Linda,” he said,