The old linoleum was so polished that with every move, as she crossed and uncrossed her legs, it squeaked. The chill in the air made her shiver. She clutched her breasts. Nobody had touched them since Luke. She held her breath and counted. Exhaled long. Breathed again. One, two, three—

“Mrs. Bowen?” L knocked on the door and opened it a crack. “We need to retake one. Left side. The X-ray hasn’t turned out good enough to my eye. Sorry, but it has to be clear for the radiologist.” L was used to anxiety, but her chosen professional manner came in short sentences. “Don’t worry. Happens all the time. Doesn’t mean anything. These old machines.” She guided Iris back to the mammography unit. “We’re due for a digital machine next month. They get much better results.” L laid bare Iris’s left breast on the cold, black square. She sandwiched it with her clean hands and lowered the machine. As she squeezed down Iris thought of the word “mamma.” And with that came sudden fear. Nothing but cold white fear.

She waited again for L to view the result. Panic rising, she forced herself to picture her garden—her poppies, the ones she’d grown from seed that were looking gorgeous. Yes. Gorgeous. They absolutely were. And she thought, It takes many people to make a garden: those who dream it and those who create it. Without gardeners, flowers are like orphans …

“Mrs. Bowen, it’s all right now. You can get dressed.”

Iris let out a slow exhale and in her shiny black sandals and paper cape went down the corridor to get dressed.

When she reappeared in the X-ray room, L said, “The results will go to Dr. O’Reilly as soon as the radiologist has read them. Probably early next week. Sometimes … just sometimes … the radiologist will send them on to the consultant in the Breast Clinic in Limerick. But only if there is the slightest doubt.” L looked up from her clipboard long enough to break into her version of a reassuring smile.

In the long corridor with its tea-colored walls and hand-sanitizer dispensers, Iris passed a woman she recognized from the village where she lived but she cast her eyes down. She sensed the woman pause and lift a hand but Iris kept walking.

The day was warming up, with patches of blue appearing here and there, clearing from the west. Iris decided not to stop in town and instead head for home but first she texted Arthur: Ok. I’ll do it. She left out: And BTW fix your hair. You look ridiculous.

*   *   *

Because Iris was the kind of person who sometimes lacked patience, the minute she got home, without stopping to make herself a cup of tea, or check her post, or listen to phone messages, or feed her cat, she started on her first blog post.

A red-orange poppy, bright as an African sora, opens above a sea of green in the flower bed, shocking everything else in sight like some electrifying force. It clashes with the pink French rose.

A minor collision of color. Cerise digitalis towers beside delphiniums and red phormiums.

Butterflies hop from dying tulips to the fired-up flowers.

A lonesome dragonfly whirrs.

Iris stopped. It was awful. She needed to find a better voice. This one was pink, sickly pink, pink like a marshmallow sweet. She needed bloodred.

Poppies—they explode and crack open like popped champagne corks and spill out those red silky yolks, taking the gardener’s breath away. Watch, and within the hour they will unfurl into big fat cups and hold the twilight until morning. They can be sloppy though, those capricious ladies of the garden. After their garden appearance, they get, well … blowsy. Like women who have stayed out too late, they need to be escorted home.

Okay, better, she thought.

From the table where she sat she looked up and out across her garden—the wild garden she’d been cultivating under the inconstant sun of the west of Ireland for twenty-five years in Ashwood, the middle of the Clare countryside.

Cultivating wilderness, that’s what she’d been doing. And she’d given part of her soul to it. Beyond the high fuchsia hedges bordering the garden, the land was boggy and rush-laden—rushes tall as hazel rods and the earth full of clay, but inside, the sticky soil had become a rich loam. Seaweed, gathered off the rocks at Doughmore, and leaf mold, gathered from the ash and sycamore trees, and her own kitchen waste and garden clippings had turned the blue gley soil a healthy black, and yielded exotics like the rare lady slipper orchid. Three perennial borders sloped southward toward the unseen River Shannon.

A rose bed lined the eastern edge.

It was Luke who’d insisted on the rose bed because roses had meanings in his family. The Bowens, from Dublin, had their customs. You gave a rose when a child was born. You gave one on a significant anniversary: a fortieth birthday—a Just Joey, a fiftieth—a Gertrude Jekyll. You planted a rose in the name of someone who had died. Luke had taught her that.

Between the living and the dead, a rose, he’d said.

From that April day in 1987 when she and Luke first arrived—when initially it seemed only the brambles thrived—the wilderness had been tamed, season after season, into a garden that shone at night when the moon was out. The white anemones in late summer were like fallen stars.

Now in the last week of May, when the garden would have been at its peak in earlier years, the wilderness, always at the perimeter, was inching forward like some monster mollusk. Even the slugs brazenly slithered on the path in the middle of the day, not waiting for the cover of nightfall. A battle that Iris was losing.

She moved from her writing table in the sitting room to the kitchen and switched on the kettle. Waiting for it to boil, she inspected her hands and their unpainted nails half-lined with black earth. Her hands felt like claws, stiff and fixed. On the granite worktop she pushed them down hard, as if she could press them into a different shape, perhaps the hands of a long-fingered musician.

Her claw hands planted on the counter, she flattened them as best she could, bearing down upon them, pressing the hollow of her palms, and stretching and spreading her fingers. Supporting herself like this on the cold counter, she looked out through the near window. The blue clematis, Alice Fisk, flaunted herself across the wooden door of the stone cabin, her tangle of twisting vine holding it in place. (If Iris had clipped Alice back like she was supposed to, the door would have fallen into the drive.) How she loved that clematis. Gutsy, tenacious. A real beauty.

A breeze blew the starlike petals and scattered them across the drive. And behind the vine, through the now blistered black paint, the cabin door revealed sploshes of crimson. Ten years earlier Luke had painted it. It was spring. Their daughter was about eight or nine at the time and she’d pleaded with him to make it look just like the one in a photograph from one of her mother’s gardening magazines. She’d said, “Can’t we paint it red? Dadda? Look. Look, Dadda, how pretty it will look.” And she’d shown the photograph.

Luke agreed, as he always did, and together they’d painted it. He’d been pleased such a small thing could make her happy.

*   *   *

The phone rang. She let it, for a moment. Then, she released her hands from the counter and answered.

“How are you?”

“Tess…” Iris let out a sigh. “It’s you.”

“Yes, pet. It’s me. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“How did it go?”

“Not toooo bad.”

Neither of them spoke for a second. Then Tess continued, “Will I ring you back? You’re in the middle of something?”

“Sort of. Do you mind? It’s been a full-on day and—”

“Not at all.” Tess paused. “Iris?”

“What?”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

*   *   *

Tess was Iris’s best friend. They’d known each other ever since they’d struck up a conversation in a queue at the supermarket. That was ten years ago. In Tess’s shopping cart that day were several liters of low-fat organic milk and potatoes and cabbage and organic apples and flour and butter. “Dinner,” she’d said and smiled at Iris, who was holding three bars of baking chocolate and butter.