Natural Causes

Description

Her husbands keep dying of perfectly ordinary things. So do her neighbors’ husbands, and her friends’ — the cruel ones, the ones who hit, the ones the law never touched. She grows the cure for all of them in her own back garden.

In a tidy cul-de-sac where everyone waves and no one tells, the women have a quiet problem and a quieter solution. Hospice nurse Calla Brennan moves in next door to a woman with the most beautiful garden on the street and a string of expired husbands in her past, and at first Calla only admires the roses. Then a man two doors down — a man whose wife flinches — dies of a heart that simply stopped, and Calla, who knows what dying looks like up close, sees the wrongness under the wellness.

The deaths are flawless. Foxglove. Oleander. Things that grow pretty in the sun and read as natural causes on every certificate, administered by a hand that’s been perfecting the art for years and teaching it, plant by plant, to a small circle of grateful neighbors. Calla could report what she suspects. She could move. But she has her own bruised history, and a husband who’s started to remind her of the men in the obituaries, and the woman next door has just offered her a cutting for her own garden. She takes it.

Domestic gothic horror grown in the suburbs, this one finds dread in the well-tended garden and complicity in the quiet street. The fear is how easy it would be — and how much you’d understand it.

Take the cutting. See what blooms.