Praying for Sleep

floribunda are complicated.
    This is a twentieth-century rose plant, and the one that Lis Atcheson now trimmed, a shockingly white Iceberg, was a hearty specimen that spilled in profusion into the entryway of her greenhouse. Visitors often admired the blossoms and if she was to enter it in competition she was confident that it would be a blue-ribbon rose.
    Today, as she cut back the shoots, she wore a dress that was patterned in dark-green paisley, the shade of a lizard at midnight. The dress was appropriately somber but it wasn’t black; she was on her way to a sentencing hearing, not a funeral.
    Although the results would make her a widow of sorts, Lis was not in mourning.
    Against his lawyer’s recommendation Owen rejected a plea bargain—even after Dorothy turned state’s witness in exchange for a manslaughter charge. Owen insisted that he could beat the rap by pleading insanity. An expert witness, a psychiatrist, took the stand and in a long-winded monologue characterized Owen as a pure sociopath. This diagnosis, however, apparently didn’t have the same allure to juries that Michael’s illness did. After a lengthy trial Owen was convicted of first-degree murder on the first ballot.
    Last week Lis signed the contract to purchase Langdell’s Nursery and that same day she gave notice to the high school; at the end of the spring semester her twelve-year bout as an English teacher would officially end.
    Surprising her older sister, Portia had asked for the nursery’s P&L statements and balance sheet, which she’d then shown to her current boyfriend—Eric or Edward, Lis couldn’t recall. An investment banker, he’d seemed impressed with the company and recommended that Portia buy into the deal while she still could. The young woman had spent several days considering the proposition then waffled in a big way and declared that she wanted more time to think about it. She’d promised Lis an answer when she returned from the Caribbean, where she planned to spend February and March.
    Portia had spent the night and would be accompanying Lis to the hearing today. Following Owen’s arrest, the young woman had stayed for three weeks in the Ridgeton house, helping Lis clean and repair. But a week after the indictments were handed up, Lis decided that she wanted to be on her own again and insisted that her sister return to New York. At the train station Portia suddenly turned to her. “Listen, why don’t you move into the co-op with me?” Lis was touched by the offer although it was clear that the majority of Portia’s heart voted against it.
    But the city was hardly for Lis and she declined.
    Cranking closed the upper vanes of the greenhouse today, shutting out the winter air, Lis had this thought: We face death in many ways and most are hardly as dramatic as finding the ghosts of our dead ancestors in greenhouses or learning that it’s your husband who’s traveled miles to slice your thin throat as you lie drowsing in bed. Reflecting on these subtler confrontations with mortality, Lis thought of her sister and she understood that Portia wasn’t being perverse or cruel all those long years of separation. Nothing so premeditated as that. There was a simpler point to her escape from the family: she did what she had to.
    Too many willow switches, too many lectures, too many still-as-death Sunday dinners.
    And who knew? Maybe old man L’Auberget changed his tune after Lis’s fateful swimming lesson, and climbed into the sack with Portia when she was twelve or thirteen. She, after all, was the pretty one.
    There was a time when this thought would have been madness and seething heresy. But madness had since come to roost in Lis’s own backyard and if the night of the storm—the delicate euphemism the sisters had settled upon—taught her anything it was that there are only real two heresies: lies and our willing acceptance of them.
    Trenton Heck would also be at the hearing today. He had an interest in this case beyond justice. Before being removed as director of Marsden hospital by the Department of Mental Health, Dr. Ronald Adler had reneged on the reward Heck felt he was due. Adler’s successor could find no moral, let alone legal, reason to pay over the money, which Adler apparently had no authority to pledge in the first place. And so with a certain reluctant desperation Heck sued Owen for shooting him in the back.
    The insurance company wouldn’t pay off for such malfeasance and Heck was horrified to