Chapter 6 ciğerpare
ci?erpare
The groundskeeper’s cottage where I lived for the summer was on the far eastern side of the property.
It was a small one-bedroom, one-bath house nestled into the line of trees behind the abandoned Willow Grove, a part of the garden that Eula had closed off after a fire sixteen years ago.
I had to go slowly across the uneven gravel, even though the moon was bright and reflected silver across the pond.
Halfway to the cottage, my phone buzzed with a text.
It was my mom.
The weather looked beautiful there today!! she wrote. Compared to a sweltering Carolina summer, anything looked beautiful, but she had a fair point about Maine. Though she was texting because she wanted to check in, not really to comment on the weather.
I took my dirty tennis shoes off on the front porch of my cottage and pressed her number in my favorites as I unlocked the door. Mom answered in one ring, like she’d been haunting her phone. She probably was.
“You usually call me by now! I was getting worried,” she said. “I was just about to Find My Friends you, to make sure you hadn’t gone and slipped off a cliff.”
“I’m not going to slip off a cliff, Mom,” I replied, closing the door behind me and flipping on the lights, though I have thought about throwing myself from one.
The cottage sleepily blinked to life, the lights warm yellow and faintly humming.
When Eula first said that I could stay in the groundskeeper’s cottage while I was here, I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t want to take advantage of her hospitality, but then I saw the prices for apartments in the area and quickly swallowed my pride.
I wasn’t sure how Wykofski and Juliette afforded their places until I learned Juliette was subletting a room over a boathouse in town and Wykofski was living in a trailer out near the national park.
Yafir lived so far inland it negated the price.
The cottage, for the summer, was perfect.
Even though it was a bit drafty, with a smoky smell still lingering near the wood-burning stove even in July.
The furniture was perfectly lived-in, with a floral couch and a deep chair for reading, and a small kitchen with a two-burner range and a sink under the window, where crusty herbs hung from the light above.
There were plaid blankets and half-height bookshelves filled with botany and ecology texts, and others about law and architecture.
It was a hodgepodge collection, though Eula had said when she offered me the cottage that her nephews used to stay in it when they visited, so maybe they had something to do with it.
Down the hall, there was a petite mint-green bathroom with a claw-foot tub, and then a bedroom in the back with a double bed on a metal frame, a closet, and a chest of drawers.
It was cozy and warm, so much different from the soulless apartment I left in New York with the roommate who sometimes did his dishes, but most of the time just showered with his girlfriend and never cleaned hair out of the drain.
“Okay, yes, you’re probably right,” Mom admitted, “but I had a dream last night where you slipped off the cliffs, and you know how my brain works. It keeps replaying worst-case scenarios, and then some fisherman would find your body in three days half eaten by lobsters and I’d be beside myself with grief for the rest of my life … ”
“You really need to stop watching true crime documentaries before bed,” I told her, and she agreed with a sigh.
“They’re just so interesting, sprout. I feel I could’ve been a private eye in another life,” she lamented.
“You could’ve solved all the cold cases,” I agreed with a sigh. “Spied on all the cheating husbands. Found all the bodies tossed overboard from cruise ships.”
“Which is more than you’d think! But nursing paid so well …”
Horticulture never did, and I’d even taken a slight pay cut to come up to Maine for the summer.
In the ten years I’d interned for, and then worked for, the New York Botanical Garden, I’d barely managed a living wage.
I was thirty-two, with a roommate and student loans and too many credit cards in my name to even think about an actual vacation.
It was safe to say that I wasn’t quite where I thought I’d be by now.
To be honest, before taking this job, I had been contemplating turning in my resignation and moving home to North Carolina before Jeff could give me The Talk about my lacking work ethic these past few months, and before I had to admit that I .
. . couldn’t find it in me to care anymore.
What’s the point?, I kept thinking.
I didn’t know the answer to that anymore. I wasn’t sure I ever had.
In lieu of Jeff giving me The Talk, he suggested that I apply for this position and take the summer to think everything over. To find an answer.
“You have a gift,” he had told me. “Apply to Lilymoor. Help Mrs. Beck with her garden for the two hundredth anniversary and then decide. You’re one of my most reliable people. I’d hate for you to leave this career without giving it some serious thought.”
Mom had agreed that maybe a summer in Maine would revitalize me, like how sometimes you just needed to move a potted plant to a different window for the view. I wanted to argue that it was probably the amount of sunlight through the window that mattered, but what did I know—maybe it was the view.
I was at Lilymoor, after all, and a not-so-small part of me thought it was coincidental that this position came up just at the ten-year mark, as if Lilymoor had wanted to remind me of that promise.
So I’d applied, and I’d been chosen.
“How’s the garden coming? Ready for the bicentennial?” my mom asked.
I wish.
“I’m still looking for the vines,” I said, “and I hope I can find them before they choke out the entire hedge maze. And I still can’t figure out where the water’s coming from that’s making the wildflowers so damp.” I felt exhausted and frustrated just talking about it.
Never mind that weird garden, which I had to remind myself I shouldn’t worry about if I didn’t even remember where it was—no matter how unprofessional that sounded. There was only so much I could do, and Mom didn’t need to know about it, or else she’d be asking about the garden, too.
“And,” I added with a huff, “I met a really rude guy today. He was asleep and I woke him up because it was closing time, and he was just—argh! Even thinking about him makes me mad,” I added under my breath as I wandered into the kitchen for food.
“And he was hot. Which is just kind of insulting, you know?”
Mom barked a laugh. “You do have a type.”
“Regrettably,” I mumbled.
“Oh! Did I tell you that I ran into one of your old college friends the other day? She was the one who took a job up in Manitoba to study those fish.”
“They were beluga whales.”
“Yes, those! Apparently she’s back at Duke as a professor now, and she seems really happy. She asked me what you were up to, and she seemed excited that you were working at the NYBG—said it fit you.”
It did, once upon a time. I took a pitcher out of the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of water as I listened.
“She also said for you to call her once you’re back in the city.”
“Sure,” I replied noncommittally. Honestly, I couldn’t remember her name, and by the conversation, Mom clearly hadn’t asked it, either, or if she had, she’d already forgotten it.
Mom was never good at names—it took Harrie coming to stay with us during college breaks for Mom to remember hers, and by then Mom loved her as much as she did me.
Harrie wasn’t close to her parents like I was with Mom, and often jokingly asked if Mom was looking to adopt.
“And you don’t even have to worry about my health insurance,” she would say.
Mom, in no formal way, had in fact adopted her long before Harrie ever asked. Mom bought her Christmas sweaters with the rest of the family, and Mom included her in Drear family reunions, and she’d even made Harrie a bridesmaid at her wedding to my stepdad, Eddie.
And at the funeral, Mom had ordered the prettiest flowers. Of course she had. I’d helped her pick them out. Harrie’s fiancé cried over them, saying how I always knew the right flowers to get. It was the one thing I knew, the one language I was well-versed in.
Harrie collected untranslatable words, and I learned the language of flowers.
Roses for devotion, pink carnations and rosemary for remembrance, bluebells for kindness, zinnias for absent friends, red chrysanthemums for love, poppies for consolation, aloe for grief, arborvitae tufts for a steadfast friendship . . . butterfly weed to let one go.
I had taken out all the butterfly weed. Thrown it in the dumpster out back of the funeral home.
“And, who knows, maybe you two can reconnect. You never do anything in the city, so maybe she can be your wing-woman.”
“I’ll put it on the list of things to do once I get back,” I said, knowing that I never would, because I didn’t want to go into all the ways I didn’t want to reconnect with anyone who also knew Harriett.
They’d either know she was dead, or they’d ask where she was since we’d been attached at the hip all through college.
And I really didn’t want to talk about it.