Chapter 8 waldeinsamkeit
waldeinsamkeit
I grabbed my shovel and headed for the Hedges to see if I could find those damn vines.
Morning was bright, and the birds were screaming, and I had a job to do.
I decided to put the door out of my mind until I found it again—because I woke up this morning realizing that I hadn’t imagined it.
The garden, and the man inside of it, had been too real.
I’d just . . . lost it. Temporarily. So I went about finding something real, something I could actually wrap my hands around and yank out by the roots.
I had a bachelor’s in science, gosh darn it.
So, with said grueling four-year degree and ten years of hard-won experience, I got down on my hands and knees in the dirt to look under the hedges—
And came face-to-face with the beady, soulless eyes of a Canada goose.
She stared at me with those pitiless, flat eyes.
I stared back.
I read somewhere that you could assert dominance over a tiger by refusing to be the one to blink first, but geese were not tigers.
And I think the information had been wrong, anyway.
Damnit snapped at me. I jumped to my feet, grabbed my shovel, and took off running down the maze. The goose wiggled through the hedge, spread her wings, and followed like a raptor hunting for sport.
Now I was a degree-toting horticulturist with a fellowship in environmental sciences running for her life from an angry three-foot dinosaur.
Two things became very apparent to me then. One was that I really wasn’t getting paid enough for this. And the second was that only one thing could stop Damnit:
Stairs.
So I made a break for the manor, out through the maze to the Central Garden and toward the veranda. Lilymoor had yet to open for the day and the daycare had yet to arrive, thank god, so at least there weren’t any witnesses as I bolted up the stairs two at a time.
Damnit had made her distaste for me known immediately my first day on the job, when I was rescued by Juliette.
At first I had wondered why that was the goose’s name, but I quickly learned that it fit her well.
Ever since then, Damnit has had a vendetta against me the likes of which even Wykofski marveled at.
Apparently she’d never displayed such immediate vitriol to a new person.
Lucky me.
But at least Damnit’s kryptonite was a decent set of stairs.
I came to a stop at the top of the veranda, winded, as the goose stopped at the bottom. She ragehissed from below, thwarted.
“Ha!” I cried. “Not so tough now, are you? I have the high ground!”
After a minute, the goose got bored with trying to figure out the steps and padded away to go get her breakfast. Wykofski was probably putting out her food. If there was one thing that sated Damnit’s hunger for chaos, it was premium goose feed.
“Oh, Sophie, dear, you’re just the person I wanted to see.”
With a start, I whirled around to find Eula sitting in one of the rocking chairs on the veranda with a cup of tea. She smiled at me and motioned to the chair beside her. My heart was still racing from the goose, and sitting down seemed like a good idea, so I took her up on her offer.
She said, “The goose seems to have taken an interest in you.”
“Something like that,” I replied, pulling off my sun hat as I sat down.
“You can’t mind her—she’s a bit different.
You know, my nephew Cyrus saved her when she was a little thing.
She got separated from her family and he hid her in the shed and fed her table scraps, thinking we wouldn’t notice.
” There was a mischievous glimmer in her eyes.
“I left out extra table scraps, obviously.”
“Well, I wish she’d stop thinking I was table scraps,” I lamented with a huff, and she cackled a laugh.
“Before you it was poor Jules, dear! The goose doesn’t pick favorites; she just has a short-term memory.”
That, at least, made me feel a little better.
Patiently, Eula rocked back and forth and sipped on her tea, looking out onto the peaceful garden.
It was eerily still, the bugs too loud and the wind moaning over the cliffs.
I could see how people thought they could hear voices on that wind.
Sometimes, when a particularly strong gust roared up from the cliffs and rattled the boxwoods, it almost sounded like someone calling out for a friend.
Almost.
“Dear, I’ve had something on my mind,” she said after a moment. I glanced over to her as she set her teacup down on the saucer on the side table. “I’ve been thinking about the garden you asked me about yesterday.”
My heart skipped. Did she remember, finally? I sat up a little straighter in the rocking chair. “You have?”
“Yes. I’m afraid I felt I was rather dismissive to you about it all.
You see, it’s a bit of a sore subject, in my regard.
Henry was always working on things, all the way up until he died,” she said, touching her necklace thoughtfully.
“So I imagine you probably stumbled upon one of his half-finished projects. He had a lot of them. I’m sure you’ll find even more. ”
“Oh. That … certainly explains it, I guess,” I replied, even though the garden hadn’t looked abandoned for very long. Maybe I was just mistaken. “I’m sorry if I caused you any pain bringing it up—”
She quicky snatched her hand from her necklace.
“Oh, of course not, dear! Don’t think anything of it.
” She leaned over to pat me on the knee.
“But also don’t worry about fixing it up.
You have much too much to worry about, anyway.
Though, that reminds me, my lawyer sent over an amended contract for you.
It’s back there on the table.” She motioned behind her to a packet on the sideboard flush against the veranda wall.
“It now includes some flowery language about my retirement as well as the bicentennial.” She waved her hand in the air.
“All this legal nonsense makes my head hurt.”
I pushed myself to my feet, slipping my sun hat back on, and went over to the new contract. There was a pen placed atop a folder, along with—
A stem of lilacs?
I brought the tiny light purple flowers to my nose to smell.
Their scent was soft and sweet, like jasmine and almonds combined.
Lilacs were the language of old love. Syringa vulgaris, funnily enough.
I twirled the stem between my thumb and first finger as I flipped through the amended contract, the changes in bold.
They just cited Eula’s retirement and—more interestingly—that if any new work arose I would be paid accordingly.
I wasn’t sure what else I could be asked to work on, so I took up the heavy pen and signed at the bottom.
“Did your lawyer go out and pick this from the garden?” I asked, coming back around with the stem of lilacs. “I thought our lilacs had already bloomed.”
And now were, tragically, in the damp part of the Wild-flower Garden.
“Oh no, he sent those,” she replied. “I asked him what would fit well in a bouquet, but I really don’t think purple is the mood.
” Why would she ask a lawyer about flowers?
I decided not to keep up with Eula’s reasoning.
“But speaking of lilacs,” she went on, “Wykofski told me you’ve been having issues with the wildflowers, too? Something about a leaky pipe?”
I let myself think for a moment longer, twirling the lilac between my fingers. “I’m not sure what it is, actually. Wykofski said there weren’t any pipes under that part of the Wild-flower Garden, so I have no idea what’s making the beds so soggy. Has it always been like that?”
“No, it hasn’t,” she replied severely. “It only started flooding recently, and never when it rained.”
“That’s what I was going to ask,” I muttered thoughtfully. “There could be a spring below the beds, but when I dug, it didn’t look like the water was coming up. Sort of over. Seeping from the wall.”
“The stone wall that faces the Willow Grove?” When I nodded, her eyes narrowed. “Ah.”
“Is there anything between that wall and the Grove?”
“No,” she replied, “there’s nothing there.”
“Well, it’s a puzzle. I should probably get to solving it—and the vines, before they choke out the entire hedge maze,” I added.
She shook her head. “I fear I’ve put too much pressure on you.”
“I don’t mind. There’s always an explanation.
I just have to find it,” I said, pushing myself to my feet.
My heart rate had gone back to normal, and I needed to at least get some of my daily chores done before I tried to solve the impossible.
I adjusted my sun hat to block the light and said I’d see her later.
“Good luck, dear!” she called after me as I left down the stairs, dodging the construction of a chair lift, because if Eula was anything, she was impossible to keep contained. And if stairs couldn’t stop her, I wouldn’t let a few vines and a flooded flower bed stop me, either.
That afternoon, I twirled the lilac between my fingers as I headed back toward the Wildflower Garden.
Sunlight spilled yellows and oranges across the blooms like a wave of paint, warm and bright.
The wind shifted, so strong it attempted to pluck my sun hat off.
It creaked and cracked through the branches, whispering softly.
There was the smell of brine and fish in the air, along with the heavy scent of rain.
A summer storm must have been creeping up the coast, though I didn’t hear any thunder yet.
The year Harrie and I visited, she mused about what it would be like to be here when a storm rolled in.
She said it was probably beautiful and terrifying.
Everywhere I turned, there were memories of her.
In the Hedges, in the Spiral, in the Lily Walk.
We’d only been here for a single afternoon, but the memories were so vivid, they seemed to have multiplied over the years.
At first, coming here, I thought it would be awful to have so much of Harrie everywhere I turned, but at least it didn’t remind me of the Harrie from the hospital.
Pale, and weak, and tired, hooked up to IVs and heart monitors and oxygen masks.
Long before the end, we knew the chemo wasn’t going to work fast enough to save her, even as she tried anyway.
“A saltshaker,” she had announced. “I’ll put myself in a saltshaker so you can season the earth with my corpse when I’m gone.”
“Harrie!” I’d admonished in a hushed tone, glancing around the room, though the door was closed so the nurses couldn’t hear. “You can’t say that!”
“Why not? It’s my body,” she rasped, “my choice.”
I rolled my eyes. “The flowers would die. I’d have to lower the pH and sodium levels. It’d be a pain.”
She smiled, though it was tired. She had become so, so tired over the last few weeks. “There’s that plant biology degree coming out.”
“Ha.”
“Hmm. If not a saltshaker, then what?” she went on, lounging back in her bed. She was all skin and bones by then, her hair short and fuzzy. I missed her pigtail braids. “What would you want me in? A locket? A bracelet?”
“Something that I can talk to,” I said, staring down at her bruised hands instead, “so I can tell you how much of an idiot you are.”
“I’m never an idiot. I’m always right,” she said smartly. “I’ll think of something. And you’ll have to promise me you’ll take me everywhere you go.”
“Harrie.”
“Promise?”
No, I wanted to reply, because you’re not going anywhere. But we both knew, deep down, that she was. She was going somewhere I couldn’t reach. “Fine,” I forced out, the word tasting like the air smelled—disinfected and sterile. “I promise.”
She’d giggled, the bitch, and I should’ve known then she was plotting one final grand scheme. For a romantic, she definitely saddled me with something utterly ridiculous in the end. No locket, no earrings, no beautiful vial of gray dust—
No.
Best friends were never so poetic.
Behind me, something rattled.
Startled, I looked over my shoulder. There was only the outside of the Hedges.
Another gust of wind cut through the wildflowers, plucking up petals and spinning them up into the sky—along with my sun hat. I gasped, trying to catch it, but my hat flew up into the sky and disappeared behind the far stone wall of the garden.
A wall that had a door tucked into it.
A blue door.
Like winter frost across a windowpane, a chill crept down my spine. There it was, exactly where it shouldn’t have been. For a second I thought that maybe I was mistaken, but it was the same rusted door handle. The same soft blue paint. The same door. The one that was supposed to be in the Hedges.
It shouldn’t be, I told myself, even as I crossed the flowers to it and settled my hand on the door handle.
It couldn’t be, I revised as the door slid open.
It can’t be, I thought as I pushed it wide.