Chapter 30 mono no aware
mono no aware
It rained the next three days.
A dreary blanket of gray crept over the gardens, eerily quiet and haunting.
There wasn’t much I could do in the gardens, so I went about in a raincoat, deadheading planter flowers and hopping over puddles, looking for the secret garden as thoroughly as I could.
Thankfully, the gray skies kept the door successfully hidden without golden hour.
I wasn’t sure how exactly to face Rus yet.
Only that, eventually, I needed to.
On the first morning, after wading through the water-logged grounds, I came into the manor’s kitchen to find Oliver at the table, having brewed a fresh pot of very, very strong coffee.
He looked like death incarnate, which sort of served him right for invading the Wharf last night.
I dug around for some toast, but as soon as I took the butter bread out of the pantry, he groaned sickly.
“No, please. I can’t look at food,” he begged.
“You need to eat something.”
“I will when I die,” he said, closing his eyes in long-suffering pain. Yes, I decided, very much like an unwanted brother. “Last night was a mistake.”
“Why were you out?” I asked, and he grumbled something under his breath, massaging the bridge of his nose as if it could somehow rub away the hangover behind his eyes. “I mean, not that you can’t be. It’s just …”
“You’ve never seen me drunk before?”
“I’ve never seen anyone that drunk before. You were practically sloshing,” I said, and he grumbled a laugh.
“I still feel sloshy.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and came to sit down at the kitchen table with him. “Is everything okay?”
He was quiet for a long moment, massaging his hangover, before he opened his eyes and turned his bloodshot gaze to me. “I don’t remember.”
“That’s a mood. Are you sure you don’t want some—oh, there you go.” I watched him rise up out of his chair and lurch toward the hall bathroom. He barely made it before he got sick. What on earth had prompted him to get that drunk?
I found out that afternoon when I stumbled on a RSVP response on the foyer table. It had been ripped open, as if in a hurry. I could only imagine that it was Oliver, and that after reading the RSVP, he’d grabbed his keys from the bowl he always put them in and left for town.
So while it hadn’t been my fault that he’d almost stripped to One Direction last night, I felt guilty all the same.
Because Cyrus Beck had responded.
I already knew he was coming, so I’d forgotten about his incoming RSVP altogether, but this just seemed to solidify the importance of finding that garden.
A simple, clean check mark in the “Will Attend” box.
Now there was a certain weight to it all.
He was coming. The train was barreling down the track.
And I had to do my part to divert it.
There were footsteps up on the second floor, so I quickly tucked the RSVP back into the envelope and returned it to the table, but it was just Juliette coming down the stairs.
I said, “You know, I was thinking—that band last night? At the Wharf?”
“Wykofski’s band?”
I nodded. “What about them for the party?”
Juliette paused halfway down the stairs. “I . . . hadn’t thought about it. They’re not, like, conventional.”
“Neither is Lilymoor,” I pointed out.
“And it would save me the trouble of finding a new quartet . . .” she mused, then turned around on the stairs again to go back up. “I’ll go ask Eula! Sunny, you’re a genius!”
No, if I were a genius, I’d know how to get Rus out of the garden. But as it was, I feared I was only making things worse.
At one point, it stopped raining just long enough for me to take a lap around the property before the bottom fell out again.
I could’ve darted for the main house, but everything I’d read about running in the rain said that you got more wet the faster you went, so I didn’t.
Besides, I was the kind of weirdo who liked walking in the rain.
The water was cool on my skin and slipped off my short hair.
Wykofski was sitting in a rocking chair on the veranda by the time I dragged my waterlogged self up the steps.
“Sunny! You’re a bit wet,” he said happily in greeting. “Feels good, eh?”
“My shoes don’t,” I replied, and sat in the rocking chair beside him. I peeled off my socks before my toes got pruny.
“Eh. I love it when it rains.” The old wooden chair creaked as he rocked in it back and forth. “I like the smell of it—it’s fresh, like nature’s laundry.”
I guessed that was one way to describe it. “It does smell good,” I admitted. I had hoped that the break in the clouds meant sunlight, but all I could see in the distance was dreary gray. We wouldn’t get more sunlight today.
He rocked a few more times, beginning to hum the Moonlight Sonata.
I turned to him with a thoughtful look. “You’ve been here awhile, right?”
“About eight years,” he confirmed.
I couldn’t believe I was asking this, but of all the people who worked here, I was sure Wykofski would be bothered the least by the question. “I know you weren’t around all those years ago, but did you ever stumble on a secret project of Henry’s? Maybe a garden he was working on before he died?”
His bushy brown eyebrows jerked high into the brim of his World’s Greatest Goose dad hat. “I always heard he left a lot of little things undone, kid. Nothin’ big comes to mind, though. Not that I can think, anyway, and most everything unfinished Eula either completed or erased.”
“Erased?”
“Ignored. You know, like the greenhouse. You stop talking about somethin’ long enough, you forget it was there.”
I wilted a little, wringing out my socks. “Right . . .”
“But, you know,” he went on, “this place . . . I don’t think it really forgets anything.”
We settled into silence as I dried my shoes, and he watched the rain. It was soothing, soft white noise. I hated it. My fingers itched to do something, to dig, to prune, to garden, so I could occupy myself. Rainy days cursed me with patience, and I was never very good at that—even as a gardener.
“Jules asked me to play at the bicentennial with the boys,” he said after a while. “I don’t suppose that was you, was it?”
I feigned ignorance. “She asked you to play at the party? That’s amazing! Are you going to do it?”
He laughed. “You’re no good at lying.”
I shrugged. “Practice makes perfect.”
Shaking his head with a grin, he looked back out over the garden. “You know, this is some great soup weather. I could break out my ma’s Italian wedding soup and warm us all up. What do you think?”
My stomach grumbled at the thought of food. “I have a TV dinner in the freezer . . .” I shivered as a particularly strong wind buffeted the veranda.
He shook his head. “Nah, you’re having my soup. It’ll warm you right up,” he said decisively, pushing himself to his feet.
“No, I really think I’ll just go back to—”
Wykofski was already turning toward the kitchen. “I think there’s some fresh carrots and cabbage from the garden, and some parsley—it’s going to be divine,” he added, kissing his fingertips, and shouted up the stairs asking if Eula wanted some soup for dinner.
Of course she did.
Oliver leaned over the balcony. “Who’s making it?”
Wykofski batted his eyes.
“You?”
“If you can strip to my music, you can eat to my food,” Wykofski announced, and disappeared to the kitchen.
Distantly, I heard Oliver echo, afraid and confused, “Strip …?”
At some point we’d have to tell him that he managed to get down to his underwear before Jules and I corralled him into my Jeep, but I didn’t think today was that day.
It would cost me nothing to leave for my cottage right now, close the door, and warm up a TV dinner anyway.
To keep my distance, since I’d already become dangerously close to everyone.
To remind myself that I was leaving, that I wasn’t a part of this place, that I shouldn’t be.
I’d only get myself hurt in the end. I didn’t want to hurt anymore.
But … it was still raining. And I was starting to get a little cold.
And . . .
Warm soup and good company sounded nice on an evening like this.
So I stayed. I told myself that I just debated so long that by the time Wykofski made the soup, it would’ve been rude to leave.
It made me feel a little better as the smell of warm Italian wedding soup filled the manor, along with fresh bread and finely grated Romano.
He was right, it did warm me right up. There really was nothing better than homemade food, Wykofski said as he brought the soup up to Eula, and we all ate in her bedroom.
He talked about his ma, and the big recipe book she left him.
“I’m only halfway through them, but I read slow,” he said as we ate.
Harrie used to make the best chicken noodle soup. It was the kind that could cure anything, but especially hangovers. I wished I’d gotten the recipe.
“It’s really good,” I told him, and he beamed.
“Not as good as my ma’s, but I’ll take the compliment, Sunny.”
When the sun finally came back out, it was for a brief and fleeting moment on the third day. The ground had become so saturated that the grass squelched under my galoshes as I trekked from the cottage to the main house and back again.
Raindrops glistened on the leaves, and the specks of blue sky reflected in the puddles like mirrors.
I was over near the vegetable garden, checking in on the watermelons that had ballooned over the last few days with all the water, and picked off a few tomatoes that had exploded out of their skin from all the rain.
The sun felt nice on my face, and the birds called to each other with their evening songs.
There was a crow being especially vocal somewhere near the Moon Bridge.
And then, shattering the reverie, came the sound of Oliver and Eula from an open window. Curious, I sat back on my heels and tilted my ear up toward the sound of their voices. I hadn’t heard Eula—or Oliver—so angry before.
“Lala, that’s not . . . you can’t walk the Hedges yet. You’re not well enough—”
“Says you!”
“Can you just stop for a minute? I want to talk to you about—”
Eula kept cutting him off. “Don’t forget to sign on the dotted line, dear. He said—”
Then Oliver exploded. “I don’t care what he said!” he cried, frustrated. “I don’t care about the inheritance. About the will, about whatever he thinks is going to be easiest.” He sounded frustrated. “I don’t care about this estate, about the money. I care about you.”
“I need to make sure Lilymoor is in good hands—”
“It’s just a place!” Oliver cried, aggravated. “Uncle Henry isn’t here anymore!”
“Yes, he is!”
I gathered my shears and my shovel, and I quickly left the kitchen garden before someone caught me listening.
Their frustration and hurt rattled me all the way back to the shed, where I poured myself a glass of Wykofski’s lemonade and drank it down.
Even that couldn’t wash away the sourness that had crept onto my tongue.
Because Oliver was right—Henry was no longer here, only the memory of him, but when you buried yourself in grief it was sometimes impossible to tell the difference between the wind and someone you missed so much you thought you could hear their voice.
But the truth was they were long, long gone.