Chapter 42 duende
duende
I stood in front of the wall of honeysuckles, in the middle of the Central Garden, and said, “I’m very sorry,” to the garden itself.
Then I heaved up the sledgehammer and slammed it against the wall.
Then again. And again. The stones began to crumble back.
I had written off the space in the middle of the Central Garden as just shrubbery.
The map said there was a filledin pond behind it, back before Henry dug the Reservoir.
Maybe there was nothing on the other side.
Maybe there was a sink-hole. Weeds. Nothing.
But maybe . . .
Just maybe . . .
Maybe there was a door.
I would tear down this wall, stone by stone if I had to.
Lilymoor had always been strange. It always had a mind of its own.
Misplaced shovels, flooding flower beds, whispers on the wind.
Moving roots and angry geese and flowers that bloomed in strange seasons.
And those vines—always those strange honeysuckle vines—that I thought were a nuisance but in the end turned out to be leading me to what I was looking for.
Who was to say that all this time, Lilymoor hadn’t been trying to get someone to find this garden that Henry had started but never finished?
It was hard to talk about the people we lost—I knew that better than most. I put up walls so high it was impossible to scale them. I thought that if I kept my hurt, if I lived in it, then some part of Harrie would live on, too.
But I was wrong, because keeping her locked tight would ensure that she died with me, and she deserved so much more.
Like vines, like weeds, like dandelion tufts, Harrie couldn’t be contained even if she wanted to.
Love never should be. She deserved for everyone to know about her laugh, and her book of untranslatable words, and her favorite flowers, and her hopes and her dreams. She deserved stories told about her, she deserved to have her name come up in casual conversation, sparking her back to life with each new person who met her memories.
She deserved life after life after life, over and over and over again—
We all did.
Henry deserved it, too. He deserved people to walk into his beautiful gardens, and he deserved to be seen for all of the ideas he never finished, all of the projects left half formed in the dirt.
Because every bit of this, every memory, every unfinished sentence, every forgotten garden, told our stories.
Over and over and over again.
And I wanted to tell all of my stories to Rus. I wanted to share them all with him, all of the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that made me feel foolish, and the ones that made me feel loved.
He saw me like few other people did and I didn’t understand why or how—but I knew that my heart beat loud and bright and I was terrified.
But some things were worth the fall.
I didn’t want Cyrus stuck in an endless summer afternoon. I wanted to see him at midnight. I wanted to see him at dawn. I wanted to spend afternoon winters with him and summer nights and Christmases and birthdays—
I wanted to waste so much time with him, it hurt to think of it all. I wanted to keep making memories. I wanted to keep making mistakes. I wanted to keep trying.
I wanted to try so damn hard.
With one final cry, I slammed the sledgehammer into the stone, and the wall crumbled inward. Breathing heavy, I stepped over the rubble and pressed my hand against the worn and familiar blue door.
It was locked, but I dug into my dress pocket for the key.
I fumbled with it, and inserted it into the rusted lock. My hands were shaking as I turned the key.
There was a click.
And the door yawned open wide.
On the other side, there were weeds, and snarling honey-suckle vines, and half-dug flower beds.
My heart sank as I stepped inside. In the twilight, without magic hour to make it look warm and lived-in, the Someday Garden looked forgotten.
All of Rus’s hard work—all the hours we spent planting and pruning and planning—was nothing but weeds and over-growth.
And I realized … I had looked at this abandoned landscape before.
I had peeked over one of the brick walls in the Central Garden, and seen nothing but a thicket of underbrush and slashed it off the map.
My heart hammered in my throat, making me sick with dread. Where was Rus?
Tears burned in my eyes. I tried to catch my breath as I stumbled into the garden. It was here the whole time. It just didn’t look like what I had imagined. There were no flowers, no gazebo, no willow—that was the biggest missing piece. There was no tree, no swing, no—
“Cyrus?” I called, my voice breaking. But there was no answer.
The brambles crunched under my tennis shoes as I picked my way through the garden. Where the willow once was, there was now a thicket of honeysuckles, flowering yellows and oranges that looked like evening light, and in the middle of those vines was Cyrus Beck.
Rus lay asleep, bright yellow honeysuckles blooming around him in a halo, the vine ends twisting along his limbs. He was on his side, head on one outstretched arm, curls of coppery hair fallen across his face. I called his name again as I sank to my knees, pushing his hair out of his face.
“Rus?” I called, hopeful and hesitant.
He woke up, slowly, like a sunrise. Blearily, he blinked away the drowsiness, disheveled and disoriented.
I brushed my fingers across his cheek, and his gaze drifted up to mine.
His eyes were the color of storms at sea, a deep and sinking blue.
They softened with familiarity. An hour ago, he had looked like a completely different man.
“You found me,” he whispered, voice slurring with sleep, as he reached up and held my cheek.
I clutched his hand holding my face. Savoring how warm his fingers felt. How solid. How real. I’d kept my promise.
I drank him in, drenched in the beginnings of night. I’d never seen him in this light before, and I didn’t believe I could possibly think he was any more handsome than he had been a moment before.
“I found you,” I echoed.
And suddenly he was pushing himself to sit up, sloughing off the vines that had crept around his limbs, golden-yellow petals falling away, and he brought me close, and kissed me like a man who had been wasting his life waiting for this moment.
He tasted like honeysuckles, and I imagined that was how sunshine tasted, sweet and warm and comforting.
Despite telling myself not to get too close to anyone, not to dig myself too deep into Lilymoor, I had somehow put down roots anyway.
I cared what happened to this place that Harrie and I loved dearly, and it wasn’t because I couldn’t let go of my grief or escape Harrie’s shadow.
I loved the gardens in the morning, and I loved drinking burnt coffee with Juliette at the kitchen table, and I loved watching the visitors suffer Damnit, and I loved stumbling on another strange Wykofski installation, and I loved wandering the maze of hedges and the Moon Bridge and the fields of artfully laid flora.
I loved it.
And I think I might love this man, too.
When we finally came up for air, he cupped his hands against my face and said, “I should’ve let you lead me to the Willow Grove. I should’ve gone with you then.”
“There’s still time,” I said. “You can try the fondue.”
“I think I’d like that very much.” He reached up and wiped the tears out of the corners of my eyes. “It feels like I’ve slept a lifetime in here.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. It was only an hour,” I teased, sniffing. I glanced around at the garden, and my heart ached remembering how it had looked before. “But all your hard work . . .”
“Time well spent,” he decided after he looked around himself, though in the end his gaze settled back on me. “With you.”
My heart swelled so full; I kissed him again—I never wanted to stop kissing him—but we heard footsteps behind us, and through the door came Oliver. He’d run after me when I left the Willow Grove and now picked his way over the demolition of the wall.
Oliver saw me first, but then his gaze quickly snapped to Rus.
He disentangled himself from me, and with a deep, steadying breath, he pushed himself to his feet. “Look, about what I said earlier—”
“Hold that thought,” Oliver replied, and slammed his fist into Rus’s cheek. He went stumbling to the side. I shrieked.
Rus righted himself, massaging his jaw. He snapped a cold glare at Oliver. “You feel better?”
In reply, Oliver shook out his fist. Then he took a deep breath, and said, “Yeah, actually, I do.” And then he turned on his heels and walked away.
I glanced between Rus and Oliver, and back again. “Aren’t you going to go after him?”
“He just punched me, so no, though he did pull it at the last minute,” he mumbled, still massaging his jaw. Worriedly, I looked after the retreating nephew. Rus took my hand and squeezed it gently. “He’ll be fine. I’ll talk with him later. I deserved it, anyway.”
“For the amendment in the will?” I asked.
He winced. “Yeah, that.”
I searched his face for any sign that he’d changed his mind about Lilymoor. He knew what I was looking for and brought my hand up to kiss my fingers. “Lead me to the party, sunshine?”
As if on cue, his phone—which had been silent for so, so long—buzzed with a call. With his other hand, he took it out of his suit jacket pocket, and upon reading the caller ID, he bit his bottom lip.
“Is it that important?” I asked.
“It’s a client.” And for a second there, I thought he was going to answer it, but then he put it on silent and slipped it back into his pocket. “They can wait.”
“Good. Because I was about to throw that phone away.” He laughed, and it sounded so good and familiar and wild, like the man he ought to be. “Now, where were we? Right. A party and a dance. I owe you one.”
“Just one?”
“At least,” he replied.
I laughed, taking the flower crown off my head and placing it on his, and together we left the garden of somedays, and stepped into the present, at last.