Chapter 16
Wizard
I urge Esme back inside the cabin and I make us a proper breakfast. There’s something grounding about routine, but also?
We’ve had a rough few days. Not nearly enough sleep, not eating at proper times.
Cracking eggs into a pan and frying back bacon, making toast… that’s me trying to be a hug for her.
The whole world feels as though it just opened up for us. That’s a scary thing. It’s not just the falling, but the being. Butterflies. Loving and losing. I understand that fear. I want to go slow, to just enjoy this brand new morning together.
The table is a big one. A rectangle with two benches that takes up most of the addition to the kitchen.
The cabin was just a single room, and now there are numerous added rooms. New windows let in fresh morning sunlight, golden beams painting the heavy wooden surface in golden light, dappled by the shadows the trees cast. That sunlight made it all the way over the mountains for us.
It feels good to set the table and sit across from Esme and be warmed by that honey glow.
I took the name Wizard because I was a computer and tech geek. It fit. But this? This is real, actual magic.
I pick away at breakfast with one hand while the other remains trapped between my knees. I dig my fingers into the meat of my thigh when I’m buzzing too hard and want to blurt out something I definitely shouldn’t say.
Even after spending a whole night outside, after bawling, after trying to get into her car and leave, Esme is still so beautiful.
I want to get off this bench and go sit beside her.
I want to hug her. Hold her hand. Wrap an arm around her and pull her tight against me.
But… slow. I swallow hard against the influx of images that filter through my brain.
They’re definitely not slow. I swallow hard and force my body to listen to me.
I’m not going to pop a boner right here at the table. I’m just fucking not.
“Do you remember when Reg had the idea to turn his whole backyard into a garden? I mean, obviously we remember the garden itself, and all the amazing times we had there, but remember when he first thought about it?” Esme’s eyes sparkle.
She’s not shutting down or withdrawing back into herself.
She’s not stepping out of the sunlight and trying to race back for the shadows.
She’s drawing us back into the past, but anything to do with my grandpa is a good memory. Syrupy sunlight drifts over Esme’s hair and shoulders. It’s at her back, her eyes are lit by it, sunshine in their depths.
“That was the best,” I say, my throat thick, but not in a bad way. “I loved doing that.”
“If he’d just stuck to the back, I’m sure it would have been fine, but then he moved it all to the front and the town office got iffy about it.”
I laugh, remember Grandpa’s outrage when he opened that specific piece of mail. “They sent him a letter and he went down there, peeved that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do on his own property.”
Esme snorts. “Remember how they agreed to let him have a garden in the front if he put up a fence and so he planted four solid rows of sunflowers?”
“He made sure they thrived. Fertilized and watered them until they were fifteen feet tall, and then he didn’t cut them down until December. They were the first thing he planted in the spring.”
Her lips curl up into a bloom prettier than any flower. “All the shelters still probably miss him,” she says, sighing wistfully. “He was a great volunteer. Such a beautiful person.”
“He sent care packages with cookies and stuff, after I moved away.”
Her whole face suffuses with love. I remember that look.
She’d set down her guard the minute we stepped into Grandpa’s property.
It was her one safe space in Hart. It was like an enchanted land for me too, but for Esme, it was doubly special.
I haven’t seen her look this way in a long time.
My heart picks up at the echo of all her special smiles and laughter.
“That sounds exactly like something Reg would do.”
“He’d take this huge box to the post office. I don’t even know how he carried some of them, they were so heavy. He made sure there was enough for everyone.”
“Did your parents ever come visit you?” she asks hesitantly, like she doesn’t want to drag the bad and all the emotional turmoil back into our moment of peace.
“Nah. I never asked them to. Never wanted them to come to any of the ceremonies, and after that, it was pretty redundant.”
Her eyes flutter down and then her face follows.
She studies the tabletop. “I’m sorry that I didn’t come back to visit Reg as often as I should have.
I made excuses about college getting busy and being too far away, with nowhere to stay, but that was bullshit.
I could have come for the weekend and camped out there.
He would have been happy to have me. I never did, and at his celebration of life…
I’ve never missed anyone more.” Before I can tell her that it’s not her fault, and try to soothe some of those turbulent weaves of grief inside of her, her eyes flick up and lock with mine. “You’re just like him, you know.”
I gulp. The air shifts, the pressure changing like the cabin picked itself up and moved halfway further up the mountains.
“No way,” I choke. “I’m not good with my hands like he was.
He could fix anything, and he did. My first car only ran, thanks to Grandpa.
He could bake anything, grow anything. He had this talent for nurturing any kind of life—plant, animal, human, or inanimate.
I was good with tech, but he did all the stuff that mattered.
” People talk about their elders like they’re disposable because they grew up in another era, but Grandpa moved through every single one.
He adapted, taking the best parts of every decade with him.
“Reg was a hero,” Esme agrees softly.
I close my eyes and think about Grandpa. He always looked the same to me. He was already old and never seemed to age any further, but I’m sure he did. I just didn’t know how to recognize things like that when I was a kid myself.
“I do that thing where I talk to him sometimes, wherever I am.”
Esme makes a small noise of agreement.
No matter how inside out the world was, how messed up, how miserable, how upside down, Grandpa always knew what to say and what to do. Even if it was saying nothing, he still made it all better.
“I know his body is in the graveyard, but I think if any energy ever had a chance of moving on, it’s his. He never could sit still. He packed so much living into his eighty-eight years.”
“I still wish he could have had eighty-eight more. The world would have been a better place.”
I open my eyes and come face to face with Esme’s soft smile. It probably mirrors my own. We’re talking about sad things, but they’re always going to be our best memories. Grandpa was so vibrant. He was so alive. He dazzled me. There’s no other way to put it.
“He was ready, though,” I say. “He was never scared of anything that I ever knew of, living or dying.”
“I think he would have been proud of the way he went. Gardening.”
“Definitely. If he could have picked, it would have been like that. When they found him, he had a smile on his face and he was staring up at the sun, even though he couldn’t see it any longer.”
Esme sucks in a breath. “I never knew that. No one ever told me.”
“He loved you.” I quickly wipe the corners of my burning eyes. “He’d probably tip that old trucker’s hat of his and tell me that he’s glad we’re riding together now.” I draw in a shuddering breath. “Fuck. I’ve cried enough these past few days.”
Esme nods. She doesn’t look ashamed though. She’s not trying to run and immediately curl into herself and hide. I know how hard it is for her to leave herself open like this, but she stares right at me and lets me see everything.
“It feels kind of nice to be all drained out and renewed after,” she admits.
“Reg didn’t have any shame around emotions.
It’s just another thing that I admired about him.
He was raised in what people think of as this hard era, and maybe a lot of it was, but it only ever burnished his heart golden.
He wasn’t like most men, old or young. He did what he felt like doing.
If that was laughing, he laughed. If that was crying, he’d cry.
If you wanted to do that in front of him, he made you feel safe enough to let go in whatever form that took. ”
Esme’s palm edges along the table. It gets closer and closer to my plate.
I finally—like a total idiot, realize that she’s reaching for me.
I fumble, getting my hand up. It smacks the bottom of the table and then my knuckles clang down hard against the tabletop before I get our fingers threaded together.
Her palm is hot and a little damp, her fingers smooth and soft as they curl around mine.
An absolute perfect fit.
I turn my face to the ceiling, like Grandpa is up there in the sky past it, looking down on us.
“We both miss you. I hope, if it’s possible, you’re in all the flowers now.
All the plants and trees that you loved.
That you’re still looking down on all the stray animals and all the troubled people.
Thank you for all the gardening lessons.
Thanks for teaching me about mechanics and about life.
Thank you for being fun. Thank you for being you and for helping me to realize that it was okay to just be me too, even if most people didn’t appreciate it. ”
“I appreciated it. I always have.”
My thoughts slam into each other, and my heart shifts into overdrive. It beats so hard and fast that my lungs don’t know how to gather any oxygen around it. My eyes blur and the world turns into a whole bunch of refracted prisms again.