Chapter 25
March sat in the armchair next to mine. It was almost identical to the armchairs in my old room, except these ones were a little softer, like they’d been here longer. Had been used more than the others.
I wondered by whom.
The lights were low, only the lamps on the nightstands on. They spilled warm orange light on his side, and I caught new shapes and angles on his face and body to draw. My sketchbook was right there on the table.
He kept looking at it.
“Who’s the girl in the picture?”
I knew he’d been looking back at the bed, at the nightstands—I was studying the way his profile looked when he turned his head, to put it on paper so I’d never forget. To immortalize the shapes of him, just like Jinx used to say.
“My sister,” I said and took one look back at Jinx’s smiling face. Like always, something inside me twisted violently, but let go fast.
“And where is she now?”
“Dead.” The word echoed in my head. “She died two years ago.”
The look on March’s face. “I’m…I’m sorry, Spade.”
I flinched. “I don’t like it when you call me that.” It was too general. Anybody could be Spade.
“Me, neither,” March said. “What happened?”
“Hastenheart.”
It was a disease like any other, I supposed. Jinx’s heart aged much faster than her body, followed a much faster timeline than the rest of her, so that when her body was twenty years old, her heart was over seventy. She just didn’t wake up one day.
“Is that why you screamed in the forest?” March said, catching me by surprise until I remembered that he had my memories.
“Yes.”
March’s eyes took a slow stroll all over my face. They were so beautiful, even with the colors a bit darkened like that.
“Is that why you hated it when your parents hugged you?”
I looked down at my lap. Nobody was ever supposed to see that. Nobody was ever supposed to know what it felt like inside me then—but here I was.
“Who was the man who stabbed you in the kitchen?” I don’t know why I asked this—perhaps I wanted to see what he’d say?
“My father,” said March without hesitation.
The gears inside me came to a halt for a split second.
His father had stabbed him—and suddenly I wanted to find his father and set him on fire. Some sort of feeling of possessiveness took over me in the lack of something…else.
But March was mine, wasn’t he? He was mine and nobody got to stab him.
“When she died, everything stopped,” I said, not entirely sure I wanted to say it, but not sure I didn’t want to say it, either.
“I waited for the world to stop with me, and when it didn’t, I started keeping to myself.
Not my parents, though. They found ways to survive it.
” Which was exactly how it should have been, wasn’t it?
“But I didn’t want survival—I wanted her back.
And when that didn’t happen, I guess, I… wanted someone to stay broken with me.”
“We all do,” March said when I paused. “It makes things easier to digest.”
It did. “Maybe I wanted them to stay broken with me because nobody else really understood. They just…they were able to fold our loss into their lives so neatly, pack it away—when for me it was still everywhere.”
“And so you began to resent them for it.” He was calm—not sorry. Like he could read my mind and know exactly what to say, and how to say it.
I didn’t need his sorry, nor anyone else’s. But I guessed it was nice if he…understood.
So I nodded. “A little bit. I carried her absence like proof that I loved her more than they did. Which wasn’t fair, I don’t think.” Not everyone handled life the same way. This I knew well.
“Fair has nothing to do with it,” March said, shaking his head. “Have you ever considered that they were pretending to have been done with the grief for your sake?”
“I have.” Except I knew my parents, and… “I think it was more that they were happy and thankful that they still had me.” Which sounded so wrong when I said it out loud.
I looked at March, expected the judgment.
Instead he said, “So you resented yourself, too.”
Well…yes, actually. I had.
Pulling my lips inside my mouth, I looked down at my lap again, wondering if this had been a mistake. I’d never spoken about this with anyone before. And this was not what I meant when I told him I wanted to see him later. I didn’t want to talk—what was even the point, anyway?
“May I?” March said, and he’d already grabbed my sketchbook off the table in front of us, but I nodded again just to make sure he took it. Was distracted by it while I got myself together.
Except I didn’t really need to, turns out.
I was way more interested in looking at his face as he went over my sketches.
I wanted to see what his eyes looked like when he saw the details of him and the faces of the other Hands I’d already put on paper.
I’d been in a rush—there was barely enough time—and they still needed work, but I thought he’d recognize himself just fine.
More than a handful of the first drawings were of him.
He did.
His eyes when he looked at me next were darker yet, his gaze so intense I felt it like a physical touch.
Then he turned the page.
“Do you wish you’d given up a different memory, if you’d known I’d see it?”
Even his voice had transformed just now. Lower. Darker.
I crossed my legs and rubbed away the goose bumps on my forearms as casually as I could.
Yes, I was going to say, but… “No.” Maybe I’d regret it later, but right now, it wasn’t so bad to have things I thought were only mine to carry alone for the rest of my life out there, on display for his eyes.
I trusted March. With every instinct, with everything I knew about him, I trusted him.
It was okay that he knew for now. It was strangely relieving.
“I do,” he said, and turned the page again, ran his fingers over the lines of the last sketch I’d drawn—off the curls of his hair.
“The stabbing?” His father. The reminder tasted bitter on my tongue.
“No, actually,” said March. “The good memory. If I’d known you’d see it, I’d have shown you the Garden of Memories.”
I doubted I’d ever heard of anything like that before. “What’s the Garden of Memories?” I asked, curious—so curious to know, but more curious to hear more of his voice, to absorb more of his expressions.
“Before a Heart passes away, they’re given the chance to pick a memory of their life, a good memory, and to put it into a glass box shaped like a heart to store it, to keep it in the realm forever.
Immortalize it, in a way,” March said. That was what Jinx called my sketches, too.
“These glass hearts are then hung on the trees of what we call the Garden of Memories, and they stay there forever.”
He spoke slowly, softly, like every word out of his lips mattered a great deal to him—or maybe it was just me. Every feeling he awakened in me was so wild, intense, all-consuming, and I needed my thoughts to dissolve into emotions right now. My body came alive when he was close.
“The garden itself is vast, made of trees and rose bushes that never wither no matter the season. The cobbles are white, the seats red, and you can take a walk through it any time you please—but the best thing about it?” His eyes sparkled more than ever.
I hung onto his words like they were my lifeline.
“When you touch the hearts hanging on the trees, you get a glimpse of the memory inside it. You get to live it as if it’s yours. ”
“Oh.” That actually sounded beautiful.
March’s smile transformed his entire face.
“Exactly. It’s like diving into thousands of different lives, living the best moments people had chosen to save for the coming generations.
Any time you feel down or hopeless, you can take a walk in the garden, see all the beauty that’s still in the realm captured into these beautiful glass hearts.
It changes your perspective completely. On everything. ”
For a moment, I tried to imagine a place like that, full of large rich trees, full of glass. Memories, good memories of the people who’d passed in every step. It was indeed breathtaking—a place of fantasy.
Now I wished he’d chosen that memory to give away, too, because, “I would really like to see that place.” A strange mix of emotions took over me at the thought of it—excitement, wonder, curiosity—and also envy.
“Then I’ll take you,” March said with a nod, like it was a done deal. A promise he had no doubt he would keep. Like he forgot that I was a Spade, and we lived across the realm from one another, and we didn’t travel across courts. The Clockfolk liked to stick close to their roots, always.
Not that it mattered, anyway.
“You know what we have for the people who’ve passed?
” I said instead. “A wall with their names written on it. Perfectly balanced.” Laughter, short and bitter, escaped me.
“But wait, because there’s more, because there’s a separate wall for those who’ve passed before their time, like it wasn’t enough that death separated them from the living, but they had to remain separated for the rest of always, too. ”
Suddenly, tears pricked the backs of my eyes, but I didn’t plan to let them shed.
When had I become such an emotional wreck, I wondered?
“Is that where Jinx’s name is?” March asked, and I was taken aback by the fact that he dared to ask me that.
Most people made it easy when Jinx came up—they did everything they could to steer away from the conversation.
It was never an issue for me, but March asked questions head-on. He didn’t shy away.
“It is. Is your father dead?” I’d have liked it if he were, but…
“No. He’s alive.” I didn’t miss the flinch on his face, though subtle.
It seemed he didn’t want to be feeling certain things, either. Maybe that’s why he kept staring at the same drawings over and over again.
I gave him—and myself—another two minutes.
Then, I swallowed all the embarrassment that threatened to keep me in that armchair, and I stood up.