Chapter 23 Holly and Hemlock
Holly and Hemlock
THREE MONTHS LATER
March comes to Hemlock like a fever breaking.
There’s no polite interval between frost and thaw.
The world simply snaps awake, as if the cold was only a long-held breath.
The snow that held court for months has dissolved into retreating dregs, slumped in the hollows and north slopes, shriveled and dirty and out of place.
Even the orchard looks embarrassed by its own starkness, the old trees naked and brittle, bark splayed in furrows like wrinkles on a spent face.
I walk the edge of the fence, fingers snagging the brittle wires as I go.
The ground is half-mud, half-ice, pocked with rabbit prints and the rusted melt of the last storm.
The sky is blown glass, veined with streaks of vapor.
The air is so raw and unrefined it stings the inside of my nose, but I like it—it feels honest, a necessary meanness before anything soft can grow back.
Lane is out here already, head down, knees sunk in the muck.
His jacket is slung over a branch, and his shirt is dark with sweat and dirt at the cuffs.
I watch him from a distance, just to see how he moves when he thinks he is alone.
His hands are decisive, stripping the old burlap from the base of the trees, pruning away the dead twigs with a small, vicious blade.
He doesn’t look up when I approach, but he must know I’m there. No one can sneak up on Lane; it’s like the ground itself reports my presence.
“Still standing,” he says, by way of greeting, not bothering to look up from his work.
“Barely,” I say. “They look half-dead.”
He shrugs, the movement rolling across his back and down his arms. “Always do, this time of year. Doesn’t mean they’re not waiting.” He rocks back on his heels, wipes his hands on his jeans, and regards me with that cloudless, unhurried gaze. “Everything’s just waiting.”
I crouch beside him, though the mud seeps through my leggings and the damp finds its way straight to the bone. I reach for a fallen branch—slick with thaw, pulpy as wet bread—and toss it onto the pile. Lane watches, expression unreadable.
“You know, you don’t have to do all this by hand,” I say. “We could rent equipment. Or hire more workers.”
He grins, teeth white in the shadow of his beard. “Where’s the fun in that?”
I shake my head. “You’re the only person I know who thinks pruning is fun.”
He stands, stretching, arms above his head.
His shirt rides up, just a little, enough for me to see the pale track of a scar at his side, the same color as the sky.
I look away before he catches me staring, but not fast enough.
He doesn’t call me on it, just smirks, and I hate him a little for it, but not enough to matter.
We move down the line, tree by tree. I hand him the clippers, the saw, the twine; he passes them back, never fumbling. There’s a rhythm to it, a way of being together that requires no words and no effort. I like this version of us best—the kind that just is, without explanation.
At the end of the row, we stop to admire the view.
The house is distant but not remote, its roofline wreathed in the vapor of the warming earth.
For a moment, I can almost believe that spring is real, that it will come and remake everything ugly and hard.
I feel Lane’s hand at my elbow, a gentle pressure to steady me on the uneven ground.
“You’re thinking again,” he says, more observation than accusation.
I nod. “I’m always thinking.”
“Stop,” he says. “Just for a second. Just look.”
So I look. The world is quiet here, the only sound the drip of meltwater from the branches, the faint creak of the trees shifting in the sun. I lean into Lane’s side, just enough to share his heat, and he doesn’t move away. His hand slides down to my waist and holds it there.
I think to myself, not for the first time today, that I love him.
It’s a strange thing, loving someone like Lane.
There’s no grand revelation, no thunderclap or swell of music.
Just the slow gathering of every ordinary moment: the way he wipes his boots before coming inside, the way he remembers how I take my coffee, the way he fixes the things I never notice are broken.
All the small, invisible acts that stitch a life together.
He looks at me now, and the sun finds his eyes, making them less storm and more sky. “What?” he asks, soft and low.
“Nothing,” I say. He knows I love him, and I know he loves me.
He lets the silence ride for a while, then presses his lips to my temple. The touch is brief, but it anchors me to the spot, makes the rest of the world fade away.
“We should get back,” I say, when I trust myself to speak.
He nods, but doesn’t let go of my hand. “In a minute.”
So we stand there, two ghosts in the orchard, and wait for the world to change again.
When the wind picks up, it smells less like winter and more like promise. I inhale deep, and it burns, but in the best way.
This is what comes after: the thaw, the hunger, the waiting for what might be. I squeeze Lane’s hand, and he squeezes back.
I could do this forever.
The world returns to normal with the arrival of the courier. I hear the grind of tires, then the long-suffering bell at the front gate. Now that the house is resting, the outside world creeps in.
I leave Lane to his trees. The walk back to the house is all slosh and suction—boots heavy with mud, steps echoing hollow on the stone porch.
I pause to wipe them on the coir mat, a habit Whitby drilled into me.
The foyer is warmer, the air flushed with the scent of yeast and wood polish.
There’s a man at the threshold, hat in hand, wearing the blank expression of someone paid by the hour to be invisible.
He holds out a parcel, wrapped in brown paper, the twine so tight it puckers the corners.
The address is in a script I don’t recognize at first—my own name, but in the slanted, continental style that makes every letter look like it’s leaning into the future.
Paris postmark, no return address. The wax seal is cracked but still carries the ghost of an emblem—something avian, maybe a crow or a magpie, picked out in black.
I sign where he points. He vanishes down the walk before I can thank him. The parcel is cold against my hands, but there is a surprising weight to it—something solid, not just paper.
I don’t open it right away. I take it to the library, cradling it like an egg.
The library is changed since winter. Whitby insisted on a spring cleaning, so the windows are streakless, the carpet beaten and left unsullied by Lane’s boots for at least one week.
The light is harsh, but it makes the room feel real, not just a monument to books no one reads.
I set the parcel on the desk and study it. My hands shake, but only a little, as I slide a letter opener through the paper. The wrapping peels away in a single, deliberate strip. Inside is a shallow box, the color of dust and old vellum, stamped with a crest I do not recognize.
I lift the lid. Inside, nestled in tissue, is a small bouquet—no, not a bouquet, but something pressed flat and arranged with the kind of precision that suggests it was done in a moment of absolute attention.
Holly and hemlock, side by side, tied at the base with a black ribbon. The leaves are dry, but not brittle; the berries retain a dull shine. The air inside the box is faintly resinous, as if the scent of the branches is trying to outlast the memory of the hands that bound them.
Beneath the foliage, a folded sheet of paper. I ease it out, careful not to disturb the arrangement.
The handwriting is elegant, a script learned under duress and now deployed with a kind of lazy confidence. I read it aloud, though there is no one here to hear it.
I breathe easier with you two near, but this will have to do for now, until we’re all together again.
No signature, but it doesn’t need one. The line is pure Larkin—half boast, half plea, all theater.
There is something else at the bottom of the box.
I lift the tissue and find a small square, thick watercolor paper, edges torn with a ruler.
It is a painting of Hemlock House in spring, the trees limned with new green, the pond a haze of blue.
The perspective is from the orchard’s edge, as if the viewer is hidden in the boughs, spying on the house from a place of exile or longing.
At the bottom right, the initials are tiny, but clear: LH.
My throat goes tight. The painting is neither skilled nor na?ve; it is simply true, in the way that only someone who has studied a thing for years can make it.
The windows are too small, the roofline bowed, the east chimney still wearing the bandage of its last repair.
The grass is rendered in wild, uncontrolled washes, but the effect is exact, almost cruelly so.
I set the painting on the desk, propping it against the inkwell. The library looks different now, like a diorama, the whole room organized to serve as a backdrop for this one small view.
I sit in the old leather chair, the one that groans if you shift your weight.
I pick up the holly and hemlock bouquet, turning it in the light.
The ribbon catches on my thumb, a snag of silk against skin.
I let it untwist, watch the way the leaves refract the afternoon sun onto the desk.
The green is so deep it almost looks black, the white blooms of the hemlock bleached and papery.
I think of Larkin, somewhere in Paris, or at least pretending to be.
I imagine him walking the bridges, the endless galleries, a ghost among tourists and lovers and students who have no idea what he is carrying around in his chest. I imagine him painting the house from memory, the wash of color spreading out like a secret he can’t hold in.
I wonder if he meant the painting as a reminder, or a challenge.
The letter is short, but I read it again, and again. I let the words settle, heavy as stones, and then lighter, as if they are burning themselves away from the page.
I trace the black ribbon with my finger. I think of the last time I saw him—his hand on the satchel, the way his heart beat like a trapped thing when I touched him.
Eventually, I fold the note and tuck it into the painting’s frame.
I arrange the holly and hemlock in a glass on the mantle, where they catch the last of the sun and throw their shadows across the floor.
The effect is almost funereal, but not sad.
It is a record of what has survived, what might still grow.
I head out that afternoon with the parcel since Lane has gotten lost in work again. I find him in the greenhouse.
He doesn’t turn when I enter. His focus is total, a kind of reverence for whatever new life he’s coaxed into being.
I watch him tamp down the soil with the heel of his hand, then slide the tray onto a shelf above his head, making room for more.
The dirt lines his palms, black beneath the nails, but his touch is always measured, as if he fears bruising the air.
I wait until he’s finished the row, then clear my throat. “Got a delivery.”
Lane glances up. His eyes are bleary, maybe from the humidity or maybe from the effort, but he nods. “What is it?”
I hand him the box, already unwrapped, the tissue cradling the painting and the pressed plants. He wipes his hands on his shirt before taking it. He’s not a careless man.
He lifts the painting out first, holds it at arm’s length, then brings it close.
His fingers bracket the edges, never touching the image itself.
He studies the brushwork, the wild lashing of pigment that makes the house almost vibrate on the page.
He doesn’t smile right away, but the lines at the corners of his eyes deepen, and I know he’s pleased.
“He always saw better than anyone,” Lane says, so quietly I’m not sure if I was meant to hear it. He turns the painting in the light, then tilts it to catch the signature. “I thought he’d send a postcard. Not this.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, though the word feels pale. “He wants to come back. Eventually.”
Lane sets the painting back in the box, then lifts out the holly and hemlock bouquet I returned to the package for Lane’s benefit, turning it over in his hand. The black ribbon coils between his fingers, a seam of memory. He sets it on the workbench, careful not to crush the leaves.
“I’m glad he left,” Lane says. “For him.”
“Me too,” I admit, and it’s the first time I say it without guilt. “It doesn’t feel as empty as I thought it would.”
Lane grunts, then stands. He towers over the seed trays, over me, but the effect is less intimidation and more gravity—like being drawn into the orbit of something heavy and constant. He reaches for my hand, tugs me out into the spring sun.
We walk the perimeter of the house, boots sucking at the saturated ground.
The air is all mud and promise, sharp with the ammonia bite of new shoots and the funk of last year’s leaves decaying in place.
Lane leads me to the old flowerbeds on the west side, where the snow has finally relented and the soil is black and cold as coffee.
He kneels, brushes aside a mat of dead grass, and reveals a scatter of crocus heads, so bright they look radioactive against the earth. Purple, yellow, white—the first color in months.
“Cleared this patch last winter,” Lane says. “Didn’t think they’d come back.”
I crouch beside him. “Nothing kills them,” I say, though I mean it as a compliment.
He grins, broad and sheepish, then picks a stray crocus and tucks it behind my ear. “Even poison ground can grow something beautiful,” he says, and the line is so perfect I almost laugh.
I nudge his shoulder. “Who taught you to say shit like that?”
He shrugs, unbothered. “It’s true.”
I kiss him, and he kisses back.
There is a sense of waiting, but it’s not the anxious, teeth-gritted waiting of winter. It’s patient, almost luxurious—the sense that something is coming, and this time it might be good.
I think of Larkin in Paris, or wherever he’s decided to haunt; I think of the house, and Whitby, and all the ghosts that used to crowd the corners. I think of Lane, solid at my side, content to let things be.
The house looks back at us, windows shining, roofline straight and true for the first time in memory. It doesn’t feel like a trap anymore, or a sentence. It feels like a beginning.
Lane rests his chin on top of my head. “Should we go inside?”
“In a minute,” I say, and we stay, letting the spring get a little closer, the thaw a little deeper, before we let the day end.
This is enough, for now.