Chapter 10 Eva
Eva
Her father was a ghost of himself.
The sheriff had taken Arthur away hours ago. Since then, Dad’s condition had worsened, his graying skin and the deep bruises under his eyes slowly turning a sickening shade of green.
He slept now, his breathing even. Unable to settle, Eva paced the room, winding the end of her shirt around her finger. A seed of panic had taken root in her heart.
Arthur had hurt him. No, Arthur had nearly killed him!
Eva shut her eyes, not wanting to feel it anymore. The shock. The grief. She’d always been able to fix the things that Arthur broke, but she couldn’t fix this. She’d tried reviving the sapling, but the aspen didn’t seem to hear her, the pale and brittle heartwood hollowed of life.
Dad’s heart still beat, lost somewhere within the mesh of roots inside his chest cavity. His sluggish pulse gave her little comfort. Eva couldn’t rest, afraid if she closed her eyes for even a moment, he would slip away.
She curled her fingers again into the hem of her shirt, pressure building behind her eyes.
For so long, Eva had feared Arthur’s return as much as she’d yearned for it.
He was always ruining things. Ruining her.
When he had shown up yesterday, Eva had feared he’d find a crack in her armor and slither beneath.
She’d thought the most precious thing he could break was her heart.
She’d been wrong.
A soft knock drew her attention to the doorway, where Izzy stood holding a teacup.
“Dad always says a hard day should end with tea.”
Eva accepted the cup without speaking and swallowed the whole thing down so fast it burned her throat.
“Oh, sweetie.” Izzy laid a hand on her shoulder. “Take a break. I got him.”
“I can’t,” Eva croaked out. It didn’t matter how tired she was, or how terrified she felt sitting here, obsessively checking his pulse, watching his breathing, waiting for him to wake.
She couldn’t leave.
Izzy sighed. “I promise to call for you the instant anything changes.”
Eva hesitated, the back of her tongue feeling scalded and raw.
“Go on, then,” Izzy softly urged.
As though released from a spell, Eva finally did, squeezing her sister’s hand on the way out the door.
She didn’t go to her room, drawn instead to the kitchen, where she surveyed the mess with raw, stinging eyes.
Glass and aromatic herbs littered the counters.
Her socks squished soundlessly on the moss-laden tiles as she stepped through the wreckage and out onto the porch in a search for fresh air and an open sky.
After Dad had refused an ambulance, they’d called Dr. Rosen, who agreed and advised them not to move their father, promising to send someone from the hospital to the house instead.
She’d said Dad’s size and strange condition left too many variables, and besides, he’d made it clear he wanted to die on his own land.
That’s when Eva had hung up the phone.
Wind chimes sang—in warning or blessing, Eva couldn’t tell.
Her eyes landed on the greenhouse, and a sudden crush of emotion drew out the long, slender leaves of the hyacinths planted on either side of the porch, purple flowers popping into bloom.
She walked toward the greenhouse, blades of grass wisping against her ankles with every step.
A lump grew in her throat when she pushed inside and her nose filled with a familiar concoction of herbs and spices.
Eva couldn’t create life out of nothing. Her gift merely coaxed existing seeds and bulbs in the soil out of dormancy. She’d limited her garden to local flora so as not to introduce any invasive species to the area, but in here?
She could grow anything she wanted.
Past the bags of fertilizer and a clothesline strung with drying sage lay a pile of books Eva had long neglected.
She rifled through the stack. A homesteader’s field guide.
A historical romance novel she’d read a dozen times.
A book on local songbirds. When she opened that one, the pages made a loud, unsticking sound.
Something old and tarry had been thumbed across an image of an oriole.
Eva touched the bird. Probably sap. They used to take this book into the woods on birdwatching days.
But when she took a whiff, she realized she was wrong.
Honey.
With a hard swallow, Eva recalled her father’s painful gasp as he begged her for honey. Lottie’s honey. Eva had never seen him so desperate, and it scared her not to understand.
She was missing something.
At the bottom of the stack, Eva found a folder full of pressed flower heads, and her heart skipped. Dad had built her a flower press for her eleventh birthday. He had made a big show of it, and the two of them had spent the afternoon collecting and preserving blooms while Dad told her stories.
Eva frowned, rubbing her thumb over a pink petal. The smooth and delicate silk wrinkled under the pressure.
Dad had a whole trove of heartbreaking folktales.
Eva still remembered her favorite, about a honeyman who found magic in the wildflower fields on their mountains.
He tried to take the magic home in sachets full of seeds, but by then the forest had already wriggled into his veins, and the seeds bloomed instead, spilling flowers out his pockets.
Eva sniffed, then immediately wrinkled her nose, forgetting the tale as the smell of rot hit her.
She tracked it to a pot of heirloom tomatoes.
Just this morning, they’d been heavy with bulbous fruit, but the weight of her emotions had over-ripened them.
Now a sour flavor stained the air, and a rime of mold coated the tomato skin in fuzzy white-blue patches.
Eva pushed out a breath. “You are in control.”
When she sat back on her haunches, a steel box shoved far into the shadows under the counter caught her eye.
Cobwebs silked the backs of her fingers as she dragged it forward.
Eva shook them off, goose bumps stippling up her arms. A bit of dust sprayed out when she popped the lid, making her cough.
Eva waved it away and lifted one of the thin green notebooks from the stack inside.
Dad’s journals.
Eva ran her thumb over the smooth laminated cover. In his giant hands, they had always seemed so small and trivial. Now this one weighed heavily in her grasp.
Something gnawed at the back of her mind.
Her father kept a detailed record of his life and business.
He’d shown Eva some of the charts he made, tracking the patterns and preferences of their bees so they could better serve their needs as keepers.
He kept logs of their apiaries, too, and made sketches of the trails he took up the mountain, noting the herbs he found along the way.
Eva lifted the cover page, then stopped herself. She’d never intruded on his privacy before, and even the thought of doing so now made her itch. But something nagged at her.
Her father’s stories weren’t always children’s tales.
They could be wicked, thorny things. In some, the honeyman was punished for trying to steal away the magic he’d found.
Dad’s imagination made every new retelling more fantastical and jarring.
Perhaps the honeyman’s lungs filled with waterweeds or he sprouted honeysuckle from his ears!
A shudder moved through her.
They were just stories.
And yet while Eva had studied cures to common ailments, nothing she’d tried had ever worked on the aspen tree rooted inside her father’s body.
Her father’s condition wasn’t exactly one you would expect to find in an anatomy book or a tome on ancient herbal wisdom.
It was strange, and wrong, and horrifying.
What are you hiding, Dad?
Eva skated her thumb across the cover again. She knew there were things he’d never told her.
Or maybe he had.
Eva let out a breath. “This is crazy,” she said aloud, needing to physicalize the turn of her thoughts, to ground herself in reality. Those were just stories!
But what if she was wrong? What if there was something more, hidden in his half-truths?
She didn’t want to break his trust, but… Eva flashed to the strain of his lungs as he had succumbed to sleep. She pictured the withered tree in his chest, its heartwood barely pulsing.
Chest tight, she flipped the journal open.
At first, Eva found nothing of significance between the pages.
There were detailed annotations and instructions for new hikers and seasoned veterans of the woods alike.
Dad had a way of spotting treasures others would pass by.
Troves of hidden ginseng untouched by sang hunters.
Fields of bloodroot, which blossomed only a few weeks a year.
Goldenseal, which had become so popular now that people often forgot you could overharvest a good thing.
But Dad never did. He had taught her that the most important thing a person could do was protect and shield vulnerable things. Precious things.
Things too sacred to be cultivated.
Eva skimmed through the more personal entries. Part of her ached to linger and soak in the details Dad had written about her mother. These pages were a window into the woman who’d given Eva life, but they weren’t hers to read, and she couldn’t help but feel the press of time.
When her eye caught on a bulging envelope wedged between the other journals, Eva paused. She reached for it and peeled off the address sticker holding it closed, then slid the contents onto her lap.
Photographs.
Her breath caught, and she flicked through them quickly, her hands unsteady. Some of the photographs had light leaks, or the occasional blur. She’d never seen this roll developed, but she recognized each one of these moments, and the memories made the center of her chest ache.
Arthur had taken these.
There were shots of the cottage, both inside and out.
Shots of her father tending the bees. Shots of Eva pulling weeds from the garden.
Eva snipping herbs in the greenhouse. Eva lifting the binoculars to her eyes as she searched the canopy for birds.
Eva grinning as she lay on the dock of their pond, her cheek turned toward the camera.
She remembered that afternoon. They’d spent it sunbathing on the dock, playing truth or dare. Her cheeks warmed when she remembered how, precisely, that game had ended.
The last photograph made her breath catch.
Arthur had taken it during the golden hour.
The sun had made everything in the garden glow.
Eva held a bouquet of dandelions in her hand, ready to be dried and jarred for tea.
She was laughing at him, not sure how or when to smile, one hand out to block the camera’s view.
This had been the day Eva realized she wanted Arthur to stay.
Grief scalded its way up her throat. Burning, burning, burning.
Eva wanted to scream, but the sound that escaped was more of a sob.
Dad had no business developing these. She’d thought the roll of film Arthur had left her had been lost in the months of grief after he left.
Eva had tried finding it, then tried forgetting.
She didn’t want them. She didn’t want him.
Frustration rose inside her, and Eva hurled the photographs away. They flew apart, fluttering—briefly—like wings. No, what she’d wanted was to matter enough for him to stay, to write to, to give a damn about the state of her heart after that night in the chapel when everything changed.
The flight of the photographs knocked down a few sprigs of tied-up sage. When her breathing returned to a normal rhythm, Eva got on her knees and collected the herbs and photographs from the floor.
She didn’t want to hold the greenhouse in such high regard, because if she did, it meant she was still holding on to Arthur. He was all over this room. When Eva closed her eyes, she could still see him hanging herbs on the clothesline. Snipping tomatoes. Coaxing a ladybug onto the tip of his glove.
And there, in the corner. There was a hidden place where the greenbrier climbed the wall outside, blocking their view of the house.
It was the perfect place to hide, and they’d used it well.
Eva flushed at the flood of memories. Arthur always had the coldest hands.
It had been such a sweet relief, in the summer heat.
Why did he come back?
If he’d just stayed away, her father wouldn’t be hurt. Arthur wouldn’t be stuck behind the very bars he’d run from in the first place. And she wouldn’t be here, hating him for it.
As Eva dumped the photographs back into the open bin, her eyes caught on a purple envelope she’d never noticed before.
Curious, she opened the flap and slid out a card.
The handwriting was unfamiliar. Eva’s eyes dropped to the bottom of the page, where the name of the sender was scrawled in curling loops.
The air rushed out of her lungs.
Lottie.