Chapter 21
Maris had expected it to feel strange, sitting in a room with a male who’d turned to stone.
Instead it felt like sitting in an empty church.
That same waiting quiet, the sense of something vast and patient in the room with her.
Garrick had crouched on the plinth and the change had moved over him like an evening turning to dusk, the warm grey of his skin going hard and matte, the gold winking out of his eyes.
His wings settled into a curve that no longer breathed.
Then he was rock, and the conservatory went quiet, and she turned a page.
She read for an hour. Maybe more. The sunlight swung its long amber rays across the ferns and the lemon trees. Once she looked up and caught herself half expecting him to be watching her, but the stone face gazed at nothing, serene and far away, and she went back to her book.
When her legs got restless she gave up on reading.
There was a planting bed along the south wall she’d been eyeing for a week, a long raised trough of good soil gone weedy and sour with neglect.
She fetched her gloves from her bag, knelt at the near end, and started pulling.
Chickweed came up in whole satisfying mats.
A volunteer maple seedling fought her and lost. She worked the soil loose with her fingers and found it black and sweet under the crust, and started planning without meaning to.
Ferns down the shaded end. Maybe the maidenhair, if she could coax it.
Something with scent near the door so you’d catch it coming in.
“I’m going to fill this,” she told the stone Garrick, because it seemed rude not to. “You’ll thank me. Right now it’s growing exactly one thing and that thing is regret.”
The statue didn’t argue.
She lost track of time in the good way, the dirt-under-the-nails way, until the light changed and she glanced at her phone and swore.
School.
She peeled off her gloves, crossed to the plinth, and stood in front of him. It felt foolish and it felt necessary in equal measure.
“I have to get Toby,” she said. “I’ll be forty minutes.
I’m bringing him back, if that’s all right.
I don’t know if you can really hear any of this.
” She hesitated, then reached out and put her hand on his chest, over the place where his heart went so slow it was almost nothing.
The stone was cool but not dead-cool. Cool like a river rock in shade. “Don’t go anywhere.”
She could have sworn the corner of his mouth was different when she took her hand away. It wasn’t. She left anyway, after smiling like an idiot at a statue.
Doris coughed all the way to Fairhaven Falls Elementary and back, and Toby chattered nearly as much as the engine.
A boy named Barclay who had eaten a crayon.
The letter G. Whether spiders had knees.
She let it wash over her, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching over now and then to squeeze his sneaker.
“We’re going to Mr. Garrick’s,” she said, turning up the mansion’s long drive, the great house rising from the gardens like a ship out of the fog. “But he’s resting, so we have to be gentle. Snack first. Deal?”
“Is he on the roof?”
“Not today. Somewhere else. I’ll show you later.”
She parked, hauled him and his backpack inside, and set him up at the kitchen table with apple slices, a juice box and a fistful of the cheese crackers he liked.
His short legs swung a foot above the floor.
He looked very small in the huge kitchen and entirely at home, and she understood that completely.
“Five minutes,” she told him. “I’m going to check on Mr. Garrick and I’ll be right back. Eat.”
He nodded, cheeks already full, and she went down the hall to the conservatory.
Garrick was still stone, still folded on his plinth with his wings curved and his face turned towards the failing light.
Whatever he was working out down there in the stone, he hadn’t surfaced yet.
She stood in the doorway a moment—she liked looking at him, sue her—then turned back towards the kitchen.
The stool at the island stood empty, a cracker abandoned mid-bite. Her stomach dropped the six inches it only dropped for him.
“Toby?”
She heard a small voice coming from the wrong direction, and followed the sound. Out of the kitchen, and through the wide central hall to the west corridor. She’d never been down it. The finished house stopped here, and beyond it were closed doors and drop cloths and rooms nobody used.
One of the doors stood open.
“Tobias Calder, you do not run off in someone else’s—”
She came through the doorway and stopped.
It was a small room, or had been made small by what it held. Dust-sheets over a chair, a shrouded shape that might have been a desk. And in the center, on the bare boards where a carpet had once been and the ghost of it still showed, a gargoyle sat in stone.
Not Garrick, but astonishingly like Garrick.
The same calm brow, the same pointed ears, the same great furled wings, on an older face, the way Garrick would look in thirty years.
The figure sat with his hands loose on his knees and his head bowed a little.
There was something in the set of the shoulders that made her throat tighten.
For the first time she realized grief had a posture, and this was it, carved permanently into stone.
Toby sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him, entirely unbothered, holding a cheese cracker up like an offering.
“—and then Barclay ate the crayon and Miss Sara said we don’t eat crayons but he said it was green apple which is a joke because crayons don’t taste like—do you want a cracker? You can’t eat it because you’re stone but you can hold it.”
“Toby.” She kept her voice soft. Not because she was frightened, but because the room had the same hushed stillness she’d felt in the conservatory. “Baby. Who are you talking to?”
“The other one.” He said it like it was obvious. He patted the stone foot gently, the way she’d taught him to pet a strange dog. “He’s like Mr. Garrick but older. I don’t think he minds me. He hasn’t said.”
She crossed the room and crouched beside her son, and up close the resemblance stole what was left of her breath.
It was Garrick’s face. It was Garrick’s future cast in stone and set aside in a closed room, and he had never said a word.
She looked at the bowed head and the open hands, and something cold went down her spine that had nothing to do with fear.
Statues didn’t sit like that. Statues didn’t grieve.
“Toby,” she said carefully, “I don’t think this is a—”
Garrick filled the doorway.
She hadn’t heard him come, but then she never did. The gold had come back into his eyes, but it was low and banked, and he was looking at the seated statue the way a male looks at something he has spent years learning not to look at.
Toby craned his head around, unsurprised, apple juice on his chin. “Is this your dad?”
“Yes.”
The word came out level, but she could see the effort it had taken in the stiffness of his posture. Toby considered the seated gargoyle again, then turned back to Garrick.
“Does he mind us being in here?” he asked.
Garrick stood in the doorway, looking past her at the stone that had been his father. For a long moment he didn’t say anything at all. She watched him look at the bowed head and saw something on his face that she had no name for.
Then he shook his head slowly.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think he would have minded.”
They left the room and went through the motions of a normal evening.
She got Toby fed and washed and into the bedroom that was rapidly becoming his during the nights they stayed.
He went down fast, one arm flung over the bear.
She stood over him for a minute the way she always did, cataloguing the miracle of him.
When she came back, Garrick was standing at the study window with a glass of something amber he wasn’t drinking. She knew before she reached him that the level voice from the west corridor had been a dam, and that the dam was breaking.
She didn’t say anything. She just crossed the room and stood next to him, close enough that her shoulder touched his arm, and she waited.
“He didn’t die,” he said, to the dark glass. “My father. Not the way people mean.”
She remained silent.
“When my mother died, he stopped.” His throat moved, once.
“Not all at once. It was slow. He stopped eating right. Stopped keeping the house. Stopped keeping himself. The grounds went. The roses went. He’d go to stone for a day, then two, then a week, and every time it got harder to bring him back.
He didn’t want to come back, that was the thing I couldn’t—” He stopped talking, and when he started again, his voice was even flatter.
“There’s a choice, in the end. When you go down deep enough, long enough, you can choose to stay.
To let the male go and just be the stone.
It doesn’t hurt. That’s what he wanted, I think. Somewhere it stopped hurting.”
“Garrick.”
“A gargoyle can always tell,” he went on, the dam washed away completely, “when the stone holds a person. There’s a…
resonance. You feel it. Even though my father was going under more often, the stone still held him.
I could feel him in it. Sleeping, but there.
” He turned the glass in his hand, catching the firelight in the crystal.
“I was away. Building the company. I’d call and he wouldn’t answer and I told myself he was resting again.
Then I came home one weekend and I walked into that room and I put my hand on him and—”
He didn’t finish it. He didn’t have to. She saw all of it, the hand on his father’s cold chest, waiting for the resonance, and finding only rock. Only a statue where a person used to be.