Chapter 12 goya
goya
I pulled my hat a little lower over my face to block out the glare of the sun, muttering to myself as I stared at the expanse of wall behind the wildflowers.
I squeezed my eyes shut, imagined the door against the gray stones, and opened them again—
Nothing.
Maybe the door only appeared when it thought I wasn’t expecting it, so I picked up my shovel and pretended to start to leave for the Central Garden again. One, two, three . . . I counted patiently up to ten, held my breath, and spun around—
Nothing.
I felt sillier and sillier.
“I know it was there,” I muttered. “I know it was.”
And yet it wasn’t anymore.
Today was Saturday, and while technically I was off on the weekends, I rarely stopped working.
I liked tending to the garden, and doing a little bit on my days off kept me from having to do all of it at once.
The storm last night blew debris across the garden, so I wandered about cleaning that up, and pulling up even more vines in the Hedges.
Though, every so often, my mind would wander back to the garden that didn’t exist, and the stranger inside. What if he was still trapped?
It wasn’t like I could tell anyone about it.
I’d tried with Eula, but she certainly thought I had been mistaken.
I couldn’t tell Juliette or Wykofski, because I didn’t want my coworkers to think I was nuts, and more importantly, I didn’t want them gossiping to Oliver about how the new head gardener had lost her marbles.
While I was allergic to romance, I could see, and he was very, very good-looking.
The image of his caramel eyes, his grin, the coy way he winked—it made me flustered all over again.
It was in moments like this that I missed Harrie most practically.
She would’ve immediately believed me, eyes glittering, and asked all about the door, and the garden, and the stranger.
She wouldn’t have thought twice, because to Harrie magic was as real as the wind.
Ghosts, kismet, fate, invisible strings—she wanted to believe it all.
And she had.
“The best stories are the ones that fill you with wonder. The ones you almost believe,” she had said, curling her arm around mine as we followed a particularly creepy ghost tour in Charleston.
The evening had been so cold, our fingers were numb and we couldn’t feel our toes. “There’s an Urdu word for it—goya.”
She never got to sleep that night, covers pulled up to her chin in her bed, swearing that there was something behind the curtain.
(There wasn’t. I’d checked three times.) In the end, she crawled into my bed and pulled the pillow over her head, and I woke up the next morning with her cold toes digging into my thigh.
I wished she were here.
But she wasn’t, and I was staring at a blank wall hoping for a door.
By Monday, I still hadn’t found the door, and I was quickly going from confused to disappointed. At least I got to open up the Hedges, despite the vines, which felt like a small triumph when a little kid went darting into the maze with a pterodactyl scream, chased by his nanny.
Around lunchtime, Juliette found me in the Central Garden deadheading the sunflowers to take out my frustrations and asked for me to come inside for a bit. Yafir was in, and apparently it was an emergency.
I took off my dirty boots at the kitchen door and met Juliette in the grand foyer as Oliver wandered in from the kitchen, crunching on a crisp apple. He had made himself scarce since Saturday, and I wondered where he’d gone.
“Oh, hey there, Miss Head Gardener,” he said, and then slid his gaze to her. “You have a friend.”
Juliette blinked at him, clearly unimpressed. “And you are . . . ?”
“Oliver,” I introduced him, and then turned to her. “This is Juliette.”
He snapped his fingers with his free hand. “Jules! I’ve heard about you, too.”
She gave a start at her nickname, and her cheeks flushed a bright pink. “Oh! Like, I hope nothing, um, nothing bad.”
“I’ll never tell,” he replied with a wink to me, and ate another bite of apple.
Juliette looked positively mortified. I was about to chastise him for picking on her when Yafir appeared at the top of the stairs, his face the color of an angry prune.
He had a huge mail sack tucked under his arm.
“The office!” he ordered in a clipped, no-nonsense voice. “Everyone!”
Oliver pointed to himself.
“Yes! Even you!” Yafir paused and narrowed his eyes at Oliver. “Especially you.”
The blond made a face. “What did I do?”
But Yafir had already left for his office.
Terrified to keep him waiting, we hurried up the stairs after him.
Yafir slammed the large sack of mail down on his desk.
Then, wordlessly, he pointed at it. Yafir, Lilymoor’s bookkeeper, was this frantic, bespectacled man in oversized tweed jackets and loose-fitting khakis, never without his leather binder and a pen perpetually tucked behind his ear.
His warm brown skin was pale as a sheet.
Hesitantly, Juliette dug into the mail sack and took a few pieces out, flipping through them.
They were all soft white envelopes with Eula’s long cursive detailing addresses.
One hadn’t been licked closed, so Juliette thumbed it open and took out the card inside.
Dearest Ann,
You are cordially invited to Lilymoor’s 200th anniversary on August 16. Please join us as we celebrate the life of this storied house, and your incredible contributions to the Lilymoor library in recent years. Thank you so much for your novels.
Best,
Eula
Yafir said, “There’s over five hundred invites. The UPS guy just dropped them all off today from Daybreak Rehabilitation and Long-Term Care.”
Juliette picked at her bottom lip. “Oh dear.”
Yafir quirked an eyebrow. “Just oh dear?”
Daybreak Rehabilitation and Long-Term Care was, apparently, the outpatient therapy center that Eula had checked herself out of, and they had finally gotten around to delivering the things she’d left there. I stared at the pile of mail. She must have been very bored indeed.
Juliette went on, “She asked if she could write the invitations for the bicentennial, but . . .” She eyed the large mailbag. “I guess I should’ve asked more questions.”
“Maybe a few more,” Yafir replied dryly, scooping up the stack of letters Juliette had taken out and dumping them back into the sack with zero aplomb. One of the letters fluttered out and landed at my feet. “I thought you said it would be a hundred people at most?”
“I did,” she replied helplessly. “Eula must have thought of more people to invite.”
“We didn’t budget for more,” he said crossly, folding his arms over his chest in agitation. “How am I supposed to keep accounts balanced if I don’t know what’s going on? Where are we going to get the money?”
I picked up the one that had fallen on the ground. It also wasn’t sealed.
Dearest Cyrus,
I would truly love to see you at the bicentennial, though I’m sure you are very busy. Perhaps if not for Lilymoor, you could spare some time for Henry’s sake? Though I do understand if you aren’t able to. I love and miss you.
Kisses!
Eula
Cyrus—the other great-nephew.
“Did she handwrite them to everyone?” I wondered aloud.
“Eula is a terror when she’s bored,” Oliver said tiredly, looking over my shoulder at the letter to Cyrus. His face pinched.
I folded the letter up again and returned it to the sack.
“It’s so many people,” Juliette murmured, and then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she opened her eyes again with renewed determination. “We’ll figure this out. I’ll see where I can trim costs or maybe pull some strings?”
“This is going to be a disaster,” Yafir announced, and Juliette shot him a tired look. “What? It will—”
“Ah! You found the letters, good!” said Eula.
The four of us spun to the matron of Lilymoor like children caught red-handed. She was leaning against her walker; she had by now decorated it with fake flowers and given the handlebars extra padding. Wykofski was just behind her, a troubled look on his face, while she beamed brightly.
“I was hoping you’d help me close them all!” she announced. “I think Ollie knows where the wax and the Lilymoor seal are, don’t you, dear?”
Oliver gave her a tired look. “Lala, aren’t you supposed to be in physical therapy?”
“I got out early,” she replied gallantly, while Wykofski made a silent slicing motion over his throat.
He eyed his aunt. “Are you sure?”
“It was all terribly dull,” she complained, “so I excused myself, all right?”
Wykofski said, “We might need to find a new physical therapist.”
“Lala!” Oliver scolded.
Eula waved her hand defensively. “Oh, don’t give me that.
There’s too much to do! As you can very well see,” she added, referring to the sack of mail on Juliette’s desk.
“And I am deeply sorry for the surprise invites, but I began thinking . . . if this is my last great hurrah, why shouldn’t I invite everyone I’ve ever known? ”
Juliette said, “This is a lot of people, Eula.”
“Too many,” Oliver agreed.
“Half would be good,” Yafir said. “There’s no way we’ll be able to fit that many people anywhere on the grounds. Right?”
And they all turned to me.
Naturally. Because you’d ask the gardener about the grounds.
I hesitated. On one hand, I agreed that five hundred people was more than a crowd, but on the other hand .
. . it was Eula’s retirement party on top of Lilymoor’s bicentennial anniversary.
After a moment of thought, there was one place .
. . Though it would take a lot of work. “We could fit them in the Willow Grove, if we opened it again?”
Immediately, Oliver shook his head. “No, I don’t think—”
But Eula interrupted him with an enthusiastic “That’s a lovely idea!”
He shot her a sharp look. “Lala, it’s been closed for over a decade.”
“Which is why we should open it again,” she replied. “Let in some fresh life.”
“But—”
“Oliver. Ollie,” she added, giving him a tender look. “It’s okay.”
If he had anything else to say, he swallowed it all, crossing his arms to trap whatever words were bouncing around in his chest.
“Besides,” she went on, “whoever will inherit Lilymoor will have to inherit all of it. The good, beautiful things, and the things that ought to be forgotten. Right?” And she slid a glance over to her nephew.
His shoulders stiffened, and he looked away.
He seemed like the obvious choice to inherit the estate.
Why did he look so disenchanted at the prospect?
For the next half hour we discussed what it would take to open the Willow Grove, from mowing the expansive lawn, to clearing the debris that had collected over the last decade and a half, to the health of the willow trees themselves.
I’d only ever given the field a passing glance, so I wasn’t sure exactly what I was agreeing to.
“And, obviously, your contract will need to be amended again,” Eula added.
I shook my head. “Oh no, it’s fine—”
She held up a hand to silence me. “I insist. Now …” And she looked over her shoulder at Wykofski. “What do we all say to lunch? Are you a bit peckish? Then afterward we’ll start sealing those letters to mail off?”
“Sounds like one hell of a plan,” the maintenance man replied, and with a silent yet incredibly vocal look to us, he wheeled her to her bedroom.
Everyone split off to lunch, leaving Oliver and me standing in the empty office.
He picked up the letter I had opened—the one to Cyrus—and tore it in two without a moment of hesitation.
Then he dropped it into the trash bin beside Yafir’s desk, turned to me, and asked, “Have you had lunch? I’m craving a lobster roll. ”
“I haven’t . . .”
“Then we’re having lobster rolls for lunch,” he decided, and when I tried to stop him, he was already out of the office and halfway to the stairs.
I guessed I really didn’t have a choice. Though as I left, I picked up the torn letter out of the trash and stuck it in my pocket. Then I followed him out.