Chapter 15 trygghet
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Just as I returned to the roses, Juliette’s voice came across the shortwave radio clipped to my belt, summoning me to the house. Eula wanted her houseplants watered, and Juliette had already caught her red-handed trying to do it herself.
Well, it was better than getting pricked by more roses, at least.
So I radioed back that I’d be there in a few and filled up a rusted watering can in the kitchen and made my way up the stairs. Eula’s bedroom was at the far end of the house, so it was a bit of a hike with a sloshing watering can, where I knocked on the door before I let myself inside.
I’d never been in her bedroom before—it wasn’t in my purview, and Juliette had taken it upon herself to water the plants there during Eula’s absence—but when I stepped inside I was struck by how .
. . removed it felt from the rest of Lilymoor.
While the rest of the estate was pristine and purposefully decorated, Eula’s room was filled with clutter—so much that some of it looked like it was about to attempt to fall in on itself.
It was as if Henry had accidentally cut open his green thumb years ago and bled it across the ornate crown molding and old stone fireplace and built-in bookshelves, dragging nature inside just for her.
There were bottles of soil, bone-white skulls of dead animals, framed displays of beetles and butterflies and moths.
In the large picture windows hung stained-glass pieces of art that threw colors across the room whenever the sun hit them just right.
And between all the plants and mementos and postcards were pictures, so many pictures, of family and friends and—most of all—of Henry.
Even if I didn’t know what he looked like from the benefactors wall at the NYBG, I’d have guessed it was him.
In his youth he was tall and lanky, with a shock of ginger hair, which later in life turned white and thin, and his tallness bent.
There were so many photos, it was almost over-whelming.
Henry in the Rose Court. Henry posing, one leg hiked up, on a wine barrel.
Henry sitting by the foundation of the groundskeeper’s cottage.
Henry smoking his pipe in a rocking chair on the veranda.
Henry mid-laugh as a bright-eyed, blond-headed child showed him a frog, as another child, with reddish hair and stouter, cried in the background.
There were wedding photos. Anniversaries. Parties—
It was a living reliquary, and the longer I looked at everything, the more bittersweet it all tasted.
There was a garden outside—the one I tended to—but this garden was just as lovely, too.
“Good afternoon,” I said happily, stepping into the room. “Jules said your plants needed some tending?”
Eula was sitting on a plush queen-sized bed, though she’d gotten dressed and curled her hair, shuffling through a stack of papers on a lap tray in front of her.
“Oh yes, yes, come in. Bless her, Jules was such a dear to look after them while I was gone but I’m afraid with all of her talents, gardening isn’t one of them. ”
“Gardening takes thyme. I’m sure she could grow into the role.”
She huffed, “I doubt it—oh.” Her eyes widened, and then they glittered with delight.
She cackled a laugh. “A pun! Clever and talented? My Oliver better watch out,” she commended, and I bit back a grin, trying not to feel too proud.
“There’s another amended contract for you, to include your new work with the Willow Grove. ”
“You really don’t have to keep amending my contract—”
She waved her hand dismissively. “I didn’t, dear. It was all my lawyer. He was adamant. Likes to be thorough with his paperwork, and bill me for the time,” she added under her breath.
Setting down the watering can, I went over to the contract on the desk.
This time, there was a white aster beside it.
The flower for patience. I picked it up and twirled it between my fingers as I read through the highlighted passages.
It seemed straightforward enough, so I signed where I was supposed to, and that was that.
“Thinking of this for the bouquets now?” I asked, referring to the flower.
“You know, he suggested it,” Eula replied, thoughtful.
“Henry loved asters, and cosmos, and star lilies. Anything with a sky-like name. He liked the irony of it, to name a flower rooted to the ground after something it would never touch in the sky. But,” she went on with a shrug, “white is so very . . . weddingish, you know?”
“I guess …”
“So the search continues,” she went on, and I tucked the aster behind my ear. “And now that that garish business is done, why don’t you come look at my Dracaena trifasciata. It looks a little droopy, doesn’t it?”
She pointed over to a potted plant by the window that looked quite fine, its spear-like leaves jutting up triumphantly in the face of Juliette’s attempted drowning. It was just a normal snake plant, almost impossible to kill. I went to go inspect it anyway and knock some dust off its leaves.
Still healthy as ever, just like all her other plants in the room.
Out the window, I noticed Juliette warding Damnit off with a watering hose in the front gravel driveway.
“The snake plant looks just fine. A little dry, but I wouldn’t worry. Did Juliette mail the invitations?” I added.
“Mm-hmm,” Eula replied as outside the events and relations director threw down her hose and made a break for the house.
Eula asked me to get her pain meds, and so I busied myself with that for the next few minutes, and got her a new glass of water, and helped readjust her pillows. “Ow, ow, ow, my old bones keep getting older,” she complained with a groan. “Sophie, my dear, never get old. You become a burden.”
“You aren’t a burden, Eula,” I adamantly replied. “Did someone say you were?”
She sank back into her pillows again with a wince. “No one has to tell me. I might be old, but I’ve yet to have the mis-fortune of becoming senile. This part of life is rotten work. Especially when you’re the last one.”
I picked a yellowing leaf off a pothos, then turned to her, confused.
“My sister died a few years ago,” she informed me when she saw my face.
“I couldn’t make it to Boston for the funeral because of the pandemic.
I’m the last oldie left,” she added jokingly, trying to lighten the mood.
“I’m grateful to be alive, but it’s tiring when the people you’ve shared your life with the longest are all gone.
” Her gaze strayed out the window, her mouth pursed into a frown.
“Sometimes you just wish you could go, too.”
“Eula …”
She blinked then, tearing her eyes away from the distant blue sky. “Oh, don’t give me that look, dear. I’ve still got a few more things to live for, and no chance a hip is going to be the thing that does me in. When I go to hell, I’ll be kicking and screaming.”
I did laugh at that, despite myself. “You know what I think?”
“That I’m just a sad old woman?”
I put the watering can on the desk and went over to her bed. “I think you need some fresh air.”
“Then open a window for me.”
“And some grass.”
“You can bring me a patch of dirt from the yard.”
I wheeled her walker over to the side of the bed and motioned for her to stand. She simply folded her arms over her chest and looked away. “Eula,” I said.
“Sophie, dear,” she replied with equal levity.
“I’m just doing my job. I want to take you to see the progress we’ve made so far, and I think in section two of the contract it says I have to run every change in the garden and its flora by you.”
She waved her hand. “I trust you. There, see? I don’t need to go anywhere.”
“I’ll tell that lawyer of yours that you’re in breach of contract,” I threatened.
She gasped. “You wouldn’t!”
“I would.”
“Fine,” she grumbled as she slowly got herself out of her bed and steadied herself on her walker, “but I’ll have to call him up anyway to amend the contract again.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For babysitting an old woman.”
“Ha.”
We began to leave the bedroom, and then she stopped me and asked for her sunglasses on the dressing table, so I went to fetch them.
They were beside a small photo of two tall teen-aged boys in black suits, Eula and her husband sandwiched between them.
I recognized the blond-haired youth on Eula’s side first, though it was the one beside Henry that made me pause.
A mess of wavy copper hair and piercing eyes, gangly in the way that most teens were before they grew into their height.
And I knew that this particular boy would.
Eula saw my interest in the photo. “That was taken the last time we were all together, just before Henry died.” She gave a sad sort of smile. “Almost seventeen years ago, now. We were all happy then.”
Because the young man opposite Oliver, staring up at me from the photo with windblown hair and a reckless lopsided smile, was the stranger from the secret garden.
Cyrus.