Chapter 21 pochemuchka
pochemuchka
A few days had passed since I mailed the letter to Cyrus, and I hadn’t seen the door since.
Which meant that, maybe, it had worked. Then again, most evenings had been overcast. I wasn’t exactly sure how this garden magic worked, but I was mostly certain I only found the door on sunny days.
This evening was very sunny, at least, and there was still no sign of it.
So maybe the letter worked, and he decided not to come to the party.
That also meant that I’d never see him again.
(Or, never meet him? Too confusing.) There was no reason for him to visit Lilymoor if not for the bicentennial, and I was gone the day after.
Ships passing in the night. Never meant to meet.
Sad, but one less thing on my plate, I decided.
Sitting down in the Hedges, I staked my shovel into the ground beside me and took a break.
The sky slowly shifted from robin’s-egg blue to a soft pink to orange, and the breeze coming up from the cliffs was heavy with brine.
I rubbed at my left hip, because it was still a little sore from when I fell off the wall.
The cut on my cheek was healing nicely, though, which probably had nothing to do with Oliver but I was sure he’d take credit anyway.
I wondered, if Cyrus had never been trapped in the garden, whether he and Oliver would’ve spoken at the party. Cleared the air.
“Doesn’t matter now,” I mumbled to myself, and just as I was deciding to call it for the evening, there was a sound. The creak of—a door?
I glanced around, but I didn’t see it.
Wind rippled through the boxwoods, and there it was again. Soft but real. I popped to my feet, leaving my shovel and sun hat by the bench, and quickly followed the sound out of the Hedges and into the Central Garden.
There, pressed into an old stone wall, was the blue door.
So the letter hadn’t worked.
I stepped into the garden, the same, as unchanging as always.
“Damn,” I whispered, and dropped onto the stone bench beside the door, and leaned my back against the vine-covered wall. I let out a hard sigh.
Cyrus was lounging in a patch of clovers by the willow, arms tucked behind his head, eyes closed. As I rose and approached him, he cracked open an eye and waited for me to say something. But I had nothing to say. I felt foolish, being so sure that letter would work, that it’d be that easy.
The door was still here, and so was he.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “It’s not your fault I’m stuck here, Sophie.”
“No,” I admitted, sitting down beside him, “but I don’t understand why it didn’t work.”
He hesitated. “It … just didn’t.” There was a frustrated note in his voice, and I studied him, waiting for him to go on. He didn’t at first, and then with a huff he sat up. “It actually made me furious, okay?”
That was a surprise. “What part of that made you furious?”
He gave me a knowing look.
I threw up my hands. “I don’t know, Rus!”
So he planted a hand in the clover as he leaned toward me, eyes narrowing. “Sophie,” he said in a low voice, “you said it’d waste my time. What did you think would happen?”
“That you’d agree, Rus.”
Silently, he massaged the bridge of his nose.
My cheeks burned with embarrassment. Oh. “So how was I supposed to know you’d take that as a challenge?” I argued, flustered, thinking maybe I should have gone with the Cancún letter. “This is seriously unfair. Why didn’t you tell me it wouldn’t work when I mentioned my plan?”
To which he replied, “I told you I wasn’t sure about it.”
But I had already realized—“You knew,” I accused, jabbing a finger at him. “You knew I’d write something to piss you off! And you let me anyway!”
He rolled his eyes toward the sky. “And yet hope springs eternal.”
“Well, you should have told me that it wasn’t going to work!
Maybe if I hadn’t sent it at all, you wouldn’t have come!
I mean, Eula said you were thinking about coming, not that you were.
So what if me sending that letter is the reason you’re coming?
” I said aloud in growing horror. “Oh god. It’s my fault. ”
“It wouldn’t have pissed me off if I thought the message came from someone I knew,” he explained, and dread coiled in my belly.
“Did I …” My voice was small. “Sign the letter as Sophie?”
“You did,” he confirmed in almost a rumble.
The blush on my cheeks was raging now. I buried my head in my hands. “Oh my god.”
“Mm-hmm,” he agreed, and leaned closer still, so our gazes were eye level with each other.
My stomach fluttered with flustered butterflies at how close he was, how wild his hair had become between our last few meetings, how dreadfully badly I wanted to take a marker and connect the constellations of his freckles—all of which were dangerous thoughts to be thinking about a man trapped in a garden.
“So,” he mused, “what was I supposed to do?”
I thought, as his storm-blue gaze dropped to my mouth, he’d kiss me.
I thought, for a moment, he looked like he wanted to.
I thought, maybe, I wanted him to, too.
But then he leaned away again, wetting his lips with his tongue, and pushed himself to his feet. Was the clover greener suddenly? I blinked, rubbing my eyes. It must’ve been a trick of the light. I pressed my palms against my warm cheeks, hoping they’d cool.
“Back to the drawing board, then,” he said, pushing his fingers through his copper hair, and started to pace back and forth.
“I don’t know what else to do,” I admitted, “aside from handcuffing you to a radiator in the house or something during the party.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” he said dismissively, then added practically, “I’d scream loud enough someone would hear.”
“You do have a funny scream.”
He gave me another deploring look.
I shrugged. “You do. And the garden will probably thwart us, anyway.”
He shook his head, turning on his heels to walk back toward me.
“No, I don’t think so. Lilymoor isn’t that belligerent.
At least not on purpose.” He said it frankly, like someone who knew the garden well.
Eula had said that the one person who knew Lilymoor best, aside from Henry, was Rus.
“This garden was used for something. I’m sure of it. One of Henry’s half-finished projects.”
“How can you tell?”
He motioned to the entirety of it. “It has his tells. The way he spread out the gardens, the timing of the sprouts that are coming up, the seeds he was going to plant in the basket—even the willow.” His eyebrows furrowed then.
“I think he used to talk about this garden. The longer I’m here, the more I remember. ”
“You were really close to Henry, weren’t you?”
He stopped pacing, hesitation freezing him to the spot, before he said, shortly, “Yeah. I used to come here every summer as a kid. This place used to be home. Then it wasn’t.”
I stood. “Maybe that has something to—oh.” I sucked in a gasp as my vision twisted. The garden turned hazy—like one of those tritone photos. I lost my balance, but he was quick to catch me. He steadied me against him. The garden spun, but at least he was solid.
“Are you okay?” he asked worriedly.
I blinked, swaying against him, as I tried to clear my vision, but it wasn’t my eyes. It was the garden—stretching and pulling, turning Cyrus double.
“I … I think it’s sunset,” I said, because it was the same thing that had happened on the top of the garden wall before I fell over it. “I think the garden’s telling me to leave.”
“Then you should go,” he said, his voice echoing, a second sooner in one ear than the other.
I nodded, taking a step toward the door across the garden, but then he swooped me up in his arms, and carried me the rest of the way.
He put me back on my feet by the door, and said, “I think this has something to do with Henry. I don’t know what, though. ”
“I’ll look,” I promised, and lurched out the door. The next thing I knew, I was stumbling out into the Central Garden, my knees scraping against the hard pebbled ground, and the deep shadows of dusk stretched across the great oak tree above.