Chapter 23 toska
toska
The door appeared around a corner in the Rose Court the next afternoon, already slightly ajar.
After I told Wykofski to turn off the water to the greenhouse spigot, the flower bed had already begun to dry out.
It wouldn’t save the wildflowers in that section, or salvage it for the bicentennial—Wykofski said he could whip up a flower sculpture and plant it back there, though I was skeptical—but I could seed new flowers for the autumn.
I wouldn’t be here to tend to them, but I could leave a note for whoever was.
It felt silly to knock on the door, but I did anyway as I hurried inside.
“Rus! You were right. I think I know what this place is,” I announced loudly, holding up the weathered journal.
At the sound of his name, he glanced up at me from his phone. He was sitting on the stone bench again, the one near the crab apple tree. “Sophie,” he greeted me, blinking, as if he’d just been very far away in his thoughts. “Hello.”
I came to sit down beside him and offered him the weathered journal.
He took it, curious, and slowly flipped through the brittle pages.
“It’s one of your uncle’s journals. I found it yesterday.
It has plans, schematics, everything—look, look,” I added, pausing on one page in particular.
“It’s the plans for a garden. This garden, Rus. I’m sure of it.”
He got up and went over to his jacket, still hanging on the knob of a crab apple tree—though, had it been in bloom before?
I couldn’t remember, but now it was heavy with pink and white blossoms—and fished out a pair of glasses from his breast pocket.
Then he came back to sit down and put them on.
They were round and sat low on his nose.
That, coupled with the curl of coppery hair that fell against his forehead, made him look achingly imperfect, a little more disheveled than before, as if every visit was slowly peeling away layer after layer he’d built up.
“Nice glasses,” I remarked. “I didn’t know you wore them.”
“They’re just readers,” he replied, then added thoughtfully, “I think I stole them from Eula.”
“They do look familiar,” I agreed.
“But they look better on me, right?”
“Devastatingly,” I said, rolling my eyes, and he bit in a grin as he returned his attention to the journal.
He studied the page in question for a long moment, lingering on the looping script of The Someday Garden at the top.
His fingers gently traced down the penciled sketches of the perimeter.
Excitedly, I glanced up at him and paused. He’d gone soft around the eyes.
I hesitated. “Is something wrong?”
Slowly, he shook his head. “I remember this. I remember him writing in this journal. I remember him talking about these plans—the flower beds, the willow tree swing, the trumpet vine gazebo . . . He wanted it ready for the bicentennial.” He sucked in a breath, sitting up a little straighter.
“He said he wanted to make a special garden for Eula—a golden-hour garden. That’s why it’s always sunset in here. ”
“And why I can only come here in the evenings,” I filled in, realizing.
The term golden hour itched something in my brain—something Harrie once said, in all her romanticized stories.
Golden hour was another name for magic hour, a time in folklore when the inexplicable was stronger.
The precipice of day and evening. Like the old folktales of halfway places—shores where land and sea met and cliff sides where land and sky combined.
Lilymoor had all of them—shore and cliffs, sea and land and sky.
“I think …” Rus looked around at the garden again, at all the half-finished thoughts, as if his uncle had left in the middle of a sentence and never returned.
He closed the journal with a soft sigh. “Henry always said that the inexplicable at Lilymoor was more potent when things were left undone. It runs wild with hope and unrealized dreams—that’s the crux of Lilymoor’s magic. ”
“You hear yourself, don’t you?”
He massaged the bridge of his nose. “Sophie, we’re sitting in a garden that has me trapped in a liminal space at sunset,” he pointed out. “Yes, I hear myself.”
“But what you’re saying is that …” I motioned with my hands, trying to find the right way to explain it. “That Lilymoor is alive?”
He tilted his head one way, then the other. “No, yes … I’m not sure? I know how I sound, trust me. But Henry always swore that there was magic here. He couldn’t explain it. He just said I’d know when it happened.”
“Like the voices in the hedges?” I asked skeptically. “That story?”
“That’s an old legend from before Eula and Henry. That’s why they bought Lilymoor, famously, because of the legend.”
I must have missed that in the documentary, too enraptured by the delphiniums. Harrie would know more—she was the one who cared about the lore of Lilymoor, instead of its flowers.
“I believe,” he went on, thinking aloud, “that Lilymoor wants me to finish this garden for the bicentennial. That’s why I can’t leave, but you can.” He looked thoughtfully at me, a thin wrinkle furrowing the middle of his brow. “Because it knew I’d need help.”
The idea, as far-fetched as it sounded, was taking root for me, too, but there was still the elephant in the room. “So . . . where is this garden, then?”
“I don’t know,” Rus admitted, nervously flicking the top corner of the journal page back and forth. “But how else could we be here if it wasn’t somewhere?”
That was the question, wasn’t it. “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath, “I’ll look for it. If it is somewhere on the property, I’ll find it. No pressure.”
“None at all,” he agreed sarcastically, and closed the journal. “In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to . . . get my hands dirty.” The way he said it sounded like he was being asked to commit a murder.
“Oh, how terrible,” I deadpanned.
“Atrociously. And in these shoes?”
I glanced down at his loafers. “I’ve seen those at Walmart.”
He made a face like I had just insulted his mother. “These are Tom Ford.”
“Then you’ll have to apologize to him for getting them dirty,” I replied, and picked at his collar. “Is your shirt also a proper noun, too?”
“Ralph Lauren …”
I barked a laugh. “This is too easy.”
“I do look good, though,” he pointed out, and then a thought occurred to him. He held up the journal. “Where did you find this?”
“Oliver took me to go see the greenhouse,” I replied, “and I found it there in the remains of the building, beneath the workbench.”
“Ah.” His voice was tight.
“He … told me what happened. About the fire. He said you took the blame for it all,” I ventured, “and then you left.” His face shuttered as he took off his glasses and placed them in his shirt pocket. Above us, the blooms of the crab apple began to wilt. “I did. So did he.”
“He misses you, I think,” I said, remembering about the far-off look Oliver got sometimes when he talked about Rus. “And I don’t even think he realizes it.”
He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “I doubt it. We haven’t talked in years.”
“Well, if you’d talked you’d know that he also blames himself for the fire. He hates himself so much that he hasn’t moved on. He’s stuck here, like you.”
He scoffed. “He’s stuck in a garden, too, I guess?”
“No, but you can be stuck in different ways.”
“Like you’re stuck helping me?”
“Lucky me. I get stuck with the nephew who is too rude, and too tall, and too—too—ginger.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Too ginger?” he echoed in disbelief.
I ignored him. “Don’t get me wrong—it’s not completely selfless,” I said.
“I’m doing this for Harrie, too. We made a promise that we couldn’t keep.
So I want to keep my promise to you, and if I can get you out of this place, then maybe that means I can save something after all—something other than flowers.
” I shifted on the bench uncomfortably. “And maybe if I find you, I . . . I won’t be stuck anymore, either. ”
His face softened, and the venom that was in his voice a moment ago vanished. “Who’s Harrie?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but the words got caught up in my throat. I had talked about her without even meaning to. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said her name aloud to a stranger, having kept her bottled up for so long, she felt like a secret.
Who was Harrie?
She was fries with vinegar and cotton candy stuck to the roof of your mouth. She was sour lemonade and bright laughs and romance novels with spines cracked at the sex scenes. She was good, and loud, and larger-than-life, so that when she left, she took all the air out of the room, too.
“She’s . . . she was . . .”
Was.
She was.
The grief came up so fast and so strong, I couldn’t tamp it down like I normally did. Hot tears burned at the edges of my eyes. Oh no, this wasn’t how this was supposed to go. I raked the heels of my hands over my eyes, but it didn’t matter.
He already saw.
How embarrassing.
I thought about fleeing the garden so he couldn’t see my ugly, tear-streaked face, but suddenly his arms came up, and he pulled me into a hug.
It was tight and encompassing. Secure. I couldn’t remember the last time I was hugged, or the last time someone let me cry on their shoulder.
I pressed my face into his chest, hating the way I cried ugly, sloppy tears.
Harrie always said that my body was wound so tight that when I finally snapped, it was like a dam bursting.
And he simply held me together, his arms wrapped around me, letting me empty all of my heart out in big, gulping wails.
He didn’t tell me how sorry he was for my loss, or for my tears, and it was a relief that he didn’t tell me that it was okay, either. He simply let me cry until there wasn’t anything left, hugging me in such a strangely safe and warm way that I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave.
After a while, he rubbed the tears on my cheeks away with his thumbs, cupping my face in his hands. “My socks,” he whispered, as if it was a secret, “are from Dollar Tree.”