Chapter 27 culaccino
culaccino
“She’s done!” Wykofski cried as he stomped his way into the kitchen, hands thrown into the air. He startled Juliette into a yelp, and all her papers went flying. “And she lives!”
I looked up from pouring a cup of morning coffee. “Who lives?” I asked, as Oliver abandoned his apple on the counter to help Juliette gather up her papers. She had printed out a list of all the RSVPs so far and was going through them, counting the dietary restrictions.
“Willow Grove!” Wykofski replied proudly. “She’s cleared of voles and mowed and lookin’ hot.”
“Amazing!” I high-fived him.
Oliver finished helping Juliette clean up her papers and said, “Please don’t ever say a lawn is hot again.”
“She’s lookin’ real sexy,” Wykofski went on, giving him the okay sign.
He scowled. “I’m not nearly awake enough for this,” he decided, and left for his room again.
Juliette gave Wykofski a tired look. “You really should stop scaring him away.”
“What? He didn’t even look at the lawn before judgin’ her!”
“You know what I mean.”
He rolled his eyes. “He’s gonna have to get used to us if he’s gonna be the one inheriting the estate,” he said, and it was the first time any of us had spoken the possibility aloud. “So I’m just gonna ease him into the madness.”
“If he decides to keep it,” Juliette muttered.
Wykofski flapped his hand at her. “Shh! Don’t speak that into existence! I like my job.”
“I like mine, too,” she agreed.
I also liked mine, but that didn’t matter. I had less than a month to go until the bicentennial, and I was no closer to finding the Someday Garden.
For the next few days, the weather turned out to be beautiful and sunny, so I used that time to do some gardening chores—deadheading, weeding, and the like—while I looked for the door and tried to puzzle out where it could be.
I had found uninhabited spaces, sure. There had been a few on the outskirts of the estate, past the Willow Grove, and on the other side of the Rose Court, one wedged between the Hedges and the Wildflowers, and a peculiar-shaped space in the Central Garden, but every one of those held only weeds, or disguised a water pump for the Reservoir, or was home to a family of chipmunks.
The reality of that was heavy—heavier than I wanted.
I feared Rus had gotten the easier job.
When the door appeared an hour before sunset, I went to visit him in the garden.
He had moved on from the gazebo and had started gardening in the flower beds, but in just a few days, the garden had transformed so much I barely recognized it.
There was wisteria climbing across the willows, and rose bushes starting to bloom, and daffodils and daisies and delphiniums waking up from the ground.
Rus was trying to decide which seeds to plant in one of the beds surrounding the gazebo.
“Maybe some asters and cosmos? Something that’s easy to flower,” he said, leafing through the brown paper packets, names scrawled across them in Henry’s long and loopy script, “though maybe star jasmine will work better? And we can fill in the path to the willow with some creeping thyme?” He motioned to the stones in the path. “I think that’d look really nice.”
“You seem happy,” I mused, eyeing the blooming rose bushes and wisteria.
He schooled his face. “What? No. I’m just bored and I should be working. I’m wasting time,” he decided. His mouth twisted. “Nonbillable at that.”
Maybe he could have lied if the garden didn’t look—well, if it didn’t look like this. “Time is more than just money, you know.”
He shrugged. “I’ve learned that time keeps me accountable. Keeps me from being reckless. There’s order to it. I like order.”
Or was he simply afraid of who he’d be if he grew wild? He was very much like this garden himself—unattended, though with a little care, maybe something more. After all, to me he didn’t seem like the kind of cold, detached man he pretended to be.
“I think you’re lying,” I muttered, more to myself than to him, but he heard it anyway.
His eyebrows jerked up. “Oh?”
I doubled down. “I think you’re lying.”
Patiently, he closed the journal and stuck it in his back pocket, turning his undivided attention to me instead. He folded his arms over his chest. “Go on.”
Look around you, I wanted to say, but he’d just wave the blooms off as Lilymoor’s magic, having nothing to do with him.
“You try to be apathetic, but when you get down to it, you’re not. You can’t be.”
“I think my client’s adversaries would say differently—”
“But that’s not you, is it? It’s the person you’re trying to be.
That’s Cyrus Beck. But Rus is . . . you’re passionate and you care, and, sure, you keep reminding me that you’re wasting your time, but it sounds to me like you keep on saying it to remind yourself that you are.
I don’t think you believe it.” I searched his face, and the raw surprise was warring with an emotion I couldn’t name. “I don’t think you ever believed it.”
He turned away, carding his fingers through his hair, a habit I began to realize he did to ground himself, but it didn’t work this time.
“I think maybe you’re afraid of something,” I went on quietly.
He walked away a few feet, as if the distance made my words easier to manage.
The rigidness of his shoulders had returned, the tenseness of his body that made him blockier.
All sharp corners and edges. I feared I’d overstepped, because he didn’t say anything for a long time, to the point where I was wondering if I should just leave, or if he’d want me to say good-bye as I did.
I’d started to go get my shovel to leave when he finally spoke.
“It’s the memories here, mostly. Everywhere I turn, I see someone I could’ve been if I had stayed, but I couldn’t stay.
Not after …” He pursed his lips, unable to talk about the fire.
“I’ve fucked up so many times, Sophie, and that was the last straw.
I ruined the one place that accepted me, and …
I refuse to do that again. So the more distance I put between that boy and me, the better off I am.
I’ve worked so hard to be someone else. Someone competent and worthy and important.
Here I’m just …” He picked at the dirt under his nail. “I’m just that screwup kid again.”
I imagined what that kid looked like. Younger than the teenager in the photo. Messy red hair and a too-wide smile and a zillion freckles and muddy knees. My chest felt tight as I imagined that kid who tried his best. “Maybe that screwup kid isn’t so bad.”
His hands stilled. “Don’t say that,” he whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve worked too hard to get rid of him.” He stared down at his hands, and the dirt on his fingertips. “He wasn’t any good for anyone.”
That wasn’t true.
I leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t be so hard on him. He turned into a good man.”
He shot me a look of utter heartbreak. “I’m not a good man, Sophie.” Then he stood and walked away.
At the end of the week, I brought a basket of strawberries, because I remembered what Oliver had told me about how both he and Rus loved them, and after that jarring conversation about his past, I wanted to make it up to him.
I was no closer to finding the door. I’d combed through the Hedges and half the Rose Court, so I knew it had to be somewhere on the eastern side of the estate—like he’d said—but other than that . . .
I wasn’t going to fail. It wasn’t an option.
Rus was in the process of planting the seeds I’d given him, so when I showed up through the door, he came over to meet me.
The sun had made the day hot, but in the garden it was still crisp and cool—never changing.
The star jasmine, cosmos, and asters that he had planted were already sprouting by the gazebo, and the creeping thyme had started to, in fact, creep along the path in purple swaths.
He motioned to the basket with a checkered blanket atop it. “What’s that?”
“Hungry?” I asked, and showed him the strawberries underneath the blanket.
A strange look flickered across his eyes before he schooled his thoughts and said, “Are those fresh?”
“Straight from the vegetable garden. Care for a break?”
“Tempt me even more, why don’t you,” he said in reply.
So we unfurled the checkered blanket and smoothed it out on the floor of the gazebo, the basket of strawberries between us.
I wanted to apologize for our conversation last time I was here, though we had both done the very adult thing and had ignored any discomfort, but every time I tried to bring it up again, something stopped me.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know why he didn’t think he was a good man.
I mean, it wasn’t like I couldn’t find out by myself—I had googled him a few nights ago and came across exactly what I thought I’d find: the digital footprint of a man who had been lured into the world of litigation, someone who was argumentative and calculating and—well—good at his job.
Very good, apparently.
His social media was sparse, but the photos that he did post were of vacations to Turks and Caicos, to the Greek isles, to little villas in Spain.
I put together that the postcards in Eula’s bedroom seemed to match his travels, and when I went to check my hunch, I was right.
He’d sent her postcards from all the different places he’d been.
For someone so bent on escaping Lilymoor, he certainly thought of it often.
I had half a mind to message him on socials, but what exactly could I say?
That in a few weeks he’d be trapped in a garden he couldn’t escape?
Maybe he’d believe it, since he so readily accepted the garden’s magic when I found the journal.
But then if he took me at my word and didn’t come to the bicentennial, I wouldn’t ever meet him.