Chapter 31 jijivisha
jijivisha
I took a deep breath and pushed open the garden door.
To my surprise, the garden had transformed very little over the last few days I’d been gone.
The flowers that had bloomed around the gazebo had barely spread, and the creeping thyme was still patchy in a few places.
While Rus had come a long way with his side of the plan, the garden itself had stalled.
The gazebo was done and the flower beds were hedged and the trees trimmed, but it all felt a little stagnant, as if the garden wasn’t quite sure of itself anymore.
Rus was tending to a small flower bed on the west side of the garden when I found him.
He slowly stood from where he was kneeling, gently laying seeds in the ground, and dusted the dirt off his knees.
This time, it was more evident than ever that he was surprised to see me again, but he didn’t say it.
That made the relief on his face all the less palatable.
He really thought I would abandon him? The idea—my own actions—repulsed me so much that I was ashamed that he doubted me for even a moment.
I deserve it, I thought, but on the other hand—
“It’s been raining,” I said softly. “I’m sorry. It’s been a few days . . .”
“Only a few hours,” he corrected gently, picking a dandelion weed out of a bed. Then he swallowed hard, twisting the stem around his finger. “If I did anything to upset you, Sophie, I won’t do it ever again—”
“No!” I said, the quickness of it surprising even me. I reeled myself in, clearing my throat. “No, you didn’t. It wasn’t you. You’re … you’re perfect.”
Perfect. While I was falling so fast and so terribly recklessly, I felt like a plant that had been deprived of the sun for so long that when I finally found it again, I wanted to burn up in it.
He studied me, his gaze unsure. Then he pulled off his glasses and stuck them into the collar of his shirt, as if he couldn’t bear to actually see me in sharp focus as he asked, “Then why did you leave?”
Because any longer, and I’d have wanted to stay.
But the more I rolled that answer around on my teeth, the less true that seemed because I already wanted to stay.
I think I had wanted to stay from the moment I set foot in Lilymoor, but I was scared that if I admitted that, time would start moving again, because time never stayed still, and I was afraid to lose this soft, eternal summer where the hours stretched like days and for a moment, if I closed my eyes and listened to the garden, I could pretend that Harrie was sitting beside me.
I think that was what Eula loved about Lilymoor, too. She could still see Henry sitting with the flowers. It was a place where grief—for the smallest of moments—felt tender and soft and warm.
Cyrus waited for my answer with all the patience of a gardener.
It was a fair question.
I was just ashamed of the answer.
“My best friend loved this place,” I found myself saying. He inclined his head, as if to listen better.
“I think I told you a little about her already. Her name was Harriett.” Was.
Such a small word, full of so much history and heartbreak.
It felt like an anchor that weighed me down under an ocean of grief.
“She was my person. We met freshman year of college in a study group. We bonded over a documentary about this place.”
“‘The Garden of Great Heights,’” he said, recalling the name of it. “I remember when PBS asked to tape that. I was eleven, I think? The crew was here all summer.”
I think, in one of the B-roll shots, I remembered a coppery-headed boy running around in the documentary, extolling every secret with this exuberant glee, and that filled me with a sort of nostalgia I didn’t think I could feel anymore.
How strange it was to realize that the world was so much smaller than you thought as a kid.
“I loved that documentary. I watched it all the time. My mom was a travel nurse, so I never really stayed long in one place. I never really made friends. Not until I met Harrie in college—I’d never met anyone like her before.
She was magical. My polar opposite. Smart, driven, incredibly organized.
I think I would’ve lost my head years ago without her,” I added with a laugh.
“I certainly wouldn’t have survived college if she hadn’t kept a leash on my drunk ass. ”
“You sound like Oliver,” he lamented. “He wouldn’t have graduated if it weren’t for me.”
“And I’m sure he thanks you every day for it.”
A bittersweet smile spread across his mouth. “We can’t all be perfect.”
“Harrie was. Even when she wasn’t,” I added, “she was.”
Because she refused to fail, and when she did she would say she was just learning.
You never failed if you never gave up, or at least that was her motto.
I think that was what felt so tragic about it all—the last year and a half of failure after failure after failure as her body gave up against her will.
I looked up at the sky. It was blue and cloudless. For months, I hated these kinds of skies. Because how could it look so beautiful and so azure and so wide on a day when my best friend had died? It should have been raining. It should have stormed.
Then, I thought, I wouldn’t miss her half as much on the pretty days.
“She died about eleven months ago,” I said.
“And I just . . . I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
Everyone is beginning to move on. Her fiancé is engaged again.
Her dream house sold to a lovely little family with a toddler and a dog.
Her books were given to the local library, her manuscript put into a drawer.
And here I am, just … standing still. Afraid.
The only time we visited here together, we made a promise to come back to Lilymoor in ten years.
She’d bring her kids. I’d bring my succulents or whatever.
This is that tenth year, and I’m here and …
” I pursed my lips to keep them from wobbling.
“It’s not fair, you know? What made me lucky enough to be healthy and alive?
I feel like I cheated, even though I know there was no way I could.
I just … I feel like any good thing I do, or feel, or achieve, I don’t deserve. ”
There it was. The deep, terrible truth. I was a coward. I really was.
I squeezed my eyes closed, waiting for his judgment, for him to tell me that I was silly, and selfish and guilt ridden and broken—all things that I knew to be true, anyway, but would have been shattering coming from him.
But as I braced for his words, I didn’t expect the feeling of his fingers lacing through mine instead.
In surprise, I looked down at our joined hands.
Tears filled my eyes, and I blinked rapidly to keep them at bay.
“But . . . kissing you made me feel selfish,” I went on.
“Kissing you meant that I was doing something for myself and I’m very bad at doing things for myself.
Kissing you—wanting to kiss you—means that I’m a different person than the one Harrie knew when she was alive.
It meant that I am still changing, that I am now the Sophie after Harrie, and what if I keep changing and keep changing, so much that I become someone Harrie wouldn’t recognize?
Then who is left to show that Harrie was alive?
That she left a mark? That she—that she was here?
” I blinked the hot tears out of my eyes and then rubbed them away with the back of my hand.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I’m a coward. I like you very much, Cyrus, and I’m afraid that I do. ”
“If you’re a coward, then so am I,” he said quietly, like a secret.
“I came back to Lilymoor because I thought I was wanted again, but then . . . I said some unforgivable things, and I went to go take a call, but my reception dropped and I was . . . too much of a coward to go back out and face what I’d said.
So I stayed here. I guess I fell asleep. ”
“I wish we were switched,” I said, blinking back the burning sensation in my eyes. “You want to move on. I just want to stay here. If time froze for me I’d be happy.”
He gently reached up and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, cupping my cheek in his warm hand. “Your visits make it easier.”
My mouth wobbled. “Why do you say all the right things?”
“Talent,” he replied, and I croaked a laugh.
He wiped the tears out of the edges of my eyes, then pulled me into a hug.
His arms were strong, and his body was warm, smelling of lavender and honey and loose soil.
As if he was made just for me, and how terrible that he was.
“I’m glad it was you who walked through that door,” he whispered. “I’m glad it was you.”
And in those words, I heard a permission I hadn’t given myself in a very long time—to be messy and awful and un-done. To be human. To be hurting.
To be alive.