42
duende
I stood in front of the wall of honeysuckles, in the middle of the Central Garden, and said, “I’m very sorry,” to the garden itself.
Then I heaved up the sledgehammer and slammed it against the wall. Then again. And again. The stones began to crumble back. I had written off the space in the middle of the Central Garden as just shrubbery. The map said there was a filledin pond behind it, back before Henry dug the Reservoir. Maybe there was nothing on the other side. Maybe there was a sink-hole. Weeds.Nothing.
But maybe . . .
Just maybe . . .
Maybe there was a door.
I would tear down this wall, stone by stone if I had to.
Lilymoor had always been strange. It always had a mind of its own. Misplaced shovels, flooding flower beds, whispers on the wind. Moving roots and angry geese and flowers that bloomed in strange seasons. And those vines—always those strange honeysuckle vines—that I thought were a nuisance but in the end turned out to be leading me to what I was looking for.
Who was to say that all this time, Lilymoor hadn’t been trying to get someone to find this garden that Henry had started but never finished?
It was hard to talk about the people we lost—I knew that better than most. I put up walls so high it was impossible to scale them. I thought that if I kept my hurt, if I lived in it, then some part of Harrie would live on, too.
But I was wrong, because keeping her locked tight would ensure that she died with me, and she deserved so much more. Like vines, like weeds, like dandelion tufts, Harrie couldn’t be contained even if she wanted to. Love never should be. She deserved for everyone to know about her laugh, and her book of untranslatable words, and her favorite flowers, and her hopes and her dreams. She deserved stories told about her, she deserved to have her name come up in casual conversation, sparking her back to life with each new person who met her memories. She deserved life after life after life, over and over and over again—
We all did.
Henry deserved it, too. He deserved people to walk into his beautiful gardens, and he deserved to be seen for all of the ideas he never finished, all of the projects left half formed in the dirt.
Because every bit of this, every memory, every unfinished sentence, every forgotten garden, told our stories.
Over and over and over again.
And I wanted to tell all of my stories to Rus. I wanted to share them all with him, all of the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that made me feel foolish, and the ones that made me feel loved.
He saw me like few other people did and I didn’tunderstand why or how—but I knew that my heart beat loud and bright and I was terrified.
But some things were worth the fall.
I didn’t want Cyrus stuck in an endless summer afternoon. I wanted to see him at midnight. I wanted to see him at dawn. I wanted to spend afternoon winters with him and summer nights and Christmases and birthdays—
I wanted to waste so much time with him, it hurt to think of it all. I wanted to keep making memories. I wanted to keep making mistakes. I wanted to keeptrying.
I wanted to try so damn hard.
With one final cry, I slammed the sledgehammer into the stone, and the wall crumbled inward. Breathing heavy, I stepped over the rubble and pressed my hand against the worn and familiar blue door.
It was locked, but I dug into my dress pocket for the key.
I fumbled with it, and inserted it into the rusted lock. My hands were shaking as I turned the key.
There was aclick.
And the door yawned open wide.
On the other side, there were weeds, and snarling honey-suckle vines, and half-dug flower beds. My heart sank as I stepped inside. In the twilight, without magic hour to make it look warm and lived-in, the Someday Garden looked forgotten. All of Rus’s hard work—all the hours we spent planting and pruning and planning—was nothing but weeds and over-growth. And I realized … I had looked at this abandoned landscape before. I had peeked over one of the brick walls in the Central Garden, and seen nothing but a thicket of underbrush and slashed it off the map.
My heart hammered in my throat, making me sick with dread. Where was Rus?
Tears burned in my eyes. I tried to catch my breath as I stumbled into the garden. It was here the whole time. It just didn’t look like what I had imagined. There were no flowers, no gazebo, no willow—that was the biggest missing piece. There was no tree, no swing, no—
