You should’ve played along, I scolded myself as I followed Oliver.You ruined it.
“When Rus and I saw the fire, he scaled the wall in the Willow Grove and tried to put it out. There’s a spigot over here that he used. Maybe that’s what’s leaking?” Oliver mused, picking his way through the weeds and wildflowers that grew despite it all. He didn’t glance back to make sure I was following, as if trying to distance himself from the moment we almost had.
Bitterness crawled up my throat, but I swallowed it back down.
I let him search for the spigot while I ventured deeper into the greenhouse. The ground grew softer. It smelled different here, too, heavy with moss and dampness.
“I think we found the culprit,” announced Oliver, motioning to a rusted spigot and the damp ground around it. “Strange that it only started leaking through the wallnow.”
“Maybe it busted after Wykofski started installing those sprinklers in the front?” I wondered aloud.
“Hell if I know. Ugh, it’s sowet,” he added with a scowl, his white tennis shoes now caked with mud. He waded back to dry land and followed the path I’d made through the weeds to the back of the greenhouse. “I’m sure Wykofski can turn off the water to this side of the garden and that should fix it.”
At the far end of the burnt building, there was a small room where no weeds or flowers grew. There was a charred desk still standing, and the remnants of a wooden chair, and broken pots and pencils. When I asked Oliver about it, he told me it was where Henry kept his workshop.
“It used to be covered with paintings and schematics. He papered the wall with them,” Oliver said, coming to join me as I sifted through what was left, which wasn’t much. It didn’t look like anyone had visited at all since the fire to see what could be salvaged.
If they had, I’m sure they would’ve looked under the charred table. I’m sure they would’ve swept aside the debris and found a burnt leather journal. I’m sure they would’ve picked it up and dusted it off.
The journal was sixteen years faded, waterlogged and with blackened edges, but it was still intact. Even the string used to wrap it together hadn’t burned through, still tied slapdash, as if its owner would be back shortly to finish whatever he was working on.
Oliver came up to me, curious. “What did you find?”
“I think …” As I unwrapped the twine and opened the cracked leather journal, my hunch was proven correct. Therewere notes. Pages upon pages upon pages, with drawings and empty seed packets shoved inside. Most of the pages were unreadable, water damaged beyond repair, but a few toward the middle were still legible.
Henry had a sharp, slanted scrawl that would have been hard to read on a good day, but his sketches were lovely. There were plans for the Rose Court, the Spiral, the greenhouse even—and then as I came to the end, there was a new garden. The schematic on the page was blurry, almost completely ruined, but I could make out a gazebo, and haphazard flower beds, and a willow—
And above it, written in long and loopy letters, was its name.
The Someday Garden
23
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 ityesterday. It has plans, schematics, everything—look, look,” I added, pausing on one page in particular. “It’s the plans for a garden.Thisgarden, 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 ofThe Someday Gardenat 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?”
