Page 84 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“What?” Garrick asked.

“Nothing.” Eric’s mouth twitched. “A year or two. The year after that. You’ve got it planned out three summers deep, standing under an arbor you built with your hands on your land, telling a child you’ll be here to smell the flowers.” He shook his head, mild as ever. “I’ve known you for thirty years. I don’t think I ever heard you make a plan past the next contract.”

“I’ve made plans.”

“You’ve made exits.” Eric clapped him on the shoulder, once, and moved off towards his wife before Garrick could decide whether to be annoyed. “It’s a good arbor,” he called back. “Nobody’s remarking on it. That’s the point.”

They weren’t. That was the strange part. A whole town could walk through the gardens all afternoon, past a frame built for a plant that wouldn’t bloom for years, and not one of them found it worth a word. He couldn’t quite stop turning it over. Fifteen years. Fifteen years of furnished apartments in cities he left, of hotel suites, of a firm he could run from anywhere precisely so he’d never have to be anywhere. He’d owned this house the entire time and let it rot rather than live in it. And now he’d gone and pegged green oak into the ground for a vine that measured its life in seasons he intended to be present for.

He looked out over the gardens instead, because it was easier than looking at that.

They were full of people, the gates open, and the wall he’d once thought of as a boundary was just something to walk through. And the whole of Fairhaven Falls was spilling across grounds his father had let go to bramble. Maris had opened them for the Spring Festival without asking him first, the way she’d stopped asking him first about most things. He’d found he liked being told rather than consulted about the garden. It meant she thought of it as hers to open.

The daffodils had done it. That was Maris’s doing too, although she’d told him it was mostly luck and old bulbs. Back in the autumn she’d found the ghosts of them everywhere under the neglect—clumps that had naturalized and spread and gone on flowering blindly in the dark under the brambles for years with nobody to see them. She hadn’t dug them out and put in something showier. She’d freed them, split the crowded ones, and let them do what they’d been doing all along.

Now they ran in drifts down the whole slope, thousands of them, pale and gold and butter-yellow, following the contours of the land the way water would. Between them she’d threaded everything else that dared to bloom this early. The small blue things, the hellebores nodding their heads, a haze of something white along the fallen wall where her ferns were just unrolling their first fronds of the year.

His mother’s garden alive again, and full of the town, and better than it had been when his mother kept it. He’d never say that to anyone but Maris, and he’d only said it to her once, at night, in the dark, where it was safe.

“He likes the feather best.”

He looked down. Toby had appeared silently at his elbow the way Toby did, a small serious presence who had learned he never had to announce himself to be welcome. He had been calling Garrick Dad since November, as though he’d never considered him anything else. He was in his good coat, which meant it would be muddy within the hour. He was looking across the roses to where Corwin Stonehaven sat weathering in the open air among the first green shoots of his wife’s roses.

“The feather?” Garrick repeated.

“I left him the grey rock and the shiny rock and the feather.” Toby counted them off on his fingers. “And the little hard hat, but that fell over, so I stood it back up. I think he likes the feather best because it’s the only one that isn’t a rock. He’s got enough rock. He is rock.”

The foot of the statue contained a small orderly museum of offerings. A grey stone. A quartz pebble Toby had found in the creek and washed at the kitchen sink with great ceremony. A jay’s feather, blue and black, stuck upright in the earth. A toy hard hat, yellow, the size of a walnut, that Toby had knocked off his construction figure and decided his grandfather ought to have instead. Garrick had watched him leave each one, without prompting and without explanation, the way children left things. They were interesting, and interesting things belonged to his grandfather now.

Nobody in Fairhaven found it odd. He had waited, at first, for someone to find it odd. A child leaving toys at a grave, at a grave that was also his grandfather, that was also stone, that was also a male who’d chosen the dark. He’d braced for pity, or for the wrong kind of gentleness. But this town had never once thought the statue strange. So when Toby stood a walnut hard hat up at the feet of a gargoyle, nobody blinked. Rona had left a rose there last week. Flora talked to him when she passed, briskly, the way she talked to everyone.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “About the feather.”

Toby nodded, satisfied, and went to check on it.

The light was going amber by the time the last of the visitors left. He walked most of them out himself, and sometimes still found it hard to believe that he was the kind of male who did things like that now. He stood at the open gate and shook Grondar’s hand and Houston’s. He let Flora inform him, at length, that the festival had been the best in living memory and that she personally deserved most of the credit. He didn’t argue. Arguing with Flora was something you did for exercise and never for results.

“The arbor,” Flora said, pausing on her way out, her small green hand resting on the green oak post. She looked up at the bare frame and then at him. “A year or two, you told the Hobbes girl. I heard you.”

“It’s a slow vine.”

“Mm.” She patted the post. “My grandmother planted the wisteria at the Inn. I sat under it as a girl and I’ll be under it when I go. That’s what wisteria is for, boy. You don’t plant one for yourself. You plant it for the ones who’ll sit under it when you’re the one who’s gone to stone.” She looked at him a moment longer, and then, uncharacteristically, said nothing else at all. She patted the post once more and went off down the drive in her traffic-cone tracksuit, humming. She left him standing there with her words lodged in his chest like a splinter he had no wish to remove.

Then the gate was empty, and the gardens were quiet, and it was just the three of them left in the long golden light. Maris was on the terrace steps with her boots off and her bare feet on the warm stone. Toby was lying full length in the grass examining something small and probably alive. And he was coming back up the path towards the two people his life was now centered around.

The house behind them wasn’t a monument anymore.

He’d noticed that too, slowly, over the winter—that the mansion he’d spent the better part of two years restoring into something museum-perfect had quietly stopped being a museum. There were muddy boots by the kitchen door, three sizes of them. There was a hard hat on the newel post at the bottom of the great staircase and a smaller one hung on the peg below it. There were seed trays going leggy on every south windowsill, because Maris couldn’t help herself. There were flats of plants waiting in the conservatory for warmer weather, and a child’s drawings held to the enormous hearth with the same fridge magnets that had migrated in from the cottage. There was a smell of woodsmoke and plants and dinner. His father’s house had been silent and shut for fifteen years, and dead for five years before that. Now it creaked and banged and tracked mud across the marble, and he had never in his life lived anywhere he liked so well.

He hadn’t gone into stone this Christmas.

He kept thinking about that, the way he’d keep pressing a bruise to check it was real. Every winter for years he’d let himself sink into stone in mid-December, the way his people did. Last year he’d gone under intending to stay that way for six weeks. He’d come up two weeks early, and not known why for eight months. This year there had been no reason to sleep through the dark at all. There’d been a tree Toby picked out that scraped the drawing-room ceiling. There’d been Maris’s terrible, joyous attempt at his mother’s mince pies. There’d been a boy waking him at dawn with a small body climbing onto the bed to announce the morning. He’d stayed awake for all of it, every short grey day, and it had been the first winter in almost twenty years he hadn’t wanted to miss.

The Pinckneys had come. They had stayed four days at the Inn, as invited, and it had been exactly as difficult as he expected for about a day and a half. Then Toby had called him Dad across the breakfast table, in front of both of them, without looking up from his toast.

He had watched Cornelia Pinckney take it. She set her cup down, but she didn’t correct the boy. She didn’t look at her husband, and she didn’t leave the room. She asked Toby whether he would show her the greenhouses, and then she went out in her good coat and stood in wet gravel for forty minutes while a five-year-old explained propagation to her. On the last evening she found him alone in the hall. She told him that Jefferson had been a kind boy and a hopeless gardener, and that she was glad Toby was learning to garden. It was not forgiveness and it was not permission. He had understood it to be the most she had.

Maris had cried in the pantry for ten minutes afterwards and then come out and asked what everybody wanted for supper.