Our Missing Hearts (27)

As he looks around, memories hover close before alighting on his shoulders like dragonflies. They’d had flowers here, before: lavender, and honeysuckle, and huge purple puffballs, his father’s favorites. White roses the size of his fist that fat golden bees wriggled into. Vines with purple star-shaped blooms. Here there had been vegetables, curling squash with hairy leaves and sprawling tomatoes. His mother’s green rubber boots, treads caked with mud. His had been orange. Once he’d been stung and his mother had pulled his wrist to her mouth, sucked the stinger from his skin.

He ventures farther, parting the weeds. There is the pole where beans once twined themselves up a teepee of string. A cool green hideaway, once upon a time. His father had had one as a child and then his mother had grown one for him. Now the strings are bare, gray from the weather, some slack and some frayed. At his feet, a tangle of dry, withered vines.

Somewhere here, he remembers, somewhere in this garden, there is a key. He is sure of it. Near the back steps, perhaps, or under the porch. A rock with a key buried under it.

They’d been outside. How old had he been? Four? Five? His father at work. His mother tending the garden: pulling weeds, pruning shrubs, tying branches—swollen with ripening fruit—to their stakes. He’d shut the back door and it wouldn’t open again and he’d burst into tears. Certain they were trapped outside forever. It’s all right, she’d said. Listen, I’ll tell you a story. She told him stories often, while she worked, as he dug in the dirt, collected twigs, lay in the grass at her feet. Once upon a time, there was a witch with a magical garden. Once upon a time, there was a young man who understood the language of animals. Once upon a time, there were nine suns in the sky, and it was so hot nothing could grow on the earth.

This time, as she wiped the smudge of dirt from his wet cheek: Once upon a time, there was a boy who found a golden key. She’d knelt by the bottom of the stairs, flipped over a stone. Presto! There it was.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility. After she left, he had stopped believing all those fantasies. Wispy, false dreams that disintegrated in the morning’s light. Now it occurs to him that, perhaps, there might be truth in them after all.

It takes him a long time, but he finds it. Pressed down into the dirt, teeth edged with rust. But it is there, hard and solid and real in his hand. It still fits in the lock, still clicks when he turns it, still draws the bolt back so he can turn the knob and step through.



* * *



? ? ?

    Inside: the smell of a house long unoccupied. A clamminess, the musty scent of air not mellowed by the warmth of bodies, but he expected this. What he hasn’t expected is how familiar it is. The long narrow hallway from kitchen to living room where he and his father had raced wind-up toys, the brick fireplace set into the wall, the staircase rising steeply before him and disappearing into the darkness overhead. Like somewhere he’s been in a dream, a place he knows without recognizing, a place he can navigate though he could not draw a map. Everywhere he looks, memories ripple and swell. He remembers the furniture that has vanished, once hulking and solid: his mother’s beloved leather armchair, the glass-topped coffee table where the three of them had once played Candyland. He remembers the color of the light in the evenings, when it was nearly time for bed: honey-colored and warm, coating everything in its sweet syrupy glow.

Inside the castle, everything was frozen in time. The maid dozed in the kitchen with a half-plucked chicken on her lap. The cook snored, one hand still raised, about to slap the scullion.

Hello? he calls, but no one answers.

There’s nothing here anymore, just speckles of dust hanging in the sunlight that seeps around the drawn blinds. A darker rectangle on the wooden floor, which for years their rug had kept unfaded. A pile of ashes on the hearth, the color of faded bones. His father had stacked his mother’s books there, set a match to their corners.

No sign of her anywhere here. Signs of her everywhere here.

He sets his hand on the banister and begins to climb. On each step his feet leave prints in the dust.



* * *



? ? ?

    Upstairs, the landing is lit only by slashes of light slicing around pulled-down shades. His parents’ room. The bathroom, clawfoot tub now streaked with rust. And there, at the end of the hallway, his room, with its uniquely shaped door: one corner cut off, to fit under the sloped ceiling. He nudges it open, but there’s no one there. In the corner stands a frame with no mattress, the skeleton of a bed. By the opposite wall, an bare bookshelf, a dresser with drawers lolling. He peers inside: empty. The husk of his old life. A long-ago memory surfaces, and he runs his hand down the jamb, brushing away the grime, until he finds it. Pencil ticks like the rungs of a ladder, each labeled with a date and two letters. BG. Bird Gardner. His name, once upon a time. Three feet. Three feet, two inches. Three feet six. Creeping ever upward.

The closet’s hinges groan as he pulls it open. Empty. Overhead, a solitary wire hanger dangles from the bare rod. There it is, on the back wall: the panel that’s actually a door, the secret he’d guarded so fiercely that he’d never even shown his friends, had kept it just for himself. And his mother. Exactly as he remembers it, uncannily so. As if he has imagined it into being.

Carefully Bird lifts up the latch and slides the panel open, revealing a gap that would be tight for a five-year-old. He flops down on the closet floor, wedges his head and one shoulder inside. He can’t see anything, but he feels around the cubby with his hands, sweeping his palms over everything he can. In his memory it’s a vast space, a huge cave, but the truth is, it’s just a nook. If he could squeeze through the opening now, it wouldn’t even hold him crouching down.