Page 8

SUMMER SOLSTICE PARTY

8

Rose had been ambivalent about the garden party until Heather disinvited her. Now there was no way she wasn’t going. Even though she was confident about attending, everything leading up to the party threw her off. Like that it was supposed to start in the early evening, with the sun still in the sky. Or the fact that when she inched her car toward the iron gates, she didn’t need to get out and ring a bell, or speak into an intercom. They just parted slowly, expectantly. Parked cars lined the sides of the long driveway and crowded the front lawn—signs of life, and yet there was so much stillness.

Nothing at all like Lowell’s house party on her first night in town. And though she kept driving forward, there was no house in sight yet. Finally, a pitched roof came into view, and the closer Rose got, the higher the Hargrove house seemed to rise into the sky, to the point that she had to bend over the steering wheel so she could get the full scope through the windshield.

Rose stopped the car right in front of the door, in the middle of the circular drive. From the passenger seat, Lowell took a deep breath, then unclicked his seat belt and grinned. “Let’s do this.”

The first thing Rose had done after Heather uninvited her from the garden party was text Lowell to see if he wanted to come with her. He replied with enough emojis to explode her phone. Now he smoothed down what was clearly his most prized piece of clothing: a bomber jacket with frilly yellow wing-looking things along the shoulders and sleeves. “Aren’t you hot?” Rose asked him.

“Thank you so much!” he’d replied obliviously. He stepped out of the car and Rose followed suit. She took in her surroundings.

Though she would become very familiar with Hemlock Hill, it would always take her breath away. The house was an estate, or possibly a manor, Rose couldn’t be sure which. They didn’t have homes like this in New York. She hadn’t even realized they had houses like this outside of the English countryside. If it wasn’t for Lowell confirming this was the right place, Rose would’ve been convinced she’d driven up to a country club, or a place they rented out for weddings, where she was surely about to crash a reception.

Just as she took her first step toward the front door, Lowell stopped her. “Everyone’s in the garden,” he said.

Rose followed his lead, rounding the house and only occasionally stopping to glance through its bay windows and up at the ivy crawling over its brick. The house invoked a slew of questions for her, like, How many wings does this place have? Questions that turned into riddles. What has many wings but cannot fly?

They walked through a gravel parking lot filled with a dozen cars, then past a cottage about the size of Rose’s house. Peeking out from behind some hedges were the shimmery blue waters of a pool. But Rose and Lowell kept walking, down stone steps with vines crawling between the treads. The steps led to a manicured lawn, surrounded on all sides by trees and shrubs. But not a single person in sight.

“Are you sure there’s a party here tonight?” Rose asked.

Lowell, who’d been walking like he knew where he was going, suddenly slowed and scanned the place like he didn’t know where he was. Except for the chirping birds overhead and the constantly croaking tree frogs, there were no signs of life anywhere in the garden.

“I know they’re here somewhere,” he muttered. But Rose was hardly listening. Something had caught her attention.

She walked down the center of the lawn, to a limestone pedestal. She thought at first that it was a birdbath. But now that she was close enough to touch it, she saw that it was actually a sundial. There was an inscription along its circumference. “‘Grow old along with me,’” Rose read.

Behind her, someone finished the phrase. “‘The best is yet to be.’”

Rose turned to find Hart, and she felt suddenly shy, like he’d caught her voicing a deep desire, not mindlessly reading some words etched in stone. But he only smiled at her. “You made it.”

“I made it,” Rose said.

“And you brought a friend.”

Lowell, already small, shrank into his ridiculous jacket. “Is that okay?” Rose asked. It was a test, and a lot rode on Hart’s answer.

“Of course,” he said.

Rose exhaled and smiled. “Hart, meet Lowell.”

Hart raised a hand in a casual wave, but Lowell took hold of it and aggressively dapped him up. Rose watched Hart, sure he was about to change his mind about Lowell being here, but he only chuckled and patted Lowell on the back.

“It is an honor to be here,” Lowell said.

“Really?” Hart said. “Okay, do you want a tour?”

Lowell could not have shouted “ YES ” any louder, and Hart gestured for them to follow him. He wore a simple white tee with khaki cargo pants, and slung around his hip was something like a tool belt, though it only had one pocket. The waxy red handles of what must’ve been a gardening tool poked out of it. Rose couldn’t help but think that he looked like a kid playing dress-up with a little pistol holster, missing only a cowboy hat. The thought made her bite back a smile.

At the edge of the lawn, just beyond some shrubbery, they came upon a pathway made of gravel the color of raw corn kernels. “This is our version of the yellow brick road,” Hart said. “It winds throughout the property. If you get lost, you can always find this path and it’ll lead you back to the main house.”

“Lost?” Rose asked. “You could get lost in your backyard?”

“ Backyard ,” Lowell scoffed, offended on Hart’s behalf.

“Well, the property is spread out over twenty-six acres,” Hart said. “We’ve got twelve different building structures throughout, and fourteen garden rooms.”

Rose tried to gauge what “garden rooms” meant, and her naivete must’ve been obvious, because Hart went on to explain.

“Segments of gardens within the larger garden.” He walked along the path, pointing to the left. Far across the expanse of lawn, all Rose saw were trees, but there must’ve been more of the property beyond them. “Over there we’ve got the Apple Orchard, Berry Patch, Vegetable Garden, and Sunflower Grove.” He then pointed in the opposite direction. “That way we’ve got the more French-style landscape, with the Reflecting Pool, the Moonlight Garden, Rose Garden, Stone Arbor, Fountain Field, and Lavender Garden. And way out there is Hemlock Pond, the Abundance Garden, the Meadow, and Statue Walk. So, yeah, getting lost is a possibility. But not the worst thing in the world in a place like this.”

Hart flashed Rose a smile over his shoulder. She tried to volley back a smile of her own, but she was still dazed by the size of this place. They’d been walking along the lawn for a while now, and yes, it was beautiful, but the cynical, tightly wound city girl in Rose had too many concerns. What if she did get lost? What if Mr. Davis was right and it was best to stay out of the world of the obscenely rich? Instead of relaxing into the beauty of the place, Rose found herself questioning the ethics of a family who would keep the Versailles of Connecticut all to themselves.

And then Hart, who’d just given her a big speech about not getting lost, decided to skip right over the golden path and squeeze through a narrow space between the trees. A new path diverged from the gravel one, this one made of flat, crooked stepping stones, slippery with inky dirt. “There’s also these other pathways that’ll lead you to discover hidden areas of the garden,” Hart said.

Rose glanced at Lowell and mouthed, Hidden areas? But Lowell didn’t seem to find anything unusual in what Hart was saying. His eyes lit up with the sights all around them.

“This place is amazing,” Lowell said, breathless.

Rose tried to see what he saw. The trees were tall and abundant enough to blot out the sun, shrouding the three of them almost instantly in full shade. Navigating the stepping stones felt like playing a careful game of hopscotch. The slabs were cracked, uneven, and half-covered in wet moss. And in this dense wood, Rose couldn’t see the house anymore. Couldn’t see any cable lines or neighboring houses. With every step they took deeper through the trees, Rose felt like she was stepping into another realm. The farther they got, the more uneasy she became.

In a small clearing up ahead, a lone wooden bench sat eerily empty. It reminded Rose that there were supposed to be people here, a party. She thought they must have been getting closer to something, that soon they’d hear music or chatter. But there were only the squawking birds, and the breeze rustling through the trees, making it sound like there was an invisible rainstorm all around them.

And here was this boy that Rose really didn’t know at all, leading her deeper into a darkening wood, something sharp poking out of his holster. A thick branch lay across the path and Hart bent to pick it up, then held on to it with a tight fist. On Rose’s arms, a wave of goose bumps surged like soldiers on alert.

As though he could hear her thoughts and feel what she was feeling, Hart turned back to look at Rose, his gaze grazing the length of her arms. “You feel that drop in temperature?” he asked. He pointed his stick up and around them. “It’s the canopy of the trees. The oxygen they’re giving off.” He took in a deep, clarifying breath as if to accentuate the point.

Hart seemed relaxed in this place, like it was his most natural habitat, but Rose was still getting her bearings. They’d been walking this rocky path so long it was getting harder to believe they hadn’t left Hemlock Hill altogether and ventured someplace they weren’t supposed to be. The grounds were made up of so many different elevations that at times Rose wasn’t sure if they’d climbed up a ridge or were down in a valley. Rocky outcroppings jutted off to the sides, bigger than any of the huge boulders she used to climb in Central Park.

And then she heard dripping. Trickling. Rose looked around but couldn’t find the source of the noise. “Is that water?” she asked.

Hart didn’t turn around, but he nodded. He pointed his stick to a spot up ahead. “The grotto.”

But Rose didn’t see a grotto, not that she was even sure what a grotto was. What she did see in the near distance, between spindly twigs and brush, was a slender, dark shape. She was still too far away to make out who it was, but from the silhouette, Rose could see that it was a girl. Though the closer they got, the less relieved Rose felt to see another person. It was strange seeing someone out in the middle of a forest, just standing there. The trickle became a rush. Rose slowed her step but kept her gaze focused until it came upon one of the girl’s arms. Half of it was missing. Severed clean off between the shoulder and the elbow.

Rose stopped walking altogether. But Lowell bounded straight for the girl. “What,” he whispered, “perfect detail.” His fingers brushed over the smoothness of her bare shoulder, down the side of her ribs, and came around to the front of her chest, where he lingered on her breast.

Hart cleared his throat and Lowell seemed to remember where he was, dropping his hand quickly. “Aphrodite,” Hart explained. “We have a few different bronze statues in the garden.”

Rose stepped around to get a look at the girl. Her dark skin glinted in the dappled light, a blank expression on her smooth face.

“And who’s that?” Lowell asked. He skipped up ahead, and Hart and Rose followed him to a rocky bluff. At its base, from a small cave, water dribbled into a stream that flowed along this side of the pathway. But Lowell was looking at the statue of a young man, staring into the water.

“Narcissus,” Hart said.

“Never heard of him,” Lowell said.

“He saw his reflection in a pool of water and became so obsessed with himself that he died,” Hart explained.

Lowell nodded absentmindedly, too busy admiring the statue’s form. “Look at his abs,” he said, hands on hips. “He’s totally yoked.”

Rose and Hart shared a brief look, sneaking smiles at each other. Hart dumped the broken branch onto a nearby pile of bramble and dried leaves, a rake lying next to it. When Lowell was done admiring the muscly statue, they all stepped back toward the path, just as Rose felt something scamper along her ankle.

“YAAHH!” she screamed, stumbling back and almost dying right then and there on the crooked stones. She might have if Lowell hadn’t broken her fall.

Hart was at her side in an instant, catching her elbow. “You okay?”

“Something…,” Rose tried to explain, looking down and tiptoeing in a full circle to avoid whatever creature had just tried to kill her. But there were only plants, drooping over the path.

“It was probably just the ferns,” Hart said. “We’ve had ferns here for over a hundred years. They were all the rage in the Gilded Age—‘fern fever,’ they called it. A couple of scientists even published studies that claimed ferns were good for mental health and virility, if you can believe it…” Hart’s eyes shimmered with the anecdote, but his words tapered off when he caught his guests’ blank gazes. “You guys don’t want to hear about the fashionable plants of the Gilded Age.”

Rose would’ve thought it was cute that Hart knew these random facts, but her heart was still lodged in her throat from the fern tickling her ankles. Hart bent over and plucked one of the fronds free. “These are especially hard to source for domestic gardens, and there’s something really unusual about them, look—may I?”

His fingertips were on Rose’s forearm suddenly, but Hart waited for her go-ahead before he went any further. She had no idea what his intentions were, but his touch was delicate, and her instinct told her that whatever he was up to, it’d be okay. She looked up at Hart, giving him a tiny nod. He carefully turned her forearm so her palm faced up and laid the length of the frond on the supple skin between her wrist and the inside of her elbow. Then he pressed the flat of his hand on the fern. It was strange, letting this boy place pressure on her body, and the surreal intimacy of it made Rose hold her breath. It was a good sort of pressure, and she held firm, leaning into it.

And then Hart took the fern off, revealing a golden carbon copy of the frond on Rose’s arm, like a silk-screen transfer. “Tattoo fern,” Hart said.

Rose had no words for what she was looking at, the only sound coming out of her mouth a small gasp. “They’ve got this dusting of golden spores underneath their fronds,” Hart said. “But don’t worry, you can just brush the tattoo off as fast as it came on.” He started to smooth his thumb over the print on Rose’s arm, but she turned her wrist, reluctant to let him. “No, I like it,” she said. No plant had ever given her a tattoo before. No boy had, either. It was a tiny moment of unexpected wonder, and she wanted to hold on to it a little longer. Hart looked at her, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“This is amazing!”

Rose and Hart turned to find the backs of Lowell’s hands and the side of his neck covered in golden fern tattoos. The tats, along with the neon-winged jacket, gave Lowell a whole new-wave-baby-punk look, and Rose couldn’t help but laugh.

“What?” Lowell said. “Don’t I look cool?”

“The coolest,” she said.

Hart clapped his hands together and took up the guided tour again. “There’s a lot more to see. A whole lot. But you guys probably want to get to the party.”

Rose had almost forgotten that was what they were here for. They found their way back to the golden gravel path, and Rose caught brief glances of the garden rooms she would later come to know so well. The lush meadow where she’d paint portraits of Hart; the orchard, where she’d help tie sparkly streamers to the trees to fend off crows; the Berry Patch where they’d eat warm golden raspberries as big as thumbs, right off the bushes. But right now, after walking to the far reaches of Hemlock Hill, Rose could finally begin to hear the faint sounds of revelry. They stepped through a hedged archway.

“The garden party,” Hart announced.