In the Light of the Garden: A Novel

by Heather Burch

  “Yes, dear, we spoke to Al last night.”

  “Al?”

  “One of the firemen.”

  She’d heard the fire truck arrive. An ambulance followed, and while Dalton spoke with the firemen, and they sprayed the tree until it neither blazed nor smoldered, she’d stood alongside her mother while Ellen was treated for burns on her feet and on her leg. “She didn’t go to the hospital.”

  Mrs. Gorben smiled. “Well, that’s a good sign.”

  The trio talked on as they settled into the house. For the next thirty minutes, people continued to show up, all expressing their sorrow and hugging Charity, telling her they were sorry for her loss. Her loss. She’d only been guardian of the tree for a few short months. It was their loss. Their loss and her fault. How could they have it so backward?

  It was an hour later when Emily and Jeanna arrived toting a pot pie and a casserole. “Keep the dishes,” Jeanna told her as she handed the casserole to Charity, who’d started opening the door at Mrs. Gorben’s suggestion. Her house was practically as full today as it had been the night before. People meandering around, helping themselves to plates of food and cups of coffee from a pot that was emptied as quickly as it was made. Someone had brought paper plates and cups; someone had brought plastic utensils and napkins. Some of the men chose to use real plates from her cupboard, and Mrs. Gorben encouraged them to rinse them and place them in the dishwasher.

  Emily eyed her at the door. “Have you eaten?”

  Charity jerked her head, no. She leaned forward. “Emily, what in the world is going on here?”

  Emily smiled, bright-red lips curving. She handed her plate to someone standing nearby. Charity didn’t glance up to see the person’s face, but sandy boat shoes covered his feet. Emily dragged her out onto the front porch. “Have a seat.”

  Charity sat down but glanced behind her at her own front door. “Why is everyone saying, ‘Sorry for your loss’?” At first they had been sweet words to hear, a healing balm as they entered her system. But as more and more people arrived, Charity began to wonder if she’d blocked some horrible thing that had happened last night. Had she lost someone? Faces filled her mind. And had she blocked it? She was suddenly terrified. She hadn’t seen Dalton this morning. Or Daisy. Or her mother. She hadn’t seen Harold. Her hands flew out, fingers gripping Emily. “What happened last night? What am I missing?”

  Emily blinked, ever cool, but her eyes betrayed her. “Your mother burned down the weeping tree.”

  Charity nodded for Emily to continue.

  Emily pulled a deep breath, and Charity’s panic escalated. It was that thing people do when they’re trying to deliver horrible news. “And?”

  Emily scanned her face, then tilted a shoulder. “And the fire department came and put the flame out.” When Charity waited for more, Emily said, “And your mother experienced some burns but didn’t want to go to the hospital, so they treated her here.”

  If that was supposed to help things fall into place for Charity, it didn’t. “Everyone is here. Why aren’t they mad at me?”

  “Mad at you?”

  She knew Emily couldn’t be a shrewd attorney and be this dense. “And why are they saying, ‘Sorry for your loss’?”

  “Because the weeping tree is dead.” Emily gave her a moment to process. “Charity, what did you think would happen? They’d chase you from the island with pitchforks? The tree was yours. The house is yours. The special ingredient that changes people’s lives . . . all yours. You freely shared all that with us. It was a gift.”

  The poem she’d heard a thousand times as a child rushed into her head.

  Will you come, sit with me

  We’ll tell our troubles ’neath the tree

  The tears we shed will surely be

  Water for the weeping tree.

  And in its shade our woes will fall

  Pain and suffering, sorrow and all

  They’ll fall like glistening diamond drops

  You see, the tree, our pain, it stops.

  “It’s still working, isn’t it?” Charity said.

  Emily cast a long glance down the road. “The magic of the tree? Seems so.”

  Charity placed a hand over her heart. “I’ve never felt forgiveness like this.” It was warm sunshine after a cold winter; it was a waterfall in a desert. It gurgled and rose, springing up and chasing away the doubt.

  Emily smiled. “That’s the thing about forgiveness. It’s contagious.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Moving Forward

  It was almost a month later when Dalton packed the last of his clothes into the last of his duffel bags. He’d always traveled with duffel bags, never going the suitcase route. He’d already talked to Daisy about leaving because once, long ago, before the party and before the tree burned, he’d told her she would be the first to know his plans.

  He hadn’t talked to Charity and didn’t plan to until the last minute. It was going to be rough on him, and he knew it.

  After watching her run up the stairs and nearly fall over the banister, something in him had changed. Charity had effectively burrowed under his skin, and it was something he’d started hating. An itch that felt great while being scratched only to irritate the skin again and again.

  He himself could only take partial blame for the situation. He’d argued with himself many a night while lying in the cottage and staring up at the ceiling, where the moonlight slashed the wall and split the room into two distinct sections. He imagined himself in one of the sections—a place where a man stood alone, a man who’d lived long enough to bury a wife and child. That changed a human. Yes, one could move on, whatever that meant, but one could never escape the memories. He felt old. Used up. Like he’d lived one lifetime, and it was inappropriate to ask for another.

  In the other dark section of the room stood Charity. Young. Beautiful. Still filled with the hope of an ever after that included a man of her dreams with the same zest and energy she carried, the way he carried his sorrow. Sure, she’d been through things, but those things hadn’t defined her. Charity—in her ageless wisdom—had forgiven Harold. She’d opened her home to her mother, a woman who was only now at age fifty-something learning who she really was outside of the pretense of what she should be.

  He’d watch the shadow split and slowly creep across his room, adding space to her area. Leeching space from his. By morning, he was little more than a narrow strip, a ghost of what he had been. In the last weeks, he’d watched as Charity had opened all but a small part of her heart to everyone. But it was that small part that concerned him. Because in it was the power to wreck her world. Of this, he was sure.

  He’d asked time and again if she’d sat beneath the remaining trunk of the weeping tree. Again and again, she’d shaken off the question. Everyone knew there were no more branches to fall. “It’s done its work on me,” she’d say, face smiling, eyes filled with light and hope.

  If he could only believe that.

  But then she’d blink, and the smile would morph into a sort of grimace, as if pain had zapped her from some unknown place. And each time, he knew his leaving the island was more imminent than the last time he’d asked. He wasn’t certain how these things worked together; he just knew they did. She was half the problem. He was the other half.

  The tree did not grow back. Its ghostly trunk stood silent in the garden. Its song no longer whispered on the wind. Still, no one had the desire to uproot the corpse. So there it stayed while rains fell, and winds rushed. While sun hammered the island, and sand crowded its base.

  It was all intermingled—him, Charity, the tree. But he didn’t understand how. Like a dream that’s forgotten at daybreak. No matter how much he tried to put the pieces together, he always returned to the same conclusion. It was simple. Charity was a woman who’d finally made peace with the ghosts of her past.

  And even though the tree had taken his despair, there were things he might never be able to offer a woman, even a woman he loved. Even Charity.
And she deserved so much more. She was fresh earth.

  He was used-up soil, nothing but filling—no nourishment, no minerals. They’d all been stripped from him. Perhaps one day he’d find a woman who sparked the dead places inside him the way Charity had. But he figured that was years and years down the road. A widow, perhaps. Someone who understood the loss of a soul mate. Or a divorcée whose suffering matched his own. They could help each other, all the while knowing that, for both, their best years, their best efforts at a perfect life, were sitting on a distant shore that they’d drifted far, far away from on an island that had been swallowed by the sea.

  He’d have a hard time getting over Charity. This, he knew. There was sunshine in her eyes and starlight on her skin. Before meeting her, he thought he’d never again feel this way about a woman. At least not for years. Now he was reduced to a man with a lot of duffel bags. He loaded his things into his car and went back inside to give the cottage a last look. That’s when he spotted the runaway coffee cup. He stepped to the sink and rinsed the cup there. The sun glinted off the sea, casting brilliant light on the yard. To his left, the single trunk of the weeping tree, lonely and grayed, still stood. But it was not the tree that drew his attention. It was her, hunched beneath the trunk, a bag and a small silver scoop beside her and a spade in her hand. She reared back and thrust the spade into the ground again and again, pausing only to wipe the sweat from her face. He leaned closer to the window until his breaths made puffs of steam on the pane. It wasn’t sweat she was wiping. It was undoubtedly tears.

  Dalton watched, and something in him snapped. He found himself fighting his own tears as if he could feel every emotion as she stabbed and scarred the ground. He had to look away. But he couldn’t; emotions swelled inside him, twisting and swirling through his system like a sudden onset of the flu.

  He swiped his face with the back of his hand. But his gaze quickly returned to her. The woman with sunshine in her hair and starlight on her skin.

  Charity grunted with the last jab. Beneath her sweaty hand, the dirt around the weeping tree loosened its grip. She cursed the hardened ground. She cursed the spade in her hand that had already caused a blister to rise and swell on the flesh of her finger. She cursed Mrs. Williamson and her arthritic fingers for dropping the looking glass and breaking it.

  She cursed the woman for showing up at her house thirty minutes earlier and pleading for Charity to make her another. In her haste, Williamson had frantically tried to glue the pieces, but to no avail.

  “I can’t. There’s no more special ingredient left,” Charity had told her. She’d escaped special requests for weeks while the town mourned the loss of the weeping tree. Mrs. Williamson had left defeated and after Charity watched the lost woman shuffle down her driveway—as if stunned—she’d gone straight to the potter’s wheel and looked up at the bag she’d placed on the high shelf, almost out of reach, the perfect place for it.

  Charity had stretched and reached, telling herself that maybe, just maybe, she could scrape enough out of it to make one last piece, a small piece. A looking glass. She’d avoid the paper in the bottom as she’d always done.

  But the shelf tipped, the bag listed, and she lost her balance, grabbing at air as the contents—the last shreds of special ingredient—were lost on the wind she created by falling. The bag landed silently beside her. The paper floated to the ground, landing faceup rather than facedown. The words were plain. Clear. And for her.

  Good girl, Lil’ Bit.

  Now, go and fill the bag again. Use the scoop. The special ingredient waits for you under the weeping tree.

  Gramps

  She’d avoided the tree so far. Never stepping beneath it. Never allowing it to take her deepest hurt and turn it into something new. Because her deepest hurt couldn’t, wouldn’t—no, she wouldn’t allow it to be removed from her shoulders. She’d worked so hard her whole life to forgive the people who’d hurt her. Who’d used her. But there was one. One she knew she couldn’t forgive.

  Charity swiped the tears from her eyes as she sat sprawled beneath what was left of the tree. There were no branches to fall, so maybe her secret was safe, but as memories began to flood her mind, she knew there was nowhere safe in the shadow of the weeping tree.

  She stared up at it, letting the tears finally fall unhindered. Her nose ran, and when she swiped it, she felt the slick moisture it left on her cheek. Charity gritted her teeth. “I can’t . . .”

  She stabbed the scoop into the softened earth and placed a heap into the bag.

  The tree was silent.

  She scooped another and another, feeling the burning sun on her back and the sting of salt air on her exposed places, every nerve of her body frazzled and raw. “I won’t.”

  She threw the silver scoop aside and dug her hands into the soft dirt. Not quite sand, not soil, and not dust. Cool, soothing. “I won’t forgive”—but when she pulled a breath, she knew something within her was being stripped of its power—“myself.”

  It was the one person with whom she couldn’t reconcile. Though she’d spent a lifetime forgiving those who didn’t deserve it, she had harbored unforgiveness against herself.

  Her head tipped back, her eyes filled, and the deepest, most mournful sound she’d ever heard ripped from her own belly and clawed its way out of her, stripping her anger and shame with every inch it took.

  She drew a breath, but when she exhaled, it was a moan, a desperate sound that scorched her ears and crushed the secret places of her being where she’d kept it all locked away. Not enough to please her mother. Not enough to protect her gram. Not strong enough to be there when Gramps needed her. She’d spent a lifetime picking up pieces like a good little daughter should. Like a perfect grandchild should. But she’d harbored an anger and a hatred for herself, all the while resenting her inability to foresee and salvage. That’s why she’d had few friends. That’s why her business had gone under. She was only good at repairing what was broken and never creating something beautiful herself.

  The island had given her hope. But it was a hope she couldn’t afford because if she allowed it in, it could also destroy her. She was Charity Monroe Baxter. Unwanted child. Daughter to a woman who half hated her. She was a good girl and knew how to please.

  Charity wiped the dirt and tears and snot from her face. Her hands were caked with the lifeblood of the weeping tree. The soil. She was surprised when a humorless laugh escaped her mouth. Then another. The bag sat between her legs, now filled to the rim with special ingredient. In the center there was a divot, a darkened place where her tears had fallen.

  The poem skated through her mind.

  The tears we shed will surely be water for the weeping tree.

  There’d been no rain; she’d felt only the moisture of her own tears and the sweat she’d accumulated while wrestling with her torment. When she stood, she felt spent, dizzy, but somehow lighter. Her throat was raw, and her neck and shoulders ached. Her fingertips stung, and she figured one or two were bloody from her rant. But inside, a sensation like pixies dancing on waves swirled in her stomach. Something was missing from inside her soul. Something she’d carried so long, it had become a part of her. But it had been reduced to dust.

  The voice from just behind her was such a shock, such an interruption to her moment, she spun around quickly, nearly knocking herself off balance.

  It had been her name, spoken softly, yet such a disruption, she almost screamed.

  It was Dalton. He looked foreign standing there, his hands grasping a plant—the sort she didn’t recognize—and slowly lifting it for her to take from him. His eyes were unsure, brows high on a forehead marked with worry lines. Maybe he was questioning her sanity. She certainly was. This new and unusual stream sloshing around on her insides made her want to question everything.

  His eyes dropped to the pot. She was supposed to take it. Obviously. Her hands came around the bottom of the plant that stood about two and a half feet tall, but Dalton didn’t let go. When her fin
gers closed, thumbs gently grazing his pinkies, a whoosh of air left her lungs. “Myself,” she whispered. “I forgive myself.” She said it straight into his eyes and watched the dawn in them arrive.

  That’s when the rain began. It fell around both of them, watering the ground, the bag, the unusual tree held between them. It drifted over her flesh and warmed her in spite of its cooling touch.

  They stayed there, she and Dalton, the plant between them, her every fear being eroded like acid on iron. When the rain finally stopped, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Freedom, resurrection, joy. It was inexplicable and yet as common as her next breath.

  He looked over at the ashen trunk of the weeping tree. “You finally had your weeping tree experience.”

  She nodded and couldn’t seem to keep the smile from her face. “I guess I did.”

  It was then that she noticed one of the many thin, narrow branches on the small tree between them. It gave up its hold and fell to the ground.

  EPILOGUE

  One year later

  Dalton had explained to Charity that he’d found the sprout beneath the weeping tree the day Daisy had called her mother. He still didn’t understand how he could have forgotten about it—sitting in the pot he’d placed it in, at the side of his house where the sun gave it warmth, and the rainwater gave it nourishment. He’d explained that he’d passed it dozens of times, not giving it a thought for all the weeks leading up to the ball. Then for a month knowing the weeping tree had died. Quietly, in its pot filled with dirt from its mother tree, it had continued to grow. He hadn’t remembered it until he was leaving. He’d planned to return to Jacksonville, and there it had been, sitting at the corner of his cottage, practically calling to him. Confused about how he could have forgotten, he’d reentered the cottage and noticed a coffee cup he’d missed. He placed it in the sink and looked outside where he’d seen Charity finally beneath the weeping tree.