I don’t take off my heart sweater and I stay in the garden long after the reporters and photographers and the hungry, cruel ladies who have watched me all day have left. My hair is tangled and in my face so I tie it back, and Isla and Charlotte and Cruz hug me before they eventually go, but the gesture feels ghostly.
Delilah lingers, like maybe she has something to say now that the others are gone. But she stays quiet and heads to the gate. When I ask where she’s going, she tells me she has work to do.
“You remember what Jack said about leaving early?” I ask, thinking of the smirk he used to get when we’d break up a party to get sleep or do homework.
Delilah looks at me funny, like I’m not supposed to say his name.
“Jack used to say leaving early was the saddest thing a person could do. That leaving a good time was a tragedy. Then you’d always say it was as sad as a butterfly in a net.” I keep my voice quiet, because memories are quiet things. My throat closes a little around Jack’s old words, but I’m happy to have remembered one more thing about him. I think maybe Delilah will soften, too. She looks up at the sky like she often does.
“When I said that, I didn’t even know the meanings of words like sad and tragedy,” Delilah says. “A butterfly in a net. God. I was . . .” She pauses, looking for the word. Brilliant, I think. Lovely. Charming. Perfect. “Silly,” she says with a sigh.
“You know now,” I say, because we’re best friends and best friends say the truest things. For the most brilliant moment, I think Delilah sees me again. The thing between us—the crazy bond that comes from having dead fathers and magical rituals and tiny apartments and a Shared Birthday—appears and we’re a yard apart but we might as well be pressed right up against each other. We might as well be one again.
Then my phone buzzes and I glance at Cruz’s name and a text from him and the answer to the question who’s texting? is all over my face, and like that, the moment’s over.
“I miss the hell out of you,” I say when she turns to leave.
She turns back in my direction. She drinks me in but I don’t know what it is she’s seeing.
“Don’t you want to stop terrible things from happening?” she says after what could be a minute or an hour. Her eyes are shiny and her bottom lip has a little-girl quiver. We aren’t being watched, we aren’t being photographed, we aren’t being seen as Those Girls.
“I wish terrible things would stop happening. Of course I do. I mean. Of course. But we’re not the answer. We can’t stop the world from happening.”
Delilah shakes her head. “Jack was here. Then I loved him. Now he’s gone.”
“You know that’s not—” I don’t finish my sentence. I get distracted by a flicker of a feeling in my chest. A tiny pulse of something I’ve been avoiding.
Doubt.
I am so close to positive that Angelika is absurd, that Delilah is heartbroken, that people are desperate but not right. I am close to positive that a Curse is an impossible thing.
But I am not quite all the way positive.
I have the smallest little drop of doubt.
“We love Cruz. We all do. We don’t want to lose him, too.” Delilah speaks in a ferocious murmur.
“What does Cruz have to do with—” My stomach turns. My eyelashes feel heavy from all the makeup and the exhaustion and something else, too. My face is melting—daylong foundation and shimmery blush and too-pink lipstick sliding down under the Devonairre Street sun.
Delilah’s melting, too, the two of us shifting from who they think we are to who we actually are.
“We all love you with Owen. Angelika thinks Owen’s perfect. Safe. Make that work, okay? For me?”
“I don’t love Owen,” I say, and Delilah laughs. I have missed her laugh the way I miss water when I’m thirsty.
“Of course you don’t,” she says.
Delilah was the first person I told when Owen kissed me at the fall dance. She’s who I told when I decided to have sex. I told her about the shape of his calves and the funny lilt in his voice when he talks to his mom on the phone. I like Owen. I like like him. I do.
But Delilah knows and I know and Angelika knows that I will never love him.
According to Angelika, you can only really love one person at a time. “Real, true love is singular in focus,” she says. “Real, true love is so big there’s not room for anything else.” I asked Dad if this was true and he handed me a book of Neruda and told me even poets don’t have the answers, let alone Angelika.
“But you and Mom only love each other,” I said. “You have Angelika’s version of real, true love.”
Dad paused.
He squeezed one hand with the other.
He didn’t answer. Instead he kissed my forehead and went onto the fire escape for a cigarette. The memory hits me hard, something I hadn’t remembered at all until now, when I remember it perfectly.
It feels out of tune with the rest of the things I’ve been told to remember.
I want to tell Delilah, but she’s looking at me for an answer, for a promise to stay with Owen, and she doesn’t want to talk about anything but that.
I give a half smile and a half shrug. “I’ll try,” I say. It’s an empty sentence, and the second I say it, I want to do the opposite. I don’t want to try at all; I want to give up.
• • •
The sun starts to set and still I’m in the garden looking like Devonairre Street Lorna instead of Actual Lorna. It’s weird how they used to be the same person.
There are a few plants that need to be set in the ground, so I start digging. I don’t talk about my green thumb to Angelika or any of the widows. I’m afraid it would somehow be another thing that means more than it is. I want it to be mine, not theirs.
I dig with my hands. I like to get a feel for it—damp, dry, clumped, dusty—if I can feel it in my fingers I know what plants to put where and how deep to dig and how to care for them. One of the lemon trees—the one with the biggest lemons and greenest leaves—is mine. So is the patch of spinach and a pot of pansies.
It’s good to have secrets, my dad used to say when I’d catch him sneaking a smoke on our fire escape. Everyone has them. I’ve kept mine close, and I’ve come to hate my father’s. The problem with keeping secrets is that once you’re gone the secrets are gone, too. I can ask the widows for stories about my father every day until the sun goes down, but they’ll never be able to tell me the deepest-down most important things about him.
I think he’d like my secret gardening, at least. I think he’d like how hard I’m working not to believe and the smile I get when I think about Cruz. He’d like all the things about me that Angelika hates.
I’ve heard the ladies talk about different flowers appearing in the garden, and they make their own list of reasons for it. Magical reasons.
It’s only ever been me.
There’s a noise by the garden gate and I look up. Nothing. I’m expecting Delilah to come back. We have more to say to each other, and she’s always said her favorite thing is to watch me garden.
“I love the secret side of you that no one else sees,” she said once and it sounded almost romantic. It was maybe more romantic than anything Owen or any other guy had ever said to me. There’s a romance to a real best friend.
I liked being seen, too. I liked Delilah knowing my secrets, and maybe if she came back to the garden, I’d tell her some of my newest ones. She’d hate them, but I don’t think that matters anymore. I think it’s more important for her to know me than it is for her to approve of me.
With dirt under my nails. I place peonies in the hole I’ve dug. Peonies are fussy. If they’re planted too far down, they refuse to flower. They are easy to care for, but they can’t be rooted too deep in the ground. And even in the best of circumstances they don’t bloom for very long.
I like peonies for those same reasons that they drive other people crazy. I like that they want to be in the garden but not too firmly embedded. I like that they can only flourish if they’re given a little space, a little room to move. I like that they won’t flower year round, but when they’re at their best they’re truly spectacular.
When I plant them, I let them know they can leave this place. I dig shallow holes and don’t pat the dirt tightly around them.
I thought I was deeply rooted at Devonairre Street, but now I’m not so sure. I want to be here, but not too far in. I don’t want to go to California, but I don’t want to be only a Devonairre Street Girl either. I remember the people in the airport a few weeks ago, with their futures and their choices and their firmly rooted love and their lives that mattered to them but no one else.
I try to imagine myself on some other street in some other state. I don’t fit in there, either. I’m not fitting in anywhere anymore.
Soon I know Cruz is there, all the way across the garden, without looking up.
“You’re there,” I say, patting the last of the peonies in place.
“Your mom’s looking for you.”
“I forgot to tell her I was staying out.” I stand up and try to brush some of the soil off, but it mostly sticks to my knees, my elbows, my wrists.
I can hear Angelika not far away, walking the streets, telling and retelling the story of how the day went. She’s so close she could hear us, too, if she were listening.
But I have a feeling she’s not listening.
“I figured you were here,” Cruz says. He’s caught me planting in the garden before, but we’ve never spoken of it. He’s nodded hello and gone on his way. Cruz and Delilah are different in that way.
“Do you think I’m like a peony?” I ask instead of a greeting.
“These things here?” he asks, stepping farther into the garden, closer to me. I nod. He leans down and inspects the pink petals. I like that he’s seriously considering the question even though it’s a nonsensical one. He’s always been that way—jumping on board with the frantic way my mind sometimes works, the strange connections it makes.
“They’re my favorite flower,” I say. There’s dirt on my neck. I can feel it. Gardening is messy business. My heart sweater is probably ruined forever, but that’s fine by me.
“I don’t think you’re like anything,” Cruz says. He stands back up and steps closer to me.
I should step away but I don’t. I already forget what I promised Delilah. I forget the little spark of fear or doubt I feel when I think too hard about Jack or Bombings or Angelika. I forget how clearly I can hear the rest of the neighborhood, Delilah’s serious voice rising up occasionally to ask if someone wants another bracelet. I forget everything as the toes of our shoes meet up.
I don’t know who leans, but one of us leans and the other follows and we’re kissing.
A Devonairre Street Girl wouldn’t kiss Cruz like this, not now, but I kiss him even harder because I don’t know that I ever signed on to be a Devonairre Street Girl.
I am Lorna Who Kisses the Boy Next Door and I am Lorna Who Looks Like Shit in Makeup and I am Lorna Who Gardens Without Worrying About How Messy It Can Get.
I am Lorna Who Doesn’t Care That the Street Is Busy, That We Will Get Caught, That Someone Could See Us.
Cruz’s hands are on my face. I wonder if I taste a little like peonies or garden ground or sticky all-wrong lipstick.
I forget to breathe, so we have to break apart for me to finally inhale.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I’d never do that with Owen; it would feel rude or gross or something. But with Cruz it’s fine. It was a messy kiss and we both know it and it was a great kiss, and we both know that, too.
It was a secret kiss, and Delilah loves secrets. Maybe she can sniff them out, the way I have an extra-strong sense for my mother’s heartbeat.
“I knew it.”
It’s Delilah’s voice at the gate of the garden. Cruz and I leap apart from each other but it doesn’t matter, she’s already seen.
They’ve both seen.
Angelika and Delilah are shoulder to shoulder at the gate. They are holding lavender and lemons and I can tell from the looks on their faces they’ve seen everything.
Delilah said she knew it, and I think I knew it, too. Knew that she’d catch me, knew that she didn’t trust me, knew that we needed to stop pretending things could be okay.
Delilah stays back but Angelika rushes forward, her hands finding my face, her nails digging in. As always they are cool, they are worn, her ring hits my cheekbone. It hurts.
“It’s not anything,” Cruz says. “Whatever you think—whatever you saw—we’re tired. This isn’t—”
“You’re tired?” Delilah screeches like something has come loose inside her throat.
“You shouldn’t have made them do the pictures and interviews—” Cruz keeps stepping farther away from me. And I don’t know what Angelika’s finding on me, but I know what I see on him.
Fear. Actual fear.
He covers his face with his hands. Delilah covers her face, too, all of us hiding from the things that are happening.
“Secrets are only bad when they’re not secrets anymore,” Dad said once, not long before he died. He seemed sad and sure. He hadn’t shaved and I remember thinking that he sounded like he was talking about something specific, but I didn’t ask him what.
I should have asked him what secret was making him so sad.
“Not there yet,” Angelika declares, giving my face one last squeeze before letting it go. She reaches into the bag she is always carrying and takes out a gray scarf. She wraps it around me, and I let her. I am so used to letting her tell me what to do, I don’t know another way.
“I’m sorry,” Cruz says, and they all look at me like I’m supposed to apologize, too, but I’m in too much shock from hearing Cruz apologize to say anything at all. “I love Charlotte,” he goes on. “This was—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m with Charlotte.”
Her name is a slice on my skin, a thing that shocks and hurts and burns.
“You’re not sorry, Lorna?” Angelika says. She drops the lavender and steps on two of the newly planted peonies. “You’re too good for us? You think you’re above all of this? You forget your father? You forget the pictures of my Chester, or Dolly’s Harold, or Betty’s Richard? You forget them all? You think I don’t know what your mother’s doing, trying to tear this community apart? You think you can leave here and leave us and have some happy life?” Angelika is shaking and growling. Her finger is darting around, pointing at me, at Cruz, in the direction of our building, at the peonies, at the sky.
“We haven’t—I didn’t—I did what you asked today. I did what you wanted.” I am speaking so quietly it’s a wonder she can hear me.
“You’ve forgotten everything that’s ever happened, everything we’ve ever taught you. You and your mother.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” I say. Angelika must have soaked herself in Aramis, must have bathed in the stuff. It’s all I can smell. It’s choking me.
“Do what’s right!” Angelika says, her voice rising, hitting the trees and the metal of the gates and the cloudy beginnings of a moon in the sky. “Do what’s right! You have a dead father and a dead friend and still, still you insist on being Lorna Ryder, Above It All! Still you do! You want to be some other person from some other street. But you are this person, from this street.”
This last part hurts the most, because it’s true. It’s the only part of what she said that I know for sure is entirely the truth—plain and ugly and terrible and mine.
Right now, right this instant, I would get in the car with my mother and drive across the country with Roger. I would take that money for our building and hope that memories of my father traveled well. I would let Devonairre Street become something different, and hope that I would become something different, too.
“I see your thoughts,” Angelika says. “Hubris. It is believing you can escape what is. You can’t escape what is.”
The gates of the garden feel like prison bars.
I am always going to be Lorna Ryder, one of the Affected, a Devonairre Street Girl.
I look at the peonies. Angelika has stepped on two more. They won’t recover. They’re not that strong.