The Someday Garden

Lilymoor

There was once a house on the cliffs that grew the most beautiful flowers.

It grew peonies, daisies, sunflowers, marigolds-wild and colorful and lush, while honeysuckles climbed their way over the high walls, and roses held court in secret alcoves. The house itself was drafty and charming, the way old and storied places were, a jumble of scalloped eaves and repurposed shipyard lumber, bone white and moss green and gray, often dressed in a cloak of midmorning fog.

The house had outlasted two of its owners, refusing to be tamed, though there was something special about its third-and current-owners that gave it pause. It was in the way the couple held hands as they strolled through the gardens in the evenings, and the way they tended to its overgrown flower beds with the patient sort of reverence reserved only for wild things. The house watched as its new owners celebrated occasions, and mourned losses that bit all the way to the bone, and decided that if they couldn't have their own, they'd make a family a different way.

So they paved the driveway up to the house and dug a parking lot against the cliffs, and gently placed paths through its sections, putting order to its seasons. Then they placed a beautifully carved piece of driftwood on its door with a word painted in lovely looping letters-a magical name for a magical house by the sea.

Lilymoor

And of all the gardens in the world, it was here where I fell in love.

1

fernweh

Lilymoor House and Gardens sat on the cliffs over Odette, Maine, like a haunting.

"Oh, she's beautiful," Harriett whispered as we rounded the twisting drive up to the historic property. She leaned out my Jeep window and took a photo with her disposable camera. "Look at her, Soph!"

"I'm driving!" I reminded her with a laugh. I'd look in a minute when I wasn't trying to keep us on the road. My knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel too tightly up the curving drive.

But then, at the roundabout in front of the house, I did take a glance.

After close to five hundred miles, a flat tire, and some dodgy gas station food, we'd finally made it.

The road trip had started as an idea our freshman year at Duke, when I lamented in a study group about a documentary I once saw about a beautiful garden on a cliff. Another girl-a brunette who always wore her hair in pigtails and her cat eyeliner sharp-perked at the mention of it.

"Wait, the one that used to air on PBS?" she had asked. We hadn't talked in class, so I didn't even know her name. "The documentary with the cute old couple who have tended the garden for, like, forty years? They're in Maine?"

I gasped. "You know Lilymoor?"

"Do I know it? I love that place! I want to write about it one day."

As it turned out, she'd taped that same documentary on VHS and watched it so many times the tape wore out. She sighed about all its gardens, its regal house, its owners-the Becks. Lilymoor felt fictional. It might as well have been, with the stories people whispered about it. That the gardens were magical, that sometimes you could hear the voice of your truest love. Obviously, it was just the sound of the wind coming up the cliffs-loads of people, from travel guides to paranormal hunters, had debunked it over the years. Still, Lilymoor sounded like a fairy tale, and maybe that was why Harrie loved it so much.

I told myself I just liked the flowers.

After study group, I admitted to her, "I've wanted to visit so badly ever since I first saw it on TV. Like, more than normal. It's like homesickness but . . . away." I frowned, thinking on it. "Far-sickness, I guess, for somewhere I've never been. I can't explain it. It sounds silly, I know."

"I don't think so," she replied with a thoughtful look. "There's a word for far-sickness. It's German-fernweh, I think."

"Fernweh," I repeated, chewing on the word. It tasted bittersweet in my mouth.

"We should go," she said, though it sounded more like a challenge as she looked me dead in the eyes. "We should make a plan."

"What, really?"

"Really really."

And that was that.

Her name was Harriett Fisher, and she collected untranslatable words in a little journal, like other people collected bottle caps or baseball cards. She was an English major who wanted to write novels, though she wasn't yet sure what kind. I was a biology major who, frankly, just wanted to play in the dirt.

We couldn't be more different, but there is this feeling when you meet someone special. Like finding a lost puzzle piece and clicking it into place-there's a certainty to it. A Yes, you are my person. The person you're going to grow old beside. The person you want in your commune when the world goes to hell. The person who inherits the solemn duty of deleting your internet history when you die.

That person.

I knew it would be Harrie the moment I met her.

So, for our graduation present to ourselves, we planned a road trip up the East Coast, hitting a few national parks, museums, and a haunted bed-and-breakfast or two, and ending in the place that had brought us together: Lilymoor House and Gardens in Odette, Maine.

Lilymoor sat on the cliffs side facing the sea, like it had been waiting all this time for us. It was a gentle house the color of bleached driftwood, with rounded architecture and a myriad of wide windows and sparrows clustered in the eaves. It looked otherworldly, some bygone ship captain's house right out of a storybook, from its sweeping front porch to its lovely moss-colored front door to the additions cobbled together with dredged bits of half-built ships-portholes and sea-crusted hulls, colorful buoys hanging from the doorway and from the rooftop like memories left out to warm in the sun. One side of the house was sheathed in brown shingles; the other was built up into an A-frame roof. The manor was mismatched, like two warring pairs of socks.

It was perfect.

The house and gardens attracted people from all around the world. Like the Jardins de Quatre-Vents in Quebec, it was privately owned and curated, and like the Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, it offered a kaleidoscope of flowers rarely grown so far north.

The road curled up to the front steps and then looped around a beautiful marbled fountain in a roundabout, where we'd eased to a stop so Harrie could snap another photo, before I parked us in the small parking lot, and we got out.

Admittedly, I was a little slow to unbuckle my seat belt, a little slower to open my Jeep door. This was the last stop on our road trip, but I didn't want it to end yet.

In a month, Harrie would go off to grad school at UCLA and I would take an internship at the New York Botanical Garden. We'd be on opposite sides of the country soon, and though I didn't say it aloud, I hated the idea of it. Not because I was afraid we wouldn't be friends anymore when we weren't in the same place, but because what if something happened? I was so used to her buying the milk when we ran out, and me paying the rent on time whenever she was too deep in her studies to remember. I counted on the smell of freshly baked cookies every Thursday, and falling onto the couch with her and a box of wine to watch The Bachelor after a particularly awful date.

But I knew that couldn't last forever.

So I wanted to go slow. I wanted to stretch out this afternoon as long as possible, but Harrie could barely contain her excitement.

"Come on, come on! We're wasting time," she said, looping her arm through mine, and pulled me up the steps to the moss-colored front door, and inside. Lilymoor was open and free to the public-it always had been-but it was emptier than I expected.

For the next three hours we got ourselves lost in the beautiful manor and its wildflowers and mazelike hedges and native trees. The gardens were so serpentine that the world disappeared the moment you turned a corner. I couldn't tell you how the garden was laid out because it felt like between one step and another, you were always somewhere different. It constantly shifted from meadowy woodlands to pristine boxwoods to lattice walls of wild roses beside a bubbling brook that seemed to dip in and out of almost every scene like a well-known visitor.

"I can see why people think they can hear a voice," I remarked as we moved through the Hedges, a hedge maze on the eastern side of the manor. "The wind coming up from those cliffs is loud."

As I said it, another gust howled through the boxwood hedges, causing two birds to startle and take flight into the late evening sky. It must have been close to seven-thirty in the evening-Lilymoor closed at sunset, so we had another hour at most. I dreaded it more and more.

Harrie glanced over her shoulder at me. "You don't believe it could be real?"

I shrugged. "It's been debunked, like, at least a dozen times."

"You can at least pretend to not be a skeptic."

"I just don't think beautiful gardens need tacky lore and ghost stories to make them interesting. They stand on their own."

"It's not tacky!" she argued, affronted. "I mean, who wouldn't want to hear the voice of their truest love? It's magical."

"There's no such thing as magic."

"Sophie, you can't look at all of this and tell me you don't believe in magic." She raised her hands and spun around. "I think," she challenged, "you're being so obstinate because you want to believe it's a little true."

I crossed my arms over my chest and shrugged again. I sort of hated how well she knew me sometimes. "It's the wind, Harrie."

She smiled. "It's magic," she replied, and marched ahead.

"The wind," I argued, following her. Though when I turned the corner, she was already around the next turn. Leave it to her to never look back.

"Magic!" she called back.

"Magically the wind, then!" When she didn't answer, I called, "Harrie?"

Another heavy gust of wind shook the branches.

I sighed to the sky. I took my eyes off her for one second, and suddenly she was gone. She wasn't around the next turn, or the next. Every corridor looked the same, apart from the stone busts hidden in the boxwoods like half-overgrown secrets.

"Harrie, slow down," I called ahead. "I've lost you."

I kept wandering. She couldn't be very far.

Then I came to a dead end, so I doubled back. I'd read once that the trick to mazes was just to hug the right side, and eventually you'd find your way out, but of course I didn't do that. I was sure Harrie had, just as I was sure she was at the end of the maze right now, laughing.

Harrie's words earlier jabbed at me. "You're being so obstinate because you want to believe it's a little true." Maybe.

But if there was the voice of my truest love somewhere on the wind, I didn't hear it.

Though on closer inspection of a William Shakespeare bust that seemed to be giving me a side-eye, I did remember something from the PBS documentary. In it, a little kid with red hair and a face full of freckles had said, "If you ever get lost, just follow the eyes!"

So I did just that.

When I finally came around the last corner, there-framed in the arched exit-was my best friend. She clicked her tongue to the roof of her mouth, shaking her head. "You weren't that far away."

I wasn't sure what she meant-I hadn't said anything at all.

"Sorry, I got a little lost," I replied.

She looped her arm in mine again. "Tell me about it. I turned around and you were just gone."

"So were you!"

"I," she said gallantly, "was talking to the voice of my truest love."

That surprised me, because I hadn't heard her talking at all, and the Hedges wasn't that big. "Who?"

She rolled her eyes, as if it were a question I should already know the answer to, and dragged me out of the Hedges and toward the next part of the garden. There was always something more to see. Somewhere to sit. Somewhere alone, where the bugs were loud and the birds shouted and everything just felt . . . slow.

Timeless.

I could stay here forever, I thought as we crossed a bridge over a pond, lily pads and cat grass lush against its banks.

As the last of the evening's golden light spilled across the smooth rocks and dotted the well-manicured shrubs and the pops of lilies vibrant and pink, we found ourselves exactly where we began-the Central Garden. The way Henry Beck had laid out the paths, they all wound their way back to the middle. It was a beautiful design choice, and because of it, the path maps looked like an unfurling flower.

I bent down to read a placard for a particularly red poppy, as Harrie raised her camera to me. I quickly put my hands up over my face. "No, I look terrible!" I complained.

"Oh, whatever, no one can look terrible during golden hour. It's the rules. Smile!" And instead of just taking one of me, she flipped the camera around and took it of the both of us instead.

I mumbled, "It probably won't even come out good."

"Of course it will," she replied, sticking out her tongue at me, and wound up her next photo, but then she paused and put down her camera, staring up at the old oak tree in the middle of the Central Garden-Lilymoor's centerpiece. It was crooked and bent, battered by storms and struck by lightning, but still it persisted. It was almost as breathtaking as the willows in the grove. I glanced over at my best friend, and there was a strange look on her face. Not lost, exactly, but . . .

"What's wrong?" I asked. "You look a thousand miles away."

"That's the thing, I guess," she replied, "it sort of hit me that we'll be on opposite sides of the country soon."

Ah. The realization had finally caught up to her. I was the one looking at the next season-gardeners tended to-but she was always so focused on the moment. I loved that about her. She lived now, not in some enchanted someday.