Chapter Text
Rose Lalonde stood outside the modernist architectural marvel she’d grown up in, flanked by a pair of suitcases. The sound of rushing water from the river that flowed beneath it was terribly familiar, reminiscent of the childhood she’d spent in what had felt, at the time, like a prison of concrete and glass and steel. She’d left home the day after her eighteenth birthday, without a destination or a goal. A few years of drifting left her with some valuable real-world experience under her belt, until she settled into some small college town in Pennsylvania. A year or so of writing and scraping by on the scarce income of a Starbucks employee, and her manuscript was accepted by a publisher. Complacency of the Learned became widely popular. Rose enjoyed the flush of income as she buckled down on the series. Fantasy had always been her strong suit, and she penned stories of wizards and magic and forbidden knowledge with ease.
She was halfway through a draft of the third book in the series when she received a phone call from a funeral home. She packed a bag and took the next flight to New York, home again after almost a decade to watch her mother lowered into the ground in a simple pine wood box as she tugged at loose threads where she’d torn her shirt.
She had intended to book a hotel room, but had instead taken her meager suitcase to the isolated monument she’d grown up in. It had never been homely, but there had always been another presence roaming the long hallways, the long shadow of her mother or the ankle-height tripping hazard of her pet cat Jaspers. Rose had settled in the empty living room and watched a memorial candle burn, and surprisingly, she did not feel alone.
She spent the week after the funeral sleeping on the couch and fielding condolences from her mothers’ acquaintances. The executor of her mothers’ will had stopped by not long after the funeral, informing her that she was the sole benefactor. The home, and the fortune her mother had accrued working for one of the largest technological empires in the world, were hers. It didn’t take long for Rose to decide what to do with it.
Rose flew back to Pennsylvania, packed her belongings into a pair of suitcases, and left the rest of her things on the curb for some lucky college student to adopt. She’d have no need for them in the Lalonde family home.
Now, she stood outside the concrete monolith as the cab that had brought her there pulled away. She waited until they were out of earshot to open the front door.
Everything was just as she’d left it, and she noted with a smirk that the vacuum she had given her mother as a passive-aggressive gift, which had in turn been bronzed, still sat on its pedestal, covered in a thin layer of dust. She breezed past it, carrying her suitcases up the stairs, and turning left down the hallway to her childhood bedroom.
Her mother had obviously been inside her room to tidy up after she left home. Her finished knitting projects were neatly tucked away alongside her yarn and needles in a basket atop her dresser. Her bed was neatly made, dark purple comforter folded over and knitted cuddle-thulu nestled between a pile of pillows. Her walls were plastered with the same nostalgic posters of wizards and many-eyed tentacular creatures and brightly colored cartoon squids. Her desk was clear, save for a spiral-bound notebook and a reading lamp. Her bookshelf was, at least, approximately how she left it, books shoved into place in uneven piles alongside assorted eclectic trinkets. Her violin leaned up against it, its case long lost in the clutter.
Seeing the space so neat felt utterly alien, and she fought the urge to open her suitcases and throw her clothes about just to make herself feel at home. She was moving back in, after all; the room would be subject to the manic whirlwind of her daily life soon enough. Instead, she rolled her suitcases aside and approached the window that peered out over the back yard.
Rose had never understood why her mother kept a garden. She’d enjoyed it well enough in her younger years, especially the fauna that it attracted. She remembered chasing butterflies around with Jaspers, leaning in as close as she dared when they landed, but never catching them for fear of damaging their wings. She’d never seen her mother in the garden, though, save for when she visited the mausoleum she’d had built for their beloved family pet. She could see it from her window, just at the edge of the forest beyond, half-hidden behind plots of milkweed and bergamot and blue aster hedged in by low honeysuckle shrubs. The garden was well tended to, even now, and Rose wondered if her mother had hired a gardening service to care for it.
The sun was setting, casting its fading rays over the garden. A few butterflies flitted about, barely visible as moving blips of color among the flowers. Rose turned her attention from the window, focusing on her suitcases. She might as well get settled in.
In the following week, Rose caught herself spending quite a bit of time in the garden. She had little else to do- her publisher had insisted she take some time off, bereavement leave ; while she was loath to admit it, she struggled to write a sentence without striking it through with enough vigor to tear the paper. To fill the empty hours and distract herself from her thoughts, she began to work through her bookshelf. Most common were thick tomes describing monstrous creatures that dwelt in the dark space between stars; worn paperbacks with wizened, white-haired men in robes splashed across the covers; glossy books on the practices of modern paganism. She’d gone through a phase in her teens, searching for something greater beyond what she’d been taught in Hebrew school. Her attempts at rituals had always fallen short, leaving her with little more than a sense of satisfaction and the sulfur smell of spent matches. Perhaps it was the recurring failure that planted the seed of doubt in her mind, a curling vine that told her the only place she would find magic was in her stories.
She was a grown woman now, far past those childish fantasies, but she found herself thumbing through her old books nonetheless. She was surprised to find a vast collection of fairy stories- not Grimms’ fairy tales (although she did have a copy), but accounts of the Fair Folk, stories from centuries past. She vaguely remembered being convinced as a young girl that her mothers’ garden held fairies, and devouring every book about them she could find, from traditional folklore to accounts of self-proclaimed witches explaining how to interact with the fae. The fantastic ideas were a decent enough distraction, though, light and easy to digest, so she pulled A Complete Guide to Fairies from a precarious pile of books and made her way out to the garden.
The sky was overcast; Rose expected the bite of chilly air, but the garden was warm, as though cast in a patch of invisible sunlight. She laid a worn old blanket out on the grass at the edge of the garden and settled down.
Afternoons in the garden became a part of Rose’s daily routine. Weather permitting, she would sit between the flowerbeds and read, or watch the butterflies flutter from plant to plant. There was always a strange, creeping sensation of being watched that she did her best to ignore. By the end of her week of leisure, she realized she had yet to see a gardener. The plants themselves seemed in immaculate condition, not a weed in sight.
The following week, she returned to her writing, though she still found the words stilted and flat. She worked better when she sat in the garden with a leather-bound notebook and smooth ballpoint pen, writing stray phrases in her looping script as they rose to her mind unbidden. She would switch between writing and reading, having moved on from A Complete Guide to Fairies to The Modern Witchcraft Guide to the Fair Folk .
When Rose began to notice odd occurrences, she chalked it up to confirmation bias. The circle of mushrooms at the edge of the forest was perfectly natural. The faint tinkling of bells came from a windchime hidden somewhere in the garden. There must be a gardener caring for the plants, despite her never seeing any trace of them. Snacks she brought out into the garden weren’t vanishing, she was just eating them on autopilot.
Each book she read spoke of the value of gifts. That nagging doubt that rooted itself in her mind told her she was being foolish. She replied, in the privacy of her own mind, that she was allowed to be foolish if she chose.
As the sun set on the second week since Rose had moved back home, she dug a tiny glass bowl from a cabinet, small enough to fit into the palm of her hand. She filled it with milk, and stirred a small spoonful of honey into it. A frilly doily she’d found tucked away in a drawer served as a placemat, laid out on the grass with the bowl atop it. As an afterthought, Rose filled a second bowl with a splash of wine. She’d felt sheepish as she selected a bottle from the expansive bar in her mother’s bedroom, as though at any moment she’d be caught out and scolded. Her late mother would do no such thing, though. She held a distinct memory of trying to squirrel away a bottle of something fruity and distinctly sweet. Her mother had caught her, but instead of a reprimand, she’d simply poured her a drink. Rose had taken the bottle anyways, out of impulsivity or spite, she couldn’t remember, and drank until she was sick.
The following morning, as her coffee brewed, Rose stepped out into the garden to retrieve the bowls. They were empty and, curiously, the doily they’d rested on had vanished.
In its place was a single wild rose, its white petals glimmering with morning dew.