Chapter Text
In the exhale of October’s last, unseasonably warm breath, a small truck sat atop a hill at the edge of town, its bed open to the sky, lined on the inside with woolly blankets and a foam camping pad. Upon it two bodies lay side-by-side, breathing deeply with their eyes on the stars above.
"You were right," Wirt said after a minute. "I’d much rather do that than go to the Halloween dance."
Sara smiled sideways at him and rested her hand on his chest, which was still a little sweaty. "I knew you’d come around to my way of thinking."
"And you're… You're happy?" he said, returning the look with wide eyes. "Like… you're good?"
She gave him a little bit of a look, but his concern was sweet. "Are you happy?"
"Yeah," said Wirt, and he smiled finally. "Yeah." She rolled over to kiss him and then sat up, her movement producing another of the characteristic squeaks they'd become very familiar with over the last ten minutes.
Wirt followed her cue, tying off the condom and then placing a hand on the wheelhouse as she went digging through the blankets in search of her shirt. "We might have messed up your truck's alignment," he said with concern, and she laughed as she wiggled back into her pumpkin-printed black turtleneck and tossed him his jeans. They lay back together in their soft bed while he made a small fuss of pulling his pants back on.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered as he finally zipped back up and returned his gaze to the sky. The stars above shone as brightly as pinholes in a light-box. "And what are stars if not lanterns, hung high on the boughs of the world-tree, promising to light the path forward?"
Hearing his own poetry coming out of Sara’s mouth made Wirt tense next to her. "You can't," he said despairingly.
She just ran an affectionate hand down his arm. "Don't tell me I can't," she said sweetly, and sat back up again. She slipped on her leggings and sneakers, crawled atop the wheelhouse, and then jumped down to the ground. Gravel crunched beneath her feet and long dry grass tickled her ankles.
"Where are you going?" Wirt asked. She could hear him copying her movements as she approached the edge of the hill. The truck gave a creak and his shoes, too, hit the ground.
Sara called back, "Just enjoying the view," and leaned up against the bare tree at the drop-off of the cliff. Wirt came up from behind to slip an arm around her chest. Their little hometown spread out several hundred feet below them, glowing brightly in a perfect Halloween-orange hue. You could see the bowling alley from here, and the high school, and the flashing lights on the hospital roof. From somewhere far away echoed the happy screams of children. The hills on the eastern horizon cut hard black shapes against the purplish sky.
Sara agreed with herself again: "So much better than the Halloween dance."
"Do you think we should still drop by?" Wirt asked. "Senior year is our last chance."
"It was boring and pointless the last three years, why would anything have changed now?” Sara asked, rolling her head in toward his shoulder. "But Funderburker’s afterparty is always good. People will actually be there." Instead of responding, Wirt leaned in to rest his chin atop the crown of her head. He was tall enough that he had to stoop a little to do it. Sara hung her hands off of his embracing arms and hummed, "You sure we can't just stay up here all night?" She looked dreamily to the east. "I want to be here to see the sun rise."
But Wirt shook his head on top of hers. "I have to go to Greg's dress rehearsal in the morning and Mom will notice if I'm not in the house."
"Yeah, you said something about that. What's he in, again?"
"Adventures of Huck Finn. It's a loyal adaptation, just without all the challenging stuff. The racism." Sara laughed. "Anyway, he's Tom Sawyer, which is kind of a big part, and he pretty much told me I'm coming, so…"
"Your brother is so cute that it kills me," Sara said, very sincerely.
Wirt said, "Yeah," with the tone of one who has endured protracted suffering, but Sara knew he didn't mean it. He loved his brother. Every time she went over for dinner, seven-year-old Greg had new stories to regale her with about the make-believe games he and Wirt played together when they were alone. Their closeness was downright heartwarming.
They stood together at the crest of the hill for a long time, taking in all the little details of the town below. Cars moved slowly down the streets where children’s nearly-invisible shapes dashed beneath the streetlights. Sara looked up at her boyfriend, clad in denim and cotton and a leather vest, with a plastic star pinned on: "Hey, cowboy," she said, reaching up to brush his hair from his face. "You forgot your hat."
"There’s nobody else around.”
"Well, there will be at Funderburker’s party. It’s –" she checked her watch "— ten oh-three. So saddle up, pardner." Sara pulled away from him and began shuffling back toward the truck to bundle up the blankets, but Wirt stopped her when he asked, "Hey, Sara?"
She turned around. "Yeah?"
He seemed deeply uncomfortable with with what he was about to ask. "...You wouldn't mind if we, um, stopped by the cemetery first, would you?"
Sara took just a second to get as good a look at his face as she could in the dark of night. "Yeah, whatever you like," she said, and Wirt looked visibly relieved – whether because she hadn't said no, or because she hadn't asked why, she wasn't sure. She jerked her head at the car. "Help me put the love nest away first?"
"Ma'am." In a fit of playfulness, Wirt tipped an invisible hat at her on his way toward the truck, and Sara crossed her arms as she watched after him. It was the time of year for spooks, she supposed, and she understood that. But she really didn’t understand his thing with the cemetery.
This would mark the third year in a row to involve some interaction between Wirt, Sara, and the Eternal Garden on Halloween night. The first had infamously ended in an ambulance ride to prevent Wirt and his little brother from dying from hypoxia after falling into the lake on the far side of the cemetery wall—not the evening a bunch of high school sophomores had expected to have when they ran off to make trouble in the graveyard that night. Wirt had seemed different afterward, as could be expected of someone who'd had a near-death experience. He gotten more confident. Easier to talk to. They'd started hanging out a lot more after that.
The following year, Jason Funderberker (the human, not the frog) had hosted a party at his parents' house, the big estate on Blackwood Street, and Wirt and Sara had gone to an event as a 'thing' for the first time. Sort of. She was a killer nurse and he was a pirate who looked uncomfortable in his own beard; there'd been age-inappropriate beverages available at the wet bar, and when the air started to feel a little too heavy and their faces a lot too warm, she and Wirt had decided to go for a stumbling walk together to enjoy some of the last foliage color before the snow rolled in. As they turned the corner, though, they'd come face-to-face with the looming gates of the Eternal Garden before them, and Wirt had stopped clear in his tracks.
"Youu okay?" Sara had slurred.
Wirt didn't answer for a minute. "I'm fine," he finally said, but he'd had a really odd look on his face when he did. Sara thought she got it, because facing the place where you almost died is pretty heavy stuff, but he'd just looked so strange to her – not sad or scared, like you'd think, but wistful, like he was missing something, or like he wanted to say something but couldn't. He removed his pirate hat almost reverently, and took a swaying step toward the gates, but then changed his mind and turned around.
"Wirt…" Sara said as he passed her by.
Wirt had looked up at her, and then a funny look had crossed his flushed face, and all of a sudden he took her by the shoulders and kissed her for the very first time, which she was perfectly happy about. She'd been pretty sure if she didn't initiate it soon it would never happen at all.
And now here they were a year a later, at the entrance to the bone garden once again. She hadn't been back since – she had little enough reason to visit the place even on Halloween – but Greg said that he and Wirt went there on their own sometimes, and when she asked why, he threw up his hands: "All our friends are there!" Which was adorable, but made things only weirder. Sara didn't care what Wirt's actions looked like to anyone else; she worried about what they meant to Wirt. Why was he haunting the graveyard? The last time she'd heard about him visiting had been months ago now, and to tell the truth, she’d sort assumed he was finally over it.
She and Wirt approached the gates side-by-side, an odd duo of awkwardly tall cowboy and half-assed jack o’ lantern. Unlike the last time she'd been here, Wirt didn't hesitate to enter, but walked in quite comfortably and began to look around, as if browsing a bookstore. Somewhere to the south, she could see bobbing flashlight beams, and knew that some kids were probably doing as they'd done just a few years past, telling less-than-spooky stories between the gravestones. Some things never changed. Wirt began meandering toward the far corner of the cemetery, where the oldest graves sat backed up against the wall. She raised the flashlight that she'd pulled from the truck’s glove compartment and clicked it on. "Aren't you forgetting something, Wirt?" she called, gesturing with it at his back. He turned around.
"Thanks," he said as she caught up with him. He turned his gaze to the far cemetery wall again, and looked suddenly quite sad.
"Hey.” She put a hand on his elbow. "You gonna tell me what's up?"
He answered, "Just thinking," which appeared to be true, but it wasn’t the answer she was looking for. Sara frowned. Wirt started trudging forward, examining the gravestones he passed in the dull glow from the streetlights outside the fence. Sara made her own easy way through the slabs, glancing at dates here and there out of curiosity as to who had died most long ago. In front of a particularly large stone, Wirt stopped and then didn't move again, not until Sara had made a full round of the aisle on her own. She came up next to him and took his hand.
"What's this?" she asked. The worn gravestone declared the man and woman who were buried in the plot together – a Rose and Harold Miller – followed by a list of no fewer than ten other names. Vernon, Bethany, Beatrice, Mary, Harold Jr. – all of them had birthdays between twenty and forty years after those of Rose and Harold, but every single name on the slab shared the same year of death. Beneath it all read the epitaph, "Gone from the World, not from the Heart".
"That’s terrible," Sara said after a moment.
"Yeah," Wirt said. He sounded kind of choked up.
"How does that happen? It must have been a disease. Or a house fire." Wirt kind of tightened his jaw, and Sara had the feeling she maybe shouldn't have said anything.
"Greg found it," he said miserably. "He was really, uh… really proud of himself for being able to read the names." Sara didn't really understand. Wirt looked positively heartbroken, but these people had died more than a hundred years ago.
"Are they relatives?" she asked.
Wirt shook his head and scratched his face, an action that looked like it might have been meant to conceal a whisk at his eyes. "No," he said. "No." And he slowly walked away again, leaving Sara by herself to hold the flashlight up to the long-lost names of strangers. She took a deep breath.
"So you're really not going to tell me what's going on with you?" she asked, jogging to catch up with her boyfriend yet again. "I'm fine with being here, but it's making you act weird, Wirt. Are you really okay?"
Wirt finally turned to look at her. "I’m sorry," he said, a little slumped over. "I've just got a lot in my head and it's kind of hard to talk about." His eyes were deeply sorrowful.
Sara thought about it. "That's too bad," she said, and gave him a hug. "I thought we were having a nice night earlier."
"Oh, we were!" Wirt insisted, throwing up his hands as if in surrender. "No, Sara, it was – it was wonderful. You’re wonderful." She grinned. "This has nothing to do with that. I promise." Wirt's face was lit all gold in the autumn night's light.
"It's got to do with when you pretty much drowned," she said. "I know."
He didn’t bother to deny it: "Yeah.” She watched him look back at the big tombstone, engraved with more names than she could count at a glance. "I guess it's, uh… hard not to feel a little sympathy for the dead now. Tonight." Sara supposed she could understand that.
They stood close by each other as a gust of wind pushed a puff of leaves against their feet. "That's the only place I haven't gone back to yet," Wirt said, and Sara followed his gaze to the portion of the cemetery wall over which arched an enormous oak. She'd climbed it a few times as a kid. "I've come back since that night to see the rest, but the other side…" He shook his head.
"Will it make you feel better if you try?" Sara asked.
"I don't know," Wirt said. "Maybe."
"Well, come on, then," Sara urged, and placed her foot in the first low divot of the brick wall.
"No, Sara, maybe we shouldn't…" Wirt tried to protest, but Sara was already on her way up. She hoisted herself up past the first load-bearing branches, and then shimmied out onto the top of the wall and sat down.
"Come on, Wirt!" she called, and she heard a defeated sigh down below. While she waited for him, she looked out on the landscape visible from her vantage point, though there wasn't that much to be seen on a moonless night. Grassy train tracks ran along the outside edge of the wall at the top of a steep hillside, with a small lake and a copse of trees at the bottom. This was the easternmost edge of town, beyond which the only things to see were the low black mountains and the vast starry sky.
"This is a pretty good view, too," she commented as Wirt finally joined her on the top of the wall.
"Yeah," he said as he settled into his seat, but he didn’t sound any happier than before. Sara really wasn’t sure she was doing him any good in asking him to be here. His eyes rested on the still lake at the bottom of the hill with a haunted lake.
"Hey.” She smiled again, trying to make it really clear she wanted to help. "What's going through your weird Wirtful head?"
The ghost of a smile flicked across his face for a second. "Heh," he said. "That's, uh…" He didn't finish the sentence, but faded away into apparently deep thought, his eyes still on the shimmering water below. "Sara," he said after a minute. "What's the biggest thing that ever happened to you?"
"Big like good?"
"Big like… significant. Something important."
She had to think about about that for a moment. "I dunno," she said. "Maybe when my parents got divorced." The other contenders were when her Gramma died and when her mother made her quit ballet, but they didn't really compare in terms of long-term consequence. "What about you?"
Wirt didn't need time to think about his answer. "Falling into that lake," he said, and he pointed as if she could possibly have missed it. "Nearly getting hit by the train, and falling into that lake." Sara smirked at him a little, and he caught her look. "What?"
"Wrong answer," she teased, and bumped him with her hip. "You meant to say, 'The moment I met you.'" They laughed for a minute, and then Sara thought about what he'd said. "I don't know, Wirt. I can't tell you how to feel, and I know what happened to you was really tough. But how can that compare to the really permanent stuff? Like when Greg was born? Or when your dad…" She trailed off and stopped, and then looked away. Wirt wasn't looking at her either.
She took a minute before continuing, softly, "…Unless, you know, what happened a couple years ago on Halloween is still having a really big effect on you. In which case, you can always talk to me about it." If that wasn't a clear enough invitation, she didn't know what was.
"I mean -- I saw a lot of things, that night," Wirt said, scratching his head. "While I was in the water."
This was new information to Sara, but it wasn't too strange to hear. "I guess that makes sense. Your brain almost shut down from lack of oxygen."
"Yeah, it did." His tone was light, but she could see his face a little in the darkness, and he looked worried. "It’s just that it was… It was really grand, you know? I saw whole towns, and rivers, and a forest that was autumn forever. And people! So many people. I made... friends." Wirt stopped and looked up at her, clearly trying to gauge her reaction.
"That’s amazing," Sara said. "I wish I could have seen it."
"You believe me?" he asked.
"Yeah.” She raised an eyebrow at him. "Why would you lie?"
He didn't answer, but she could see him smile. "It was the strangest thing that ever happened to me," he said, and he picked at the moss atop the wall with the hand closest to her. "And then ever since I woke up, it seems like everything else has been strange too. I mean – look at me. I have friends. My stepdad and I went fishing last weekend and I didn't totally hate it. And, you know, you and me…" She took his hand. "I got my acceptance letter to the conservatory yesterday."
Sara said, "You did? That's great, Wirt!" He squeezed her hand back. She didn't say any of the things they were both thinking, about how far away the conservatory was from the state school where she had been offered a chemistry scholarship. This wasn't the time for that.
"Everything's kind of great,” he said. “And sometimes it makes me wonder if, I don't know, I never really made it out of that lake. Maybe I'm making all of this up in my head while I drown."
"You’re fine, Wirt," she said. "You're right here, with me."
He said, "Yeah. I think I know that." Sara pondered this. She couldn't force him to accept her objective existence, so she did the next best thing, and leaned in to kiss him instead.
"And you know what else?" Wirt continued when they were done, pointing down at the train tracks ten feet below their dangling shoes. "That thing I said about getting hit by the train? That's not even possible. These tracks haven't been connected to any railway for forty years. But it happened anyway." He threw up his hands. "I just don't know anymore."
Sara squinted at the overgrown tracks. "That's…" And now it was her turn to pause uncertainly, because she knew for a fact that she would have heard something as loud as a train that Halloween two years ago, as she climbed the tree to follow Wirt and Greg across the wall and was confronted with the sight of them plunging into the water. "That's really weird, Wirt."
"Don't I know it," he said, hunching over his lap with his arms crossed. Starlight glinted off his sheriff's badge. "There's a point where the weird gets so big you can't tell where it ends anymore."
Sara closed her eyes against the stirring wind, which pushed her hair across her face and serenaded them both with the rattle of grass and the smell of sweet earth. She tried to put herself in the place that Wirt talked about, in an endless autumn forest with sunlight pouring down through the branches. It was beautiful, and she smiled.
"I can kind of imagine it," she said. "Your fall forest."
"Yeah?" Wirt asked, and scooted toward her a little. He put his hand back over hers and she could hear him lean backwards, closing his eyes as well. "And can you imagine the schoolhouse by the pond?"
A 'schoolhouse' was only ever old-fashioned, so what Sara thought of was apples by the chalkboard, and wooden desks neatly in a row, bleached by the sun through dusty windows. "Yeah."
"And the mill by the river?"
Easily. A modest grist mill churned evening waters slowly as bluebirds nestled in the nook of the chimney. "Mm-hmm."
"And the frog steamboat?"
"Pfft. Wirt," she laughed.
He waved her down, though. "No, really! Imagine it. A great big green-and-white steamboat, pedaling through the marshes, and every one of the passengers is a singing frog dressed to the nines."
"Wow. Yeah, I can imagine that." She opened her eyes finally, and looked at him with a warm and flush feeling. "I couldn't ever come up with most of this stuff." She leaned into his arm and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. "I really wish I could have seen these things with you."
"Well, it wasn't all nice," he said.
"I don't care," she said. "I'd like to be there with you." In her mind, they were two dark happy silhouettes almost disappeared against the splendid shadows of fall, walking together on a path made for pilgrims.
And somewhere far away, there came the small, but definite sound of a steam engine's whistle.
They jumped at the same time and stared down the tracks for nearly a full minute, half expecting a black train to arrive beneath their feet. Wirt turned to look at her finally. "Uh… jeez, it's getting late," he said with a nervous laugh. "That… after-party, huh?"
"Oh." Sara checked her watch. "Yeah. I guess we can still go to that."
"Yeah," Wirt agreed. "Senior year's our last chance." And they sat awkwardly for a minute longer before Wirt gave her a lopsided grin and they started to descend the tree, one after the other.
At the bottom, everything was silent. The kids who'd been popping around the graveyard before seemed to have left. Sara turned her head as they walked away, and cast her eyes back again over the Garden's wall.
"I'd like to hear more about it," she said to Wirt, and he looked down at her. "Didn't you say something about people, too?"
"Oh man," he said, and smiled, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder while they walked side-by-side. "Yeah. Some of them are right over there." He was pointing toward the old plots by the wall.
Sara gave him a look. "Come on, Wirt."
"No, really! Let me tell you, Sara, you should have been there. You would have loved Beatrice."
Before the dress rehearsal at the auditorium the following morning, while Wirt was off looking for a cup of coffee, Greg bounced up to Sara in the front row of seats and placed a drawing in her lap.
"Hey Greg," she said. He was dressed in overalls and a straw hat, with Jason Funderburker strapped to his back like a fat green baby. "What's this?"
"I drew you a picture!" Greg said proudly. It was a crude depiction of a sailboat, with what looked like himself and Wirt standing aboard among several green people in top hats. The brothers were only recognizable for their headwear distinctive to two Halloweens ago. "It's a frog boat. I kinda forget, but me and Wirt visited waay back-a-day." He hoisted himself up between the armrests of the seat next to hers and swung his feet back and forth.
"Oh yeah?" she asked.
"Yeah! It was a nice day, and Jason Funderburker shared his beautiful tenor." The frog croaked. Greg dropped to the ground as the director made a call to begin rounding up children backstage. "You should have come, Sara! Jason says to invite you for the next time. Anyway, I gots-to-go!" And he scampered off, leaving Sara holding the paper by herself.
Wirt came back as the lights were beginning to go down, and offered her a Styrofoam coffee cup. "What's that?" he asked as she folded up the paper and tucked it into her bomber jacket.
"Present from Greg," she said. They quieted down as the curtains began to draw open on a late summer pastoral scene, and didn't speak again for a long time. Sara never stopped smiling even once.