Tom dropped his bags on the floor of the entrance hall. Tiny mushroom clouds of dust billowed up into the rays of grey-yellow sunlight that slanted through the windows on either side of the front door behind him. He and his sister Caryn had been raised by their grandparents in the surprisingly bright rooms of this black stone three-story. A decade ago as the old couple became like children themselves, Caryn and Tom had had to take them in. Ten years the house had been left alone; ten years the furniture had been covered, and the mirrors had reflected only drop cloths and dust motes.
Tom and Caryn had taken turns doing the regular maintenance on the house, running the AC and heater in the appropriate season, keeping tabs on the pipes in the winter, making sure the lawn service did its job. They’d ‘kept it up’ but Tom couldn’t remember cleaning the place in the past couple years. Now, he couldn’t believe the accumulation of dust; everything looked slightly furry. From where he stood, all and sundry seemed in its place. He and Caryn had left as much as they could in the house hoping, at the start, that if it were ready for them, their grandparents might return to it someday. That had never happened, and Tom was home again to get things in shape for the realtor.
It seemed several circles were coming full turn in his life.
The dust dried Tom's nose sufficiently to make him sneeze. His sniffles whispered through the hollow hall like an old man's breath. He sneezed again and remembered another arrival in that foyer. Twenty-two years before, a newly orphaned eight-year-old boy and his six-year-old sister had entered that same door. One of them sniffing loudly…
The door banged shut behind them as Grandfather brought in the last of their things. Tom looked up at his grandmother who held his sleeping sister. Something large had changed. He could speak the changes because he had heard them from the mouths of so many adults in the last weeks, but the words had seemed a foreign language until that moment. Understanding if not acceptance dawned; they would never return to Ohio, never hold Mom’s hand, never trade tickle storms with Dad.
His grandmother no longer resembled the cheerful Mrs. Butterworth syrup bottle. There were lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes that didn’t accompany a smile, and there was a stoop to her shoulders that had nothing to do with Caryn’s meager weight.
"You two have come to stay with us for a while," his grandmother said finishing her statement with a taught smile. "Tommy, get that box and come upstairs with me.”
She took him to the room he and Caryn usually shared when they visited, "This was your father's room, but now it's yours. I cleaned it up just for you."
All the neat stuff, the pennants and baseball pictures, trophies and old books had been taken away. The room looked unnaturally clean…
Tom had an ulterior motive for telling Caryn he would do the cleaning and do it alone. He planned to lose himself in the series of simple tasks and hoped the rapid-fire sense of accomplishment would spark his creative engine. His publisher would only accept the I’m-working-on-it excuses for a few more months before shuffling Tom to the back of the roster to make room for new talent. In the year he'd been blocked, Tom had become more and more certain that he was a one novel author, that the success of his first book had been a fluke, and that he'd never write again.
He left his luggage behind and walked to the back of the house. In the kitchen, he stopped and stared out the window at the yard. Grape vines had overtaken the red, wooden fence; they looked like verdant, sinuous tentacles that the earth had sent up to the fence down. The square garden plots were gone, replaced by wild growths of weeds and the liberated descendants of domestic plants. The back walk was a road map of cracks and veins of green. Moss and the roots of the trees, the sun, wind, and rain had worked hard over the years to return the garden to some semblance of its natural state. At the center of the yard, a discarded book, grey with mildew, lay, its sun-bleached pages open to the sky. Near it, an old bicycle seemed to sit in rusty repose one tire bent over the pages as if reading. Great arms of ivy had grown from the far corner of the yard to encircle the book and the bicycle. Wrappers and papers loosened from god-knew-where and a few soda and coffee cans dotted the brown and green ground. Tom stared and the light yellowed. The blemishes in the yard vanished…
Two children ran into the garden. A nine-year-old Tom raced past his sister. His lengthening Dutch-boy haircut slapped either side of his face. His clothes were clean enough, but it was apparent he'd been around. He was wearing what his grandmother would call a ‘good day shirt' and his adventures were written all over it. The day, by the thinness of the white sunlight, was hardly young. He began to dig in one of the garden squares amidst some seedling tomatoes. Caryn followed more slowly, she was much smaller than he was and much fairer. She shied away from the growing pile of dirt he was making almost as if it frightened her, but she knelt down next to him. He pretended to pick something up off the ground, something tiny beyond sight. He dropped it into the hole he’d made and began to cover it up…
Tom blinked the past from his eyes and returned to the front of the house to pick up his bags. He had already dropped off his laptop and all other reminders of his writing life in the small workshop attached to the garage. He wanted to take all pressure off his dammed up creativity. If ideas blossomed, he could take note in his journal. If that wonderful, itchy, jittery need came back, if something real took hold, well it was all out there in the garage waiting. For now, Tom’s Merry Maid service was here for a house call.
An hour later, he set the cleaning supplies outside the door to his old room, and peered in. In the middle of the chamber, walls made golden by the setting sun, the four-poster bed sat like a queen bee in the center of her hive. Tom crossed the room, unlocked the sash window, and gave it a tug; it stuck on the left side as if the solid, shellacked wood wanted to keep the old, comfortable air in. Some wiggling, pounding, and a few well placed curse words did the job. Once it was opened and propped, he saw the holes in the screen just big enough to let in the mosquitoes that had been the bane of his childhood summer nights. As he went back for his bucket of cleansers and rags, Tom was careful not to catch even a glimpse of himself in the cracked mirror atop the wardrobe; bad luck, that…
Tom sat on his bed and stared at the picture of his parents. When alone in his father's room — his room for over a year, now — Tom often thought of his parents. Grandfather said they were in Heaven. Tom knew what that meant; he'd learned his Sunday school lesson as well as the next kid. He wondered if Caryn even remembered them. She and Tom never talked about their parents.
Caryn was seven and enjoyed exploring the benefits of her newly discovered green thumb. She’d gotten over her fear of soil and digging quickly once their grandfather offered to let her help in the garden. He said it had never grown better than it had since she'd arrived. He'd even let her plant a patch of her favorite plant, ivy, in the far corner of the back yard.
Grandmother said it would over-take the place before too long, but Grandfather had poo-pooed that with a smile. Tom put the picture back in its secret hidey-hole under the floor boards. There were pictures of his parents through out the house, but this one was his alone. It was one of the first photos he’d been allowed to take with the family camera. His parents posed goofily over the kitchen table looking very 50’s-appliance-ad.
He dropped the throw rug over the loose board just as Caryn, smiling broadly with dirt under her fingernails, burst into the room to tell him that Grandmother had finished reading the story he had written…
Tom picked up the shards of glass that had fallen from the mirror and laid them carefully in the trash can he'd brought along. The story his grandmother had finished reading that day had been some atrocious horror tale full of flying werewolves, creeping green oozes, and dripping blood. His grandmother had told him he had a wonderful talent for description. She'd said she was looking forward to his next effort which she praised just as heartily.
He had never asked Caryn what she'd been planting that day. It had been the middle of winter, surely too cold to go outside. Perhaps if he brought her back to the house before they sold it and they relived their memories together, they could talk about the things they had never shared with each other.
Tom got the dust rags and began to go over the furniture. As he worked, he lost himself in musings about the past.
In trying to ignore the voice in his head that repeatedly told him he had nothing new to write, Tom had passed a week in simple cleaning, polishing, dusting, and arranging. He’d done all he could without actually redecorating the house. As he’d worked through each of the rooms, he’d relived a different part of his childhood. In the kitchen there were memories of Grandma's large breakfasts before school and of cozy Sunday dinners. In the basement, Tom remembered his grandfather teaching him to work on lawnmower engines and build electronic gadgets from scrap parts. In the family room, the ‘parlor’ as his grandmother had referred to it, there were nights in front of the television with his sister and both his grandparents and bowls of popped corn or coconut cookies and milk. All the secrets of his past were so mundane; what did he have to write about?
Tom cleared his mind and went through the kitchen and out the back door. He had saved the garden until last. Even in the short time he’d been back, the yard had changed. Hot summer sun and warm rains had deepened the green of the wild growth and plumped-up the pages of the abandoned book.
Tom sat on the upper most step of the back porch, stared into the garden, and dreamed awake…
"Go on," his sister's giggling voice said from the house. She shushed the other children at his twelfth birthday party who stood behind her, "go out to the garden, go under the ivy, Tom.”
Tom, at twelve, walked down the stairs looking over his shoulder. Grandmother stood behind his sister slowly urging him on with a flapping wave of her hand. He walked into the garden. The ivy patch in the far corner had begun to take over. It was where he sat and thought, where he went to be alone and sometimes write. The whole family knew that, especially his sister. He stopped and looked at the dark-green, heart-shaped leaves.
"Under the leaves,” Caryn said.
Something silver flashed from beneath the umbrella of the leaves. Tom knelt and looked. It was a cloth-bound notebook. Sewn into the cover was a picture frame bisected by a white ceramic rose. On one side of the rose was a picture from the previous summer of Tom and his sister planting vegetables in the garden. On the other side, was a picture of their parents doing the same thing in the garden of their old house, the Ohio house.
His sister was suddenly behind him. "Grandma helped me make it. It's for secrets…"
Tom blinked the past out of his eyes again. It was in that notebook that he'd written the first stories he’d been proud of; from his jotted observations and ideas, realistic stories had grown. He smiled. Thanks to Caryn, they had planted more than tomatoes and beets and squash in the garden in the years they'd lived with their grandparents; a lifetime of stories had their start there.
He decided to leave the back yard as it was; nature had spent a lot of time working to return the place to its original state. The new owners could do with it as they pleased. They could start from something wild and free instead of being influenced by any order he imposed. They had the raw materials; they just had to do the work.
Tom watched cloud shadows chase each other across the ground. In the slight wind the fence creaked like the runners of an old rocking chair. He let the coolness of the day lull him as he stared into the garden. The breezes caught the drying white pages of the book, and they fluttered in the secretive shadows beneath the dark green leaves of ivy.