Chapter 5: The Garden That Listened

Grandpa carried her to the garden.

She didn't fight him anymore. The fighting had gone out of her somewhere between the dining room and the door, the way fire goes out when there is nothing left to burn. She was simply heavy now, the particular heaviness of a small person who has used up everything they had and has nothing left to perform.

He set her on the bench.

The garden noticed immediately. It always did.

The trees turned first, slowly, the way they always turned, with that enormous unhurried attention that made you feel both very small and very seen. The flowers followed, their singing shifting into something softer, lower, the kind of sound you make for someone who is past the point of words. They came as close as they could. Petals brushed the edge of the bench. Leaves curled toward her like hands.

Shyla sobbed.

Not prettily. Not quietly. The heaving, graceless, full-body kind of crying that six year olds do when they have stopped caring how they look, which is the most honest kind of crying there is. Her shoulders shook. Her face did things faces do when they have given up controlling themselves.

The flowers sang softer.

It didn't help.

The trees leaned closer.

Still nothing.

Grandpa sat beside her and said nothing, because he was not the kind of grandfather who said it's alright when it wasn't, and she was not the kind of child who would have believed him if he had.

He raised his hand.

One click.

Everything stopped.

The singing. The wind. The distant sounds of the house. The rustle of everything living, all of it folded closed at once, clean and total and complete. The clouds above held their colours perfectly, amber and violet and something between rose and a word she would never find. The other worlds hung motionless in the light blue sky, caught mid-drift.

Time stopped.

In the silence that followed, edgeless, enormous, even Shyla's crying slowed. Then stopped. Not because she had decided to stop. But because the silence was so complete that grief itself seemed uncertain whether it belonged here.

Grandpa took her hands.

He straightened her dress at the shoulders. Smoothed it the way he always did, with the quiet attention of someone for whom small things were never small. Then he lifted her into his lap.

She sat stiff as a board.

She was not looking at him. She was staring at the stopped sky with the focused intensity of someone who is furious and heartbroken and absolutely determined that neither of those things will show.

Both of them showed completely.

Grandpa waited. He was extraordinarily good at waiting.

After a long moment he reached up and cupped her face in both hands, gently, just enough, and turned it toward his.

She resisted for one second.

Then she let him.

Her eyes were full. Right at the edge. Her jaw was tight, her lips pressed together, fighting it with everything she had.

He wiped her eyes with his sleeve. Once. Then again.

"Shyla," he said softly.

"Yes." Barely a sound.

"Are you okay?"

Her small body trembled. Just once.

"Yes, Grandpa."

He looked at her with the eyes that had never once been fooled by anything she said.

Four seconds.

"Why does Momma hate me?" she said.

It came out before she decided to say it. Small and raw and very, very real.

Grandpa looked up at the stopped sky. Something moved through his face, anger, grief, disappointment, all three at once, running under his expression the way cold water runs under ice. There and powerful and invisible unless you knew where to look.

Then he looked back at her.

"Your mother does not hate you," he said. Quietly. Carefully. "She is protecting you. She has always been protecting you." A breath. "Your father too. He loves you."

Shyla looked at him steadily.

"Then why don't they show it?"

He had no answer for that.

"I want to feel it," she said. Her voice was getting quieter, the way voices get when they are carrying too much. "Like Mr Bunny and his Junior Buddy. I want Momma to feed me. Tuck me in." She looked at her hands. "I want Dad to take me to school. Come home for festivals." A pause. "Is that too much, Grandpa?"

He still had nothing.

"I feel like I'm dying," she said.

The words sat in the stopped air and took up far more space than they should have.

"I want my Mom." Her voice cracked, just once, just slightly. "At night I get scared. My body feels like something is pulling me into the dark. Like something is sucking me in and I can't." She stopped. Swallowed hard. "Please help me, Grandpa."

He reached for her.

But she had already slid off his lap.

She walked fast, the way children walk when they are trying not to be seen falling apart, her small figure moving through the stopped garden, past the frozen flowers, past the leaning trees, growing smaller and smaller until she was only a shape at the edge of everything.

Then a suggestion of a shape.

Then nothing.

Grandpa sat alone on the bench.

His hands lay open in his lap.

Above him, very slowly, time began again.

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