Neruda could not help but frown at her garden.
Her favorite smell was that of warm jasmine, which seemed to hang thick on the air like invisible fog. But those plants were choked by three kinds of weeds. She had planted dozens of different colors of spider lilies and named each of them after an auntie. But those plants were losing strength in their graceful stalks and touched their heads to the ground. The troubled waters of her little pond had dried up. The sound of the hummingbird’s rapid wings had ceased. Her small but satisfactory plot of land looked grievously deserted.
I wish I had never left this place. I can feel the anger coming from your roots.
“Rudy! Get in here!”
Don’t call me Rudy.
I hate being named after a poet’s pen name. It’s like being named after a place that doesn’t exist. Pablo Neruda stole his last name from another poet, a dead guy from Bohemia. Brilliant, just another dead thing about me.
Inside the little pink cottage that had once radiated with such love and beauty, Neruda felt the tremor of death. After her grandmother had gone to plant roses along the road among the stars, Neruda could not bear to enter the house. After her grandmother had gone to the deep place to keep herself eternally, Neruda could not bear to cross the threshold of the front door. After you left me alone—before showing me how to plant Echinacea, before teaching me how to cut onions without crying, before telling me the secret to loving a boy—you went and made them bury you in the ground and made me bury you in the heart.
“Rudy, come and see this!”
Don’t call me, Rudy.
I couldn’t walk any faster than I was. Every little bit my shoe sank into the pink shag carpet would bring back an insistent memory. Sitting on the floor, cutting out paper dolls. Tumbling down the soft steps into the sunroom. Getting rug burn from tickle fights and wrestling matches. I think everyone seeks the permanence in time and grieves her limits on earth, but we can make enough memories so that we have an escape. We can live in those memories like we live in a cottage and dream in perpetual safety.
Neruda finally met her sister in their grandmother’s bedroom, a place that would always be their grandmother’s bedroom—no matter who was sleeping there. The girls stood next to each other, touching hips and staring down at a large trunk.
“Do you think this is what mom was talking about?”
It is human nature to be carefully destroying herself and preserving herself incessantly. Did she give us some pieces of herself? Did she gather her favorite things? Did she leave warnings and notes of wisdom? Did she finally reveal all of her secrets? Or will this just be more death? Death trapped in a box. Neruda knelt in front of the large wooden chest, half-covered by a coarse pink blanket. There was a crude carving on its lid that read, “significa sombras.” She fingered the letters her grandmother had made. She lifted the lid.
There is a new angel coming to us now.
