‘Really?’ she replied. ‘I can barely smell a thing. Must be allergies.’
She went to open the gate but when she tried to flip the latch, it was locked.
‘What the heck?’
‘We’re too late,’ Jackson said, scanning a sign posted on the wall as she rattled the lock. ‘They closed early for maintenance.’
With my eyes closed, I held on to the bars and breathed in.It was such a heady perfume, a dense, overwhelming combination, but at the heart of it was something familiar. Jasmine? My dad loved jasmine-scented anything. Once he told me it reminded him of my mom and I’d held on to that memory forever.
‘These gates have a history all their own.’ Jackson grasped the railings too, his hand right above mine, not quite touching. ‘They’re from Union Station, the railway station they knocked down in the Sixties to build the interstate. It’s cool how they were able to repurpose them here.’
‘My brother the history buff,’ Lydia said, this time with admiration. ‘And what’s even cooler is that before this was a fragrance garden, it was a poison garden.’
‘Really?’ I searched the flowerbeds for evidence.
‘Lydia, quit it,’ Jackson groaned. ‘No, not really. They didn’t even build this place until the nineteen-sixties. Seriously, you cannot believe a word my sister says.’
‘It’s a good job you’re pretty, Jackson Powell,’ she replied before grabbing my arm and marching me back the way we came. ‘Because you have no imagination.’
In the distance, I heard a low and foreboding rumble. It sounded like a big truck driving by but from the matching looks on the twins’ faces, I suspected it was not.
‘Thunder.’ Jackson grimaced as the blue sky clouded over with unbelievable speed. ‘We should move.’
‘Why didn’t I bring a jacket?’ Lydia wailed, letting go of my hand and taking off in a sprint. ‘I don’t want to get my hair wet, I just washed it.’
I hated surprise storms. A surprise storm took my dad from me and I had no desire to get caught in this one, but there was no outrunning it. With only that one warning, the heavens opened and down it came. Living in Wales, I was used to rain, but this was something else. Huge, heavy raindrops that hit sohard they almost blinded me as I ran side by side with Lydia. I felt my feet slapping against the footpath but all I could hear was the driving rain. The packed park was suddenly completely empty, everyone had run for shelter.
‘Wait up!’ Jackson yelled, his voice lagging somewhere behind us. ‘Shit! I think I twisted my ankle.’
We slowed to a stop and turned back to see him limping, his white shirt transparent and glued to his body. I swiped my waterlogged hair out of my face as Lydia rushed to her brother’s aid, understandably less distracted by his suddenly visible abs.
‘Can you put any weight on it at all?’ she asked, ducking underneath his arm and forcing him to lean on her for support.
‘It’s not that bad,’ he claimed, sucking the air in through his teeth every time he touched his foot to the floor. It certainly looked that bad. ‘Y’all go on without me, I’ll be just fine.’
‘Oh, sure. It’s not that bad.’
With a pointed look, Lydia bent over and poked his ankle with her forefinger. He let out an unholy howling sound.
‘He broke it last summer playing ball and it never did heal right,’ she explained while her brother cursed her out loudly and creatively. ‘Catherine gave him something to help heal it up but I just knew he didn’t use it. Your grandmother’s remedies always work.’
‘I did too use it,’ he muttered in response but from the sullen set of his jaw and shifty look in his eyes, I was pretty sure he was lying. ‘Give me one minute to catch my breath and I’ll be fine. Go on.’
‘One minute and we’ll all be drowned,’ Lydia argued. ‘Em, you run on home, you’re soaked to the bone. If you catch a cold and die, your grandmother will kill me too. No point everyone dying.’
‘People don’t die from summer colds,’ I assured her, catchingJackson’s eye before he could look away. Suddenly I was too aware of the clinginess of my own shirt and folded my arms across my body. ‘Besides, I don’t know that I could even find my way home in this.’
‘OK then,’ she sighed with acceptance. ‘Let’s at least get out of the rain.’
Lydia and I helped Jackson hobble over to the closest oak tree. The ground underneath its dense canopy of leaves was relatively dry compared to the rest of the park and we lowered Jackson carefully to the ground, his ankle already swelling up inside his sneaker. Carved into the sturdy trunk of the tree, I spotted a heart about the same size as my palm, with an arrow shooting through it. Inside were two initials but they’d been worn away by time and the weather.
‘And I thought the heat was bad,’ I said, the rain still hammering down as though it might never stop. ‘Does this happen a lot?’
‘Usually later in the summer but the weather has been all over the place this year,’ Lydia replied. ‘Once things really heat up, we might get a storm like this every day. You don’t get much of a warning.’
‘I wouldn’t say exactly like this.’ Jackson winced as he tried to flex his foot as the rain thrashed down.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘This is a doozy.’
