Mom’s words repeat in my head:Never trust your heart, never trust love.
I run, the wind howling against my face, the air burning in my lungs, my bare feet smacking against the pavement. I can still feel the places where Oak’s hands touched my skin. The scent of him pressed into my flesh: of the river behind his house, wet earth, and a long, winding road.
I left my sandals beside the back door of Oak’s house. But I’m not going back. I won’t risk it; I can’t trust that my heart won’t tip back into his arms. That I might forget why I left in the first place.
All the fear that lives inside me, the warnings I’ve repeated to myself my entire life—never get too close, never make eye contact, don’t let them love you—force my legs to pump even harder. My heartbeat cracking against my eardrums.
I reach our driveway and sprint toward the house, over the creek, and gasp for air on the front porch before pushing inside. Archer is leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping a cup of coffee, the shotgun at his side—like he intends to stay awake all night.
“What happened?” He sets his mug on the counter.
But I march past him and out into the garden. The tulips sway innocently, a section of the crop now headless, ripped from the soil, but most of the garden is untouched.
Over the years several of my ancestors have tried to destroy the tulips: Uncle Sergie mowed down the whole garden with a ridinglawn mower one night while drunk; my great-grandmother Pip tried to dig up the bulbs with a shovel, uprooting most of them in hopes that a local man who bred horses on the other end of town would stop loving her. But it didn’t work. The tulips always returned the following spring, and the locals kept falling in love.Obsession and desperation and misery.
I head for the toolshed and find a pair of large, rusted shears. They’re heavy, haven’t been used in a decade, but I make for the garden, determined. At the first row, the tulips churn around me as if they sense something, feel the malice of my intention, and I swing the shears up, snip off three beautiful tulip heads, and watch the blooms hit the ground like they’ve been decapitated.
“What the hell are you doing?” Archer shouts from the back porch.
“They ruin everything,” I say, shearing off another five tulips.
I hear Archer’s footsteps on the porch stairs, but I keep hacking at the tulips, watching the blooms roll across the soil, the air fragrant and alive with their terrible scent. But just before I can snip off another towering clump, Archer rips the shears from my hands in one swift move. “You think destroying the tulips will be this easy?”
I turn on my brother, my ears pulsing. “I have to try.”
Archer holds the shears at his side, and I eye them, ready to snatch them back, but he gives me a look, his eyebrows raised. We both know that I won’t be able to wrestle them from him: he’s stronger, and he’d win this battle one way or another—just like when we were little kids and he’d swipe my favorite stuffed rabbit from my bed and run into the woods, knowing I couldn’t catch him.
His eyes flatten, trying to unearth the truth from his sister.“What happened tonight? You went to see that boy?” He squints, his upper lip curling a little, like he’s found it. Discovered the thought I’ve been trying to hide. “You started to fall in love with him, didn’t you?”
I don’t answer.
“Shit, sis. You know better than that.”
I exhale, craning my head back to stare up at the moonless sky, every star vivid and sharp like needlepoints. “I really liked him,” I whisper, I confess, heat rising behind my eyes. “I thought… I don’t know, that maybe it was real.”
“First rule of being a Goode: never believe anything that feels like love.”
I lower my head, looking down at the pile of tulips at my feet, and I feel suddenly afraid that I’ll never leave this house—just like Archer. That all my plans are impossible.Improbable.And I’ll never be any better than everyone else who couldn’t find a way out of Cutwater.
That I’ll stay here forever.
Archer grips the shears, using them to point to the garden. “Without the tulips, what do we have, Lark? We’re just two orphans living in a shit house, in a shit town, with no future. But these flowers give us power. Control.”
“But we’ll never have love.Real love.”
He turns away from me briefly, like he’s hiding something, a thought, a memory he doesn’t want me to see. Then his eyes swing back. “I’ll take power over love any day.”
He starts toward the back porch, then pauses, turns to face me again. “If cutting down the garden would end the curse, someone in this family would have done it long ago. This garden… this is ourlife. It’s all there is. The sooner you accept it, make it work in your favor, the less miserable you’ll be.” His eyes soften, pity forming at the corners. He feels bad for me. “I know it’s hard. But we have to be tougher, more resilient than anyone else in this town, or this life will destroy us.”
My eyes drop to my feet. Tulip seasonwillend, winterwillcome, yet we will still be the Goodes. And the curse will not end for us. We will never be rid of it. It will start all over again next spring.
My brother leaves me in the garden.
The screen door banging shut behind him.
I’ve known a lifetime of lovesickness; I grew up watching Mom push away unwanted affections, our doorbell ringing at all hours of the night, men standing on our porch pleading with her to love them in return—their voices waking me from sleep.
I grew up with this maelstrom of forsaken love all around me. And when I scan the garden, I see what others do: the beauty of each rare bloom, white petals cut through with an ancient red incantation. But I also know the tulips are made of darkness. They are a plague. And they will ruin us, one way or another.
