The Garden of Rose Manor

Short Story

By Victoria Ashleigh Rose

I think that I wanted to run away from home as young as nine years old. I remember being young—if only in fragments of yelling, screaming, and whimsy—with a cognitive glaze blurring between. Every child wants to run away, at least for the time between the persistent ringing of a mother’s vocal cords and dinner, but not everyone has a place to run to. I had a garden, an enchanted scape of wildlife, history, and neglect; all of the things I found resonance with. 

When we first moved into the Rose Manor, my earliest memory is of my mother crying. We were in a restaurant in the city one day before the move. My little hands scribbled crayons onto paper—a bird, or maybe a horse, or some form in between—and my father rambled to us about how much we would love the new house. My mother repressed a sob and my crayon snapped under pressure while my father toasted obliviously to our new life.

“I don’t want to move, Daddy.”

I remember my voice squeak like a fork jutting across porcelain as a scowl spread across my father’s face. It was the kind of look that would make an innocent man plead guilty, and perhaps even believe that he was.

We are much like puppies at that age: ready to jump with excitement alongside you or fall ashamed from one harsh look. I didn’t know what I did wrong.

“You don’t mean that. You saw the house, sweetheart. You’re going to live like a princess, there. Why the heck wouldn’t you want to move there?” My father asked me, voice tense, smile wide, and teeth clenched.

“Because mommy doesn’t.” 

I didn’t understand the concept of silent truths yet, or of actions that don’t make situations better, or of powerlessness.

The house itself was all wrong. My mother said it was something between a Spanish-Victorian-Mexican villa and the set of The Great Gatsby, which was too many things. It was all high ceilings and grand chandeliers and Venetian wallpaper, and the backyard was all white plaster walls chipping and pealing beside brass fountains and marble backsplashes, with cascading stone staircases shaping an in-ground pool, just like in the movie. My mother said that my father made it worse by blanketing the rooms with Persian rugs and leather couches, but she painted every white plaster wall bright colours as though their aged surfaces were a blank canvas and not a monument to time. I had always secretly preferred the white, but I couldn’t tell her why. 

It was fun to run laps around the pool and the fountains or to swim in the summers or watch the birds collect worms from the card room window whenever it rained, but if you ducked your head into a dark tunnelled staircase and fought off the spiders and ghouls, you would find a creaky old door with a rusty lock. I found the key beneath the brown underbelly of a hundred-year-old toilet bowl in the abandoned changerooms, and my father never questioned it. Beyond that door were five pointed trees standing abruptly against the sky, marking the place where magic once—if only for a childhood—ran unbridled through the foliage and the brambles. Dying trees were kept upright only by the lifeline of ivy, tangled and knotting with the grip of life taken over by new life. The roses returned some years in stark bundles and folds of red and pink and white, interlacing with wooden fences and outlining the chipping white of cement walls, though the grass grew just as tall every spring. One day, my mother got me a book called The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and told me it reminded her of me. I read it over and over again until I understood what every word meant. I wanted to write my story one day, too, I thought.

My father and I were supposed to build a tree fort down there. So many summers were welcomed with plans and promises like that. We were going to bring the garden to life and plant new roses and strawberries to accompany the wild ones, but I always went down to the garden alone. So, I cut passageways out of weeds on my own and tied rope to my favourite evergreen tree a little higher up every time the most climbable branches were mysteriously cut. I would put down planks of wood as the base of my fort, but the next time I’d visit, they were gone, and I learned that people break promises. Maybe that’s why I wanted to run away. I wonder if I was the only one.

My father lied, my mother yelled, and my siblings fought and cried, but the garden was always quiet, except for those tender moments where I could swear that it whispered. I would climb up to the highest point of the evergreen tree where the circumference of the trunk fit fully in the clasp of my small hands, and I’d perch like an owl atop branches that should have surely caved under me, and they never did. It’s crazy to think about the sort of places we go to for safety. 

I pretended to be locked away there one summer with my sister and my childhood best friend, just three princesses reviving a magical garden, believing that with our foraging and singing and playing, we could renew the magic that once kept this place alive. We believed that the flora was as sentient as the animals, and the animals were as sentient as us, and that if we were nice enough to the animals, then the garden would bloom forever. We talked to the squirrels and the trees alike, and the forest never stopped giggling.

When word spread to the playground about my make-believe game, it became like a secret club, but no one had taught me about the market value of exclusivity, so I told everyone that they could join until no one wanted to, anymore. And so, I went down to the garden alone again until the snowfall killed my hope of reviving the magic once more. 

When the spring returned, the wild weeds tickled my tiny shoulders and scraped my arms. I remember going back to the house, creaking open that old door, and locking up my secret little place. I brought that garden back to life just by loving it. A piece of me will always be there, jumping broken fences and shuffling between walls, running my fingers along the gripping textures of an old stone arch, climbing up the trees until the branches bend and will themselves to hold on if only to let me watch the sunset. I never left without sticky fingers, stained in the blood-like sap of a tree only staying alive for me; so as to give me that comforting lesson that I was so small, and still am, and yet the world was so vast before me. At one point, I had found a family of snakes curled and coiling into the crevasses of cracked plaster (beautiful and unpainted, left alone in its natural purity). The babies let me pick them up and feel them wrap around my hands because they were little like me, and we did not yet know to fear each other. The mother snake would make her rare appearance only to stare with equally matched curiosity. She was nearly six feet long, and I was barely over four feet tall. Perhaps that’s why she never saw me as threatening. 

My father’s men started to visit the property more regularly—landscapers, tradesmen, or some guys off the street needing a quick buck—and my garden became the dumping ground for branches and rubble from various construction projects. I watched as they ripped up my roses alongside the weeds and pissed all over my strawberries, discarding their cigarette butts into the dirt. I watched as one of them decapitated the mother snake with a shovel and threw her body into the ditch, and the roses never came back. 

That year, my mother divorced my father, and I wondered how much time I had spent watching my parents fall out of love. I wondered how long she had wanted to run away, too. Maybe moving and running away aren’t very different from each other. I still visited my father at Rose Manor—if only to sneak off into the garden—but for the first time, those hallways sat as quiet as my evergreen trees. The rubble never really got cleaned up. Eventually, a new layer of grass and weeds formed over the mounds. The rose beds sat barren and dry, and every now and again, I had searched for snakes, but I never found another. 

I fell in love with a place that had been long forgotten by everyone but a child, adamant on its unkept beauty, and it forever remains in that state to me; a fixed point that I return to in the unconscious hours of the night, and on spirituous adventures spurred by, “will you follow me anywhere?”, “would you like to see my world?”, “do you trust me?”. I learned all the secret passageways inside the old plaster walls, but I promise I don’t break in a lot… Only when I want to run away.

I don’t live there anymore… and yet I feel myself drift down from the delicate breeze to explore its familiarity every time I fall asleep. I can see the ghost of that young girl, so unaware of me, and I know then that I’m dreaming. This is where my dreams always take me. 

I don’t live here anymore, but I will die here, in the life that flashes before my eyes, the memories of that innocent time… in this peaceful dream.