The Doll in the Garden

Chapter 18

A Visit to Cypress Grove

THE MOONLIGHT silvered the yard as Snowball led Kristi and me out of the house. When I looked up at Louisa's bedroom window, I saw Aunt Viola peering out into the garden, but she didn't notice me. She was looking at the hedge, which was swaying as if someone had run through the gap ahead of us.

"Where's Carrie?" Kristi asked me. "We can't leave her here."

"She must have gone home without us," I said.

"Let's go." Kristi pushed past me, but I lingered a moment, watching Louisa's window. Aunt Viola was gone, but the light still glowed softly.

"Goodbye, Louisa," I whispered, knowing as I spoke that I would never see her again. She had sent Snowball to me for the last time, and she was sleeping now with Anna Maria in her arms.

"Come on, Ashley." Kristi pulled my arm. "It's scary here in the dark, and I'm cold."

Ignoring her, I stooped down and stroked Snowball's fur as he rubbed against my legs and purred. "I won't see you again either," I told him.

Tears filled my eyes as he slipped away from me and ran up the steps. Leaping to the sill of an open window, he crawled into the house. I waited and in a few seconds I saw him looking down at me from Louisa's room. Then he was gone and Kristi was pulling me through the hedge.

***

As we stumbled out of the shrubbery and into the afternoon's hot sunlight, we almost tripped over Miss Cooper. As old and wrinkled as ever, she was sitting on the grass in her own yard. When she saw Kristi and me, she said, "It was all true what you told me, all true."

"You gave Anna Maria back to Louisa," I said, "just like you promised."

"Yes," Miss Cooper said, "I did, didn't I?"

"And she forgave you," I added.

Miss Cooper smiled then and her wrinkles shifted and reshifted, forming new patterns. "She died peaceful," she said. "She died my friend."

Stunned, I watched Miss Cooper struggle to her feet. "She couldn't have died," I said. "She couldn't have."

Miss Cooper glanced at me and shook her head. "She died on this very day in 1912. I told you that." Then she hobbled away, leaving Kristi and me standing in the hot sunshine staring after her, too dumbstruck to speak.

"Come on." I grabbed Kristi's arm and started running. Despite the heat, we raced across the lawn and down Homewood Avenue toward Lindale Street.

"Where are we going?" Kristi cried.

"To Cypress Grove," I shouted. "It can't be true, Louisa can't be dead, not after all we did."

By the time we'd run the five blocks to the cemetery, we were panting and soaked with sweat. At the iron gates, I paused a moment, almost afraid to enter the still, green landscape ahead of me.

"You said she wouldn't die if she got her doll back," Kristi said. Her voice was so sharp with accusation you'd think I'd deliberately betrayed her.

Ignoring Kristi, I walked slowly down a gravel roadway. Unlike the memorial park where Daddy was buried with only a brass plate to mark his grave, Cypress Grove was an old cemetery, and you couldn't mistake it for anything but what it was. Many of the stones had fallen over and lay half-buried in the grass. The inscriptions were hard to make out, partly because the writing was old-fashioned and partly because the words had been almost worn away by years of rain and snow.

"If we don't find her grave, then she didn't die," I told Kristi, but even as I spoke I saw the pink stone angel Miss Cooper had told us about. It was standing in the shade of a holly tree, somberly regarding the ivy curling around its base.

It was a hot, dry July day, and leaves from the holly tree littered the ground! As we stepped into its shade, the leaves crunched under our bare feet, cutting our skin with their sharp edges. Sunlight and shadows mottled the little angel. Slowly I made out the letters caned into the stone:

LOUISA ANN PERKINS

BELOVED DAUGHTER OF ROBERT ALAN PERKINS

AND

ADELAIDE JOHNSON PERKINS

JANUARY 11, 1903 – JULY 17, 1912

MAY SHE REST IN PEACE

WITH THE ANGELS OF THE LORD

"She died. Louisa died," Kristi whispered.

I grabbed Kristi's hand and squeezed hard. Louisa was as real to me as Kristi, and my eyes filled with tears as I remembered the way she'd hugged Anna Maria and then fallen asleep. We'd tried so hard, Kristi and I and even Miss Cooper, but we hadn't kept Louisa from dying any more than Mom and I had kept Daddy from dying.

We'd failed, and the same anger I'd felt at Daddy redirected itself toward Louisa. Just like him, she'd deserted me. I'd never see her again; I'd never see him again. How could they just turn their backs and leave me?

Sinking to the ground beside Louisa's grave, I cried so hard my chest ached. All my tears for Daddy, the ones I'd held back so long, poured out of me. "How could you do it?" I sobbed. "How could you go?"

Kristi patted my shoulder and whispered something, but it didn't comfort me. It was Daddy I wanted. No one else would do.