The blackberry bramble had completely ensnared the backyard.

The chain-link fence was lost beneath it. The gate to the parkland beyond was locked by thorny vines and hidden from view. It had engulfed three rose trellises, five spindly grown-from-the-pit avocado saplings, and a garden gnome. The sundial had been thoroughly throttled, and the boldest of the vines had progressed to making grasping forays onto the rusted old swing set.

“Wow,” said Cassie.

“That’s what I said.” Matt took a pull from his beer and rolled his shoulders uncomfortably in his black suit jacket. It was too tight. He probably hadn’t worn it since Tyler’s wedding six years ago. “Mom said she hadn’t had time to do much gardening since Dad really started going downhill. I thought she meant, like, the parsley had gone to seed or whatever. But this is… yeah.” He took another drink. “This is intense.”

The subdued clatter of the kitchen rose and fell as Tyler stepped outside. “I brought you some casserole,” he said. “Please help eat through the food or it’s going to live in my freezer for the next decade.”

“I’ve already had about three dozen deviled eggs,” Cassie replied, turning away from the blackberry behemoth. “I don’t think I can manage anything else.”

“You’ll hurt Mom’s church friends’ feelings.”

“I’m sure they’ll recover.”

Matt snorted into his casserole. Tyler smiled thinly. “What are you doing out here?”

“Hiding.” Cassie turned back to the blackberried yard. “I don’t know anybody here. Except you guys. And Mom.”

“Well, I’m sure it would mean a lot to Mom if you were sociable. This is her community. With Dad gone, and the three of us out of the house, she’s going to need these people in her life.” Cassie felt guilty enough to turn around and prepare to mingle until Tyler added, “Plus I don’t see either of you… expanding the family any time soon.”

“Jesus, Tyler,” Matt muttered. He turned away and leaned on the deck railing.

Cassie wordlessly slid open the door and marched through the kitchen, leaving a trail of mumbled condolences and awkward silences in her wake. Tyler was right about Mom, but frankly, he could shove the recommended sociability right up his sanctimonious ass.

She trudged up the stairs and down the hall to her old bedroom, moved the filing boxes off her bed and onto the treadmill that had evidently taken up residence there since her last visit, and sat down. She felt like she ought to cry. She wanted to cry. Sitting on your childhood bed at your father’s funeral was supposed to be the Moment to Cry. But instead she just wondered who the hell had moved the treadmill in here. Probably Tyler.

She looked around her room with dry eyes. It was mostly a storage room now, haphazardly stacked with square plastic tubs and repurposed Amazon boxes, topped off with a recent layer of medical odds and ends from Dad’s palliative care. The only remaining vestiges of her childhood existence were the quilt on the twin bed and a few faded rectangular silhouettes on the wallpaper where her pictures used to hang. She still had some of the better framed botanical prints in her apartment, but she had left the illustrations she had drawn herself here. They must have been trashed. Too bad—some of them were pretty good. Western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), milkweed (Asclepias speciosa), balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata). Blackberry, obviously (Rubus armeniacus). She rarely got the chance to sketch her subjects anymore, but hand-drawn illustrations were passé anyway.

After enough time had passed that she was confident no tears were coming, she sighed, tugged the wrinkles out of her dour black dress, and stood. She probably should go socialize. For Mom. She opened the door.

Someone stood in the hallway, just outside her door. A man.

Cassie halted uncertainly. She didn’t know him.

Did she?

She couldn’t tell; his back was to her. He was leaning against the banister, looking over the guests.

He turned his head, then straightened up and stared at her, his face shadowed. He did not speak.

Several heartbeats passed in silence. Cassie had just opened her mouth to ask him if he was looking for the bathroom when he finally spoke.

“Your father was a kind man. He will not be forgotten.”

Cassie stared up at him, mouth still open. He had the greenest eyes she had ever seen. Bottle-green. Emerald. “I-I’m sorry,” she stuttered, finally finding her voice. “Thank you. How did you know Dad? Or do you know Mom? There are so many people here, I’m having trouble remembering everyone.”

“That’s all right,” he said solemnly. “I'm an old friend.”

Strange that a man Cassie’s age would consider himself an old friend of either of her parents, but Cassie simply extended her hand and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

He looked at her hand for a moment, as if unsure what to do with it, then reached out with both of his hands and gently clasped hers between them. They were warm and dry.

“Well,” she said after a moment, reclaiming her hand and turning to look over the crowd again, hoping that would hide her blush. Cassie considered herself more or less inured to awkward social interactions after a decade of biology conference mixers, but this man was really putting that to the test. She cleared her throat and continued inanely, “A lot of people came.”

“Yes.”

Cassie watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was looking around with great interest, taking in everything from the photos on the wall to the remains of the buffet below to the potted plants peeking out from shelves and end tables, and running his fingers absently over the buttons in the cuffs of his suit jacket. For something he seemed to be so unused to wearing, it was remarkably well tailored.

“I’ve never been inside before,” he murmured, gazing contemplatively at a fern (Nephrolepis obliterata) potted in a ceramic bowl. “It’s wonderful.”

“I’ll pass that along to Mom,” Cassie replied. “She takes a lot of pride in her homemaking.” Cassie thought guiltily of her disaster zone of a bedroom and wished she had shut the door behind her.

“This house is full of life.” The man closed his eyes for a moment. “I was afraid to come—I thought it would feel dead. But it doesn’t.”

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Cassie was becoming increasingly sure she’d met him before. Something about his halting cadence felt deeply familiar, and he was speaking to her as if he already knew her. He’d said he was an old friend. Pleased to meet you was probably an inadvertent insult. She opened her mouth to apologize and ask his name when her phone buzzed.

“Oh, sorry, excuse me.” Cassie fished out her phone and turned away. It was an email from her boss, asking her to change several key sections in the latest proposal. She’d try to get to that tonight. She dashed off a quick reply, then silenced her notifications and put it away again, turning back to the man. “Sorry,” she said again. “Work.”

“Your work means a lot to you.”

“Yes, well.” Cassie shrugged a shoulder. She spent too much time with her job. This job, anyway. It had sent runners through her life until there wasn’t really any time that she was not effectively on call. But that’s not something she wanted to talk about with this person, “old friend” or not.

“Cass?” Matt poked his head up the stairs. “Tyler wants you.”

She turned to him, stepping away from the conversation with relief. “What for?”

“A picture.”

“A picture? At a funeral? Are you serious?”

Matt shifted uncomfortably. “He—”

“No, it’s fine. Whatever.” She suddenly remembered the man was standing there too, an audience to her rudeness. She flushed. “Oh, uh, excuse me, I have to go—”

“No, of course.” He nodded cordially to Matt, who was peering at him with a how-do-I-know-you expression on his face. “See you later.”

Tyler’s wife, it transpired, was the one who wanted to take the picture; Tyler himself had the good sense to act a little embarrassed. But Mom didn’t seem to mind, preoccupied as she was with keeping a little black-clad grandchild from squirming out of her grasp. Another bounced up and down in Tyler’s arms, a third at his feet, while a fourth gestated prominently in his wife’s ruched black maternity dress. Cassie marveled at the woman’s fortitude, and felt the burden of “family expansion” lifted somewhat. Tyler clearly didn’t need sibling backup on that front.

She looked up once while the church friend pressed into photography duties fussed with the settings on her phone. Cassie wasn’t sure why this friend in particular had been selected; her glasses were so thick, they lensed her eyes into enormous distorted orbs. The man was still standing at the banister, watching the gathering and plucking at his suit. Watching her, specifically. It was easy to tell; his green eyes were almost luminous against his face. But when she looked up again, he was gone.

⥈

Cassie awoke sometime in the night. The guests had long since departed; except for the slight creaking of the old swing set outside, the house was silent. Matt was at his apartment, working on some big contract, and Tyler and his brood had left for their own home. Tyler, evidently forgetting that Cassie had already put in for the whole week off work, had tried to guilt her into staying; after all, being in academia, surely she must have “nothing else to do.” Cassie let him dig his verbal hole for the pleasure of watching him have to climb back out of it when she reminded him.

Now it was just her and Mom and a big house that made occasional distant gurgling noises for no apparent reason.

She would have liked the sight of her childhood room to have been reassuring, but the clutter rendered the moonlit landscape almost alien. The room was strange to her. Even the smell was strange. It smelled of dust and disuse.

Her fingers picked at the stitching on her quilt. Mom had made it as a baby blanket before she was born, then expanded it to fit her bed as she got older. It was so worn down by now, the patches had patches. At least this part of her room remained intact, even when everything else changed around it.

Cassie stared out the window, wondering what had woken her. The moonlight was shining into her room, illuminating the treadmill and the patches of wall where the pictures weren’t. The blackberry sketch used to hang just beyond the foot of her bed; now it was bare wallpaper. She’d dreamed about the blackberry, hadn’t she? She looked out the window again. The moonlight shone on the blackberry bramble, too. A few late flowers gleamed white.

The boy—she’d been dreaming about the boy in the bramble! Cassie hadn’t thought about him for years. The memories felt strangely murky, clouded by more than just the passage of time. A neighbor’s son, about her age, always there when she went out in the yard. He’d made a little fort—more of a bower, really, barely big enough for them to stand—inside the largest part of the blackberry bush, just on the other side of the fence. She’d made sure to keep the gate free of blackberry vines so she could slip through to him. To have a tea-party, to draw pictures, to read a book, to plot world domination, to complain about her brothers. He told her fables about the forest—some funny, some sad. Sometimes they just sat silently in the little hollow, huddled like rabbits. In the dream, she was little, and crying. He had his skinny whipcord arms wrapped around her and was whispering something in her ear.

She couldn’t remember more than that. Her dreams used to be so much sharper, almost eidetic. That had changed too, somewhere along the way.

Her eyes focused suddenly on the backyard. Was that a person? The shadow looked like a man, standing behind the old swing set, almost in the blackberry. Cassie watched the shadow for a long time, but its only movement was the shifting of leaves in the wind.

She meant to make breakfast for Mom the next morning, but when she came downstairs in her sweatpants Mom was already at the stove converting leftover funeral potatoes into some sort of hash in the frying pan.

“Good morning,” she said lightly. “Hot water in the kettle.”

“Morning.” Cassie puttered around the kitchen until she found the instant coffee and cocoa mix. “How’re you doing?”

Mom considered the question carefully. “Better,” she said finally, and turned her attention back to the hash.

“That’s good,” Cassie replied. That was the extent of the conversation until they had each finished their breakfast. Cassie started loading the dishwasher while Mom gazed thoughtfully out the window. “I should work on the yard.”

“Okay.” Cassie shut the dishwasher and wiped her hands. “I’ll help.”

“You don’t have papers to grade?”

“It’s summer, Mom.”

“Oh. You’re not doing any research?”

“I am, just not this week.”

“Ah.” Mom nodded vaguely. “I’ll go find the gloves.”

They weeded in silence for half an hour, working their way through the raised bed closest to the kitchen. It was normally an herb garden, but right now it was clumps of woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta) and a few struggling garlic shoots. Cassie nibbled on the woodsorrel as she went along. “When do you want to tackle that blackberry?” she asked, yellow flower bobbing as she spoke.

“Goodness.” Mom straightened up and shaded her eyes. “Not yet, I’ll have to work up to it. Let’s get through the beds first at least.”

“Sounds good.”

“Might take a few days.”

“I have all week.”

They moved on to the vegetable bed. “Mom, do you remember that neighbor kid I used to play with all the time?”

Mom wrestled a bolted cabbage out of the dirt before answering. “Who?”

“There was a boy. My age, skinny, dark hair. We used to play in the blackberry bush.”

Mom straightened up, hand on her hip, and stared. “Surely you’re not talking about the boy you used to have little tea parties with?”

“Yes,” said Cassie, puzzled. “Him.”

Mom laughed. Cassie was so shocked she nearly inhaled the woodsorrel stem. This was the first time she had heard Mom laugh since Dad got sick. “Oh, sweetheart,” she chuckled. “That was an imaginary friend!”

The woodsorrel fell from Cassie’s open mouth. “What?”

“None of the neighbors even had kids when you were growing up. Lord knows why you felt the need to invent another little boy to play with when you had your brothers—I would have expected a little girl, at least—but he wasn’t real. I think he may have been a fairy at one point.” She laughed again and pulled Cassie into a tight hug. “I’m astonished you remembered him at all, let alone as a real person! It was just the sweetest thing, you disappearing into the underbrush with a toy or an extra sandwich for your little friend. I wish I remembered his name! You drew pictures of him and everything. I kept ahold of one; I’ll have to see if I can find it.” She planted a firm kiss on Cassie's head and released her, smiling. “Thank you.”