Cassie, age nine, hunched intently over a book within the bramble bower. All was quiet but for the rustle and chirp of a family of finches, and the occasional sound of pages turning.

There was a slam, and a shout. Her brothers came thumping down the deck steps, thunderous and uneven. She ignored them until they started calling her name.

The boy looked up from his own book only for a moment. “You should ignore them,” he said. “They just want to play tetherball.”

Cassie agreed. She hooked her hair behind her ears and curled over the book again, but the shouting continued.

“Cass!” Tyler called. “Mom said you have to play with us while she’s at the store!”

“No she didn’t!” Cassie shouted back immediately. The boy sighed.

“She did too!” There was a sudden violent rustle; Tyler had thrown the tetherball at the bush.

The boy stood slowly, folding the book shut. The birds fell silent.

“Stop!” cried Cassie, jumping to her feet as well.

“Come out!” Tyler ordered. “Come play tetherball!”

“C’mon, Tyler,” Matt argued, “let’s just play by ourselves.”

“Let go,” Tyler said irritably; Matt must have grabbed his sleeve. A moment later, the bramble juddered under another blow from the ball. A few dead leaves filtered down from above and fell into Cassie's hair. The hollow began to grow dark, as though the sun had passed behind a cloud. The boy didn’t move.

“Stop it!” Cassie cried again, voice rising. “You’re hurting the blackberry!”

“You’re hurting the blackberry!” Tyler mimicked, pitching his voice to a shrieking mockery of Cassie’s. “I’m coming in to your stupid fort.”

“No!” The book tumbled from Cassie's hands. “Don’t!”

“Just leave her alone, Tyler,” Matt urged, but there was a wrenching rustle from Tyler as he tried to force his way in. “How do you even get in here? Ow!”

“Tyler, don’t, I mean it!” Cassie yelled. There was another yelp of pain. All she could see of the boy in the deepening gloom was his eyes. The smell of earth and green rot filled her nose. “Tyler, back out! Back out!”

“I’m trying!” Tyler’s vitriol had changed to alarm. “Cassie, I’m—OW!—I’m stuck!” He began to thrash. The air tightened. Wood creaked.

“No, stop—hold still!” With a last despairing glance at the shadow over her shoulder, Cassie slithered through the twisted brambles, feeling the thorns glide along the surface of the bare skin of her arms and comb the flyaways in her hair. There was a scream. “I’m coming out, just hold still!”

She slipped through the half-open chain-link gate and ducked under the low green arch of the blackberry tunnel into the backyard. She squinted against the sudden brilliance of the sunlight and staggered into Matt, who was tugging in vain at both of Tyler’s arms, trying to haul him out of the bramble. Tyler was ensnared up to his chest in the dense tangle; he’d lost his footing entirely, and his shirt was speckled with blood. Matt tugged again, grunting with the effort, and Tyler howled wordlessly in response, tears streaming down his face.

“Stop!” Cassie screamed. She knocked Matt’s hands away. “Just stop moving for a second!”

“Get me out,” Tyler blubbered. “It hurts!” But he did as she asked and held still.

“Okay, now stand up really slowly.”

Tyler worked his feet back under himself, sniveling. Cassie took a deep breath. “Now say you’re sorry.”

“You—!”

“Do it!”

“Fine! I’m sorry!”

“Now unhook all the thorns from your shirt. Keep moving real slow. Matt and I can help. Every time you feel a new snag, stop moving and pull it out.”

Working gingerly, they managed to extract Tyler from the blackberry bush thorn by thorn. His shirt was ruined; smears of blackberry juice and droplets of blood seeped together, and the fabric had been torn in several places. His jeans had a couple stains but would live to see another day. Matt ran to get the antiseptic and bandaids while Cassie helped pull the shirt over Tyler’s head.

“It was like it grabbed me.” Tyler winced as the shirt unstuck from a cut. “I was stepping in through the gap and then both my feet got stuck at the same time. Ow!” Matt had begun a clumsy Neosporin application.

“You just have to move real slow and smooth, or else the thorns catch,” Cassie replied.

“You don’t move slow,” Tyler accused.

“I have practice,” Cassie snapped.

She was not gentle with the bandaids.

⥈

The peach tree (Prunus persica) was furthest away from the blackberry bramble, so that was where Cassie started pruning. She needed to think.

It was a simple thing, recognizing troubling possibilities: no dithering, no denial, no willful suppression of reason or intuition. More difficult was deciding what to do about them, once recognized.

The peach tree was going to look alarmingly bald when she was done, but freshly-pruned trees always did. Mom knew the drill, and joined her with the shorter shears on the lower side after a while.

“Aside from your boss,” she asked, as though they had never ceased their conversation earlier, “how’s work?”

“Mostly good,” Cassie grunted. One of the branches was in an awkward place. “The research itself is going all right. I really like the other two research assistants; we have a game night every month, and we go hiking every couple weeks. One of the lab techs bakes cookies and brings them in on Fridays.”

“Are they good?”

“Yes, very.”

“Well that’s nice.”

“Mm-hmm.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

They lapsed into silence again. It took a moment for Cassie to realize Mom had stopped pruning and was staring blankly up at the sky.

“Mom?”

“I’m sorry.” Mom looked down and wiped her eyes. “I feel like I’ve forgotten how to talk. About anything other than your dad, I mean. I keep thinking I need to check on his drip or figure out when the best time is to call the doctor, and then I remember... And then I remember that my daughter is here and I have no idea what her life has been like for the past… however many months. Years.” Her voice hitched. “I’ve forgotten the living.”

“Oh, Mom—” Cassie dropped everything to the ground and pulled her mother into a hug. “I don’t feel forgotten at all. And my life has been really boring for quite a while.” Until now. “You haven’t missed anything. If there had been anything important I would have told you whenever I came to visit Dad.”

Would she have, actually? It was hard to know. She had been so numb with grief and resignation every time she came, it was like an out-of-body experience. Surely she must have cast her eyes upon the backyard innumerable times during those visits, and yet the state of it came as a fresh shock, as though seen for the first time, during the funeral. She wondered what else she had missed.

Mom sniffed and gave a watery chuckle. “Yes, I eavesdropped as much as I could on all your conversations with him. Plants, plants, and more plants. He was always so good at indulging your passions. If you loved it, he loved it. Did you know he subscribed to the International Journal of Plant Sciences when you started your PhD?”

Cassie had seen a stack of them in the master bathroom while helping Mom clean it. “Oh, that’s where those came from.”

“He wanted to be able to have ‘topical conversations’ with you, he told me. Then he got into it and talked my ear off until I reminded him that you’re the botanist and he should leave me be and text you instead.”

Cassie had saved every single one of his texts, even the ones that were just a scattered collection of plant emojis punctuated by a thumbs up. Especially those.

Mom brushed her hair back and sighed. “And of course I’m still just talking about him.”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

“Yes, I’m sure my therapist would agree. But I want to talk about you.”

Cassie hesitated. “Honestly, I’d rather talk about Dad. Or you. But if you really want to, I can regale you with lab drama.”

Her mother gave another chuckle, drier this time. “Please do. I’m all ears.”

They moved to the pear tree (Pyrus communis) next as they chatted, which took most of the afternoon. The light was turning from gold to amber when Matt showed up with half a “Condolences” cake from the guys at the firm and Mom went inside to start preparing dinner. She was still working her way through the funeral leftovers. Cassie stayed outside, stacking the heftier trimmings against the fence for winter kindling and tossed the remainder into the compost pile. When that was done, she stepped back to survey her work.

She was stalling.

A mosquito bit her neck. If she lingered much longer she would be eaten alive—but it wouldn’t hurt to at least neaten the compost pile a bit. Cassie turned around to go get the rake.

He stood there in the fading light, hands relaxed at his sides, watching her attentively. He cast a shadow; the rising breeze stirred his hair; the twilight gnats making a nuisance of themselves drifted around his head every bit as much as they did Cassie’s.

He had to be real.

Had to be.

Cassie held out her hand. “Could you pass me the rake, please?”

Wordlessly, he plucked the rake from where it was resting against the wall and brought it to her. She took it from him and gave it an experimental pass on the compost pile, climbing to the top as she went, and it raked just as it ever had. The rake was real, at least. She settled it tines-down in the pile and leaned on the pole, considering him thoughtfully from her perch. He returned her steady gaze.

“What’s your name?” Cassie finally asked. An endless variety of polite alternatives of that question probably existed. I’m so sorry, I can’t recall your name. I didn’t quite catch your introduction the first time. But if this man was willing to repeatedly arrive—uninvited, unannounced, unobserved—in her mother’s backyard, she didn’t owe him manners.

And if he didn’t exist at all, she owed him nothing.

He looked faintly puzzled. “You don’t know my name?”

“Do you know mine?” she challenged.

“Of course I do,” he replied. “Cassandra Nicole Harris.”

Shit. Cassie tried to ignore how it made her feel, to hear him speak her name. Her full name, no less—that was troubling. She scrubbed a stray strand of hair away from her face with the back of her glove. “I don’t remember your name,” she said shortly. “Sorry.”

He smiled up at her. “You’ll just have to make one up for me, then.”

Cassie smiled back in spite of herself. “You got it, Hieronymus.” She used the rake to steady her descent from the pile. “Not a good sign, you know,” she added as she pulled off her gloves.

“What’s not a good sign?”

“Not having a name.”

“I have a name.”

“A name that I make up for you doesn’t count, Edvard.”

He looked inexplicably startled for a moment, then repeated firmly, “I have a name.” He was soft-spoken enough that it was easy to miss how deep his voice was. He stepped closer to her, making Cassie aware again of his height. She didn’t move away, but she gripped the rake harder as she looked up into his shadowed face.

“Why,” he asked, “would it be a bad sign?”

Because it would increase the chances that you’re a figment of my imagination. “Because,” she hedged, surprising herself with a facet of honesty, “it makes it much harder to ask my mother about you.”

She had meant to say something flippant, maybe even caustic, but that’s not what came out. Oh well, this would do, even if it made her sound like some countryside Victorian virgin. A mama’s girl.

Obviously she was more of a daddy’s girl.

Abruptly, Cassie looked away, struggling to swallow around the lump in her throat. She busied herself with winnowing an errant strand of hair back into her braid, hoping to dash away the tears before they could be seen, but there were too many, dropping to the ground with just enough light left in the sky to betray them. Why now, why now. She pressed the gardening gloves to her eyes, face on fire with shame and hoping it was at least too dark to see how red she was.

“I’m sorry,” she choked, mortified. “I’m sorry.” Then she was on her knees, a caricature of a woman gone mad with grief, humiliated and unable to stop, rake fallen over and gloves pressed so hard to her eyes that her retinas bloomed with abstract pattern, and still she couldn’t stop the tears. “I’m sorry.”

Suddenly he was holding her, long arms wrapped around her sobbing frame, gathering her to himself, murmuring in her ear with his deep soft voice resonating where her head rested against his chest. He felt so real, warm and solid and scratchy where his stubble caught at her hair—but he couldn’t be. She was unhinged by the death of her father. She was having a psychotic break. She was manifesting literal daddy issues as some nonsense backyard apparition that drew from the legacy of her childhood imagination and hackneyed tropes of masculinity. She needed therapy and medication and probably better health insurance than what she got through the university.

Now she was crying at the prospect of having to postpone her research, too. Madness sabbatical. Foolishness on top of tragedy.

Still he cradled her, lips moving against her hair, further proof that he couldn’t possibly be real. She would never allow someone she’d met twice before, spoken to for a grand total of what, twenty minutes, to hold her like this. She’d have hit him with the rake. Instead she curled into him, let his low croon wash over her, didn’t even try to understand what he was saying. It didn’t matter. She needed just a moment, just a moment longer, in the embrace of her delusion.

When the last light of the sun had faded and the tears had dried to salty tracks on her face, Cassie rose to her feet. The breeze kept the mosquitos at bay, but away from the warmth of the man as he sat silently in the dirt, goosebumps swept over her skin.

What does one say to one’s hallucination after an episode?

“Thank you,” she croaked, not meeting his eye. Then she picked up the gloves, walked back to the house, and climbed the stairs of the deck, shivering.

Matt flicked on the porch light and came out from the kitchen just as she reached the top. Judging by his face, she must look as ghastly as she felt. But something over her shoulder caught his attention, and his expression changed instantly from pity to surprise.

“Who the fuck is that?” he blurted.

Cassie felt her stomach plummet to the center of the earth. She whirled around and caught sight of the man just as he disappeared into the gloom beyond the porch light’s reach. She turned back to Matt, mouth open and no sound coming out.

He kept squinting into the darkness. “Isn’t that the guy you were talking to at the funeral?”

“Yes,” Cassie finally managed.

“What’s his name?”

“I have no idea,” Cassie replied.

And she laughed so hard she started crying again.