The Garden Gate

Welcome to The Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is a story centred around an absurd detail (for example, people walk on their hands or hedgehogs fly).

In December 2018, Phil (using his Alan Kemister pen name) published his most recent novel. Tilting at Windmills, the second in the Barrettsport Mysteries series of soft-boiled police detective stories set in an imaginary Nova Scotia coastal community is available on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Tilting-Windmills-Barrettsport-Mysteries-Book-ebook/dp/B07L5WR948/. He’s currently working on a saga about the hazards of ignoring climate change.

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The Garden Gate

by Phil Yeats

 On an early spring day in his seventy-first year, something possessed him to tackle the gate at the bottom of his garden. The sun was shining and the temperature warm. Ten years earlier, before the physical frailties of old age overtook him, he might have strode through the gate and wandered down the lane into the fields and forests beyond.

But those days were long gone. Now a slow stroll inside his garden walls, using his Grandpa’s Weeder to pull out a few dandelions, was the extent of his exertions. But that afternoon, he strapped his old leather tool belt around his waist and approached the gate.

The hinges looked frozen and the latch rusted shut. He oiled the hinges and inspected the latch. Generous applications of penetrating oil and some tapping with a hammer accomplished nothing. The latch would not open. He turned to the rusted screws holding the latch to the gate. They were so rusted he couldn’t find the slot for the screwdriver, but they refused to release the latch when he pried.

He was silently cursing his luck when a childlike voice called from beyond the wall.

“Can I help?”

The latch lifted, freed by the outside pull-cord that extended through a hole in the door. It swung open silently and a young child, a girl perhaps five or six years old, marched through. “This is a magic gate. It leads to wonderful places.”

He smiled. The idea of a magic gate was absurd. But she was so young and happy, and she’d opened the latch he’d been unable to free. Could there be something in her claim?

She wandered around his garden, picking flowers from the unkempt beds surrounding his lawn. She paused when she completed her transit and held up her bouquet. “I’m taking these home to Mummy. She’ll be so happy.”

She disappeared through the gate and it silently closed behind her. He tried to lift the latch, but it remained frozen.

That evening after his lonely dinner, he recalled a similar spring day fifty years earlier. He was twenty-one, he’d graduated from high school and spent two years at university. Neither had been a positive experience. He was too shy, too socially inept, and uninterested in the society of ambitious youths. He returned home and worked in the family business, a small-town lumberyard and hardware store.

The only person he’d ever connected with was another student from their high school. She was several years younger than him and, in most respects, very different. She was dedicated to her music, intent on becoming a classical pianist. He wasn’t particularly interested in anything. But she was also a shy outsider in a musical culture far more country than classical.

That fateful day, she’d stood by the gate at the bottom of his family’s garden, the garden that was now his, and told him her family was moving to a big city so she could pursue her musical ambitions. She abandoned the intimacy they’d established and strode down the lane without looking back.

He tried to follow her career in those pre-internet years but soon lost track of her. He remained in his home town, assuming responsibility for the family business and eventually inheriting his house when his parents passed on. Five years ago, he’d sold the business to a young engineer, a city slicker who wanted to put his urban existence behind him. The three of them, the engineer, his wife, and their infant daughter, became valued members of their rural community.

 

She appeared a few days later as he dozed on the patio behind his house.

“Hello, Raymond,” she said when he opened one eye. “Do you remember me?”

He struggled for several seconds to come fully awake. Then stared at the woman who could be anywhere in her fifties or sixties, maybe even as old as his seventy-one. She was elegant, an urban woman who paid attention to her appearance. He hadn’t seen her for fifty years, but something about her voice gave her away.

“Linda,” he said, “have you returned after all this time? Or is this a dream?”

She crouched down and took his hand. “No dream. I’m here to make up for so much lost time. But first we must venture through the portal. I must show you my life and explain why I stayed away for such a long time.”

“Portal? What sort of fantasy fiction are you talking about?”

“The gate at the bottom of your garden. It’s a portal to anywhere you chose to go.”

“No way. It’s merely a gate onto a country lane. And anyway, the latch is rusted shut. The gate’s inoperable.”

He hesitated but said nothing. He’d struggled to convince himself the little girl who appeared to enter through the gate was anything more than a dream he had when his efforts to free the latch caused him to black out.

“Come with me. I’ll show you the way.”

She stood without releasing his hand and tugged him upright. They walked to the gate, where she flicked the latch up with a finger. The gate swung open, and they walked onto a city street.

“How did you do that?” he asked. “I’ve been trying for days to get that latch free.”

“If you believe and have somewhere important to go, it will open.”

“Where are we?” he asked.

“New York City. We moved here the day after we parted.” She climbed the stairs to an old brownstone townhouse, opened the front door, and walked along a hallway to a bedroom at the back.

Inside, a young woman struggled through her labour pains in the presence of two other women. One was Linda’s mother. He looked more carefully at the woman giving birth. It was Linda, the Linda he remembered from so long ago.

“I was pregnant, our baby, when I left but didn’t realize it. That was a shock, but not nearly as great as my other revelation from those first five years in New York. I learned that my ambition to be a concert pianist wasn’t my ambition at all. It was my mother’s ambition, and she’d let nothing, not even the birth of our baby, get in the way. She weaved it into the narrative she was making for me, the story of a musical prodigy. Our baby became a love child, the result of a liaison with a famous musician who’d impregnated and abandoned me.”

Linda tried, as they watched the birth of their daughter, to explain how she’d been drawn into her mother’s fantasy of a musical prodigy daughter. How she’d struggled so hard through four years at a famous school for preforming arts and finally realized it was a chimera. She was a competent pianist who’d studied at a famous music school, not the next great concert pianist.

After the baby, a tiny girl, was born, they walked onto another street, a grungier one that could have been in any large city. The apartment they entered was smaller, more modern, and somehow exuded a friendlier aura.

“I abandoned my parents, not a happy parting, and retrieved Amy from the maiden aunt she’d been living with and established my career as a pianist for hire. I had a few gigs with symphonies, mostly fill-ins when they were desperate. Mostly, I worked as a session musician for big recording studios. It was a grind but paid reasonably well because I’m a very competent pianist. We lived here until Amy went to university, where she met and married an engineering student. You’ve met them. They bought your lumberyard.”

“What?” Raymond exclaimed. “I sold my business to my daughter and her husband. Why didn’t they say something?”

“Amy doesn’t know you’re her father.”

“Why didn’t you tell her. You must have realized who they were buying the lumberyard from.”

“I didn’t. By that time, I was living in Los Angeles, still working as a session musician, but this time more often with film studios where I got cameo roles playing the piano. Amy was living in Ohio where Ben had a job with a power utility. When they bought your business, I was in Japan working on a film where the piano player had a bigger role. I had some lines and a few scenes where I wasn’t sitting on my piano bench.”

They’d left the second apartment and Raymond realized they were back outside his house. Linda paused with her hand on the latch release outside his garden gate. “I’ve known about the crazy coincidence for three years and struggled with what I should say.

“That’s why I’m here,” she added as the gate swung open. “How do we handle this? What do we tell Amy? And the little girl you met here three days ago. Her name’s Zoe. She’s our granddaughter.”

“That’s crazy. They live a kilometre from here. If you haven’t told them, why would she appear at my garden gate?”

“Told you. Magic portal. Seen by anyone associated with this house and sensitive enough to feel the vibrations.”

Raymond strolled toward the house humming ‘good, good, good, good vibrations’. He shook his head. The whole idea of a magic portal was utterly absurd. He looked around, ready to challenger her. Linda was gone.

 

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The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/