Willowview

“It’s too hot here.” On the third dreary day since moving to town, a town she knew nothing about and liked nothing about, Charlotte leaned over the edge of the couch, watching beads of condensation trickle down the stem of her mother’s wine glass. The rainfall, at first a relief from the blistering end-of-summer sun, had become another trap—humidity on top of heat. Everything felt uncomfortable. Even reading, her only respite, had become irritating as her fingers stuck to the pages, resulting in the frustration-propelled flight of Great Expectations. 

“Rhinecliffe is beautiful. You’ll make friends in no time,” her mother reminded her, oblivious to the social dynamics of adolescence. “And whining won’t help anything.” The platitude echoed in the thick air. 

In the late afternoon, the drizzle slowed to a stop; the sky, static and grey, washed the world below with deafening quiet. “I’m going for a bike ride,” Charlotte called as the screen door closed behind her.

About a mile away, the air was crisp and sweet, and she took her first breath of relief in weeks. She stopped pedaling, dismounted her bike, and stretched, exhaling toward the lavender-hued rose bushes that flanked opulent iron gates. A patinated plaque read Willowview. And, just below the plaque, she discovered a strange sight: a house, less than three feet tall, perched on a small table with a handwritten sign: Free. Inquire within. 

Charlotte peered through the arched windows to see an exquisitely decorated interior. The furniture was upholstered in luxurious fabrics; the dining room had a tea set and cakes laid out on a baroque table. Portraits and fine art replicas hung on the walls. An all-blue room featured a bar, cobalt and mirrored, with matching shelves that held glasses of various types—snifters, cordials, champagne coupes. A charming miniature phonograph sat behind a chaise. In place of a record was a gold ring. 

Carefully opening the dollhouse, she retrieved the ring, which slipped easily onto her finger. It certainly looked real—it was quite old, and the central disc had likely been engraved at some point, but with what she could not make out. She ran her finger tip across the worn-smooth markings, and a strange and overwhelming emotion washed over her; her eyes began to well.

Through the gates, wet Belgian blocks wrapped around the estate’s namesake. A large willow tree stood in the center of the drive, its sodden branches rustling and dripping like whispers as Charlotte walked past. Behind it, a large manor came into view. Thirty-foot shrubs stood next to the home like a fortress; ivy cascaded down the brick exterior and wandered onto the carved stone framing the front entrance. 

Charlotte pressed the gold doorbell. Westminster Chimes rang, and moments later the large door opened without a creak, revealing a woman holding a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace and grape hyacinths. 

“Yes?” She stood stoically, neither smiling or frowning, staring at Charlotte through slightly upturned eyes the shade of her silver hair. 

“I don’t mean to bother you, but I saw the dollhouse outside your property. Is it yours?” The woman’s expression remained unchanged. “I found this on the little record player inside,” Charlotte offered the ring on her palm.

“Ah,” the woman sighed, her face softening. “After all this time.” She stared at the ring, seeming to forget that a person stood on her doorstep.

“My name is Charlotte—I just moved here. I live down the street.” The lady searched Charlotte’s eyes for a moment before presenting a magnetic smile. 

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Lilian Engel—Lily,” she said, looking over the girl curiously. “I’ve been waiting for this ring to turn up for ages! I truly can’t thank you enough for finding it.” She spoke with a transatlantic accent, a uniquely upper-crust mannerism that Charlotte had only ever heard in old movies, which added an amusing sense of theatrics to her persona. 

“Darling, you look positively exhausted. Would you care to join me in the garden for afternoon tea?” 

The way Lilian Engel asked questions indicated that an answer was of no importance. Charlotte didn’t really mind; there was something alluring about her. Lily was not young, but didn’t exactly seem old—the sort of ageless quality that comes from taking painstaking care of oneself for a lifetime. And despite her obvious wealth, Charlotte didn’t find her pretentious; if anything, she was surprisingly affable. 

Lilian floated through the entrance hall, her delicate white dress dusting the marble floors, and into an airy parlor. Classical music bounced off the French blue chinoiserie walls and frescoed ceiling. As the music grew louder, Charlotte found its source behind a hidden door, at first mistaking the opening for a large crack in the wallpaper. Pausing to peer into the secret salon, she discovered a gold-horned phonograph surrounded by cerulean settees, lacquered indigo tables, robin’s egg drapes, and a cobalt bar near the back wall. 

“They said Liszt’s music made people hysterical, you know—”

Charlotte startled, unaware that Lily had noticed her stop. 

“—that it caused a ‘verifiable insanity’ among those who attended his performances.” 

Charlotte pondered for a moment. “Did they really go crazy?”

With a laugh, Lily replied, “Of course not. Sadly, plenty of people are afraid that emotion is contagious.”

Charlotte nodded. “It’s beautiful.” Lily, swaying to the music with her eyes closed, didn’t seem to hear her. Charlotte stood in the doorway and looked around nervously, unsure what to do, so she said, “I’ve never seen so much blue all together.”

Lily looked up. “It’s the only color that doesn’t fade away.” She whisked a tasseled cornflower silk off a fauteuil and draped it nonchalantly around her as she walked toward the windows overlooking the garden.

Lily led her guest onto a sweeping veranda. Motioning to the cushioned chairs, she poured two glasses of iced tea.

“Thank you.” Charlotte absorbed the scenery around her. A stone path wound through gardens teeming with flowers, past a topiary menagerie, and along a shimmering pool before disappearing behind a pond and a large willow. The looming greenery that seemed so authoritative from the street now provided a sense of security; the scents of the garden, fresh from the earlier rainfall, mixed in the breeze. As the wind ran across her face, it was easy to forget that a world outside existed. She felt undeniably safe and calm, despite sitting with a stranger, and something curiously familiar, like revisiting a pleasant dream from a past life.

“It has a peculiar effect on people,” Lily said.

Charlotte imagined her bliss was obvious. “It’s just so… peaceful. I’d never leave if I were you,” she joked, watching hummingbirds zip around honeysuckles and jasmine.

“It took an eternity to get right. People thought I’d lost my mind,” Lily laughed. “Perhaps I had.”

“To build the house?”

“One deserves to have a beautiful place to escape to, don’t you think? Life can be so dreadful,” Lily said blithely, popping a cherry into her mouth before tossing the pit into the grass beside her. “Would you like a tour of the garden?” 

They began near the poppies and walked along the path; Lily carried the bowl of cherries. 

“It started with the dollhouse,” she said, brushing her fingertips along the flowers. “It’s based on a home I lost when I was young. We were always linked in a way, the house and I; I felt very alone once it was gone…” she trailed off, her tone growing pensive. “For years, I would have vivid dreams—specific dreams—of being there. They harrowed up terrible feelings. I began to feel as though the house was asking me for help.” She paused to look up at the sky, as though it held her next words. “So I made a promise to recreate it.”

“Well, what’s so bad about building a dollhouse?” Charlotte asked.

“It became a long ordeal,” Lily flicked her wrist as if batting away a memory. “When I started working on this house, they thought I was being fanatical. People love to say things like Let go and Don’t live in the past. But what’s the use of that?”

Lily stopped walking to look at two bluebirds bathing in a fountain. 

“Sun does not bleach in a day, but leave your things unattended long enough and they become too faint to see.” She turned abruptly from the birds and continued on the path. 

“It makes sense that you’d want to remember your favorite place,” Charlotte offered as she tried to keep up. 

Lily’s face tensed for a moment; she plucked the stem from a cherry and chucked it with gusto. Staring absently at a shrubbery-giraffe, she finally responded, “What most fail to understand is that it’s the other way around: it is the past that lives in us.” Lily gestured casually toward the bowl in her hands.

Charlotte nodded in silent assent, taking a cherry and holding it timidly as they walked toward the willow. 

At the pond, the breeze picked up, blowing Charlotte’s hair around rather chaotically; Lily appeared unperturbed. 

“So, you built this house too?”

“No, but I made quite a few changes to the grounds and interior to get it all right,” Lily replied, running her hand along the willow’s leaves. “By that point, I was prepared to be alone here forever.”

Charlotte stood silently in the wind and watched Lily, who now gazed into the pond. 

“If it means anything, I think what you’ve done here is incredible,” Charlotte said, trying to look as reassuring as possible. 

Lily sighed. “Love can make one careless—selfish. Everything else seems to disappear into a fog.” Her eyes stared absently at something distant. Charlotte looked in the same direction, but saw only the reflection of the willows in the water. 

Then, as though remembering she had left the bath running, Lily turned from the pond. “Anyway, enough about that,” she said with a lighthearted laugh. She parted two clusters of hanging branches like they were drapes and walked through the foliage. 

“I loved the weeping willows at Belle-Vue,” Lily said, wandering toward the trunk. Flecks of light that had slipped past the verdure seemed to flutter through the air. 

“I’d hide underneath them and imagine that everything outside looked just the way I wanted it to.” She placed a hand on the bark. “They’re funny, these trees; they’ve been nicknamed because they look as though they’re weeping when it rains, the way the water falls off the branches. But they are also particularly good at absorbing excess moisture in the ground. It’s always made me think that they dry their own tears.” 

“That’s a nice way of seeing it,” was all Charlotte could think to say. 

When they retreated through the leafy veil, the sun was just beginning to set. 

“Grand-Mère always called this the Angels’ Hour,” Lily said, the blanket of golden light that covered the garden washing over her as she stepped back into the outside world. Chills descended Charlotte’s body; it was unbearably beautiful, and she felt incredibly sad.

“It’s going to be dark soon. I think I should get home before my mother starts to worry,” she said. “This has been really lovely.”

As Lily looked at her, sun reflecting in her bright eyes, Charlotte felt a pang of dread. She swallowed hard, squeezing her hands together. “Is it alright if I visit you again?”

“Of course, darling,” Lily said, letting out a reassuring laugh that made Charlotte release her grip. “Now, hop along while there’s light left—you can use the gate in the hemlocks,” Lily pointed to an exit carved into the wall of trees. 

Charlotte smiled and departed. Arriving home, she found her mother in the living room with the television on, asleep next to a large glass of wine. 

That night, the rain returned in full force. Torrential downpour was accompanied by howling winds, thunderclaps, and bright flashes of lightning until the early hours of the morning. Charlotte slept soundly. When she awoke, the gold ring was sitting on her nightstand. Panicked, she jumped out of bed and got dressed, putting the ring on her finger to ensure she didn’t misplace it again.

The morning atmosphere was turbulent; the rain had let up, but the sky was somber, the towering cumulonimbus blocking the sun like a duvet flung over a table lamp. The farther she got from her house, the stronger the wind blew.

The willow in front of the manor trembled in the gale, flinging cold droplets onto Charlotte’s face as she approached the house. The windows were dark. She rang the doorbell, but the chimes did not sound, and the front door was ever so slightly ajar, as though someone had closed it behind them without making sure the latch caught. After knocking a few times to no response, she hesitantly entered the house and called for Lily. No one answered, but Liszt’s Liebesträume from yesterday was playing. 

Charlotte made her way through the hall. “Lily?” she called again, “It’s Charlotte! Your front door was open—I have your ring!”

When she reached the wallpapered door, she found that everything in the salon but the phonograph was cordoned off by velvet ropes. 

Confused, she left the room to see velvet ropes blocking the rest of the parlor furniture, the hallways, and every door in sight. As she stared at the garden through the tall parlor windows, a gust of frosty wind swept across the nape of her neck, resulting in a spasm of shivers that made her blood run cold. “Lily?” she called again in a whisper. The music stopped abruptly.

“Excuse me. How did you get in here?”

Charlotte started, raising her eyes to see a slender, well-dressed man glaring at her.

“Sorry, I—did you just turn the record off?”

“The phonograph? That thing is a hundred years old, it doesn’t work.”

Charlotte stiffened. 

“I’m sorry, but you can’t be here,” the man said, “The house is closed to the public until tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Today is the last day of Willow Week.”

The man squinted at her, then let out a huff. “For the first week of September, when the willows are at their fullest, there are to be no guests.” When Charlotte didn’t respond to his rehearsed spiel, he rubbed his brow. “Many people think it’s silly, but Lilian insisted that the week be observed this way, and we believe her wishes ought to be respected. And we have had our share of oddities…” he trailed off. “Anyway, I’m just on my way out.”

“So she’s here?”

“Ha, ha,” the man said without laughing. He gestured in the direction of the door. “If you don’t mind.”

Charlotte understood. She nodded slowly and left.

Outside, light showers fell quietly from the dull grey sky. She walked down the drive and, feeling she might cry, paused in front of the willow and rubbed the ring’s gold disc, which was no longer smooth. A warmth radiated from the ring and over her body as Charlotte held up her hand. Engraved on the center of the ring was a small flower, surrounded by text: 

Forget-me-not

L.E. 

1909