The Treasure Box (29 page)

She fitted a screwdriver into the top hinge and smiled. Robert Frost had written about mending walls, repairing the breach, and here she was creating one. “
Before I built a wall,
” she quoted under her breath, “
I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out
.”

All these years, Vita had never thought to ask what she was walling in or walling out. Now she knew. She had experienced firsthand the claustrophobia that came with too much safety.

The white picket gate, once removed, might make a nice backdrop in the corner of the garden to accent her irises. But no more walling in or walling out. She would put in an open arch in its place, perhaps. Or an overhead trellis. Some climbing plants—pink cottage roses or purple clematis
.
But no gate that could be latched.

The top hinge fell free, and the gate sagged at an angle against the ground. She had just removed the bottom hinge when the hairs on the back of her neck prickled, that sensation of being watched. Slowly she lifted her eyes and found herself staring into the gaze of a small dog. Sable and white, with keen, intelligent eyes and a beautiful face.

A Sheltie. Like the one in her dream.

“Hello, there,” Vita said quietly, intent on not startling the animal.

The dog wagged its tail and regarded her curiously, its head cocked to one side. One of its ears flopped over, and the other stood straight at attention. Vita laid down her screwdriver and extended a hand in the dog's direction. It sniffed her palm, then gave a polite kiss to her fingertips.

“I see you two have met.”

Vita looked up. Hap stood over her, clad in gray dress pants and a navy polo shirt.

“I had to go to Asheville to buy some antiques from some old friends of mine,” he said. “They're moving to the Cayman Islands and can't take her with them.” He stooped down to scratch the dog's ears. “How would you feel about an addition to our little family?”

Vita leaned back against the wall, and the Sheltie edged nearer, resting her head on Vita's knee. The dog's dark eyes held an expression of deep wisdom, and Vita could have sworn she was smiling.

Vita stood up and slapped the dirt off the knees of her jeans.

“Does she have a name?”

Hap nodded. “Joy. Her name is Joy.”

“Of course.” Vita laughed. “What else would it be?”

Joy bounded ahead of them to explore her new home. Vita took Hap's hand, and together they followed her along the path, through the opening in the stone wall, into the garden. A garden with no gate. A garden which would never again lock a soul in or shut love out.

EPILOGUE

A
s the sun rose on a brilliant autumn morning, Vita sat in the garden swing, watching a breeze stir the tendrils of the willow tree. Last night's early frost had melted with the dawn, and a perfume of wet grass and mulching leaves wafted on the morning air. The oaks were beginning to turn bronze, and across the alley, in the neighbor's yard, the big sugar maple glowed red and yellow, as if each individual leaf had been painted in the night.

In the distance, the undulating layers of the Blue Ridge Mountains rose up in mist, decked out in all the glorious shades of fall.

Upstairs, in the guest room, Hattie Parker still slept. Out in the yard, near the back wall, Joy was getting a drink from the fountain.

Vita gazed at the blue drift of sky over the mountaintops.

She smiled as the dog returned to her, leaped into the swing, and settled her dripping chin across Vita's thigh.

Tomorrow was Vita's wedding day. Tonight everyone would gather for the rehearsal and dinner. Vita and Hap. Hap's mother, Roe. Mary Kate and Gordon and the twins. Hattie.

Vita's family.

Gratitude welled up in her soul and overflowed. The old man in Pastimes had been right. She held in her hands something more rare and valuable than she could possibly imagine. A miracle. A mystery. A wonder.

She stroked Joy's silky ears and pondered—had there ever been an old man? Vita seemed to think, now, that she had not bought the Treasure Box at all, but that Hap had given it to her that night up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The night he asked her to marry him. A gift from him—and from his mother, and from his mother's aunt, all the way back to Sophie, who had sacrificed her life for the love of a friend.

Vita knew she'd never sort it all out, and at last she was content not to try. The Treasure Box program was gone—if it had ever existed at all. Everything had changed, and the person she had once accepted as herself now seemed a mere skeleton of who she was intended to be, a heap of bleached bones in an arid, barren place.

She didn't know how it had happened. Only that her ears had been opened and the mud washed from her eyes. For the first time in her life, she really saw, really heard.

Saw the pieces of the distant past, memories of anger and isolation and disconnection, dry bones scattered in the desert. Heard a voice out of the emptiness: “Daughter of earth, can these bones live?”

But no answer was required, because the miracle was already happening.

Like a reel of film run backward, she saw it all. Bones assembling. Ligament and flesh and skin attaching to a skeleton of memory, rising up whole and strong.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Past, present, and future. What might have been, or was, or is, or is to come. It was all a unity, all one, bound together by the Lover of Souls, the Creator who sees every possible then and now and hereafter.

Vita Kirk had walked through the labyrinth and come to its center. To a past with the gates removed and the walls broken down. To a present where pain and heartache had already given way to healing and hope. To a place where joy nipped at her heels and the silent, neglected baby had grown into a vital, living soul.

And over the hill, behind the bend, beyond the farthest place her eye could see? She did not know what waited there.

Only that the future—whatever it turned out to be—would be rooted in the rash, outrageous, unimaginable claims of love.

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