Two Gardens / Due Giardini
Same Walk, Different Shoes
“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.
Two Gardens / due giardini
Arvalo got up early enough that, when he crossed Via Tiburtina to the basilica grounds, he disturbed only the pigeons. He knelt in the shade of a stone pine, in brittle grass that had been long choked by smog, and pressed his fingers into the earth. The earth rejoiced in its small, still way, pulsing heat up into his fingertips. Arvalo smiled, squeezing back, as if holding hands with the planet. “It is good to be back with you.”
He withdrew his hands, the grass moving back to its place. A couple of priests peered at him from a doorway out of the basilica, curious to see a dryad in their grounds. Feeling their eyes on him, Arvalo rushed back to the apartment.
A few hours later the family packed themselves into a train car headed south. Arvalo sat beside his wife, Songbook, and across from his daughters. “Do you remember Italy, Maro?” his youngest, Eo, asked.
Maro, the oldest, had been two years old when they left for America. She shook her head. “I feel something being here, but I don’t remember Rome at all.”
Eo, sitting in Arvalo’s lap, kicked her feet and watched an old couple shuffle past, already forgetting the question. The old man smirked at her, a doe-eyed green-skinned little girl sitting on her papa’s lap, and she sparkled back at him. She looked down at Arvalo’s hands. “Papa, why are your hands so dirty?”
Arvalo wiped them on his jeans. “Ah, I slipped out for a walk this morning. Felt the ground.”
“How was it?” Maro asked.
“Eh, well, a bit mixed. The new regulations on emissions are certainly helping, but the Drood is asleep here as much as any large city.”
Songbook put a hand on his knee. “You alright, dear?” Songbook could feel the unease in her husband’s posture, see the sorrow-joy in his eyes at returning to this place. To his country. He bore a knot of feelings that she could not understand, she who had lived all her life in one place and knew no other home. Had never been forced to leave, to live so far from her soul-tree. They loved each other well, but this was the one doorway she could not pass through.
Chalk in the Window, their middle daughter, slid down in her seat, looking up at the ceiling. “Is there food on the train?”
“Nothing you’d like,” Songbook said. “Are you hungry? Did you not eat enough at breakfast?”
“I did. I don’t know.”
“She’s just bored,” Maro said, rolling her eyes. Arvalo looked at his oldest daughter, scarcely more than thirteen, and wondered if he had ever been as old as her.
“Hello!” Eo called, seeing the old couple return with their arms full of paper-wrapped packages.
The two elderly Italians were wrinkled up like dates, with dark skin and layered clothing, even in the heat of summer. Arvalo was always bad at guessing human ages, but the couple had to have been in their nineties. “Buongiorno,” the old man said. “Veniamo con offerte.”
“What are they saying?” Eo asked.
“They said good morning—and that they brought offerings.”
Chalk in the Window sat up. “What kind?”
The old couple looked at her, brows furrowed. My children don’t speak Italian, Arvalo said. What are your names?
“English?” Arvalo nodded. The old woman smiled. “I am Rosa, this is my husband Alfonso.” Alfonso, who did not speak English, smiled at the mention of his name.
“This is my wife, Songbook. Our daughters are Eo, Chalk in the Window, and Maro.”
Rosa blinked. “Chalkeen? A-wind—”
“Chalk—in—the—Window.” Arvalo said it slowly, emphasizing the spaces between the words. “American dryads are named for the first object the child touches.”
“Oh, how nice,” Rosa said. “You are not from London?”
“No,” Arvalo smiled. “Utah.” When she did not seem to recognize the word, he motioned westward with one hand. “California.”
“Ah!” The old woman’s eyes crinkled as she smiled with recognition. “California.” They left a few minutes later, wishing Arvalo and his family well.
The offerings turned out to be a couple of sandwiches, sliced ham and cheese, a handful of euros, and a bottle of wine wrapped in a hand-written page of prayers for the return of dryads to Italy. Songbook ate half a sandwich, sharing the rest with Eo, who wondered why no one in Italy liked pickles. Maro and Chalk in the Window shared the other, sipping from the water bottle from Arvalo’s backpack. He and Songbook took turns sipping the wine, though the prayers were crumpled up and put into a pocket, unread.
Rome gave way to the countryside, to little towns that stood stationless beside the tracks for the high speed train. Here a river lined with houses on all sides, there a hilly fortress manned by coffeeshops and the doddering elderly in place of mercenary bands and scheming clerics. Maro came back from the bathroom with her lips drawn tight and her fists balled up. “What’s wrong?” Arvalo asked.
“A woman in line for the bathroom muttered something at me when I walked past.”
“Oh?” Songbook said. “What did she say?”
“I don’t know,” Maro looked down. “But I could tell it wasn’t nice.”
Eo climbed down from Arvalo’s lap and hugged Maro about the knees. “It’s okay, Maro.”
Maro smiled and picked her sister up. “Thanks, baby.”
“I’m not a baby, I’m five!”
“Five is a baby,” Chalk in the Window said, poking Eo in the stomach.
“Is not!”
Arvalo watched his children bicker with a smile. Songbook put her head on his shoulder, chuckling sleepily. Three curly-headed young girls, spring-green of skin and precocious as could be imagined. Well-fed and well-sunned, happy. Arvalo looked out at a countryside that he’d known for nearly a hundred years, land he could draw with his eyes closed. And yet, somehow, a foreign place.
A few hours later, all were asleep, lulled by the muffled wind and occasional rumble of the speeding train. Arvalo rolled the empty wine bottle from hand to hand, gazing out the window.
“Papa?” Chalk in the Window was sitting up, Maro’s head in her lap. Eo was draped over Songbook’s chest, snoring in harmony with her mother. His middle daughter’s eyes were bright, two mossy aquariums full of sunlight. “Why did you leave Italy?”
“Well,” Arvalo looked around, as if worried he’d be overheard. “To have you. And your sister Eo.”
“But you had Maro here.”
“We did,” he bit his lip. “But that was a long and difficult process. Dryads could not have children here.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “We still don’t know. It started gradually. It used to be that a dryad’s grove would double in size every dozen years, soul-trees blooming like dandelions in the park by our house. One year it was a lean spring, and the next it was worse. And then nothing grew. No children emerged smiling and asking questions like you and your sister.” He looked down at Maro, her shaggy curls crushed against her sister’s legs. “Maro was the only one born that year.”
Maro was the only child that year to survive beyond a few weeks. Arvalo did not like to lie to his children. But how old is old enough to know about such things? About death laid at the door of every family, the great weeping fires all across the hills and mountains and beaches. Of churches full of praying dryads, a thing never seen before.
Of prayers unanswered. The priests who insisted that dryads were a plague on the land, that it was God’s will that they be pushed out. He shut his eyes, pretended to sleep. The train raced on, and Arvalo felt like he’d been cut loose and was twirling away into the dark, lost, lost, lost.
The family gate to the local dryadic grove was lined with trash. Arvalo stooped down, pulling the garbage bag from his back pocket, and started to put the cigarette butts and pieces of glass inside it. Eo and Maro joined him, while Chalk in the Window took a photo of the gate, of the high branched trees beyond it—limbs curving like unstrung longbows. “This is where we’re from,” she said. “This is half of us.”
“It is,” Songbook said, her voice quiet and reverent. Arvalo thought of the groves back in Songbook’s hometown, the vastness of them. His own home felt like a potted plant by comparison.
Arvalo spoke the words of opening and the gate swung inward. They went in, shutting the wrought iron behind them and looking up at what remained of Arvalo’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. “Welcome to Boschetto Rivo.” He went from tree to tree, pointing and naming his relatives as he went. “Marta. Colisua. Orvolon.”
A few hundred feet from his family’s trees, Arvalo walked hand in hand with Maro until they came to a wide-branched stone pine, the shade was nearly cold beneath her branches. Arvalo did not touch his first wife’s soul-tree, the only thing of her that now lived—aside from their Maro. He said her name softly, putting a hand on Maro’s back, nudging her forward. “Clara.” Maro lingered at Clara’s tree a long while.
His two youngest daughters stood in the open space nearest the gate, the empty place where their own soul-trees would have grown, if they’d been born on this continent. Maro had moved on and was admiring Arvalo’s soul-tree with a curiosity that staggered him—and he realized that she had never met this part of him before. Arvalo had grown up knowing every inch of the grove. He watched it change in the seasons, watched himself grow. He knew every branch and shade of bark in the trees of all his family, but to them, to his children, all of this well-trod landscape was fresh and strange.
Eo sat down on the roots of Arvalo’s grandmother and drank from the family water bottle. Colisua’s branches swayed in the wind from the sea. Songbook put a hand on Arvalo’s shoulders, her eyes soft and sorrow-laden. “I’m sorry, love.”
How strange, he thought, to grieve for something that had created such love in their lives. Maro’s sisters would not exist, Songbook’s life with him would not exist but for the blight that had swept across his country and driven him west to the wide plains and plateaus. To vast spaces clean of whatever had gone wrong back home.
“Papa,” Eo said, leaned back against the grandmother tree, “what was grandma Colisua like?”
“Your great-grandmother was a violinist,” Arvalo said. “She always smelled of rosin, and she was a prankster.”
“Like Chalk in the Window?”
“Like Chalk in the Window, yes. They could have been sisters.”
Chalk in the Window was, at that moment, standing with a hand on the trunk of his own tree, eyes squinted in concentration, memorizing the details of him. Half-confused, a little frightened. Arvalo felt his heart swell, both here and at home, in a grove where Eo’s little sapling was sprouting like a weed. Where Chalk in the Window’s branches curved skyward, like unstrung longbows.