Page 17 of Until the Last Leaf Falls

“How comfortable are you with a computer?” he asked.

“I’m sure I can learn.”

Niles blushed. “I’m sure you can. It was… more of a rhetorical question. I’ve only lived in this town for six years, and all I know about it is second- and third-hand. It would be lovely to include memories from people who grew up here and remember how it changed.” He drew a deep breath and wondered if he sounded too eager.

Bob didn’t seem to think so. His face creased into a delighted smile. “First-hand memories I have in plenty. Where can I turn out this box?”

Spilling into the Glade

Bob came every day and painstakingly typed out the history he remembered, using the photos in the shoebox to jog his memory, while Niles grew used to sharing his space with someone who wasn’t Orren, who didn’t know about the memories of trees, or the existence of memory keepers.

Lucky for him, Bob wasn’t the suspicious type. He didn’t look askance at the books of folklore and myths slowly filling a bookcase, and he never asked why Niles took his coffee outside to drink in the glade or wandered off for half the morning to photograph trees. Niles had felt self-conscious about that in the beginning, worried about forgetting that it wasn’t Orren who worked across the room from him and saying something outlandish that would drive Bob away.

He needn’t have worried.

Bob relished the opportunity to tell his story and appreciated Niles giving him a place to do so. While Orren had worked in the library, Niles had brought him hot chocolate and invited him to share lunch. Now it was Bob who set cups of coffee on Niles’s desk and reminded him that it was lunchtime. In exchange, Niles magnified Bob’s screen to ease the strain on his eyes, taught him how to use a speech-to-text app to make typing easier for his arthritic fingers, and added page after page of photos and Bob’s memories to the website.

With Bob around every day, Orren’s absence felt a little less like a painful, missing tooth and more like a dream with potential. And instead of waiting for Orren to message him, he used the leaves he’d saved to share his own news.

I’m no longer alone in the library, was one of the first messages he wrote and left on the reception desk after Bob had joined him.

The trees love to hear the memories of people, read another, when he’d shared some of Bob’s stories and the wave of joy from his trees had nearly knocked him over.

And one night, and harking back to Orren’s early messages, I miss seeing you sitting in the glade.

He’d felt part bold, part silly leaving this note, but it had disappeared as all the others had, and instead of a leaf he’d found a book on the language of flowers on the reception desk the next morning, with pressed leaves amongst the pages. Orren’s message—conveyed by forget-me-nots, cedar, and red tulips—kept a flush in Niles’s cheeks for most of the day.

“I’m nearly done with my story,” Bob said as if he hadn’t noticed. “Is it okay if I bring a few people?”

Niles looked up from Orren’s gift. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, I’ve been talking about your project to everybody who stands still long enough to listen.” It was Bob’s turn to flush. “You won’t believe how many people in town are digging through their photos and stories right now. They love the idea of the website and want to contribute their own memories.”

Warmth bloomed in Niles’s chest. He was still alone, spent much of his time sitting in his glade talking to the trees and missing Orren, but these days people greeted him as they passed in the street and he got more than a quick, distracted ‘thank you’ when he delivered and collected books. The website telling the town’s history through its old trees attracted more traffic than he had dared hope, Bob was no longer the only visitor to the library, and for the first time in five years, Niles didn’t feel invisible.

“Of course, please bring them,” he said. “They don’t have to come one at a time either. We can set up more workstations.”

Sure of Niles’s approval, Bob didn’t hang about. Within a week, the quiet library had become a hub of chatter, laughter, and industry. People brought photos, old postcards, signs, and many, many stories about life in the town.

Niles soaked up the laughter, the warmth of company, and the stories. He immersed himself in a world he’d not experienced, and as the weather improved, the joy and laughter spilled from the library into the courtyard and the glade.

Conversations out here had a different tone.

In the library, people talked about the town, the lives they’d lived there. There were stories of a fire that had destroyed three houses just off the market square and damaged two more, the new housing estate going up at the edge of town, of much-loved shops closing, and new ones taking their place. There was even a humorous piece about the various fads that had swept the town over the years. All these were what Niles categorised as community memories, events that had affected large numbers of people at once.

The conversations in the glade were more personal. Recollections of school days and lost loves. Musings about people who’d left the town for work or study and had never returned, or people who’d arrived as strangers, much as Niles had, and had never left.

On occasion, Niles wondered if his trees had a way to direct the conversations in the glade. A fanciful idea, sure, but in the six years he’d lived here, he’d never heard conversations like these, let alone been part of them. And no summer had been as cheerful as this one.

Which was the strangest thing of all, because he never stopped missing Orren.

Niles had resigned himself to a lonely, miserable year. He’d made lists of projects and distractions to bury that loneliness under mountains of work—only to find he had no time to be lonely.

From the moment he opened the library he was surrounded by people, mostly smoothing their path as they documented their memories of the town. His days didn’t end with the library closing, either. Bob and his friends often lingered in the glade, chatting until the light faded—and Niles realised with a jolt that they enjoyed the company as much as he did, and for much the same reason: as an antidote to a too-quiet house.

Loneliness is like thick fog, he wrote to Orren one night, printing tiny, careful letters on a long, narrow tulip leaf. Other people face the same weather, just as isolated and unseen, but the fog made me think I was the only one out in it.

A birch leaf, the pale green untarnished, waited on the reception desk the next morning.