The rosemary sounds like static when it's angry—seventeen years of Margaret Chen's voice, crackling with accusations about ungrateful children and wasted piano lessons. I planted it next to the sage three days ago—sage that hums with the same woman's whispered apologies to empty rooms.

Now they're doing something I've never heard before.

The rosemary's static is softening. The sage's hum is getting stronger. When I press my ear to the soil between them, the frequencies merge into something that makes my teeth ache in a good way, like biting ice cream.

Plants remember everything we tell them. Most people think I'm delusional when I explain this. But Margaret's children both come here weekly, and neither speaks to the other.

That's about to change.

David arrives first. He always does—Wednesdays at 10:17, carrying his mother's old watering can with the dent she made throwing it at the garage wall. He kneels beside the rosemary like he's praying, which maybe he is.

I watch from behind the tool shed, tweezers in hand, pretending to examine aphid damage on the climbing roses. The rosemary's leaves tremble when David touches them, and I hear fragments: "Why won't you call? Your sister misses—" But David yanks his hand back like he's been stung.

He's been doing this for three years. Getting close to hearing, then pulling away.

Today, the plant won't let him.

The rosemary's static shifts pitch, becomes almost melodic. David's shoulders tense. He's hearing something different. Something that sounds less like his mother's disappointment and more like... worry? Love wrapped in clumsy words?

A car door slams. Sarah's Honda, recognizable by the squeaky brakes that need fixing and the bass line thrumming through the closed windows. David's head snaps up.

They haven't been here at the same time since the funeral.

Sarah stalks past her brother without acknowledgment, heads straight for the sage. She's always been the efficient one—quick movements, short visits, emotional walls built from compressed grief. The sage responds to her presence with a sound like wind through wheat, but sharper. Hungrier.

I count heartbeats. Watch the siblings' hands move in identical patterns—checking soil, deadheading spent blooms, the same careful attention Margaret taught them both.

The plants are getting louder.

What happens next triggers a surge of synesthesia, causing colors that don't have names to appear. The rosemary and sage begin to harmonize—not just their preserved voices, but the memories themselves. Root systems connect underground, chemical signals flowing between species like whispered conversations.

David hears himself at seven, showing his mother a composition he'd written on the piano. But he's hearing it through Sarah's memory—how proud Margaret was, how she bragged to the neighbors, how she worried David was too much like her father, who'd broken his hands trying to be concert-worthy.

Sarah hears herself winning the science fair, but through David's twelve-year-old perception—how their mother's face lit up, how she said Sarah was going to change the world, how she stayed up all night learning about mitosis so she could ask intelligent questions.

Both siblings freeze.

The sage whispers, "I never meant for you to compete. I just wanted you both to know you were extraordinary."

The rosemary crackles: "The fighting wasn't about you. It was about my fear that love wasn't enough to protect you from disappointment."

Sarah's hands are shaking. She's hearing her mother's voice speaking words Margaret never managed to say aloud, pulled from the spaces between what she'd said and what she'd meant.

David stands abruptly. For a moment, I think he's going to bolt—run like he did from the funeral, from the lawyer's office, from every family gathering for twenty years.

Instead, he walks toward his sister.

"She was terrified," Sarah says without looking up from the sage. Her voice sounds rusty, unused to being heard.

"Of us?" David stops three feet away, close enough to smell the herbs but far enough to retreat.

"Of failing us. Of saying the wrong thing. Of being like her mother." Sarah finally looks at him. "She told the plants things she couldn't tell us."

The sage and rosemary are humming now, a sound like tuning forks finding the same frequency. Other plants in the memorial section are joining in—the basil with Margaret's laughter, the thyme holding her recipe for healing soup. This lavender remembers her singing off-key lullabies.

David kneels beside the sage. His sister doesn't move away.

"I heard her say she was proud of your music," Sarah whispers. "She played your recordings when you stopped calling."

"She kept newspaper clippings about your research. In a shoebox by her bed."

They're not looking at each other. They're looking at the plants, listening to their mother's voice speaking truths she'd been too scared to share with the living.

The memorial garden settles into new harmonies. Margaret's love, no longer fragmented between competing griefs, spreads through root networks like water finding its level.

Brother and sister sit in soil that holds their mother's voice. Not her criticism or disappointment, but the underground river of love that had run beneath everything else—constant, patient, waiting for the right conditions to surface.

I pack up my tools and leave them there. Some conversations are meant to happen without witnesses.

The plants will remember this as well.