The Flower Arrangement (10 page)

The IKEA flat-packs for the cot and the changing table were piled
up on the stripped floorboards. The room smelled of fresh paint and of the roses from her father's garden. He had cut every single one and brought them over in a saucepan, but they were not enough to hide the sweet, cloying smell of death.

Michael stood at the door. He hadn't slept in days and his eyes were red-rimmed. He was wearing his wedding suit and carrying a black dress she did not recognize over his arm. She could hear voices downstairs. “Lara, you have to let him go now,” he said. “It's time.”

“Please, don't make me.”

In the end, her dad and her brother came and sat one on either side of her. Phil held her hand, her dad held her head, leaned his temple against hers.

“You don't have to go anywhere,” he said quietly.

“People are waiting,” Lara whispered.

“What do they matter?” her dad said fiercely. He touched Ryan's cheek with the tip of his finger. His voice cracked. “Nobody's going to take him from you again until you're ready to let him go.”

“What if I'm never ready?”

“Then we'll stay here with you. Right, Philip?”

Her brother squeezed her hand. “Right.”

Time passed. The sun rounded the corner of the house and poured in through the window. A sharp-edged rectangle of light moved slowly across the floor and climbed into Lara's lap, then fell over her arms. And she saw that there was nothing she could do for her baby now except bury him. She closed her eyes and nodded. She still did not know which one of them had taken Ryan from her arms, her brother or her father.

It rained at the graveyard that day. The view her mother had loved so much dissolved behind a wall of water. Lara leaned on Michael's arm while they lowered the little white casket into the ground. Her father put his hand on her shoulder. “You don't ever have to come back to this place,” he said. “You're not leaving him here. You're taking him with you in your heart.”

*   *   *

He had been right, she thought, as she reached for another delphinium to slot into the frame. She had given Ryan up but she had never let him go. Her arms remembered his exact weight: two hundred and forty-one grams. The weight of a jug of water, a Kindle, a pot of African violets.

The street beneath the window of the workroom rang with loud voices and laughter as the nightclubs began to close and people poured out looking for taxis. After that, there were a few hours of quiet. Through the haze of her concentration Lara half heard an occasional sound. The clatter of a lorry delivering crates to the pub on the corner, the distant wail of a siren, the swish of a taxi driving past, too fast, on the way to the stand on St. Stephen's Green.

It was getting light again as she unwound the silver ribbon for the guitar strings. She cut it into lengths and pinned them into place. Most nights now she lay awake thinking about all the years she'd been married, running them back and forth in her mind, trying to find a clue she had missed. But tonight, she had not thought about Michael at all. She wondered whether he was asleep in their old bedroom, or whether he had moved to wherever Glen lived. She hoped that wherever he was, he was happy. There wasn't any point to both of them being sad.

The wreath was so big she had to carry it in both arms. She left it on the counter in the shop while she cleared a space in the cluttered cold room, then she closed the door and checked the time. It was 6 a.m. Too late to go back to her father's house, too early to deliver the wreath. She didn't feel tired, so she rolled up her sleeves, went back into the shop and began to go through the buckets of flowers, sorting out the living from the dead.

*   *   *

Phil had taken the keys to the van home, so at nine o'clock in the morning Lara hailed a taxi on the corner of Montague Lane.

“Dear God,” the driver said softly when he saw her loading the guitar-shaped wreath into the back. He didn't speak for the whole
journey, and when she tried to pay the fare, he shook his head. “Sorry for your trouble.”

“Oh no,” she tried to explain. “It's someone else's trouble.”

“We all have troubles, love,” he said.

*   *   *

Karina answered the door. As she took the wreath from Lara's arms, she began, finally, to cry, tears falling into the delphinium bells.

“Do you want to see him?” she asked through her tears.

“I'd love to.”

Lara followed her down the hall, past a mountain bike leaning against the wall. There was a baseball cap on a coat hook. A pair of scuffed trainers kicked off and left by a shoe rack.

Karina led her into the living room. A flat-screen TV on one wall, bookcases against another. A bureau with a clutter of framed pictures. A window looking out onto a neat lawn with a trampoline in the middle of it. The coffin was in the center of the carpet on a folding stand. Karina tried to prop the guitar against it, but it slid sideways. “Damn it!” she said through her tears.

“Let me.” Lara bent down quickly and, pulling scissors and a roll of wire out of the pocket of her raincoat, secured it to the stand. Then she stood beside Karina and looked down at the boy lying between the fussy satin ruffles. He looked as if he had just climbed in for a rest. He was wearing jeans and a blue Superdry T-shirt and the same tangle of friendship bracelets Lara remembered.

He had so nearly become a man. The ghost of his future self was there in the hands that were too big for his arms, the hardening jawline below his childish mouth, the thickening eyebrows above his closed eyes.

We want to protect ourselves from the pain of death, she thought, but we can't. And even if we could, would we choose to? Would Karina have decided never to have a child if she'd known this was going to happen? Would Lara herself have passed up on those blissful months that she carried Ryan if she had known she was going to lose him?

*   *   *

The exhaustion she had kept at bay caught up with Lara after she left Karina's house and followed the maze of redbrick streets that led to the canal. The banks were blooming with tall bulrushes. The world was turned upside down in the mirror of the water. Swans floating over trees that seemed to be rooted in the sky. Her own world had been turned upside down. But fathers die, marriages end. Her loss was nothing compared to Karina's.

She walked on as far as Charlemont Bridge, then she stopped and waited for her feet to tell her which way to go. She wanted to go home, but the house she had lived in with Michael was not her home now and her father's house had stopped feeling like home when he had died.

The shop was her real home, she realized. It always had been. It had comforted her last night, when she thought she was beyond comfort. It had helped her to comfort Karina. And it needed her now the way she had needed it once. So she turned and crossed the bridge and started walking back toward Blossom & Grow.

Ben sends flowers on my birthday. Beth, my art director, picks them up from reception and carries them in to me like a sacrificial offering. She lurks behind me, fussing over them, crackling the cellophane, while I finish writing captions. It's deadline day and the magazine is due to go to press in two hours.

“Wedding Belles,” my fingers clatter on the keys. “All White on the Night.” I am dying to slip in a “Bridal Wave” or a “Frilly Cow,” but weddings are a serious business.

“Twenty-eight roses! One for every year,” Beth says in that wistful voice that some women reserve for flowers and babies and people who die young and tragically. “How lucky are you?”

Everyone passing my cubicle interrupts me to give me tips on flower care. Maggie, the receptionist, tells me to pierce the top of the stems to help draw water up. Tony, the editorial assistant, advises me to mash the ends with a wine bottle. Ruth, our boss, orders me to plunge the roses up to their necks in cold water. A man I've never met dressed in head-to-foot motorbike leathers offers to go out and buy them a Sprite.

“Citric acid travels up the stems quicker than water.” His voice is muffled by his enormous motorcycle helmet.

“Right.” He doesn't look like a person who knows one end of a flower from the other. I take the padded envelope he's holding, but his gloved hand stays where it is.

“Phil.” He looks at me expectantly; his deep-set brown-black eyes are all that's visible through the flipped-up visor on his helmet.

“Fill what?” I frown. I've kind of had it with floral advice at this point.

“Phil Kiely. I'm the new courier.”

“Right.” I realize that he's waiting for me to shake his hand, so I do. The worn fingertips of his gloves remind me of the rough pads of Pat's paws. I start to swivel back to my desk, then I remember my manners. “I'm Katy.”

*   *   *

When I can finally take a break, I call Ben to thank him.

He says, “Beautiful flowers for a beautiful lady,” in a very convincing Italian accent.

“You do realize that the older I get, the more this is going to cost you?” I say.

He switches back to his normal voice. “I plan to leave you before it gets too expensive. Before you get to three figures, definitely. So you'd better enjoy the flowers while you can.”

“I will.”

But I won't, not really. I don't trust roses. They're like those fainting goats you see on YouTube. If you look at a rose sideways, it'll just keel over. I should know. I've seen them do it on dozens of bridal shoots. I'd much prefer lisianthus or anemones. But Ben has been giving me red roses on my birthday every year for seven years. It's a bit late to tell him that now.

*   *   *

Ben has invited my mother and my sister over for a birthday dinner and they are in the kitchen drinking wine when I get home. Mia is an accountant, but she's the one who looks as if she has the funky job. Tonight, her long blonde hair is loose and she's wearing a jade-green silk halter-neck dress that leaves her shoulder blades bare. I briefly
consider changing out of my boring gray office dress, but what's the point? I'll still look more like an accountant than she does.

My mother is Mia's fainter echo, her older, silvery twin. Both of them are tall and slender and blonde. I have missed out on their Viking genes. I can thank my father for my height (short), my build (solid) and my curly dark hair (uncontrollable). But I've never had the chance.

Everyone kisses me and wishes me happy birthday, and Pat, my old greyhound, wags at me from his basket. He's too arthritic to leap around when I get home the way he used to, but his tail hammers an impressive drum solo on the creaky wicker.

My mother finds a vase for the roses and Ben produces a bottle of pink champagne from the fridge. Pat is gun-shy, so any loud noise terrifies him. I bend down, put my face next to his and cover his ears with my hands so he doesn't hear the cork pop.

In the dark tent my hair makes around us, he is all eye-shine and whisker-tickle. Whatever time of year it is, Pat always smells of autumn. Damp leaves and bonfire smoke. He sniffs behind one of my ears and licks my nose thoughtfully. His muzzle is gray and the tips of his black eyelashes are white. When anyone asks how old he is, I say he's ten, though it's fourteen years since I found him.

“If that dog was a man,” Mia says to Ben, “you'd be in serious shit.”

“Tell me about it,” Ben sighs.

The kitchen smells of garam masala and chocolate. My favorite Fionn Regan CD is playing. The table is laid with a white cloth and there's a brightly wrapped pile of presents on my chair. It wasn't always like this. Until Ben came along, Mia and I walked on eggshells on birthdays, waiting for our mother to remember that our father wasn't there for yet another important family event.

On my tenth birthday, I came home from school to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a compact, drawing her eyebrows on with a kohl pencil. She had decided to gas herself and turned on the oven. After ten minutes, nothing had happened, so she lit a match to see if the gas was working. A sheet of flame scorched her eyebrows away.
Mia and I joke about it now, but back then I used to take my mother's shoelaces out of her runners at night because I'd read that prisoners sometimes used them to hang themselves.

After dinner we drink Frangelico and eat amaretti, lighting the tissue paper wrappers and letting them rise in columns of trembling ash while we make our wishes.

Mia wishes for a man. Not one of the ones who fall at her feet on a weekly basis.
The
man. My mother says that's like a turkey wishing for Christmas.

“Hey, I'm a man!” Ben pretends to be offended.

My mother ruffles his hair and says, “You're different.” Then she wishes for her wisteria to blossom. It's been seven years since she planted it and she hasn't had a single flower.

Ben wishes that this will be the year when he finishes his screenplay so he can sell it to Hollywood and give up his job at the library. I wish that Pat was immortal.

While Mia and I are clearing the table, Ben goes out into the garden and closes the back door. My mother darts an accusatory little glance at me.

“Relax,” I say. “I told you he's given up. He's just out there having a cigarette.”

Ben and my mother have only ever had one row, and they have had it about a hundred times. It's the one about legalizing marijuana. I have had too many rows with him about smoking pot to count.

He has always said the same thing. That a joint is a piece of punctuation after a day at work, a full stop that allows him to start a new sentence. That it helps him to write. But the truth is that most nights he hardly writes at all. I'm not sure what he even does in the tiny box room that he uses as an office. I gave up asking long ago.

And a month ago, I gave up waiting for him to grow out of getting high and I asked him to stop and he said he would. If I'd known it would be that easy, I would have asked him years ago.

I spoon coffee into the French press and watch my mother out of
the corner of my eye. She is picking at the tape on a prettily wrapped parcel with a perfectly lacquered fingernail and watching the back door.

Ben is my boyfriend, but he is the man in my mother and my sister's lives too. The tap-fixer, the plug-wirer, the tire-changer, the map-reader.

“He's one of the good guys,” Mum said once. “He'll never leave you in the lurch the way your father left me.”

I hate talking about my father, so I did what I always do when she brings him up. I changed the subject. “What is a lurch?” I asked her. “I've always wondered.”

*   *   *

My mother's present for me is a framed picture of the two of us on my first birthday. A crooked orange washing line cuts the photograph into two uneven triangles. My mother is holding me by the hand. She's wearing denim dungarees and her blonde hair is in Krystle Carrington flicks.

I am bald, wearing a white onesie and stretching my free hand out toward the camera, toward the father I don't remember.

Mia gives me a book called
The Dog Whisperer
. On the flyleaf she has written:
Takes one to know one!

“Are you calling me a dog?” I throw my napkin at her.

“Well, you can be a bit of a bitch!” she laughs.

“Cow!”

“Girls!” our mother says. “Language.” When we were small, she was so tense that sometimes she communicated in single words for days.

Ben's present is an oval silver locket on a fine chain. I snap the catch and it hinges open. On one side there is a tiny photograph of Ben in the black fedora I gave him last Christmas. It's a serious hat, but he's wearing it with a goofy grin.

On the other side is my favorite picture of Pat. The one where Ben caught him winking. People who don't believe that dogs wink are the same ones who think that babies only smile because they have wind.

“That's so sweet!” I get up and walk around the table so Ben can fasten the locket around my neck.

“You're so sweet,” he says, pulling me down into his lap. His eyes are slightly glassy. His breath has a sour, musky tang.

“Have you been smoking pot?” I whisper.

“No! I swear! I just had a roll-up.” He nibbles my ear.

“Not in front of the children,” Mia groans, putting her hands over her eyes. And I think how little my little sister knows about me.

*   *   *

My mother comes and stands beside me at the sink while I'm washing up the china plates that are too delicate to go into the dishwasher. I can hear Mia and Ben crashing around the living room. She is teaching him to salsa to the Gipsy Kings.

I hand my mother a soapy plate to dry, but she stares down at it instead. “I was probably washing Mia's nappies on
my
twenty-eighth birthday,” she says. This doesn't sound like a question, but it is.

I nod at the plate. “Are you going to stand there till that dries itself?”

*   *   *

“Leave all that, birthday girl,” Ben says after my mother and Mia have gone. “Come to bed.”

“Are you sure?” I ask carefully. He takes my hand and twirls me around the kitchen, humming “Bamboleo.”

Pat lifts his head and looks at us wistfully. In his day, he used to love to join in any kind of horseplay.

“Sure I'm sure,” Ben says.

But by the time I have brushed my teeth and undressed, he is already asleep, his face half covered by his tangle of red-brown hair, one pale arm thrown across my pillow as if he is frozen in a salsa spin.

I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at his arm. I know the scatter
of his freckles by heart. But I'm not sure I know
him
anymore. Or maybe I just know him too well.

I peel off the cream lace slip I put on in the bathroom and pull on the sweater that Ben has thrown on the floor, and then I go back out to the kitchen. I dry the plates and put them away carefully. I empty the dishwasher. I load the washing machine with the linen cloth and napkins. I scrub Pat's food bowl and his water dish. I find some Sprite and pour a few capfuls into the vase with Ben's roses. I rearrange the order of the three framed watercolors of Sandymount Strand and then change them back again. I clean out the fridge. I tidy the saucepan drawer. Then, when there is nothing else left to do, I open the back door and go out into the garden.

Pat heaves himself up stiffly and follows me, walking on the tips of his toes. He puts his head on one side to watch me rummaging in the tall blue glazed plant pot by the back door. But he doesn't stay around to watch me picking out the tiny cardboard cylinders that Ben has stuck into the soil around the base of the camellia.

*   *   *

“I'm confused.” Mia doesn't sound confused. She sounds grumpy, but I can't tell if that's because I've woken her up in the middle of the night or because I'm having trouble explaining why I called in the first place.

“What's this about?” She yawns.

“It's me and Ben,” I whisper. I'm sitting in the yellow armchair by the window with my toes tucked under the sleeping dog. The floor around me is strewn with the petals I have pulled off every single one of Ben's roses. The stalks have been planted upside down in the bin.

“It's four in the morning, Katy. If you've had a row, go back to bed and make up.”

“We didn't have a row.” I bite my lip.

“Then what's the matter?”

I close my eyes, as if saying it in the dark will make it easier. “We
haven't, you know, been getting on”—I take a breath—“in the bedroom. For a while.”

“How long is a while?” She sounds wide awake now.

I press my thumbs into the sockets of my eyes. Soft fireworks of color blossom in the darkness beneath my eyelids as I do the math. The last time was New Year's Eve. That's six months ago. The time before that was Ben's birthday last year. “I don't keep count,” I say.