The Flower Arrangement (4 page)

He was the straightest talker she knew, but there was one thing he had never been able to say. Phil still teased him about it. “Come on, Dad, it's three little syllables. You can do it!”

But the words caught in her dad's throat. His face would flush, his hands would flap in frustration. He could say “I love you” in French or Danish, or Creole or Esperanto. But he couldn't say it in English.

He hailed a passing taxi, and as he opened the door, Lara heard the driver singing along to the radio. George Michael's “Faith.” She waited until the taxi had disappeared around the curve of Mount Street, then she let her breath out in a little ragged sob and looked up at the elegant facade of the hospital. The red brick glowed in the afternoon sunshine and the windows were full of sky. She wondered which was the room where she and Michael had been told that Ryan was gone.

Faith was not enough: Lara could have told the taxi driver that. She'd had faith through the three years it took to get pregnant. Through the false alarms and the dashed hopes and the fear that it was never going to happen. Through those first three months of her pregnancy when she was terrified that she would do something wrong. Through the scare at ten weeks, when she'd had spotting.

She'd still had faith the afternoon of her twenty-four-week scan, when the technician's smile had frozen and she switched off the machine.

And even after the doctor had told them that she was sorry, really sorry, but there was no fetal heartbeat, Lara had faith. There must be
something wrong with the machine, she'd said. She'd felt Ryan moving that morning. Michael was holding one of Lara's hands and the doctor had taken the other one, and she explained that what Lara had thought was kicking was just a uterine contraction, her body reacting to the loss of her pregnancy. Their baby had been dead for days.

Lara felt then the way she thought people must feel when they realize that the car they are traveling in is about to crash, frozen in the moment between impact and aftermath. Believing even as the car swerves crazily into the path of the oncoming traffic that it can somehow be stopped. She turned to Michael, wanting him to tell her that this could not be happening, but all the color had drained from his face. His mouth above his neatly trimmed dark beard was a thin, shaky line.

She felt as if she was watching herself from a distance as she was admitted to the hospital to be induced. As she had a shower in a tiled communal bathroom, soaping her swollen stomach for the last time. As she lay on a bed in the pre-labor ward hooked up to an IV of Pitocin.

She listened to groans and the restless pacing of the other women on the ward, who were going to deliver live babies. Now she could only remember one of them, a dark-haired girl called Rebecca, very young, very overdue. Sixteen, she heard one of the nurses whisper, unplanned pregnancy, no boyfriend.

Rebecca sobbed all night and Lara was grateful to her for that. She was so stunned by the violence with which her future had been ripped away that she couldn't cry at all. That night, it was as if the girl was crying for both of them.

But in the weeks that followed, all she could do was cry. Everyone said that she would feel better after she went back to work, and she wanted to believe them. But when she finally returned to her office on the top floor of an elegant Georgian house on Leeson Street, Lara felt worse. Everything looked unfamiliar. Her shelves of design books, her framed typography posters, even the weekly work list, written on the whiteboard in her own handwriting. It all belonged to a stranger—the person she had been before she lost her baby. The only things in the room that she
felt any connection to were half a dozen flower postcards pinned to the wall above her desk.

The red and white tulip by Judith Leyster. The vase of white lilac by Manet. The bowl of blowsy roses by Henri Fantin-Latour. The vase of tumbling blooms by Brueghel—lilies and tulips, fritillaries and daffodils, carnations and snowdrops, cornflowers and peonies and anemones. Those flowers had all died four hundred years ago, but that first week back at work, they planted a seed in Lara's heart. Flowers had healed her before, when she was the child who had lost her mother. Maybe they would heal her again now that she was a mother who had lost her child.

“Lara, you do realize,” Michael had said gently, “that people send flowers to mothers when a baby is born. You'll have to go to maternity wards every other day. You'll have to go back to Holles Street. Have you thought about how hard that will be?” It had been his last attempt to get her to reconsider and the only thing that could have changed her mind, but by the time he said it, it was too late.

She had already resigned. Told her boss, Frank, that afternoon that she was leaving. Blurted it out in a traffic jam on the way home from a meeting because they were friends and because she felt like a fraud taking a brief for an annual report that she was never going to design. He had looked sad and shocked but not surprised.

“When do you want to go?”

“As soon as you can do without me.”

He had helped her clear her desk and driven her home. Her things were still in the boxes, lined up in the room that should have been Ryan's nursery.

*   *   *

Lara parked on Holles Street and unloaded the last delivery of the afternoon, a frothy arrangement of white agapanthus and lisianthus with the faintest blush of pink.

Two overdue women in slippers with fleece dressing gowns pulled
around their enormous bumps were smoking on the steps of the maternity hospital. “Jesus,” one of them said, turning to look at the bouquet as Lara passed, “I'd have to have triplets before me fella gave me a bunch like that.”

“I'd have to have the winner of the Grand bloody National,” her friend snorted, “and the Cheltenham Gold Cup.”

Lara was smiling as she crossed the marble floor of the entrance hall, but her throat tightened as she took the stairs to the third floor, where she had given birth to her own baby on a sunny spring morning sixteen weeks before his due date.

The first time she had delivered a bouquet to this hospital she sat outside for nearly an hour trying to talk herself into getting out of the van. She'd only made it as far as the hall, where she dropped the flowers on the porter's desk and bolted back out. But she'd forced herself to keep coming back until she could bring the bouquets all the way up the stairs to the nurses' stations on the maternity wards.

She had learned to distract herself, to fill her mind so there was no room for the memory of the day she'd walked down these same stairs without her baby. Today, she made a mental list of flowers for next week's order, moving on to foliage as she hurried along the corridor, past the closed doors of the private rooms. She handed the bouquet over to the nurse at the desk, then started back the way she'd come.

“Nurse!” A voice called from behind a closed door as she passed.

Lara looked up and down the corridor. It was empty.

“Please?” The woman sounded frantic. “Could someone help me?”

Lara hesitated, then walked back and opened the door.

A pale, exhausted-looking woman was propped up on the pillows in the bed, a baby in a blue blanket in her arms. “Please!” she gasped, pointing at a stand near the door. “Can you get me that bowl?”

Lara picked up the plastic bowl and crossed the room quickly.

“Can you hold him for a second?” The woman held up the bundle. “I need to be sick.”

Lara froze and looked down at the baby. He could not have been
more than a few hours old. “I can't,” she said. But the woman was already thrusting him into her arms.

*   *   *

Nothing Lara had read in her “what to expect” books had prepared her for the tiny body of her dead son, so small that he fit into her cupped hands. He weighed exactly two hundred and forty-one grams. He was the color of a ripening plum.

She had returned to the hospital and brought Ryan home the night before he was buried. Michael could not bear to look at him but Lara could have looked at him forever. His eyes sealed closed beneath the finely traced eyebrows. The smooth whorls that would have become his ears, the mouth like a puckered flower. She had sat up all night holding him in her arms, learning him by heart.

“It happened for a reason,” Michael kept saying. But when Lara asked him what that reason was, he couldn't tell her.

The postmortem showed that their son had died prematurely because of a rare chromosomal problem. The chances of it happening a second time were minimal. The doctor said they could try to get pregnant again whenever they were ready, but a year had gone by, then three, then five, and Lara still felt that having another child would be a betrayal, that they would just be trying to replace Ryan.

*   *   *

Lara braced herself as she took the baby from the woman in the bed. She had not held a baby in her arms since that night she had held Ryan. She waited for the usual tsunami of grief to slam into her, but it didn't come. Instead she was overcome with something that was almost joy. He was small and helpless, but he was so alive. She could feel his warmth through the blanket. He squirmed against her chest and let out a small, scratchy little cry.

The woman finished retching into the basin. “God! Sorry!” She wiped her mouth with a tissue. “He was two weeks overdue. They had
to induce me last night. The stuff they gave me was awful.” Lara nodded; she remembered it. “I keep getting these waves of nausea, but it's worth it! I still can't believe he's here!” She held out her arms.

Lara handed the baby over, carefully. “Does he have a name?”

“My husband thinks he's a Daniel”—the woman settled the baby gently into the crook of her arm—“but I like Ted.”

“Me too!” Lara smiled. “It's my dad's name!”

“Seriously?” The woman looked up at her. The color had come back into her face now. She still looked exhausted, but her eyes were shining with happiness. “It wasn't just a coincidence that you came to our rescue. It was a sign!”

Lara leaned over and touched the baby's cheek. Felt the velvet of his skin beneath her fingertip, softer than the petal of any flower.

She had the strongest feeling that maybe the woman was right. That maybe this was a sign for her too. She was forty, but it wasn't too late to try for another child. There was still time.

He opens his eyes again and she is still there, between the sink and the bin with the biohazard sticker on it. He blinks at her in amazement. “Jesus, what are you doing here?”

“Nice to see you too.” She laughs and peels off her leather gloves, undoes the belt of her red coat. Her shoes are high, he sees, and her legs are bare. “I heard your wife died.” She stuffs the gloves into her pocket.

“You must be pretty hard of hearing.” Ted tries to sit up. “She died a long time ago, love.”

She shrugs the coat off. The dress is black velvet with a deep V neckline. He has to force himself to keep his eyes on her face. “But you're still wearing a wedding ring,” she says.

He glances down at his hand, sees the new bruise that has seeped out around the needle of the morphine pump they inserted this morning. Is he just imagining it, or is the ring looser on his finger?

She whooshes herself up on the windowsill, her elbow brushing against the flowers his daughter brought yesterday, or was it the day before? “Avalanche roses.” She picks up a fallen petal, puts it into the palm of one hand, presses her nose to her palm for a moment. “My favorites.”

“What are you doing here?” he asks her again.

She shrugs. “I was just, you know, in the area.” She looks around, the pale arch of one eyebrow rising as she takes in the tangle of wires that sprout from beneath the bedcovers, the metal drip stand, the
oxygen tank. “More to the point, what are
you
doing here?” Her eyes arrive back on his face. She shakes her head. “You don't look too good.”

“You look . . .” He tries to find a word that can contain it all. The treacle and chestnut of her hair. The creamy triangle of skin above the velvet neckline of her dress. The sheen on her long pale legs. The word that swims to the surface of his consciousness is “ravishing.” But instead he says, “. . . just the same.”

Three sudden stabs of pain pass through his chest cavity like laser beams. He gasps and presses the pump. The morphine bails the pain out of him as if it is water and his body is a sinking boat. After half a minute, he can breathe normally again.

“How bad is it?” she asks softly.

“How bad is it when the love of your life walks in looking like sex on legs and you're wearing a hospital gown your ass is falling out of that has little ribbon ties up the back?” he replies. “Pretty bad.”

He catches the shadow of a smile as she turns to look out the window. Behind her he can see the blurry green haze of the golf course. A minute ago, this was his idea of torture. To know that it was only a hundred yards away. The springy, rain-drenched grass, the buffeting wind, the line of sight from the sixth hole down past the elms to the velvety green. But the real torture is to have to lie here, trussed up like a turkey, tethered to the bed by the catheter and the oxygen line and the drip, too weak to stretch a hand across and touch her. He finds the pump button with his thumb and presses again.

She turns back at the bleep, lifts a hand to her mouth, nibbles the skin at the side of her thumb. “Anything I can do?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Come to bed.”

“You and your one-track mind,” she says. Then, to his amazement, she slides down off the windowsill and walks over to him. She kicks off her shoes and clears a space between the lines and the tubes and lies down beside him, propped up on one elbow, her face just inches from his.

He can see the curve of her breast beneath the velvet. Her bare left arm with the wishbone scar left by the metal pin that held her wrist
together where she broke it. “Your breath smells like a hundred-year-old turnip,” she says.

“It tastes like one too.”

“Let's see.” She presses her warm, soft, wet mouth against his dry, cracked lips for a long time. “It's not so bad,” she says softly. Then she whispers, “
Te dua
.”

He knows it means “I love you,” but is it Turkish, or Armenian or Albanian?

A Spanish “
Te quiero
” is all he can dredge up in reply. He lets his head drop and presses his face into her neck. He can feel her warmth, the buzz of her blood beneath her skin, but he can't find her scent. The hospital smell is too overpowering.

He lets her name rise up his throat and come into his mouth. How long is it since he has said it out loud? Three syllables. “Mar-ga-ret.”

When he opens his eyes again, she's gone and so are the roses. There is a vase of anemones on the windowsill now. Purples and whites and dark pinks. His daughter is sitting in the uncomfortable orange plastic chair by the bed, reading a book.

“Lara, what happened to the roses?” His voice is a croak.

“I changed them on Tuesday when I was in with Phil, remember?”

Desperation. He tries to sit up. What day is it now? How long since Margaret was here?

“Dad?” Lara looks alarmed. “Will I call a nurse? Do you need something?”

His body concertinas back down onto the pillows but doesn't fall into place right. It feels like a piece of origami that has been folded badly along the wrong creases. “Just some water!” he croaks.

She holds the glass, the rim cool and hard against his trembling mouth.

His beautiful daughter has lavender-colored circles beneath her sherry-brown eyes and they are his fault. The poor child has been running around looking after him for how long? Weeks? Months? But his daughter is not a child, he realizes with a sudden jolt. She is two years older than Margaret.

“You should go home now,” he tells her. “Get some rest.”

She pulls her chair closer. “Dad, I only just got here. I want to spend some time with you.”

She holds the hand without the cannula in it and tells him about her day, a tangle of words from which he tries to unpick meaning. A woman who hugged her when she delivered a bouquet of flowers. A man who wanted her to tie a five-thousand-euro engagement ring around the stem of a white rose. A couple who were getting married in June but who wanted daffodils and tulips for their wedding.

There is silence, and he finds a question to slip into it and fill it. “How's the garden?”

“It's good. It's been hot so I'm watering it every day. I'll do some weeding at the weekend.”

“Let Michael do it,” he says.

“He's . . .” Her thumb running backward and forward over the gold band on her finger for a few seconds—he sees it. “He's busy. I can do it myself.”

Something is wrong with what she's saying. A thought catches, tugs at his brain, a fish on the line, but then pain roars through him and it takes all his strength to keep it out of his face, and when it is gone, it has taken the thought with it.

*   *   *

A nurse with red hair and breath that smells of cigarettes tucks a towel under his chin, squirts shaving foam onto her palm, rubs lather on his face.

She has already washed him and helped him into the new pajamas he asked Phil to bring. He wants to look good when Margaret comes again. He feels an ache beneath the ache in his chest: she will come again, won't she?

The nurse holds his head gently to steady it while she shaves his chin. He can feel kindness in the tips of her fingers. Cancer has given him a hypersensitivity to compassion in other people.

He remembers the consultant who gave him the news after the first
tests. He had been putting up with the cough for months. He had only gone for the scan to please Lara. The man, a boy really, only a few years older than Phil, was nervous. He wanted to look away, who wouldn't? But instead he held eye contact, kept his gaze on Ted's eyes, like a hand steadying his shoulder, while he explained that the prognosis was not good.

Ted thanked him, then left the hospital and drove to Bullock Harbour. It was a stormy day in early April, the sea heaving under a sky of fast-moving gray clouds. Seagulls rode the wind above the tossing waves. The smaller boats with their scuffed and peeling hulls had been pulled out of the water. A few lads were fishing off the end of the jetty. The air smelled of rotting fish and tar. Ted closed his eyes and took huge lungfuls of it. How could he be dying? He had never felt so alive in his life.

If he was lucky, he might get to see Rory McIlroy give the U.S. Open another shot in June. Might. Possibly. But he almost certainly wouldn't see Dublin qualify for the All-Ireland in August.

He would have liked to see Leonard Cohen again, he thought, to watch the white stars of his little
Magnolia stellata
bloom one last time, to be there when—if—his bloody son ever found a girl he wanted to be with for more than a fortnight, to see his daughter holding a son or a daughter of her own.

The nurse holds up a mirror. His cheeks are sunken and his forehead seems to extend to the crown of his head, where a few pathetic wisps of hair still cling. His collarbone protrudes through his mottled skin like a coat hanger. He starts to laugh, though he's not supposed to. Laughing makes him breathless. Margaret was right. He looks awful. He looks like Gollum.

*   *   *

The morphine pump chirps and the pain liquefies. He remembers the sun on his neck on a beltingly hot Sunday morning. Walking hand in hand with Margaret down Sir John Rogerson's Quay. The eggy smell of the river at low tide as they crossed the bridge. How old was she
then? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? She had wanted to go to Bray, to the sea, that morning, but so had half of Dublin.

The train was still on the platform at Tara Street but the doors were closed. When Margaret went up to the office to ask about the next one, the stationmaster took one look at her and added an extra carriage to the train. That's how beautiful she was. Is.

She is thirty-eight and he is seventy-one. How is this supposed to work? A summer shower outside the window. Beyond the clang and rattle of the approaching lunch trolley outside his door, he can hear the drops whisper against the glass. He imagines breaking out of this overheated room, pulling out the wires and the tubes, striding along the corridor, taking the stairs in twos and walking out into the parking lot, turning his face up so a curtain of cool rain closes over his face.

When he opens his eyes, Margaret is back floating at the corner of his vision near the window, looking at a framed photograph of Lara and Phil.

“You were snoring,” she says.

A short, round woman in a blue overall that looks about to pop pokes her head around the door. “Knock! Knock!”

Ted wants her to go, wants to be alone with Margaret, but he knows he has to play this stupid game. “Who's there?”

“Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“Cheer up!” The woman grins. “It's corned beef and cabbage today!”

He shakes his head. The door closes. Margaret sits on the end of the bed giving him a quizzical look. Drops of rain sparkle in her hair. She is wearing the same red coat. “Aren't you hungry?”

His appetite dwindled away the last few weeks before he came into the hospital. The morphine killed the last of it. Now he remembers a salad he shared with her at a beachside restaurant in Italy. He can almost taste the feathery green spears of rocket, the juicy pink shreds of Parma ham, the two ripe figs halved, the salty Parmesan shavings. He can see the cracked blue Formica table, the cheap, battered cutlery,
the sooty red wine in the chipped tumblers. He can hear the music of Italian being spoken all around them.

Margaret leans over and picks up the photograph. The children, taken a few Christmases ago. Lara in an elegant green dress with her hair up in a bun, smiling her serene smile. Phil in his bike leathers with reindeer antlers planted on his rumpled black hair, his chin tilted back, caught in mid-laugh.

“Tell me about them,” Margaret says.

“Lara's the sorted one. She's been with Michael for ten years now, married for eight. She runs a flower shop.”

“A flower shop? I thought she was a graphic designer.”

“She was”—he feels his throat tighten with sadness—“but she lost a baby. He died when she was six months pregnant.” He has to swallow before he can say his name. “Ryan.”

“She was going to call him Ryan?” Margaret's eyes widen.

He has to look away. “I thought she'd never recover, to be honest. But the shop has been great for her. All those people and all those flowers.” Lara always loved flowers. Was always at his elbow in the garden, soaking up the Latin names for plants like a thirsty plant herself. “It's that little place on Camden Street, you can't miss it. It's painted bloody pink. Blossom & Grow.”

“That rings a bell.” Margaret smiles down at the photograph for a long moment. “She's lovely,” she says.

Lara's dark hair is as long as it was when she was a little girl, long enough to sit on. She still has the bony-shouldered gymnast's body she had back then and the same watchful kindness in her dark eyes. Only her hands show her age, the skin dry and flaking from so much time in cold water, her fingers permanently nicked from thorns.