The Flower Arrangement (6 page)

All those years when Ted and Lara thought they were looking after Phil, Phil was looking after them.

Do you remember how much Lara wanted us to have another baby? he thinks. Jesus! All those wishes on rainbows and bloody stars! Do you remember how hard we had to try to grant them come true?

Margaret laughs, a ripple that washes over him like cool water. “Oh yes,” she says. “We had fun trying, though, didn't we?”

And he does not have many moments left, but he would give all of them to be back in their creaky divan bed on one of those Saturday mornings when they tried. The door closed, the curtains drawn, their daughter safely planted in front of a video downstairs. He would, he thinks, give anything, everything, to be thirty-eight again and making love to his wife.

“Shut up,” Margaret says, “or you'll make me cry.”

What was the name of the imaginary baby Lara had? he thinks. The one who slept in her top drawer till she was ten? Daisy? Poppy?

“Lily,” Margaret says.

She disappeared overnight, he thinks, when Phil came along.

“She'll be back,” Margaret says lightly. “Lily. She's just waiting for the right moment.”

Like you, he thinks.

“Like me.”

Margaret is still there when it gets light and the nurse comes to open the curtains. The nurse straightens his pillows and wraps a blood pressure cuff around his limp arm and clips a thermometer to his ear. She taps his arm gently until she finds a vein and slides a needle in,
and the morphine fog rolls in, but still Margaret stays and the dark behind his eyes blooms with velvety pansies.

Where does it come from? he thinks. The word “pansy”? I can't remember.

“It comes from the French verb ‘
penser
,'” Margaret says. “To think.”

Margaret, are you really here? Or am I just imagining you? There is a long pause. Margaret?

“Does it matter?” she whispers.

*   *   *

“He said Mum's name,” Lara says. “At four o'clock. He tried to sit up and he said ‘Margaret.'”

“Jesus,” Phil says softly. “He's still in there.” His voice is thick with tears. “He's a fighter.”

Ted hears the sleeve of his son's leather jacket creak as he puts his arms around his sister. They are both crying. He wants to cry too, but there is no water left in his body.

Love doesn't break your heart, he thinks, but dying crushes it. Flattens it with an iron fist until every last drop of love has been squeezed out.

“Remember my nicknames for them?” Margaret whispers.

“Blossom” for Lara, because she was delicate and pretty as a cherry flower. “Grow” for Phil, who was like a beanstalk.

I read somewhere, he thinks, that your life flashing before your eyes is just a medical phenomenon. That when your organs start to shut down, your brain just cycles through everything that's ever happened, looking for something it knows might save you.

“Save you for what?” Margaret asks. “Haven't you had enough of this, Ted? Aren't you ready to go yet?”

She has a point.

The flashes come not in a rush but slowly, like the fireworks they saw once on a long-ago holiday in France. They bloom, like flowers, in the velvety darkness.

Fragments Ted had forgotten. Lara, at seven, swinging upside down from monkey bars in St. Stephen's Green, her hair so long it swept the ground. Coming downstairs one morning to find Phil, about four, sitting in a shaft of sunlight, his spoon of cereal on hold halfway to his mouth while he sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to himself.

A deserted beach they found on their honeymoon in Crete, after a long, hot, dusty trek down a steep gorge. Margaret yelping with delight when they finally saw the glittering mirage of the sea ahead of them. Tearing off her boots, her socks, her shorts and knickers, her T-shirt and bra and running naked over the hot sand to dive into the water.

“Come on!” she yelled.

Ted looked around. There were some goats perched on the steep red cliff watching them, but they were the only people on the vast stretch of rock-scattered shingle. They were Adam and Eve and it was the beginning of their marriage, the beginning of the world.

His son has gone. Gone to the canteen for a bottle of water. Gone forever. Ted heard the door swing closed as he left.

His daughter is sitting by the bed holding his hand. She thinks they are alone. Behind the dark of his eyelids he looks into Margaret's face. She has been swimming. Her hair is wet; there is a speck of sand between two eyelashes.

I don't know how to do this, he thinks.

“You don't have to do anything,” she says. “Just follow me.”

He summons the final glimmer of his life force and squeezes Lara's hand one last time. He feels her fingers curl around his and her say, from a long way off. “
Ti amo
, Dad.”

He holds her voice in his ear so that he won't forget it, then he lets go of her hand and follows his wife into the sea.

The old lady was wearing zip-up sheepskin booties and what looked suspiciously like a real fur coat. In June. She sighed and turned the card carousel again. It squealed like chalk on a blackboard. Ciara winced and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she had lost her place in the online order form. How many peonies for next Saturday's wedding? She flicked back through the order book, looking for her scribbled notes. The carousel squealed again.

“Can I help you?” Ciara said rudely. In her defense, it was the third time she had asked.

“Speak up!” The woman pointed at the hearing aid that protruded from one ear.

“Can I help you?” Ciara shouted.

“No! I'm waiting for the other girl, the dark-haired one.”

Nobody over the age of twelve years old could still be called a girl. “The other
woman
,” Ciara said pointedly, “is not here.”

“I'll wait.”

“She's not coming in today.”

“Oh.” The woman looked annoyed. “Is she sick?”

Ciara shook her head and gazed at the jumble of tick-boxes on her screen. Zinnias: color, quantity, degree of opening. She was tired of customers asking questions she couldn't answer. Tired of being reminded a dozen times a day that she was no substitute for her boss. Ciara was good with bouquets and boutonnieres and corporate
arrangements but was bad with people. She didn't have Lara's uncanny ability to hear all the things they didn't say as well as the things they did, and to somehow translate their unspoken feelings into flower arrangements.

The old woman stopped turning the carousel and tapped the back of Ciara's screen. “Is she on holiday then?”

“No.” Ciara closed the laptop, almost grateful to this annoying woman for saving her from the weekly order. Lara could get it done in half an hour, but Ciara had been tinkering with it all day. Adding and subtracting flowers, dithering over colors, changing the quantities. She hadn't conditioned this morning's flowers or checked last night's orders, and the water in the buckets hadn't been changed since the day before yesterday.

“Look,” she said, “I'm a trained florist. If you just tell me what you want I'll—”

“What I want,” the woman said petulantly, “is to know when the other
girl
is coming back.”

Ciara wanted to know too. Lara had thrown herself into her work after her dad was diagnosed with cancer in April. She had plowed on after Michael had left her. She had worked through the awful weeks of her father's illness—helping customers, taking orders, making deliveries. She had insisted on doing all the flowers for a wedding the week her poor dad had died, but she hadn't come back to the shop since the funeral. Not once, and it had now been six weeks. Ciara and Phil were trying to keep everything going, but Blossom & Grow was falling to pieces without her.

*   *   *

“What flower are you today?” Lara's dad used to ask her those first years after her mother was gone. Trying, without prying, to see how she was doing. Sometimes she was a thistle, prickly and defensive. Sometimes a forget-me-not, tiny and blue and invisible. Today she was
a dicentra, a heart-shaped red flower drooping on a bowed stem. Raw, exposed, turning itself inside out.

*   *   *

At night she dreamed of her father standing beside her as she watched his coffin going into the ground. Of Michael passing her in the street without knowing her. Then of endlessly losing them both and trying to find them. But waking up to reality was worse. It always took Lara a few seconds to figure out what she was doing sleeping in her father's house, in his room. Then it hit her. Her father was gone. Her marriage was over.

*   *   *

The first shadow had fallen the Monday after she had held the baby in Holles Street. Her dad had a bad cough since Christmas and she had been nagging him to go and have a checkup. Eventually, after a lot of grumbling, he had given in and his GP sent him to the hospital for tests. Lara had been worried enough to put off asking Michael about trying to get pregnant, but not too worried. Her dad had been overdoing it, she thought; he probably just needed a week in bed.

The week after Saint Patrick's Day, he arrived at the shop one evening and asked her to go for dinner. She should have known when he took her to Milano that something was wrong. He liked the cozy snugs of old-fashioned bars and the hushed luxury of expensive restaurants. This was a bright, noisy pizza place with an open kitchen where chefs spun wheels of dough in the air like jugglers.

Her dad barely touched his food. He sipped one Peroni and sat watching her eat her dough balls and salad, then pressed her to have cheesecake.

“Better bring two spoons.” She smiled up at the waiter. “He'll end up eating most of mine.”

But her dad shook his head when she held her plate out to him. She
put her spoon down and stared at him. She had never known him to refuse dessert before. “What's wrong?”

He reached across the table and took her hand. Whatever it was, it was bad. Her dad was the most loving man she knew, but he did not do public displays of affection.

“I got the results back from the hospital, that's all.”

Her heart gave a sickening lurch. This was why he'd brought her here, to this clattery, public place, she thought. So that neither of them could get upset.

“No tears.” His voice was steady but his blue eyes were pleading with her. “Or I'll do a runner and leave you with the bill, okay?”

“Okay.”

His fingers tightened around hers. “It's cancer.”

“Cancer,” she repeated, as if it was a foreign word she didn't understand.

“Metastatic small cell lung cancer to be exact. A big name for a couple of little tumors.”

Behind him, a table of women were laughing and clinking glasses. It seemed odd and awful to Lara that anyone could laugh at a moment like this.

“Oh, Dad,” she whispered. “Is it bad?”

“Well, it's stage four, so I suppose it could be better.” He was keeping his voice light. He was trying not to upset her, putting her first, the way he always did.

Fear hurtled through her like a freight train, pulling carriages full of terrifying possibilities behind it. Her strong, steady, invincible dad suffering, frightened, vulnerable, even dying. She dug the nails of her free hand into her palm.

“What's the prognosis?” How did she even know that word? she wondered. How was she managing to sound so calm?

“Well, it's straightforward, at least.” Her dad's dark eyes slid away toward the kitchen, where a chef was pulling a pizza out of an oven with a long-handled shovel. “It's inoperable. Chemotherapy is an option
but I'm not too keen on the idea. I've googled it and the chances of success at this stage are not that great.”

“Dad!” Her voice came out too loudly and one of the women at the next table turned to look at her. “Don't do that! The Internet is full of misinformation and worst-case scenarios. What about getting a second opinion?”

He stared down at their hands. His broad and tanned and bunched with veins, hers long and pale, red at the knuckles, the nails short and peeling.

“You know there are no mistakes,” he said softly, “only lessons, and some of them are hard ones. And you know me: I'm strong as an ox. But when my time does come”—he swallowed a mouthful of his beer and wiped his mouth and looked into her eyes—“well, let's just say that I'm not going to rage against the dying of the light.”

“Listen,” she said. “Those doctors don't know you, Dad, they don't know how bullheaded you are.”

He tried to look offended, but he had the ghost of a smile. “Me?”

“You're the most stubborn person I know. If anyone can beat cancer, then you can. But you have to promise you'll do the chemo. Please? For me if not for yourself.”

He rubbed his gray hair with the flat of his hand until it stood up like cotton candy. “If I was half as stubborn as you say I am, I'd say no.”

His eyes locked with hers, and the fear and the sadness that neither of them could give voice to passed between them; and Lara felt love, like a tight fist, clench around her heart. “But you know me too well, Lara. I'd go to Timbuk-bloody-tu for chemo if you wanted me to.”

*   *   *

When someone came into the shop, Lara could almost always intuit before they even spoke what feeling they wanted to express. Knew without having to think what flowers to pick to give it voice. But her intuition had not worked when Ryan was dying inside her, or when the cancer was growing in her dad's chest.

“I should have known,” she told Michael that night, sitting up beside him in bed, her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes raw from crying. “Why didn't I know that something was wrong?”

“You did know,” he said. “You're the one who made him go to get the tests, remember?”

“But I should have made him go
sooner
.”

“Don't be so hard on yourself, Lara,” Michael said sadly. “You can't know everything.”

*   *   *

At the end of April, after two cycles of chemotherapy, the shadows were gathering. Her dad was going into the hospital for another three-day battery of tests that would reveal whether the cancer had spread.

Lara took the morning off work to drive him in. That April day seemed almost painfully beautiful. Cherry blossom in drifts in the gardens of the redbrick houses of her dad's street in Ranelagh. Heavy green canopies of spring chestnut leaves along Shrewsbury Road. She rolled down the windows so her dad could breathe in the scent of the chestnut blossom. Fear, like a fishbone, stuck in the back of her throat. What if this was the last spring he would ever see?

As they waited for the traffic lights to change so they could turn in to the hospital grounds, her dad turned to look at her and she saw, in the bright spring sunlight, how much the last four weeks had changed him. The skin on his face was too loose for the bones. The white baseball cap he wore at a jaunty angle didn't hide his threadbare eyebrows. The too-bright yellow golf jumper bagged across his thin chest.

“Lara, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything, Dad.”

He exhaled slowly. “Will you think about trying for another baby?”

This was what he wanted—something for her, not for him! He had spent a lifetime putting her and Phil first and he was still doing it, even now.

She had to swallow the lump in her throat before she could answer.
“I have been thinking about it already,” she said quietly. Since the day she'd held the newborn baby at the hospital, she thought about it all the time, but she had been too caught up in her dad's illness to do more than think. “I'll talk to Michael this weekend,” she said. “I promise.”

“Good! Great!” Her dad started to laugh. “Jesus! If I'd known I could get my way like this, I'd have gotten cancer years ago.”

“Dad! That's not funny!” But secretly Lara was glad that her dad was laughing, as the lights changed and she turned the car onto the long avenue that led up to the hospital.

“This time next year,” she said, “you could be driving me to the maternity hospital.”

“I could!” he said, turning away quickly so that she couldn't see his face. “Couldn't I?”

*   *   *

Lara had asked Ciara to open the shop on Saturday and Phil had promised to call into the hospital. She left Michael sleeping and went downstairs to make breakfast. She couldn't remember the last time she'd taken a Saturday morning off to spend with him.

Looking back, it seemed like all they talked about the first three years of their marriage was getting pregnant. And after they lost the baby, it was as if they had run out of things to say.

They still made love, occasionally, but from the very start, the desire for a child had been so strong that it overshadowed their desire for one another. When it was gone, what was left behind felt halfhearted and hollow.

They had put up a wall between them, Lara could see that now. Whatever happened, this morning's conversation would bring them closer.

She put the coffee on to brew, then opened the back door and stepped outside in the flimsy silk nightdress she had not worn since her honeymoon. The small pergola that Michael had built was covered in loops of jasmine, and Lara's flower beds were blazing with color. Blowsy white peonies, dusky purple irises with golden stripes, pale
orange poppies with sooty centers. The first tea roses of the year were budding. Elinas, pink petals tipped with crimson, and the ivory Jeanne Moreaus that smelled faintly of lemons. Lara wanted to pick one and put it on the breakfast tray, but Michael hated cut flowers.

She went back inside and began to set the tray. Her mother's blue Venetian glass dish filled with raspberries. Orange juice in a white jug. A honey pot with a wooden dipper.

Sunshine streamed in through the window, warming the terracotta tiles beneath her bare feet. She could not have cut flowers in the house so she had pictures of them instead. Two huge framed Georgia O'Keeffe poppy prints. An apron with a pattern of climbing roses. A wooden clock that Phil had given her with a pendulum in the shape of a red rose.