The Flower Arrangement (9 page)

“Come on, Lara,” he said, turning to look at her over his shoulder. “We can't keep this poor woman waiting.”

Karina was a tiny, elegant, dark-haired woman in her fifties, the owner of a French bistro on Wexford Street. She had been one of Blossom & Grow's first customers. Lara had been nervous and needy back then, so desperate to get her business that she had offered a weekly order of table and reception flowers for only a fraction more than cost price. When she called in with the second delivery, Karina had poured her a cup of coffee and steered her into a chair.

“First rule of business,” she had said. “Don't undervalue your product.” She had asked her for the wholesale price of the flowers and then insisted on paying a 60 percent markup. She had been a friend and a business mentor to Lara during those first years when she was finding her feet.

Karina had always wanted a child, and when she was in her late thirties and still single, she had a baby with the help of a Californian fertility clinic and a sperm donor she nicknamed “Odin.” He was a Viking god, she told Lara, this stranger who had fathered her child. A perfect specimen of manhood according to the information the clinic had given her. Six foot five and blonde, with 20/20 vision. A triathlon winner with a doctorate in engineering.

But Damian had somehow missed his father's genetic longboat. He was small-boned and dark and sallow-skinned, like his mother. He was also dyslexic and, Karina complained, allergic to any activity that involved fresh air. But Lara was sure there wasn't a boy anywhere on the planet who was more loved.

Karina was already in the shop, sitting in the wrought-iron chair under the shelf of orchids, staring into her lap. The anguish in her face was so raw that Lara forgot her own panic. She nodded at Ciara and Phil and they disappeared into the kitchen. She turned and put up the “Closed” sign on the door, then walked over and put her arms around her.

“I don't have the words to tell you how sorry I am,” she said softly.

Karina pressed her lip between her teeth. Minutes passed before
she could speak. “Everything happened so fast.” She inhaled quickly in three short, sharp breaths. “On Monday morning he said he had a pain in his back. I thought he was making it up—he had rugby camp, and you know how much he hates rugby—but I was working and I made him go.” She bent her head and rubbed her forehead hard with her fingertips. “I should have taken him to the doctor.” Her eyes darted wildly around the shop. “How did I not know that something terrible was wrong?”

Lara remembered her father's diagnosis. Just because you loved someone, it didn't mean you could know everything, she thought.

“I got home at seven”—Karina's voice was robotic—“and I was exhausted and he was still complaining about his back, so I gave him paracetamol and a plate of lasagna and I plonked him in front of the TV. All I wanted to do was have a glass of wine and get into the bath. So that's what I did. At about eight, he knocked on the door, and I was annoyed. I told him to wait five minutes, to give me a bit of peace.” She made a fist and pushed her knuckles against her mouth. “But he started to cry. He hasn't cried since he was six or seven, so I knew something was wrong then. But by the time I came out of the bathroom, he had collapsed. He could hardly breathe and he couldn't speak. He lost consciousness just before the ambulance came. He died on the way to the hospital. They tried to bring him back. They did everything they could, but . . .”

She doubled over; it was a minute before she could speak again. “When we were still waiting for the paramedics, when he was lying on the landing, he was staring into my eyes. He was trying to tell me something, Lara, but he couldn't, and now I'll never know what it was.”

Lara's father, too, had looked into her eyes just before he died. He had been slipping in and out of consciousness for days, but he came back to be with her, and it felt as if he was with her again now. “Damian was telling you that he loved you,” she wanted to tell Karina, without knowing where these words came from. “He was saying good-bye.”

“It was his heart,” Karina said. “They don't know for sure yet but
they think he had a tear or a rupture. How is that possible? He wasn't even thirteen. His birthday is on Thursday. He wanted a guitar.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and fumbled in her bag for her phone and showed Lara a photograph of a blue acoustic guitar.

“This is the one he wanted. Can you make it for me, Lara, in flowers?”

“Of course,” Lara said, without even thinking. “Is there anything else I can do?”

Karina clenched her jaw. “Can you make me cry? Everyone around me is crying. My bloody parents, who didn't even want me to have Damian. The customers at the restaurant. The fucking undertaker had tears in his eyes this morning.” She made a sound that was almost a laugh. A short, sharp bark. “But I can't!” She shook her head hard. “What's wrong with me? Why can't I cry?”

*   *   *

After Karina had gone, Lara stood at the door and remembered the last time she'd seen Damian. He had been in the shop at the beginning of the summer, his inky black hair shaved into a buzz cut, his wrists covered in friendship bracelets. He had been bored, fidgeting with his phone while his mother had dithered between snapdragons and foxgloves. How was it possible that a boy who had everything to live for would go home to his mother's house in a coffin tomorrow morning?

Tomorrow morning! A wave of panic hit Lara. She had promised Karina that she would deliver the guitar wreath first thing. How was she going to do that? What had she been thinking? She wasn't ready to come back to work. She might never be ready.

She reached for the phone. She'd call all the florists she knew in Dublin. Get someone else to take the job on. She began to scroll frantically through her contacts. Appassionata, Gingko, the Garden. Then she stopped, remembering the look in Karina's eyes. She could pass any other job over to someone else, but not this one. She pulled her
hair into a bun at the back of her neck and rummaged in the clutter on the counter for a pen to pin it into place.

She wasn't even sure where to begin. Most of her customers wanted simple, elegant arrangements. She had made a few frame wreaths at her training course in London six years ago, but nothing this elaborate. There might be a supplier out there who stocked a guitar-shaped wire frame, but if there was, it was too late to order one now. And the guitar had to be blue. It was going to take a hundred flowers at least, maybe even two hundred. She looked around at the rows of buckets. There was nothing blue in stock except for some anemones that looked as if they were going over.

She picked a card off the carousel and turned it over. Then she pulled the pen out of her bun and began to make a list.

*   *   *

“I'm going,” Phil whispered to Ciara, “before she changes her mind.”

Ciara peered at the card over his shoulder. Lara's handwriting, chaotic at its best, was almost illegible.
Hydrangeas. Vanda orchids, royal blue. Blue Star delphiniums. Cornflowers.

“You're never going to manage that on the bike,” she whispered back. “You'd better take the van!” She took the keys from a hook by the till and tossed them to him. “Try the wholesalers in Dún Laoghaire. They're expensive but they usually have a lot of stock. You might be lucky.”

Phil tucked the card into the pocket of his leather jacket. “Don't let her leave, okay?”

They both looked up at the ceiling toward the workroom. They'd left Lara sitting at her worktable, her chair facing the wall instead of the window, staring into space.

*   *   *

Lara listened to their lowered voices, to the jingle of the temple bells as Phil left the shop, to the sounds of a few customers coming and going, to Ciara's footsteps walking back and forth as she served them.

For a long time she studied the photograph that she had emailed herself from Karina's phone. The blue acoustic guitar that Damian had set his heart on. Then she reached for a pencil and one of the drawing pads she used to plan wedding arrangements and began to sketch.

By the time Phil came back up to the workroom, she was re-creating her drawing in three dimensions, using wire.

“Ciara's conditioning the flowers. I brought you a muffin and a coffee,” he said. She looked up at him quickly, and then down at the takeaway cup, afraid she was going to see the gray Camden Deli logo.

“Starbucks,” he said gently.

“Thank you.” She bent her head over her construction. “Could you check if there's any more of this eighteen-millimeter wire in the drawer? It should be next to the ribbon rolls.”

For a moment there she sounded almost like her old self, Phil thought. “Sure,” he said, turning away so she wouldn't see the relief on his face.

Phil and Ciara wanted to stay after the shop had closed but Lara sent them home. She couldn't bear being around other people right now. The way they treated her, as if she was breakable, reminded her of how broken she was.

She thought about Frank's offer as she worked, imagining the ordered hush of her top-floor office at Green Sea. The door closed, the only sound the click of her mouse as she tinkered with typefaces. Whole days slipping by without having to talk to another person.

She stared at the five buckets that Ciara had lined up on the floor beside the workbench—a carpet of two hundred and fifty flowers. Blue after blue after blue. She might not miss the shop if she went back to design, she thought, but she would miss the beauty of the flowers.

She went downstairs to find what she needed. Her neat store cupboard was unrecognizable. She stared into the chaos, feeling as if she was looking into a mirror. One of the low-hanging bulbs had blown. Flattened delivery boxes that should have gone out with the recycling weeks ago were shoved onto the deep shelves that had been built to
hold rows of clean jam jars. Unstable stacks of teetering vases stood here and there on the floor. They clinked and jingled as she stepped over them to get to the blocks of Oasis.

What would happen to Blossom & Grow if she didn't come back? she wondered, as she stood in the kitchen by the two huge shallow plastic basins, waiting for the feather-light foam to soak. As if in answer to her question, an odor of decay seeped through the doorway from the darkened shop.

Senescence, she thought. A beautiful word for what happened to all living things as they progressed toward death. Petals fading, leaves falling, stems beginning to rot. It happened to some cut flowers fast—gerbera and irises and brassica—but it happened to all of them in the end, and now it was happening to Blossom & Grow. Lara's job had been to keep it nourished for five years, but now it was beginning to die.

She sloshed the water from the basins into the sink and carried the heavy, dripping Oasis upstairs. She set it on the workbench, then found her scalpel and began to cut the foam to fit the frame. She slotted it into place in sections, carefully, then smoothed it down with the palm of her hand and beveled the edges with a sharp knife. She cut thick blue ribbon to length and pinned it along the exposed edges. Then she set to work on the flowers and foliage. Carefully clipping the dark green heather she would use for the fretboard. Searching through the vases for flowers that were open to just the right degree, then cutting each stem on a diagonal to exactly one and a half inches long.

It was after midnight by the time she began to insert the flowers. Slotting them in one by one at a downward angle so there would be no gaps in the dense tapestry of blue. Dusty hydrangeas pale as robins' eggs. Delphiniums iridescent as butterfly wings. Cornflowers the hazy blue of the summer skies above the grave where the dead boy would be buried.

Lara's mother had chosen her own grave because it had a view of the sea. She had been buried there on a bitterly cold January day the year Lara turned thirteen. Lara remembered looking up and away from the horrible open mouth of the grave, at the gray sweep of the bay, the
black silhouettes of the Wicklow hills on the horizon. What did the view matter, she had thought, when her mother was not alive to see it?

Her dad never brought Phil and Lara back to the graveyard. He had buried some of her mother's things beneath a honeysuckle in the garden. A worn leather glove, a birthday card that she had written for each of them. The last photograph of the four of them together.

There was a wisdom to what he had done; Lara saw it now. As the memory of her mother faded, the honeysuckle grew stronger. When Lara stood beneath it in summer, when it was in full bloom, her mother's sweetness seemed to live on in the scent of the flowers.

Her dad had always called her “your mother,” but in those last few weeks before he died, when he was dying, he had started saying her name. Margaret. He had said it with longing and surprise and sometimes with annoyance, as if she was in the room with him. Her name had been his last word. And hearing it was what made it possible for Lara to let him go. The thought that maybe, after so many years apart, her mother and father were finally together again.

They had buried her dad on a beautiful summer's day, six weeks ago. Sunshine pulling sequins and glitter from the sea, the hills dreamy and purple and green in the distance.

“I hate this bloody place as much as Dad did,” Phil had whispered, putting his arms around Lara. She buried her face in his shoulder and closed her eyes so she did not have to look at her father's coffin, or the headstone with her mother and her son's names on it. Two people she loved who had never met but who shared a name. Margaret Ryan and Ryan Gray.

*   *   *

When the time came to take the baby away so that they could bury him, Lara could not let him go. At the time the funeral was supposed to start, she was still sitting on the edge of the bed in the spare bedroom in her dressing gown, cradling Ryan's small body in her arms.