The Light of Hidden Flowers

by Jennifer Handford

  A few of these people—hardly close enough to call friends or family, really—had posted happy birthday greetings on my wall. Like a distant echo from one end of a tunnel: Happy birthdayyyyyyyyyyyyy, you person we barely know!

  But tucked within these faraway comments was a birthday wish from my high school boyfriend, Joe. My truest love. The man I had never forgotten.

  Loving Joe had been like sliding on eyeglasses after a lifetime of poor vision. Joe was my revelation.

  “Happy birthday, old friend. Good one? Hope so.” Eight words. Our first bit of direct contact in fifteen years.

  Though we had been Facebook friends for a few years, we had never messaged each other, had never posted on each other’s walls.

  I stared at the wish, an almost supernatural bridge from the past to the present, as if I could feel the tug of leaving one dimension for another. I captured the screen with his wish on it, printed it, and cut it out with scissors. I stared at it as if it were a prophecy.

  As I brushed my teeth before bedtime, I remembered the gift from Dad. I went to my bag and pulled out the rectangular box. Inside was a necklace with a silver charm. In my palm, I examined it closely. It was a saint, but not one I recognized. On the back of it was engraved “St. Brigid, patron saint of safe travel.” Also inside the box was an Expedia travel voucher with a note. “Take a month, take two! Travel, explore! Happy birthday, Daughter.”

  I sat down at my vanity, picked up the phone, and called Dad. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Will you do it?” he asked. “Take a big trip?”

  “Someday,” I said, staring at my reflection in the mirror, pressing on the blue veins pulsing against my ghostly complexion, the halo of hair that had sprung free from the ponytail.

  “Okay, Daughter,” he said. “Your choice, whatever you want.”

  “I like the necklace,” I said. “St. Brigid, huh? When did you start believing in saints?”

  “I’ve always believed in saints,” Dad said. “Your mother was a saint, if there ever was one. She’s smiling on you today, you know that, right?”

  “I know.”

  “Boy did she love you.”

  “I wish I felt like I knew her,” I said, like I always said.

  “Know yourself, and you’ll know her,” Dad said, another one of his famous sayings. “You’re a lot like her.”

  When I hung up, I sat on my bed with my gifts: Clinique skin care products from Jenny, my St. Brigid charm and travel voucher from Dad. And a wish from Joe Santelli. I picked up the piece of paper and pressed it to my chest as if it were a rabbit’s foot.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Joe Santelli asked me to dance when we were both sophomores. It was the snowball dance, and I had gone with one of the neighborhood girls and he had arrived with his posse of guys. We slow danced to Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses” and he nuzzled his mouth into the hair draped around my neck. “You smell so good,” he said, and I remembered how pleased I was with myself for having done my research. I had read an article in Seventeen: “Drive your guy wild. Use coconut shampoo!”

  “What happened to your date?” I asked, because I had heard that Joe had asked Sarah Myers to the dance.

  “She asked me,” Joe said, “but, I don’t know . . . Lots of drama. Just as well. This worked out much better.”

  By the end of the night, we had danced ten times, exactly. I had kept track, assigning more meaning to each successive dance as though I were practicing ratios and proportionality in AP math.

  When he walked me to the door of the gym, he leaned in and kissed me. I closed my eyes and let the shocks radiate off my marrow. When he pulled back, I would have given up food for a week just to taste his bottom lip for another second.

  “Maybe we could get together on Monday?” he said. “Work on our science projects?”

  “Science projects?” I responded, as the air left my tires. I no longer felt that ten dances meant true love. I felt more that I was being used. That being the smart girl in all the AP classes made me a hot commodity for a guy who didn’t want to do his own work. That by Monday, Joe would ask me to “help” him with his science element project, that it would be me researching the radioactivity of promethium and hand-spooning him the information so that he would get a good grade.

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.” I smiled and then walked outside, where I knew Dad would be at the curb, waiting in his whale of a Cadillac, Frank Sinatra crooning on the cassette player.

  “There’s my beautiful girl with the beautiful mind. How was the dance?”

  When I struggled to find words to tell Dad how the dance was, I finally said, “I think I’m being buttered up to do a science project for Joe. I thought maybe he liked me, but that would be dumb. Why would he like me?”

  Dad laughed and squeezed my knee with his giant basketball hand. I tossed it back to him. “Oh, Missy,” he said. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m just happy that if a boy is using you, it’s for your smarts, not something else . . . If you know what I mean.”

  “Dad!” I shrieked.

  “Missy,” he said, now serious, his hand returning to my knee. “I’ll tell you why a guy would like you. Because you’re quick and funny, and smart and witty. And that mug of yours is pretty adorable, too.”

  That night, as I lay in bed, I replayed the splendor of the night. Slow dancing with Joe, the kiss at the end of the night, the offer that left me questioning his motives.

  Monday after school, Joe and I met in the library. I approached him cautiously, businesslike, as though the other night hadn’t happened. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t clueless about his intentions, that I understood he wanted help with his homework, and that dancing with me was the price he felt he needed to pay.

  “What’s up?” I said casually, like I’d heard the cool kids say upon greeting one another.

  “Hi, Missy,” he said sweetly, not at all matching my aloof tone. “Friday night was fun.”

  “It was okay.” My breathing was uneven.

  Joe looked down at his notebook, as though I had hurt him.

  “So you’re researching promethium,” I said.

  “Yeah, and you picked neptunium, right?” When Joe opened his notebook and scanned his pages and pages of slanted, microscopic boy-handwriting, I choked back my tears, because what I had thought was wrong. Or so it appeared. He had already done quite a bit of research. Joe wasn’t using me; he really just wanted to study together.

  “Friday night was really fun,” I said. When Joe looked into my eyes, I felt as though we belonged to each other. Try as I might to focus on the elements and their chemical reactivity, I was having a hard time extinguishing the chemical reaction that was heating my chest and pulling at my center of gravity. I just wanted to reach for him.

  After high school, we went off to college. Joe chose a military college three hours from William & Mary, where I opted to go. Time and distance and circumstance pulled us apart gradually, the way a shoreline disappears at high tide, until we no longer had any contact. The years passed. One day Joe sent me a friend request on Facebook. He was married with three children. They lived in Jersey. He was a marine, now retired from the service, working as a security consultant. His wife, a brown-haired beauty who could have passed for his sister, looked adoringly at him, as the three children balanced on their laps. I accepted his friend request and now peeked into their lives, wondering what it would have been like, to be married, to be a mom. To have a different kind of life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JOE

  I found Kate crying again last night. I had just finished watching an hour-long show on FX—an edgy military drama soaked in gratuitous violence and debauchery. Not that I turned it off. I should have. The last thing I needed was more grotesque images to invade my brain while I tried to sleep. I had enough tape from Afghanistan to last me a lifetime. I should do myself a
favor and watch Happy Days before bed from now on. I used to love Happy Days.

  I had just clicked off the television and hobbled with my crutch to the back door to let our dog Scout outside to go “good boy.” My leg ached tonight, as it often did with the rain. A below-knee amputee was shorthand for my condition. The IED that blew up my leg took my buddy Allen’s life. As a lieutenant colonel, I didn’t have to be on patrol with the guys, but I was. That was the part Lucy had the hardest time with: not that I had come home wrapped like a mummy, but that I was reckless.

  I let Scout back in and had just checked the locks when I heard Kate crying. Weeping more than crying—the low, awful hum of my kid hurting. I crutched my way down the hall and poked my head into her bedroom. Kate was a real toughie, so hearing her cry hit me particularly hard.

  I sat on the edge of her bed, smoothed the blanket on her back. “What’s wrong, Kate?”

  “Nothing.” She stopped crying at the sight of me, wiped her eyes. “Just the usual.”

  “Tell me,” I said. This first year of middle school had been an eye-opener. Girls we’d known since kindergarten had turned mean over the summer.

  Kate backhanded her tears and turned to me. “Stupid stuff. I sat next to Anna. She got up and scooted down, so I scooted down, too. Then she yelled at me, ‘Why are you following me? I’m trying to save a spot for my best friend!’”

  “Oh, honey.”

  “Whatever,” Kate said. “I was just scooting down.”

  Little brat, I thought, but of course didn’t say. “Girls can be cruel at this age,” I said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said, patting my reconstructed knee.

  “Can you stay for a minute?” She moved toward the wall and I slid in next to her. We both stared at the ceiling with our arms crossed over our chests, saying nothing.

  Just a year ago, Kate didn’t care about all this girl drama. She was the happy-go-lucky kid who marched to the beat of her own drum, not worrying that her interests weren’t mainstream, happier to read Anne Frank than to listen to Katy Perry on her iPod.

  But then she started middle school, and rather than being satisfied with who she was, she found herself tormented by the attention drawn to her by differences she’d never even perceived before. Some days were fine, then others she realized—more like, she remembered—that she was not quite like the other girls. The girls who made friends so easily, ran in packs, paired up. And poor Kate just couldn’t find her way in. She was made differently than the other girls were, and what she was made of didn’t interest them.

  I stifled the urge to give her advice. This is what you need to do, Kate . . . I couldn’t help it—I was the dad, a guy, and my impulse, my job, was to fix things, even though I knew that that wasn’t what this called for. Just be there for her, my wife—correction, soon-to-be-ex-wife—would say. What about you, Lucy? I’d want to scream. Why weren’t you there for her? A thirteen-year-old daughter needed her mother.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” Lucy had said less than a year ago. “I’ve been a wife and a mother. A marine wife,” she clarified, “and Joe, I’ve had enough. Enough.” When she said the second enough, she cut her hand through the air for emphasis, like drawing a line in the sand.

  Only days later, she accepted a job working as an event planner for an international law firm, setting up conferences and award trips all over the world.

  “Kate’s at risk, Lucy,” I told her when she called the other day. “Middle school is a real battleground for her.”

  “Well, battlegrounds are your specialty,” she said, throwing me under the bus. Lucy took every opportunity to indict me for deploying for my third tour, as if it were voluntary, as if it were my choice to return to Afghanistan. I didn’t have a choice, but Lucy thought I should have tried harder to fight the system. As far as she was concerned, I chose the Marines over my family, and because of it, I lost my leg, lost time, lost years of our children’s childhoods, and in the process, killed our marriage.

  She never wanted me to forget that I made my own bed, and now it was time for me to lie in it.

  I turned toward Kate. Asked her if anything else happened.

  “Same as usual . . . girls laughing when I walked by.”

  “Why?” I said, like a stupid fool. Obviously she didn’t know why.

  Kate just shook her head side to side.

  Another wave of anger. Irrational thoughts poured over me, fantasies about defacing their lockers, spray-painting “Mean Girl” and “Bully” across them. Then I’d call their parents and warn them that their daughters are little brats and they might want to intervene before they grow into full-blown bitches.

  Instead, I launched into nonsense.

  “Girls who act like that . . . they live their life on the surface,” I said. “Where everything changes from day to day: their friends, their moods. A lot of waves, a lot of stormy weather. You, though—you, Kate, you run deep. Still water runs deep.” I was losing myself in this ridiculous analogy. It had sounded good in my head, but now it just sounded like I didn’t have anything better to say. What good did it do to tell her that someday she was going to be an awesome adult, that someday these foolish girls would be struggling and she would be thriving, that someday she would realize that middle school girls were just an annoying hiccup in her otherwise extraordinary life as an award-winning novelist or classics professor or Nobel prize–winning scientist? Kate could be anything she wanted. She just had to make it through this first.

  “I just wish . . .” she began, but was unable to finish. I could fill in the words for her. I just wish I fit better. I just wish Mom wasn’t in Costa Rica with her fancy lawyers . . . again. I just wish things were like they used to be.

  “Mom will be home next week,” I said.

  Kate just nodded stoically, though I could tell she was filled to the top. Next week might as well have been a year from now. Kate knew I’d walk through fire for her, but the one thing I couldn’t do was be her mother.

  “How are you doing, Dad?” she asked, burying her head into my chest.

  “We’re talking about you, not me,” I said, kissing her head. “Let me check on your brother and sister, and then I’ll come back.” I left her room and tucked in Olivia and Jake, then grabbed my cell phone from my dresser, and turned off the bedroom light. With me in the chair next to her bed, Kate fell asleep in no time. When her breathing became rhythmic, I opened my phone and clicked on Facebook.

  I wasn’t a chronic poster, but I did occasionally post pictures of the kids. For my family. They liked to see what we were up to. All told, I only had about forty friends on FB, so it didn’t take long to scroll my news feed. I got a kick out of seeing guys from my unit, now home with their families, in their new jobs, looking so clean and scrubbed, so unlike the camouflaged, dirt-caked warriors I’d spent so much time with. Bob Adams had been in my Marine Special Operations Battalion in Afghanistan, and was the most fearless guy I knew. He was on his second tour when he got hit by an IED. He lost his arm, but from the look of his posts, it wasn’t stopping him much. Somehow he managed to play hockey with his son.

  I liked to check in on my high school friends, too. Mike Marshall, a guy I played football with, had lost a ton of weight and was now an elite marathon runner. I never thought a linebacker his size could slim down so much. And Mr. LeFey, my civics teacher. He was a great guy. “Come see me after school,” he’d say, and when I’d get to his room, he’d have college packages he’d sent away for. “Let’s take a look,” he’d say. It was because of him—him and a guy named Frank Fletcher—that I ended up at Virginia Military Institute and then in the Marines Corp. They were my mentors.

  Frank Fletcher. I dated his daughter, Missy. She was my high school sweetheart. She was so sweet, so cute, and so damn smart. I’d never met anyone as smart as she was. I loved her and her da
d. Missy never posts on Facebook, but she “likes” everything I post. That is so like her, to care for everyone else, but never one to get out in front.

  Missy had been on my mind all day. It was her birthday—not that I needed an excuse for her to be on my mind. I sent her a happy birthday wish, just a generic “have a nice day.” But if there were no rules, if there was no social etiquette I’d violate by doing anything more than wishing my high school girlfriend a happy birthday, if it didn’t matter that I was a married—now separated—guy, if it was acceptable for me to lay it all on the line, I would have posted the memory of my eighteenth birthday.

  We went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. Missy got me a collector’s edition Mets baseball and a teddy bear wearing a T-shirt that said “Missy loves Joe forever.” She told me she had it made at the T-shirt shop. After dinner, we walked through the mall. We took a strip of pictures in the photo booth kiosk. I still have that tattered strip in the middle of my yearbook.

  That’s what I would have liked to say: “Hey, Miss—remember my eighteenth birthday? That was a great night.”

  And then I’d ask her if she was single, and if she ever thought of me, and if she’d like to re-create my eighteenth birthday as much as I would.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next week, the Longworths were back in our conference room. Mr. Longworth held a giant stack of documents, per our request. Our sheet labeled “List of Documents for a Financial Plan” sat neatly on top. That was our standard operating procedure. The first step was for new clients to collect their documents, the pile of paper that captured their financial life. Dad likened himself to a doctor: “If you’re sick, you don’t go to the doctor and give him half the information, and then go to another doctor and give him the other half. How could he treat you? I’m the same way: I can’t make a diagnosis unless I have all of the information.”