At the other end of the barn, a plywood stage had been set up. On Sunday, Seth would stand there, playing bluegrass for the crowd. Bluegrass was happy music, and Antoinette wished he was playing it now. She needed something happy.
They had been in the barn for an hour, and though Eli was gone, she still heard him screaming her name. She balled her hand into a fist and smacked her forehead.
“Shouldn’t you make her stop that?” Will asked as he lifted a folding table from the stack against the wall.
Lily looked up from where she stood at the other end of the barn. A can of white paint sat at her feet. She was almost finished painting the walls.
“She’ll quit if it hurts,” Antoinette’s mother said. She sat on a straw bale, too tired to help. Her skin was paler than usual, and every few minutes she took a deep breath. When she did, she steepled her fingers over her heart and pushed.
Antoinette mirrored her movement, pressing her fingers into her heart as if she could tease the grief out. But when she dropped her hand, she hurt just as much as she had before.
Will ran a wet rag over the table, and sawdust slid to the barn floor. “Won’t most of the artists bring their own tables?” he asked. “Seems to me that you shouldn’t be doing all of this work for them.”
“Each year a few people forget something. Besides, we need tables for our flower arrangements and lavender bread.” Her mother closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. After talking with Eli at the gate, she had grown quiet. She seemed to be withdrawing inside herself.
Antoinette tucked her elbows tight against her side. She felt sluggish, the way she did after a seizure. Except she hadn’t had a seizure today. She hit her head again.
“Why don’t you go home, Rose,” Lily said as she dipped her paintbrush into the can. “We’ve got this.”
“I’m fine,” her mother said.
Lily looked at Antoinette. “You’d listen to me, wouldn’t you?” Her gaze was heavy, but Antoinette didn’t mind. As her mother grew weaker, Lily seemed to grow stronger.
Antoinette stretched up on her toes and walked to the far end of the barn. She paced under the herbs hanging from the rafters. Basil, rosemary, oregano. And lavender. They always had lavender.
Her mother used to pick a basketful of the flowers. Then she’d spend the rest of the day baking lavender bread and lavender butter cookies.
The scent would spread through the house. On those nights, Antoinette would dream she was so full of words they popped from her mouth like soap bubbles. She’d wake with her lips buzzing, sure that if she had opened her eyes a second earlier, the room would have been ringing with words like home, love, safe.
And Mommy. Most of all, Mommy.
“What’s the story behind this garden show?” Will asked. He popped the metal legs of a table open and righted it.
“It’s a family tradition,” her mother said.
Antoinette focused on her mother’s face. It hurt to do so, but she didn’t look away. She studied the sharp line of her mother’s jaw, the curve of her cheek, the color of her skin—pale white, like the Honor roses Antoinette had pushed into bloom a week ago.
“Our parents’ first year of farming was rough,” she said. “Thirty years ago, there wasn’t a big market for commercial flower farms. They lost most of their crop and thought they might have to sell the farm.”
“Toss me that rag,” Will said to Lily.
She threw it to him, her aim true. “They were tough,” Lily said, picking up the story. “Mom decided to have a garden show. What did she say, Rose? She wanted to—”
“Spit in the eye of defeat.” Antoinette’s mother laughed. “Mom was stubborn.”
Will wiped dust from his fingers. “Sounds like it runs in the family.”
Lily threw another cloth at him. It hit him in the chest with a loud thwack.
Antoinette only vaguely remembered her grandparents—a woman with soft arms and a man with a big laugh.
“Cora and Teelia invited the entire town,” Lily said. “To everyone’s surprise, the show was a success. Mom and Dad made enough money to hold on for one more season. Since then, we’ve had the show every year.”
That’s what Antoinette needed to do—figure out how to help her mother hold on a little longer. She flapped her hands and cocked her head to the left. “Aauugh,” she said as she walked over to her mother and tapped her side.
Her mother gently pushed her away. “No touching.”
Antoinette didn’t stop.
“Antoinette, I said no.”
Bits of dried lavender fell from the rafters, dusting Antoinette’s shoulders. She stomped and a puff of sawdust caught in her nose. Then she smacked her head. Hard. She had to save her mother.
Lily gently tugged Antoinette’s hand away from her head. “Don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself.”
I don’t care. Antoinette wrenched free and bared her teeth.
Her mother sighed. “Leave her alone. She’ll stop when it hurts.”
I hurt now. She didn’t mean her head; her heart hurt more than her head ever could.
Lily whispered in Antoinette’s ear. “It’ll help your mom. She worries about you.” She squeezed Antoinette’s hand, then went back to painting the wall.
Antoinette wanted to curl up against her mother’s side. They would hold hands. Antoinette would hear her mother’s song again. Then she would fix everything.
She screamed and stamped her feet. Her mother was dying and she couldn’t stop it.
“I wish you could tell me what’s wrong,” her mother said.
Me too, Antoinette thought. Someday the words would come; she would start talking and never stop. She paced in a tight circle. The rhythm of one foot falling after another was soothing. A minute passed where the only sound in the barn was the scuff of her feet through the sawdust.
Lily broke the silence. “Try counting.”
Antoinette didn’t realize Lily was speaking to her.
“Antoinette,” Lily said again.
This time she stopped. She cocked her head to the right and curled her hands to her shoulders. Her heart beat faster, and her eyelids flickered.
“Try counting,” Lily said as she walked toward Antoinette.
“What are you doing?” her mother asked.
“She needs help.” Lily stopped just out of Antoinette’s reach. “One. Two.”
Antoinette’s arms uncurled and dropped to her sides.
“Three. Four.”
Her jaw unclenched, and her eyelids stilled.
“Five. Six.”
Antoinette sighed, and her heart slid back into its normal rhythm.
“It’s best to stop on an even number,” Lily said. “At least it is for me. That way everything fits together.”
Antoinette made herself look Lily directly in the eye. It hurt, but she didn’t turn away.
“Counting will help you make sense of things,” she said.
Peace settled deep in Antoinette’s middle as she realized she wasn’t alone. Lily understood.
ROSE’S JOURNAL
April 2013
I don’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice, or the way it felt when she held me in her arms. Since she died, pieces of her have faded away. Sometimes it seems like she was never here at all.
Memory is like that. And one day soon it will be my turn. Pieces of me will start to fade away. Five months have passed since Dr. Teyler told me I was dying. But now that Lily is home, I’m not afraid anymore.
Tonight I sit in the van, watching as she cuts armloads of white Honor roses and Casa Blanca lilies from the night garden. We are going to visit our parents’ graves. Her arms overflow as she walks toward the van. I whisper a prayer of thanks for Antoinette’s ability to pull life from unexpected places.
I whisper another prayer for Will. He’s watching Antoinette for me, and I hurt for him. I see the way he looks at Lily.
But I also see the way Lily looks at Seth. They still fit together.
The drive to the cemetery is short. When we arrive, Lily helps me from the van, then hands me a bundle of flowers. “We probably should have waited until tomorrow,” she says as we start toward our parents’ grave.
“We’re here now.” I need to be a family again. Mom, Dad, Lily, and me. I put my nose in the flowers and inhale. The night is warm as we start up the hill. Lily walks backward, as if not being able to see what lies in front of her makes it easier to face.
“What’s it like?” she asks. “Dying, I mean.”
I watch my feet. The path is smooth, but lately I fall easily. “You always did get right to the heart of things, didn’t you?”
“I did it again, didn’t I?” Lily says. The ground changes from flat to a slight upward slope.
“Subtlety was never your strong point.”
Lily laughs, and I am young again. “I’ll answer your question, but I need you to promise me something.” I wait until she agrees before continuing. “Keep Antoinette safe and tell her how much I love her.” I shift the flowers to my left hand. “I’ve got to stop for a minute to catch my breath.”
My lungs strain and white dots float before my eyes. I sit on a stone bench next to a grave, shut my eyes, and explain what’s happening. Then I say, “Tell me it’s snowing.” It’s a bad joke, but Lily laughs anyway.
“It’s a miracle,” she says. “A snowstorm in April.”
Stranger things have happened.
I catch my breath and open my eyes. Lily has stripped the petals from several roses. She scatters them over my head. “I told you. It’s snowing.”
She takes my bundle of flowers and adds them to hers. “Maybe we should go home,” she says.
“No,” I say, “It’ll pass.” I should have brought my oxygen tank. I take a nitro pill from my pocket and slip it under my tongue. “Do you remember that hollow feeling when Mom and Dad died? The impossibility of it?” Some mornings I still wake expecting to find Mom cutting flower stems at the kitchen sink. When I remember she’s dead, I experience that feeling of loss all over again.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Lily whispers. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s okay. Telling someone makes it less lonely.” I loop my arm through hers, careful of her broken hand. “Help me walk.”
She shifts the flowers to her other arm so she can take my weight.
“Dying feels like that,” I say. “Except you’re losing everyone you’ve ever loved at once. There’s this panic. You try to hold on because you feel yourself slipping away, but you can’t control your body. The weird thing is, you don’t think about dying yourself. You think about the people you’re leaving behind. It feels like they’re the ones dying. Not you.”
Mist twirls around us. It’s normal here, but tonight it feels like the dead rising up to greet me.
“After panic, resignation sets in. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. No one beats death. Not even Antoinette.” I wave my hand in air, dispelling the mist. “It’s not bad. Make sure you tell Antoinette. Tell her it’s not bad.”
This day has been coming since the first time I held Antoinette. So much of mothering is about fear. Fear that your child will be hurt. That she will get lost. That no one will ever love her with the same all-consuming intensity that I do.
But most of all, I fear the day I will have to say good-bye to her, because no matter when that day comes, it will be too soon.
We buried our parents side by side, under a shared headstone. Lily stops shy of the gray stone carved with their names. Then she kneels and I see her lips moving. She’s counting, her version of prayer. She rests the flowers beneath the stone, and when she turns to me, I see my past in her eyes. “I promise. Antoinette will never forget you,” she says.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lily had worked harder in the past week than she had in the past six years. Her muscles were knotted in places she couldn’t reach, and no matter how much she coughed she still felt sawdust in the back of her throat.
She needed a drink of water. It was early—not even six in the morning—when she padded into the kitchen and flipped on the light.
A low groan filled the room.
“What in the world?” She turned in a slow circle. The room was empty.
There it was again. A moan, like a tree creaking in the wind.
She knelt and peered under the table. Antoinette sat under the farthest end, her knees folded to her chest.
“I thought I heard someone in here,” Lily said. She held out her hand. “Why don’t you come out here with me? I’ll make you something to eat.”
Antoinette dropped her head to her knees and started rocking. She had been agitated at the drying barn last night. Apparently, she still was.
“Your mom’s asleep, but I don’t think she’d mind if we woke her. I know she wouldn’t want you to sit out here alone.”
Yellow butterflies dotted Antoinette’s pajamas. The print was light and happy; the exact opposite of Antoinette’s demeanor.
“What about Will? We could wake him up.”
Antoinette groaned. If grief had a sound, this was it.
“Well, you can’t sit under there alone.” Lily crawled under the table and sat next to her niece. Their hips touched, and Antoinette leaned into her.
Lily rested her cheek against the top of Antoinette’s head. “I know it’s hard watching your mom get sicker. When my parents died, I felt . . . lost. Everything just stopped. Like the world forgot how to spin. I always felt like I moved to a different tune than everyone else, and that feeling got worse after they died. I was so lonely.”
She wrapped her arm around the little girl and pulled her close. “I won’t let it be like that for you. You’ll never be alone. I’ll be right here with you.”
The planks in the wood floor were old. With time and temperature changes they had shifted slightly, creating tiny cracks between the boards. Lily ran her fingers along the spaces, counting each one.
“Count with me?” She took Antoinette’s hand and placed it on the floor. She guided it along a split in the floor by their feet. “One.”
Where that crack joined another, Lily shifted Antoinette’s fingers. They followed the new line. “Two.”
When Lily reached twelve, Antoinette stopped groaning.
On twenty-two, she stopped rocking.
On thirty, she crawled out from under the table and pointed to the back door.
THE DAFFODILS WERE starting to brown, only the tips of the leaves so far, but they’d need to harvest the remaining flowers soon. Tomorrow, or the next day, Lily thought.
She and Antoinette sat in the grass at the head of a row. Antoinette was still in her pj’s, and Lily still wore the T-shirt and shorts she slept in. Yellow and white flowers stretched into the distance. If they stored half of them in the commercial freezer, they’d be selling daffodils into May.
Antoinette grabbed a browning flower, but Lily pulled her back. “Leave it alone,” she said.
Antoinette struggled for a moment, then sighed and rested her head in the crook of Lily’s arm.
“I don’t like it when they turn brown either,” Lily said. “It’s messy, but it’s part of the process. They’ll come back next year.”
Lily sensed someone standing behind them, and she turned.
“You’re out early,” Seth said.
Lily was unsettled by his sudden appearance but tried not to let it show. They would be working together. To make that possible, she’d have to ignore the heat in her cheeks and the twinge in her heart she felt every time she saw Seth.
“Trouble sleeping.” She raised her eyebrows and nodded toward Antoinette who shrieked and flapped her hands when she noticed Seth. “This is the first time she’s smiled all morning.”
“Well, we go back a ways, don’t we?” He sat on Antoinette’s other side. She shrieked again and pointed to the daffodils.
Lily and Seth went back even further, but she didn’t say so. She kept the conver
sation safe: “I hate watching them die.” She indicated the daffodils. Some people braided the leaves or cut them back before they browned. It was cleaner, but those same people were always surprised when their plants didn’t flower the following season. As the leaves browned, they absorbed nutrients the plant needed for the next year.
Seth stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle. “After the leaves brown, we’ll divide the bulbs. We should more than triple the crop next year.” He looked past Lily to Antoinette. “She’s happy with you.”
He had always known what to say to make her feel better. Lily stroked Antoinette’s shoulder. “I hope so.”
“I’m going to Teelia’s this morning to pick up her stuff for the show. Why don’t you two tag along?”
His invitation surprised her, but she tried not to let it show. Antoinette flapped her hands and kicked her feet. She made a happy shriek.
“I guess that’s a yes,” Lily said, her relief at seeing Antoinette happy outweighing her discomfort at being with Seth. “Let me change and leave a note for Rose.”
TEELIA WAS WAITING when they parked in front of her old barn. As they got out of the truck, she ran over, carrying a faded red toolbox. “I’d stay and help, but one of the fences in the back field is down.”
Several alpacas stood at the fence by the barn. A brown one nudged Teelia’s elbow. “You already ate,” she said, pushing it away.
Alpacas hummed. It was a strange upturned sound, as if they were asking a question. Hmm? Hmm? Several of them clamored for Teelia’s attention.
“Hush up,” she said before turning to Seth. “The wheel’s just inside the barn, and the yarn’s in the blue milk crates. I also need the metal portable pen for Frank.”
Seth disappeared into the barn while Lily helped Antoinette from the truck. The little girl tumbled down and headed over to a circle of dead grass by the front paddock. There she sat and pressed her fingers to the ground.
The Peculiar Miracles of Antoinette Martin Page 22