Wildflower Hill

by Kimberley Freeman

  “But—”

  “She’ll be fine,” he said. Then hung up.

  I stared at the phone for a few moments before replacing it. I couldn’t quite believe what had just happened, and I burned with fury. Burned.

  Somehow I had to go upstairs and tell this beautiful, fragile girl that her daddy wouldn’t come and get her. I thought about calling Patrick but couldn’t bear the thought of making him come out in the rain. I took the stairs carefully, as always, breathing deep to get my anger under control. She was sitting up in my bed by lamplight, staring at the window.

  “Mina?”

  She looked around.

  “He can’t come, sweetie. It’s too stormy.”

  She nodded.

  “Hey, I know what might cheer you up.”

  She watched me as I went to my dresser and opened the top drawer. Inside, I found my Swan Lake tiara. I carefully pulled it out and brought it over to her.

  “What’s that?” she said, brightening, finding her voice again.

  “It’s so special, Mina, you have to be careful with it.”

  She took it from me reverently and gazed at it.

  “It’s a special tiara. I wore it when I was dancing Odette.”

  “Swan Lake,” she breathed.

  I took the tiara from her and put it on her head, encouraging her to go and look at herself in the mirror over the dresser. Her fears were forgotten as she twirled in front of the mirror, the tiara sparkling in the reflection.

  “Come back to bed,” I said. “There’s room for both of us in this one. We’re not worried about the storm.”

  “We’re not,” she said, marching back to the bed and snuggling up next to me, the tiara still on her head.

  I switched out the light, and her soft hand found mine in the dark. “Good night, Emma,” she said.

  “Good night,” I replied.

  I lay awake until I was sure she was sleeping. Her hand uncurled from mine. The storm passed overhead, and she didn’t stir.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I found myself awake early, cramped and hot in my bed. Mina slept on peacefully. The tiara had fallen off her head and lay on the pillow beside her. I picked it up carefully and placed it on the bedside table. Soft morning light glowed beyond the curtains. I thought about my garden and decided to get up and do some more work down there. I pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and went downstairs.

  The sky was clear, washed clean by the storm. The grass and rocks were still damp. I picked up my bucket of tools on the way and set them down near the old rose bed. I was slowly making my way through, cutting, pulling, digging. I’d no idea if the roses would grow again after being pruned back so savagely, and I realized with a touch of sadness that I would never see them bloom, either. Somebody else would own the house then.

  I put down my trowel for a moment as I thought of this. Somebody else parking their car in the driveway, somebody else moving their things into the bedroom, somebody else cooking in the big echoing kitchen.

  Told myself I was being sentimental and kept digging.

  The sun rose fully, and I went inside to check on Mina. She was awake and dressed and in the sitting room looking at my awards. I made her breakfast, then asked if she wanted to do some more dancing practice.

  “No,” she said, “I want to help you in the garden.”

  So I gave her a sturdy pair of gardening gloves, and we went back outside into the fresh morning light. I didn’t want her in the rose bed; I was too worried about the thorns. So I told her to collect the fallen twigs from around the sick cabbage gum and put them in a pile near my weeds.

  Mina was much more relaxed than the previous night, and she chatted happily about gardening, about how she and her dad had planted a little vegetable patch and grown their own tomatoes. I was still angry at her father for not coming to get her the night before, and for not taking an interest in her dancing, so I wasn’t persuaded by one gardening story.

  “What do you do with your time, Mina?” I asked. “If your dad is working on his computer.”

  “I work three afternoons a week at a supermarket. Packing shelves,” she said.

  I was taken aback. “Really?”

  “I make some money that way, to give to Dad to help. And I have a friend who comes three mornings a week to help me learn things. Her name’s Mrs. Pappas.”

  “Like schoolwork?”

  She shook her head. “No, I finished school last year. Mrs. Pappas teaches me how to go on the bus and stay safe and things like that.”

  “You can go on the bus by yourself?”

  “I did once. That was fun. But I nearly forgot my stop.” She giggled, throwing a handful of twigs on the pile. “Then I remembered the chocolate shop, and the stop was right outside it.”

  “Ah, hard to forget about chocolate.”

  She didn’t answer, and I looked around to see her peering between two spiky bushes under the cabbage gum.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I rose slowly and came to join her. I expected to see an animal, maybe a dead one. But it wasn’t an animal. It was a shape. I frowned. “It’s a cross.”

  “Like at a church.”

  “Yes. Something must be buried here.” Or someone, though I didn’t want to say that and freak Mina out. “Let’s see if we can make our way through to it.”

  Mina and I hauled branches and deadfall out of the way, and I savagely hacked back the sedge. Finally, we got there. I crouched carefully. The cross was about thirty centimeters high. I used my trowel to scrape off the decades of accumulated dirt. Letters. I didn’t want to pull the cross out, so I got in close to uncover the other letters.

  From top to bottom, written vertically: C H A R L I E.

  “Does it say something?” Mina asked.

  “Charlie,” I replied. A shock to my heart. Somebody was buried here? Surely not. Surely people were buried in cemeteries.

  The sound of a car engine. I looked up to see Patrick turning in to the driveway. The sun flashed off his windshield. Was it that late already?

  “Patrick!” Mina exclaimed, running down to greet him.

  “We haven’t practiced,” I said, dropping my tools. I was aware that I was filthy with soil and sweat and that my hair was unwashed.

  “We’ve been gardening, and we found a cross,” Mina told him.

  “Can I see?” he asked, and Mina led him over.

  “‘Charlie,’” he read. “I wonder who Charlie was.”

  “I’m hoping a pet,” I said.

  Patrick straightened up and looked at me, raising one eyebrow. “A pet? You think? On farms, animals die all the time, and nobody gets sentimental about it. I can’t imagine someone planting a tree and raising a cross over the grave of a pet. It’s obviously some kind of memorial. To a person.”

  He was right, and I knew it. The cross had been deliberately placed there. I just found the idea that there was a body buried in the house paddock a little creepy.

  “Go and pack your things, Mina,” I said to her.

  “Okay.” She hurried off inside, and Patrick smiled at me. “You have dirt on your face,” he said.

  “Where?” I asked, my hand going to my left cheek self-consciously.

  “Here.” He grasped my fingers gently and moved them to the other side of my face, then let go.

  Warm tingles. I brushed off the mud. “So you think it’s a person buried here?”

  “It might be. Dig it up and see,” he joked. He glanced up at the branches that spread above us. “I wouldn’t stand here for long if I were you. Some of these branches look as though they are dying.”

  “The possums,” I said. “I suppose I’d better do something about them. This tree is more important than I thought.”

  That night, after a long shower that washed away all the mud and sweat of the day and left me pink and clean, I was thinking about the cross. In truth, I hadn’t stopped thinking about it all day. I was clean and dry,
so I didn’t want to go down into the dew-soaked evening to look at it again. Instead, I opened up the main bedroom and went to the window there. I pushed the sash open. The moon was just off full, and white light fell on the dewy fields. The cabbage gum was right there. This was the only window in the house that faced it.

  The scene awoke a stirring of memory within me. I concentrated, trying to grasp it. Then realized: this was the painting in Grandma’s house. The one she’d told me always made her feel calm and happy. Of course it was, I could see it from up here. The curve of the hill and, behind it, the distant rocky outcrop, just the same. This tree was special to her. She’d planted it where she could see it every day, and when she’d left, she’d had it painted so she could still see it.

  Patrick was right, the tree was some kind of memorial. I’d always thought the tree was planted too close to the house, but perhaps that was the point. To keep somebody close. Somebody named Charlie. Tears pricked my eyes, even as I wondered if my imagination was overreacting.

  I stood there a long time, breathing the night air, watching the silver moonlight create shifting shadows over the fields. My grandmother loved somebody named Charlie. He was the man in the letter, for certain. But he’d died. I felt the world swing away from me a moment. If he hadn’t died, Grandma might have married him. Never met Granddad. Never had Mum or Uncle Mike. History would have erased me. And yet I wished things had worked out differently for Grandma’s sake. It’s a terrible thing to lose the man you love.

  The following Saturday, back at the school hall, Mina was brilliant. She remembered the whole dance, and Marlon began to put the rest of that part of the show together. Six other children danced around her—very simple, slow movements—and it all started to look wonderful. Marlon pretty much memorized Mina’s dance in one viewing, changed a few moves she was having trouble with to make them more practical, and I felt a bit useless. I sat and watched and realized my knee didn’t ache so much from the long drive down.

  Spring started looking toward summer. The concert approached. The gardens grew tidier. The last of the boxes was emptied and packed away. Monica had nothing to do, so I let her go with great regret. She promised she’d come to see me once a week, and she did, but it wasn’t the same as having her around all the time. I missed her. Patrick was distracted and busy. I grew lonely.

  I walked a lot. I even ran sometimes. I tried to dance, but it was a thin impersonation of the kind of dancing I’d once been capable of. I felt fully and clearly the truth that my body would never move like that again. The flexibility was gone, and pain always waited if I wasn’t careful. It still made me cry.

  We were three weeks out from the concert, and Marlon called four nighttime dress rehearsals.

  “You don’t have to go,” Patrick said. “It’s an extra drive to Hobart for you.”

  “My knee’s pretty good now,” I said. “And I’d love to see Mina in her costume.”

  The summer evenings were divine. The light stayed on the land late, and the air was sweet to breathe. Nothing like fumy London in summer. As we climbed out of the car at the school, everything smelled beautiful: cut grass, distant flowers, food cooking. I took deep, grateful breaths.

  On the other side of the car park, Mina’s father was dropping her off. I craned my neck to see him, scowling. “I don’t suppose he’ll come to this year’s concert, either,” I said.

  “Best not to get involved, Emma,” Patrick said.

  Mina waved, excited by the night and the hall lights and the glittering difference of it all.

  I walked over to take her hand, leaned into the car, and said to her father, “You should come in, Mr. Carter.”

  “No time,” he said gruffly.

  “Are you going to be able to make it for the concert this year?”

  He glared at me. “Nobody’s business,” he said.

  “Emma,” Patrick said, caution in his voice.

  “She’s a beautiful dancer. It seems a shame for you to miss it.”

  “Close the door please,” he said. “I’m in rather a hurry.”

  I did as he said, and Mina looked up at me with an expression of confusion. “He’s very busy,” she said.

  “I know, honey,” I replied, stroking her hair. “I just don’t want him to miss out on seeing you dance.”

  We went into the hall, and when Mina ran off to join her friends, Patrick turned to me and said sternly, “You shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “He’s a selfish bastard.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “He wouldn’t come out and get her from my place during the storm, even when she was sobbing with terror.”

  Patrick shrugged. I prickled. “Sorry,” he said. “But Marlon told me that right from day one. We can’t really know anything about these families, and they are all coping with difficulties in different ways. He’s doing his best to bring in a good income while still working at home. That’s admirable.”

  “But he’s too busy to spend time with her. You can’t be too busy for love.” As I said it, I had the horrible feeling that I had been. That my whole life, until my forced retirement, had been precisely too busy for love. I hadn’t seen Grandma before she died; I wouldn’t visit my mother; even Josh had grown sick of my not being there for him and had run off with his assistant.

  And now? Was I reformed? Only because I had to sit still so bloody often. I thought of the initial unfriendliness I’d shown Monica, Patrick, Penelope Sykes . . . everyone, really.

  Patrick was called away to deal with some crisis, and I took my seat in the front row to watch.

  The lights were dimmed, and the stage lighting came on. Patrick had explained that they started dress rehearsals so early to get the children used to the lights. I saw why. Some of them were completely stagestruck, forgetting moves and wandering about instead. Marlon remained beautifully patient despite the disaster that was happening onstage. I stifled a chuckle.

  Then Mina’s music came on, and she emerged in her costume: a blue leotard with a soft, silky skirt over it. She was barefoot, as I’d advised her to be. She took center stage, the lights softened, a white spotlight hit her. I tensed, wondering if she would be distracted, like the others.

  Then she raised her arms in a perfect arabesque and started to move.

  I admit, I was invested—deeply so—in Mina’s performance. But it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Not just because she nailed every move, not just because she looked like a pale blue angel up there surrounded by six other white angels who moved slowly in a circle around her. But because she was a girl who had been given so many challenges in life and had overcome them with such grace and spirit. I cried all the way through it and wondered how her father could bear to miss it.

  Patrick dropped me off just after ten. I put the kettle on and slipped off my shoes and was thinking about climbing straight into my pajamas when there was a knock at the door.

  Curious, I went to open it.

  Patrick was there. “I’m sorry, I forgot to give you this.” He handed me a plastic package with a phone charger in it. “From Monica. She ordered it for you. Only came in today.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the package. The kettle started whistling. “Come in for a coffee?”

  He glanced away from me. He was uncomfortable for a moment. Then he seemed to find his voice. “Sure.”

  In the kitchen, I plugged my mobile phone into the charger and made coffee. We sat at the table and talked about the rehearsal, about Mina, then somehow got on to the weather. We were talking like people who really wanted to talk about something else but weren’t quite brave enough. I did admire him. I admired his lean body, his green eyes, his long fingers around his coffee cup. I also admired his gentle humor, his kindness, his courage. But I was afraid to do anything other than admire him. I was afraid to get closer to him, though I wasn’t sure why.

  “I should go,” he said, finishing his coffee. “School night.”

  I laughed.
“I’ll see you on Saturday morning. Not that I’m needed anymore.”

  “Of course you’re still needed,” he said. Gently, earnestly.

  I didn’t believe him, but I would go anyway. I’d grown fond of Mina. I’d grown fonder of Patrick.

  I saw him off at the door. He walked halfway to his car, then turned around and came back. I waited in the threshold. Moonlight suited him. He came to stand right in front of me and said nothing. I said nothing.

  Then he leaned in and kissed me. Warm lips, warm body. I pressed myself against him, curious hands running over his back, feeling the shape of him under his clothes.

  He stood back, said, “Good night,” and went back to his car.

  I couldn’t stop smiling, even after his car had disappeared out of sight.

  Next morning, late, I came down for breakfast. While I waited for the toaster, I switched on my newly charged mobile phone. It beeped at me. I had four new messages.

  Already my heart was beating quicker.

  I dialed the message bank number, noticing that my hands were shaking.

  “Emma? Are you still on this number? Call me.” Josh.

  As I listened to the four messages, a narrative unfolded. Call me. Need to talk to you. Sarah and I have split; it wasn’t working. She’s not you. Call me, babe. I miss you. Call me. Call me.

  Call me.

  Dreams solidified into reality. Everything that had gone between—my accident, the inheritance, life at Wildflower Hill—grew as light and pale as tissue paper. There was no battle with conscience, there was no wondering if I was being a fool. There was only his voice, as I’d imagined it a thousand times, telling me to come home.

  I called him. I called London. I called my old life.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Beattie: London, 1965

  Beattie dropped her little case full of toiletries on the crisply made bed while Ray wrangled their two large suitcases through the door of the hotel room. They dragged on the thick brown carpet.