by Kris Radish
It is a work of art, Emma agrees, as Stephie snags her for a final inspection just moments before Robert and Marty are about to flee for their night at a coastal resort.
“Can you believe this day?” Stephie asks, leaning up against the orange, black, red and yellow crepe paper flowers she has helped stick all over Robert’s car windows. “It’s like some kind of wild fiesta that’s on crack.”
“Forget the crack,” Emma corrects her. “I’m thinking mainlining heroin between the toes and under the armpits.”
“You know, this is the kind of stuff I tell my friends about and they do think I’m on crack,” Stephie shares, standing next to her and crossing her arms in exactly the same way.
“They’re jealous because they probably hold their family reunions at little restaurants and are home before dark,” Stephie adds, then lets out a huge breath and leans her head against Emma’s shoulder.
Emma puts her arm around Stephie and feels the weight of the day fold around both of them like a blanket. She’s finally tired, more like exhausted, and yet she also feels exhilarated.
This is what the choosing is all about, she realizes.
“Did you know?” Stephie asks.
“Know what?” Emma asks, not daring to move an inch lest this magic Stephie moment burst.
“That they were going to get married.”
“Not a clue.”
“I guess we are all dumbasses.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, come on, Auntie Em. They went away, to that island together. They have been inseparable and it’s time Grandma like, you know, got on with the rest of her life.”
“What do you think she was doing with her life till now?”
“Not waiting,” Stephie tells her. “But kind of waiting while she ran the rest of the world.”
But.
But Stephie says she looks so darn happy and so beautiful and then Stephie says she hopes to God she gets the good-looking-grandma genes so she can look that hot when she’s in her seventies.
“That’s all that matters, isn’t it?” Stephie asks, lifting up her head.
“Looking hot?”
“No, silly. Being happy. That’s the most important thing.”
“You’ve got it.” Emma is amazed that Stephie knows something so important at such a young age. “It’s nice to be loved and to love, too.”
“Then I’m in already,” Stephie declares planting a huge wet kiss on Emma’s cheek just as Marty and Robert come racing up to the car, looking as if they cannot wait to kick off their wedding shoes and leave the wild party behind.
The party, it seems, is following them to the car and Robert quickly flags down his new granddaughters and says it’s time to hit the road.
The bouquet, everyone starts to shout, looking for the flowers Marty doesn’t have, as Marty stands with one hand on the back door and the other on her hip as if she’s daring the crowd to keep yelling.
The bouquet! The bouquet!
Then Marty remembers she didn’t order a bouquet but instead donated the money they would have spent on flowers to the food pantry. But Marty Gilford hates to disappoint. She thinks fast, which has always been one of her many, many strong traits and quickly unravels the long white silk scarf from around her neck. She’ll use that instead of the bouquet.
“Back up,” she orders Emma.
Emma backs into the crowd and Marty raises her hands while Robert looks at her as if he has just won the grand prize in the biggest lottery ever held in the United States of America.
“Woo-hoo!” Marty shouts, waving the scarf as if it is a long rodeo rope.
Then she turns in a circle three times and stops so that she is once again looking right into Emma’s eyes.
And she does not so much toss as throw the scarf right into Emma’s face so it is impossible for Emma not to catch it.
And when Emma opens her eyes again she sees Marty smiling at her as if she too has just won the lottery and before she drops down to get into the backseat she says, “There you go, Emma Gilford.”
Then Emma turns and Susie Dell and Erika are standing right next to her like bodyguards.
“Emma, Susie and I have to tell you something. Something kind of big. It’s about Samuel.”
As her mother’s final words bounce through her head, Emma stands in Marty and Robert’s car exhaust fumes and listens.
28
THE TWENTY-EIGHTH QUESTION:
What do you see when you close your eyes?
IT IS VERY LATE, OR VERY EARLY, depending on how you look at it, when Emma dives into the center of an outrageous cluster of flowers called red hot pokers, lies flat on her back, tips her head, moves her arms and legs out as if she is making a snow angel like she remembers making that one time when Marty drove them all night to Tennessee where there had been a freak snowstorm, and asks herself what she sees when she closes her eyes.
It is three-thirty in the morning and while she waits for her eyelids to flutter closed Emma swears she can still hear people singing and dancing at the wedding reception, which is entirely possible. It is a total wonder no one has been arrested. Perhaps the only thing that has kept that from happening is the fact that almost all of the people who live next to the park were invited to the wedding by wise Marty.
It is also a total wonder that Emma was able to keep standing after Susie Dell and Erika told her what they had done.
Their confession was like a shotgun blast to the temple and Emma was still absolutely uncertain what to do about the hole in her head.
Susie Dell finally confessed that she had temporarily stolen the photo of Emma and Samuel so that she could ask Erika to help track him down. It was supposed to be a surprise, she explained, inviting Samuel to the reunion. And it almost happened, until Samuel missed one plane and then another and ended up right back where he started.
Speechless, Emma had teetered on the brink of being either pissed off or enormously grateful that someone had done something that she has been too terrified to do herself.
“We were just trying to help. And we both realize we may have gone too far, but it also seems obvious to us that you still love Samuel, Emma, and that he loves you. He told us he’s called you nine times, by the way,” Erika told her as Emma continued to stand frozen. “I just thought we had to tell you because he will call again, and he won’t give up this time.”
This time.
As she closes her eyes now, Emma sees nothing at first but darkness and an occasional white floater that crosses under her eyelids and then doubles back in the same direction like a frightened spider. She lets go of the tension in her shoulders and eases her neck. She wills her legs to relax and pushes her back into the ground to spread out the aching muscles in her shoulders and she lifts her fingers so they can run up the deliciously long palm-like leaves of one of the most outrageous, wild and flashy plants in her entire yard.
Red hot pokers are gloriously showy. Emma’s boisterous batch of pokers are red on the top and yellow on the bottom and have always reminded Emma of miniature Christmas trees and of course her own showy mother. They rise out of their soft beds of palms on long green stems as if they are looking around to make certain that every other flower in the joint is watching them. They multiply because they like themselves so much, Emma thinks, and she is also beyond certain that they are always saying, “The more the merrier. Let’s take over this whole damn yard.” And they would if Emma did not thin them out, which is as painful to her as sending a child to a time-out corner in the house, withholding allowance, or grounding a high school daughter for coming home late three nights in a row. The weeded sisters are never tossed to their deaths but are now in gardens and parks and in every yard of just about every Gilford this side of the Mississippi.
Emma’s recent batch of blooming perennial pokers is especially brilliant and looks as if it will be blooming well into late summer and maybe even fall, which is especially wonderful, and as she is lying with her eyes closed, an
d her hands tickling their strong stems, it finally dawns on her that these flowers, too, are part of her family.
Doesn’t she keep flower records like some people record a baby’s first smile, the best laugh, those adorable first steps? Doesn’t she watch them each day out the windows as if she were waiting for a teenager to come home from a date and then make out under the porch light? She plans for their futures, talks to them, and often when she looks at them she can feel her heart skipping a beat. She thinks about them when she is gone, worries about them in storms, hopes nothing bad or evil will ever happen to them, and that when she returns they will be as happy to see her as she is to see them.
This realization does not paralyze Emma or make her want to jump up and consult a psychotherapist. This sudden burst of knowledge makes her happy. What she sees behind her dark eyelids is what her gardens will look like in late summer, all the brilliant blossoms blending into a unique chorus of visual beauty that she knows is her seasonal graduation party.
Yes, she has photographs of her gardens in full bloom that she lovingly leaves on her living room coffee table, and behind her desk at work is an expensively framed photograph of herself squatting in her yard the very first summer every single plant went into full bloom.
And not one person has ever thought the photographs, her gardens or the horticultural side of her life was terribly odd. Well, not that odd, anyway. It does help that one of the production workers knows a woman who legally married her cat; that the CEO of the company is obsessed with bathroom cleanliness to the point of having changed the locks in his restroom so he is the only one who can get inside; that a woman who works part-time in the graphic arts department still fervently collects Beanie Babies; that three guys in the design department, who claim not to be gay, just pooled their money to buy a “guesthouse” in Key West; and that a well-respected botany researcher has recently discovered that some plants actually communicate with each other.
My plant thing, Emma tells herself, is a good thing.
Emma knows, however, that even as she has settled her place with her sisters and finally accepted responsibility for her life choices and decisions, Samuel and his messages and the parlayed declaration of his love is a puzzle piece that has not yet found its place.
She also knows that in just a few more hours it’s likely that her newest sister will drill her yet again about Samuel, because she has agreed to meet Susie Dell for brunch.
They have a list of shared questions that have them wondering. Where will Robert and Marty live? If they sell one house what happens to the second one? Will they travel? Will their families blend together as smoothly as they did during the reception?
Suddenly the questions don’t really seem to matter so much because all she can see now with her eyes closed is her mother, who would most likely be telling her to stop worrying so damn much, and to run like a frisky deer in Samuel’s direction, and to forget about the rest of the questions.
And so many of the strange events from the past several weeks and the months before that, when Marty must have met Robert and started to fall in love, all make sense—as if the first-ever canceled Gilford brunch was not the biggest clue of the century. There was Marty’s recent admittance of exhaustion. All the extra things she started asking Emma to do that made Emma want to divorce her family. The trip to her father’s garden. Marty’s oblivion when it came to Joy’s drinking problem. The clues, in retrospect, seem endless and obvious.
Marty was getting ready to cede her royal Gilford family matriarch crown so that she could switch gears even more finally.
Emma is so longing to see beyond the darkness and into the future.
She is so longing to preview film clips of the next day, the next month, a year from now.
She is so longing to escape the intervention with Joy.
She is so longing to assess the surge of power she felt when her mother told her she no longer wanted to be in charge all of the time.
She is so longing to finish the conversation she started with Janet about her and Susie Dell’s idea to start a business together.
When Marty and Robert drove away from the wedding, which was nothing short of a miracle considering half the empty beer cans in the state of South Carolina were tied to the car’s back bumper, Emma felt her heart move as if someone with a very large hand had come up and bashed her in the chest. She stopped breathing. Her ribs ached. She had to lean into Erika and she spontaneously started crying as if she had just sliced open an onion the size of a basketball. She knew, absolutely knew, if she had to do anything but wave, she would drop over.
She was certain that she would cry so long and so hard that she would still be crying when she got home and would never have to water her garden again, and that even as she was thrilled for her mother’s happiness, she would be devastated by all the changes that would surely occur now, one after another.
This after chastising herself for being such an ass just weeks ago when she was rude to her mother, when she complained about her familial obligations, when she was thinking every fifteen seconds about what her life might be like if a relative did not call her and ask her to do something as if she were a personal assistant and did not have a life of her own—when all the time she had a life that she had simply forgotten to claim.
Now here she was in her garden, not crying.
Emma expected to close her eyes and physically feel yards of distance between her and her mother erupt like one of those coastal storms that pushes west and rides through the Carolinas like a land-based riptide.
But instead she felt a lightness that kept making her laugh out loud and she was certain it was not from the four cans of beer and the three glasses of champagne she had consumed over a fifteen-hour period.
Behind her eyes she now sees her mother laughing and the way she looked at Robert when he leaned in to kiss her. She sees her mother graciously hugging what seemed like three thousand cousins, in-laws, nephews and great-nieces and dancing very, very slowly with a man who must have just gotten out of the hospital with a new hip. Marty is bent over the grandma who was in her wedding party and then they are kissing and hugging. There she is embracing Susie Dell, and no doubt telling her that she will always be welcome, that her level of love has just been multiplied and that she must, of course, ignore all the rude and insane comments her new siblings make.
She sees her mother pushing up against her so that their arms touched when Emma sat on the bench by her father’s garden and sobbed for everything she had missed. Then there she is with her head tipped back and that wild laugh that makes birds turn in midair to see if they are being followed by a new and very wild species.
The video that is playing in her head is not the one that Emma expected. She so wanted to see the clips of the future, thought she would lie in a pool of her own tears and examine, not just her conscience, but the plans her mother has made and so delightfully carried out. She expected to be paralyzed by the thought that Marty wouldn’t be there every single minute to nag her to cut her hair or buy the reunion balloons or wash her dishes or run an errand for Joy or Debra.
But Emma isn’t paralyzed. She’s happy as her red hot pokers dance around her head and she thinks that if she does not get out of her garden very soon, the early morning birds are going to start landing on her face.
When Emma does open her eyes she moves slowly at first. She wobbles to her feet, stretches, and watches the almost forgotten white silk scarf that Marty tossed to her when she left the reception float to the ground as it slips off her neck. Emma gently picks it up and raises it to her face.
It smells like her mother—an earthy, sweet scent that wraps itself around Emma before she can lace the scarf back around her own neck. This is when Emma realizes with certainty that there is absolutely no distance between her and her mother at all. This is when she knows that the answers to the questions she has been asking for so very long have been resting inside of her all along. This is when the new portal inside of her heart t
hat opened when her sisters confessed their total and undying love for her opens up even wider. And she thinks she knows something else.
She thinks she knows.
Almost.
Even as she races towards the house and realizes she has not bothered to check her answering machine for two days and is deeply, hopelessly terrified that there will not now be a message from Samuel.
More terrified than she was before the family reunion when she hoped he would never call her again.
29
THE TWENTY-NINTH QUESTION:
Can you please cut off the back half of this dress?
STEPHIE RUSHES INTO EMMA’S KITCHEN so fast it’s a wonder she does not go right through the far wall and take out three windows. As she screeches to a halt, all Emma can see is a sea of lime green as the prom dress and soon-to-be-Miss-Higgins formal attire, is waved in front of her as Stephie wails, “Can you please cut off the back half of this dress?”
The lime green prom dress looks like an artifact from a Charleston side-street used-clothing store that makes most of its money during the month of October when everyone is looking for trick-or-treat costumes.
Stephie holds up the dress, which is so bright Emma worries it could blind someone, and suddenly it’s twenty-five years ago and she is shopping for this very dress with Marty who is struggling not just with the color, but with the low-cut neckline, the slit up one side, and the fact that her baby is actually going to wear this garment in public.
The mere sight of the lime dress now sparks a momentary time-travel experience for Emma that makes her entire world stand still.
Emma had been looking for a prom dress for three weeks and in those three weeks Marty took her not just to every prom dress store in Charleston and Higgins, but possibly every store in the entire state of South Carolina. Emma kept insisting she wanted a dress that would not be like a dress every other girl at the senior prom would be wearing.