Chapter Forty-One
It felt surreal to Florence to be back in her old rooms again at Cliffhaven.
The last time she was here, three years before, she’d been mourning the passing of Doris.
At the time, she thought she’d never again know a grief so raw and harrowing, but she’d been wrong.
Astrid’s passing had gutted her. This time, a part of her was missing.
A part of her was gone, and she knew she’d never get it back. She’d never be whole again.
Charles had flown to Paris as soon as he’d heard the news of Astrid’s overdose.
Florence had come home from work to find Astrid still and unmoving in their bed, her lips tinged blue, her eyes vacant and staring.
Charles took care of closing out the apartment, arranged for the body to be flown back with them.
And he brought Florence home with him to Cliffhaven.
Scarlet was despondent at the funeral. She shrieked and fell to her knees when they lowered the coffin into the ground, and it took the strength of two men to pull her up again. She wept hysterically, and Florence’s heart couldn’t help but pinch at the glimmer of Astrid she saw in the display.
After the funeral, Florence wandered the halls vacantly, like a ghost. No one asked anything of her. She slept late and went to bed early and pushed the food around on her plate, barely eating.
After a while, Florence started to wonder if she really had become a ghost. People no longer tried to engage her in conversation when they saw her.
She wondered sometimes if they even saw her at all as she glided through the rooms of Cliffhaven silently.
It was almost like she wasn’t there, the way that people’s gazes slipped past her (or was it through her?).
One afternoon, she went into the library to get a book, and she saw them standing there, silent and still as statues.
Birdie, Charles’s wife, her hair swept back into a low chignon, and William Bass, standing over her.
Florence stopped instantly and breathed in sharply as the cold realization of what was happening washed over her.
Bass’s hand was on the top button of Birdie’s silk blouse, and he leaned toward her, possessively, and she toward him, as if they belonged to each other.
Birdie’s eyes drew toward Florence, reflexively, across the room.
But Birdie didn’t say anything, and her expression didn’t change when she saw her watching them.
Bass leaned forward and kissed Birdie’s neck, and, after a moment, Birdie closed her eyes.
Florence retreated from the room, as quietly as she had come.
A few months later, Scarlet Towers died silently in her sleep.
She was only forty-seven. The medical examiner said there was nothing wrong with her, aside from the fact that she was dead.
But nobody was surprised by her passing or questioned its cause.
It was obvious that Scarlet had died of a broken heart.
Three years passed at a pace that felt, to Florence, impossibly slow and, at the same time, much too fast. Suddenly (or so it seemed to Florence), her old companion Verity—her first playmate, the girl with whom she had shared the nursery and been tutored side by side—had graduated from college, married, and had a son.
Florence could barely recognize her old playmate anymore—Verity had grown tall and lean, leggy and lithe.
Gone was the round face Florence had known so well, the pudgy hand that had held hers in the dark of the night when the strange noises of the old house settling around them had seemed the hungry grumbles of a monster’s belly.
Verity had grown chic, with her hair cropped short and oversize sunglasses, her brightly colored shift dresses and her chunky knit sweaters worn over button-down shirts and stirrup pants.
She had landed a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City, and she had married a stockbroker named Francis Gordon, who, while he himself was rather plain looking, owned an attractive brownstone on the Upper West Side.
At the christening party for their son, Hugh, which Birdie hosted at Cliffhaven, Florence looked across the room full of guests she only half recognized and wondered where the time had gone.
How had she not changed at all, while the rest of the world went on around her?
It was like she was wading through a vat of molasses, her movements sloth-like, her progress slow, even though it felt to her as if she were exerting far too much effort to have traveled so little distance in such a length of time.
It was amazing to her that simply existing with no real purpose other than to make it from one day to the next could be so exhausting.
The raw pain and emotion she had felt for the first few months after Astrid’s passing had settled into a low, throbbing ache below her ribs.
A constant presence, but one that was not as all-consuming as it once had been.
Florence could feel Charles’s eyes on her from across the room, even though her back was to him.
She’d felt him looking at her all day. It was as if, somehow, this milestone of Verity’s had called attention to her in the most unexpected and unwelcome way.
Verity’s achievements threw into stark relief Florence’s lack thereof.
Verity had an education, a profession, a marriage, a child.
A place in the world. While Florence was like a spinning top—constantly moving but always staying in the same place.
It raised the uncomfortable question: What to do about Florence?
It was a suffocating question. It made Florence’s head dizzy to think about.
Florence left her drink on the side table and meandered down the hall to the library, away from the hum of the party. She ran her hand across the spines of the books in their cases and settled into the leather sofa by the fireplace.
She heard his voice before she saw him.
“Not enjoying the party?” Charles asked.
“Just getting some air,” Florence said.
“Can I join you?”
“Please,” Florence said, motioning to the empty seat next to her.
Charles sat. For a moment, they just looked at each other.
“I know these past couple years must have been quite hard for you,” Charles said. “Seeing Verity get married, become a mother.”
Florence picked at the hem of her dress. “Not really,” she lied. “I don’t think I’ll ever do those things.” This part, at least, was the truth. She said it practically, matter-of-factly, without an ounce of emotion. “They’re just not what I imagined for myself.”
“Birdie thought you might want to go east for school,” Charles said.
Here it was, then. The time had come. She’d worn out her welcome.
“We could help you, if that’s what you wanted,” Charles went on. “I’m close with the dean at Wellesley, and, of course, Birdie has ties at Vassar. We could help with your lodging and tuition and then get you settled after, wherever you wanted to go.”
Florence’s heart ached. It was ironic, what he was offering her.
It was the kind of offer Astrid would have leaped at and exactly the thing that Florence dreaded.
Maybe everyone was cursed to want the thing they could not have.
Or maybe they only wanted it because they couldn’t have it, and that was the curse?
Her whole life, Astrid had longed for an open door, the opportunity to go and be whatever she wanted, to separate herself from her family.
But all Florence had ever wanted was to stay at Cliffhaven, to be accepted into the Towers family fold.
Astrid had been hedged in her whole life, desperate to get out.
And all her life, Florence had been desperate to be let in.
“That is a very generous offer,” Florence said.
“But then, you’ve always been generous, and very kind, to me, Charles.
I hope you won’t find it impertinent of me to say, but I’m not like Verity, with her grand ambitions to go out into the world and make something of herself.
I’m not like Astrid either—I don’t have a passion for art or dance; I don’t need to create something.
I’ve always been a creature who is firmly rooted in people and place.
I want to be here. I want to make myself useful here. ”
She’d never been able to be so honest with Scarlet, but the past few years had changed her. Besides, she’d always looked up to Charles as a big brother.
Charles looked relieved. “I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said. “I thought it would be selfish of me to ask you to stay. I thought it might be hard for you to be here, after all that’s happened.”
Florence nodded. “It is,” she said. “But it would be harder for me not to be here, if that makes any sense.”
“It does,” Charles said. For a moment, he looked deep in thought. “I will have to run this by Birdie, of course,” he said. “But—” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Birdie is expecting,” he said, very seriously.
For a moment Florence sat there, waiting for him to finish. Expecting what? And then, it dawned on her: a baby.
“Oh,” Florence said, unable to hide the shock from her voice.
“Yes,” Charles said. “It surprised me as well. She’s due at the end of the summer.”
“I’m—I’m very happy for you,” Florence said, but in her mind, she saw Bass’s face—Bass, leaning into Birdie in the library, kissing her neck.
“Thank you,” Charles said. “We will need someone to look after the baby—a nanny. Birdie doesn’t want to take much time away from her charities or the foundation. It would be such a comfort to me—and I’m sure Birdie will agree—to have someone close to us, someone we really trust, in that role.”
He looked at Florence, and Florence understood.
“I don’t know anything about babies,” Florence said.
“I saw how you looked after Granny Doris when she was sick,” Charles said. “And the way you cared for Astrid. You have a nurturer’s heart, Florence. You’d be a natural.”
Florence wavered—it was never a role she had envisioned for herself, but then again, here was a way forward, a way to make herself useful and needed at Cliffhaven. A way to stay.
“Okay,” Florence said. “Yes. Of course.”
Birdie gave birth to Saoirse early one late-summer day at Cliffhaven.
Florence was the first to hold her after the doctor pulled her from between Birdie’s legs, red faced and squalling.
Florence clasped her gently to her chest and marveled at the existence of her.
Impossibly small. Impossibly soft. Still covered in the thin film of vernix from the womb.
Florence moved into the nanny’s quarters off the nursery, her days fading into a delirious haze of bottle feedings, changing cloth diapers, baths, and rocking Saoirse back and forth in the chair next to her crib, her downy head lilting against Florence’s chest as she fought off impending sleep.
Saoirse curled her hand around Florence’s index finger, and Florence could almost burst with how full she felt—how content, how happy, even.
Florence read to Saoirse from picture books as Saoirse cooed and pawed at the pages with her pudgy fingers.
When Saoirse could crawl, Florence went down onto her knees with her on the nursery floor, played at blocks and Barbies, made choo choo noises while dragging a toy train across the carpet.
Florence stitched up the baby blanket that Saoirse wore to threads, the one she couldn’t sleep without, and checked under her bed for monsters before turning out the light.
When Saoirse had a nightmare, it was Florence she called out for in the middle of the night—“Tabby, Tabby, my Tabby”—Saoirse’s first word she ever spoke after “No.”
Charles was a frequent visitor to the nursery, leaning over Saoirse’s crib to tuck her in, putting her onto his shoulders, and bouncing her around the room during playtime.
Florence would watch them from her chair, but she could never bring herself to tell him what she knew, the truth that simmered beneath the surface.
She wondered if time would lay bare the sins of Saoirse’s mother—if, as she grew, Saoirse’s light hair would settle into a vibrant blond, if her chin, the arch of her nose, might betray her.
Time could bear witness, Florence decided, but she would not, could not, bring herself to do it. She loved the child too much to ever harm her, even with the truth.