Chapter 4
Chapter Four
It wasn’t till Daniel drove Ivy and baby Lily home from the hospital that Ivy heard what happened to Daniel and where he’d been when she’d gone into labor.
Infant Lily was in the car seat Ivy had brought several months ago, tucked in and fast asleep, and Ivy couldn’t help but spin back to look at her, watching as Daniel drove them the twenty minutes back to Bluebell Cove.
“It was chaos,” Daniel explained, clutching the steering wheel and scowling out the front window.
“I mean, one minute, the sky was clear, and the next? The storms came on fast. I had to sail my way to the coast and tie up the boat. I took refuge in a little shack that hasn’t been used in years.
I mean, it was grim. I wasn’t sure how to get word back to the other fishermen. ”
“That must have been frightening,” Ivy said, although she couldn’t look at him while she said it. Something about the story felt off to her, crooked. But she was too tired to fight with him. She was always too tired to fight with him.
“Yeah. The storm went on for hours. Eventually, I fell asleep. You know how hard it’s been for me to sleep lately.
It was almost like a blessing, as crazy as that sounds.
When I woke up, the sky was clear, and I sailed back to the docks.
A few guys were floored that I made it back.
They said I had to get to the hospital right away.
They were like, ‘We thought you were gone for good.’ I couldn’t fathom that.
I felt like that guy from the story who sleeps for a thousand years. ”
“Rip Van Winkle?” Ivy asked. “I don’t think he slept that long.”
“Whatever his name is,” Daniel said. He’d never been one for stories or facts.
Ivy’s heart felt black and blue from hours of labor, and her body felt ravaged. She forced herself to look at her husband, at the father of her baby, and she smiled at him. “I’m glad you made it in time for the birth,” she said. “I don’t know what Lily and I would have done without you.”
She wondered where Elliot had gone when Daniel arrived. She wondered if he’d waited in the waiting room to learn if she was all right.
She wondered if Daniel had asked Elliot to go, deeming it inappropriate. She could imagine that, she supposed. Her heart felt dim.
Daniel parked in the driveway of their house and hurried around the truck to help Ivy pull the car seat from the back seat.
Slowly, she walked up the front steps and entered the house, the same house her mother and father had brought her and her sisters back home to, and where she’d been raised.
The nursery was waiting upstairs, freshly painted and bright with sunshine.
She pulled the curtains and willed her baby to keep sleeping for a little while.
She collapsed in the little daybed she’d put in the nursery, praying that everything would be all right.
She couldn’t manage Daniel’s needs right now. She could barely keep herself afloat. The baby was all that mattered right now.
The next few days were a blur of nursing, of finding a rhythm and accepting gift after gift from members of the community.
Ivy’s father came by a few times to say hello and dote on the baby.
Wren, who was a teenager and still living in the house that Ivy and Daniel had taken over after their wedding, was mostly with friends, although she often came home to make Ivy dinner and clean up.
Daniel, of course, had to work. He woke up every morning at three thirty, drank an entire pot of coffee, often ate a ton of bacon and eggs, and sped off for the docks, where he sailed over the black and thrashing ocean to catch pounds and pounds of fish.
When he returned, he frequently smelled so wretched that Ivy insisted he shower before he went near the baby.
She wondered if Lily was already associating that fishy smell with her father, a gruff man who clearly didn’t know what to do with an infant.
He’s the father of my child, Ivy often reminded herself. He’s the man I love.
The fact that Elliot Rhodes had been the one to drive Ivy to the hospital when Daniel had been missing came up exactly once.
They were on the back porch of their place, hosting James and Wren for grilled fish, potato salad, watermelon, and cheesecake.
Baby Lily was asleep upstairs, with her monitor on full blast so Ivy could run up when needed.
It was a pleasant evening, sixty-five degrees, with a gentle breeze fluttering the cedar leaves.
“So, Daniel…” James used the rough tone he so often did when he spoke to men. “How did it feel to come back from the dead?”
Daniel let out a strange laugh. He should have been accustomed to James’s moods by now, but Ivy knew he wasn’t, that perhaps he never would be.
“I guess you’re referring to one of the scariest nights of my life,” Daniel said. “I almost missed the birth of my first daughter. I don’t take it lightly.”
“No, I imagine you don’t,” James said, leaning over the table. His eyes were fiery. “You know who had to take my daughter to the hospital, don’t you?”
Daniel clenched his jaw. Ivy wanted to tell her father to calm down, to keep his trauma or whatever it was to himself. But James couldn’t be stopped.
“It was kind of Elliot to drive me,” Ivy stammered. “He happened to be coming down the stairs when I went into labor. He was more frightened than I was. Probably I should have told him to wait till Daniel came back.”
“You’d been told that Daniel was missing,” her father interjected. And then he pressed it. “Where were you on the coast, exactly, Daniel? I know that coastline like the back of my hand.”
Daniel told him the precise coordinates of where he’d had to tie up his boat during the storm. He explained the shack where he’d taken refuge. James still looked irate, as though he’d decided that he wasn’t sure he believed him but didn’t know how to prove that Daniel was lying.
At that moment, Lily began to cry upstairs, and Ivy excused herself.
Wren hustled behind her, following like a shadow.
Ivy sat on the daybed in the nursery with her baby in her arms, feeling Wren’s gaze on her.
Wren was six years younger than she was, sixteen years old, and no longer a child.
She saw the animosity between their father and Daniel. She saw everything.
“Do you think Daniel’s lying about where he was when you went into labor?” Wren asked, crossing her arms hesitantly.
“What?” Ivy scowled at her little sister, even as her heart thumped. “No. Don’t let Dad get to you. He never trusts anyone.”
Wren remained in the nursery as Ivy nursed the baby. Ivy wanted to tell her to go, to leave Ivy alone in her sorrow and loneliness. But Wren seemed unwilling to give this up.
“Do you think Daniel wanted to be a dad so soon?” Wren asked.
Ivy scowled at Wren. “What do you mean by ‘so soon’? We’ve been married for a couple of years. Plenty of people have kids at twenty-two.”
“Sure. Yeah.” Wren scratched the back of her neck. “I hope he’s helping you enough? I mean, I know you said you’re going to go back to the inn soon. I know you need the money.”
“He’s helping,” Ivy said, although the truth was she hadn’t ever seen Daniel change one of Lily’s diapers, and he’d never woken up to help get her to sleep. “But his main priority is his job. It had to be.”
Wren made a face that indicated she couldn’t possibly understand the dramas of adults.
“You’ll understand when you have kids,” Ivy said, using an expression that countless people had said to her when she was younger. She’d always resented it.
She saw that Wren resented it, too. But as Wren traipsed back downstairs to escape her, Ivy’s heart throbbed with sorrow that she couldn’t communicate what was really on her mind.
She wondered if her own mother had gone through these feelings of loneliness when she’d raised her four daughters.
She wondered if James had been any help at all.
* * *
A benefit of giving birth at the end of May was that Maine was simply gorgeous during the late spring and summertime.
During the months that Ivy wasn’t yet needed back at the inn, she’d set her baby in the stroller and go for long, sunny walks, making note of every changing tree, every blossoming flower, and every new development across Bluebell Cove.
Bluebell Covers were pleased to see her out and about and were always eager to hold baby Lily.
“Aren’t you both gorgeous! Aren’t you looking so well!
” Plenty of people were fine to comment on Ivy’s body, which Ivy resented without knowing how to ask them to stop.
But Ivy let them hold Lily, feeling a tug at her heartstrings, anxious about handing her baby away to so many others. Lily took kindly to them. She was a social baby, curious and eager to be in the world. Maybe she was already more social than Ivy ever had been.
When Lily was six weeks old, Ivy turned down a street she often didn’t walk down and found a curious sight.
Standing at the corner was an older woman Ivy wasn’t familiar with, with bright white hair and an old-fashioned dress.
She swept her stoop and adjusted what looked to be a FOR SALE sign in the front window.
As Ivy drew closer, she realized the shop for sale was a flower shop.
Its interior was lined with gorgeous flower arrangements and plants for private gardens.
An intoxicating scent wafted from the door.
Something forced Ivy to stop in front of the flower shop. The older woman stopped sweeping and smiled at Ivy and her baby.
“Hello,” she said. “Would you like to buy some flowers?”
Ivy nodded. “I would love to.”
Ivy pushed the stroller into the soft darkness of the flower shop, where she set the stroller up in the corner and inspected the numerous bouquets.
Lily was fast asleep. The older woman peered at the baby before whispering, “I haven’t seen a baby that small in a long time.
Look at how tiny she is. She hardly knows a thing about the world. ”
Ivy smiled gently. She waited for the woman to ask to hold her and was grateful when she didn’t.
She selected a bouquet of lilies and roses and baby’s breath, marveling that she’d never bought flowers for herself before.
She adored them. And it wasn’t like Daniel made it a habit to buy flowers for her.
She couldn’t remember the last time he had.
“Why are you selling the flower shop?” Ivy asked as she paid for the bouquet.
The older woman smiled sadly. “I opened this place when I was a young widow,” she said.
“I poured my life into it. My life after my husband passed, I mean. It saved my life. I’ve made what feels like millions of bouquets.
I saw Bluebell Covers through birthdays, weddings, and funerals.
I saw people through the textures of time.
Oh, but I’m old now. I can’t stand for very long without giving in to the pain.
I hate it! But my sister’s in Florida and invited me to come live with her.
I suppose it’ll be a good chance to change my life.
Maybe I’ll be the kind of woman who reads magazines on the beach.
Perhaps I’ll go on one of those long Florida boats that take you through the swamp!
I’ll take a picture of an alligator.” The woman laughed.
Ivy couldn’t help but feel pleased with the woman, with her humor and her wit.
“My family owns the Bluebell Cove Inn,” she explained.
“I understand how stressful it is to own your own business. Well, I’ve always known what it’s like to watch as someone else takes on the brunt of the stress.
” She didn’t point out that often, her father tried to shove that stress onto her.
“You would do things differently at the inn?” the woman asked. “If it were yours and yours alone?”
Ivy considered this, surprised that the woman had gleaned that from what she’d said. “I suppose so, yes. A part of me has always dreamed of opening my own place.”
The woman’s eyes glinted. “You like this flower shop, don’t you?”
Ivy laughed. “I do. It’s really beautiful. It makes me daydream in a way I haven’t in a long time. Having a child means I barely dream at all.”
“That won’t do!” the woman said. “Now is the time to dream as much as you possibly can. You have to have doubly big dreams now that your daughter’s here. She has to feel how big your dreams are so that she can invent some of her own.”
Ivy’s heart filled. For the first time, she wondered what her mother had dreamed of before her death. She wondered if she’d really wanted to manage an inn with an angry man named James—or if she’d yearned for something else, some other story that Ivy couldn’t have fathomed.
Ivy wondered if her mother had felt backed into a corner by her own decisions, by all the children she’d chosen to have and love. It often felt like the worst curse of humanity that you were only allowed to live one version of your life.
“I don’t know if my husband would go for it,” Ivy said finally, letting her eyes flutter to the ground.
“Ah, the husband conundrum,” the older woman said sadly.
Ivy felt an apology on her tongue. How could she be so tactless? This woman had lost her husband years and years ago. She likely ached for the life they’d built together.
“I was devastated when he died,” the older woman said. “I had to banish all ideas of what we were going to do together and make up my own story. My story was about this flower shop! I wonder what yours would be, if you didn’t have to ask someone’s permission to do what you wanted?”
Ivy was caught off guard so much that she took a step back and nearly dropped her bouquet.
“Forgive me, honey,” the older woman said, her eyes spitting light. “I’m at the end of my time in Bluebell Cove, which means I’m saying a lot of what’s on my mind. I don’t know if it’s always best.”
Ivy told her it was all right, of course.
She placed the bouquet on the stroller and wheeled sleeping Lily out onto the sidewalk, where she waved goodbye to the older woman and hurried back to her side of town.
All the way home, tears threatened to spill from her eyes.
She had no idea where they’d come from, nor how to get rid of them.
But when she walked into her front door and heard Daniel’s sports channel, and smelled Daniel’s fishy smell, and realized that it was up to her to make dinner, tend to the baby, and keep their house afloat forever, she pushed all thoughts of the flower shop to the side.
It couldn’t be her dream. She knew that.