Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Present Day
Ivy’s head rang with the police officer’s call.
Standing in a panic in the center of the Autumn Festival, she blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of what she had to do next.
Elliot Rhodes, of all people, stood before her with a half-eaten whipped-cream dessert, his thick brow furrowed.
She could just barely make out his sturdy, deep voice as he asked, “What’s happening? Ivy, are you all right?”
Lily, Celia, Juliet, and Wren returned then with little chocolate chip cookies speckled with sea salt. Lily tried to hand Ivy one but soon realized she was nonresponsive. “Mom?” Lily demanded. “Mom, what’s going on?”
At the sound of her daughter’s voice, Ivy was startled back to reality.
“I have to go take care of something,” she said, taking a step away from her sisters and daughter and this handsome man who, for whatever reason, showed her the time of day.
She pictured Tyler in the kind of prison she only knew from movies: shackles, wet stones, and screaming in the distance. Had she raised a criminal?
Lily tore after Ivy, her questions urgent. “You have to tell me what’s going on.”
“Tyler got arrested,” Ivy murmured, praying she didn’t say it loud enough for the others to hear.
Lily’s lips formed a round O. Before she could respond, Elliot bungled toward them with a promise to do whatever he could to help them with whatever it was.
Before Ivy could stop her, Lily turned to look at Elliot, smacked her thighs, and said, “It’s my brother.
He’s going through this phase lately. I don’t know? Something happened, apparently.”
A phase? Tyler? Ivy felt her jaw drop with alarm.
She’d known that Tyler was moody and preferred to spend hours in his room alone rather than sitting with the family for dinner, but his grades hadn’t faltered.
He still did most of his chores. What was she missing?
Had the flower shop distracted her so much that she no longer saw her own son and his struggles?
Elliot took this news in stride. “How old is he?”
“He just turned seventeen,” Lily answered. “So I mean. He’s going through it.”
Elliot nodded sagely, as though being seventeen meant anything to him. Ivy wanted to scream. She wanted to tear all the plastic flowers from all the ridiculous autumnal decorative stands.
“Man, I remember being that age,” Elliot said, mostly to Ivy and with entirely too much kindness.
“I was a mess of hormones and fears. Do me a favor and go easy on him, okay? He’s probably in over his head with guilt.
Hating himself.” Elliot shrugged. More empathy than Ivy had ever seen echoed from his eyes.
But Ivy couldn’t fathom that the seventeen-year-old Elliot she’d known back in the early 2000s had been at all “over his head with guilt.” He’d had the beautiful Shelly and a promise of their future together.
He’d had the world at his fingertips. Was he making things up to make her feel better?
Did he secretly think she was a bad mother? Maybe she was!
“We’d better go,” Ivy said. She spun on her heel and fled the festival, headed for her car, which was still parked back at the house.
Lily chased her, her footsteps scraping against the concrete.
Ivy was grateful that she’d decided to come, although she had to fight herself from saying, “Don’t you want to run off and see your friends?
Maggie and Madeline? Don’t you want to run off and hatch a plan to leave home and go to college?
Don’t you want to run around and spread more gossip about us?
” But she felt too pathetic to say a thing.
In the car, speeding off for the station, Lily finally spoke.
“I’m sure it’s not a big deal,” she said hesitantly.
“We don’t know anything yet,” Ivy said.
“Tyler’s not crazy,” Lily assured. “He’s been hanging around some people he wants to impress, that’s all.”
Ivy flinched. “How do you know about that?” Lily wasn’t in high school any longer. It didn’t make sense that she’d have such knowledge about the goings-on there, did it?
As though she could read her mother’s mind, Lily said, “I’m still in town. I have plenty of friends still at the high school. And Tyler and I talk, Mom. I mean, I know what’s going on in his head, and it’s not always pretty. Not that it should be! Being alive is complicated.”
Ivy took a staggered breath. “Should I look into therapy?”
Every one of her bodily cells screamed that she couldn’t afford therapy! But maybe she could find something through their pathetic health insurance? Tyler’s health came first.
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “I don’t know if Tyler would open up like that. He’s, you know.” She stalled. “He’s more like you. He keeps things in. Mostly.”
Ivy squeezed her steering wheel till her knuckles hurt.
She couldn’t believe her daughter had just said that.
But then again, she couldn’t believe that Lily had told Elliot Rhodes that Tyler was in trouble.
Had she raised her daughter to be so open about family secrets?
What else was Lily belting out to the greater Bluebell Cove audience?
“Please, don’t tell strangers what’s going on with us,” Ivy couldn’t help but say.
Lily flared her nostrils. “Elliot obviously wants to help.”
“He doesn’t want to help. He’s like everyone else in Bluebell Cove. He wants to gossip about us. He wants to spill our secrets to the world.”
“Not everyone is like that,” Lily muttered.
But Ivy felt sure her daughter was wrong. She’d already lost the taste of Elliot’s dessert on her tongue. She felt empty.
All at once, they were at the police station.
Ivy raced from the car to the front door, which Lily caught before it closed on her.
There he was, her youngest boy, sitting hunched in a plastic chair to the right of the counter.
His dark hair hung in strings down his face, and his cheeks were blotchy, as though he’d been crying.
“Oh, Tyler,” Ivy breathed.
Her son flinched to look up at her. Rage and fear echoed from his eyes. But before he could answer, the same officer who’d called appeared. “Evening,” he said, his voice broad and flat. “Thanks for coming down. I know it means a lot to Tyler not to have to spend the night.”
Ivy’s heart felt cracked. She told herself that the officer was just putting on a show to frighten her son. That was what cops did on television shows.
“What happened?” Ivy asked.
“Vandalism, ma’am,” the officer said. “We picked Tyler and a few of his buddies up outside the high school. They had all kinds of paint on them. Spray paint and buckets. They hit the gym pretty hard. We think they were planning on hitting the football field after that.”
Ivy closed her eyes and, for some reason, found in her mind’s eye an image of toddler Tyler, finger painting in the sunny kitchen, laughing as he did it. How had they gotten here?
The officer explained that because this was Tyler’s first offense, he was only getting a warning.
The same couldn’t be said of his friends, who would have to put in some serious community service hours.
Ivy listened, her fists tight, until the officer cleared his throat, asked her to sign a few papers, and said they could go.
Tyler limped along beside her, looking more pathetic than she’d ever seen him. Lily wrapped her arm around him and whispered something in his ear, something Ivy couldn’t hear. When they got in the car, Ivy told herself not to lose it. She told herself to hold her tongue.
But suddenly, she burst with, “What on earth were you thinking?”
At this, Tyler could do nothing but cry. He couldn’t explain himself. Lily felt like a fool.
* * *
Back at home, they found Wren in the living room under a blanket, tired after too much time outside.
Graves’ disease still had a profound grip on her, it seemed.
But when she saw Tyler, she tapped the sofa seat next to her, urging him over.
Tyler shook his head and shot for the staircase.
A minute later, his mini speaker blared with a song that Lily didn’t recognize.
“What happened?” Wren asked, her eyes enormous.
Ivy dropped into the chair beside the sofa and put her face in her hands. Lily was still in the foyer, checking her phone and switching her weight. Obviously, she was needed elsewhere.
“Go on, honey,” Ivy said flatly. “You want to go, so just go.”
Lily looked like she’d been smacked. “Call me if you need anything?”
“Will do.” Ivy raised her chin and gave her daughter a look that meant now. So Lily turned on her heel and fled the house, headed back for the festival.
Wren and Ivy sat in silence, the television on mute but showing an eerie pharmaceutical commercial. It made Ivy feel insane.
“I think I might be in over my head,” Ivy admitted quietly.
Again, Wren asked for details about what happened tonight, and again, Ivy refused to give them. She couldn’t open up to Wren. She couldn’t open up to anyone. It was just as Lily said. She wondered if she was too broken to ever love again.
“Can I ask you a question?” Ivy asked. She couldn’t bring herself to look at her little sister.
“Of course.” Wren cupped her knees and waited.
Ivy felt the weight of her expectation on her shoulders. “Do you think Lily hates being here? Do you think she should go away to college?”
Wren was quiet for a little while, as though she wanted to be careful not to say the wrong thing.
“I hear her and Celia talking about it sometimes,” Ivy said. “I know Lily loves her Aunt Celia. And I know I should be grateful for that. But things here in Bluebell are breaking down. Things I need Lily’s help with.”
Wren’s voice was meek. “They’re your dreams, though, aren’t they?”
Ivy twisted her head to look at her sister. In the greenish light from the lamp, she looked entirely too sick and thin. It suddenly felt like they were fighting a losing battle against everything that tried to hurt them—everything from diseases to teenage angst.
“I stayed in Bluebell Cove,” Ivy warbled, reciting that same old refrain.
“Yes. But you also built your own reality here,” Wren said.
“The flower shop? That was your dream. Maybe Lily has her own version of a flower shop in her heart. And…” Wren wetted her lips.
“I don’t think she wants to go far. She wants to be able to drive home whenever she can.
Maybe she wants to set up her adult life here?
But the only sure thing that will push her out of your life is trying to cling to her now. You know?”
Ivy blew all the air from her lungs. She was surprised at how angry Wren’s words made her.
She needed to be stronger in the face of all this change.
Standing, she re-zipped her coat and headed for the front door.
“I’m headed to the shop for a little while,” she said.
But right before she opened the door and entered the frigid black night, she glanced back at her little sister and said, “I do appreciate your honesty, Wren. I mean, I want to appreciate it. Which is all I can really say right now.”
Wren nodded. “I know, Ivy. I love you. We all do.”
Ivy walked the entire route to the flower shop, taking care to draw a perimeter around the Autumn Festival.
The air was crisp and alive with the smell of bonfires, autumn drinks, and desserts.
Laughter rang out. Some of it belonged to Lily, she was sure.
Some of it also belonged to Celia and her new boyfriend, Landon.
Maybe right around now, Elliot was sharing a second dessert with some other woman, someone who could accept love and tenderness.
Standing on the corner, Ivy forced herself to see the flower shop for what it really was.
She saw the cracked edges of the window.
She saw the busted roof and the door, badly in need of repair and a fresh coat of paint.
She’d known the place needed TLC, that it needed money she didn’t have.
But Elliot was right—it was really worse for wear.
She couldn’t bring herself to go inside and see how bad it really was.
This, she suddenly realized, was why so many people had stopped buying flowers from her. Nobody wanted to enter a place that looked haunted. Nobody wanted to buy beautiful flowers from a woman who didn’t believe in love.