Chapter 9 #2
Ivy felt as though she was moving in slow motion.
She opened her lips to speak, then closed them again and took a breath.
In a sense, what Celia told her clicked everything into place.
Lily had been especially secretive lately, hardly telling Ivy anything about her days or her dreams. She’d gone to work at the eco-lodge and often eaten and hung out there, all while Ivy pretended to manage the flower shop.
She’d gotten so good at pretending to manage the flower shop that she’d created her own stress about managing the flower shop.
She often caught herself saying, "Christmas is one of our busiest times! " It had been true in the past.
“You should talk to her about it,” Celia urged.
“She’s sick to her stomach. She knows you want her to stay here.
She feels all this pressure on her shoulders.
But the truth is, she’s seen us through this transition.
She’s done what she set out to do. And she’s not afraid of this next step. We have to help her along.”
Ivy bowed her head and closed her eyes. She couldn’t believe that her older sister, the sister who’d abandoned her, was standing here, telling her what to do about her daughter.
She couldn’t believe she had the nerve. Slowly, she turned around, walked down the hallway, and appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, where she watched Lily and Tyler smearing frosting over Christmas cookies.
Lily stopped speaking abruptly when she spotted her mother.
“Mom,” Lily said, her smile falling. She knew that Ivy knew, now.
Ivy thought she was going to collapse. Her knees clacked against one another.
“I’m heading home,” Ivy said. She wanted to scream, to cry, to beg.
But she knew that none of it would force Lily to stay in Bluebell.
She knew that none of it would turn back time.
She walked to the lobby, where she put on her coat, left, and trudged through the snow.
When she reached her own living room, she sat on the same sofa where, a thousand years ago, Daniel used to sleep, with his fishy smell, and wake up when she turned on the channel.
She didn’t take off her coat. Instead, she rolled into a ball and felt sorry for herself.
Northeastern winds thrashed against her windows, threatening to tear the house from its foundation.
The front door suddenly burst open and brought in Tyler, of all people.
His cheeks were red from the cold, and he hadn’t bothered to put on his coat during his walk between the inn and the house.
He took off his shoes and sat on the sofa, on the other side of her feet.
He talked down to his shoes. “She needs this, Mom,” he said.
“She’s done enough for us. She’s going to suffocate. ”
Ivy felt as though everyone had had this conversation without her and had been searching for ways to clue her in. She rubbed the back of her neck. She felt a thousand years old.
“I know she needs this,” Ivy murmured. “I know that.”
But what about what I need? What is it that I need? Why is that question so difficult to answer?
“You have to let her,” Tyler said.
Ivy was quiet. She thought about how, in October, she’d decided not to punish Tyler for the vandalism that had gotten him picked up by the cops.
She hadn’t known how to handle him and had felt herself drifting away from him, unable to look him in the eye.
He looked so much like his father. He couldn’t possibly know how looking at him hurt her heart.
“Will you please just come back?” Tyler asked, his voice ragged. “We can’t celebrate Christmas without you.”
Ivy forced herself upright and peered across the sofa, across the living room, where, through the window, she could see the bright Christmas lights around the Christmas tree they’d only just set up together. She could still hear Christmas music, if only faintly, traveling on the wind outside.
“Please, Mom,” he said again. “We need you.”
Ivy wasn’t accustomed to hearing her son say anything so open and honest. It was true what Wren had said.
Ivy and Tyler were more alike than Ivy knew.
And perhaps because of this, she stood and followed Tyler back to the eco-lodge, where Sophie, Lily, Wren, Juliet, and Celia stood in the kitchen, surrounded by bottles of wine and bottles of soda, their faces expectant and nervous, as though they were sure that Ivy was a bomb about to go off.
Ivy reached for a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass, raising it to her sisters, her daughter, her niece, and her son. “It sounds like we have something to celebrate,” she said.
At this, Lily threw herself forward and wrapped Ivy in a hug. Ivy was so caught off guard that she nearly dropped her glass of wine. Lily’s tears stained her cheeks. “Thank you, Mom,” Lily breathed. “You don’t know what this means to me.”
That night for dinner, the Harper sisters and the children who were joining them decided on pizza: ten different flavors that ran the gamut of ham and sausage and chicken and black olives and hollandaise sauce and so on.
Together, the pizzas lined up on the counter seemed to represent the broadness of the Harper personalities.
Ivy slid her second slice on her plate, refilled her glass of wine and joined the others in the living room, where Sandra Bullock wandered through a bone-cold Chicago and fell in love with Bill Pullman.
For a little while, Ivy watched Lily’s face as she watched the film, a film she apparently loved.
Ivy wondered how her daughter had ever fallen in love with the concept of love, especially when she’d never really seen it at home herself.
Maybe Ivy hadn’t prepared Lily for the real world.
Again, her heart ached with fear about what awaited Lily out there.
She took a bite of pizza and told her head to stop spinning. Eventually, it did.