Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
It was October, the week before Tyler’s first birthday, and not long before the Bluebell Cove Autumn Festival.
The flower shop was burdened with countless orders for birthday bouquets and flower arrangements for the festival, autumnal wedding bouquets, and boutonnieres for the high school’s fall dance.
There were even a few funeral arrangements for older folks from the community—tasks that Ivy performed solemnly, knowing these felt to the living like final gifts to the dead.
She felt grateful that so many people in Bluebell Cove trusted her like this.
The flower shop had even been cited as one of the “best new businesses” in the community of Bluebell Cove, lending more proof to Ivy that, in opening the flower shop, she’d done the right thing for herself and her life.
When she told Daniel about the praise, he grumbled and left the room.
But it wasn’t like that conversation was much different from most of theirs of late. He was a stranger.
At the end of a smog-blue day about two months ago, Daniel had confessed “everything,” or his version of everything.
He explained that he’d quit his college classes and spent nearly every day of summer vacation drinking beer and fishing.
This was no surprise to Ivy, who’d opened every bill from his community college and hadn’t received one for summer classes nor fall.
She’d known he wasn’t at school. He could have been helping with childcare.
He could have bonded with his children, both of whom loved him like he was the sky itself. But he didn’t care.
She’d considered asking him what he was up to all day. Why wouldn’t he help her? Why wouldn’t he love her the way she deserved to be loved?
But she’d never been good at talking to him. She felt she was getting worse every year.
Now, Daniel was back at work as a fisherman. The guys at the docks had welcomed him with open, fishy arms and given him back his old fishing boat. She could see the doom and gloom written all over his ruddy face. But she didn’t know how to help him.
That Thursday before everything changed in their lives forever, Ivy was in the kitchen, making dinner for Tyler, Lily, Daniel, and herself. Daniel came home, dropped his things in the foyer, and walked into the kitchen to peck Ivy on the cheek.
“Daddy!” Lily cried, throwing her arms in the air.
Tyler was in his high chair and grinned happily at his father. It was like Christmas morning when he came home. Ivy tried to guard her heart from jealousy.
Dinner was clam chowder and cheese biscuits, Daniel’s favorites.
He ate heartily and sloppily, then went into the living room to lie on the sofa.
Lily padded after him and sat at the end of the sofa, watching the sports he had on the television, while Ivy took Tyler upstairs to clean him up and get him ready for bed.
Tyler was exhausted and fell asleep right away.
Lily was harder to drag to bed, as she didn’t want to leave her father.
Daniel surprised Ivy then by offering to take her.
“Are you sure?” Ivy had never once seen Daniel take their children to bed.
But Daniel was already on his tired feet, drawing Lily into his arms. He carried her up the stairs and into her bedroom, leaving Ivy alone in the living room.
Ivy was stumped. She suddenly had more time, so she went to the kitchen, scrubbed the counters, and listened to the radio until Daniel returned and fetched a beer from the fridge. He cracked it open and drank from it, still standing in front of the fridge.
There was a look on his face that Ivy didn’t recognize.
“Did you ever believe in those old sea stories?” he asked.
Ivy turned off the faucet. “Like mermaids and stuff like that?”
“I guess so. Mermaids and sirens and ancient creatures in the deep,” he said.
“I used to,” Ivy said. “Celia and I used to go to the Cove and tell each other scary stories about what was out there in the fog over the water. She used to scare me so bad. But I used to fantasize I was a mermaid, too. That I would one day grow my tail and get in the water and swim away.”
The truth was far more complicated, of course. She’d been nervous to grow a tail, nervous about what life would be like in the ocean without her sisters and family. But she’d always felt different, like an outsider.
“Did you?” Daniel smiled and sat at the kitchen table.
It had been a long time since they’d hung out like this and had a conversation. Ivy wondered if he wanted her to fall in love with him again. She questioned if he wanted to love her again, too. It felt easier than getting divorced and breaking up their family.
Besides, divorce was expensive.
She wondered how many people in the world stayed together because they were afraid of the cost of splitting up.
“I think that’s part of the reason I wanted to be a fisherman,” Daniel said thoughtfully. “I wanted to spend more time on the water. I wanted to see if there was anything out there, if I could prove any kind of magic really existed. And you know what?”
Ivy frowned, waiting.
“I’ve never seen anything,” Daniel said, leaning forward, his eyes urgent. “I’ve been looking and looking for years. But no. We invent magic. We need the idea of magic because our lives have so little enchantment to them.”
Ivy crossed her arms over her chest. For some reason, she thought of Lily earlier, scrambling up to sit beside her father on the sofa.
She thought of how sure Lily had been that she wanted to see what her father saw and experience her father’s life.
She considered that only a few years ago, Lily had been merely an idea—nothing but the concept of “having children.” And now she was here, ready to love them as well as she could.
Wasn’t that a version of magic? Wasn’t that enough?
But Ivy didn’t know how to express any of this to Daniel. He got up, shaking his head, and returned to the television, where he drank the rest of his beer before he went to bed.
All night, as she tried and failed to sleep beside him, Daniel’s words rang through her head.
She turned to look at him in the moonlight.
A strange feeling of long-lost love rattled through her.
“Daniel,” she whispered through the darkness, but he turned away from her and kept sleeping.
By the time she woke up the following morning, he was gone.
* * *
The next day, Ivy performed her ordinary rituals.
She finished work, picked up the kids from the sitters, stopped by Bluebell Cove to help out, then returned home to make dinner.
She’d more or less knocked Daniel’s questions about sea monsters and magic out of her head, although she still felt them like a strange shadow at the back of her mind.
Usually, Daniel slumped into the house by four thirty or five.
By the time Ivy fed her babies and prepared them for bed, she still hadn’t heard his truck in the driveway or his key in the door.
She knew this wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm.
The man had had a long-standing affair and was known to go drinking with the other fishermen.
It wasn’t like he was very good about contacting her or telling her his plans.
Ivy poured herself a glass of wine and put on a movie she liked for a change.
It was called How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days, and it made her guffaw.
She watched it all, pouring more wine and snacking on cheese and crackers.
It wasn’t till it was finished and the sky was jet-black outside that she realized Daniel still wasn’t home.
Next, Ivy performed the task that every wronged wife eventually does.
She called Daniel’s cell. She imagined it ringing on a hotel bed somewhere while Daniel and that girl who’d come into the flower shop watched it and laughed.
She imagined Daniel telling that girl that she was “magical,” that his wife never had been and never would be.
But the phone cut straight to voicemail, which felt even worse. It meant that he’d turned it off.
The night was strange. Storm clouds brewed across the Cove and made the cedar trees along the edge of the property quake and shiver.
She turned up the heat and put on a bigger sweater, then caught herself wishing that Wren was still around.
Like the rest of the Harper sisters, Wren had left Bluebell Cove and had decided that communicating her whereabouts was beneath her.
If Wren were here, she would know how to make tonight more fun and less chaotic. She’d know how to tell Ivy to forget about that guy! Maybe Ivy would finally find a way to open up to her sister. Perhaps Ivy would finally say, “I need to get out of this.”
She refilled her glass of wine and selected another DVD from the pile: Ever After starring Drew Barrymore.
As soon as she’d placed the disk in the drive, there was a terrible knock at the door.
She bolted upright and hurried to answer it.
Her thoughts were so scattered that she couldn’t make sense of them, save for one: Daniel left me.
But of course it was far less complicated than that.
On the front stoop were a police officer, a Coast Guard officer, and her father, James Harper. It felt like a joke. They looked at her with stoic, awful expressions. Their skin was gray.
Ivy knew without being told. But she asked it anyway because that was what she was supposed to do.
“What happened?”
“We need to come in, honey,” her father said, sounding more gentle and loving than she’d ever heard him.
“I’ll make tea,” she said, because she didn’t know how to have people over without giving them something.
“No need, Mrs. Elbert,” the police officer said.
Ivy led them into the living room, where they stood in front of the television.
The DVD player's mouth was still open, revealing the Ever After disk.
Ivy had a ridiculous thought that they would all sit and watch it together.
Her dad could say what he always did when she appeared: Anjelica Huston dated Jack Nicholson for sixteen years!
Instead, she supposed, they were going to stand around and talk about how and why her husband had died.
They told her that the storm had come out of nowhere. Daniel had taken his boat too far from shore, away from the necessary channels, where it had capsized and sent him over.
“He didn’t suffer,” the police officer told her, his hat in his hands.
But Ivy wanted to know how on earth the police officer could know that. It wasn’t like he knew what it was like to drown. It wasn’t like he’d been at the scene.
Or perhaps—and here was a heinous thought—they all knew that Daniel had been drunk at the time of the incident. Maybe that was why he’d taken his boat too far from shore. He’d been too out of his mind to realize what he was doing before it was too late.
“You can tell me the truth,” Ivy said, raising her chin. “I can take it.”
The officers exchanged glances that told her they had no interest in telling her the truth. They didn’t think they owed her that.
“That’s all we know at this time, ma’am,” the police officer said. “We are so very sorry for your loss.”
Not long after that, the officers left. There wasn’t anything left to be done, not at Ivy’s place, not when she needed to grieve.
Ivy felt as though there were stones in her stomach.
She sat at the kitchen table with James Harper and watched the rain pelt the window.
It felt strange that her father had gone through something similar, that he’d lost his wife so many years ago.
They were united in this as a widow and a widower. She didn’t know how to say this aloud.
What she wanted to tell her father was that Daniel didn’t think life was magic. That just last night, he’d been sitting where James Harper sat now, telling her that life was all pain.
Ivy decided to focus on logistics because it was a way to contain her own emotions. She talked about funeral home arrangements, about doing the flowers herself.
“Honey, you don’t have to do them yourself,” her father said, frowning. “Everyone in Bluebell will understand if you need to take some time off. And there are other flower shops. Other people to tend to this thing.”
But Ivy gave him a look that meant back off.
“My flower shop is all I have right now,” she said. “And my children.”
“Your kids will need you now more than ever,” her father said.
Her ears rang with shock. She couldn’t believe he’d just said that aloud.
She wanted to remind him of how mean he’d been during the years after her mother’s death.
She wanted to remind him how “not there for us, not in the least” he’d been.
It occurred to her now that maybe her father thought he really had been there for them, that he’d worked tirelessly to offer them the very best of himself. That was a terribly dark thought.
“You should go get some rest,” she told her father. He kept a room for himself over at the inn, a room attached to the office that the guests couldn’t reach.
“I’ll come by tomorrow morning to make sure you’re all right,” he said, getting up, letting the chair screech across the floorboards.
Before he left, he hugged her clumsily, as though she were a child and she’d fallen off her bicycle and needed help. She couldn’t get out of his embrace quickly enough.
As soon as the door closed behind him, Tyler started screaming for her upstairs. She hurried to bring her baby into her arms, to cradle him until he fell back asleep. She cried gently, dampening his hair, and reckoned with how alone in the world she was, now.
But a moment later, she realized she felt just as alone as she had when her husband was still alive. She didn’t know what to do with that fact. She resolved never to admit it.
She resolved to let her children continue to love their father for as long as she could.