16. Flora
— ? —
Flora
The storm comes out of nowhere.
One minute the sky is clear and I’m helping Mom stake tomatoes, and the next the wind is picking up and the clouds are coming over the ridge and she’s yelling at me to get inside.
The rain starts before I make it to the porch, a downpour so heavy it sounds like the world is ending, and I duck through the door just as the first crack of thunder splits the sky.
“That came on fast,” Mom says, already lighting candles. “Power’ll go out any minute.”
She’s right. The lights flicker twice, come back for long enough to be insulting about it, and then die completely, and the cottage goes dark except for the two candles she’s already got going on the windowsill.
She doesn’t seem remotely bothered. This is a woman who lived without electricity on purpose for most of my childhood, and a power cut in her house registers as roughly the same size of event as a change in the weather, which is what it is.
I think about Cecilia’s interview, two nights away now, and about how much easier it would be if the power stayed off through it and I never had to hear whatever she’s going to say.
I know I’ll watch it anyway. I’ll sit at this table with my husband out in that cabin and let a stranger tell me about my own marriage, because not knowing would be worse.
“Matches,” Mom mutters, rummaging through a drawer. “We need more candles. Check the guest cabin, there should be a box of supplies in the closet.”
I hesitate, because the guest cabin means Aster, and my mother knows the guest cabin means Aster, and there is a fifty percent chance the candles are in the kitchen drawer she’s currently standing in front of.
“Flora.” Mom’s voice is patient. “It’s just matches.”
I grab a jacket and make a run for it.
I’ve been avoiding that cabin for five days the way you avoid a room with a wasp in it. I know exactly how many steps it is from the back door because I’ve counted them from the kitchen window without ever admitting to myself that’s what I was doing.
The rain soaks me through in seconds even though the cabin is only fifty feet away. I burst through the door dripping everywhere and find Aster sitting on the narrow bed with a battery lantern, looking like he was expecting me.
“Candles,” I gasp. “Mom needs matches and candles. She said there’s a supply box.”
“Closet.” He stands up. “I’ll help you look.”
The closet is small and crammed with everything Amora has accumulated over twenty years.
Old quilts, boxes of Christmas decorations, a stack of board games from the eighties with the corners taped.
There’s a shoebox of photographs I make myself not open.
There’s a jar of buttons, which is the most my-mother object that has ever existed, and Aster’s duffel, shoved in on top of all of it because there’s nowhere else in this cabin to put a bag.
I dig through it while Aster holds the lantern above my shoulder, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him and hear him breathing and neither of us says anything about either.
My hand brushes against something leather, wedged down the side of his bag.
I pull it out. A notebook, worn soft at the corners, one an artist would sketch in. Except when I open it, there aren’t any sketches inside.
It’s music. Pages and pages of handwritten lyrics, staff lines filled in by hand, dates scrawled into the corners.
The first page is dated over a year ago, on hotel stationery from a city I don’t recognize.
She called today. She sounded tired. I asked if she was okay and she said yes but I know when she’s lying. I know every sound she makes and that was a lie and I should have been there and I wasn’t and I don’t know how to fix any of this.
I turn the page.
Started a new song. About the freckle constellation on her shoulder.
Fifty-three freckles, some lighter than others, the one near her collarbone that she doesn’t know I can find in the dark.
I want to write a song about that. About knowing someone’s body like a map you’ve been studying your whole life.
Another page, another date.
It’s our anniversary. I have flowers being delivered but it’s not enough, it’s never enough, and I’m three time zones away while she’s in our house alone and I can’t remember the last time I made her laugh.
And another.
D minor today. An apology in D minor. I’ve written forty verses and none of them are right because there’s no music that says I’m sorry I forgot how to stay, but I’ll keep trying until there is.
I keep going. I know I should stop and I don’t.
There are dozens of them, some just two lines long, some filling whole pages with crossings-out and arrows and second attempts.
A song about the sound of my kitchen timer.
A song about the way I sing wrong lyrics with total confidence.
Four separate attempts at something about my hands, all of them abandoned partway through, the last one with a note underneath in smaller writing that says can’t get it, keep trying.
There’s an entry from last winter that’s just one sentence. Called the house at 3 AM her time to hear the machine because I wanted her voice and didn’t want to wake her.
I remember that message. I found it in the morning, eleven seconds of silence and then a click, and I assumed it was a wrong number.
I deleted it standing at the counter in my robe.
I have thought about that eleven seconds maybe twice since it happened and he has been carrying it around in a bag for months.
The last entry is from a month ago, right before the tour. It isn’t a song at all. It’s a list, numbered, in handwriting that gets worse as it goes down the page.
things to actually do when I get back
1. no phone at dinner. any dinner. ever 2.
ask about the shelter and remember the answers 3.
find out what she does all day. actually find out.
she has a whole life and I know four facts about it 4.
book somewhere with no wifi, two weeks minimum, do not move it 5.
be home. that’s it. that’s the whole list. just be home
He wrote that a month ago. He wrote it, and then he packed, and then he got on a plane, and I sat in our kitchen for fourteen days waiting for a man who had already worked out exactly what to do and simply hadn’t started doing it yet.
I’m crying.
I don’t realize it until the pages blur, until I feel it on my cheeks and taste the salt on my lips.
“Flora?”
I look up. Aster is standing in the closet doorway watching me cry over his own handwriting.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he says quietly.
“I wasn’t looking for it. I found it, it was just here.”
“It’s okay.” He moves closer, slow and careful about it. “It’s okay. Those were always for you anyway.”
“A year.” My voice cracks. “A whole year of songs and I didn’t hear a single one of them.”
“Longer than that.” He sinks down beside me on the closet floor, our backs against dusty boxes. “I’ve been writing about you since the diner. Every song, every album, they’re all you. Even when I was too stupid to come home, you were still the only thing I wanted to write about.”
“Then why couldn’t you just be here?” The words tear out of me. “Why did you have to chase everything else when you had this? When you had me?”
“Because I was terrified.” He says it simply, like a confession he’s been carrying around for years. “I’ve spent my whole life measuring what I’m worth by how loud the crowd screams. And I was scared that if I stopped, if I slowed down for even a second, I’d disappear. That I’d be nobody again.”
“You were never nobody to me.”
“I know.” He reaches for my hand. “I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. I was so busy proving myself to the entire world that I forgot the only person I needed to prove anything to was sitting in our kitchen waiting for me to come home.”
The thunder rolls outside and lightning flashes through the small window and the rain keeps coming down like it’s never going to stop.
“Why didn’t you play them for me?” I ask. “Any of them. One of them. You wrote fifty songs about me that nobody has heard and you never sang me a single one.”
He’s quiet for a second.
“Because then you’d have known how much I needed you,” he says. “And if you knew that, you’d have known how badly I was failing at it.”
I don’t have anything to say to that, and he lets the quiet sit for a while before he goes on.
“This is your element,” he says. “Your world. And I never stepped into it. It’s only ever been you stepping into mine.”
“I never asked you to change, Aster. I don’t want you to stop singing. You should be able to chase the lights as far as you want to. I don’t ever want to be the reason you don’t.”
He turns to look at me, his eyes bright in the lantern light.
“I’d chase the lights to the ends of the earth, Flora. But you’re the only thing I’d chase forever.”
I don’t decide to kiss him.
One moment I’m crying over his handwriting and the next my mouth is on his, desperate and aching and hungry. He makes a sound in his throat, surprise and relief and want all at once, and kisses me back like he’s drowning and I’m air.
Then I pull away and press my hand flat against his lips.
“That never happened,” I whisper.
“Flora.”
“That never happened.”
I scramble to my feet and grab a box that might have candles in it and practically run for the door, his ragged breathing following me the whole way.
I make it back to the cottage soaked and shaking and shove the box at my mother without meeting her eyes.
“Found some,” I manage, and my voice comes out wrong enough that I hear it myself.
Mom takes one look at my face and doesn’t ask a single question, which is either the kindest or the most calculating thing she’s ever done and I’m too wrecked to work out which.
She just takes the box out of my hands and tells me there’s a dry towel in the bathroom, and goes back to what she was doing like a woman who has never once in her life needed to know something before its time.
I go to my room and close the door and sit on the bed in the dark, listening to the storm, pressing my fingers against my lips where I can still feel him.
I keep waiting to feel guilty and it doesn’t arrive.
That’s the part I can’t get past. I kissed him and I lied about it inside of four seconds and the only thing I feel is that I want to go back out into the rain and do it again, and none of the things he did have stopped being true, and both of those facts are just going to have to live in me at the same time tonight.
Around two in the morning the rain slackens enough that I can hear, across the yard, a guitar.
Two chords, a pause, the same two chords again, somebody working out where a song goes next.
He doesn’t come to the house. He sits in that cabin with the storm coming down and plays the same six seconds over and over until he’s got them, and then a seventh second, and then he stops.
I lie there until the rain stops sometime near four, and then I lie there in the quiet, which is worse.
I don’t sleep at all, and I stop pretending to try around six.