Chapter One #3
Heat warms my skin. My father knows that I move too often to make lasting friendships.
But I have my work, and the satisfaction of knowing that my gardens bring people both joy and peace.
At the end of a long day, I am content to curl into bed with Gully at my feet and a book in my hands.
I am fine; I have my reasons for choosing this path.
My father chose something else—he chose my vibrant mother, a home, this little suburban community where everyone knows everyone.
“Look at that,” he says then, nodding toward the window and saving me from having to answer his question. “The magic hour.”
He’s right. The light in the kitchen is changing, the strong spring afternoon sun easing into a soft wash of gold. This was always my mother’s favorite time of day, when the sun hangs just above the ocean and its light pours over the coast like honey falling from a warm spoon.
“Magic hours,” I correct, emphasizing the plural.
At this, my father produces the first flicker of a genuine smile that I’ve seen from him since I stepped out of my truck.
My mother swore that the magic hour lasted twice as long in Bantom Bay as it did anywhere else—that it wasn’t one hour here, but two.
Gully stands and walks to the kitchen door. He looks over his shoulder expectantly at me, and I, in turn, look at my father.
“Should we take a walk down to the beach?” I ask. “Enjoy the light?”
“I don’t think so,” he says too quickly, telling me all I need to know about the offers of company he has rejected in the past months. “You go ahead, if you’d like.”
I want to argue with him, but he’s already walking into the living room, settling into the armchair with one of his mystery novels in hand. I frown, then remind myself that I’m staying. There is time.
I head outside, thinking I’ll walk Gully to the beach. Instead I stop on the driveway.
There, at the end of the pavement, the yellow doors of my mother’s studio seem to glow. In truth, everything is glowing—even Gully. He looks practically ethereal, a halo of golden-hour light making his fur shine.
I walk toward the doors and then stop again.
When I was home for my mother’s funeral, I’d peeked inside her studio but had not been able to bring myself to cross the threshold.
Now, the fresh yellow paint on the doors makes my stomach twist. What if I look inside and find that my father has taken on the studio as one of his projects?
What if he has tidied it the way he has the house, scrubbing away the last signs of my mother’s creative, exuberant spirit?
There is, I know, only one way to find out.
With the sun pressing a warm hand to my back, I open the doors. Gully, either out of protectiveness or curiosity, moves forward first, and I follow.
Immediately I release a long, relieved breath.
The studio is a mess. A truly spectacular mess, just as it always was.
Tables of various sizes are crowded with dust-covered tubes of paint, hardened mounds of rags, magazines, photographs, and sketch pads.
Brushes, palette knives, and pencils jut out like dried bouquets from glass jars.
Fluttering garlands of pastel ribbons and tissue-paper flowers crisscross in arcs below the blue ceiling.
Multicolored constellations of dried paint speckle the concrete floor.
In the light that streams through the open doors, dust motes sparkle.
Best of all, my mother’s scent laces the air. I breathe in, feeling it drift softly through my aching chest. Gardenia, sandalwood, linseed oil. The very scent that had called me home. My mother’s fragrance has disappeared from the house, but here, in the studio, it remains.
Everything in the studio remains exactly how she left it, frozen in time.
Including the painting she’d been working on.
I walk to the canvas and blow a breath over it, watching as the dust that coats it lifts and swirls away, revealing a sloping meadow of bright California poppies and lush green grasses that glow beneath a bluebonnet sky, the sea a hint of silver in the distance.
I lean closer to the painting, my breath catching in my throat.
My mother’s brushstrokes are both precise and energetic.
The flowers are so real, so tiny and exquisite and unique, that they seem…
well, they seem alive. As I stare at the painting, I feel my chest swell with a delicious, delighted form of hope, a joyful certainty that good things lie ahead.
My worries for my father, my grief for my mother, even the pain I have carried since the darkest day of my life, ten years ago, are all pushed aside by the helium balloon of optimism that expands steadily within me.
Everything, I think, is going to be okay!
After some time, and with difficulty, I manage to pull my gaze away from the painting.
The buoyant feeling in my chest deflates but does not disappear.
The hope that emanates from the canvas is as addictive as sugar, and I have to remind myself that it is entirely manufactured by my mother. It is not real.
For generations, the women in our family have all had a talent for one thing or another, and this was my mother’s—she could affect people’s emotions, deeply, with her paintings.
If my mother wanted you to feel happy, she created a painting that made you feel happy.
And if she wanted you to feel sad—well, my mother never wanted anyone to feel sad.
Mostly she used her gift to inspire the students who filled her painting classes at the community center.
She poured her own feelings of confidence into the paintings she displayed for her class—and when her students viewed those paintings, they discovered a newfound belief in their own ability to express their creativity on canvas.
The truth, though, is that I often had the sense that my mother was holding back, that there was more she could do with her gift.
But when I questioned her, she would become unusually quiet, her expression haunted.
I was left with the feeling that there was something in her past that she was ashamed of, something that followed her all her life.
Be careful with your gift was all she would tell me. Remember that every action has a consequence.
Even now, my face grows hot as I think of her words.
If only I had listened to her.
Turning away from my mother’s painting, I move around the studio.
I pause in front of a large corkboard covered with images torn from magazines, scribbled bits of poetry on colorful scraps of paper, and photographs.
There is a photograph of me in the yard when I’m five years old, a flower crown in my tangled chestnut hair, the skin around my blue eyes crinkled with laughter.
Another is of my parents on their wedding day.
They stand on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall, my father smiling in a stiff-looking navy suit and my mother beautiful in a whimsical ivory dress that hangs off her shoulders and floats airily to the ground.
I walk to the shelves along one wall and run my finger over the spines of her many art books. I wander to a long wooden table littered with crumpled papers and rough drawings.
A breeze moves through the studio, and the warm air is suddenly thick with my mother’s scent.
I stand very still. There is something different lurking within the familiar perfume now.
It is my mother’s, yes, but there is a strange edge to it that I don’t recognize, an unsettled, slightly sour note that swirls through me, whispering to me of loose ends, of regret.
What is it, Mom? I breathe in, searching for an answer. What happened?
It’s then, when I open my eyes, that I see it.
There, in the middle of her worktable, is her yellow, leather-bound calendar. A pen lies on top, as though it were set down only moments ago.
I pick up the calendar and hold it to my chest for a beat before opening it. I turn the pages, my pulse racing at the sight of my mother’s looping handwriting. All of the appointments and lunch dates and birthdays and teaching obligations that filled her life.
Still veiled by that disquieting version of her scent, I find myself flipping to the last pages that contain writing, the days that followed her death. These pages, too, reveal a life brimming with plans, a future my mother had believed she would see.
And there, on the Thursday after her death, she’d written three words and circled them with a thick, red marker.
The Oceanview Home
I frown. There’s no time or name attached to the entry, no explanation for why she might have planned this visit. I trace the words with my finger, a little spark of something—curiosity? Premonition? That feeling of hope instilled by my mother’s painting?—flickering within me.
Growing up, I’d passed the sign for the Oceanview Home—an assisted living community for seniors just south of Bantom Bay—countless times, but I’d never turned down the driveway. I’d never even caught a glimpse of the building through the woods that separated it from the road.
Why had my mother planned to go there? I don’t have any living grandparents, no elderly relatives, and my parents were too young to have been considering moving there themselves.
So why would she visit the home? Why had she circled the words so insistently, so urgently, so differently than any of the surrounding entries in her calendar?
I pull my phone from my pocket, open the web browser, and search for the Oceanview Home. Its website is practically ancient, populated only by a tiny photograph of a drab-looking, washed-brick building and a few meager paragraphs about the home and its offerings. I feel strangely disappointed.
I’m about to put my phone away when I notice the website has a drop-down menu. My finger moves to touch on the Employment Opportunities page. And there, with that troubling version of my mother’s scent murmuring over my skin, I read the description of the one job available:
Gardener wanted for a very special project.