Chapter Twelve
Lavender: A flowering herb in the mint family with needlelike leaves and wooly purple blossoms whose soft, woodsy scent bridges the earthly and the eternal, soothing anxiety
Weeding the beds of the sunken garden is a long, tedious, gratifying job.
A sea of flowers in shades of violet emerge as I go, thriving under my attention.
Lavender, catmint, salvia, phlox, and sweet peas all bloom in shades of purple.
As sunlight pours over the blossoms, the sweet peas’ refreshing, gingery scent stirs the air, carrying a message of change.
I pause, wondering, and then continue with my work.
I’ve been weeding for a couple of hours when I notice two figures making their way down the ramp from the terrace.
As they get closer, I see that it’s a male caregiver in the home’s navy uniform pushing a woman in a wheelchair.
The man is short and muscular, with a cheerful, open face and broad smile.
The woman in the wheelchair is a tiny wisp of a person wearing glasses and a brimmed hat that casts her delicate features in shadow.
“Hello!” the man calls. “I’m Mario, and this is Adele Abrams. You must be Lucy.”
I nod and smile. “Hello. It’s nice to meet you both.” Gully stands from where he has been sunbathing on the path, stretches, and then lumbers over to greet our visitors. Adele reaches out a small hand to pet him.
“You know, you’re the talk of the home,” Mario tells me. “Everyone has been watching you whip this place into shape. It’s like having our own live HGTV show… but even better because now we get to visit you and walk through the garden.”
I look up toward the home, surprised to learn that I’ve been a topic of conversation.
Mostly I’m glad the residents are talking at all.
Maybe, I think with a small, inward smile, a crack is forming in the hard wall of the Gloom.
I wonder if Jill is watching us now, if she’s about to storm out here and yell at me for chatting with Mario. I shrug off the thought.
“I hope people will start coming outside now that the paths are clear for walking,” I tell Mario.
“We’ll be the trendsetters. Won’t we, Adele? Everyone will want to explore out here after we do.” He pauses and then says to me, quietly, “Adele has been a bit down lately. I hoped some fresh air might help.”
Behind Adele’s glasses, her gaze swims slowly over the flowers.
“Thank you for coming to visit, Ms. Abrams,” I tell her, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.
Mario bends toward her, meets her eyes, and taps his own ear.
“You might want to turn up the volume,” he says.
She blinks at him, then lifts one elegant hand to her ear and fiddles with her hearing aid.
I thank her again, and this time, her eyes rise to meet mine and I see something so adrift, so lonely, in her gaze that I feel my throat tighten in response.
“Please call me Adele,” she tells me. Her voice is thin, refined, and quivering with melancholy. Her eyes move slowly over my face and then back over the garden. “Everything,” she says quietly, “looks quite beautiful.”
Despite so many years of turning away from this part of myself, I cannot help immediately wondering if there is a scent among these flowers that might be meaningful to Adele.
The impulse is ingrained in me, try as I might to ignore it.
Even as I form the question, I know the answer—the scent of lavender, heady and soothing and warm, travels over my skin, whispering to me.
A gossamer thread shimmers in the air, rising from the flowers and encircling Adele as though to draw her closer.
Even though I have spent ten years keeping to myself as much as possible, there have been moments like this one now and then with a client in one of my gardens.
A moment when I’ve realized that the scent of a flower I’d grown would awaken something within them.
And always, in that moment, I hear my mother’s voice, warning me to be careful.
But now for the first time, her warning does not come.
If you can’t find magic, I hear my mother say instead, you must make it.
My pulse quickens. I know there is a reason I do not hear her warning, but instead hear her encouragement.
There is a reason the catmint returned that memory to me, now.
Just as I’m sure there is a reason that my mother’s scent has guided me here, to the Oceanview Home.
I still don’t know what that reason might be, but I can’t help feeling that it has something to do with this impulse within me now—an impulse not to turn away from Adele, but to lead her toward the flowers.
But what if I am wrong? What if the memory that the lavender stirs within Adele torments her the way that Jack’s memory so irrevocably tormented him?
I’ve never told anyone what I did to Jack.
Not even my mother. I was too ashamed. I swore to myself that I would never use my gift in that way again, that I would move away from the place where the scents of my flowers were the strongest, that I would never form attachments that might tempt me to use my gift, even if it meant moving over and over again.
My parents thought that heartbreak over losing Jack drove me away, but the truth is that it is fear and shame that have kept me running all these years.
Running from Bantom Bay. Running from myself.
And yet, here I am, in a garden in Bantom Bay once again.
If you can’t find magic, you must make it.
My gift destroyed Jack, but I remind myself that my own memories, the ones the scents of my flowers have returned me to so many times, have only ever stirred within me a welcome sense of delight and clarity.
I so very much want Adele to feel that delight, too. Not “The Gloom” of the home, but the magic of the garden.
I take a deep breath and sense, braided with the scent of lavender, a new resolve strengthening within me. I kneel down on the path and look up at Adele. “Do you smell the lavender?” I ask, my pulse loud in my ears. Despite my resolve, my voice trembles. “It smells wonderful, doesn’t it?”
Adele seems to consider me for a moment before turning her face toward the bed of lavender. I watch, my heart pounding, as she inhales. The corners of her thin lips purse with disappointment. It occurs to me that one’s sense of smell might fade with age, weakening right along with sight or hearing.
“I think you need to be a bit closer to the flowers to smell them,” I tell her, standing up and dusting off my knees. “Can I help you?”
Flames of curiosity flicker in her eyes. “Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”
I glance at Mario. He looks uncertain but gives a small shrug. I move around Adele’s wheelchair and slowly push it right to the edge of the path. Still, the lavender grows beyond the row of boxwood hedges, and I’m not sure Adele is close enough to smell it.
I step back to Mario’s side. “Is she able to stand?” I ask quietly.
Mario nods. “Physically, yes. But lately, she refuses—”
“I can stand,” interrupts Adele, turning in her chair to gaze at us.
Mario opens and closes his mouth. “Really?” he asks finally.
She nods decisively. “Yes.”
Mario and I stand on either side of her.
After we help her to her feet, she takes a couple of steps forward and leans over the hedge toward the nearest lavender plant.
Her lips press into a determined line. She closes her eyes and breathes in several long inhalations, her nostrils flaring with the effort.
The scent of the lavender sweeps around us in a great, warm, effervescent wave.
For a moment, Adele is very still, and I know that she is far away.
I watch her, my heart lodged in my throat.
It is only a moment before she straightens and opens her eyes. I watch her fearfully, waiting for her horror, her anger, her accusations—but a slow, radiant smile spreads across her face. When she speaks, her voice is blissful in a distant, dreamy sort of way.
“Oh,” she says softly, “we had a lovely time.”
Relief floods through me. I glance at Mario, and see his head is cocked to the side as he watches Adele, his expression bewildered.
“A lovely time—?” I ask.
She looks at me, her eyes clear. She seems taller than she did moments earlier, and steadier on her feet.
“In France,” she explains with a wistful sort of excitement.
“Wesley and I were on our honeymoon. We were in Provence, staying in a little chateau tucked within fields of lavender. I’d never traveled outside the country before, and every single thing I saw astonished me.
Delighted me. I felt it just now—my own youthful delight at the world.
How I wanted to devour it! And I did, practically! ”
She laughs. “We ate the most delicious pastries for breakfast—croissants, of course, and pain au chocolat and chausson aux pommes,” she says, gliding through this list of pastries in beautiful French.
“We read books by the blue swimming pool… and we ate dessert at every hour, plate after plate of calissons and canelé and tarte tatin… and Wesley threw a stick for a very funny scrap of a dog who wandered by.” She looks at Gully, who lies nearby on the path and watches these proceedings with calm interest. “A much smaller dog than yours, Lucy. She was white, with a little stub tail and the most darling eyes.”
Adele falls quiet for a moment before continuing. “I’d forgotten what Wesley said to me on that trip, but just now, I was… I was with him again. I saw him—so tan and handsome with those beautiful green eyes I know so well. I could hear his voice.”