Chapter Fifteen
California wild lilac: A flowering native California plant in the buckthorn family whose cones of delicate blossoms emit an intense, boiling-honey scent that recalls first love
Over the weekend, I tell my father about the time I spent with Adele and Vikram. I tell him how the scents of the flowers that I cared for transported them back in time, stirring forgotten memories, and that the experience seemed to have awaked a vibrancy within them.
My father hardly bats an eye. “Scents are remarkably powerful,” he says.
“Hardly a day goes by that I don’t strike up a conversation with one resident or another,” I go on. “It’s an entirely different sort of job from the more solitary ones that I’m used to,” I say, grinning at him meaningfully.
“Oh, I see,” my father says. “These old folks are your new friends, are they?” He sighs. Then, after a beat, he groans and lifts his hands in surrender. “Fine. A deal’s a deal. Let me get my sweater.”
My dad drives us into town. Seeing him behind the wheel of his old sedan, looking steadily at the road ahead, lifts my spirits.
Already he seems more like his old self.
But once we’ve parked and begun walking toward the Shark Bite Café, he spots the small crowd gathered inside and his pace slows.
It’s Sunday morning, and we’re not the only ones in Bantom Bay with coffee and croissants on our minds.
I slow my pace to match his. The truth is, I hadn’t expected the café to be this busy. I am almost as hesitant to face the crowd as he is. All of these people had loved Jack and Jack’s parents. If they knew the role I had played in—
“Are you okay?” my father asks, glancing over at me.
I nod and try to shake off my anxiety, reminding myself that the whole reason I’m here is to help my dad.
In the café, behind the counter, Roger’s eyes go enormous when he sees us. “Gregory! Long-lost Gregory!” he booms out over the five people in line ahead of us. “It’s great to see you!”
My father seems to shrink into himself as heads throughout the café swivel in our direction.
“Gregory! Hi! It’s been ages. How are you?
” says a smiling woman with silver hair clipped back in a barrette and a big cotton tote bag hanging from a shoulder.
She looks vaguely familiar to me—I think she might have worked at the community center at some point when I was growing up.
I wonder how my father knows her. Probably, if I had to guess, through my mother.
“Fine,” he says quietly. “How are you, Patty?”
Before the woman responds, the door swings open and Naomi Lawson, my mother’s best friend, walks in.
At my side, my father goes rigid.
Naomi has barely taken a step into the café before she spots my father and stops. “Gregory,” she says. It’s as though she’s seen a ghost. Then she notices me and blinks. “Oh, Lucy!” she cries, and steps forward to wrap me in her arms.
It’s wonderful and terrible to be held by Naomi. She reminds me so much of my mother. She smells, as she always has, of plums and old books and marigolds.
“Hi, Naomi,” I say, swallowing.
“It’s so good to see you,” she says. Her eyes swim a little as they search my face. I think she might be looking for my mom in me, and my guess is she sees her. “We have all missed you so much, Lucy.”
She swipes at the bottom of her eyes and looks over at my dad, whose shoes appear to be glued to one spot on the café’s floor. “You, too, Gregory. I hate that it’s been so long. I hope you’ve been getting my messages.”
“Yes, I have,” my father says, looking more uncomfortable by the moment. “Thank you.”
“Did you know that your retirement not-so-coincidentally aligned with a serious dip in my coffee revenue?” Roger teases my dad from behind the counter. I turn to realize we’ve made our way to the front of the line.
“We’re here to make up for that,” I say, taking my dad’s arm.
“Say, Gregory,” Roger says. “Naomi and I and a few others are going over to Glen Davis’s house on Tuesday night.
Glen bought this model train kit that he’s hoping to put together to surprise his grandson with at his next visit.
Long story short, the kit turns out to have a million parts and poor Glen can’t make heads or tails of it, so we’re all going to see if we can give him a hand.
In exchange for our help, he’s supplying wine, beer, and his famous lasagna.
Oh, and magnifying glasses. He says the pieces are tiny.
” Roger takes a breath and passes two coffees over the counter along with a bag of pastries.
“Care to join us? I know everyone would love to see you.”
I shoot my dad a hopeful glance. I can’t help thinking it’s the exact sort of invitation that my mom would have said yes to for the both of them.
My dad would have gone to Glen’s to make my mother happy, but I bet he would have come home buzzing with the thrill of having put something together with a bunch of other people.
He’d probably have been the lead engineer, quietly telling everyone else what to do, and they would have had that train assembled in record time.
But now he says, “I don’t think so, Roger. But thank you for the invitation.”
Roger nods, clearly disappointed. You can’t keep a man like him down for long, though.
“Fair enough,” he says cheerfully, shaking off his disappointment as easily as a Labrador shakes off water. “But you know, Gregory, all this coffee can’t drink itself. You’ll be back in again soon, won’t you?”
I can see my father weighing his response and I have a sinking feeling that he’s about to tell Roger the truth, and that the truth is that he has no plans to the leave the house again anytime soon.
Naomi and maybe, possibly, everyone lingering in the Shark Bite is looking at my dad as he considers his response.
It’s like watching someone with a needle approach a little kid holding a balloon.
My father opens his mouth—
“Of course,” I say before he can speak. “We’ll see you soon.”
On the drive home, I look over at my dad.
“It’s hard to see them, isn’t it? It feels like Mom should be there, too.”
He stares through the windshield. I’m beginning to think he’s not going to respond when he says, “She made it all look so easy. Talking with people. Connecting. Sharing her feelings.”
I nod. Sometimes I think that my mother’s heart must have been enormous, so big that it had already held a lifetime’s worth of love a million times over by the time it stopped working. She would never have wanted to live any smaller, to love any less.
“I’ve always thought that you’re like her in that way,” my father says. “Or you used to be, before you and Jack broke up.”
I look over at him. “Broke up? No,” I say quietly. “That’s not quite what happened.”
His brow furrows. “What do you mean? After that terrible accident, Jack moved away, and you were so upset…”
When I first heard that Jack had survived crashing his car, I’d been overcome with relief, but my relief had proved to be short-lived.
One of Jack’s legs had been too damaged within the crush of metal and had to be amputated.
My heart ached for him; I knew that the happiest moments of his life had all taken place on the football field.
But his playing career was over… and soon, so was his parents’ marriage.
Between Jack’s suddenly rampant drinking and the car accident, their family never recovered.
His mother closed her gallery and moved with Jack to Colorado. And then… silence.
“I know how hard that was for you,” my father goes on. “You were heartbroken. And you’ve… well, you’ve never really seemed the same since, Lucy. All that moving from place to place. All that time alone.”
Through the car’s open windows, the honeyed scent of California wild lilac tumbles in, whispering to me of first love.
“You’re right,” I say quietly. “I haven’t been the same since Jack’s accident.”
My dad pulls onto our driveway. He turns off the car and a sudden, weighty quiet falls over us. The sight of that stretch of grass beside my mother’s studio makes my throat feel tight. My dad and I both sit there, not moving.
I take a deep breath and look at my dad. “I haven’t been the same, but it’s not because Jack broke my heart.” I think of how hard it has been for me to open up to people since that day with Jack in my garden, and I amend my words. “That’s not the whole reason.”
I swallow. I realize that I want to tell my dad. I want him to know the truth. I will never have the chance to tell my mom, but I can tell my dad. I am so tired of the weight of this secret. This shame. The words, at last, spill from my lips.
“It’s because Jack’s accident was my fault,” I whisper. “I caused it.”
Confusion flickers in my father’s blue eyes. “What do you mean? You weren’t even there. That accident couldn’t have been your fault—”
“It was my fault,” I insist. “All of it. Jack’s accident. Losing his leg. Losing his dream of playing football. His family breaking apart. I’m responsible for all of it.”
“Oh, Lucy,” my father says. “Of course you’re not.”
“Jack was… troubled,” I forge on quickly, before I lose my nerve.
“I think he was depressed. I’m not sure anyone else knew that.
And no one knows that a week before his car accident, he visited me in my garden.
I hoped that a scent among the flowers I grew might help him—that it might jog his memory of a moment in his life that might be meaningful to him, that could heal him in some way.
” I pause, holding my dad’s gaze evenly.
“Go on,” he says. His face reveals none of the skepticism that I know he must feel. “What happened?”
“The scent of the flowers made Jack remember something. I don’t know what.
But he became very upset. More upset than I’d ever seen him.
Whatever he remembered… it tormented him.
That whole week, he wouldn’t speak to me.
He looked terrible. I could tell he hadn’t been sleeping, and that he was drinking.
And then… and then he drove himself right into that tree. ”
For a beat, my father is quiet. “And all these years,” he says at last, “you’ve blamed yourself?”
I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes.
“Jack could have died,” I say. These are words that I have said to myself over and over again.
“That was a path that I set him on. I regret what I did to him, and to his family, every single day. I wish I could rewind time and change things. I wish I could take it all back. When I’m here, in Bantom Bay, I feel so much worse.
I think of Jack, and what I did, constantly.
And I know that people still look at me and think of him.
Everyone here is kind, and I know that they think well of me, but that’s only because they don’t know the truth.
If people here knew the part I played in what happened to Jack, how I ruined his life, they would…
” I trail off, emotion overtaking my voice.
I feel my father leaning toward me then.
He puts his arms around me, hugging me as best he can from across the car.
“What happened to Jack wasn’t your fault, Lucy,” he says gently.
“Long before he walked into your garden, he was struggling with things that had absolutely nothing to do with you. We all sensed that. I think it’s why we all cheered so loudly for him at those football games.
Even when he was winning, he always seemed like the underdog. ”
Tears slide down my cheeks. If my mother were alive, she would have understood why I feel that I am responsible for what happened to Jack and his family. I’m sure that’s why I could never bear to tell her.
I put my arms around my father and rest my head on his shoulder. Even if he doesn’t believe me, saying the words aloud for the first time, talking about Jack, sends a small shaft of light into the darkness I have carried for so long.