Chapter Twenty-Nine
California poppy: A native California wildflower with golden, cup-shaped blooms whose soft, citrusy scent inspires hope and healing
My father’s blue eyes are utterly clear and focused, and something about them stops the panic that hearing Jack’s name might have otherwise ignited within me.
“What do you mean, you wrote to Jack Harris?”
“I found his mother’s phone number in your mother’s address book. I called her, and she gave me Jack’s email address.”
I stare at him. “What? Why?”
“Hang on,” he says then, and leaves me standing, stunned, in the living room while he disappears into his bedroom. He returns holding his laptop. “Let’s sit,” he says and steers me toward the dining table.
“Dad, I—” I begin to say, blood rushing loudly in my ears.
Ten years ago, Jack told me to stay away from him, and the anger in his voice on that day, the coldness in his expression when he’d ignored me from then on, moving away without saying another word, has always felt like an insurmountable wall, a locked door through which I could not pass.
“You need to read this,” my dad says firmly. It’s only when I feel his hand lightly holding my wrist that I realize I’ve begun to turn away. Everything in me wants to leave, needs to leave. Now. But my dad sets the laptop in front of me on the table. It’s open to an email.
Dear Mr. Barnes,
Thank you for writing. For years, I’ve wanted to reach out to Lucy to thank her
I look up at my father, my heart in my throat, and he nods toward the computer screen for me to keep reading.
for changing my life, and my mother’s, for the better.
I don’t understand how, or why, but in her garden a decade ago, I remembered something that I had forgotten.
I remembered that when I was six years old, I walked in on my father with a woman who was not my mother.
I remembered my father grabbing me by the collar and making me promise not to tell my mother.
Forget this happened, Jack, he said. I was scared and I was confused and somehow I did forget. Or I thought I did.
Now I think it was always there in the back of my mind—my father’s anger, his selfishness, his lies. I think I was never the same after that day. For years, I could not shake a feeling of dread. I lived with a sadness that I didn’t understand.
After I left Lucy in her garden, I went home and confronted my father.
It all came out then—his affairs, his lies.
It wasn’t just the time I walked in on him; he’d been cheating on my mom for years.
She was devastated. We both were. I drank too much and I crashed my car and wound up in the hospital.
I lost my leg. I hardly remember that day, or many that followed it. Maybe that’s for the best.
My mother took me to live in Colorado. She thought we needed a fresh start. My father moved to San Diego. They divorced.
Once we were away from my father, the darkness that had hung over my life, and my mother’s life, slowly lifted.
I stopped drinking. I went to college. I fell in love with a woman named Rebecca.
We’re married now, and we have an amazing son named Noah.
I work as a counselor at a rehab center.
My mother remarried. He’s a great guy, and together they run an art gallery in Boulder. I’ve never seen her happier.
That day in Lucy’s garden changed my life. Lucy saved me. She freed me, I think. She freed both of us—my mother and me. I’ll never really be able to explain what happened, but I’m so thankful that it did.
Please pass this on to Lucy. I treated her terribly, and she didn’t deserve it.
I should have reached out years ago. I convinced myself that I was the last person on earth she’d want to hear from, but I think the truth is that I just wanted to put everything that happened in Bantom Bay behind me.
I should have called Lucy a long time ago to apologize, and to thank her.
I’m so sorry. If she ever wants to talk, I’m here.
Take care,
Jack
I look up at my father. I don’t know what to say. It’s like the world has flipped upside down.
“I had no idea,” I say quietly.
All these years, I have blamed myself for ruining Jack’s life. I never knew that his father was so awful to his mother and him.
Now I envision Jack as a husband and a father. I imagine his mother in her new gallery, happily remarried. My chest fills with light—it is a weightless, peaceful feeling that I haven’t felt in far, far too long.
“Thank you, Dad,” I say, hugging him. It seems that all this time that I have been trying to help my father, my father has been trying to help me. “Thank you for finding Jack.”
“There’s something else you need to know,” he says. “Come with me.”
My mother’s studio is just how we both have left it—messy and dusty, full of color and light.
“Your mother was so happy here,” my father says, looking around.
I nod. “It was her favorite place.”
“No.” My father’s voice is suddenly firm. “That’s what I want you to understand. This wasn’t her favorite place. She loved it, and she was very happy here, but this was not her favorite place. Your mother loved painting, but it wasn’t her great passion.”
“Of course it was,” I say, baffled. “She was an artist.”
“She was a teacher,” my father says. He doesn’t raise his voice, but it seems to echo in the studio.
“Teaching was what your mother truly loved to do. She was an exceptionally talented artist. We all know that. She poured her emotions into her work, and somehow, we felt those emotions deeply when we viewed her paintings. That was one of her gifts. But, Lucy, it wasn’t her only gift—and it certainly wasn’t the one that truly mattered to her. ”
He looks down at the paint-splattered floor.
“When I met your mother,” he continues slowly, “I thought she was the most remarkable woman I’d ever known.
She was so interesting and creative and beautiful…
and complicated. So very complicated. She’d made something of a name for herself in the art world, but her success didn’t seem to bring her much joy.
She spent her days alone in her studio. Not this studio, of course.
She had a little studio in the city when we met. She was unique. But also… solitary.”
He gives a funny little chuckle of the sort that I haven’t heard from him in ages. “And me? I was as ordinary as they come. I think she found my ordinariness charming, somehow, if you can believe it.”
“I can believe it,” I say, because I can.
My entire childhood, I witnessed how charmed my mother was by my father, by his devotion and his affection and his care.
She loved him with every part of herself.
What I have more trouble believing is that my mother had ever been solitary.
I can only picture her surrounded by friends, the people of Bantom Bay whom she loved and who loved her.
I think of her calendar, so full with her teaching schedule and lunches and walks and lectures and clubs.
“It was after we were married and moved here,” my father tells me, “that your mother began teaching. And that’s when she truly seemed to blossom.
She loved sharing her love of art with others…
being a part of a community… feeling as though she gave back to the universe as much as she had received.
I don’t have that sort of goodness, not even a fraction of it, but I admired it so much.
“So her favorite place really wasn’t this studio.
It was the studio in the Bantom Bay Community Center.
What she did there—the connections she made with people, the way she brought them joy—meant far more to her than any painting she made with her own hands.
It was only when she started working there that she felt like her gift really mattered, like she really mattered.
What she did for the people who took her classes, the way she listened to them and guided them and used her gift to give them a sense of beauty and purpose in their lives—that was magical.
Your mother knew that it was never her gift for painting that was important.
The people were important. The connections. ”
It is the most my dad has said since I’ve been home. It might, in fact, be the most I have ever heard him say.
I think about how satisfied I have been over the years, creating gardens for my many clients, and how that satisfaction feels quiet and small compared to the happiness that I have felt since I started working at the Oceanview Home.
The people. The connections. I feel as though a piece of me has been missing all along, and now I have found it—or, perhaps, returned to it.
My life in the past three weeks has been fuller than the previous ten years combined.
Everything is messier, perhaps. Scarier.
But so much more fulfilling and joyful, too.
“The work that you’ve done at the Oceanview Home,” my father goes on. “The way you care about those residents and the way they obviously care for you… your mother would be so very proud of you. As I am.”
“Well,” I say a few minutes later, once we’ve cleared our throats and dried our eyes and stepped away from our embrace. “If this studio really wasn’t Mom’s favorite place, maybe it’s time to clear it out.”
I see the fear that passes over my father’s face, and I press on anyway.
“She’s not here, Dad,” I say gently. “She’s not in these things. And the community center needs art supplies. Badly. I was there last week.”
I can see my father considering my words. He looks around, taking in the sight of all of my mother’s tools and paints with a new thoughtfulness.
“I really think Mom would want us to give everything to the center,” I tell him. “And then, when this space is cleared out, I think you should use it as your workshop. Get your tools out of the pantry. I think Mom would have wanted that, too.”
My father looks at me, surprised. After a beat, he turns slowly and walks toward the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“To find boxes for all of this stuff,” he says over his shoulder. “No time like the present.”
Alone, I look around my mother’s studio, trying to memorize it just as it is. My eyes land on the painting she’d been working on when she died, the one that emanates so much hope that my heart grows buoyant the moment I look at it.
When I stand in front of the painting, I draw in my breath.
Because now I see what I couldn’t see the last time I came out here—that this painting is of the view from the Oceanview Home.
This is the field of golden poppies that stretches beyond the western garden wall, the sloping meadow of wildflowers that leads to the scattering of trees, the silver sea beyond.
My mother had already been to the Oceanview Home when she died.
But when?
And why?
Two hours later, my father and I drive down to the community center, the bed of my truck filled with boxes of art supplies.
When we step into the lobby, the air is fragrant with the fresh scent of the potted primroses on the reception desk, but I see my father’s eyes catch on the peeling paint, the grubby grout.
He walks over to the lopsided bulletin board, frowning.
I tell the girl at the desk that we’ve brought a donation of art supplies, and she breaks into a smile.
“We really need them,” she says. “I’m in the Thursday painting class and I’ve started bringing in some of my own stuff because the center is running so low on everything.”
“Are there any tools around?” my father calls from where he stands at the bulletin board. “This needs to be rehung properly.”
“I have no idea,” the girl says with a cheerful shrug. “But there are some people working in the theater. Maybe they have some.”
In the art studio, as we’re adding my mother’s supplies to the shelves, I notice my father stop in front of the painting of my mother’s that hangs on the wall.
I walk over and stand beside him, feeling that sense of determination, that sense of overcoming fear, swelling within me as I look at the image.
“Remarkable,” my father murmurs.
“Gregory! Lucy! What are you two doing here?”
We both turn to see that Roger stands in the open door of the studio. My father gestures toward the shelves and explains that we’re dropping off some of my mom’s old painting supplies.
Roger smiles a bit sadly. “What a nice idea. She would have loved that, wouldn’t she? Knowing that all of her old things will be used to create new art?”
I nod and ask him how the work in the theater is going.
“Well, it’s a bit more of a project than any us thought.
” He lowers his voice and steps farther into the studio.
“It’s kind of a motley crew with an entirely unhelpful skill set in there.
My talent for cooking only gets us so far.
” He gives my dad a hopeful glance. “Any chance I could convince you to give us a hand, Gregory? It would be great to have someone who actually knows what he’s doing operating some of these tools.
We have coffee and lasagna and cookies and wine. ”
I suspect that Roger and I both hold our breath then, waiting to see what will happen next. My dad glances back at my mother’s painting, then faces Roger again.
“We’ll need to fix the bulletin board in the lobby, too,” he says. “It’s crooked.”
Roger claps his hands together, grinning. “Sure! We’ll add it to the list.” As we’re leaving the studio, he leans toward me and murmurs conspiratorially, “It’s a very long list, Lucy. Never-ending, really.”