The Light of Hidden Flowers (28 page)

“Guys,” Joe said to the kids. “Lucy. This is my friend Missy. She and I went to high school together, if you can believe that.”

“You went to high school?” Jake said to his father.

“Back when the dinosaurs roamed,” Joe said.

“High school in Alexandria?” Lucy clarified, speaking to me.

I nodded.

“And you live in New Jersey now?” she asked.

“No, I’m still in Alexandria.”

“What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

Our
neck of the woods. Like she and Joe alone owned New Jersey.

“Just visiting,” I said lightly, smiling, but for all I knew I had the squiggly-lined mouth of nervous Charlie Brown. Lucy—ha!
Lucy
—would pull the football from me at any minute, landing me flat on my back.

“Visiting family, friends?” she asked.

“Geez, Mom,” the older daughter, Katherine, said. “It’s like you’re interrogating her.”

Lucy glared at Katherine.

“Me,” Joe answered. “She’s visiting me.”

“Oh!” Lucy responded, slapping her own forehead. “My bad!”

“Joe,” the barista called, signaling that our order was ready.

“Kids,” Lucy said. “Can you say hello to Daddy’s friend?”

A jangle of hellos escaped from them.

“Hi, guys!” I said. My falsetto was crazy, the voice of a strung-out druggie.

“We should go,” Joe said. “Bye, kids! I miss you!”

“Where are you going?” Jake asked.

Joe halted, looked at me uneasily. “I thought I’d show Missy some of the sights.”

“Take her to Emille’s,” the little guy said.

“Why would he take her there?” Olivia wanted to know.

“Because Mom loves that place and she’s a girl, too.”

“That’d be dumb,” Olivia said. “Dad’s not going to—”

Katherine took her little brother by the sleeve. “Jake, come with me.” She steered him toward the pastry display, looking back at me with what I perceived to be a look of pity.

“But why?” Jake whined.

“Do you mind if I say you’re a total dork?” Katherine said.

“Kids will say the darndest things!” Lucy piped in.

“We’ll be going,” Joe said.

We took our coffees from the counter and exited the shop. Joe drove us away, and neither of us said a word the entire trip back to the hotel. Inside the lobby, the same oxygen that left me euphoric only an hour before was now under pressure, and damaging my lungs. If I didn’t get back into the atmosphere soon, I might die. Finally, I spoke. “That was a lot.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was horrible and you must have felt ambushed.”

“This might be more than I bargained for,” I confessed.

“Don’t say that,” Joe said.

“I think I need some time alone,” I said. I knew myself well enough to know that the clock was already counting down: 10-9-8-7 . . . and by the time it reached one, any confidence I had would have withered to nothing.

“I want to spend the day with you,” Joe said, but if I was detecting his tone correctly, he was as freaked out as I was.

“Maybe later,” I said. “I think I’d better go up now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Call me later?”

Joe nodded and I made a beeline for the elevator, stepping in and watching the doors close just in time. The tidal wave of childhood insecurity hit before I even reached the third floor.

Flopped onto my bed, the bed where Joe and I had just made out the night before, I cried silently as though all the bad news of my life were brand-new: We’re sorry to tell you your mother was hit by a giant truck! You’ll spend your entire childhood motherless. We’re sorry to inform you of your father’s Alzheimer’s! Oh, by the way, he won’t last long. The dementia will clobber him like a cartoon anvil. And then he’ll have a stroke and the nurse you were too afraid to dismiss will let him die.

Oh, and Joe? We’ll bring him back to you with such tenderness that you’ll feel as though nothing in the world could keep you apart. Except for his wife and three children, the four human beings who will matter more to him than you ever could. Every time you see them, you’ll know where you stand: against the wall, because there are only five seats at their table.

I had put on a good face, had acted brave traveling through Italy and then India, had made a good showing of being Frank Fletcher’s daughter. But dating Joe, my high school sweetheart who had an ex-wife and children and one leg—who was I joking? I just wanted to be home in my town house, burrowed into the down comforter on my bed, my pint of pistachio gelato nearby. I wanted to recite my Italian phrases. I wanted to chart stocks. I wanted my father. I even wanted Lucas, because loving him was risk-free. I knew what he was—a tax-free municipal bond with a good yield. It would never make me rich, but it was steady and predictable and, under no circumstance, would it spike or plummet. There would be no conditions where I would feel like this.

Who the hell do you think you are, Missy Fletcher?
You’re no one’s daughter or wife or mother or sister. You belong to no one, and no one belongs to you.

I lay quietly and stared numbly and watched movies and ate room service. At noon, Joe knocked on my door. We sat on the bed and held hands. “Promise me you won’t make any decisions?”

I agreed, which was a lie, because I had already made up my mind: I had strayed too far off course. Charting new territory was one thing, but opening my heart so that it could feel like this was something entirely different. Living an adult life was still brand-new to me. Book-smart, I needed to work my way through some classes and tests before I was ready to be out in the field.

“I think I’ll head home,” I said. “There’s a train leaving at 1:40.”

“We barely spent any time together.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. It just made it so real. That you have a family: three kids, a wife. I can’t possibly imagine how I would fit into that.”

“That’s because you don’t know everything.”

“What?”

Joe brushed my hand. “Straight-A-student Missy Fletcher doesn’t know everything. Your IQ might put you at genius, but none of us knows what’s planned for us. When it comes down to it, we need to trust in the grand plan.”

“Do you?” I asked, though clearly he did, whether this plan was divine—driven by the God he had always believed so fiercely in—or just a knowledge he’d attained after seeing as much as he had.

“I have faith,” he said.

“After everything you’ve been through,” I said, “how could you have any faith left?”

“Faith is a choice, Miss. I choose it.” He smiled. “It’s not a coincidence that our paths have crossed again. There are no mistakes when it comes to me and you.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

The weeks that followed fell into a predictable pattern, one I clung to. In the daytime I did the work of the orphanage—filing paperwork, soliciting NGOs for support. With the lawyer’s help, we created our entity: Global Education Initiative, and were able to piggyback off our Fletcher Financial 501(c)(3) organization. Our firm had already proved a long history of giving to worthy organizations. From there, we created a new entity, funded not only with my personal money but also with some of the Fletcher Financial “Give Back” program’s money.

And Joe. He and I talked every night. Our conversations were as familiar and warming to me as my childhood bedroom. He was exactly the same, and entirely different. He maintained a bubbling enthusiasm for life, organic gratitude toward mankind, a genuine desire to help others—that was the same as eighteen-year-old Joe. He was deeply thoughtful, contemplative, reflective—that was thirty-six-year-old Joe. There was nothing simple, dogmatic, easily definable about him. If I thought for a second that I would find in him a blind acquiescence to a creed or code, I would have been wrong. He hated the war he fought in, he believed passionately in each of his men, he valued all human life. Nothing was simple. Everything was difficult. Everything was gray. He was nuanced and pained and laden. He was mature. He carried his adulthood like a pro. He was a veteran, in every sense.

And with his children, he tried so hard, cared so much. He coached Jake’s soccer team. He built sets for Olivia’s school play. But Katherine he worried about the most. She continued to struggle with her self-esteem. A clique of popular alpha girls had decided they couldn’t bear the fact that Katherine, with her straight As and passion for reading and writing, couldn’t name a Justin Bieber song and chose to wear the wrong brand of skinny jeans. Joe didn’t need to describe for me the hundred different ways they chose to punish her for these failings. I knew their work all too well. Joe shared his worries with me, and then, as if catching himself, would pull himself together with a tidy, “She’ll be fine! Girls like her are the ones who do the best, later in life. Look at you,” he always said, as if I were a shining example of the tortured girl in middle school eventually rising to the top.

I would agree, because I knew he needed me to agree, to affirm his belief that his daughter would be okay—eventually, but these stories of Katherine hit me in the gut. Later, after Joe and I had said good-bye, I’d lie in bed and think of her, because she and I were the same. Along with so many others. And not all of them were “fine.” Not all of them made it out of middle school.

“When can I see you again?” he asked one night.

“Anytime you want,” I answered without reservation because I ached for him, wanted my hands on him as badly as my heart wanted to pump blood. The resolve I’d felt in New Jersey, the certainty about not being part of his life, had faded almost immediately once I left. “But you have to come here.” I couldn’t stand the thought of running into his family again. I wanted him, but it had to be here.

A few weeks later, Joe called. “Guess what?”

As it turned out, Katherine had been chosen as a finalist in a Library of Congress writing contest. She would be honored in DC, at the Library of Congress itself. “We’re coming to your territory,” Joe said. “Are you up for meeting Kate again?”

I had thought about Katherine so often, I felt I already knew her. But who was I kidding? She was bound to hate me, because for her, I was no one worth knowing. Her parents had just divorced, and I was Dad’s “new friend.” She would have no choice but to hate me out of maternal deference, out of spite for her father, because she was simply a teenager, and she wasn’t supposed to like the things and people her parents liked. But I still remembered that day at the coffee shop, how she stepped in when her mother was asking me so many questions, when she’d tried to defuse the situation by steering her little brother away, by stopping Olivia from saying more. At the time, I’d thought she looked at me with pity, but now, as I considered it, maybe it was empathy.

“I’ll try.”

The following weekend, Joe and Katherine arrived. We had decided that they would get settled—take the Metro to their hotel, rest a bit—and then meet me for dinner. When I’d asked what Katherine liked to eat and Joe said, “Believe it or not, she loves seafood,” I knew just where to recommend.

When I pushed through the doors of Pier 6, Joe and Katherine were already at the bar. Joe was drinking a frosty ale, and Katherine appeared to be sipping from a soda. When Joe saw me, he signaled to his daughter, and they both smiled. Joe walked to me, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, and then led me back to the bar.

“A formal introduction,” Joe said. “Kate, this is Melissa.”

“Congratulations on your writing contest,” I said. “I read your essay. It was great!”

She seemed surprised. “Did my dad give it to you?”

“It was posted online,” I said. The theme of the contest was “A Book That Shaped Me,” and Katherine wrote about one that took place in Afghanistan, before the Taliban, and how the main character was once at school, and then a day later—once the Taliban was in—she was no longer able to go. Katherine did a nice job of juxtaposing this situation to America, where education is free and available to all.

“Thanks for checking it out,” she said.

“What genre is your favorite?”

“Mostly historical fiction,” she said.

“Anything depressing,” Joe added, “war, poverty, the Holocaust.”

Kate smirked at her father. “True, I like reading about kids in tough situations.” She went on to tell me about a Newbery award winner she had just read, about a boy from Sudan who became a refugee after rebels ripped through his village, and another book—an MLK Literary Arts award winner—about a young girl torn from her village and forced onto a slave ship, where she was sold to a cruel master in Virginia. “I also loved another book about a girl who had cerebral palsy and couldn’t communicate, but inside she was brilliant.”

Katherine Santelli was thoughtful, articulate, and so far, not at all acting like a teenager. There was no eye rolling, no “whatevers” or “yeah rights.” Talking to her was like talking with an adult, but then again, as I thought back, I was the same way. I had had an easier time relating to adults than teenagers, when I was Kate’s age. When the waitress came, I said, “I don’t know if you like clam chowder, but it’s really good here.”

Katherine loved clam chowder and ordered a bowl, as did Joe and I.

After a few bites, Katherine said, “Do you mind if I say this is the best clam chowder ever?”

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “Because I’m in total agreement.”

For dinner, Katherine ordered the grilled shrimp over wild rice, I chose the crab cakes, and Joe got the snapper. We passed on dessert. “There’s a place right down the road,” I said. “The chocolate soufflé is worth the wait.”

While the soufflé cooked, Joe and I sipped coffee and Katherine enjoyed a hot cocoa with whipped cream. “My dad told me about the work you’re doing in India,” she said. “When I grow up, that’s the kind of work I want to do. I want to help people. Somehow.”

“I believe you,” I said, “after listening to you talk about your reading. You certainly have the heart and the mind for it.”

At the end of the night, we said our good-byes. “Thanks so much for meeting me,” I said. “It was really nice talking with you.”

Katherine took an awkward step forward and then stuck out her hand. I took it in mine and then decided to be brave. I pulled her in for a quick hug. “Good luck tomorrow!”

She looked at her dad, and then at me. Hesitantly she said, “Do you want to come?”

“Would you?” Joe said.

“I’d love to,” I said.

That night, I lay in bed with my phone, texting Joe.
She’s amazing
.

I worry so much about her,
he wrote.

Me:
She’s perfect exactly how she is.

Joe:
But she doesn’t fit in.

Someday,
I typed, but couldn’t finish my thought. Wasn’t my life an anthem to “someday”?

The next morning, I left my town house and walked to the King Street Metro station. The morning was brisk and cool yet sunny. By the time I hit the station, I had already shed my jacket and scarf. I rarely rode the Metro, and this morning, on such a quiet day with low ridership, I relished the thrum of the car zipping over the tracks. At the Smithsonian station, I disembarked. Once on the National Mall, I walked toward Fourteenth Street. Joe and Katherine were approaching our meeting spot, coming from the opposite direction. The book festival was setting up, giant white tents spanning ten blocks. We found the location where Katherine would be awarded her prize.

The ceremony was lovely. As a finalist, Katherine was called up onstage. She posed for a photo with the director of the contest, as well as the editor of the KidsPost for the
Washington Post
. Afterward, we spent some time in the tent, which was set up like a bookstore. While Katherine browsed, Joe and I held hands, and the electricity between us—our want for one another, especially during this weekend, when we couldn’t be alone—jolted shocks through my limbs. After checking that Katherine was absorbed in a book at one of the tables, I leaned into Joe, put my mouth on his neck. Risk-averse Missy Fletcher had the urge to make out with her boyfriend, right then and there.

“I’m going to need to see you again, soon,” Joe whispered into my ear, kissing the top of it, sliding his fingers along my neck and into my hair. “You’re killing me.”

The following weekend, Joe returned to Virginia to see me. He knocked on my door, and when I opened it, we rushed to each other. We were frenzied, clawing at each other. Stripped of our clothing, disrobed of any pretense, we slipped into bed. I kissed his gorgeous neck, ran my fingers over the marine tattoo on the crest of his hip. He rose to sit on the edge of the bed and removed his prosthetic half leg. I turned away to give him privacy, but it didn’t matter because Joe’s missing limb meant nothing to me in terms of my love for him. I ached for his loss, but not for mine.

Then I felt Joe’s body next to mine, his chest against my back, his arms around me. I turned so that we were face-to-face. I closed my eyes and I was there again, at the beachside hotel, the first time Joe and I made love. Then I opened my eyes, and I was here and so was he. I no longer needed to fantasize. Joe was in my bed, loving me.

Later, we slept, wrapped in arms of animal warmth. When we awoke, it was three in the morning. A thin stream of light slanted through from the bathroom night-light.

“What are you doing to me?” I asked, tracing my finger along the ridge of his cheekbone.

“Loving you,” he said.

“For how long?”

“I’ve always loved you,” he said.

“But will you love me forever?”

“I’m no longer a guy who makes promises,” he said. “Life has shown me that even the most heartfelt promises can break.”

“If you don’t promise me forever,” I said, kissing his mouth, “what will I believe in?”

“In yourself,” he said, kissing me back. “Believe in yourself, Missy Fletcher.”

Later, with Joe’s head on my lap, I drew maps on his back, an elegy to our past, a sonnet to this moment in our present, a ballad of love never forgotten. We knew enough to respect time and space in this moment, were aware that the air and light around us would forever be the touchstones we’d rely upon to remember it. We were optimistic, yes, but we were wary, too, enough to know that a moment like this might never come again. As archivists of our love, it was our job to carve etchings of it on our souls.