The Understory (11 page)

“What makes you think—” But he stopped himself when he realized the bottle was in his hand, so he opened the door and led Story Easton into his home. Drawings of various plants and flowers, some sketched on scratch paper, some on dinner napkins, were scattered throughout the living room. They walked past five abandoned TV dinners and several empty beer bottles, and when Story saw a crumpled up
National Geographic
, featuring a plethora of exotic shrubbery and foliage on the cover, she wondered if it was a botanist’s alternative erotica—plant porn, perhaps.

“Okay,” he said, after grabbing a glass, pouring her a drink, and inviting her to sit on the couch, “what do you want to know about the treasure box?”

“How big is it?” Story asked first.

Martin Baxter approximated the height and width with his hands, and it appeared to be about a foot wide and a foot deep.

She slapped her hands on her thighs right before her next big question. “Okay, where exactly is it?”

He said, quite directly, “It’s in the heart of the Amazon rainforest,” then followed with a vigorous gulp.

“Shit. That’s complicated,” Story blurted. “Isn’t there a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest? Maybe Cooper wouldn’t know the difference.”

Martin Baxter sounded both elitist and jaded when he said, “Yeah. Most people can’t tell the difference between a tiny field mouse and a giant capybara.” After taking another drink, he asked, “Who’s Cooper?”

Story ignored his question and moved on to more important things. “Fine. I’ll just have to take him there. How do I get to the Amazon?”

“Very carefully,” he said, taking another drink. “First, you fly into Manaus, and then you take a riverboat—”

“Help me plan my trip—and I’ll pay you whatever you want. I’m loaded.”

“It shows,” he said, looking at her beat-up Volvo in his driveway. “I can’t help you.”

“Oh, Martin,” Story said with a sigh, “we’ve already been through this.”

He smirked. “No, really, I’m busy. Got a big trip of my own planned. Leaving in two days . . . and after that,” he sighed, “the university’s adding another class to my already busy schedule, and I just won’t have any time.”

She shook her head. “Let me get this straight, you’d rather go to the Hamptons than help a little boy reinvent himself? Where in the hell are you going that’s so—”

“The Amazon.”

“What?!” Story screamed. “That’s awesome! We’ll go with you! And Cooper can find the treasure box, and—”

“No. Absolutely not. Took me six months to prepare for this trip.” Martin Baxter shook his head in an almost violent way. “First off, I don’t even know you.” He poured them both another drink. “Secondly,” he said with a chuckle, “I don’t even know you.”

“Not in the biblical sense, no, but . . .”

Martin fought a smile, but continued, “Not to mention the fact that this magical treasure box is totally made up. It only exists in this mess of a brain,” he said, pointing to his head.

“Not to him. To him, it’s real.” Story paused for a moment and, without trying, oozed sincerity. “It has to be.”

He broke eye contact with Story and stared into nothingness. “You don’t understand. This trip isn’t just a trip. It’s a journey,” he said.

“Okay, I get it. It’s an expedition with a purpose,” she said. “We can help you. What are you after?”

He pointed his head in the direction of a large hardcover book written by Abigail Baxter, titled
Flores Amazonias
, sitting on his dusty coffee table. “Page eighty-seven.”

Story flipped through page after page of beautiful hand-drawn flowers, but when she got to page eighty-seven, devoted to
Selenicereus wittii
, the tropical moonflower, there was no picture, just a blank box with the caption
No picture available
.

“My mother refused to draw a picture of a flower she’d never seen in bloom.” Martin began to laugh. “Tenacious broad, my mom. She made twelve trips to the Amazon to catch it in blossom, but she never did.” He held his index finger in the air, and with a flair that bordered on mysterious, he said, “One chance. That’s all you get. It comes to life for one night out of every year, and as soon as the sun comes up, it withers away, and its life is over.”

“So we’re both looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

The professor said, “Oh, it exists.”

“Have you seen it?” said Story.

“No,” he said, “but it exists, it—”

“Has to,” Story said with raised eyebrows.

“God, you’re giving me a headache,” Martin said, bringing both hands to his forehead.

“Just tell the university that we’re your research assistants,” Story said, realizing for the first time that, on the off chance that she’d actually get to go to the Amazon, she’d have to convince Claire and Cooper to go, too.

“The university isn’t funding this trip,” he said, sneering and staring into his bourbon. “After careful consideration, they think I’m a—”

“Suicidal drunk?”

“Never go into counseling.” He threw a glare her way. “I have a sponsor.”

“AA?”

He didn’t look at her. “No . . . deep-pocket sponsor who, for some reason, has a particularly passionate interest in getting the world’s first and only photograph of a tropical moonflower in bloom. I’d love to do research for the university, but since they’re not on board, well, you go to the money.” He put his drink down. “He’s a local guy. Name’s Judge Stone.”

After that, Martin Baxter excused himself to the bathroom, and Story used her time alone to look at a picture hanging by the front door. The frame, heavy and silver, was made up of a series of flowers painted red, blue, and violet, interspersed with dark green, heart-shaped leaves. Inside the frame were two delicate faces, shining with smiles, and even Story, prone to cynicism, had to admit they were beaming with life.

“This frame was a birthday present,” Martin said when he returned. He stood behind Story and looked at the picture as though he was looking through a window into another time. “They’re all different flowers in the morning glory family. That’s why she bought it for me. Morning glories are uncommon in art—everyone loves the rose.” He pointed to each separate flower surrounding the picture. “This is a bindweed. This is a jalap. Scammony, below that. And this here is the non-tropical moonflower—
Ipomoea alba
—it’s not the night-blooming cactus moonflower I’m hunting, but they’re related. They’re both nocturnal, they’re both climbers, and they’re both angiosperms.” When Story looked to him for clarification, he added, “They flower.”

He let out a short-lived laugh. “Kate always joked that if I had a choice between saving her or the ethereal moonflower in bloom, there’d be a moonflower, perfect and repotted, next to her tombstone.”

But as Story watched Martin Baxter come to life when he spoke about his wife, she knew he would have done anything to save her. He placed his finger on the frame and caressed it as if he was touching the rare moonflower itself. “She didn’t even like flowers—that’s the funny thing.” His face became more desperate and morose. “But she loved that I did. That’s the kind of person she was.”

Story felt his sadness in her gut. “I read about your wife and daughter, and I’m so sorry—”

“Everything I loved was in that car.” An intense Martin Baxter stared at the photograph as if he could will them both back to life if he tried hard enough.

Underneath Kate and Hope’s picture was another one of Hope, taken at what looked to be a kindergarten production of “Three Billy Goats Gruff.” The picture showed Hope wearing a whimsical, mischievous smile and a cardboard cutout shaped as a big cloud. “She played the part of the wind,” Martin said, staring at the picture and smiling. Without breaking his gaze, he said, “It wasn’t a speaking part, but she stole the show,” and then he laughed a little. “She practiced for weeks. At first she was just a whisper of a breeze, but then the whisper became a blustery gust, and finally, one night, she raged through the house, whisking away everything in her path.” He replaced the smile on his face with a pensive stare. “Everything she touched, everything she did, retained the very essence of her. When you were around her, you felt . . . alive. She could make you fall in love with the wind.”

The next picture frame was empty, except for a piece of paper, folded into a small square, stuck in the center of the frame. Story figured whatever was on that paper was either too private or too painful to be in full view, yet was important enough to be put on display.

Martin swiped his finger over the glass, daydreaming about the first time he told Hope about the moonflower. He and Kate had taken Hope to a local botanical garden after she’d asked how greenhouses worked. When her dad told her how the sun was involved, Hope listened with a focused curiosity. Though the sun was an infrequent visitor in Portland, Hope had always been a fan, and she was enamored of the very idea of the radiant ball of fire.

Thanks to her dad, and several books he’d given her, Hope knew facts about the sun that most eight year olds did not. In fact, when asked, Hope could draw a diagram of energy flowing through the sun’s seven layers. With a red crayon, she’d draw the core, then the radiative and convention zones, then the photosphere, chromosphere, transition region and, finally, the corona with its blistering loops. And that night, after spending the day inside a botanical greenhouse, a giant solar collector in which Hope got to observe the power of the sun’s heat and the plant life it produced, she asked her dad, “Does a person have a core like the sun?”

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she looked up at a picture of the sun hanging above her headboard.

Martin thought about it, sat down next to her, and put his arm behind her small shoulders. “Like the sun, people have layers—skin, muscles, bone—but the closest thing to a core would probably be a person’s heart. Some believe that’s where the soul is, and hopes, and dreams, and fears—”

“Fears?” Hope asked.

“Sure,” Martin said, strengthening the hold he had on his daughter. With a smile, he said, “What’s my brave Hope afraid of?”

When she stared up at him, he could tell she didn’t want to say it, but he figured it out anyway. That’s what dads do.

“If you’re afraid of the dark,” he said, “that’s quite common.”

“Seriously?” Hope said.

“Oh, yeah,” he assured her. “I know plenty of grown-ups who sleep with nightlights.”

Hope sighed. “I wish I were older. I wouldn’t be afraid of anything then.”

Martin laughed at that, until he realized that a perfect, organic teachable moment had presented itself. Martin was surprised it hadn’t come up before. “You know that flower Grandma hunted for so long but never found? The same one I tried to find when I went to the Amazon last June?”

Hope nodded. “The nocturnal one?”

“It’s a tropical, night-blooming moonflower, and Grandma wanted to draw it because it’s very rare and very beautiful. It only blooms once every year, at night, and the moment the sun comes up, it shrivels up and closes its petals.”

Hope scrunched her nose. “This isn’t part of a riddle, is it?” Hope hated riddles.

Martin raised one eyebrow, and said, “What’s white, alive, and dead all at the same time?”

“Let me get this straight,” said Hope. “It actually likes the dark?”

Martin looked into his daughter’s eyes. “It
loves
the dark, because it needs the dark.” It was something he and the moonflower had in common. “Maybe at night, you should pretend you’re a moonflower, soaking up the darkness, basking in the moonlight, and then you won’t be scared anymore.”

“Hmmm,” she said, “I guess. That might be apropos,” she said, looking slightly embarrassed. She smiled. “Am I being verbose again?”

“You, verbose?” Martin teased, smiling.

Hope blurted, “Wait, Dad, I’ve got it now. Let me start over.” She let out a young-girl giggle. “Oops. My bad.”

Martin always envied Hope’s ability to start over, because the idea of Hope growing up and leaving him to start over without her left him feeling empty. It was years and years away, but Martin prematurely mourned her absence. “Okay,” he said, “start over.”

Hope beamed. “I will be the fabulous fairy that sleeps deep inside the moonflower bud!”

Martin wondered, at that moment, what it must be like to be Hope, full of possibility and magic, and he longed for the ability to walk in her lavender Converse sneakers for one moon cycle. He laughed, and then he said, “Okay, but you’ll be waiting a long time for it to open. And then when it does, it might be hard to get out. You’ll be stuck.”

“You’ll come and release me,” Hope said. But then Hope, suddenly serious, seemed to change her mind. “I’ll figure it out, Dad,” she said, looking into her dad’s eyes. “In case you can’t find me, you know, like that time at the mall when I found my way back.”

“Of course you’ll figure it out. You always do,” he said. “By the way, how do you become a fairy?”

“Magic.” Hope gave him an incredulous look. “Duh.”

Martin nodded. “Duh. The Amazon is full of magic.”

“Yeah.” A sense of mystery seemed to consume her, and Hope’s eyes lit up when she said, “I will wake up in the middle of the Amazon, and I will have to find a magic treasure box, which will turn me into a fairy—and I’ll be able to fly!—and when I get scared at night, I’ll find the moonflower and it will teach me to love the dark.”