“Sienna! I’m so glad to see you. We just got in, and I came right over.” She leaned forward for a hug, which Sienna returned stiffly.
“Why, Marnie?” Sienna asked without preamble. Her voice was almost a whisper, but filled with the low throb of pain that made it audible to Marnie over the clatter and murmurings of the shop. “Why did you tell me Susan would live?”
Marnie’s brow creased with compassion, and she stared at Sienna for a moment, her mouth agape. She blew out a breath and glanced around the room. There was a table for two apart from the others, and her eyes lit on it. “Could we have some tea and sit? Then I’ll tell you whatever you’d like to know.”
Sienna nodded and started to put together a tray with two pots—a small clay one for Marnie’s pu-erh and a glazed brown pot for the Keemun Sienna preferred and added a plate of sandwiches and almond pastries. She carried the tray to the table where Marnie was already seated.
“Thank you,” Marnie said. She piled her plate with food and poured a cup. “How’s Peter?” she asked. She lifted the mug so that the steam rose up before her face, and she inhaled deeply. But she did not take her eyes from Sienna.
“He’s dying,” Sienna said, returning Marnie’s gaze. “But Tovah and Jessie are out, so I had to be here today.” She poured a cup of tea and readied it perfunctorily, sloshing the cream a bit so that a drop made its way slowly down the side of her cup.
“I see.” Marnie drew a deep breath and released it. She ate a tea sandwich, drank half her cup of tea, and looked around the shop. “I saw this. Before. The shop full of life and love and hospitality.” She looked at Sienna, who stared straight at her, a blank look plastered over her face. “But as to why I said Susan would live, that was not a vision. Not exactly. It was a sound.”
Sienna thought of the moments after Susan’s birth, the quiet that had been so startling. Susan would never cry. She gulped her tea to keep her composure, then looked back at Marnie. “A sound?”
“I saw something. An impression of your rooms, yours and Peter’s, the house, the shop, the gardens, the church, all the places you love. And Susan was there, but I never saw her. I only heard her. Her laughter. I thought it meant that she would live.”
Sienna stared into her teacup, then drained it in three long gulps. She nodded without looking up, rose to her feet, and walked toward the kitchen. She stepped into the cooler and let the tears flow until her face ran cold with them. Then she wiped the puddle from her neck, stepped out into the kitchen, and left a note for Lettye that she would be back in the morning.
In her car, Sienna blinked at the sight of her hands on the steering wheel. Her fingers smelled like herbal dish soap and vanilla from baking. She drove to the hospital and parked without letting herself think about what Marnie’s vision could have meant. But as she turned off the ignition and set herself to watch with Peter, she could not shake a remembered phrase from the prophets. “Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.”
“It was a dream,” she said aloud. A dream and not a vision. It had been meant to be interpreted symbolically, surely, instead of looked for in real life. If Marnie could make such an awful mistake, what certainty was there of hope?
After Susan died, Sienna had dug into the garden and built up her business. There was always something to hold. The joy of roots and even weeding seemed blasphemous to her in the early weeks—all that life in her hands when she felt so empty. The happy clatter of cups and spoons seemed a sacrilege. But she kept going because she had known somewhere deep that God shows up where we are. She had hoped that He would find her there in the digging and the work, that she would look up at the end of some long day and see that He had been with her all along, working alongside her, or better yet, that His would be the face on the other side of the teapot. It seemed a half-baked fantasy now, the idea that God would pour for them and then let her cry it out on His shoulder.
Hope was not something you could see, was it? What was it she had read once in her prayer study? “Hope is memory remembering the future glory of God.” Maybe it was faith that you couldn’t touch. But that didn’t work either. If you couldn’t touch faith, then it was all a game, wasn’t it?
This dilemma carried her through the parking garage and across the street. When she entered the hospital, she had come back around to the original sore question. Had Marnie only told them a dream? And was she only wishfully thinking when she said Peter would be okay? Was that another dream? She shuddered at the thought of Peter as merely a peaceful presence in her memory; she did not wish to be haunted by the ghost of his loss before it happened.
As she opened Peter’s door, she decided there was only one thing for it. She would have to hold onto something with her hands again and hope that God would meet her there. Peter was asleep, but his long, warm hands were stretched out on top of the blanket. She sat down next to him and held those hands, waiting.
Notes from Sienna’s tea files
Tasting Notes: Cocoa Yerba house blend, yerba mate´with vanilla, cinnamon, and raw cacao powder.
Provenance: South American except for Vietnamese cinnamon.
Liquor: Opaque dark chocolate brown.
Astringency: Mild bite that mellows well with addition of milk.
Body: Rounded, with long-lasting substance.
Fragrance: Cocoa and holiday baking.
Serve with: Milk and sugar, stevia, or honey. Grounding.
Chapter Thirteen
Sienna woke up after dark. Someone had put a warm blanket around her shoulders and a pillow under her face where it leaned on the bedrail. She jerked upright, and Peter squeezed her hand. He was awake.
“Hey,” she smiled at him. She could feel the sleep creases on her face stretch from the smile. She rubbed her cheeks with her left hand and yawned.
Peter looked at her quietly. She suspected he had been watching her for a long time. For years, even. Early in their marriage, she would wake up well after sunrise to find him smiling at her softly, that same peaceful vigilance on his face. She had not noticed him watching her the past six months, but she was immediately eased to see him now.
“When I’m better, will you feed me pears?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she managed. Her throat was tight with sudden tears. After Susan died, when the summer fruit came in, Sienna had been too exhausted by grief to eat it. She bought bowls full of peaches that lay forgotten on the table until they were overripe and drew flies. One night she had come home from a long day of painting and hammering at the teashop and found Peter in the living room. He sat her down on the couch, handed her a pint of cold beer, and fed her sliced peaches with homemade whipped cream. It was the first food she had tasted in months, a sort of sacrament of healing. Peter’s favorite fruit was pears.
He waited until she had swallowed back her sadness before he went on. “And oatmeal stout over ice cream. And that spice—what is it?”
“Cardamom.”
“Cardamom,” he nodded, “that goes so well with pears.”
“I’ll make you cardamom shortbread, then?”
“Yes, or it can be in the ice cream. You choose.”
She nodded. The memory of cardamom tugged at her, bringing up thoughts of long autumns and cooler weather. “It’s baking season, you know. I’ll have to make the shortbread soon to warm the house.” A Bible quote popped into her mind, one they had used to flirt with each other. How can one keep warm alone? She pushed back a quiver of fear. She did not want to be alone.
“And pear season soon,” Peter said.
“Yes.” She looked at him, not sure what to say. His deep eyes were lit from within, like sunlight in a clear brown stream. Sienna recognized the light as hope, and she raised her eyebrows. “Peter, the doctors? Have they any news?”
“No,” he whispered. The light was not gone from his eyes. “But I’ve had a visitor.”
Sienna knit her brows, remembering the conversation and confusion that had driven her to his bedside ea
rlier. “Marnie?”
“Susan.” He spoke her name quietly, but the joy of it squeezed her heart.
“Susan?” She breathed deeply, released the breath. “Our Susan?”
Peter nodded. “At first I was dreaming, but then I was sure I was awake, Sienna.” He followed her glance toward the morphine drip that he controlled with a tiny button. He shook his head. “I wasn’t medicated at the time.”
Sienna cleared her throat as her eagerness to connect with their daughter overcame her visceral fear of ghosts. “You saw her?”
“I heard her. In the dream, I was at my drafting board. The windows were open, and I heard laughter. Then it came into the room with me, and I knew it was Susan. I could see her whole, like a joyful light. But the laughter, it was here when I woke up. Her laughter filled the corners of the room.”
Sienna gasped.
“I’m going to recover. I don’t know how, but I know I will.” His eyes grew brighter, and she could feel his pulse race in the fingers she held.
She shook her head, puzzled. “But Peter, how can you know? How can you be sure it was her?”
“Listen, Sienna. It’s still there. Just listen.” A glow of happiness suffused his face, and he closed his eyes, head slightly tilted as though heeding something precious.
She tried to open her ears, her spirit, to hear what he heard, but she was distracted by the sudden labored sound of Peter’s breath. Alarmed, she sat forward and called the nurse’s station. Before the nurse had answered, the door opened.
“Mrs. Bannock,” Nurse David said, a serious but calm look on his face, “if you’ll excuse us for a little while? We have to stabilize your husband.” Another nurse and a young doctor followed him in—Dr. Patel, one of the residents she had met in passing.
She looked down at Peter then. His face was still happy, but his lips were bluish. She kissed his knuckles and stepped back as the medical team began to work and speak rapidly in their coded language. She went into the hall and nearly collapsed against the wall. A nurse named Lydia came up to her with a cup of ice water and pressed it into her hand.
“Here, Mrs. Bannock. Drink this.” Sienna complied, not knowing what else to do. “I’ll bring you a chair.”
“Thank you, Lydia.” Sienna said when the nurse had rolled a desk chair over to the wall outside Peter’s room. She sat heavily and stared into the water. At length, the young doctor came out into the hall.
“Mrs. Bannock?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“Your husband is stabilized for now, but we’ve had to sedate him. If you’d like to go home and rest tonight, he won’t likely be awake again until midday tomorrow.”
“Oh,” she said, suddenly realizing that in the suspense of waiting, she had not really considered leaving Peter’s side.
The doctor seemed to sense her hesitation. “Of course, if you’d like to stay with him, that’s fine, too, but you may be in for several long nights.”
Sienna looked at the earnest young woman with eyes equal parts intelligence and compassion. “Tell me, Dr. Patel, is he likely to improve?”
“I’m sorry, but no.” She frowned, waiting for the news to sink in. Behind her, the second nurse came out of Peter’s room and lingered, obviously wanting a word with the doctor. Dr. Patel waited, quiet, to see if Sienna had any other questions.
“When he’s like this, the medicines, are there side effects? Hallucinations, maybe?” Sienna asked.
“Not usually,” Dr. Patel replied, hesitantly. “Mrs. Bannock, this is not strictly medical, but I have observed, and my older colleagues have told me as well, that when people draw near to the end of their lives, they sometimes have moments of… ecstasy. Or what some people call self-knowledge or revelation. Is that the sort of experience that prompted your question?”
Sienna glanced at the unfamiliar nurse, still lingering behind the doctor, looking a little impatient, then back at the doctor’s kind eyes. “Yes,” she nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Patel.”
The doctor nodded, a sympathetic smile on her face. She placed a hand on Sienna’s shoulder. “Please, go home tonight. Rest. Peter will sleep tonight, and you can keep watch again tomorrow.”
Sienna nodded thanks, and the doctor turned away, walking some steps down the hall before she turned to the nurse and began to speak in low tones. Sienna watched them till they turned a corner. Then she stood and went into Peter’s room. Nurse David was watching an IV bag and adjusting a drip. He looked up and gestured welcome when she came in.
Without the suffusion of joy on his features, Peter’s skin seemed gray. But a smile lingered in the nascent crow’s feet beside his closed eyes. She listened to his slow, regular breathing and watched his lips return to a washed-out pink. She kissed them and left for home.
That night at home, Sienna did not want to turn out the lights and go to bed. She ate a meal of cold leftovers from Savitri’s, wrapped a well-worn shawl around her shoulders, and tried to sleep on the couch. The lamplight was comforting, but a moth had got in and would not stop hitting the bulb. The soft thunk-thunk of its body against the glass annoyed her. She left the moth to its fruitless quest and went upstairs, not bothering to turn out the lights on the way.
In the bedroom, she found the dark preferable to looking at Peter’s empty pillow. She lay under the blankets on her side of the bed and tried to relax. Her thoughts had matted together into an impenetrable rug. She couldn’t unravel the unspoken questions to resolve them, and she felt her mind muffled by the weight of them. She kicked off the blankets and rolled over, hoping the sharpness of cool air would shock her into clarity or soothe her into sleep. At length, the only discernable effect was that her feet got cold. She burrowed back under the covers and stared at the wall.
In the past, she would have tried to pray, but she couldn’t think how. Prayer could not be done alone. Sometimes you had to wait for someone else’s prayer to hold you. She hoped she was held in prayer now. Perhaps, if God was thinking of her, as always He was meant to be, it was enough. It would have to be enough, because she could not form a thought on her own, and the wall did not inspire any. She rolled over onto her back and let her eyes travel over the ceiling. The ceiling fan murmured quietly above her feet. The crown molding bridged the white expanse to the wall, and in the corners…
In the corners, she began to cry. She wept for love of Peter, of Susan, of Marnie, of Tovah, the dogs, Cleotis Reed, A.C., Nina, Lettye, Jessie, and the pilgrim at the manuscript table, for Liz and Deborah and every face she had seen. She wept for Nurse David and Dr. Patel with the compassionate eyes, for Lydia who brought her water. She paused her sobs to blow her nose, loudly, on the corner of the sheet, then gulped air hungrily through her nose and mouth.
The air was filled with a light pungent scent. Perhaps the smell had been there all along, or perhaps the tears had jerked it free from her swollen nose. It was wild bergamot, she was sure of it. Her tangled thoughts resolved into the single image of the red blossoms in the altar arrangement. She drank the memory like she had gasped for air, amazed at her desperate need for its beauty. The flowers were bright, almost too bright, behind her eyes, and she closed them, as much to shut out the intensity as to draw it nearer.
She must have slept, though it could not have been for long. There was light in the sky when the phone woke her, and her tears had dried. Her mouth was dry and gummy as well, but she managed to answer civilly. It was Tovah, her hoarse voice hesitant over the line.
“Sienna? Have you checked the emails lately?”
“Mmm? No. Why?”
“Look,” Tovah croaked, “I know you have a lot on your plate, but maybe today before you go, could you leave the investors’ files on the desk? I think I can be in tomorrow, and I’ll deal with it.”
“What?” Sienna sat up in bed, startled. “What’s going on, Tovah?”
“Five more groups have cancelled. Those bad online reviews. We’re bleeding money.” Tovah breathed loudly through her swollen throat, and Sienna wi
nced in sympathy to hear the misery over the phone. Sienna must have made a small noise of alarm as well, because Tovah rushed on reassuringly, “We’re going to make it, Sienna, don’t worry about that. It’s just that we’ll need more money to get through these first couple of months than we thought, at least until the good reviews catch up with the bad.”
“Oh, Tovah,” Sienna said, not knowing which of her problems to address. She settled for the immediate one. “I will leave the file on the desk, no worries. Now, you take care of yourself today.”
“I will.”
“And Tovah?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for watching out for us.”
Notes from Sienna’s tea files
Julie Patel, 32, oncologist, knitter, reading tutor, loves coffee flavored ice cream: Darjeeling brewed with dried cherries, served in large mug with 1 teaspoon sugar and a splash of half and half. Rounded, calming, earthy sweet. Takes the edge off of bitter foods.
Chapter Fourteen
The day did not grow easier. Nina was late for the first time, and Sienna had to open the store alone. Fortunately, only Cleotis seemed to notice.
“Where’s my Nina?” he asked genially when Sienna set down a tray laden with his usual order.
“Oh, I’m sure she’ll be along soon,” Sienna said in a placating tone. She caught the wry dark eye and switched to honesty. “I have no idea, Cleotis,” she said in a lower voice, “but if you’re set here, I’ll go see if I can find out.”
He nodded, watching her carefully, then turned to smile at a gray-haired woman in a pink sweater who approached the chess board. Sienna walked away quickly while he was distracted with a new challenger, but she felt he had seen right into her during their brief exchange. She hoped her anxiety did not show so easily to all the customers.
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