The Light of Hidden Flowers

by Jennifer Handford

  Now the two of them were giving me puppy-dog eyes, their hands clasped together in begging position.

  “I need to mull it over,” I said, thinking I would find Reina and run it by her. “When do you want to do this?”

  “Tonight,” Kate said.

  “Tonight!” I gasped. “Why tonight?”

  “Because there is a lunar eclipse,” Aneeta explained, “and my father has a telescope and said we could watch it.”

  Kate leaned in close to me and whispered, “I’ve never slept over at a friend’s house.”

  “Never,” I said. A statement, not a question. I had gone my childhood, tween, and teen years without a sleepover, too. I’d overheard girls talking about them—pricking their fingers to become blood sisters, painting each other’s nails, confessing truths that made sense of adolescent confusion.

  “Once a girl slept over at our house,” Kate said. “But I’ve never slept over at a friend’s house. Please?”

  I looked at the two of them, then shooed them away. “Go, you little beggars. Let me think about it.”

  I found Reina hunched over a giant blueprint, discussing with our foreman the plans for the water lines. I listened in for a while, and then walked away with the thought that I would catch her later. I could text Joe or Lucy, and gauge their reaction. But how would that sound—me, the supposed adult in charge, looking to them for advice as to whether Kate could have a sleepover with Aneeta? They didn’t know Aneeta, or her parents, or the town, or the risks attendant to her leaving my side. It would only make them worry.

  I got back to work, screening candidates for the headmistress position. She would work alongside Mrs. Pundari, though Mrs. Pundari would continue management of the food and housing, whereas the new hire would be in charge of the school and the teachers. There was one woman in particular in whom I was particularly interested. Her name was Ms. Chopra, and she was educated in Mumbai at the university, though had returned home to Rohtak to care for her parents. Although she hadn’t had the opportunity to graduate, she had taken numerous classes in education, special ed, and curriculum development.

  When Reina was free, she sauntered over, glimmering from the diamonds on her sunglasses and the diamonds in her eyes and the diamonds she kicked up in the dust. “Need me?” she asked.

  I outlined for Reina my dilemma about letting Kate go home with Aneeta. “What if something happens while she’s out of my reach?”

  Reina looked at me with disapproval. “Let the girl go,” she said. “It’s Aneeta! Her family is lovely and educated. Nothing will happen to her.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Of course, you’re right.”

  When I delivered the news to the girls, they yelped and jumped in the air and hugged me until I couldn’t breathe. Hours later, after we had put in a good ten hours, Aneeta’s parents arrived at the orphanage. The girls ran to greet them, and when Shri and Aadesh nodded their heads and smiled, I knew the news of the sleepover had been delivered.

  “Thank you for having her,” I began, when they joined me on the steps.

  “This will be such a treat for Aneeta,” Shri said. “She and Kate have become . . . how do you say?”

  “Two peas in a pod,” I said. “Yes, indeed they have.”

  “The walk is not far,” Aadesh said.

  “This sounds crazy on my part, I know,” I admitted, “because you walk this walk every day to get Aneeta. And I know she walks it herself much of the time. But . . .” I stalled, worried about insulting them. “Would you mind if Salim drove you all home?”

  Shri laughed. “Of course, that would be fine.”

  “Let me just make sure Kate has everything she needs.”

  I went inside and held Kate by the shoulders. “Kate, you know that your life is in my hands, right? If something happens to you, I would die—like, hero’s-journey, throw-myself-into-a-fiery-pit die. I need you to tell me that you will be safe. That you will make only safe decisions. Okay?”

  “I get it,” she said. “I promise we’ll stay inside Aneeta’s house, except to look out the telescope.”

  “You have your phone?”

  “Got it.”

  “Text me the second you get there.”

  “Got it.”

  I reached for her and squeezed her into a bear hug. “Promise me you’ll be safe and smart.”

  As Kate drove away with Aneeta’s family, my heart seized into a fist. I had just let a fourteen-year-old girl in my charge out of my sight in India. I flashed to a time I’d gotten lost in the supermarket when I was little. “Where’s your mother?” I remember a woman asking me. I stood there shaking my head no because I didn’t have a mother and this lady asking me about her whereabouts made that reality ache in my heart. When my father found me, the lady gave him a disapproving nod, and then she looked at me and dumped the responsibility into my lap: “Stick close to your father, in case he loses you again.”

  A few minutes later, Kate texted that they were at Aneeta’s and that she and her friend were inside and were planning to read books for a while.

  I calmed down. Just a bit.

  Around seven, Reina announced that she was ready to call it a night. I agreed that I was finished working, too . . . but the idea of returning to our motel a good three miles in the opposite direction made me nervous. Here at the orphanage I was only a mile from Kate, should she need me. On the other hand, if I let Salim and his car go for the night, I would be at the orphanage without transportation, so what good would my proximity do? At least at the motel I could hail a taxi if a situation came up.

  “You’re kind of green,” Reina said. “You look like you’re going to puke.”

  “I might just do that,” I admitted. “I’m worried about Kate. What if something happens to her?”

  “She’s fine. It won’t.”

  “Gang of thugs? Earthquake?”

  Reina shook her head.

  “Fire?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “Don’t tell Aneeta that,” I said. “She got stuck in a fire, remember?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Reina said. “Why don’t you and I stay the night here at the orphanage? I’ll have Salim run me into town for some takeout for us. I’ll ask him to stay ‘on call.’ The proximity will make you feel better.”

  Near midnight, after Reina and I and all the girls in the dorm had eaten a feast from a restaurant in town, played hours of cards, we retired to our bedroom, a newly constructed room where the live-in headmistress and a few teachers would sleep. The room smelled of fresh-cut pine. Reina and I flopped onto the new bunk beds, exhausted from the day. After a few big breaths, Reina pulled herself up, walked to the desk under the window. Kate had been working at that desk, doing her homework and other projects for the orphanage and school.

  Reina rubbed her finger along the touch pad on Kate’s laptop, stared at it for a minute.

  “Snooping around?” I said, yawning, a little surprised that Reina would be looking at Kate’s laptop.

  “I was actually just checking to see if our new electricity was working,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah . . .” Reina said, distracted, clearly reading something on the awakened computer’s monitor.

  “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “I didn’t mean to read anything,” she said. “But I just happened to see Kate’s writing.”

  I stood and joined Reina at the laptop. I recognized the document on the screen as Kate’s monomyth—the hero’s journey she was writing for English. She had it dissected into steps: the call to adventure, refusing the call, answering the call, supernatural aid, crossing the threshold, entering the belly of the whale. She was currently writing about one of the trials her hero encounters: temptation. Her protagonist, Prosperina, had left the village and gone into town with a girlfriend. The girlfriend t
empts Prosperina with an ancient herb. She tells her it’s harmless, but wonderful, like standing in the middle of a diamond shattered into a million pieces. Prosperina hesitates, but the girlfriend persists, until finally she submits and smokes the magic herb.

  My heart gonging feverishly, I looked at Reina and found her biting her lip. In the margin of the story in a comment box was Kate’s note to herself. “Aneeta’s house, record feelings, details.”

  “They’re going to do drugs!” I shouted.

  “Well, now . . .” Reina said, with maddening calm.

  “Reina! We’ve got to get to her. What if she’s already done it? What if they were ‘bad’ drugs? What if she’s sick . . . or worse? Oh my God, Reina. We’ve got to get there.”

  “Okay, okay, let’s think. Let’s calm down and think. On one hand, this is just a story—”

  “Reina!”

  She jumped. “All right! You’re right—it does seem to be pretty fact-based. I’ll call Salim and see if he can come get us.” She pulled out her phone.

  At the same time, I texted Kate. No response.

  “Salim’s not answering. It’s going straight to voice mail,” Reina said.

  I shoved my feet into sneakers and found a flashlight in the storeroom. “Forget it, I’m walking,” I said. “More like running.”

  Reina pulled on her sneakers, too.

  When we got outside, we were met with a darkness I could never have imagined. As if blackout curtains covered the sky, as if a black Sharpie underscoring my grievous error in judgment had been swiped across the heavens. I should have never let Kate go. I had lost her. I had failed. I wished the night sky would swallow me whole.

  We were out in the middle of nowhere with not a house light or streetlamp or car passing by. Just inches outside our flashlight’s anemic beam, we literally could not see our hands in front of our faces.

  When at last our eyes had adjusted slightly, we could just make out the road. After Reina walked directly into a fence, I stepped clumsily into a hole and twisted my ankle.

  “How are we going to walk a mile like this?” Reina asked.

  “We’re not,” I said, reaching for her hand.

  “We can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Kate!” I hollered, though she was nowhere around. “Kate!”

  Then I fell to my knees and heaved a tidal wave cry because there was a chance I had made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed. There was a chance that I had ruined a life—more, lives. “Kate,” I cried. “I’m sorry, please. Give me another chance.”

  Just then my phone issued a beep, alerting me of a text message. Maybe it was Kate. Please, let it be Kate.

  It was Lucy.

  Hi Missy, Just checking in. Haven’t heard from you or Kate yet tonight. Have her text, okay?

  I covered my face and cried. In my stupidity, in my childish, lethal naïveté, I had assumed that I would always be saved from whatever trouble I happened to fall into—by Dad, by a safety net, by my risk-averse behavior. But what I’d fallen into now, I couldn’t see to the bottom of.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  JOE

  Tuesday again. Up on the fourth floor of the veterans’ hospital, I found my group of guys. Five minutes in, I could already tell that Tony was in a mood.

  “F— this, f— that. Food sucks, pain never ceases, f—ing headaches getting worse.”

  I let him bitch for about five minutes without correcting any of his language, without pointing out the bright side to still having one leg and two arms and a more-than-well-functioning mouth.

  Andy, though, was in a good mood. He told the group that he had been reading a lot of books about “crossing over” and how thin the line was between life and death. “I think I have a better sense of life because I was so close to death,” he explained, his eyes dreamy.

  “That’s one of the freebies of war,” I said. “How close you come to death gives you a hell of a perspective on life.”

  “That’s it,” Andy said.

  “It’s not just war,” I said. “I once was on an airplane, sitting next to this brilliant pediatric oncologist. Kids died around him every day, yet he had this look to him—this understanding that put him at peace. ‘How do you do it?’ I asked him. You know what he said? He said that spending time with someone who is so close to leaving this world almost makes you feel the next world.”

  “Bunch of shit,” Tony grunted. “Dead’s dead. Worms in your head, dead.”

  “What do you say, Carlos?” I asked.

  Carlos hung his head low. “I’d deny this if any of you jerks repeated it,” he said. “But when I was lying there—blown to bits—all I felt was anger. I was angry I was being cheated out of the rest of my life. I’d never get married, hold a kid, drink another beer. It was this anger that saved me, though. I channeled it into my will to live, to see another sunrise. I was angry but calm, like I knew if I stayed mad enough, I’d survive.”

  “Same for me,” Andy said. “I felt the same way.” He looked right at Tony, raised an eyebrow. “Bro, you can’t tell me that after what we’ve been through, you don’t feel that there is more than meets the eye. Life as we know it—this mortal, amputee-learning-to-walk-and-live-again life—is just part of it. I feel it, I really do.”

  Tony opened his mouth to spew some more garbage but stopped, hung his head. “Whatever,” he said. “I guess.”

  I looked at the guys—one at a time. “I’m not saying that any of this was set in the stars, anything preordained or such. I’m just saying that we set out on a path, made choices based on what we were good at, what our interests were—for us, we became soldiers, sailors, airmen, or marines. But at some point that path ends and another path is placed before us. It could seem random, but to me, if you give it enough thought, doesn’t it seem like all the paths know each other, like they knew all along they’d intersect?”

  “That’s it,” Andy said. “That’s how I look at it, that everything that has happened did so for a reason, and as screwy as it sounds, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  I left the meeting feeling incredibly hopeful, as if my group had made some sort of emotional progress. I drove to Holy Angels to pick up Olivia and Jake. Olivia started chatting before she was even buckled up. “Daddy, Daddy, guess what? There’s going to be a talent show . . . and I can sing in it, or say a poem, or even do comedy . . . wouldn’t that be hilarious?”

  I just stared out the windshield and grinned because things were looking up. My two youngest kids were happy as could be, Kate was in India with Missy opening a school for girls and feeling good about the work she was doing, my group of wounded warriors was talking philosophy and theology and finding meaning in their situations. It had been a long time since I felt so optimistic about everything. Just like when I was eighteen. I loved that feeling.

  When we got home, I found Lucy’s car in the driveway. She wasn’t scheduled to pick up the kids until Thursday night, so I wasn’t sure why she was at the house unless she needed to pick up or drop something off. She had already moved everything she wanted from the house to her new condo, so I couldn’t imagine what she would need. When we opened the front door, a delicious aroma wafted toward us.

  Lucy stepped out from the kitchen and held her arms open for the kids, who ran to her.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  An apron covered her T-shirt and jeans. “Oh, nothing! Just thought I’d cook you dinner so you’d have it for later,” she said, stepping back into the kitchen and scooping up a pile of cut carrots to add to the salad bowl. “Chicken cutlets with mushrooms in a white wine reduction.”

  If the kids were in a good mood before, they were over the moon now. Mom’s home! They chattered excitedly all the way up to their rooms.

  “You’re fixing us dinner?” I clarified, going to the stove to take in the chicken and mushrooms simmering in a creamy
sauce. Lucy could cook, but Lucy didn’t like to cook. Tacos from a kit or pasta with jarred sauce was much more her speed.

  “You object?”

  “Not really,” I said, stabbing a mushroom, placing it into my mouth. “I’m just a little surprised.”

  “Once it cools, I’ll put it in the fridge,” she said. “You can heat it up later.”

  “If it makes it to the fridge,” I said, spearing a piece of chicken.

  “I haven’t heard from Katherine today, have you?”

  “No, but that’s not unusual, right? We don’t hear from her every day.”

  “Most days,” Lucy said. “You think she’s all right?”

  “Of course I think she’s all right,” I said, still examining Lucy closely; the dissonance of her wearing an apron and cooking a dinner that required wine and deglazing was like trying to make sense of a kangaroo in our yard.

  “You trust Melissa,” she said. “I know that. And so do I.” Lucy bit into a baby carrot. “She’s great, Melissa. Right, she’s great?”

  “Agreed,” I said. “She’s pretty great.”

  I looked at Lucy and she looked at me. Our eyes locked. What the hell was she up to?

  I changed the subject. “How’s work?” I sat on the sofa and removed my prosthetic, leaned it against the wall, hung the silicone sleeve that protected my skin over it.

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “It’s good, busy.” She went to the refrigerator and cracked open an ice-cold beer for me. “I’m a little tired of all the travel.” She poured herself a glass of white wine.

  Lucy came and sat down next to me. Close to me. Too close. For some reason, I was self-conscious about my stump. It had been a long time since Lucy and I had sat on the sofa together. A long time since she had seen my half leg. “What’s going on, Lucy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sliding in even closer, curling her legs under herself like a cat. “I guess I just miss being here. With you, with the kids.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, attempting to scoot closer to the edge, to make at least an inch of space between us.