The Light of Hidden Flowers

by Jennifer Handford

  “Yep,” I said. “Order whatever you want.”

  And while we stuffed our faces with the sugary goodness of mounds of ice cream covered in hot fudge and caramel, I told the kids the plan. How I was going to fly to Paris to surprise Kate and Missy. How by this time two days from now, we’d all be together. How it was important to tell the ones we love how much we love them.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  On our last night, Reina, Kate, Aneeta and her family, and I sat outside on lawn chairs admiring the beautiful building in front of us. Mrs. Pundari and the children played on the grassy lawn. The sun had descended just enough to shade the sky a magnificent purple, casting mystic shadows on this special home and school for girls.

  “The white paint no longer looks white,” Aneeta said.

  “Just like the Taj Mahal,” Kate said. “In new light, everything can seem different.”

  “This school is a thousand times more beautiful than the Taj,” I said.

  Reina smiled.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Because its beauty isn’t just external, it’s internal. It’s in the walls, in the bunks, in the girls who sleep in them. The ovens that cook the food, the tables and desks for the students. Ms. Chopra and Mrs. Pundari. The books and the playground and the music room. Every inch of this place is beautiful.”

  “You’re right,” Reina said. “The Taj is just a show-off. Like a popular girl prancing around in her Prada in a poor part of town.”

  This made me laugh. “You think the Taj ever looks down on all those people and wonders what it would be like to be part of it all?”

  “To have real friends, not just admirers?” Kate said.

  Kate and I both knew what this meant. Neither of us had ever been the popular girl, but we had certainly been the outsider. Now we were part of something. I had taken on adulthood, and because of it, I now had meaningful relationships with the people in my life. I was no longer anyone’s dependent. I was proud to be the mom, the dad, the boss, the friend, the benefactor. I wouldn’t get straight As in all my roles; I knew that. But life wasn’t lived on a report card.

  And Kate. She had slain the dragon and won the prize. She would go home with a bag full of confidence and the knowledge that she could be someone’s treasured friend. I didn’t believe she would get mired in the middle school pettiness again. Her view now extended to a much farther horizon.

  The color of the sky changed again, now a glowing rose. The adults drank from plastic cups filled with wine. Kate, Reina, and I would leave, but part of us wanted to stay. Of course we wanted to stay with our new friends and family. I was happy, so happy. I loved Kate and Reina and Aneeta and her family and this orphanage. I loved Joe. I would always love Joe. I couldn’t wait to see him, and I hoped with all I had that he couldn’t wait to see me. I no longer thought in terms of “ending up” with Joe, as though there were an objective to our relationship beyond simply being with each other. I just wanted to spend time with him. I just didn’t want another year to go by without knowing him. I just wanted his lips on mine.

  I rested my eyes on the school, the fruit of our labor, funded in part by my father’s money. He would be proud, because building a school in India was a Frank Fletcher plan.

  My father was extraordinary in a million ways, but he wasn’t perfect. I saw that now. He held me to the only standard he knew—his own gregarious, bold, outgoing standard—and in doing so, he cast a shadow that would always chill me with the breeze of inadequacy. Only now—so many years later, as I loved Kate with motherly affection—did I realize how robbed I was of my own mother’s love. Her death had disassembled me in ways that were never addressed by my exuberant, cliché-loving, glass-half-full father. I loved my father, but I had never much loved myself because I always judged myself through his eyes—and those optimistic, can-do eyes could only find me lacking.

  If I wanted to, I could harbor an animosity for my father for the rest of my life. I could hold a grudge, and let it fester. After all, it was pretty insulting of him to leave me a You could do better! letter at his death. It was hurtful in a thousand different ways. It was low because my father should have loved me for exactly who I was. He should have championed my introversion, appreciated my quiet, contemplative ways as a viable alternative approach to life. His letter was degrading in a thousand different ways. Except for the one way that mattered: he was right.

  I did need a push. I did need to be called out on my cowardice. I needed a microscope turned upon my parochial, hemmed-in life. And I needed it from Dad, the man whose opinion I valued the most. That’s why it hurt the most. Because the truth hurts.

  I get it, Dad! Here I was, nearly as far from home as was possible without leaving the planet, with less certainty and safety than I had ever known, and I saw myself and my world with the clarity of a crystal.

  I looked again at the orphanage and school. Now that the sun had plunged even deeper and nightfall had yawned across the giant sky, the structure shone gold. A week from now, a month, a year, how would I remember this moment? I knew. It wouldn’t be a memory drawn from my beautiful mind. It would be a feeling—a tender, warm, resounding pulse—pulled from my teeming heart.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Before I had my “pitch” ready, people would ask, “What’s your new book about?” and I would juggle a bunch of words in the air: father, daughter, Afghanistan, India, introversion, bravery, and they’d look at me like maybe I didn’t know myself. In fact, I hadn’t randomly drawn a bunch of words from a hat. The seeds for The Light of Hidden Flowers were planted much more naturally.

  Years ago, I happened to be sitting in the audience of a business conference listening to a speaker. This guy was one of those larger-than-life, charismatic born storytellers. Then, a few years later, I read a book about introversion, kind of the exact opposite of this guy. Somewhere along the way, I got an idea for a novel. My protagonist would be introverted—brilliant, but quiet. She would work with her father, the charismatic superman of her life. But the father would leave her. He would get sick and die, and she would need to stand on her own two feet.

  From there, the flowers grew. The story of lost love, the travel to India, the responsibility of adulthood for my once-diffident protagonist. At some point I realized my character was on a modern-day hero’s journey. My kids had taught me about the monomyth, so that made the writing of this especially meaningful. A little bit of them woven into the words.

  I am grateful to Lake Union Publishing for their continued support, for Jodi Warshaw’s steady leadership and David Downing’s superior editing, and for the efforts of the entire marketing and publicity team.

  I am humbled by the help I received from Colonel Matt Day of the USMC. Matt is a friend of our family, and while I’m typically a bit shy about asking for help (a little like Missy!), I asked Matt to review the sections that pertained to being a marine and the USMC, in general. He corrected some of my word choices, phrases, descriptions, but what Matt’s commentary mostly did for me, was “make it real.” Reading his firsthand stories of IEDs, night terrors, and the lifelong haul (physically and emotionally) that our service people carry, hit me straight in the heart. To know that this is for real, that our men and women are out there, fighting this fight, every day. My gratitude for their sacrifice is great.

  I am thankful to my husband, Kevin, for his constant love and praise. He is my beloved, and I am grateful for his unwavering encouragement.

  I am fortunate to have the most supportive group of friends, who cheer my every accomplishment and celebrate me as though I really were hot stuff. More than a year later, we’re still using the leftover “Cheers to Jen!” cups and napkins from the last book party.

  A Q&A WITH JENNIFER HANDFORD

  Q. Missy has taken longer than most to “become an adult.” Has loving her father too much—and thus, staying by his side—proved to be her downfall?

  A. Missy is a h
igh achiever who relies on her book smarts, but in many aspects of her life, she has “failed to thrive” because she has chosen to stay near her father rather than branching out on her own. We can trace this behavior back to the childhood trauma of losing her mother. Whether consciously or not, Missy internalized this loss and compensated for it by staying close to home. In her naïveté, she neglected to consider her father would someday grow old, or in his case, get ill. Missy’s role as child is quickly exchanged for the role of parent as she assumes the care of her father. Because it happens quickly, her adulthood accelerates from zero to sixty. Before she knows it, in her lap she has the burden of her father’s illness, the firm’s future, an eager boyfriend, a love from the past, a school in India, and the tender soul of a teenage girl.

  Q. You have described this story as a “hero’s journey,” referring to mythologist Joseph Campbell’s famed monomyth. Did you set out to write a hero’s journey?

  A. I set out to write a story about a shy daughter and her gregarious father. I knew the father would die and the daughter would be left on her own for the first time in her life. Courage, strength, fortitude would be needed for her to carry on. As I came to inhabit this space, it occurred to me that Missy would embark on an adventure—riddled with trials and challenges—and much would be required of her. I suspected Missy had it in her to overcome these obstacles, and in the end, she would emerge with not only the prize but also a boatload of self-esteem.

  Q. For Missy, what was the prize? What was her payoff for taking the risks?

  A. Missy returned with many prizes: (1) the self-confidence in knowing she could lead rather than follow, (2) the courage to stand up and fight for what she believed in, (3) the permission to stand on the edges of the bell curve and experience the risky side of life, and (4) the insight that she and Joe may not be forever, but they are for now, and now is the only place to live. But her biggest prize was Katherine. Missy had never been an influence to anyone. It was always the other way around—people were an influence to her. With Katherine, she got to be that special person. Missy got the chance to be the mother she never had to an insecure middle school girl.

  Q. Missy held her father in the highest esteem, believing him to be the ideal man, and in doing so, turned a blind eye to his flaws. As she grows into a stronger person, she begins to see him through a clearer lens, don’t you think?

  A. Frank Fletcher loved his daughter, and he admired her intellect, but he wasn’t shy about pointing out her shortcomings. He wasn’t outwardly critical of her, but in their daily conversation he would insinuate that her life was lacking. “Why don’t you go shopping with some girlfriends? Why don’t you play tennis at the country club?” He meant well, but Missy wasn’t a shopping-and-country-club type of girl. Frank Fletcher believed she’d be happier, better, more successful if she were. Herein lies the dissonance between who Missy was and who her father wanted her to be.

  Q. How does the brain play a thematic role in this story?

  A. We are each given certain talents on which to hang our hat. I made my protagonist exceptionally smart, but she’s a bit of an introvert and shies from too much sociability. Frank, in contrast, may not have a genius IQ, but he’s outgoing and friendly and could talk his way through any situation. Thus, each relies on her/his brain in a specialized way.

  Q. Frank gets Alzheimer’s. Was there any question as to which disease you would assign him?

  A. Frank had to get Alzheimer’s because what could be more devastating to a storyteller? For a man who lived to retell stories from the war, from his lifelong career, of his beloved wife—what could be a worse fate than losing his memories, his words?

  Q. You inhabit the space of an Afghanistan war veteran—an amputee, no less—as well as a Vietnam War veteran. Was it important for Joe to be a marine and for Frank to be an army vet?

  A. I am hugely patriotic and have great appreciation for the men and women who serve and have served in the armed forces. As an eighteen-year-old headed off to college, Joe was nearly perfect—at least in Missy’s eyes. He was strong, optimistic, determined. He was a guy on a mission. And I knew he would end up a marine. So when I considered him fifteen years later, and the challenges he might have faced, in addition to a fed-up-with-the-Marines wife, I thought of an amputation. It was the type of issue that would give Joe pause, but I knew Missy wouldn’t flinch. And Frank—outgoing, gregarious Frank—wasn’t without his share of pain. He’d been to war and buried his wife. These facts make his rosy outlook on life even more spectacular.

  Q. There are similarities between Frank (Missy’s father) and Lucy (Kate’s mother) in that they both push their children to be different from their true nature.

  A. A child loves her parent no matter what, and we see in Missy how forgiving she is of Frank’s implied criticism of her. She lives with it because she loves him so much and believes that his drive for her to be more outgoing is the only way he knows to root her on. Frank was a great man, and maybe he did all he knew in terms of being a father, but he wasn’t flawless. Missy finally sees that.

  And Katherine, once she’s in India with Missy, sees that love comes from unlikely sources and “family” can be made of people we just met.

  Q. You set the scene in a financial planning office and give Missy the profession of a financial planner. Yet we come to see that Missy’s passion resides more in policy and philanthropy. Do you think most people have dual interests when it comes to their careers?

  A. Speaking from my own experience, I’ve wanted to be many things. When I moved to Washington, DC, in my early twenties, it was because I was single-sighted on working for the CIA. I very much wanted to travel overseas and live in DC and research foreign lands. But around the same time, I got involved with stock picking and investing. Investment clubs had popped up everywhere, and I became interested in the financial world. I eventually chose it as my career and went on to work as a financial planner for nearly fifteen years before I tried my hand at writing. That’s when I entered a novel-writing contest. My “next” career was launched from there.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  When we first meet Missy, we get the sense that she is a “behind the scenes” type of gal. When Frank falters at the seminar and forgets what he’s talking about, Missy knows what she should do. She knows she should shout from the back of the room to help her father, but the words won’t come out. Her shyness has debilitated her. Are some people too nervous to act, even in a situation such as this?

  Missy lurks on Facebook as her way of living vicariously through others. In a sense, watching others is her “call to adventure.” Some contend that Facebook and other forms of social media have created more loneliness, rather than less, because the sense of inclusion is merely implied, rather than real. What do you think?

  Joe, in his youth, was the type of guy who wanted to save the world. Now that he’s older, he sees that there are a lot of things he can’t control. He volunteers at the veterans’ hospital, but he can’t cure the guys. He’s there for Kate, but he can’t go to middle school for her. Are guys—in general—fixers? Is it hard for them (and women, too) to accept that there are some things that can’t be fixed?

  Missy admits that her father has aged and she hasn’t seen it. How reliable is our memory? Do we hold on to our best images? Do our minds see through “rose-colored” glasses? Is there anything wrong with remembering the past more fondly than perhaps reality demands?

  Missy has a real identity crisis, and we often find her asking, “Who the hell are you, Missy Fletcher?” Does life have a way of passing faster than we had planned, until the point when we wake up one day and we’re older than we realized, looking at ourselves in the mirror and wondering the same thing: “Who the hell are you?”

  Missy is irritated by Lucas because they are so much alike, but she’s smart enough to do the math. If his characteristics annoy her, then perhaps she annoys herself. I
s it hard to see ourselves in others, in our children? Do we tend to like people who are like ourselves, or are we too critical for that?

  Missy has a fear of flying, but in a sense, it’s another excuse for her to stay put. She’d love to travel, if only she could board a plane. And we find her goading Lucas into taking trips that she herself has shown no ability to take. Why has it taken her thirty-six years to overcome this fear?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2012 Marty Shoup

  A native of Phoenix, Arizona, Jennifer Handford now lives in the Washington, DC, area with her husband and three children. One of three first-place finalists in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest in 2010, she published her first novel, Daughters for a Time, in 2012. People magazine hailed it as “a wrenching, resonant debut about infertility, cancer and adoption. Grab your hankies.” In 2014, Acts of Contrition was published. The Light of Hidden Flowers is Jennifer’s third novel.

  Please visit Jennifer at www.jenniferhandford.com.