I straighten and hurry toward him. “Are you okay?” I call.
His head swings in my direction and his eyes, behind round black glasses, widen. He immediately pulls the hat from his head and presses it to his enormous chest. “Oh, pardon my language. I thought I was alone.” He is surprisingly soft-spoken for someonewith such looming height. “Lucy, isn’t it?” He looks over at Gully. “And the famous Gully.”
“Yes, hello. Are you sure you’re all right?” I hate to think of what Donovan would say if he heard that a resident had had even a minor tumble outside.
“I’m fine, really,” the man says. He holds out his hand and I pull off my glove to shake it. My hand feels tiny in his, and I have the sense that he’s careful not to squeeze too hard. “Louis Crane,” he says. “Pleased to meet you.”
I have to tilt my head all the way back to smile up at him. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Crane.”
“Oh, just Louis, please.”
I nod. “Are you enjoying your walk?”
“Very much,” he says in that surprisingly soft voice. “It’s a nice change of pace to be out on my own for a bit.”
“I can understand that. I won’t keep you.”
“No, no. It’s good for me to stop for a moment. Apparently I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t see the path ahead of me.” He shakes his head, chuckling, but his laughter is hollow. “Would you believe I used to be an athlete? I’m not so nimble anymore.”
“Oh, I believe it,” I say. “I imagine it must be hard to see the path from all the way up there. What was your sport?”
Louis gives me a surprised look. “You can’t guess?”
“Basketball?” I venture, though it might have just as easily been football. He’s tall, but broad, too.
Louis nods. “I played with the San Francisco Warriors. That’s what they were called back then. I was with them from 1963 to 1967.” He looks out over the flowers then and says, “Four short years, fifty-someyears ago, and yet here I am in a walled garden by the sea, still talking about basketball.”
“It must have been a very exciting time in your life,” I say.
“It was. And it wasn’t really just those four years,” he concedes thoughtfully. “I spent most of my life in the world of basketball. I coached after I stopped playing. Basketball is what I’ll be remembered for.”
And yet…He doesn’t say these words but I hear them.Basketball is what I’ll be remembered for, and yet…
“Is there something you’d rather be remembered for?” I ask.
He looks down, and his expression becomes sad, almost confused. “I wassomeonebefore basketball….” he says quietly.
When I see the confusion in Louis’s eyes, I can’t help wanting to ease some of his pain. I sense him searching, combing over his past in his mind, looking for the piece of himself that he has lost.
I look away, swallowing. Even though the flowers I’ve cared for have lifted Adele and Vikram’s spirits, my mind catches on thoughts of Jack. I wish I could understand what went so wrong with the scent of my flowers that day. How can I make sure that nothing like it ever happens again?
When I breathe in, the soft, green, springlike scent of lily of the valley fills my lungs. It’s a happy scent, a youthful scent, a scent so fizzy with hope that my nostrils tingle as the fragrance travels through me. I sense the connection, golden and timeless, that shimmers between Louis and the flowers, and I can’t stop myself from moving toward him, touching his arm.
“Lily of the valley,” I tell him quietly. “Those are your flowers. Do you smell them? Here, I’ll help you.” I take him by the elbow andhe walks along with me so easily, so willingly, that I wonder if this is why he is here. Has he talked to Adele, to Vikram? Has he heard about the flowers… and the memories their scents stir?
The lilies of the valley are very low to the ground, their tiny white blossoms like rows of perfect bells. I kneel on the path beside the flowers and look up at Louis. I hold out my hand. After a moment of hesitation, he takes it. Holding on to me tightly, he bends his giant body as low as he can to the small flowers and closes his eyes. He breathes in the bright, happy scent.
A few moments quietly pass.
“The field behind my elementary school,” Louis whispers dreamily then. He slowly opens his eyes and straightens. He looks down at the little flowers, his gaze not quite in focus.
“In the spring, the field was full of those same little white flower bells,” he says in wonder. “Ms. Reilly, our art teacher, took us out there every day. We’d draw the flowers… press them into little books… paint them. Ms. Reilly was a photographer. That’s what she always told us at the start of every year. ‘I’m Ms. Reilly. I’m a photographer,’ she’d say. ‘And between the hours of eight and two, I’m also your art teacher.’?” Louis chuckles wistfully. “She was funny.” He shakes his head. “I haven’t thought about her in years. Decades.”
He looks at me, his expression a mix of wonder and joy. “But I… I just saw her! I waswithMs. Reilly. It was the last day of the school year. She brought in her camera from home that day, and she let me use it. It was because I always took her class seriously,” he says slowly, like he’s just realizing this now. “A lot of the other kids thought going outside meant goofing around, but I knew why Ms. Reilly brought us to that field. She brought us out there to look atthe natural world through the eyes of an artist, and that’s what I did.
“I felt so special holding her camera that day. Looking through it, seeing the field in a new way, choosing how to capture what I saw, what to frame, how to frame it, how to tell the story. I was tall even then, and I felt like I stuck out everywhere, like I never quite fit in. I felt like I always had to be moving, like I had to prove to everyone what I could do with my size. To justify it, somehow. But with that camera in my hands that afternoon in that field, I felt… I felt like I could be still. Grounded. I felt”—he thinks for a moment—“at peace.” He spreads a large hand over his heart. “I feel that peace now. I remember it.”
He shakes his head, smiling. “I’d forgotten all about that day.” He blinks down at me. “Lucy, you magician. How did you know those flowers would mean something to me?”
