Including the painting she’d been working on.
I walk to the canvas and blow a breath over it, watching as the dust that coats it lifts and swirls away, revealing a sloping meadow of bright California poppies and lush green grasses that glow beneath a bluebonnet sky, the sea a hint of silver in the distance. I lean closer to the painting, my breath catching in my throat.
My mother’s brushstrokes are both precise and energetic. The flowers are so real, so tiny and exquisite and unique, that they seem… well, they seemalive. As I stare at the painting, I feel my chest swell with a delicious, delighted form of hope, a joyful certainty that good things lie ahead. My worries for my father, my grief for my mother, even the pain I have carried since the darkest day of my life, ten years ago, are all pushed aside by the helium balloon of optimism that expands steadily within me.Everything, I think,is going to be okay!
After some time, and with difficulty, I manage to pull my gaze away from the painting. The buoyant feeling in my chest deflates but does not disappear. The hope that emanates from the canvas is as addictive as sugar, and I have to remind myself that it is entirely manufactured by my mother. It is not real.
For generations, the women in our family have all had a talent for one thing or another, and this was my mother’s—she could affect people’s emotions, deeply, with her paintings. If my mother wanted you to feel happy, she created a painting that made you feel happy. And if she wanted you to feel sad—well, my mother never wanted anyone to feel sad. Mostly she used her gift to inspire the students who filled her painting classes at the community center. She poured her own feelings of confidence into the paintings she displayed for her class—and when her students viewed those paintings, theydiscovered a newfound belief in their own ability to express their creativity on canvas.
The truth, though, is that I often had the sense that my mother was holding back, that there was more she could do with her gift. But when I questioned her, she would become unusually quiet, her expression haunted. I was left with the feeling that there was something in her past that she was ashamed of, something that followed her all her life.
Be careful with your giftwas all she would tell me.Remember that every action has a consequence.
Even now, my face grows hot as I think of her words.
If only I had listened to her.
Turning away from my mother’s painting, I move around the studio. I pause in front of a large corkboard covered with images torn from magazines, scribbled bits of poetry on colorful scraps of paper, and photographs. There is a photograph of me in the yard when I’m five years old, a flower crown in my tangled chestnut hair, the skin around my blue eyes crinkled with laughter. Another is of my parents on their wedding day. They stand on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall, my father smiling in a stiff-looking navy suit and my mother beautiful in a whimsical ivory dress that hangs off her shoulders and floats airily to the ground.
I walk to the shelves along one wall and run my finger over the spines of her many art books. I wander to a long wooden table littered with crumpled papers and rough drawings.
A breeze moves through the studio, and the warm air is suddenly thick with my mother’s scent. I stand very still. There is something different lurking within the familiar perfume now. It is mymother’s, yes, but there is a strange edge to it that I don’t recognize, an unsettled, slightly sour note that swirls through me, whispering to me of loose ends, of regret.
What is it, Mom?I breathe in, searching for an answer.What happened?
It’s then, when I open my eyes, that I see it.
There, in the middle of her worktable, is her yellow, leather-bound calendar. A pen lies on top, as though it were set down only moments ago.
I pick up the calendar and hold it to my chest for a beat before opening it. I turn the pages, my pulse racing at the sight of my mother’s looping handwriting. All of the appointments and lunch dates and birthdays and teaching obligations that filled her life.
Still veiled by that disquieting version of her scent, I find myself flipping to the last pages that contain writing, the days that followed her death. These pages, too, reveal a life brimming with plans, a future my mother had believed she would see.
And there, on the Thursday after her death, she’d written three words and circled them with a thick, red marker.
The Oceanview Home
I frown. There’s no time or name attached to the entry, no explanation for why she might have planned this visit. I trace the words with my finger, a little spark of something—curiosity? Premonition?That feeling of hope instilled by my mother’s painting?—flickering within me.
Growing up, I’d passed the sign for the Oceanview Home—an assisted living community for seniors just south of Bantom Bay—countless times, but I’d never turned down the driveway. I’d never even caught a glimpse of the building through the woods that separated it from the road.
Why had my mother planned to go there? I don’t have any living grandparents, no elderly relatives, and my parents were too young to have been considering moving there themselves. So why would she visit the home? Why had she circled the words so insistently, so urgently, so differently than any of the surrounding entries in her calendar?
I pull my phone from my pocket, open the web browser, and search for the Oceanview Home. Its website is practically ancient, populated only by a tiny photograph of a drab-looking, washed-brick building and a few meager paragraphs about the home and its offerings. I feel strangely disappointed.
I’m about to put my phone away when I notice the website has a drop-down menu. My finger moves to touch on theEmployment Opportunitiespage. And there, with that troubling version of my mother’s scent murmuring over my skin, I read the description of the one job available:
Gardener wanted for a very special project.
Chapter Two
Lupine: A flowering plant in the pea family with upright, showy spikes of colorful blossoms whose sweet scent inspires restoration and renewal
Two days later, I head south out of Bantom Bay. Free of town, the sun-dappled road slackens and curves through a dense forest of oaks and pines, coastal scrub and manzanita. Bush lupines thread the dark underbrush, their tall stems of golden blossoms fluttering like candles along the way. Here and there the trees suddenly thin, offering a glimpse of the sea.
Within hours of sending a brief email expressing my interest in learning more about the gardening job, I received an even briefer reply from a man named Donovan Pike asking me to meet him at the home. After seeing the bland website, I had not expected much—an institutional building with a few anemic garden beds in need of plants. Instead, when I spot the sign for the Oceanview Home and turn off the road, I’m happily astonished to discover that what awaits me at the end of a long black ribbon of driveway is a beautiful, if timeworn, country estate. A columned portico anchors twosymmetrical wings below a tiled roof. Dreamy swaths of white roses clamber over the faded-brick facade, lending it a soft, vital glow. Tucked in among the blossoms, rows of tall casement windows reflect the bright sky.
My spirits lift further still when I step out of my truck and find myself practically swimming in the thick perfume of those roses. I stop and breathe in, noting wisps of other scents that gild the air—the soft comfort of lavender, the fresh spring wash of lily of the valley, the silver flash of sea salt, the bright hint of lemon.
