The Light of Hidden Flowers (17 page)

I pulled my face out of the pillow and looked at him. “I know you’re right,” I said. “But really, I’m not going in today.”

Lucas buttoned his shirt. “You need to defend what’s yours, Melissa. Trust me, don’t spend too much time wallowing.”

Just leave,
I wanted to say.
Please, just leave, and stop talking.
“It’s not that simple,” I said, growing irritated. “Everything is different.”

Lucas reached under the bed for his loafer. “What’s different?”

I just shook my head, because what was different wasn’t the obvious—that Dad was dead, that he had left me a crappy
You could do better!
letter, that I had a choice in my future. What was different was the cauldron inside of me, brewing a potion of anger for my father that I had never once felt before, a fury that could singe metal. I had never rebelled as a teenager; I had never screamed the iconic, adolescent
I hate you, Dad!
I had never felt a teardrop of ill will toward the man who loved me so well. Until now. Now, at this moment, only weeks after his death, I was ready to scream horrible epithets at him. The I Hate Frank Fletcher Club was holding its inaugural meeting.

I slept until noon, and when I woke, my head was cloudy and uncertain; for a moment I felt like a child waking from a nap, and for an even briefer moment I remembered my mother lifting me from my bed and holding me against her chest. “There’s my girl, there’s my girl,” she sang.

With the nostalgia still clinging to me like shrink-wrap, I went into the shower and let the hot water and soap pull me into consciousness. With a towel wrapped around my body and another one around my head, I returned to my bedroom and slipped back into my bed. I pulled the towels from me and tossed them onto the floor, then covered myself with the down comforter, and shut my eyes. I padlocked my heart and tried to figure out if what I was doing today was merely a charade or if I was for real.
Who the hell are you, Melissa Fletcher?
I asked, and this time I needed an answer, because what I was thinking about doing required me to be bona fide, not just a pretender.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I spent the next week in unusual places. While my warm bed beckoned me to stay, I was too enraged with my father to surrender to the cozy cave of it. The people in my life were few in number—Dad, Paul, Jenny—but I had always trusted each of them implicitly. Jenny I held blameless, but Dad and Paul had lied to me. And because I didn’t know to look for the worst in them, I’d never realized they were stunting my growth with their fake kindnesses. I’d stayed young and naïve and, just like a child, never left home. But now that I had shimmied into this new, mistrustful skin, now that I understood that everyone—even the so-called good ones—could be sharks, it was easier to step out. So long as I had my mace and safety whistle and healthy dose of skepticism.

I drove to the country club—the patch of land and collection of people I loathed the most, for how utterly out of place they made me feel. But I went because it was the geography my father cherished more than any other, and I wanted to be there, not to feel him, not to be near him, but to stomp on his sacred ground. That was the girl I was now: a spiteful, impudent, angry teenager, ready to defile a consecrated place.

I put my name on the “orphan” sheet as someone looking for a tennis match, and then went to the gym and attempted to jog on the treadmill. But my plan to spite my father on his hallowed ground backfired because everywhere I turned, I saw his ghost.
Die already!
my mind blared.
Leave me alone!
I didn’t need to see his chatter-teeth dentures in the mouth of another old man, or hear his booming laugh from a guy goofing around with a buddy, or see the wink-and-a-smile combo my father had perfected delivered by some dandy at the coffee bar. My father was everywhere.

Just as I was rounding my last lap, my phone vibrated. It was the pro shop, notifying me that another single had shown up in search of a partner. I shot a snide look to an older guy pumping dumbbells who had the uncanny ability to clear his throat with the same tenor as my father, then wiped down the treadmill, ducked into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face, and headed to the pro shop.

There stood a woman, a slick alpha girl decked out in all the best gear, a one-piece tennis dress clinging greedily to her perfect curves. As if she were stepping onto the courts at Wimbledon with Venus Williams. I hated her instantly.

“I’m Melissa,” I said. She eyed me like the other girls always had, no doubt wondering why I was wearing a tennis skirt with bulging pockets from the days of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.

“Devon Marchón,” she said in her confident, corporate, hint-of-Charleston drawl. She was looking in my direction, but not actually making eye contact. More like she was looking past me, scanning for some cute guy who might delight in watching hotshot Devon Marchón kick my sorry butt. “My tennis partner got called back to work. She’s a
surgeon
. I didn’t even know about the
orphan
list.”

She was a VP of marketing at a big firm, she told me as we walked. She rambled on, blabbing about her accounts, her corner office, her new Mercedes. Not once did she ask what I did. I was dying to tell her a lie, like that I was the president of her competitor.

At the court, she took a slug from her gigantic Vitaminwater and unzipped her pro-series Wilson tennis racquet. I set down my Made in China water bottle I got for free from the grocery store. I pulled my racquet from my bag.

“I had a racquet like that when I was in high school,” she sneered.

Me too,
I wanted to say.
This one.
“I haven’t played in a while,” I admitted.

“I’ll try to take it easy on you,” she said, smiling like a mean girl who’d just played a prank.

On any other day, Devon sizing me up as a nerdy, pasty, out-of-fashion easy win would have proved to be an adequate indicator of the game to come. But what she didn’t know, what she couldn’t have known, was that my father had died recently and, as a parting gift, had lobbed a grenade in my lap, and while the bomb didn’t go off, it sparked enough to light embers inside of me. Whether the small blaze would kindle into an inferno, I didn’t know. The only thing I knew was that I was burning hot with anger, and although I might not be able to hit straight today, I could crush the ball in my bare hand.

What Devon Marchón didn’t know was that I had thirty-six years of people pleasing under my belt. That up until recently I was as agreeable and smooth as plush velvet—but now that my father called me out as a mimic at best, I was as sharp as barbed wire.

And what Devon Marchón also didn’t know was that I had spent ten summers at tennis camp when I was a kid and played varsity in high school.

Devon spun her racquet, and I called “W,” so I served first and we rallied for a while. Then I hit a lob over her head, and Devon leapt to return it—a scissors flying open—to no avail. I served again, smoking it. I’d always had a pretty decent serve. But today I was thinking about my father, imagining his too-big dentured smile painted across the ball. I beat the hell out of it. I won the game.

When it was Devon’s turn to serve, I was sure to pivot into my forehand and follow through on my upswing, creating a nice topspin. She talked to herself—“Okay, Dev, let’s do this. Okay, Devon”—and nailed one over my head that I couldn’t return. “That’s the way,” I heard her say. “Now we’re warmed up.” I quelled the urge to ask if I could hit to the doubles court on her side, since it sounded like there were two of her over there.

For me, tennis was a game of math, a matter of statistics, a contest of who made the fewest errors. In order to win, I didn’t need to be phenomenal, I needed to be one percentage point better than she was. I needed to not make mistakes. More points were given up in the net than anywhere else. Risk takers hit toward the alley, aiming for the corner shot, but they missed much of the time. At all costs, I positioned myself to use my forehand and I hit up the middle so that the ball never got caught in the net.

Devon was a risk taker, but she was good. She nailed a few I couldn’t return, and it was indeed a tough match. I was out of shape and exhausted and made the wrong assumption about her having a weak backhand. She didn’t. But I hung in there, and had my serves to help me out. I eked out a win, surprising the hell out of her.

At the sideline, I bent at the waist and gulped from my toxic BPA water bottle. “Here,” Devon said, offering me a bottle of Vitaminwater from her duffel bag. “Drink this.”

Funny thing about finishing on top. People look at you differently, almost instantly.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Great game,” she said. “Do you want to get lunch?”

“I’ve gotta scoot,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

“Definitely!” she hollered back. “Let’s plan on it.”

I refrained from telling her that that wouldn’t happen. If she didn’t like me before the match, she had no business liking me after the match. As two-faced as the rest of them.

At home, I logged on to my computer. If I did as Dad suggested, if I got the heck out of Virginia, if I traveled—where would I go? To Italy, of course. I pulled up the research I had done so many times before, the reputable cooking schools, the ones with five-star reviews, the best places to go. In my exhaustive style, I had examined thoroughly the options available. Tuscany was where I wanted to be, so when I came across the cooking school in Certaldo, I knew I had found my place. I’d stay in a nineteenth-century villa surrounded by grape and olive orchards. I’d learn from local cooks. We’d focus on meat, cheese, wine, and produce. When we weren’t cooking, we’d hike, tour Siena and Florence, and devour the delicacies of the local trattorias. We’d visit nearby artisans, farms, and vineyards.

I picked a date—two months from now—and planned the trip, start to finish. And then I booked it. I consulted no one, including Jenny or Paul. Including Lucas.

Lucas had been calling every night. “What’s going on?” he implored. “When can I see you?”

“Soon,” I promised, because in this tangle, he wasn’t what had me snagged.

The following Tuesday, he was waiting for me on my stoop.

“Have you been to work this week?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, finding my keys.

Lucas stood. “When are you going back?”

No answer.

“Melissa,” Lucas said, reaching for me.

“Lucas,” I said. “Let’s go inside and talk.”

We sat next to each other on the sofa. I scooted over a bit, placing more distance between us.

“I’m not going back to work,” I said. “At least for a while.”

Lucas blinked, and then blinked again. He cleared his throat. “Why?”

“I need to go on a trip. Alone.”

“A trip?” Now Lucas was the one to place distance between us, pushing back into the corner of the sofa. “Why?”

Because I had a suitcase full of rage and unless I dumped it thousands of miles from home, it would find its way back to me. I could already tell how attached to me it was becoming, how needy it was, desperate for me to carry it around all day.

“What about us? What about our wedding?”

“I promise to marry you as soon as I get back,” I said, and I meant it. I would marry Lucas, I would schedule a mammogram, and I would clean out Dad’s house. All of the things I had been putting off.

This surprised Lucas. He brightened. “We need to set a date.”

I reached for my desk and grabbed the paper calendar. “Let’s do it,” I said.

The relief on Lucas’s face was evident. “This’ll be great. Now I’ll be able to check it off my list! I’ll be able to get back to work, knowing how many weeks/months we have; I’ll know how much work to take in between now and then, and when I’ll need to wrap up my projects so we can go on our honeymoon.”

I lived for checking things off my lists, so who was I to say, but still, his efficiency made my ears ring.

And just like that, two type A planners/organizers/schedulers inked their wedding date on the calendar, setting aside other obligations, such as dentist and doctor appointments. We programmed alerts and reminders.

Lucas reached for me and pulled me in. “This is good,” he said. “Nothing like having a plan.”

“Yep,” I said, kissing his cheek. “Perfect for us. Two peas in a pod.” I smiled and kissed his cheek again. Resignation settled in like the flu.

With Lucas appeased, I went about my next bit of business. With the same exhaustive research methods I used to pick stocks, I selected a counselor whose niche was my greatest phobia: the fear of flying. Her name was Susan McGillis, which reminded me of Kelly McGillis in
Top Gun
, with Maverick and Goose, and the MiG. (
So you’re the one,
Charlie said to Maverick.) I took the accident of her surname as a good sign. And she really was a top gun: in another life, she’d been a naval fighter pilot, had flown F/A-18 Super Hornet jets over Baghdad, logged twenty missions in Desert Storm.

We met at Starbucks. “I understand the workings of airplanes better than most,” she explained, as we sipped lattes and picked at scones. “And I get the worry, the anxiety. For me, it wasn’t the fear of flying. It was the anxiety of
where
I was flying. Fear’s fear.”

I told her about my last encounter on an airplane. The near panic attack that left me at the airport while my suitcases flew to Italy.

“You know,” she said, “the body doesn’t know the difference between excitement and fear. They register the same.”

“I haven’t had much experience with either,” I confessed.