A Fall of Marigolds (22 page)

I
should have guessed Chester Hartwell had planned to follow me from the moment he met me in the great hall. He had come to the hospital not to ask questions of Mrs. Crowley, but because he had trailed me there. And he had waited in the hospital reception area as long as it might take an ordinary woman like me to change out of a uniform into street clothes and get to the ferry house. He had concluded his hopeful questioning at the hospital, thanked Mrs. Crowley and Ethan no doubt, and then made his way to the ferry house to see whether I was among those waiting for the next boat.

Of course he had seen me without my seeing him.

He saw me get into the hansom and so he got in one. He followed me to Chambers Street and saw that I’d paid my driver to wait for me. So he waited. And when I came out alone some fifteen minutes later and got back in the carriage, he instructed his driver to again follow me.

Right to the tailor shop.

He had watched from the street as I went in. Seen through the window that I was talking to a man who surely met the description of Andrew Gwynn he’d been given.

And then he had come in, ready to pounce.

A great sense of defeat fell over me, thick and cold.

“I’m afraid I’m a little lost here,” Nigel said.

“Allow me to explain, Mr. Gwynn. You are Mr. Gwynn, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but who are you?”

My voice seemed to have been encased in stone and I couldn’t summon the energy to smash the granite.

“I’m Chester Hartwell. I’m a private detective.” He produced a business card and handed it to Nigel.

And I could say nothing.

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Hartwell?” Nigel said politely. His accent was just like Andrew’s. Soft and melodic. My own voice seemed light-years away from me.

“There is, indeed. You see, I’m under the employ of Angus Ravenhouse. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.” Nigel’s blank stare made Hartwell laugh. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Gwynn. It’s far too late for games.”

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” Nigel’s polite tone was so much like Andrew’s. It gave me the strength to throw myself into the conversation. I knew that once I did, I would change its course.

“You’re talking to the wrong man!” I exclaimed. “This is Nigel Gwynn, not Andrew.”

Mr. Hartwell needed only a moment to process this information. “Then I shall wait to speak with the right man.”

“What is going on?” Nigel said, his courteous tone giving way to concern. “I’d like to know. Especially if it involves my brother.”

“Yes, Miss Wood. We’d all like to know. I’m sure the authorities might like to know, too.” Hartwell smiled effortlessly, as if threats of calling in the cops were something he said as easily as his own name.

A tremor of fear started to blossom inside me, growing in intensity as seconds ticked by. Truth is truth, Ethan had said, but sometimes the truth was ugly. Truth itself was not beautiful or hideous. It was like change, neither good nor bad. And there was nothing I could do to make beautiful what Lily had done to Andrew, what Angus done to Lily, what the fire had done to me.

I looked down at Lily’s scarf around my neck and I saw the tattered threads where I had removed the key. And I thought of the letter she had written that I held in my handbag. A letter that spoke of what she had done but also what she had suffered.

And I realized that while I couldn’t beautify what was ugly, I could hide the hideous under the cover of mercy.

What is mercy for if not to cloak ugliness?

I had the power to do it.

Everything that had happened until then had led up to that moment. I turned to Nigel. “When is Andrew expected to return?”

“Soon. What is all this about?”

“Will you lock up the shop for a few minutes? Please? This is important.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mr. Hartwell raise an eyebrow. He wasn’t expecting me to take charge. I was surprising him. And he didn’t like it.

“I’d say it’s more than just important—” he began, but I cut him off. I would cede no more power to him.

“You will be silent, Mr. Hartwell.” I turned back to Nigel. “Will you please close the shop for just a little while, Mr. Gwynn?”

Nigel Gwynn walked over to the store’s entrance, locked it, and pulled down the shade. When he came back to us, he motioned to chairs that someone might sit in while waiting to be fitted for a suit. We sat.

“What is all this about?” he asked.

I drew in my breath. Where to begin?

“It’s about your brother marrying someone who was already married and stealing a necklace,” Hartwell said confidently.

The words sounded so ridiculous that I marveled that they had struck fear in me only a short time earlier. “You are incredibly misinformed, Mr. Hartwell. And may I remind you that I have the information you seek. I know everything you want to know, so I suggest you be quiet.”

“Miss Wood, please, what is all this?” Nigel entreated me.

I pointed to Hartwell. “This man will tell you that only days before he sailed, your brother falsely married a woman who was already married, that the two of them conspired to steal a necklace belonging to this woman’s husband, and that Andrew somehow had something to do with her death on the ship that brought them here. None of it is true. And I have the proof.”

Hartwell was absolutely silent next to me.

I pulled out the letter and certificate from my handbag. I opened the certificate and showed it to them both.

“Andrew had no idea Lily was already married. She didn’t tell him. But she was planning to tell him by letter the day they arrived at your tailor shop. That’s why she had this. But she never made it to America. She contracted scarlet fever on the ship and died before reaching New York.

“When your brother was admitted to the hospital he was numb with grief over losing his wife. I had recently lost someone, too, so I was especially aware of how difficult that day was for him. When I asked whether there was anything I could do for him, he asked me to retrieve your father’s pattern book from his trunk in the baggage room. I would’ve told him that wasn’t possible but I felt such sympathy for him, I told him I would try. When I found his and Lily’s luggage in the baggage room, I thought the smaller of the two was his. It wasn’t. The smaller one was hers; I knew that as soon as I opened it. I would’ve just closed the lid but I saw she had a book of Keats’s poetry in her trunk. And it looked like a well-loved volume, so whether I should have or shouldn’t have, I decided I would take the little poetry book to Andrew. I thought it might comfort him to have something of hers. I didn’t know that the book had been your mother’s. Nor that Lily had taken it from Andrew’s trunk and put it in hers so that when he opened the trunk in New York after she disappeared, he would find it. And he’d see what was inside.”

I unfolded the letter. “I didn’t mean to read it. It fell out of the poetry book along with the certificate. When I saw what was written on the certificate, I confess I could not help but read it.”

I cleared my throat and began to read the letter slowly, line by line. When I was finished neither man said a word.

“Andrew still doesn’t know about this letter, Mr. Gwynn,” I continued. “I hadn’t the heart to tell him. There were times when I wanted to. Times when I thought I should. And the day he left, I thought I had.” I touched the scarf around my neck. “This scarf was Lily’s. I’d offered to wash it for him so that it would be free of disease when he left. On the day he was to be discharged I put the letter and the certificate inside the scarf and wrapped it in tissue so that he would find them later. But he left the scarf, wrapped, as a thank-you gift to me when I was away from the ward. And the note he included led me to believe he truly was better off not knowing. He still believes in the sacred beauty of love, Mr. Gwynn. Of all the things I have trifled with, I very much do not want to trifle with that.”

“And the necklace?” Hartwell asked.

“I know where Lily put the necklace, and since that is all you care about, I will see that you leave with it, provided Mr. Gwynn here doesn’t think we should do otherwise.”

Nigel shook his head. “I hardly know what to make of any of this. If what you’re saying is true—”

“It’s all true,” I assured him.

“Then this necklace is not mine or my brother’s to lay claim to.”

“But I am telling you this, Mr. Hartwell.” I went on. “You will leave New York, and you and your employer will not trouble the Gwynn family again. You will say nothing to Andrew Gwynn about this—not now and not ever—and if you or Mr. Ravenhouse does, I will let the British police have this letter. They might find of interest Lily’s accusation that her father was defrauded by Mr. Ravenhouse. Do we have an understanding?”

Chester Hartwell nodded once. “Where is it?”

I unwound Lily’s scarf. The necklace circled my neck, its gems warm on my skin.

•   •   •

BEFORE
he allowed Hartwell to leave, Nigel insisted that he sign a statement that he’d received the necklace in question. It took a moment for Hartwell to agree, but in the end he did as Nigel asked. I signed it as witness and so did Nigel. Nigel then folded that piece of paper and tucked it into his pants pocket.

Hartwell tipped his hat and turned from us. He left the shop without a word.

Nigel and I watched him board a trolley and take off down Seventh Avenue.

When he was gone, I turned to Nigel and offered him the letter and the certificate. “I don’t know what to do with these. I keep thinking I do. I don’t.”

He stared at them for a moment. “Why didn’t you put them back in her trunk after you found them?”

“I tried to. When I went back to the baggage room Lily’s trunk had been taken to the incinerator. The luggage of all those who had succumbed to the fever on that ship was confiscated and burned.”

“You could have given them to Andrew.”

“Could I? Could you? Could you have looked at your grieving brother, sick and separated from everything that mattered to him, and given him
that
letter?”

He did not answer me, and we were quiet for a moment.

“What made you do all this?” he finally said.

I knew the answer. It came quickly to my lips.

“I did it for love.”

Nigel’s eyes widened. “You’re in love . . . with my brother?”

For a moment I wanted to believe there was a way that I might love Andrew Gwynn purely and without pretense, and that he could love me, but how could that be? I could never share with him the terrible thing I knew, nor my own part in shielding him from it. How could I love a man completely to whom I could not bare my soul? My hand went instinctively to my neck, where the scarf rested against my skin now that the necklace was gone. Peeling myself away from the fire, from Edward, from the island included this: releasing Andrew Gwynn from that part of my being that wanted to rescue him and keep him close.

“I did it for love’s sake,” I finally said. “Someday you might think Andrew will need to see that letter. But I pray that day never comes. I truly do. Mercy would keep him from ever learning what he cannot change and what would change nothing. I saw hope in your brother’s eyes when he left the island, Mr. Gwynn. He still believes in love. Even though it cost him.”

Nigel Gwynn stared at the papers in my hand. “They’d be ash now if Andrew hadn’t asked for the pattern book, yes?”

“Yes.”

Again he stared at the papers, willing them, it seemed, to speak of what should be done with them. “I see hope in his eyes too,” he finally said. “Every day a little more.”

Nigel Gwynn took the papers from me. Then he reached behind the counter and drew out a pair of shears.

•   •   •

I
left the tailor shop a few minutes later. Nigel asked whether I would like to leave my address with him should Andrew wish to contact me or in case Chester Hartwell showed up again. But I shook my head. Chester Hartwell would not be returning.

“Are you sure?” Nigel pressed. He knew I had bound myself to his brother and was now choosing to loosen the strings.

“I am.”

Nigel kindly offered to hail a carriage for me, but I declined and stepped onto the busy street alone.

For a moment I stood there watching life zoom and saunter past me, in all its severity and magnificence. I was shedding my skin, becoming raw and new. Everything that had kept me bound to the island was sloughing away with each brave step I was taking.

As I stood there, familiarizing myself with my renaissance, I knew there was one thing left I needed to do. Wanted to do.

I boarded the next trolley headed in the direction of Chambers Street.

We had gone no farther than two blocks when I saw Andrew Gwynn walking down Seventh Avenue with a bolt of cloth on his shoulder. The trolley was slowing in traffic and for a moment our eyes met. Instinctively I raised my hand to the window glass that separated us. At first his stare was that of a stranger. It took him a second to embrace the notion that in that moment, his two worlds had collided—the sad life he knew on Ellis with me and the hopeful one he was building here with his brother. Then his eyes burned with recognition. The trolley began to accelerate and he seemed to vacillate between running after me and continuing on his way back to the shop. I kept my hand to the glass, and smiled at him, feeling tears sliding down my cheeks unchecked and landing on Lily’s scarf. And then he raised his hand to me, waved once, and lowered it slowly. He did not run after me. I turned to face the back window as we passed so that I could continue to watch him. He stood facing the trolley with his hands on the bolt of cloth until I could no longer see him in the distance.

TARYN

Manhattan

September 2011

I
had always assumed I had lost Mrs. Stauer’s scarf in the maelstrom of my escape on September eleventh. The most I had ever hoped for was that I might find its closest match. It hadn’t occurred to me that the florist might have had it all this time. I hadn’t thought to try to contact him; nor could I have done so. Until the photograph had turned up I hadn’t even known Mick’s last name; nor could I remember which florist employed him.

As I stood with the phone to my ear, the words “I have your scarf” echoed in my head. I couldn’t believe that the scarf was no longer lost to me. In all the years I had spent looking for its match, I had never fully considered how I might feel when I found it. Here now was not just its match, but the scarf itself, safe in the hands of the very person who had used it to pull me back from the rim of hell.

I hurried to the back room and shut the door so that I could talk to Mick alone. Even before the photo, Celine knew that a florist had helped me escape the tower’s fall, but she didn’t know everything that Mick Demetriou had done for me in the single hour that had defined our relationship. No one knew.

“What did you say?” I asked, when I was safely behind the closed door.

“I said I have your scarf.”

Mick’s voice sounded different than it had on the day I’d met him. Deeper. Softer. I would not have recognized it.

“I found it in my delivery van,” Mick continued, when I said nothing. “I went back for my vehicle after the roads opened again. Your scarf was on the floor by the buckets where we . . . where we waited. I almost didn’t recognize it, it was so covered in dust.”

“Oh.” I willed away the mental images of those remembered moments. The buckets. The water. The flowers. The searing pain in my chest. The ghostly figure next to me guzzling water like an exile in the desert.

“I have tried for years to find you. I thought you said your name was Karen. I couldn’t find you on any list of surviving family members. I kept looking for someone named Karen.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry about that,” I mumbled, remembering clearly the moment he had asked for my name.

“No, it’s my fault,” he said. “I didn’t hear you right.”

“There was a lot going on.”

He paused. “Yes. Yes, there was.”

Another moment of silence stretched between us.

“The reporter told me you’d been identified. I’d like very much to give you your scarf back,” he said.

“I should probably tell you it’s not even mine,” I confessed.

“Pardon me?”

“I was supposed to match it for one of my customers. I had just picked it up that morning. That’s why I was late.”

A third stretch of silence followed before he said, “But you want it back, don’t you?”

His tone was distinctly hopeful, as if he needed me to want the scarf. After all these years trying to find me, it was important to him that I have it. As I contemplated his question I could sense that the scarf was near him. Perhaps he was holding it in his hand as he talked to me.

Mick’s question hung between us, unanswered.

It was the wrong question. What I wanted didn’t matter. It never had. None of this was ever about what I wanted.

“Are you still there?” Mick asked.

“I’m here.”

“Don’t you want it?” Sadness coated his voice as he repeated his question a third time.

His tone hinted to me that he had ascertained the weight of what he was asking. To an outsider it would seem such a simple inquiry: Did I want a lost scarf returned to me or not? But Mick was no outsider. I answered him with the one question that had obsessed me for a decade.

“Do you think everything happens for a reason?”

“Do I what?”

A door inside me seemed to fling itself open and the ponderings of more than three thousand days flew out. “Do you believe it was just a fluke the photographer found that memory card, and that there was a photo of you and me on it? And here you’ve kept the scarf safe all these years while you looked for me. Do you think that was a coincidence?”

“Well, I . . . No, I guess I don’t.”

His quick confidence in providence awed me. “You think the photographer was meant to find our photo?” I insisted. “That it was meant to be published? You were meant to see it? You were meant to keep the scarf all these years so that you could get it back to me?”

A second or two passed before he answered.

“All I can say is I’ve looked for you for a decade. At every 9/11 event, inside every subway station, in the face of every woman on the sidewalk who reminded me of you. And yes, I’ve asked God to help me find you.”

“To give me back that scarf.”

“Well, yes. But it’s not just about the scarf.”

He was right. It wasn’t just about the scarf. It was about what I was willing to live with. If fate had twice orchestrated the whereabouts of an insignificant piece of neckwear, surely fate didn’t stop there. It was far better for me to believe that chance alone impacted my choices.

I didn’t want to play destiny’s game anymore.

I didn’t want the scarf back.

“I told you it’s not mine,” I said. “It was never mine.”

“Yes, but—”

“I will see if I can locate the woman it belongs to. I am not altogether sure she is still living but I will find out.”

“But—”

“Look, I can’t play the game anymore.”

“Game? What game?”

It was time to end the conversation. “I will always be grateful for what you did for me. Really. I have to go. Someone will be in touch with you if we can find the owner of the scarf.”

“Wait. There’s something else—”

“No. There’s nothing else. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Taryn, please don’t hang up!”

“Good-bye, Mick. Thank you again. For everything. But please don’t call me back.”

I pressed the button to end the call and pulled the phone to my chest, which was heaving now with anger, sorrow, and trepidation.

Surely I had made the right choice.

The reasonable choice.

I stayed in the back room until I had thoroughly tamped down the tide of doubt that had swelled inside me.

•   •   •

KENT’S
parents arrived the next day, Saturday, to attend the anniversary services on Sunday. As a treat for Kendal, I let her stay with them at the Marriott downtown, just a short walk from the newly opened memorial grounds. I decided at the last minute to attend with them but I arrived just as the service began and left before it was finished. I stayed long enough to achieve a measure of peace. Kendal and I found Kent’s name on the North Tower’s shining, watery monument, and we ran our fingers over the letters etched in granite. We stood for a moment under the shade of the lone surviving pear tree and marveled that it had been loved back to health and replanted there. The grounds were hallowed to me, but also private. I knew it was selfish of me, but I didn’t love the idea that Kent shared a final resting place with so many, because that meant I had to share it, too.

Yet I knew this day was important to Kendal and I wanted to have the memory of the event to share with her, even if its very public nature was still too much for me. I didn’t want to be recognized as the woman in the photo, and I didn’t want to run into Mick, though the crowds were in the thousands, and it was easy to stay in the shadows.

It was a moving ceremony, even from an emotional distance, and I was glad I went, though I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to commemorate that day without wishing I could just fall asleep before midnight every September tenth and wake up on the twelfth. When Kendal and I returned to the apartment later that day I was exhausted.

Kent’s parents stayed through Tuesday, a welcome distraction for me. By the time they left, the city had returned to its normal day-to-day hum.

I tried to return to mine.

I found I could not.

Restless and moody, I was unable to concentrate on anything. Mick’s phone call kept replaying itself in my mind. The hope in his voice when he said he wanted to return the scarf and the disappointment when I said I didn’t want it haunted me. It was as if he, too, was struggling to comprehend what to make of our intersected lives, and he had hoped I would be the key to his making peace with similar thoughts.

The worst part was, I still owed Kendal the truth. She deserved to know why I was on the street on 9/11 instead of at the Heirloom Yard, where she and nearly everyone else thought I had been.

I lay awake every night on the edge of sleep, wanting the ease of thinking that everything that had happened on the day Kent died was mere coincidence.

But I woke every morning hungry for more than a random life for me and for my daughter.

As the month bent toward the beginning of autumn and the first leaves began to blush with a tinge of color, I knew that I had been kidding myself. The steady cadence of the seasons was proof enough that I still believed there was divine order in my world. And yet I continued to let the days go by, one by one, without sitting down with Kendal and without making inquiries about Rosalynn Stauer.

I thought about telling Kendal the truth.

I thought about trying to find Mrs. Stauer.

I thought about the scarf.

I even dreamed about the scarf.

But day after day went by and I chose to do nothing.

I was helping a customer choose fabric for a quilt on the last day of summer when the most remarkable thing happened. The woman had in her hand the quilt pattern for a Tangled Irish Chain, one of my favorites, and she was struggling to choose between a blue or green color palette. There were hues of both colors that she loved and hues of both that she hated, and the pattern, which was the same for everyone who bought it, did not dictate which color she must have.

As the woman stood there contemplating her options with the pattern in her hand, clarity suddenly fell upon me. The answer I was looking for had been right in front of me the whole time. I had the power of choice, just like the woman who was now faced with choosing which fabric to buy. I could believe that a photographer had been destined to come upon a lost memory card, or that Mick Demetriou was destined to find me after a decade, or that I was destined to be a phone call away from being reunited with the scarf and yet chose to do nothing.

That was the beauty and terror of choice.

I chose to love Kent. It had been my greatest joy, choosing to love him. I hadn’t understood the beauty of this freedom to love until I began to understand, at that very moment, that it was countered by the freedom to hate.

This was what Mick had meant when he told me, as we sputtered and coughed in his delivery van, that it wasn’t my fault that Kent was at the top of the North Tower when the first plane hit. My choices that terrible morning had been prompted by love. What others had chosen had been prompted by hate. The effects of our choices had spilled onto each other. They always did.

Which must be why, in the midst of all this freedom to choose, a scarf had been sent my way. So that Kendal could be born and so that I could continue to hope love would triumph.

•   •   •

THE
next day, the first of autumn, I told Celine that the man in the photo had Rosalynn Stauer’s scarf and that I needed her help in finding her. A decade ago, Mrs. Stauer had been quick to forgive me for losing her scarf, considering the circumstances, but we had not seen her in the store for a long time. Celine, initially surprised that I had said nothing of Mick’s phone call until then, thought she could find Mrs. Stauer, if she was still living. Celine seemed to understand rather quickly that I’d needed time to process the scarf’s sudden reappearance in my life—and Mick’s, too, perhaps. I was still in the midst of that process when I told her. If I was meant to have the scarf returned to me, then I needed to find out why. Perhaps the reason was bigger than me, just as it had been the first time. Perhaps it wasn’t about me at all, but about Mrs. Stauer. The scarf had been precious to her. Maybe the scarf was reappearing now for her sake, not mine.

I wanted to share the scarf with Kendal before I handed it over to Mrs. Stauer. Kendal’s life had been spared because of it. The scarf was a key part of the story I owed her, the only beautiful part. If she could see the scarf and touch it, perhaps it would soften what I had to tell her about the rest of that day.

Mick would surely bring the scarf to me if I asked him, but I wanted to go to it, just like I had done the first morning I saw it.

A few minutes after ten, I tapped his phone number into my cell.

A male voice answered. “Athena Florist.”

“Mick?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s Taryn.”

•   •   •

I
made arrangements for Celine to pick Kendal up from school.

Before I left for the subway station and Greenwich Village, I went upstairs to the apartment. I had a sudden and surprising urge to feel pretty. I changed into a honey-hued blouse, linen capris, and coffee-brown pumps. I pulled my hair out of its ponytail and clipped a gold barrette into it.

It was a Friday afternoon and the sidewalks were already teeming with people heading out early for the weekend. It still felt like summer. I boarded the number one train to the Village and twenty minutes later emerged onto the sidewalk at Christopher Street, just a block away from where I needed to be.

I walked slowly, preparing my heart and head to see the scarf again.

To see Mick again.

I saw the blue awning first and then the stylish sidewalk arrangement of flowering plants in pots.

His shop was small like mine, but bursting with color that no other store on the block could match. The tinkling of a little wind chime tied to the door handle announced my arrival. I breathed in the scents of a dozen different kinds of blooms.

Mick was at the register just a few feet from the welcome mat, ringing up a purchase. The last time I had seen him he was covered in ash. But the first time, he had looked very nearly like he did now. Even his apron looked the same. A slight sprinkle of gray that had not been there before touched the black hair at his temples. He raised his head when I stepped in and a smile broke across his face.