Chapter 19

I was sometimes taken aback by how much comfort I took at being back in the world that I thought I had rejected, and how the chaos that had once seemed unbearable to me was now a friend. Chaos and anonymity were a shelter of sorts. I felt so small here, like a child, but my insignificance in the madness of this world was like a mother's warm arms. I was, in a sense, free. I was still sad and broken, but maybe that would change. Maybe that was hope? Could hope survive the loss and hatred and despair that threatened to swallow me up every day? If love had survived, then maybe hope had too?

These were the thoughts that filled my mind and heart as the days and weeks passed and I slowly built a life for my daughter and myself. As time passed I began to realize just how deeply entwined we had become in Sheila's life, and she in ours. It was mid-summer, late in the evening after a long day of carting pots around, helping people select plants, and explaining for the umpteenth time what to do—or not do—about aphids. Sheila and I were sitting at the small table on the back porch eating dinner and watching Sulamith on the little patch of grass, reaching into the flower beds and pulling apart lavender flowers and daisies with her tiny fingers. She was wearing a simple little yellow dress I'd picked up at a thrift store, and a diaper. Her plump baby legs were bare in the grass and I could see it tickling her as she crawled towards another daisy to grasp it and pull with her clumsy yet elegant baby movements. Her face intent. Her little head, covered in wispy molasses coloured curls, bent over her work. When she had first started doing this I'd tried to stop her, but Sheila had said, “Oh she's fine, leave her to it. She's just learning her flowers.”

Sheila and I had completely overhauled her back garden so that there were no toxic or prickly plants for us to worry about, and while I'd worried at first that Sulamith might get stung by a bee, she never did, so we watched her and enjoyed her antics as she would find yet another flower to pluck to pieces. Honestly, she wasn't in any danger of running out.

Sheila turned to me as we ate and asked, “Do you ever think about the future? Where you'd like to go? Where you'd like to be eventually?”

I made a face, pressed my lips together and scowled. It's the face I make when something comes up that I don't want to deal with. Sheila knows that face and she said hurriedly, “I'm not trying to pressure you, the opposite really. I don't want you to feel obligated to stay but, I wanted to tell you that . . .” Sheila's face went soft and she looked out over the garden as Sulamith pulled down a borage plant, “I love you and your little girl as if you were my own flesh and blood. I know that I said that you could stay as long as you needed to, but I wanted you to know that you don't ever have to leave if you don't want to.”

I think I started sobbing pretty uncontrollably at that moment. I didn't want or mean to, but I'd been worried about being away from Sheila and not just because she was helping me keep my act together, but because I love her too. In some ways, after all I'd been through, it was like I needed a mother and I felt like I was home.

I remember Sheila hugging me and stroking my hair, saying, “No no, I didn't mean to make you cry. Sh sh sh . . .”

But after I finally settled down I told her, “I love you too Sheila.”

After that it only took me a few days to decide what to do with the money my parents had left behind. I had often wondered if that brutal December storm that had hit Nova Britannia a year and a half earlier had been mirrored in this world, and it turned out that it had, and boy did it do a number on the garden centre. The worst part was that, through some loophole in Sheila's insurance, only a portion of the repairs had been covered and she had been forced to take out a small mortgage on the house.

“It's not a big deal,” Sheila had told me. “It'll push back my retirement by a few years but it's not the end of the world.”

The term was up on the money that Sheila had saved for me so I used some of it to clear out the mortgage on the house and another chunk for some improvements to the greenhouse which left me with a small nest egg to tuck away. Sheila put my name with hers on the deed to the house, and made me a part owner of Buds and Blossoms.

*

And so the summer passed. I had my okay days. I had my bad days. Sulamith was my little light, the thing I held myself together for. To see her face each day and see her grow and change and hear her little voice as she would look at us and say, “Ma-ma? Shee-ya?”

I would watch her, transfixed, as she toyed with the idea of walking, and hold my breath thinking, Is she going to do it? Is she going to step away from the chesterfield? Her chubby tentative feet wobbling, then she'd smile, coy all of a sudden and change her mind. Then one day, I looked up from what I was doing and there she was, teetering towards me, a giant smile on her face. I got down on my knees and waited for her to make it to me and when she did she let herself fall into my arms and I held her and said to her, “Oh my girl! Look how far you walked!”

She was so proud of herself and I couldn't believe how sweet and wonderful she was but that night after she was asleep I cried harder than I had in a long time. Rowan would never see her walk. I couldn't even tell him about it.

Days passed. Flowers bloomed and faded. Sulamith's walking turned to running and Sheila and I were hard pressed to keep up to her. The busy buzz of summer mellowed to a sweet hum, and then, at the end of August something unexpected happened. Evan came home.