Chapter One Chapter One
Yarrow: A flowering herb in the aster family with lacy umbrellas of blossoms whose soft, mossy scent aids healing
ONE MONTH EARLIER
When I awaken one morning in early spring and discover that the air hums with the peaches-and-cream scent of gardenia, the warm amber wash of sandalwood, and the straw-like aroma of linseed oil, I am certain of two things.
First, that my mother visited me in my dreams. Her scent is a specific bouquet that I would recognize anywhere, at any time, in any life. I close my eyes and inhale deeply, trying to hold on to her perfume even as it slips away, and as I do I remember pieces of my dream: my mother beside me, bending her head toward mine, whispering of Bantom Bay.
I open my eyes.
My second certainty: I must go home.
Returning to Bantom Bay is never easy for me, but the thought of my mother calling to me, beckoning me, fills me with a desperate sort of longing. The last time I was home was for her funeral six months ago, and though I stood beside my father as we spread my mother’s ashes in the sea, I still have trouble believing that she is truly gone. I haven’t been myself these long months without her; there is an unsettled, rootless feeling at my core, a hollow ache that not even working in my beloved gardens soothes.
At the end of the bed, my enormous dog, Gully, lifts his head and gives me a questioning look. I stroke his silky tan fur, thinking. I finished installing my latest garden in Santa Barbara yesterday, transforming my clients’ backyard of patchy grass into a lush oasis of decadently fragrant bee’s bliss sage, nightshade, and rock rose, a sanctuary where the aroma of flowers stirs the spirit and worries slip away for a spell. I haven’t yet accepted another job, and I haven’t paid next month’s rent on my tiny, furnished apartment. This is how I have lived for the past decade—never accepting one project until I’ve completed the last, never staying in any town for long, never forming strong attachments, and never returning to Bantom Bay for more than a few days at a time.
But as the last hints of my mother’s scent drift through me, I feel that pull again, that certainty that she is calling me home, so I rise and pack everything I own into the bags and boxes I always have on hand. I don’t own much—some clothes and linens, my favorite novels, Gully’s bowls and food. All of my landscaping equipment is stowed in the locked storage bins in the bed of my truck.
By late morning, Gully and I are on the road, our brief little life in Santa Barbara growing ever smaller in the rearview mirror.
Bantom Bay, California, is a sliver of a town that curves along the coast between the Pacific Ocean and the densely wooded Bantom Ridge, some twenty miles south of San Francisco. I’ve always imagined that the town gathers the sea and the forest to it possessively, like a child pulling blankets up to her chin, and it gathers people to it in the same way. Most who discover Bantom Bay never leave. For all the ways that my mother and I were similar, this was one of the ways that we weren’t. She had no desire to live anywhere else, while I have moved up and down the West Coast, forever leaving one place for another.
By the time I arrive in town, it’s late in the afternoon. I pass the small library I visited weekly as a child and then my old elementary school, still painted the creamy pink hue of a Sarah Bernhardt peony. When I pass the community center where my mother taught painting classes, the truck is suddenly too warm, my heartbeat loud in my ears. I open the windows, and the air that pours in smells of coastal wildflowers, forest, and sea—yarrow, bay laurel, chaparral, sagebrush, and brine, as familiar to me as a lullaby. Beside me, Gully rouses himself and hangs his head outside, his eyes half-closed and his expression blissful.
Along Miramonte Drive, shingled buildings in salt-scrubbed pastels bear the names of shops and restaurants that have been there for as long as I can remember, and longer still. Corde’s Hardware. Pacific Surf Shop. Bantom Bay Books. Sakura Sushi. Miramonte Pizza. Las Olas Taqueria. I can’t help smiling when I spot the cheerful red geraniums and trailing sweet potato vines that spill lavishly from the window boxes of the Shark Bite Café. I planted them myself a couple of years ago, and the café’s owner, Roger, was delighted to find that business ticked up soon after.
My smile falls when I pass the building that once housed the Seadrift Gallery. It’s a music store now, with a row of guitars glinting in the window. I look away, my thoughts spiraling darkly back to a day that I would do anything to erase. On the wheel, my knuckles are pale, and I’m barely able to resist the sudden, long-ingrained impulse to turn my truck around and leave.
But I think of my mother’s scent moving through me this morning, and I press on, driving a half mile up Bantom Ridge, along a road that curves below a canopy of outstretched live oak branches. It’s bittersweet to arrive at my childhood home and see that it is as charming as ever, its peaked roof and white clapboard tidy against the backdrop of dense green forest. At the end of the driveway, the yellow doors of the freestanding garage that my mother used as a studio appear freshly painted. I turn off the engine and just sit for a moment, torturing myself with memories of all the times I’ve looked up from this exact spot to see my mother opening those doors and hurrying out to greet me, her smile dazzling in its warmth.
Apparently I’m not quite done torturing myself, because my gaze shifts to the left of the studio. There, a stretch of carefully mown grass shows no sign that it once held the first garden I ever planted. The white tuberose flowers, so violently crushed on that day that haunts me, are long gone. No hints remain of what occurred here a decade ago; my guilt is a secret buried within me.
Had I known what would happen in that garden, what I would do there, I never would have planted it. But I was only ten years old and blithely hopeful about the future when I first dug those flower beds, my interest in plants newly piqued by the herb garden my fourth-grade class created at our elementary school. I remember even now the innocent excitement I had felt as I lined up in a row with my classmates, each of us pulling on our gardening gloves while we waited for our turn to receive an herb from our teacher.
“Rosemary,” Mrs. Maple said, placing a tiny, green-needled plant in my outstretched palm.
Rosemary. I breathed in. Its fragrance was woodsy and herbal, rich and savory and layered with olive oil and pine. By that age, I’d been aware for years that my sense of scent was highly attuned; everywhere I went, fragrances whispered to me, telling me of the world, revealing to me insights that were hidden from others. But it wasn’t until I held that rosemary in my hands that I began to understand my powerful connection to plants and their scents.
The soil of the school’s herb garden was so soft that I didn’t use a spade to dig into it. I simply sunk my gloved hand into the dirt, scooping out a little hole, and gently settled the rosemary into place. I patted the soil around the stem, and then instinctively drew a circle with my finger, leaving an indented moat around the plant that would hold water and disperse it slowly.
My classmates watched me and mimicked my action, drawing little circles around their own herbs. Twenty circles. Twenty plants. But I noticed that only my rosemary grew half an inch even as we stood there on that first day.
I visited my plant, caring for it, every day at recess. It continued to grow quickly, and was soon twice the size of the other children’s. Clusters of beautiful, small, pale blue flowers appeared along its branches where all the other plants had none.
And then one day, as I stood in front of the plant, puzzling over its unusual size and the strange connection that I felt to it, I sensed the rosemary’s earthy, green, complex fragrance intensifying, lifting above all of the herbs’ scents, pressing so close to me that it felt like breath against my skin, a murmured answer to my questions. The aroma was so strong that I could almost see it, gossamer and shimmering in the air.
It was intuition, I suppose, or some old, inherited knowledge that made me bend close to the blossoms and draw in a deep breath. The rosemary’s scent slipped through me in long, silky tendrils.
In an instant, I was no longer in the schoolyard; I was with my mother on a fog-strewn afternoon in the Garden of Fragrance in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. We were roaming the paths, and I was burying my nose into every plant. I was unsteady on my feet, only just walking, and my mother held my hand gently but firmly. I wore soft shoes that thumped along the path. My mother read each plant’s name aloud as I breathed in its scent, her clear voice floating down to me through the milky fog.
Pineapple sage. Shore juniper. Lemon verbena. Rosemary.
I registered every fragrant note, realizing that I knew these names even before my mother spoke them. The plants were familiar to me—old friends, newly met. Their scents cradled me in the same gentle, firm way that my mother held my hand, leading me, showing me the way forward. I felt delighted and content, aware that the garden made my heart sing in mysterious ways.
And then… I was back. I was standing again, somehow, beside the rosemary plant at my elementary school. All around me, children were running, playing, just as they had been. It was like nothing had happened, like no time at all had passed.
My mind spun. I should have been scared, but instead I felt the emotions of the memory still moving within me—connection, delight, the comforting presence of my mother. What I experienced had not felt like a remembrance; I had been there again. I had been a toddler in the Garden of Fragrance. The fog had been cool and damp on my skin. I had felt my mother’s hand, heard her voice, smelled the individual scent of each plant.
And yet I had entirely forgotten about that day until I was returned to it.
In the schoolyard, I felt the shape of my future shifting. The scent of the rosemary I’d planted, the memory of that day with my mother, had shown me something about myself. I wouldn’t forget it again.
That very afternoon, full of youthful certainty about the bright things that must lie ahead, I went home and asked my mother if I could plant a garden next to her studio.
Beside me in the truck, Gully’s big tail thumps on the seat, and I’m grateful to be pulled from my thoughts. I look over at him, then follow his gaze back to the house.
My father stands in the doorway now, one hand raised in greeting. I draw in my breath, startled by how much older he looks than when I saw him last. Thinner, too. A lump of worry forms in my throat. My father has always been a quiet, serious man—confident, if regimented, in his approach to life—but now his shoulders slope and his expression seems uncertain. In the time since I was home for my mother’s funeral, he seems to have become a diminished version of himself. It’s as though someone has taken an eraser to all of his sharp edges, softening him.
Oh, Mom, I think as I open the truck door. I’m sorry. I should have come home sooner.
“Hi, Dad!” I call, working to keep my voice upbeat.
“Hello, Lucy,” he calls back. He seemed distracted when I phoned from the road to let him know I was coming, and he has the same tone now, as though his mind is elsewhere.
I let out Gully and make my way up the porch steps, studying my father carefully. There’s gray stubble on his long, usually clean-shaven face. And there’s something about his blue eyes. Have they… faded? Maybe it’s just that the skin underneath them is darker. He hasn’t shrunk, though. I still have to rock onto my toes to kiss his cheek. I breathe in and am relieved to find that his scent is the same as ever—he smells of redwood trees and pencil shavings, of newspaper and wool.
And inside, on the shelves that surround the old stone fireplace in the living room, my mother’s small, evocative paintings of Bantom Bay still emanate with her love for this town. They’re still surrounded by the shells, the jars of sea glass, the smooth, twisting driftwood branches that she found on a lifetime of beach walks. There is still my parents’ shared collection of books, the moss-colored couch bearing an array of patterned throw pillows, the large Persian rug faded from years of afternoon sunlight.
The house remains both quirky and neat as a pin, my mother’s colorful personality and my father’s fastidiousness knitted together in perfect, if baffling, harmony. I’m not sure if there have ever been two people more different, or more in love.
The house is just as it has always been—and yet. When I breathe in, there is no trace of my mother’s scent in the air. Six months ago, a hint of it still lingered, but now it is gone, replaced by a faint mix of lemon cleaning products, sea salt, and books.
Tears prick my eyes, but I manage to blink them away. If I start crying now, I’m not sure I’ll stop.
“Would you like… water?” my father asks as I follow him into the kitchen. “I’m afraid I haven’t been to the store recently.”
I walk over to the fridge, open it, and peer inside. It’s sparkling clean but stocked only with a quart of milk, a carton of eggs, and a wilted head of lettuce. What is he eating?
“Water is perfect,” I say, and pour two glasses. We sit across from each other at the table. It’s then that I realize that he’s studying me, too, and I wonder if I look as changed as he does. Each of us had orbited around my mother in our own particular way.
Loss changes a person just as love does, perhaps in equal measure.
“So you finished your projects in Santa Barbara?” he asks. “Everything went well?”
I nod. “Everyone seemed happy.” I think for a beat and then add, “Oh, you’ll like this. One of my clients had a tiny chihuahua named Stinker who took a shine to Gully. She was always racing out of the house and prancing around him, darting all over the place while I was working in their garden. I think my clients started to worry that either Gully or I might not notice Stinker and accidentally step on her, so they put a bell on her collar.” I pause meaningfully, but my father looks at me blankly. “They put a bell on a dog named Stinker,” I say.
“Oh. Oh, I see,” he says slowly. “Stinkerbell. That’s funny.”
“Well, if you have to say it’s funny, I’m not sure it is,” I say, grimacing but laughing a little. “Anyway, what’s the latest here? What’s new in Bantom Bay?”
He gives me a sad smile. “I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong person.”
Around us, the house falls quiet. If my mother were here, she would be bursting with news. Otis Redding would be playing on the stereo. One of her friends would be knocking on the door, or calling on the phone, or sitting right here at this kitchen table, drinking coffee or playing cards or telling stories. Instead the stillness of the house presses down, a weight too heavy for anyone to bear alone.
I reach across the table and rest my hand on my father’s.
“It’s really good to see you,” I tell him.
“It’s good to see you, too,” he says, patting my hand. “I’m glad you’re home.” The warmth of his words doesn’t quite reach his eyes—there’s a sadness there that seems to leave no room for other emotions.
I swallow. It’s one thing to run from my own pain, and quite another to run from my father’s. I’d thought I might stay in Bantom Bay for a few days—enough time to sift through the emails that I’ve received from interested clients over the past few months and settle on my next job—but now, seeing my dad like this… I know that I can’t leave him. The speed at which I resign to stay surprises me. Maybe I am more tired of my perpetual moving than I realized.
“I was thinking I’d stay for a while,” I announce, before I can think better of it. “That is, if you don’t mind the company. I’m sure I can find work nearby. There’s always someone who needs a gardener.”
My father’s eyes widen, then narrow. He gives me that look again, like he’s studying me. “You want to stay in Bantom Bay?”
He has every right to be surprised. I haven’t visited for more than a few days at a time since I graduated from high school over ten years ago. He thinks this is because I become restless if I stay in one place for too long, that wanderlust is as deeply ingrained in me as my love for flowers. I’ve never told him, or anyone, the real reason I keep moving.
“If you don’t think Gully and I will get in your way,” I say. Gully is lying near my feet and at the sound of his name, he lifts his gorgeous head and gives me one of his soulful, slightly apologetic looks as though to say he realizes that his size means he will always, inevitably, be somewhat in the way. I reach down and run my thumb over his velvety black muzzle.
“Lucy, I’m retired,” my dad says. “I’m sure I’ll be in your way more than the other way around.”
It was a mere month after he retired from the accounting firm in San Francisco where he’d worked for decades that my mother died of a heart attack—no warning at all, their plans for their golden years disappearing along with her. Though I call my dad every week, I’ve yet to get a straight answer as to how he has been spending his time.
Now that I’m home again, I feel more acutely aware than ever that our little family is just the two of us. There are no aunts, no uncles, no cousins. Only this town, the neighbors who have always known us. Where are those neighbors now? I wonder.
“How is it, being retired?” I ask, trying to keep the worry from my voice. “What have you been up to?”
He shrugs. “Oh, this and that. House projects, mostly. All of the little things I never got around to when I was working.”
I glance over his shoulder into the living room. It strikes me that it’s not just clean, it’s immaculate. It’s like no one actually lives there. He’s left everything exactly as it was when my mother was alive, but without her presence, without the whirling, joyful mess she so often left in her wake or her complicated, lovely scent, it feels more like a museum than a home.
I look back at my father. “Do you ever have company over? The Hummels? The Constantinos?”
He shakes his head.
I stare at him. “But you must see them. They invite you to dinner?”
He shrugs. “They invite me, but I’m not up for much socializing these days. I keep myself busy, though. There’s plenty to do around here.”
“Oh, but Dad,” I say, “aren’t you lonely?”
He levels his gaze on mine and says gently, “Aren’t you?”
Heat warms my skin. My father knows that I move too often to make lasting friendships. But I have my work, and the satisfaction of knowing that my gardens bring people both joy and peace. At the end of a long day, I am content to curl into bed with Gully at my feet and a book in my hands. I am fine; I have my reasons for choosing this path. My father chose something else—he chose my vibrant mother, a home, this little suburban community where everyone knows everyone.
“Look at that,” he says then, nodding toward the window and saving me from having to answer his question. “The magic hour.”
He’s right. The light in the kitchen is changing, the strong spring afternoon sun easing into a soft wash of gold. This was always my mother’s favorite time of day, when the sun hangs just above the ocean and its light pours over the coast like honey falling from a warm spoon.
“Magic hours,” I correct, emphasizing the plural. At this, my father produces the first flicker of a genuine smile that I’ve seen from him since I stepped out of my truck. My mother swore that the magic hour lasted twice as long in Bantom Bay as it did anywhere else—that it wasn’t one hour here, but two.
Gully stands and walks to the kitchen door. He looks over his shoulder expectantly at me, and I, in turn, look at my father.
“Should we take a walk down to the beach?” I ask. “Enjoy the light?”
“I don’t think so,” he says too quickly, telling me all I need to know about the offers of company he has rejected in the past months. “You go ahead, if you’d like.”
I want to argue with him, but he’s already walking into the living room, settling into the armchair with one of his mystery novels in hand. I frown, then remind myself that I’m staying. There is time.
I head outside, thinking I’ll walk Gully to the beach. Instead I stop on the driveway.
There, at the end of the pavement, the yellow doors of my mother’s studio seem to glow. In truth, everything is glowing—even Gully. He looks practically ethereal, a halo of golden-hour light making his fur shine.
I walk toward the doors and then stop again. When I was home for my mother’s funeral, I’d peeked inside her studio but had not been able to bring myself to cross the threshold. Now, the fresh yellow paint on the doors makes my stomach twist. What if I look inside and find that my father has taken on the studio as one of his projects? What if he has tidied it the way he has the house, scrubbing away the last signs of my mother’s creative, exuberant spirit?
There is, I know, only one way to find out.
With the sun pressing a warm hand to my back, I open the doors. Gully, either out of protectiveness or curiosity, moves forward first, and I follow.
Immediately I release a long, relieved breath.
The studio is a mess. A truly spectacular mess, just as it always was. Tables of various sizes are crowded with dust-covered tubes of paint, hardened mounds of rags, magazines, photographs, and sketch pads. Brushes, palette knives, and pencils jut out like dried bouquets from glass jars. Fluttering garlands of pastel ribbons and tissue-paper flowers crisscross in arcs below the blue ceiling. Multicolored constellations of dried paint speckle the concrete floor. In the light that streams through the open doors, dust motes sparkle.
Best of all, my mother’s scent laces the air. I breathe in, feeling it drift softly through my aching chest. Gardenia, sandalwood, linseed oil. The very scent that had called me home. My mother’s fragrance has disappeared from the house, but here, in the studio, it remains.
Everything in the studio remains exactly how she left it, frozen in time.
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 seem alive. 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, they discovered 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 gift was 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 my mother’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 the Employment Opportunities page. 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.
