The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin Page A

Lara. He chose love.
    â€œYour wife’s a lucky bird,” the old man who ran the stall used to say, handing over a bunch of roses or gerbera or freesias. Ted didn’t have the heart to tell him that his wife had not been lucky and the flowers were his way of trying to heal his daughter.
    *   *   *
    The morphine is still humming through him but the pump has gone, he guesses because he is too weak to press it. The IV is gone too. This is a kind of euthanasia, though that is not what they call it. He is dying, like a forgotten plant might on a windowsill, of dehydration. Everything is closing and fading, the edges blurring. His legs, which haven’t moved for weeks, are now restless; his hand, free of the IV line, shoots out and knocks the photograph off the bedside table. He dreams of bringing a frosted glass of wine to his lips, a tumbler of cold water, but he would settle for a drop licked from the tap over the basin.
    Someone moistens his puckered lips with a cotton swab and he swims through the whirling darkness up to the surface. A gurney squeals outside the door and he hears himself moan over the boom of his heart, then he hears his son’s voice.
    â€œDad, it’s okay. I’m here.”
    â€œLara,” he manages to say through his parched mouth.
    â€œShe’ll be in later.”
    He concentrates his whole being into the three words. “Michael. Splitting up.”
    â€œShe told you he left?”
    No, Ted thinks, you just did, you Muppet. He opens his eyes, or maybe he just imagines that he does. Because there, instead of his grown-up son, is the five-year-old Phil in yellow Peter Rabbit pajamas, with Rory, the grubby stuffed lion he used to carry everywhere, tucked under his arm. Ted used to have to wash Rory in the middle of thenight, then tumble dry him and put him back in bed beside Phil before he woke up.
    Phil stands on tiptoe to put the cotton swab into a dish on the table and takes Ted’s hand. He is not smiling. His dark eyes are serious beneath his jagged fringe. “Listen to me, Dad,” the child Phil says in Phil’s adult voice. “You don’t have to worry. I’ll look after her, I promise.”
    *   *   *
    Margaret is wearing a hospital gown. She lifts the ends and does a twirl. He sees a flash of her bare bum in the gaps between the ties at the back as she spins.
    He can’t move. Can’t speak now. But his mind, for once, is clear. She’s not here, he tells himself. I’m just imagining her.
    She cocks one eyebrow and marches over to the bed. Taking his hand, she slides it up under the cotton gown and presses it against her belly. “Are you imagining this?” The tips of his numb fingertips brush inch by inch along the raised seam of a Caesarean scar.
    Why did you have to die of a stroke? he thinks when she is lying next to him. Do you have any idea how often I’ve had to hear that word?
Diff’rent Strokes
. Golf strokes. The backstroke. Stroke of genius. Strokestown.
    â€œI’m so sorry,” she sighs theatrically. “I should have died of something much more exotic. Like trypanosomiasis or Chediak-Higashi syndrome.” There’s a pause. “Yes,” she says, “I can hear it when you laugh inside.”
    He laughs again in his mind when he is telling her about five-year-old Phil’s solemn promise to look after Lara.
    She shrugs. “What’s so funny? He’s been doing it for years.”
    The penny drops. He thinks of Phil, at two, in the months after Margaret was gone, plodding up the stairs one at a time to hammer on the locked door of his sister’s bedroom.
    â€œKitoons!” he’d demand. “Kitoons!” and he wouldn’t budge till Lara had dried her tears and come out and brought him downstairs to watch
Scooby Doo
or
ThunderCats
.
    He remembers Phil as a teenager standing thigh-deep beside him in some river for whole