The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin Page B

afternoons, handing the rod to him when he got a bite because the sight of the hook caught in the mouth of a trout made him woozy.
    Phil last summer, traipsing around the golf course in his head-to-foot bike leathers, insisting on playing eighteen holes though he couldn’t care less about his handicap. It was just an excuse to spend time with his dad.
    All those years when Ted and Lara thought they were looking after Phil, Phil was looking after them.
    Do you remember how much Lara wanted us to have another baby? he thinks. Jesus! All those wishes on rainbows and bloody stars! Do you remember how hard we had to try to grant them come true?
    Margaret laughs, a ripple that washes over him like cool water. “Oh yes,” she says. “We had fun trying, though, didn’t we?”
    And he does not have many moments left, but he would give all of them to be back in their creaky divan bed on one of those Saturday mornings when they tried. The door closed, the curtains drawn, their daughter safely planted in front of a video downstairs. He would, he thinks, give anything, everything, to be thirty-eight again and making love to his wife.
    â€œShut up,” Margaret says, “or you’ll make me cry.”
    What was the name of the imaginary baby Lara had? he thinks. The one who slept in her top drawer till she was ten? Daisy? Poppy?
    â€œLily,” Margaret says.
    She disappeared overnight, he thinks, when Phil came along.
    â€œShe’ll be back,” Margaret says lightly. “Lily. She’s just waiting for the right moment.”
    Like you, he thinks.
    â€œLike me.”
    Margaret is still there when it gets light and the nurse comes to open the curtains. The nurse straightens his pillows and wraps a blood pressure cuff around his limp arm and clips a thermometer to his ear. She taps his arm gently until she finds a vein and slides a needle in,and the morphine fog rolls in, but still Margaret stays and the dark behind his eyes blooms with velvety pansies.
    Where does it come from? he thinks. The word “pansy”? I can’t remember.
    â€œIt comes from the French verb ‘
penser
,’” Margaret says. “To think.”
    Margaret, are you really here? Or am I just imagining you? There is a long pause. Margaret?
    â€œDoes it matter?” she whispers.
    *   *   *
    â€œHe said Mum’s name,” Lara says. “At four o’clock. He tried to sit up and he said ‘Margaret.’”
    â€œJesus,” Phil says softly. “He’s still in there.” His voice is thick with tears. “He’s a fighter.”
    Ted hears the sleeve of his son’s leather jacket creak as he puts his arms around his sister. They are both crying. He wants to cry too, but there is no water left in his body.
    Love doesn’t break your heart, he thinks, but dying crushes it. Flattens it with an iron fist until every last drop of love has been squeezed out.
    â€œRemember my nicknames for them?” Margaret whispers.
    â€œBlossom” for Lara, because she was delicate and pretty as a cherry flower. “Grow” for Phil, who was like a beanstalk.
    I read somewhere, he thinks, that your life flashing before your eyes is just a medical phenomenon. That when your organs start to shut down, your brain just cycles through everything that’s ever happened, looking for something it knows might save you.
    â€œSave you for what?” Margaret asks. “Haven’t you had enough of this, Ted? Aren’t you ready to go yet?”
    She has a point.
    The flashes come not in a rush but slowly, like the fireworks they saw once on a long-ago holiday in France. They bloom, like flowers, in the velvety darkness.
    Fragments Ted had forgotten. Lara, at seven, swinging upside down from monkey bars in St. Stephen’s Green, her hair so long it swept the ground. Coming downstairs one morning to find Phil, about four, sitting in a shaft of