Love Letters from Ladybug Farm (29 page)

Noah looked at her, confused, and then at Lindsay. “She was in the hospital that day” Lindsay said quietly, “and she has been ever since. Noah, I’m so sorry, but she passed away this morning.”

There was no reaction but a slight tightening of his jaw. He sat there for a moment longer, but when Lindsay reached across the table to touch his hand he lurched to his feet, turned, and bolted from the room.

The memorial service was held in a rambling white clap-board building with a big spreading oak in front and neatly tended evergreen plantings nestling against the foundation. A small brass plaque near the door read “Harbor Home.” Otherwise, it looked much like any other house on the street.

Inside, rows of metal chairs had been set up, and all of them were filled with people of all descriptions—men in shirtsleeves and women in cotton dresses, boys in jeans and T-shirts, teenage girls with restless babies. At the front of the room were a bank of flowers and a picture of a pretty woman with straight brown hair and a shy smile who was far too young to die.

Noah had not spoken on the long drive to Richmond; he rested his head against the back window and watched the landscape roll by with a bleak, unseeing gaze. The women did not try to engage him in conversation. None of them knew what to say.

A woman named Sandra Wilkes identified herself as Mandy Cormier’s supervisor at Harbor Home Halfway House, and spoke about the work Mandy had done there, the lives she had touched. Some of her clients stood up and told stories of what she had meant to them. Some of them wept. Cici, Bridget, and Lindsay kept stealing glances at Noah, but he remained stony faced and stoic, gazing straight ahead.

Afterward they went up to Sandra and introduced themselves. Noah mumbled, “Good to meet you,” and stuffed his hands into his suit pants pockets, staring over her shoulder.

Sandra said, “Your mother meant so much to us here at Harbor Home. Just look around. There isn’t a kid in here whose life wasn’t changed because of her.”

Noah replied, “Yeah, there is. Me.” Then he said, “I’ll wait in the car.”

Sandra watched him sympathetically as he left. “I can’t imagine how difficult this must be.”

Lindsay said, “I don’t think any of us can.”

“She told me about her arrangement with you. I have some papers for you. A small life insurance policy, some guardianship papers ... We’ll pack up her things, unless you’d like to go through them now.”

Cici said, “I don’t think this is the right time.”

“Oh, and these.” Sandra reached into her purse and brought out a packet of envelopes bound with a rubber band. “Mandy asked me to give these to Noah. Maybe you could ... ?”

Lindsay took the envelopes, Cici and Bridget collected the other papers, and they made arrangements to have Mandy’s belongings held in storage for Noah until he was ready to go through them.

Noah was leaning against the side of the car, his jacket off, staring straight ahead. All three women went to him. Lindsay handed him the bundle of envelopes. “These are from your mother.”

He looked down at the packet, but said nothing.

Lindsay glanced at the other two. “There’s something I think you should know. Before we knew about your mother, I was looking into the possibility of legally adopting you. I’d like to talk to you about that sometime. If you think it’s something you might be interested in.”

Now he looked up at her, slowly.

“Either way” Cici said, “there’s something else you need to know You might not have been born to us, but you
are
our kid.”

Bridget laid a gentle hand upon his arm. “You’d better believe it.”

He dropped his eyes again. His fingers closed on the packet in his hands and he said, lowly “I called her a liar.” His voice tightened, and so did his fingers. “The last e-mail I sent her ... I called her a liar.”

His shoulders started to shake, his face began to crumple, and all three women stepped into him, surrounding him with their embrace as he sobbed.

The one immutable rule on Ladybug Farm was that time stopped for no one. There were eggs to be gathered and animals to be fed, rows to be weeded, ponds to be cleaned, beans and squash to be harvested, herbs to be cut, roses to be watered, flower beds to be mulched, bird feeders to be filled, compost to be turned, grass to be mowed. Sometimes a delay of even a day or two could mean the difference between a healthy plant and a dead one, an abundant harvest or no harvest at all. And sure enough, when they returned home from the memorial service, Ida Mae announced that cutworms had taken out half the tomato vines, and potato bugs had infested the potatoes. Everything came to a halt as all able-bodied hands rushed to the garden with cardboard collars for the tomato plants and insecticidal soap for the potatoes.

“You spent more time mulching and less time on that computer,” Ida Mae observed dryly, knocking potato bugs off a leaf and into a tin can with a stick, “and you wouldn’t have to worry about bugs.”

They all knew she was probably right. But there were also one hundred ladybug cookies to be baked, decorated, and packaged, twenty large and one hundred small gift baskets to be packed and wrapped, twenty-five gallons of cherries to be made into cherry wine jam, and twenty champagne glasses to be converted to table decorations—all before the end of the week.

Noah fed and watered the animals, cleaned their pens, mowed the lawn, harvested crops, and attended to his other regular chores without interruption. But for the most part he spent his time alone, either roaming the woods or in the art studio, and the other members of the household gave him his privacy.

“The thing I feel the worst about,” Lindsay said, piping black dots onto the red frosting of a ladybug cookie according to Bridget’s instructions, “is that we’ve been so busy with our own problems we didn’t even notice what was going on with him.”

“That’s not true.” Cici was still pitting cherries. “We knew something was bothering him. We should have tried harder to find out what it was.”

“Having once been an actual teenage boy myself,” Paul said, glancing over the tops of the half-rim glasses he wore for close work, “believe me when I tell you that there is always something bothering them. Trying to stay on top of it every single time is crazy-making.” He hot-glued another perfect cluster of miniature apricot silk roses into the center of an ivory bow and passed it to Lori, who used florist wire to secure it around the stem of a champagne glass.

“Come on, Uncle Paul. I mean, I know it was hard for you, growing up gay and all, but you went to Choate and spent summers on Cape Cod. It’s a little bit different for a kid like him. Not,” she added guiltily “that I’m one to be talking, with all my whining about missing out on Italy. I never spent one day of my whole life without knowing that I had two parents who loved me. And that’s why I don’t think people like us can really understand what it’s like for him.”

Paul smiled at her. “Truer words, princess.”

Bridget took another pan of cookies from the oven and set it on a wire rack to cool. “That day we came back from the hospital,” she said, “and he had done all that work sprucing up the place and keeping up with everyone’s chores ... we thought it was because he was trying to get out of the trouble he was in. Now I think it might have just been his way of saying he was grateful, you know, to be here.”

“He is a remarkable young man in so many ways,” Cici said. “I just wish there was something we could do to make things easier for him now.”

The screen door squeaked open, and there stood Noah. “You already have,” he said.

They all turned guiltily and he gave a one-shouldered shrug, and a rueful, fleeting smile. “It’s okay if you talk about me. I just don’t want to ... you know, I’m more the kind of guy who likes to work things out for himself.”

Lindsay straightened up from the tray of cookies. “We know,” she said gently. “But if you ever want to talk, we’re here for you.”

“All of us,” Paul added.

Lori added, “Yeah.”

Noah said, “Yeah, I know. But it’s nicer to know I don’t have to.”

Bridget smiled at him. “That’s fine, too.”

He looked around the room at all of them for a moment, then he said, “There’s one thing I wanted to say. Then maybe ... in a week or two, when things kind of calm down around here, maybe we’ll talk, you know, about that other thing.” He looked at Lindsay, an uncertain mixture of shyness, pretended nonchalance, and hope in his eyes. “That legal thing you told me about in Richmond.”

Lindsay had to swallow before she could speak, but she could not restrain her smile. “Okay. That would be great.”

Noah went on. “What I wanted to say was, I know ya’ll are thinking I’m mad at her. My mom. But that’s not it. I don’t blame her, not now. I’ve been reading her letters. I think about her writing them to me when I was just a little baby, and she didn’t even know where I was. She was kind of funny.” He smiled a little, faintly. “And interesting. She sounds like somebody I might have liked to know. So that’s the thing. I had a whole year, after I knew where she was and who she was, and I could have talked to her. But I wasted it. I wasted it trying to punish her, or trying to prove I didn’t care, or I don’t know, a lotta different things. But that’s what I’m mad at. Nothing else.”