The First Gardener (38 page)

“It’ll be all right.” Suzy kissed her sister’s wet curls. “Mama’s gonna get a job, and we’re gonna get us a house and have all the macaroni and cheese we can stand.”

Mackenzie looked at Suzy and gave her a soft wink. “You’re exactly right. She sure will. But you three are going to become prunes if we don’t get you out of here.”

Suzy protested. “Aw, man.”

“Come on,” Lily coaxed.

All three climbed out, and Mackenzie wrapped them in towels. Then she led them toward the laundry room, where the first load of fresh, dry clothes was coming out of the dryer. Sandra held them out to the girls as if they carried the plague, but they didn’t seem to notice. Once they were dressed, they went downstairs with Eugenia to enjoy what they were told was a Mexican fiesta, with a special request accompaniment of macaroni and cheese.

Mackenzie returned to her room and stood in her closet, surprised to find she actually wanted to put on real clothes. She stepped into dark-wash straight-leg jeans and pulled on a white V-necked T-shirt. Her red flats with the brushed-gold buckles sat at the ready, and she slipped her feet inside.

She went to the mirror and studied her face. Her eyes seemed virtually hollowed out from the weight she had lost. She must have looked as scary to those girls as Dimples’s teeth.

She took a few minutes to put on some makeup and brush her teeth and for a moment act as if she were alive. For the first time in so long, she actually felt she might be.

She walked from her bathroom and saw the bright-red amaryllis standing tall in its container on the table. She remembered Gray bringing in something from Jeremiah, asking her if she knew what it meant. She hadn’t known. And until this moment she hadn’t really cared. She wondered about the meaning of that flower all the way downstairs.

Her mother’s face registered a brief shock at her arrival in the kitchen. But as usual, Eugenia acted as if everything was normal. “You want to help that little one with her plate before it ends up on the floor?”

“Sure. I’d be glad to.”

And the rest of the evening she helped her mother, her mother’s crazy friends, and a far-less-frantic Jessica—who had stayed late without even being asked—to take care of those three girls.

While Lily, Toby, and Suzy ate ice cream at a long table by the bay window in the kitchen, Mackenzie sat down by their mother. “Your children are beautiful.”

She nodded modestly. “Thank you. I believe they are as well.”

“I’m sorry.” Mackenzie shook her head. “I can’t recall your name.”

“It’s Grace.”

“Yes, right. Grace. Well, I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.”

The woman turned her remarkable gray-green eyes toward Mackenzie. “We’ll get through. That’s what we do. We go through.”

“Yep, not around or under. Right, Mommy?” Suzy’s face was still stuck in her bowl.

Her mother laughed as she ran her hand down the top of Suzy’s clean head. “That’s right, baby. Just through.”

Mackenzie’s hand dropped to the table as the impact of the words settled on her. They echoed in her mind as she sat there listening to childish pleas for more ice cream. Finally Grace announced that dessert was over and it was time for bed.

When Eugenia rose to clear the table and walked by, Mackenzie grabbed her mother’s arm. “What’s the amaryllis mean, Mama?”

Her mother looked at her, her face revealing nothing. “It means ‘pride,’ Mackenzie.”

Mackenzie felt the force of the word. “Pride?”

“Yes, darling. And seems like we’ve all been dealing with our own form of it.”

“How am I prideful, Mama?”

Eugenia shook her head gently, the way a mother would at her baby girl when she doesn’t want to hurt her. “Self-pity can be pride. I’m not saying that’s where you are now, but in any kind of loss, it can come hunting for us.”

These words struck harder, the weight of them pressing Mackenzie deeper into the cushioned seat.

“It does have another meaning, though, that I think you should consider.”

“Yeah?”

Eugenia shifted the sticky ice cream bowl to her other hand. “It means ‘determination.’ Something I always instilled in you.” She picked up another bowl and walked toward the sink.

Mackenzie rose slowly. Suzy jumped from her chair. “Can we sleep with you, Miz Mackenzie?”

Mackenzie hesitated a second, then smiled. “I’ve got something even better than that for you.” And before she had thought it through, she was standing at Maddie’s door with Lily, Toby, and Suzy right behind her.

Her hand shook as she stood there. She felt one of the girls jostle another and whisper something. Then she opened the door slowly, revealing the room that had been virtually sealed as a tomb. Her baby girl’s smell no longer lingered, but every ounce of her still seemed alive in that world of pink.

Mackenzie closed the door quickly. Her pulse raced.

“You okay, Miz Mackenzie?” Lily’s hand was on her shoulder.

She looked down at the expectant face and exhaled slowly. She wanted to retreat. Just run to her room, climb in bed, and pull the covers over her head. But she couldn’t. Not now. If she did, she was pretty certain Suzy would come looking for her with twenty questions.

For some reason, that thought calmed her. She turned the knob and opened the door again. “Let’s get you girls put to bed.”

She tucked the two older girls into the twin beds and fixed Suzy a pallet on the floor—or a “palace,” as she called it. Then she found a book and read them a story. Before she was through, each of them had fallen asleep.

Mackenzie pulled the covers up tight under Suzy’s chin and marinated in the magic of a five-year-old. She didn’t want to let it go. She wanted to grab it and bottle it up to pull out and enjoy whenever she wanted.

The light in Maddie’s closet shone through the door she had left cracked at Suzy’s suggestion. She walked to it and held the knob in her hand. These were waters she hadn’t even dreamed of traveling. She let go of the knob and just stood there.

Not around or under. Just through.

She pulled it open, wide. Everything in there was just like it was the day Maddie died. She hadn’t touched it, not one piece of it, though she suspected that Eugenia or the housekeepers had dusted and vacuumed.

She entered the closet and closed the door behind her. She ran her hands along the edges of Maddie’s tulle “princess skirt” on its hanger. Maddie’s shoes were all still neatly placed side by side, and the papers from her first couple days of school still sat on her bottom shelf.

Mackenzie took a construction paper booklet from the shelf. The first page read,
My World, by Maddie London
. Each following page held a drawing of how Maddie saw her world. There were stick figures of Mackenzie and Gray. A pretty good depiction of a fluffy dog, a wild-haired child she had to assume was Oliver, and a picture of Rosa’s pancakes. And a tall, dark figure holding a flower.

It was Maddie’s world, all right. It had been Mackenzie’s world too. But grief had swallowed it whole. She had allowed that to happen.

She’d had a picture of her world too, a picture in her mind. She and Gray and at least two kids living out their lives together, doing what they were created to do, loving people, loving God. And then, when they were old, sitting on the front porch with their grandchildren.

It was such a beautiful picture. A perfect picture. And her life hadn’t turned out anything like it. For that, she had rebuked heaven. Ever since Maddie died, in one way or another, that’s what she’d been doing.

In that moment, the truth of how she’d lived the past six months washed over her and she knew: only she could have allowed it. Yes, the grief was real and thick. But she had chosen to let it all consume her. And only she could dig her way out.

She pulled more papers from the shelf and carefully studied them one by one, letting the pain and loss of what lay before her be felt. Telling herself, minute by minute,
Go through. Go through.

Tears ran in steady streams down her face the whole time. Then she reached the last page, a half-drawn picture. The irony wasn’t lost on her. Maddie’s picture had never been finished. Nor had hers.

Mackenzie crumpled to her knees, pulling one of Maddie’s shirts from a hanger as she did and stuffing it against her face to stifle her cries, cries that came from deep inside her. It felt like they’d been pushed so far down they had clogged up her soul. But as they were dislodged, so was something else. Something even deeper. Something . . . healing.

Bursts of grief rushed through her for at least thirty minutes. When the tears finally subsided, she felt spent but somehow alive. The pain hadn’t killed her. In fact, feeling it, experiencing it, going through it had actually allowed her to know she was alive.

She lowered her body to the floor and curled up on her side, the fine fiber of the carpet pressed against her cheek. “Forgive me,” she whispered.

She spoke it for so many different reasons. But she spoke it first to herself. She had to in order to live. If she didn’t let go of what she was holding against her own heart, she could never move forward. Then she spoke it to Maddie, as she had done many times before. But she determined this would be the last time. It had to end somewhere, and she was choosing for it to end here.
I’m so sorry, baby. Please forgive me.

Finally she spoke it to heaven. She was coming to realize that heaven hadn’t been holding her prisoner. Yes, God had allowed her to be crushed beneath a weight of grief she didn’t feel anyone should have to carry, but it was she who had imprisoned her own soul. With self-pity? Yes, she knew it. It was self-pity that had held her in a prison of grief.

Not that the pain wasn’t real. But somehow it had welded itself to resentment over the fact that real life didn’t match her picture of it. She had assumed she deserved to have the life she wanted, and when that didn’t happen, she had wanted to give up. For that, she told heaven she was sorry.

She lifted her head slightly and pulled the half-finished picture toward her. As she studied it, a soft seed of hope stirred, a thought that maybe, just maybe, an incomplete picture meant that there was something left for heaven to work with.

She couldn’t imagine what her new picture might be. In fact, just believing that there might
be
one would be the biggest step of faith she had ever taken. And in that deep place in her soul, where the black pit that had all but swallowed her whole still existed as a reminder of what she could choose, she made a decision.

She didn’t just take a step, though. Mackenzie London leaped.

Chapter 52

Eugenia kept her ear by the door of Maddie’s bedroom while Mackenzie tucked in the three sisters. Dimples had told her earlier that Mackenzie had taken the girls to her bathroom. At least Dimples thought it was Mackenzie. “If it wasn’t,” she’d said, “there was another real attractive brunette rummaging around here, and you might want to call the police.”

Berlyn assured Eugenia it was Mackenzie and told Dimples it was time for a new hearing aid to go with her one good eye. So the three of them had gone to check on Sandra in the laundry room. They found her stripped to her bra and granny panties and waiting on her own clothes to dry because she was certain they had all been contaminated. She swore she’d seen lice.

Eugenia confirmed her suspicion. She was pretty sure there were no lice, but at this point Sandra had driven her crazy, so saying there were lice brought satisfaction and some entertainment. The three friends watched Sandra strip off her remaining clothes quicker than they would have come off on her wedding night if God actually had a man on earth who could tolerate her. Eugenia had to fetch some of Mackenzie’s sweats just so they wouldn’t have to look at her.

Everybody had finally gotten settled for the night. Jessica had even come up with a big basket of bath oils and lotions and some nice pajamas to help Grace feel pampered and comfortable in the guest room. Eugenia had to admit that Jessica had more to her than anyone suspected. Not just starchy organization, but practical caring—and there was a lot to be said for practical caring.

When Mackenzie went into Maddie’s room, Eugenia had felt a thud of panic collide with her airway. She wasn’t sure how the events of the day would actually reveal themselves in Mackenzie’s emotions. And she certainly hadn’t planned on telling her about the flower. But Mackenzie had asked. Eugenia might have her faults, but she’d never believed in protecting people from the truth.

Life was what it was, and this was Mackenzie’s life. So she had told her. Besides, she was still trying out this whole surrender thing too.

She stood there in the hallway for a long time, praying for Mackenzie. And when she finally heard stifled cries coming from inside, she’d felt some of her panic subside. Other than the day at the mall, Mackenzie had shown virtually no emotion since the miscarriage. As far as Eugenia was concerned, real crying was almost always a good thing. And though it took everything she had not to rush in there and wrap her arms around her baby girl and let her know everything would be okay, she knew Mackenzie needed this grief more than she needed her mama. She needed to feel the pain of everything she had lost.

Besides, truth be told, this day had worked out much better when Eugenia had surrendered it. Not that she’d ever in a million years tell Jeremiah he’d been right.

It was a while before she heard Mackenzie’s sobs subside. And then there was nothing. Eugenia cracked open the bedroom door and saw light peeking out from beneath the tightly shut closet door.

She knew what the loss of Maddie had done to her own heart. But as a mother she had no idea what it was like to bury your child—let alone lose five more. As much as she tried, she couldn’t fully understand Mackenzie’s pain. All she did know was her deep pain at seeing her daughter hurt.

That was when a whisper came to the deepest place of her heart.
Mine too.
And then she realized. She knew that all this time there was a Father in heaven who had only one desire as well—to heal his children’s hurt.