The Understory (9 page)

“Y
ou’re late.” Ivy Powers and her happy-face-on-a-stick greeted Story at her cubicle, spewing an onslaught of deadline reminders and a new suggestion for the
Grief and Loss
series. “You’re including flowers in the design, right? Sad people like flowers.”

“Sad people don’t like flowers, Boss . . .” Guzzling her to-go coffee with beer-bong dedication, Story shuffled past Ivy to her desk. She’d just kissed a handyman, and she had only five days to figure out how to find a magic treasure box that didn’t exist.

“Ms. Powers, please,” Ivy said.

“They just say they like flowers to be nice, Boss. Because all of us stupid ‘happy’ people don’t know what to say, and instead of just saying
sorry,
we bring them bushels of delphiniums, roses, tulips—all of which wither and die a slow death—so the recipient gets to witness the death of something they love. Again.” Story’s memories of the days following her father’s death overflowed not with one indelible image, but with one overwhelming, offensive smell—death in the form of decaying bouquets from well-wishers.

Ivy flipped her happy face over like a pancake, and pointed to the other side of the cardboard cutout—a sad face with a slash through it. Bad attitudes were not welcome in her division. “Just because you feel like this doesn’t mean you get to show it.” She flipped sadness on its back like the cheap whore she thought it was, and showed, once again, the preferred happy face. “Now,
this
is where you need to be.” She winked another scary reminder. “Happy equals profit.”

“Cha-ching,” Story said with an exaggerated smile as two-faced Ivy walked away. She hollered, “You’re really growing on me, Ivy!” but because her pun was unappreciated, she knew the only
real
way to get back at her boss was to use company time for personal business.

So when all was clear, she Googled “Martin Baxter” to find out more about the magic treasure box, and how she could create one for Cooper. The first entry linked her to a fan’s website about Martin Baxter, author of the popular children’s book
Once Upon A Moonflower
. The next entry was an article in
The Oregonian
: “LOCAL PROFESSOR LOSES WIFE AND DAUGHTER IN FATAL CRASH.”

Another entry led her to Arizona State University’s official web site, with a link to Martin Baxter’s background information on the Biology Faculty page. “Professor Baxter comes to us from Portland State,” began the paragraph, which went on about Martin Baxter’s area of expertise—tropical plants, specifically rainforest bromeliads. Learning he was “son of the late Abigail Baxter, world-renowned botanical illustrator” made Story curious if he had been close with
his
successful mother, and then she wondered if Mrs. Baxter’s flower drawings could comfort a mourning widow.

Story found several other websites devoted to
Once Upon A Moonflower
, but none gave the specific location of the magic treasure box, nor did they explain what was in it, so it was time to ask the writer himself. After a successful Google search, she dialed Martin P. Baxter on Esther Drive.

A man answered, at last, on the tenth ring. “Hello.” It was not a greeting—more like a warning not to bother him.

“Hello. Hi.” Story fumbled, not sure where to start. “Is this Martin Baxter? Author of
Once Upon A Moonflower
?”

The man didn’t answer. He took a couple of slow breaths, as if he was thinking. Story grew uncomfortable, so she began doodling a happy sunflower on her desk calendar, and when she could no longer stand the silence, she repeated, “Hello?”

The man remained silent, but Story heard him take a drink of something and clear his throat.

“Um, I’m sorry to bother you at home, sir,” said Story, “but I’m doing a story about your children’s book, and I have a couple of questions for you.”

He grunted something that almost sounded like “Mmm-kay.”

Story began scribbling the outline of a treasure box on the paper in front of her, hoping to fill the inside before the conversation’s end. “What was your inspiration for writing a magical story that takes place in the rainforest?”

The man let out an unforgiving and disappointed sigh. He’d probably been asked that one a million times. Strike one.

“Um, how did this project differ from your academic writing—”

“Oh, for Chrissakes,” he yelled into the phone, slurring his words a little. “It’s a goddamned fairy tale! That’s how it’s different—”

“Right, sir. Sorry.” Strike two. After a quick, desperate breath, she blurted, “I need to know what’s in the magic treasure box.”

After a long pause, Martin Baxter delivered four unexpected words. “It’s just a book,” he said. His voice had softened, though, and Story remembered the smile he wore in the picture with Hope on his shoulders.

“I know it’s just a book, sir, but the story seemed to come from someplace pure,” she said, “and I know it sounds crazy, but that treasure box is a source of hope for—”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” he interrupted. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lecture at ten o’clock, and I’m on my way out.”

Story grimaced. Of all people, she should have known that sometimes even the mere mention of hope is an ugly reminder that you don’t have any. “Of course, sir,” Story said. “Thank you for your time.” As she prepared to hang up, something urged her to stay on the line. After a pause, she said, “It’s a lovely story, Mr. Baxter.” In the brief moment between what she’d said, and what she said next, it truly was a beautiful moment between strangers.

But all beautiful things eventually die.

“I mean, I haven’t read it all, but from what I’ve heard, it’s clever, I mean, it’s well-written, at least the bits I heard when I was eavesdropping.” By now she was drowning. Being a colossal failure was Story’s strength, though, so she pressed on. “I mean, if I was eight, this book would totally make me want to visit the rainforest . . . or at least recycle my plastic.”

This is my favorite book in the world, though I have never read it.
Ugh.

And then Martin Baxter did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He laughed. “You’re a horrible interviewer.”

“I’m a horrible
everything
. Really. It’s like a sport for me.”

The silence was back.

“Well, thanks again,” Story spit out, “and good luck with—”

“It has whatever you need.”

Story was confused. “Pardon?”

He spoke in a deliberate and sincere tone. “The magic treasure box. Inside, it has whatever you need.”

But before Story could ask him exactly what he meant, the sound of a dial tone intruded. She was left staring at her doodle of an empty treasure box, the white space on the page a glaring reminder of what she didn’t have.

Strike three.

C
laire Payne and
sorrow,
the constant companion that had occupied her passenger’s seat for the last year, drove to work together, trying hard to keep
rage
from squeezing into the front seat. When she’d dropped Cooper off at school, a teacher had asked for, and received, an unexpected, impromptu parent-teacher conference regarding Cooper’s angry outbursts over emotionally neutral things like right angles and cytoplasm, and by the time she left, Claire was late, pissed off, and ashamed she wasn’t doing a better job with her son.

“What are you, fucking retarded?” she hollered out her window, honking loudly and swerving as a man, ambling through the crosswalk, kept her from speeding through the yellow light. When the light turned red and she screeched to a stop, the lumbering man approached her car window and reached for something in his back pocket. He was close enough for Claire to read his shirt, which said “Sunrise Manor”—the local mental hospital.

He might be an escaped axe murderer, she thought, there for a quick Tuesday-morning slaughter. She locked her door and whispered, “Oh, God, don’t kill me, don’t kill me. I can’t die—I’m all he has now.” She heard
Have a little faith
in her head, but ironically, it was her late husband David who had been good at seeing the best in people. In the past year, Claire had become accustomed to seeing the down side of things. She hadn’t always been that way. In fact, she used to be the woman who “had it all,” the perfect, together, working mother—the kind of woman nobody ever saw get flustered over hectic schedules or botched casseroles. Claire was never seen crying at the supermarket because something in the produce aisle made her sad, and she didn’t shed tears over sentimental movies designed to manipulate your emotions. And she never used to swear at all. But recently she found herself saying things like “fuckballs” and “cocksucker” when life proved too much to bear, which, lately, was about every eight minutes.

The man motioned Claire to open her window, and with eyes shut tight, she pushed the button. But as it turned out, the man
was
fucking retarded, or as they said in Claire’s line of work, “mentally handicapped with compromised social awareness and appropriateness.”

The man’s voice was lazy, inarticulate, and belabored, and at first, Claire thought he was deaf, but he managed to speak in a purposeful, almost commanding tone in spite of it. He handed Claire a perfect silky red rose, its petals still closed tightly, defying the scorching Phoenix sun, and he uttered only two words: “Rise above.”

What Claire didn’t know was that these were words he had been taught by his social worker, as part of Sunrise Manor’s new Rise Above community project, designed to alleviate the stereotypes and misconceptions of the mentally challenged. All she knew was that as soon as the man smiled at her, Claire Payne began to cry.

It began as a basic welling of the eyes, but escalated, in a matter of seconds, to a full-blown, sniveling sob-fest. This was the first flower she’d received since David’s death.

With the light still red, she opened her car door and attacked the man with a bear hug, all the while dampening his custom-made, silk-screened T-shirt with tears and a small trail of snot. When she squeezed him, she was surprised he felt different than he looked. There was more to him than she’d expected—three layers to be exact. Far underneath his visible exterior was a musky layer of sweat, which wasn’t gross, but the sweet smell of diligence and hard work. And next was a soft white undershirt, his contribution to acting like a grown-up. Over that, he wore the new shirt he was proud of, and Claire noticed a stubborn crease on his shoulder seam. He’d ironed it for good show.

As the light switched from red to green, he mumbled to Claire, “Like rose?”

“No. I hate flowers! Thank you so much!” Claire said in-between sniffles, running back to her car before oncoming traffic killed them both.

By the time Claire walked through her office door, she was a frantic heap of smudged mascara, topped with a healthy coating of humiliation.

“Good morning, Dr. Payne,” Jessica said, just as she did every morning, but this morning Claire started laughing right in the middle of the waiting room when she realized
she
of all people was there to provide emotional advice.

“Do I look stable to you?” Claire said to Jessica, her twenty-five-year-old receptionist. “Who in their right mind would look to me for stability? Someone totally crazy, that’s who.”

Jessica gave Claire a look that said,
Shut up, there’s a patient behind you
, so Claire shut up. After all, crazy people were her business. When Claire looked behind her, she saw the elderly Florence Dickerson, her nine o’clock appointment, having already waited for thirty minutes.

Claire gave her patient of five years a warm, “Good morning, Florence.”

Florence Dickerson stood in a pool of her own silver-gray hair, which had cascaded down from her eighty-two-year-old scalp and piled up so high around her, she made Crystal Gayle’s hair seem short. “Nothing good about it. Nothing good at all,” she said in a formal, cranky English accent. “And I must kindly remind you not to call me Florence, as it is not my name.”