True Places(66)
Whether or not Iris’s father appeared, whether or not he wanted his daughter, Suzanne vowed to do the right thing by Iris, to protect what was pristine and free in her. It wasn’t the same as parenting her, at least not by any standard Suzanne was aware of, but she would do her best. For far too long she had been floating along in a sea of compromise, dammed up by walls of fear. If Iris could maintain her integrity in the face of overwhelming odds, so could she.
Suzanne rose from the couch and went to see Iris, who was still at work. The girl needed a break; they both did. She gently placed a hand on Iris’s shoulder.
“Iris?”
The girl looked up from her notebook. “Yes?”
“Are you up for an hour’s drive?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s go to a botanical garden.”
Iris considered. “Aren’t all gardens botanical?”
Suzanne laughed. “Bring a jacket; looks like rain.”
The drive was long and flat. The closer they got to Richmond, the less Iris liked what she saw out the window. So many roads, buildings, huge trucks. It was quiet inside the car, but imagining the noise and the smells made her anxious. She was about to ask Suzanne if they could turn around and go home when they drove through an area that was just houses with trees scattered in between. Soon it was green all around. Suzanne turned left through a gate.
“The Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. I haven’t been here for ages, not since a field trip with Reid’s eighth-grade class.”
A gigantic building, like a palace made of ice, loomed ahead.
“That’s the conservatory. We can go there first.”
Suzanne parked and led Iris into the Palm House at the entrance of the conservatory. Iris had read about cycads and palms in Suzanne’s books, but that wasn’t the same as standing beside them, examining their texture, experiencing their solemn pride. They moved through to another room, where the air was as thick and moist as on a mid-August day. Suzanne showed Iris the orchid collection and explained about the different types: the showy cattleyas with their ruffles and frills; the oncidiums with their dainty little flowers, looking just like their nickname, “dancing ladies”; and the dendrobiums and phalaenopsis, with a dozen or more intricately painted blossoms on each graceful arching stem, almost too beautiful to look at. Iris peppered Suzanne with questions about how the orchids grew and lived.
Suzanne pointed to a pair of blooms, each as large as her palm. The petals were the color of lilacs, with throats of deeper purple and yellow. “This one, a cattleya, has an amazing scent, but only at night because it’s pollinated by moths.”
Iris imagined sleeping outside with orchids hanging from the trees above, waiting for the nighttime scent and the arrival of the moths, wings silver and ghostly in moonlight. If only she could enter the world of her imagining, or her past.
They moved on to the dry part of the conservatory, where cacti and other desert plants grew. Iris knew a little about them from her books and a National Geographic show about the Sonoran Desert, but she found the idea of life with little water disturbing. If she had to live without a stream or a river, she, too, would become hard and thorny. She followed Suzanne out of the conservatory and toward the Woodland Walk. On the way, they passed through gardens that reminded Iris of those planted around houses: neat groups of plants and trees arranged around paths, benches, fountains, and small ponds. Iris saw signs for the Healing Garden and asked to see it. One part was for meditation, although no one was sitting still the way Reid had demonstrated for her. The other part of the Healing Garden was a circle of plants around a grassy area. In the middle was a huge mortar and pestle on a stand.
“My mother used one like that.” Her voice caught in her throat. To regain her control, she concentrated on a sign by a stocky tree whose gray bark was covered with knobby thorns.
Suzanne came close to her; their shoulders touched. “Prickly ash.”
“Good name.”
“Says its bark can be used to treat toothache.”
Iris had a bad toothache when she was about seven, before Daddy left. Mama had mixed up something for it, boiled leaves and roots for a tea, put a compress on her cheek. Mama hadn’t minded when Iris clung to the pink bear with the rainbow tummy patch Daddy had given her, even though Mama had a fight with him about it. Iris didn’t understand most of what they said except that Mama thought the bear was bad. Daddy said it was just a stuffed bear, and it seemed to Iris he was right because she wanted very badly to keep it. Every time Daddy brought things home for Iris and Ash that Mama said didn’t belong, they had a fight, but he kept doing it anyway.
Iris had no idea what herbs and roots Mama had used to ease her toothache, and it saddened her. It was like forgetting Mama’s face, or the smell of her hair. She could only just recall those, and now she doubted herself. She had a hole in her mind where Mama used to be, and another for Daddy. And they used to be just about everywhere.
Lost in her thoughts, Iris walked the rest of the circle, not bothering to look at the plants. Suzanne followed her without a word.
They crossed two bridges and reached Woodland Walk. All the right trees and bushes and flowers were there—not just the Virginia ones that Iris recognized, but also ones that came from other similar places. But Woodland Walk had no wildness in it. Nothing struggled for life or was joyful in living it. It was like a TV show of the woods. Nothing surprising would ever happen there the way it did in real woods, all the time, if you knew how to watch. Ash would not show his face in Woodland Walk.