The Easter Lily

The doorbell always makes the dog bark, so he taps on the glass. His daughter is asleep in his arms in her pink furry coat that makes her look like a fat pink cat. Anna parts the curtain of the door to see who is knocking, though she knows already who it is. She frowns, then unlatches the lock and opens it. She stands behind the door as he enters. All her past happiness of opening her door for him, the anticipation of hearing him knock, seeing him outside of that parted curtain, has gone away. At some point over the past year, her love packed its bags and left and is nowhere to be found on her face or within her heart.

He carries their daughter to the living room where he lays her on the new sectional she always said she would buy someday. The old one, which they made love on too many times to remember, has been exiled to another room. He looks at it sadly in the dark room where it sits pushed against a wall-papered wall. He stands in the middle of the room frozen for a moment, lost in time, the way a ghost might haunting the place that haunts him. It has only been a little over a month. She stands by the door and opens it again as though to usher him out quickly, the way one might a fly they would rather not make the effort to swat.

“One more thing,” he says, to her obvious and instant displeasure.

He pulls from the porch a lily in a plastic pot with yellow-paper wrap. He picked the yellow because it was her favorite color. “For the girls,” he says. “And for you.”

She frowns, holding the cheap 6.99 flower that has yet to bloom with no enthusiasm at all. Its green stem is tall and thin with five green bulbs yet to bloom, dangling sickly from it. One of the leaves is torn and it is unclear if the flower will even make it to Easter, but it is a tradition. They’ve had one for five years.

“I don’t know why you do this,” she complains.

“I think you do.”

She shakes her head. She sits it on the table and pushes aside a yellow ceramic egg from her perfect Easter arrangement on the placemat. The flower in the cheap pot clearly has messed with her arrangement and is already a nuisance to her. He stands in the doorway and waits for her to tell him to leave, which she promptly does. She doesn’t say thank you for the flower and there is no joy in her eyes because of it. He didn’t expect the thank you, but hoped to see that look. With all the flowers he had ever given her in the past five years, that was always his greatest reward. What came before or after the thank you. The look in her eyes. That was love.

Her eyes are dead looking at him. To someone else, they are as he likes to remember them. A someone he doesn’t know, but who exists in the night of his thoughts and the dawn of her hope. Someone who she sees on occasions and with the kind of anticipation that she once saw him, maybe. He envies him, without a face or a name to know, without certainty of his existence, but with the dreadful feeling one with cancer has. That this invisible death exists. He wonders if this man feels so blessed that he is, to have both the love and the time of such a beautiful woman as his Anna. He must drop the pronoun, he tells himself. She is not his anymore, after all. But he is still very much hers.

“Does he make you happy?” he asks her in the doorway.

She scowls at him. “I am happy. What does it matter who I am with. But my happiness is no concern of yours. Nor is who I am with or what I do.”

“I wanted to leave Easter baskets for the girls on the porch.”

“No,” she snaps. “Don’t drive by my house and don’t come up here again other than to drop of our daughter.”

Alex nods. He can feel the tears coming again. They come something like Japanese Zeros might have come upon Pearl Harbor. And the ships and men of his defense of his heart are decimated once more. All over again. Sunk and shot up. He has had a hundred Pearl Harbors over the past month or so and there is nothing he can do about it. He was waiting for the atomic bomb to come.

He read somewhere that if he was to have any hopes of getting her back, as the article described in just 4000 words how to get any girl back stopping just short of offering a money-back guarantee, stressing any and saying in parentheses (no, your girl is not exempt), the way is through acting like you are happy and pretending not to care if they come back or if they don’t. Casual Indifference, it is called. Works every time. There were written lines to say and ways to act and haircuts to get and certain colognes to wear. So, he bought all the right stuff and practiced in his mind what he would say and do, but he could never follow through with it because it seemed so fake to him. It always seemed that she deserved better than indifference. And he didn’t want her to ever think that he could take her or leave her. It was never that way.

Anna recalls the cheating. The wonderful man she loved like no other before him became a nightmare, betraying her, and though he was good to her and her kids from a previous marriage, and they shared the kind of love she had always wanted, the other women came in intervals for a year or so before they finally washed away. Like random shotguns blasts over a span of time that left her confused, angry and disoriented.

They left him depressed for he and her were one and nothing he did to her wasn’t anything he didn’t do to himself. Neither could answer why it happened, and everything he said to her was just an excuse. He couldn’t apologize enough and though they spent several years more together, on the wings of that perfect love they both felt, the thought of what he had done festered inside of her head and decimated what she had for him. It was a long lingering illness that killed their love. Something like being gut-shot and bleeding to death in the woods.

They happened. The women. He couldn’t lie about it. He tried before to lie about it. To defuse and to explain it. To bury them. But he reached a point that he couldn’t lie to himself or to her anymore. “But why?” he asks himself still. There are no clear answers. A lack of self-love, a childhood of no love from his father, his father’s infidelities, his mother’s suicides. His mother had committed suicide a dozen times, but never fatally. The pills in the sink fell like teeth, her neck in his hand. Him screaming at her to stop. Razorblades stained crimson on the porcelain bathtub after the water had drained from it. The bandages were in the medicine cabinet next to the Vaseline. Apply direct pressure.

The one question he asked of her that she never answered, if you love me, mom, why do you try to kill yourself? She stared listlessly in the hospital room out a dark window as though she didn’t hear the question. Mom? he asks again. She looks back at him. Do you know where your dad is? she asks back, calmly. The medicine kicked in. She was in the storm of a nervous breakdown. She didn’t hear what he said. He goes back to standing on the porch of his ex-girlfriend’s house. The door is closed and the lock clicks goodnight.

His ex-girlfriend had asked him, if you love me, why did you do this? He looked out his own dark window of sorts that wasn't really there and he couldn’t answer her. His arms weren’t bandaged and his throat wasn’t sore from vomiting sleeping pills, but there must have been that same hazy look in his eyes. I don’t know, he said. I don’t know. I only know that I love you. That was not enough.

God came into his life in 2015, October 12, exactly. A cross on the back of a semi-truck he saw out of a bus window in traffic. A message board sign at a church that asked him, Will the road you are on lead you to home? And a Bob Marley song, seconds after he asked God for a sign. Three Little Birds. And though he thought at times, God came a little too late, another sign appeared, Trust God in his timing at all times, posted on Facebook immediately after his doubt. There have been no women since. Not even the desire that was never really a desire. It was only a need for destruction. To destroy himself. A negative coping mechanism he learned long ago as a boy with a finger down his mom's throat to make her vomit up death.

He leaves a small grocery sack on her porch of things she gave him over the years that were meaningful, that he thought to give back because he couldn’t look at them anymore. Pictures of them together, she with their beautiful daughter. Pictures that once lit his soul aglow. When he got to his apartment, he regretted giving those things back. There was nothing for him to look at anymore. And his soul glowed with the lackluster shine of a dull black rock. There was nothing left in him but vacancy. The intolerable vacancy of a hollowed-out heart.

The next night, when the shadows crept and the thoughts of losing her blackened his mind again, darker than ever before, he grabbed the garage door opener and made the long walk out. There was a hitch in the door which expressed reluctance, but it let him inside and it closed behind him gently and all the light in the world was left in the parking lot.

It is Easter Sunday, two days later. The lily has bloomed. Despite the plastic yellow-papered pot, it is beautiful. Three of five blooms bud and the girls have their Easter baskets their mom made them up the night before and left on the table on behalf of the bunny. She peaks outside to see if he left baskets. She expected he would, despite her warning. For his faults, he had an overwhelming and well-meaning desire to be kind to the girls. He was always loving, which was a contradiction to his deceitful acts. She respects that much about him. The love and open displays of affection. She thought there would be a basket for their daughter, at least, but the porch is bare. Maybe he plans to give it to her later.

She gets the girls ready for church and decides to take them to their church. The Methodist church on High Street that the kids call a castle. It is much less boring than her family church. She looks around for him, but he isn’t there. Surely, he wouldn’t miss church. Not on Easter. He got drunk last night and overslept, she figures. The pastor is surrounded by Easter lilies. He says that the tradition is that lilies sprang up where Christ’s tears fell as he was crucified, and that they commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and hope of life and love everlasting. Her girls smile, so beautiful in their Easter dresses.

She calls his phone afterwards from the parking lot. It goes straight to voicemail. She drives by his apartment to take his daughter to see him. His car isn’t there. They go home. The lily has bloomed more. All five blooms budded. Beautiful bright white lilies. She thinks of what the pastor said. Tears of Christ. The girls tear into their baskets and eat some of their candy and she makes lunch. The bag of stuff he left lays in the kitchen, tied at the top. She checks her phone. No messages. She puts it out of her mind until her daughter comes in the kitchen and asks about seeing her daddy today.

She gets a feeling in her stomach. An unsettling feeling that she cannot let go of. She calls his mom, but gets no answer. The day goes by slow and she goes to her sisters’ house for dinner. The boisterous voices of everyone drowns out her thoughts for a while. She stares at a carved ham that sits in the middle of an island, flanked by green beans, potatoes and dinner rolls. She doesn’t eat meat and it is a carcass. A metaphor for something she can't figure but that she feels.

She is smoking a cigarette on the porch when her phone rings. She is sure it is him to bother her about time with his daughter when she was already there once to give him time. He wasn't going to see her tonight, she is going to tell him. She gets annoyed and pulls it out to answer it. Shortly after, her phone drops on the porch just as their daughter presses her face to the window and laughs. Her nose squashed against the glass. She can see the lines of his face in hers. She can see him in her eyes.

His funeral was two days after. In the preceding days, she felt every emotion there was to feel, but mostly anger and sadness. The church pastor who baptized their daughter delivers the eulogy. There are pictures scattered about, mostly of them, or of Alex and his daughter. Their daughter sits on Anna’s lap and sleeps. There are dried tears in the corner of her tired eyes. How could you do this to her, she fumes without saying anything at all. Listening to the pastor talking about forgiveness and the hope of love eternal. Of all people, how could you do this to her? His mother sobs inconsolably.

Two nights before, when he sat in the car in the garage with the exhaust hose in, he tried not to think of his daughter. But when he did it was how could someone with a broken heart ever give a child the love she rightfully deserves. Death sat in the passenger seat in a black suit. Do it, Alex, he said. Your daughter will be better off. In a few years, she will not even know you. Whoever your ex is dating will become her daddy. There were no zeros swarming over his Pearl Harbor anymore. No tears. Just an ominous calm. Take a deep breath, Alex. For your daughter’s sake. Then death dropped the bomb and there was a flashpoint and a mushroom cloud.

The casket is laid to the earth. His daughter throws the first handful of dirt on it, not really knowing what it is she is doing. Understanding enough to know that her daddy is in the casket below and will be put in the ground for reasons she doesn’t yet understand. Sleep, someone said. Rest. Peace. No one says anything about suicides going to Hell. The girl doesn’t like having dirty hands so she asks for a napkin. Her mom takes her into her arms for fear she will fall into the hole and wipes her hands. She cries again and they go home.

Tears don’t last. Days, weeks, then they go away. Pain dulls. Hurt and sorrow washes from the soul over time. There is a framed stitching in their hallway that says Time Heals All Wounds. There are many more about laughter and love. Heartache passes like a storm. The dead are never lost to memory, but memories fade and all that there is left are the good ones. The bad never lasts.

That is what Alex wanted. He wanted Anna to forget the bad and to only remember the good, which she did. He knew so long as he was on this earth, she would never forget the bad. What anger and pain she had in her tormented heart over him was gone, and she only recalled how kind and sweet he was when they were alone together, or when he was with the girls. And she told their daughter about her daddy whenever she looked at the picture taped on her bedroom wall. He is smiling in the picture looking back at her.

Your daddy loved you to the moon and back, Anna says to her. The girl looks out the window to try to see the moon, but it is daylight. I can’t see the moon, momma. Tonight, you can see the moon. She doesn’t forget. After her bath, they sit on the front porch together and look at the moon and listen to the crickets.

Time passes. A month, two, three. The curious site of the Easter lily wasn’t noticed until summer. Around the Fourth of July. The flowers outside had all bloomed, all that they had planted together. The spring flowers had all died, except for that Easter lily. It sits on the middle of the table still, atop a different placemat and amid a different arrangement. There are no ceramic eggs or Easter bunnies around it anymore. All the Easter grass has been picked up from the cracks in the wood floor and the Easter candy was long gone. The lily, however, shows no sign of age and looks as healthy as the day it first bloomed. Five full blooms for five years.

A month later, she sits and looks at it. She looks it up online and the lifespan of the lily is two to four weeks after it blooms, they say. It has been six months. Twenty-five weeks, exactly. She begins to wonder. Things move in her that haven’t moved in a while.

At Christmas, it is still fully bloomed. It is perfect. “That thing is still alive?” her sister remarks at the family’s Christmas Eve party.

“Yes,” she smiles drinking a glass of wine. “It is.”

“When you moving on, sister?”

“I don’t know. When I’m ready, I guess.”

The following Easter, there it remains. Still in full bloom. She reunites it again with the ceramic egg and the usual Easter decorations. Still, it is perfect as the day it bloomed. Anna becomes obsessed with that lily. No one touches it, or dares to move it. It is a sign from God, obviously, such the anomaly as it is. She begins to write in a journal. Her thoughts. Memories. How he creeps in now and then, but invariably goes, she pines. She realizes why he gave up his life. It was selfless. And she forgave him for everything.

Their daughter grows up across the span of three years. She is in school and practicing math at the dining table. Doing homework. She is working on spelling words. Anna is beside her, quizzing her. She looks at her and the resemblance she bears to her father is remarkable. She remembers the first time they met and unfortunately the last. When she closed the door as he stood on the porch in the glow of the porch light. She gets lost in her daughter’s slate-blue eyes the way she was lost in his once. Then she looks at the lily. Still, it remains just as the day it bloomed. The centerpiece of her table.

She planted it in a different pot. A nice ceramic red pot. It belonged in the home as much as anything else, and it was emblematic for the peace she felt in her life, the faith that served her well across the years. Three Easters passed and she had dated, but they didn’t work out. Eventually, they were all a disappointment in some way or another. There were a few that seemed well enough, but what good is well enough. She always had some dissatisfaction with the lack of love she felt in herself for them. And the more she gave herself, the more hollowed she felt. There was something missing.

She finds herself sitting at the dining table, drinking wine, staring at the lily, and writing in her journal. Something she never thought she would do. Letters to God. To Alex. She is turning into a pretty good writer, she feels, and thinks she might craft something into a story or two.

On the fourth Easter, the kids wake up and there are Easter baskets from the bunny on the table, as to be expected. When one of the girls goes outside, she finds three more baskets on the porch. “Who are these from?”

Anna looks them over. Maybe an ex-boyfriend. The older girls' dad. No. They sit the baskets inside and hurry to church. The same Methodist church in town on High Street that the girls no longer think of as a castle, at least, in as much as they express. Anna feels the glow of the church as she walks in. The cross on the wall, the pastor smiling, and folks greeting one another to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the hope of life and love everlasting. She feels happy and warm as though not alone anymore in her heart and very much at peace with her soul.

The man sits immediately behind her and the girls in the next pew. She smiles at him and he back at her. He is handsome and he has slate-blue eyes. There is something familiar in his eyes to her. There is warmness and peace in them. One of the girls drops a crayon on the ground and he picks it up for her. She keeps looking back over her shoulder and he is there, smiling at the pastor. She wants to say something to him, and is overcome with the desire to do so, but it is during service and she cannot be so impetuous. Then she remembers when she met Alex, how she simply said Hello, I am Anna in a dimly-lit bar. The rest was history. She has always been impetuous.

After the service the man leaves before she can say anything and she feels bad that he did and that she said nothing when she had the chance. A weird, empty feeling overcomes her. The girls ask for a donut and juice from the parlor so she takes them. Everyone smiles at them as they pass and the littlest one stops on the grate of the air vent that blows her dress up. She laughs and in the crinkle of her nose and eyes, Anna sees her dad and smiles.

He is in the parlor by the donuts. The man who sat behind her during service. He helps each of the girls get a donut, a napkin, and juice. Anna smiles at him warmly and he smiles back at her. There is a moment when neither say anything and in the silence, there is something that feels like fate.

“I feel like I know you.”

“But we’ve never met before,” he grins.

“I am Anna.”

“I am George.”

“Now we have met.”

George leans down and looks at the youngest girl who is drinking her juice and who had spilled some on her dress. He helps her clean it off with a napkin and he gazes into her eyes. She smiles at him peacefully and gives him a hug.

Anna marvels at their interaction, perplexed by how her daughter took so easy to the man for a moment, but then she is suddenly not perplexed at all. God moves in her soul and the familiarity of the man is too obvious to ignore any longer, or to deny. The supernatural existence of him, the impossibility, that she dares not speak of so not to jinx it, is confounding. She puts her hands over her mouth and begins to cry and George quickly stands up and takes her into his arms. He says softly into her ear, “Love never gives up. And it always finds a way. There is always a way, Anna. I knew it.”

Several men walk in carrying Easter lilies from the pulpit. They announce that they are giving them away to anyone who wants them. Anna says she already has one at home that cannot be replaced. Her hands are clammy as she invites George for lunch and he smiles and says, yes.

But she realizes in the car that in all the excitement of the parlor and the girls with their donuts, she hadn’t given him her number, her address, or directions. She sees his car pull away, but she isn’t concerned. She is set at ease in her faith that she will someday see him again. Love doesn’t give up, as he said. It finds a way.   

About an hour later, he taps on the glass of the door and she, again perplexed, parts the curtain and happily sees his face and answers it with an old familiar sense of anticipation that had been foreign to her for years. He walks into the house with great reverence and looks around. He smiles at the pictures on the wall. The dog that usually barks or jumps on new people, lays calmly at his feet.

“I am sorry I forgot to tell you,” she says, “but I am a vegetarian. I guess I should have said so when I invited you.”

“No,” he says, “I am, too. As was Christ.”

“How did you know where I lived?” she asks softly, her eyes wide.

“I brought the Easter baskets this morning, Anna,” he says.

“But we only met this afternoon. In church,” she replies weakly.

He looks at her and only smiles.

They eat lunch at the dining table, in the shadow of the lily, and Anna sees that on the corner of one of the flower pedals, it appears that they are finally starting to wilt. A bit of sadness in her is quickly replaced by understanding. “Their purpose had been fulfilled. Their unnatural life had been withdrawn and planted elsewhere, for the sake of love eternal,” she’d later write in her journal reflecting upon the day.

After lunch, George takes the girls to the backyard to fly the kites he put in their Easter baskets. The youngest daughter giggles as she looks up, and running with the string in hand, she trips. She laughs as she falls in the thick grass, her kite still blowing wildly in the wind. Her white wooly jacket making her look like a fat spring lamb. George runs with her and falls to the ground beside her. They both laugh wildly. She looks up into the sky and shouts that she can see the moon. It is silver. “Mommy, mommy, I can see the moon!”

Anna smiles from the back porch. “You can? That’s good, honey!”

The girl looks at George and says, “That is how much my daddy loves me. To the moon and back!”

And George smiles with tears in his eyes and says, back to her “I know. And he always has and he always will, beautiful.”