The Peculiar Miracles of Antoinette Martin

by Stephanie Knipper

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In the spirit of Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers--and with a touch of the magical--The Peculiar Miracles of Antoinette Martin is a spellbinding debut about a wondrously gifted child and the family that she helps to heal.  

Sisters Rose and Lily Martin were inseparable when growing up on their family’s Kentucky flower farm yet became distant as adults when Lily found herself unable to deal with the demands of Rose’s unusual daughter. But when Rose becomes ill, Lily is forced to return to the farm and to confront the fears that had driven her away.

Rose’s daughter, ten-year-old Antoinette, has a form of autism that requires constant care and attention. She has never spoken a word, but she has a powerful gift that others would give anything to harness--she can heal with her touch. She brings wilted flowers back to life, makes a neighbor’s tremors disappear, and even changes the course of nature on the flower farm.

Antoinette’s gift, though, comes at a price, since each healing puts her own life in jeopardy. As Rose--the center of her daughter’s life--struggles with her own failing health and Lily confronts her anguished past, the sisters, and the men who love them, come to realize the sacrifices that must be made to keep this very special child safe.

Written with great heart and a deep understanding of what it feels like to be different, The Peculiar Miracles of Antoinette Martin is a novel about what it means to be family and about the lengths to which people will go to protect the ones they love.

“This is the kind of book that invites you home, sits you down at the kitchen table, and feeds you something delicious and homemade. You will want to stay in this world where new relationships bloom out of broken ones, sisters find one another again, and miracles really do occur.” —Tiffany Baker

Release date: August 2, 2016

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

ROSE’S JOURNAL

April 2013



MY DAUGHTER, ANTOINETTE, whispers in her sleep. Real words. Tonight when I hear her voice, I rush upstairs, but I’m too late. She is quiet. And the sounds could have been anything. The wind. An owl. Crickets.

She lies on her side. Her right hand stretches toward the doorway, toward me, as if even in sleep I’m the sun she rotates around.

I reach for her too. But I don’t enter her room.

When she sleeps, I can pretend I don’t notice her eyes, a finger’s breadth too far apart. Her arms are relaxed, not held tight against her shoulders as they are much of the day. Her white-blonde hair, still newborn fine, fans out behind her like a dandelion puff, or as if she were running and the wind caught it.

The window is open, and a breeze flutters the sheer white curtains. It’s the first week of April, but already the air is so warm the tulips are sprouting. Kentucky is like that. Unpredictable. Tonight is dark, but here in the country, street lights don’t obscure the stars.

I close my eyes and summon a dream. In it, Antoinette sprints through the farm, fingers brushing the daffodils and tulips. Her legs are strong, pounding the dirt like any other ten-year-old girl. But this image ignores the child she is. In a more accurate vision I see her walking toward me, marionette-like, arms cocked, hands curled toward her chest, knees bending and popping with each step.

I move into the past, pulling up memories of us sleeping curled into each other as if still sharing the same body. Swaying in time to field sparrow songs. Dancing under a shower of lavender petals in the drying barn.

She shifts, turning toward the window. Outside I envision the fields bursting with white tulip buds. It’s too early for them, but stranger things have happened.

My sister, Lily, used to be fascinated by the Victorian language of flowers, memorizing the meanings for each plant we grew on the farm. It was a game to us. She scattered bouquets around the house, and I tried to guess her message. Daffodils represented new beginnings. Coneflowers were for strength and health.

And white tulips were for forgiveness and remembrance.

My heart stutters, and a familiar pressure builds in my chest. I breathe deeply, counting each beat. When my body calms, I look at my daughter.

A strand of hair sticks to her cheek. I walk into the room to free it, but she turns away from me and curls into a ball. I stop, unwilling to wake her, letting her linger a bit longer in dreams, safe in a place where I can’t hurt her.

That will come soon enough.

Chapter One



Antoinette Martin stood in the kitchen, staring at the alarm above the back door. The red light was not on, which meant it wouldn’t scream and wake her mother if she opened the door. She could walk in the garden.

Pops of joy burst through her body. She bounced on her toes, bare feet slapping against the old oak floor. The smooth wood felt like creek water in July. A happy thought. She bounced again.

When her body calmed, she reached for the doorknob, then hesitated. She and her mother lived on a commercial flower farm in Redbud, Kentucky. Though most of their fifty acres were cleared and given over to flower fields, thick woods rimmed the back edge of their property. Antoinette was not supposed to go outside alone. It was easy to get hurt on a farm.

She mashed her nose against the cool glass of the kitchen door window. Outside, she didn’t need music or art to block the white noise that engulfed her. The groan of the refrigerator; the swish, swish of the washer; the hum of the air conditioner. Outside, the land sang, and that was better than the Mozart and Handel compositions their neighbor Seth Hastings played on his violin.

At night, Antoinette would sit on the back porch of their farmhouse listening while Seth played the violin, or she would page through her mother’s art books. She could name Bochmann’s Lark Ascending from the first trill of the violin. She could close her eyes and re-create the crooked grin of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or the slope of the hill in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, brushstroke by brushstroke in her mind.

Unusual for a ten-year-old, but then very little was usual for Antoinette.

The sunlight shining through the door was sharp. Tears filled her eyes, and she screwed them shut. She felt tied up inside, as if her muscles were too tight. The sun still glowed red behind her eyelids, but the hurt was gone and that helped her decide. She needed music to calm down.

With her mind emptied of everything else, she forced her arm outward until her fingertips brushed the flaked paint on the door. It felt sharp against her skin, and she almost recoiled. But when would the alarm be off again?

Summoning control, she flapped with one hand and pushed the door with the other.

The door opened with a sigh, and the light fell harder on her face. With her eyes closed she leaned into the sun, wishing it could draw her outside. Controlling her body was sometimes difficult, but that morning she moved like a ballerina, swiveling her hips and sliding through the door like a ribbon of silk.

On the porch she threw her arms open, ready to fly to the sun. Then she listened. The land sang to those who stood still long enough to hear it.

People had songs too, but Antoinette needed to touch them to hear their music. Sometimes she grabbed her mother’s hand, and the low, sweet sound of a pan flute filled her body. When that happened, Antoinette felt like she could do anything. Even speak.

Today the outside world sounded mournful, like the oboe’s part in Peter and the Wolf. Antoinette wiggled. She almost opened her eyes, but she thought better of it; if she did, she would be lost. Her brain would lock on to the blades of grass, and she would start counting. One, two, three . . . four hundred, four hundred one, four hundred two. The counting would trap her for hours.

She kept her eyes closed as she climbed down from the porch. A breeze snaked around her ankles, making her nightgown dance. She laughed a high-pitched giggle that bubbled up from her throat. If she raised her arms, she might be light enough to fly. She lifted her hands, then brought them down hard enough to clap her thighs.

The flagstone path would lead her to the flower fields, but today she wanted more than the feel of stone beneath her feet. She left the path and pushed her toes into the soil. The ground buzzed, a tingle of electricity that vibrated up her legs, calming her muscles so that on the way to the garden she didn’t bounce or flap, so that her legs didn’t fly out from under her.

She walked until her feet bumped against a ridge of soil that marked the start of the daffodil field. From her bedroom window she could see the bright yellow heads nodding in the sunlight, but out here she could feel them.

She squatted and pushed her hands into the loamy soil. It slid from her fingers, coating her nails and the creases of her small hands. She inhaled, filling her lungs with the scents of the garden: soil, compost, and new green grass.

With her hands in the dirt, the music was louder. A chorus of woodwinds flooded her body: clarinets, flutes, and bassoons. But the tempo was too slow and some of the notes were off. Sharp in one place, flat in another. Her heart pounded in her ears, and her arms tensed. She needed to flap, but she forced herself to stay still while a picture formed in her mind, a picture of a bulb bound by clay soil, and a plant weakened by root bores.

Antoinette hummed, increasing the tempo and correcting the notes. When everything was right, she stopped. Her body was calm now, but she slumped to the ground, exhausted. Bits of mulch pricked her cheek, but she didn’t move. She breathed deep, listening to the robins calling from the nearby woods.

“Antoinette?”

At first she didn’t hear her name; she was lost in the sensations around her. Then a rough hand fell against her neck. The touch sent a jolt through her body, and she fell back, her eyes wide with fear.

“Sorry. Sorry,” a man said as he snatched his hand away.

She tried to sit up, but her muscles weren’t working yet.

“Antoinette.” The man was calm. “Antoinette. What’s wrong? It’s Seth. Look at me. Are you okay?”

He touched her cheek and turned her head toward him. When she leaned into his calloused hand, her heart stopped racing and she relaxed. Seth was as much a constant in her life as her mother. Like her, he understood that speaking wasn’t the only way to communicate.

He crouched in front of her, the tips of his long dark hair tickling her cheek. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?” he asked.

Her arm felt heavy, but she pointed over his shoulder, back home where the blue clapboard farmhouse rose beyond the sea of daffodils.

“Home?” he asked. “You want to go home?”

She pointed and opened her mouth. Home. That’s what she wanted to say. The word would be whisper light if she could get it out.

Seth slid his arms under her body. She picked a daffodil before he lifted her. The commercial fields weren’t for home flower picking, but the yellow daffodil would make her mother happy.

Seth cradled her as he walked back to the house, and she melted into him. He smelled like green grass and tobacco. Through his thin T-shirt, she felt the steady thump of his heart, which was its own form of music.

THE KITCHEN DOOR popped open with a thud. Antoinette raised her head from Seth’s arms and saw that the room was empty. Her mother was probably still asleep.

“Rose?” Seth called. There was no answer. The air inside the house was heavy and quiet. He started down the long hallway that led to the bedrooms.

Through an open door, Antoinette saw her mother, sitting in one of the two blue chairs by the window overlooking the back field, her journal open on her lap. She turned when Seth knocked on the doorframe.

Focusing on faces was difficult for Antoinette; they changed every second, tiny muscles shifting with each smile or frown. One person could wear hundreds of faces. But Antoinette forced herself to study her mother’s face. Her lips were rimmed with blue, and deep circles sat under her eyes. Her short blonde hair stuck out in all directions and shadows highlighted her gaunt face.

“I found her outside in the daffodil field,” Seth said.

Her mother closed the journal and stood. “She’s been wanting to go outside, but I’ve been so tired.” She leaned over Antoinette who was still snug in Seth’s arms. “You always were persistent.”

Antoinette held out the daffodil.

Her mother smiled when she took it. “Daffodils symbolize new beginnings,” she said to Seth. “From Lily’s flower book. I can’t believe I remember.”

Antoinette felt Seth flinch. “Hard to forget.” His rough voice was tinged with something that sounded like regret. “She carried that book everywhere.”

Antoinette was sandwiched between the two of them. Content. The word floated up from somewhere inside her. Her entire body felt warm. She stretched toward her mother, wanting to hear her song.

Her mother drew back. “You need to sleep,” she said, her lips forming a sad smile.

“She was lying among the daffodils,” Seth said. “Last night, I noticed some of them had browned around the edges. I planned to harvest them today, but then this morning they were fresh when I got there. Antoinette was half asleep in the middle of them. She didn’t hear me until I was right next to her.” He spoke slowly and his voice was heavy with meaning, but Antoinette was too tired to figure out what he was trying to say.

He sat in one of the chairs and shifted Antoinette so that his arm was behind the crook in her neck.

“She’s so tiny,” her mother said as she sat across from Seth. “It still surprises me how heavy she gets after a while.”

Seth laughed. Antoinette liked the sound. She closed her eyes and let the noise wash over her. She was too tired to flap her hands, but she twitched her fingers against Seth’s arm. Happy.

She usually was happy around Seth. He could be abrupt with others, but he was always kind to Antoinette and her mother.

Once, some boys at the farmers’ market had giggled at Antoinette as she stretched up on her toes and walked in circles under the Eden Farms tent. When Seth heard them, he stopped unloading flats of impatiens, walked over to Antoinette, and put a hand on her shoulder. In his presence, the tension left her body, allowing her to stop walking and stand still.

Seth didn’t say a word. He just glared at the boys until they started fidgeting. Then one by one, they apologized.

“They’re kids,” he said after they scattered. “They don’t know what they’re doing, but it hurts anyway.”

He had been right. It did hurt. Every time someone stared at Antoinette a little too long or crossed the street to avoid her, a small, bruised feeling bloomed in her chest.

Knowing that Seth, along with her mother, understood how she felt eased the hurt a little.

Thinking of her mother, Antoinette cracked her eyes open, and watched the slow rise and fall of her mother’s chest. Despite her fatigue, she struggled toward her mother. If she could hold her mother’s hand, everything would be all right. She imagined her mother’s song—the notes of a pan flute, smooth and round as river rocks.

“Not now, Antoinette,” her mother said.

Antoinette didn’t stop trying. As she struggled to sit up, she stared at her mother’s tapered fingers. At the green-and-purple bruise on the back of her mother’s hand. It was from the IV she had in the emergency room last week.

Seth wrapped her tight in his arms and leaned back. Now she was even farther from her mother. “Your mom needs some rest.”

Antoinette shook her head hard, making her hair lash against her cheek. Mommy! If she could say the word, she was sure her mother would respond.

“She can’t do this much longer,” her mother said, her voice cracking. “And I . . . well, it’s not like I’m going to get better.”

Seth sighed. After several long seconds he said, “It’s time to call Lily. You can’t keep avoiding her, Rose.”

Antoinette strained against his arms, but he was too strong. The exhaustion that stole through her body trapped her, making her eyes shut as if tiny weights were attached to her eyelashes. She was tired. So tired.

“I don’t know,” her mother said. She sounded small and scared. “It’s been six years. Antoinette was too much for Lily as a four-year-old. It’s not like things have improved. And the way I left things with Lily . . . what if she won’t come?”

Antoinette fought to open her eyes but couldn’t. Her body grew heavier and heavier.

She heard Seth: “The three of us aren’t kids anymore, Rose. Lily’s your sister. The girl I know will come if you ask.”

Antoinette couldn’t fight it any longer. She sank into Seth’s arms as sleep overtook her.

Chapter Two



Lily Martin lived a cautious life. She looked to numbers. Math was consistent: two plus two equaled four. Always. There was no way to make it something else. Rearrange the numbers, write the problem horizontally or vertically, and the answer was always the same. Four. Equations had solutions, and their predictability made her feel calm, settled.

Except today.

She had spent most of the day reformatting death tables for the life insurance company she worked for. They weren’t really called death tables. Life expectancy table was the correct term, but what else did you call a collection of data that predicted when someone would die?

Lily headed the actuary department, and it was her responsibility to know when someone was likely to die. A healthy, male, nonsmoker could expect to live 76.2 years, whereas a smoker’s life expectancy was reduced by 13.2 years. A thirty-two-year-old woman with congestive heart failure—well, she was uninsurable.

The death tables fed the rating engine that supplied price quotes for insurance policies. Over the weekend, the rates for smokers and nonsmokers had been switched until someone in the IT department realized that a worm had slipped through their firewall and flipped the data.

Lily came in to work that Monday and spent the morning fielding calls from the CEO and the head of IT. At noon, after death had been restored to its rightful position in the insurance world, she grabbed her laptop and left, planning to finish working from home.

Upon arriving there, she opened the door to her study and set her computer on the desk. Sunlight filtered through the two large windows. While she waited for the laptop to boot up, she opened the windows. A yellow finch sang in the redbud tree outside. From her childhood study of the Victorian language of flowers, she knew redbuds symbolized new life, perfect for a tree that bloomed in spring.

She stared out the window, and for just a moment she was not in her house on the south side of the Ohio River; she was back at Eden Farms, in Redbud, Kentucky, where she grew up. April was her favorite time there. The land was waking, and the air tasted like hope.

Covington, where Lily now lived, was in northern Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio River. The land there was steep hills and deep valleys, not mountainous like Appalachia in eastern Kentucky but different enough from the town where she grew up that she often felt she had moved across country instead of only two hours north.

Redbud was in central Kentucky, just south of Lexington. The land there was draped in Kentucky bluegrass and rolled like soft ocean waves, much of it decorated with white-plank fences that surrounded the area’s sedate Thoroughbred farms. Nestled among them, Eden Farms was a burst of color. In summer, the fields behind their farmhouse were a crazy quilt of purple, pink, yellow, white, and red. For Lily, it was a wonderland, and she and her sister, Rose, used to pretend they were fairies, the fields their kingdom.

Outside her house a car honked, and Lily came back to the present. She pressed her fingers hard against the windowsill. Nothing good came of dwelling on lost things. She bit her lip as she turned from the window. Covington was nowhere near New York or Chicago in size, but it was a far cry from the country, where everyone lived acres apart. In Covington, if she stood in her side yard and stretched out her arms, she could touch her house with one hand and her neighbor’s with the other.

She lived in the city’s historic district, and her house was two hundred years old. The floors sloped in places and the yard was postage stamp size, but she had transformed the ramshackle place into a warm, inviting home. Here in the study, the walls were the color of sun-warmed soil, and three Kentucky landscapes hung above her desk. Her sister had painted them at age fifteen. The colors were too bright and the proportions were off, but Lily liked their slight awkwardness. It reminded her of Rose at that age, lanky but beautiful, child and adult at the same time.

A purple potted orchid and a small framed picture decorated Lily’s desk. In the photograph, Rose and Lily stood with their arms wrapped around each other, holding on as if they’d never let go. Their cheeks were pressed together and their hair—Rose’s light blonde and Lily’s deep brown—twirled over their shoulders. Seth Hastings had snapped the picture right before Rose left for college.

At the thought of Seth, Lily clenched her jaw and quickly looked away. Losing him shouldn’t hurt after all these years, but it did.

Focus on work, she thought. She sat in front of her laptop, and her stomach grumbled.

“If you’d let me take you to lunch like a normal person, you wouldn’t make such awful noises.” The voice startled her, sending her heart to her throat.

Her neighbor, Will Grayson, leaned against the doorframe. He slumped into the wall as if he couldn’t hold himself up, reminding Lily of how he had looked when he’d been taking morphine. Almost a year had passed since his last chemo treatment, but from his appearance today she guessed he still had some pills left.

Automatically, her mind went to the death tables. A thirty-four-year-old male in remission from lung cancer had a five-year life expectancy of 13.4 percent.

Thankfully, Will stood solidly among that 13.4 percent.

Several months ago, she had accompanied him to his oncologist’s office for a follow-up visit. The doctor smiled at them. “I don’t get to say this often enough,” he said. “Your CT scan is clear. We got it all.”

Lily thought she might slide to the floor in relief, but Will was nonplussed. He nodded once and stood. “Cancer’s got nothing on me,” he said. That’s what she liked about him—he made his total self-interest charming.

Now she looked up at him and smiled. “I thought you were finished with that stuff,” she said, referring to the powerful pain pills he had taken when he was ill.

His dark hair shot up in surprising directions and smile lines feathered out around his blue eyes. He was an emergency room doctor at St. Elizabeth Hospital. She knew that before his illness he’d had the habit of spending an hour each day in front of the mirror, even on his days off. She’d once asked why he dressed like a member of the Young Republicans club.

Postcancer Will still wore khakis and button-down shirts, but on his days off he didn’t tuck in his shirttails, and he no longer smoothed every hair into place. Sometimes Lily caught him taking deep breaths as if testing his lung capacity. When he finished, he’d close his eyes and smile, seemingly content in a way she’d never seen before.

He tugged his shirt cuffs over his still-thin wrists. “I’m not working, and it’s too good to waste. Want some?” He fished the prescription bottle from his pocket and tossed it to her.

She tried to catch it but missed. The bottle smacked into her nose. “No,” she said, leaning over to pick it up.

He shrugged as he took the bottle. “Suit yourself, but you’re missing out. How about lunch? I’m starving.”

She shook her head. “I have to work.”

“Aw, come on. What’s a guy got to do to impress you?”

They went through this routine at least once a week. Will wasn’t specifically interested in her; he was interested in anything female. Since she fell into that category, he occasionally slipped into Romeo mode with her until she reminded him that she wasn’t interested. Which was true. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes her heart sped when his dark hair flopped into his eyes. Then she forced herself to count the girls she had seen leaving his house that month. Six in March.

“When are you going back to work?” she asked.

A month ago, Will had taken a leave of absence. “To focus on the things in life that really matter,” he had said.

Now he crossed the room and spun her chair around till she faced him. Then he leaned down, putting his hands on the armrests. He was so close she felt his breath against her lips. “As soon as you agree to go out with me,” he said.

She saw flecks of lilac in his blue eyes and felt her cheeks flush. “Did you get the coffee grounds I left on your stoop?” she asked.

“Thanks. Worked wonders for the azaleas.” He pointed at her computer, which now sported the blue screen of death, warning her that a data loss was in process. “I think you’ve got a problem.”

“Shit!” She turned away and jabbed the power-down button then waited for the screen to black out. “What do you want, Will? The key’s for emergencies, not your daily drop in.” He flinched slightly, and she immediately wished she could take back her words.

“Ah, cut to the quick. You’re cruel, Lily Martin. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

She glanced at the picture on her desk t. . .