Twenty

by Debra Landwehr Engle

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

At age fifty-five, Meg's life is too filled with loss for her to remember what magic feels like. All she has left is a yard brimming with plants that are wilting in the scorching Iowa summer—and a bone-deep feeling that she's through with living. Meg has something else too: a bottle of mysterious pills, given to her years ago by an empathetic doctor. He promised that they would offer her dying mother a quick, painless end in exactly twenty days. Though her mother never needed them, Meg does. But a strange thing happens after Meg swallows the little green pearls. Now that she's decided to leave this world, Meg is rediscovering the joy in it. She sheds everything she no longer needs—possessions, regrets, guilt—and reconnects with those she cares for. Finally confronting the depth of her grief, she's learning that love runs deeper still. But is it too late to choose to stay?

“A book to hold against your heart long after the last page is turned.” SUSAN WIGGS

“Twenty reminds us to live with our hearts wide open even when they've been broken, and how to love even when it hurts.” JULIE CANTRELL
“Written with such strong and heartfelt faith in the magic and power of never-ending love, it will renew your own.” JUDY REENE SINGER

Release date: January 28, 2020

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 240

Sample

Early this morning, long before the sun came up, I took the pill bottle out of the freezer, looked at the green drops of gelatin that shimmered like pearls, and stirred them into my raspberry yogurt. I watched them lose their color and melt down until they disappeared, the way marshmallows do when I make ambrosia.

It was 3:27 a.m. I checked the time on Daddy’s mantel clock, and I sent myself an e-mail on my phone to mark the moment. I was 80 percent certain taking the pearls was the right thing to do. It surprises me that I’d take such a step without knowing for sure. But how could I know?

Maybe the pearls lost their potency long ago. Maybe they were a hoax all along. Maybe they won’t work the way Dr. Edelman told me on the day when it sleeted and my umbrella turned inside out.

I licked the yogurt off my spoon and settled back into my chair, as though I’d just finished some of Mama’s pork chops, and stared out the kitchen window at the darkness, letting myself sink into the quiet. I didn’t feel any different. Of course, I didn’t know what to expect. Would my toes start to tingle? Would my lips turn blue? Would I suddenly clutch my chest and fall to the floor? Not likely. From what Dr. Edelman said, I may feel better than I’ve felt my whole life. Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be the way to go?

I propped my feet up on the red chair, knowing the first light of dawn would arrive in just a couple of hours, bringing relentless heat with it. Every day for weeks, there has been nothing but sun. It glares through the windows and lights up the room, making it a little too easy to see a thin layer of dust on Mama’s angel collection. It glances off the toaster and the stainless steel canisters.

In a normal Iowa summer, thunderstorms and tornadoes crop up like weeds. How many years would we have given anything for such a string of preposterously bright days? But this summer we’ve had nothing but outrageous heat and an endlessly cloudless sky. Every day I step out the screen door to check on the gardens, and every day I see that my herbs are browner around the edges. The leaves of my black-eyed Susans are sagging, and the grass looks like hay, snapping when I drag the hose across the yard to keep everything barely alive.

Day before yesterday, the temperature hit 106 degrees at four in the afternoon. While I watered the flowers for the fourth time that day, I listened to the spray drumming against the leaves of the coneflowers and hostas, and I had a familiar feeling. The plants weren’t responding anymore. They looked parched and exhausted, as if they’d given up. No matter what I do, I can’t revive them.

“Some years it’s like this,” I said to them. I looked around the yard at each one of them, just like when I volunteered in Rose’s class and tried to make eye contact with every student. “Some years it’s too much rain, other years it’s too little. I wish I could give you everything you need, but it’s out of my hands.”

I wrapped the hose around its holder on the side of the house, left my dusty garden shoes at the kitchen door, and came inside to wash my face with cool water. Then I stretched out in bed, not even bothering to turn down Mama’s quilt, and slept until the sun came up yesterday morning.

I come from a long line of flowers. Mama’s name was Lillian, and her mother was Camellia, a rather exotic name for a woman on the prairie. Along with naming me Marguerite after her favorite daisy, Mama gave me three things: Red hair that hasn’t faded. A love of nature. And a belief that somewhere between heaven and earth there is magic.

I still remember when I was five years old and we were out in the backyard. Mama hung Daddy’s T-shirts on the clothesline, and Holly played in the playhouse that Daddy built for us. He’d painted it white with green shutters, just like the house in our favorite Little Golden Book.

I helped Mama, handing her the heavy, damp shirts from the laundry basket. Suddenly she stopped, holding a clothespin in midair, and said to me, “They’re here, Meg. Can you feel them all around you?”

I was wearing my favorite blue gingham pinafore with the kitten appliqué and a white bow in my hair because I’d just gotten off the bus, home from kindergarten. I remember nodding my head and closing my eyes. I felt a brush of air against my cheek and ankles, then a beam of light warming the right side of my face. But I could also see and smell them, something that had never happened before. They were like swirls of perfumed air wrapping themselves around me.

“I see them,” I said. I remember the startled look on Mama’s face.

“What do they look like?” she asked me.

“They’re pink and yellow and blue and green,” I said. I felt peaceful. Whatever I saw felt familiar to me, like a memory.

“They’re tickling me,” I said, and Mama laughed, that tinkly chime of a laugh she had before everything changed.

“Don’t ever forget them,” Mama said. “They’re always with you.”

I nodded my head, then put my hands in the air and turned in a circle. “I’ll remember,” I said. I know Mama hoped I would.

I felt those swirls and breaths and tickles, wearing them like a shawl two months later when, on a blustery November day, we buried Daddy after the train wreck. Mama wore a pillbox hat like the President’s wife and a tailored black suit with a black wool coat that had a fur collar. Holly was too young to remember, but I never forgot it. How dreary the day felt, how I’d never seen Mama cry like that, how gray and brown and black everything seemed.

Then, in the middle of the service by that awful hole in the ground, when the minister recited the 23rd Psalm, I saw the bright colors swirling and dancing in front of me. I reached out to touch them and smiled, and Mama didn’t try to stop me because she knew what I was seeing and wished she could see them, too.

By the time I was seven, though, I no longer saw the colors or felt the whispers on my cheek. I felt lonelier somehow, but I didn’t know why, so I busied myself teaching Holly how to dress Barbie in her emerald-green ball gown with the taffeta skirt, and how to brush her blond hair so it would shine when Ken picked her up for their date.

“How handsome you look,” I said to Ken one day, using my best high-pitched Barbie voice. “You’ll make a very good dad.”

Not until years later, when Joe and I had Rose, did I realize what a big hole Daddy’s death left in our lives.

Mama died five years ago today. Holly called before I left for work, which was early in Seattle.

“Hey, sis,” she said. “Just thought I’d catch you before you left for the day.” It was good to hear her voice, but I knew she was calling to check on me, and I felt tears come immediately. I didn’t know I was that fragile.

“Good timing,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I’m just finishing my coffee. How are you doing this morning?”

“Not bad,” she said. “The kids are still in bed. They don’t go back to school for a couple of weeks, so they’re sleeping in while they can. And Phil went out for an early run. I was just getting myself some breakfast and thought I’d say hi. I know this day is hard for you.”

“For you, too.” I gazed out the window at the shed and the hills behind the house and tried to focus on the present.

“Sure, but my life didn’t change like yours did when Mama died. I don’t know what she’d have done without you.”

“Yeah, I do miss her,” I said, clenching the edge of the kitchen counter and willing myself not to cry. Five years. When would I ever move on?

“I’m sure you do,” Holly said. “She was something, wasn’t she?”

I paused, swallowed, and tried to keep my voice from breaking. Holly wouldn’t have minded, but I’m tired of being pitiful. “No question,” I said, slipping on my shoes to distract myself. “I don’t know how she kept everything going after Daddy died. She never let on how much she struggled. After all that courage, she deserved a better final few years.”

“I don’t know,” Holly said. “You made those years the best they could be. I hope you know how much I appreciate that, Meg. You gave up a lot for her.”

I paced the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, sat down at the table, and stood up again—anything to keep my voice from cracking on the phone. “We needed each other,” I said. “I think she helped me more than I helped her.” I could feel myself starting to break.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’d better get going. I need to help Nancy open the shop for the day.”

“Sure,” Holly said. “Say, if you go to the cemetery today, would you mind taking some flowers for me? I’ll send you some money for them.”

“No problem,” I said. I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket to wipe my nose. One of Mama’s old handkerchiefs. The one with daisies on it. “And don’t worry about the money.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll send you a check anyway. Know that I’m thinking about you.”

“You too,” I said. “Give my love to Phil and the kids.”

We said good-bye. Then I sat down, put my head on the table, and wept.

Nancy let me off early again today since business at the store has been so slow. With this drought, no one is buying anything for their yard, and I’ve adopted as many of the plants as I can. I feel bad for them, like the stray dogs that get left behind at the shelter while their kennel-mates go to good families.

When I brought home several flats of flowers earlier in the summer, I planted them in special places in my beds and gave them lots of fertilizer, but the heat started soon after, before they had time to get established. Every day I’ve fought to keep their leaves from curling and their tips from drooping.

Even the ones I planted for Rose and Mama are suffering. Nancy helped me pick out the most beautiful shade plants—bleeding heart and hosta and astilbe and Japanese painted fern—and I planted them under the protection of the pergola. But even the shade isn’t sheltering them this year, now that all their reserves are gone.

When I came home from the shop and the cemetery, I started to sweat just getting from the car to the screen door. I pushed the hair out of my eyes, filled the bowl on the porch with water for the gray barn cat and her kittens, then changed into shorts and a T-shirt and sat in the cool of the kitchen for a minute before going out to water the flowers again.

Some of the plants are making a feeble attempt to bloom, but they need all the energy they can muster just to soak up the water from the hose and try to stay upright. The truth is, there’s no substitute for rain, and these rescued plants haven’t had a drop of it since I brought them home.

It’s like the last day of Mama’s life. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get her enough pain medicine. Now I can’t give the flowers the water they need. It’s never enough. They’re trying to keep up, but I can’t restore their vitality, just like I couldn’t restore Mama’s. Or Rose’s.

Every day I’ve half expected Nancy to droop from the strain herself, but she doesn’t. She puts up her hair in a long, shiny brown ponytail and wears the green polo shirt with NANCY’S FLOWERS on the pocket, and she always makes the best of it.

“No customers, no sales—it means I only have to balance the cash register once a day,” she told me last week. I remember having that kind of attitude. Cheerfully forging on, believing that challenges are just temporary and good times will return.

I’ve tried to stay busy at the shop, dusting the watering cans and rain gauges, rearranging the bird feeders, straightening the bags of mulch and fertilizer. It has given me plenty of time to think, and my thoughts always turn in the same direction:

I think I’m done.

I’ve tried to journal about those words before, but they never would come out on paper. But now I’m ready to speak them out loud, at least to myself. If I have twenty days to make sense of my life, this is a good place to start.

I think I’m done. I’ve heard those words over and over, floating up from somewhere inside me like a butterfly. When I first started hearing them a few weeks ago, I sat down and asked myself, “What am I done with? Do I want a different job? A new house? Am I done worrying about when the drought will end?”

The answer was always no.

Then I started feeling tired. I know this is how Mama felt toward the end of her life. “I’m weary,” she’d say to me. I tended to her with the same care as she’d always given Holly and me. Mama’s tinkly laugh was gone, but we still told jokes and stories.

We’d been together for years, ever since Joe left and Mama started forgetting things. Up until then, she’d always had more energy than I did, so I could tell when her health started failing. She slept more, and sometimes she said she was so tired she could hardly move.

Lately I know how she must have felt. I find myself being forgetful, too. I’ll pay for my groceries at Ted’s Market but accidentally leave a bag behind. Or I’ll get home and neglect to take the bags out of the car. I threw out a dozen eggs after they’d spent a sweltering afternoon and entire night in the trunk.

“Menopause,” Holly says. “You’ll grow out of it.” But I’m not sure. The last thing this world needs is another old lady with Alzheimer’s and no children to take care of her.

At my last checkup, the doctor told me I’m healthy as a horse. I asked myself if I was depressed and decided that, except for wishing I had the energy to paint my bathroom, I have nothing to complain about. But at fifty-five years old, without Rose or Mama to care for and with a yard full of plants that I can’t bring back to health, I feel like my job is finished.

A few days ago, on a particularly slow day, Nancy put a sign on the door that said, BACK AT 1:00, and we headed down the street to get a sandwich for lunch. We sat in the booth by the window, and I looked out at the neighborhood shops, the same ones I’ve known my whole life. The fabric shop where Mama bought cotton prints for the dresses she made for me and Holly. The dime store where we shopped for Rose’s art supplies for school.

“Are you okay?” Nancy asked. “It seems like you haven’t been yourself lately.”

“Sure,” I said, “just a little tired.” The truth was, I hardly had the energy to eat. I’d been thinking about how much I missed my life. Missed desire. Missed the feeling of deliciousness and anticipation keeping me awake at night. I’ve had a child, a marriage, a job I enjoy. I’m a member of the Five Gallon Club for donating blood so many times. But what am I going to do for the next thirty or forty years? I wished some big, clanging noise would let us know when it’s time to go. The end.

Just then, a waitress at the other end of the diner dropped a tray of plates, and the crash resounded through the restaurant. I knew in that moment. When our waitress came to take my plate away, I said, “Thank you. I’m done.”

So that’s it, I thought to myself that night as I brushed my teeth. I’m tired. I miss Mama and Rose. And Daddy. I’ve done the work I came here to do. I’m done.

That’s when I saw the swirls of colored lights that I hadn’t seen since I was a child, and I remembered the green pearls in the bottle at the back of the freezer.

I woke up this morning feeling rested, like I’d had a long and deep slee. . .