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Chapter Two: Daisy Chain - Part Two
Flax
Flax knocked on Suite 206 softly before he pushed on the already slightly cracked open door. He moved to sit on the bed, next to the bunched up comforter covering the small mound.
Placing his hand on her back, he murmured, “Hey there, chickpea.”
The small figure wiggled beneath the blankets at his touch.
Flax smiled sadly when her little redhead popped out from beneath the covers, shaking the mussed strands out of her face.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her. “How did you even get in?”
Since the day he—and Olive and Calla—had barged in on him, Lenten had seen to it that Suite 206 remained locked at all times now.
Olive wriggled a little wormy arm up and out from under the covers, producing the small, gold skeleton key that usually hung from a chain inside Lenten’s coat pocket.
“Ah,” Flax said, trying hard not to be impressed by the girl’s resourcefulness. “I’m guessing your uncle doesn’t know you have that.”
He watched her shrink back down into the bedspread. She shrugged, the blankets moving more than she did, then shook her head.
He shrugged. He couldn’t very well get mad at her—seeing as how it was he who taught her how to pick pockets. So instead, he simply said, “You know your uncle won’t be too happy with you for taking it?”
Again, she shook her head.
“So why’d you swipe it?” He took it from her hand to put in his own pocket. He’d slip it back later before the absent manager noticed, to keep his little creeping vine—and subsequently himself—out of trouble.
Olive sat up, licking her lips. She gazed up at him, the covers all but drowning her. “They still smell like her.” She buried her nose in the thick comforter’s downy mass.
Oh God, Flax groaned silently. Goddamn, that he kept getting caught in this mess.
If he were a smart man, he’d head on over to Juniper’s or Jonquil’s—or both, maybe even together—and not emerge until the whole thing blew over.
But, because he’d lived more than long enough, Flax knew that grief didn’t just blow over. He’d said enough goodbyes in his life to know those were the things that stuck with you forever.
So he sighed and grabbed the little girl under each arm and pulled her—blankets and all—onto his lap. Wrapping his arms around, he held her wordlessly.
“She’s never coming back,” Olive stated quietly, pulling her little Daisy up from under the covers to hold the doll the way he held her on her own lap, “is she?”
Silently, he shook his head against her tiny, silken cheek.
She stiffened and let out a resigned huff before nodding. She snuggled into the bunched up fabric, squeezing it. She inhaled deeply, as if she knew that even that scent—that last bit of Mei—would eventually be gone and she wanted to savor it while it lasted.
After a few more breaths, she turned her face and tipped her chin back to look at him. “Why?”
Flax paused, not knowing how to explain something no one really understood. Settling on the simple, he said, “It was just her time, that’s all.”
“But why?” Olive asked. “Did she do something wrong? Is that why she had to leave?”
“Aw,” he told her, hugging her closely, “no, petunia, no. Mei didn’t do anything wrong. It just happened. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
Olive looked at him, a question in her eyes that couldn’t quite make it to her lips. She turned away, facing forward to swing her little feet, her stockinged heels hitting the mattress between his legs. She leaned back against his chest, growing silent for a very long time.
Finally, in a voice so quiet he had to strain to hear it, she said, “I thought we could stop it.”
“I know you did,” Flax told her. “And I know you did your best, but no one could have stopped it. It was just her time.”
“If I’d tried harder,” she murmured quietly, “if I hadn’t treated it like a game...” She shook her head and sunk impossibly lower.
“There wasn’t anything else you could have done.”
She shook her head, disbelieving. “I should have tried harder.” She pouted, biting her quivering bottom lip as more tears fell down her face. “I didn’t even say that I was sorry,” she said, her voice a quiet whine. “I didn’t think that when she said goodbye she meant forever.”
He bit his own lip and listened to her cry, unable to think of what more to say.
“I didn’t even say sorry,” she wailed, guilt and shame clear in her voice.
That was it.
He just couldn’t listen to her go on like this any longer. Determined to put a stop to her tears, Flax gripped the little girl by the waist and turned her around. He gripped her chin in his hand and forced her to meet his gaze. “Now you listen to me, little girl,” he told her in a straight, no-nonsense tone, “Mei loved you from the very first second she saw you to the very last second she had left. If she could have, she would have loved you forever. When it was her time, you were the very first person she wanted to see. She wanted to be sure that she got to see you one last time, to say a proper goodbye.”
Olive gave one long, loud sniffle, wiping her nose on the comforter. “She did?”
“She did,” he told her, using a corner of the covers to wipe her cheeks. “And she knew you loved her with all your little heart and she knew that, if you could have, you would have kept her here with you and with your uncle forever and ever.”
Olive, with her chin still cupped in his hand, nodded her head furiously. “But I couldn’t do it, could I?” A sad, disgusted look pinched her face. She shook her head from his grasp and averted her gaze, her little girl voice—the level and pitch of it—lowering staggeringly, sounding more mature and world-weary. “I try and I try and nothing I do is ever good enough.” Looking back up at him with much older eyes, the little, eight-year-old said, “Is it?”
Flax stared into the soul who’d been stuck in this hotel for thirty years and knew that there wasn’t an answer for her.
So instead, he gathered up the sides of the comforter and wrapped her up more fully in it, rubbing it and its scent against her arms. “It gets better,” he told her. “With some time,” he said, hoping he sounded more convincing than he felt, “and with lots of people around who care about you—”
“Like you and Uncle Lark and Calla and Rowan?” she asked, her voice again gaining its usual youth and sweetness.
“Yeah,” he said as he tweaked her nose, glad to see her innocence surface from the jaded haze, “if you surround yourself with people like that—I promise—it gets better.”
Olive stared into his gaze for a long moment. “Then how come Uncle Lark always wants to be alone?”
That stymied him for a moment. “It’s,” he started, “different for your uncle.”
“Why?”
Lord, damn the person that invented that question.
“He’s just not as smart as you are,” he said with a joking smile. He tickled her, making her squeal with laughter. “But he’ll come around eventually. Okay?”
Still smiling, Olive nodded sagely before letting out a loud yawn.
Sweeping her up into his arms, he was glad to see sleep start to take grief’s place. Even if it couldn’t fix everything, at least her dreams could give her a few moments of peace.
“Come on, you weed,” he told her when she bundled herself and her little doll closer, laying her head sweetly on his shoulder, “let’s get you to your own bed.”
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