*
The private investigator found Baby Packer first.
It was easy, from the records. He had been adopted back in 1977, after only a few days in the hospital. A two-month-old baby with a case of malnutrition. When Lavender closed her eyes, she could still remember how he had looked, that last day on the farmhouse floor, his infant limbs squirming spastic.
Cheryl and Denny Harrison had filled out the proper paperwork, still available in the state records. They had given Baby Packer a starchy new name. Ellis. According to the investigator, Ellis Harrison no longer lived in New York City, but he’d grown up there. When Lavender tried to picture that skinny infant as a twenty-four-year-old man, her heart beat so slowly, so exaggeratedly, she wondered if it had liquified.
What about Ansel? Lavender had asked, tentative.
Ansel would be twenty-nine years old now. According to the investigator, he lived in a small town in Vermont—he had studied philosophy in college and now worked at a furniture store. At this, Lavender beamed with pride. College. Of course. He’d been such a smart little boy. Harmony had printed Ansel’s address on a folded sheet of paper, which Lavender had purposefully let slip through the dusty crack behind her dresser.
The women had spent the following weeks in therapy discussing Lavender’s options. Harmony urged Lavender to write Ansel a letter—wasn’t she always writing letters in her head? But even the remote prospect felt impossible. The thought of meeting her children again made Lavender so queasy, they often had to end their sessions early so she could lie down.
Ansel, especially. Ansel would remember.
Eventually, they settled on a compromise. She would start with the furthest point of contact, a level of interaction distant enough that Lavender could gather some information without crushing herself entirely.
Dear Lavender, Cheryl Harrison had written, in response to the letter she and Harmony had crafted. I’m glad you reached out. I have a photography show opening in San Francisco next month—would you like to meet then? I don’t know what you’re hoping for, and I’m not sure I can help, but I’m happy to talk. If you want to come to the gallery, my assistant can arrange it. With warmth, Cheryl.
Now, as the van merged onto the highway, Lavender thought of Johnny. His ghost was a devil, whispering constantly on her shoulder, persistent even after all these years. Jesus, Lav. What a stupid idea.
The investigator included it at the very end of the report, an afterthought. Johnny was dead. He had never returned to the farmhouse, had dodged child protective services, started a new half-life in a redneck town just an hour’s drive south. Fifteen years ago, he had driven drunk down the interstate and collided with a semitruck, killing himself as the car exploded on impact.
When Lavender thought of Johnny now, she could only see the flames.
*
The city emerged, restless, before them. Harmony hummed along to the radio as skyscrapers rose from the fog—Lavender gripped Sunshine’s Buddha so tightly it indented a print in the center of her palm. She had been so many people in this short life. It seemed remarkable that the girl from the farmhouse had evolved into such a ripened self. Lavender had learned to meditate. She could do a headstand. She could bake enough apple pie to feed sixty people. She had cocooned herself so definitively in the warmth of other women, in the rhythms of Gentle Valley—the therapy sessions and dinnertime poetry and afternoons in the garden—she had almost forgotten the sharpness of the world outside. She’d stopped reading the newspaper last year: 9/11 was too raw, too tragic. As San Francisco uncurled itself in the distance, a glittering menace against the overcast sky, Lavender felt unmoored, like a weightless body hurtling through space. She tried to summon the girl she’d been at twenty-one, traveling alone for months, breasts heavy with milk—that now seemed like a disparate universe. Sometimes I feel like I’m shedding myself, she told Sunshine once, the only person who understood. Sometimes it’s like I’m stuck on the floor, searching for the cast of my own skin.
Sunshine had come to Gentle Valley pregnant, with hands covered in red blistering burns and a mouth that refused to speak. Not a single word. Lavender had been there nearly a year when she arrived, and she recognized something visceral in the way Sunshine jolted at every heavy footstep.
Sunshine’s baby was born a few months later. Lavender was wordlessly appointed godmother—Sunshine panted as the nurse held a cool washcloth to her forehead, unspeaking as always when it came time for a name. When Sunshine handed the baby over, Lavender felt a spasm of love, devastating and familiar, so extreme she nearly burst into a wail. Most of the women in Gentle Valley had taken on the names of flowers, trees, colors. But another person came to her, as she examined the infant’s red, flaky skin—the reason Lavender stood, alive, this tiny heart beating into her palm.