A Fall of Marigolds

Back in Clara’s timeline, Clara returns to the boardinghouse where Lily had sent the trunk. Exhausted by the day’s events, Clara sleeps in the rented room before calling Ellis Island with a message for Ethan and for Dolly, letting them know she would be spending the night on the mainland. The next day, Clara goes to the newspaper office again, this time reading all the articles about the fire that she had avoided for months, “something of a ritual cleansing, long overdue” (338). Each article feels “at first like a blow to the chest, and then a remembrance for the dead, and then a stone to be cast across the wide sea of [her] memory” (340). She next decides to travel to see Edward’s parents and his fiancée, Savina Mayfield, to tell them that Edward died comforting the young girl whose hand he held when they jumped. The woman at the newspaper office gives Clara the Brims’ address but remarks that Savina had already married someone else. This news leaves Clara almost speechless.

Unfortunately, when she arrives, Edward’s family is out of town. She leaves a note with a neighbor who tells her that no one had really liked Edward’s fiancée; there were signs that Edward had started to see she “was nothing but trouble wrapped in a pretty face and sweet talk,” and that Edward “had told his mother he had met someone and was having second thoughts” (345). Clara feels her grief all over again but is soothed by the thought that this love was not all one-sided, that Edward had loved her in return. She visits his grave and thanks Edward because her “grieving heart could still believe in love” (345).

Clara returns to the boardinghouse “with one purpose: to erase from the world the last remnants of [Lily’s] deception” (347). Clara gives Lily’s trunk to a homeless woman on the street, though she keeps the scarf. She returns to Ellis Island with a feeling of “weightlessness, as if Lily’s letter and certificate had been made of iron” and weeps with relief (348). Ethan is waiting for her, and he believes that Clara had spent the night with Andrew. As the hurt washes over his face, Clara allows herself to admit, finally, that Ethan is in love with her, as much as she had been in love with Edward. Clara reassures him and, after Ethan kisses her, tells him that she still plans to go to Scotland, that she needs “time for [her] heart to be still” (350). Although Ethan is disappointed, he understands that she needs time, and Clara promises to write to him.

Taryn meets Mick for dinner and feels “an unexpected kinship with Mick, a bond [she] had not sensed with anyone since Kent was alive” (352). This sense of connection prompts her to share everything with Mick, her struggle since 9/11 and her new understanding that she “had been living an in-between existence that had kept [her] cushioned from the hard and beautiful aspects of a full life” (352). Mick asks Taryn what her plans are, and she answers that she will finally tell Kendal the full story of the day Kent died, but she understands that he is also asking her if she has room in her life for a relationship.

The next day, Mrs. Stauer comes to the shop and Taryn asks her if she can keep the scarf for a few more days, so that she can have it with her when she explains everything to Kendal. Mrs. Stauer explains that she never intended to take the scarf, she just wanted to see it again. She points out that no matter what guilt Taryn might feel over Kent’s death, it was the scarf that had made her late, and in so doing “saved [her] daughter’s life” (359). Mrs. Stauer also shares a letter addressed to Mrs. Stauer’s late aunt Eleanor, who had been a maid in Scotland. Dated November 16, 1911, the letter reveals that Eleanor had been in love with a man who did not return her affection, and the letter writer gives her the scarf as a farewell gift to remind her to always choose love. The letter writer reveals that she is returning to the United States for love, before telling Eleanor to “[b]e happy. Choose hope.” The letter is signed, “Clara” (364). Taryn decides to give the scarf to Kendal, who “was just beginning to understand that the freedom to love and be loved, though it shook you to your core, made life exquisite” (364).