A Fall of Marigolds

“[L]uck was finding something you thought was lost for good, or winning a porcelain doll at the county fair, or getting a new hat, or having every dance on your dance card. Good luck made you feel kissed by heaven and smiled on by the Fates.” 

Clara’s thoughts in response to those who told her she was lucky to have escaped the fire reveal the true depths of her depression. She never says she wished she would have died in a fire, but these silent admissions are troubling.

“The scarf billowed up between us, soft and eager to fly. I caught a whiff of fragrance in its threads, delicate and sweet. In the sunlight it looked less like fire and more like a burst of monarch butterflies. I could see a cascading fall of marigolds splashed across the fabric.”

Clara describes the scarf and its beauty and attributes intentionality to it, saying it is “eager to fly.” This anthropomorphic description foreshadows the way the reader will eventually come to understand the scarf, as symbolic of both change and love.

“The fire robbed me a of a future with Edward in it, I am sure of that, but it also stole from me my affinity with the wild and wonderful. The hospital was busy, but it was not wild, or wonderful. It was a steady place, with its hum of ten thousand words that were unknown to me. Despite the hammer of illness, it was a very tame place.”

Clara’s decision to attend nursing school and live alone in New York City was an unusual one at the time, especially for a young woman. This statement reveals what Clara must have been like before she met Edward and experienced the tragedy of the fire. Clara, at one point, longed for excitement and change. After Edward’s death, however, she wants everything to remain calm, or “tame.”

“My father once told me that when a child is to be born, there is no stopping it from coming. Something inside the mother’s body—something she cannot control—simply decides the child is to come out. The mother might want to wait until the doctor comes or for the snowstorm to end or the sun to rise or the husband to return, but she cannot press a lever to stop the baby from coming. […]. There are some things you can’t stop even if you want to.”

Clara uses the metaphor of childbirth to describe her inability to stop reading Lily’s letter to Andrew. However, it also functions as a metaphor for love and change, something both Clara and Taryn will discover by the end of the story.

“Which was worse? Mourning the loss of something without knowing you never actually had it, or mourning the loss of what you thought you had and never had at all?”

Clara describes her dilemma over whether to tell Andrew about Lily’s letter, or allow him to live in blissful ignorance. Her resistance to shattering Andrew’s beliefs about his late wife reflects her own uncertainty about Edward’s feelings for her. Ultimately, Andrew will remain unaware of the truth, and Clara will not. As Ethan comments later, there is no one right answer to this question.

“He would surely go looking for her in paradise and perhaps learn the truth at last in heaven. But heaven seems a place where truth cannot hurt. Here, the truth can be devastating.”

Clara thinks that she might not have to tell Andrew about the letter, simply because he might die from scarlet fever. This quote reveals her simple, almost childlike faith in a heaven where we are reunited with our loved ones. It foreshadows the way in which Clara will reconcile her grief over Edward and her new understanding of love as a gift from heaven. 

“The tears ran down my face in rivulets but I refused to give voice to my sobs. I felt something deep and raging in my throat, scrabbling for release, but I locked my lips shut. A groan rumbled there but I did not let it out.” 

When Dolly declares that love at first sight is impossible, Clara is moved to tears, and for the first time, she tells someone about Edward. Her attempt at bottling up her emotions is on display in this quote and indicates the result: an emotional meltdown, a rage and grief that boils over, affecting everyone in its path.

“I dreamed I was in the elevator with Edward and the elevator was on fire. He smiled at me and reached for my hand. I gave it to him. I had flowers in my hair and I was not afraid.”

Clara’s dream is troubling, another indication of how depressed she is. The symbolism of the flowers in her hair, like a bride, combined with the fire also symbolizes the way in which she feels her love for Edward was consumed by the fire, which also destroyed her hopes for the future.

“The photographer who had happened upon the memory card said it had been a fluke, a chance rendezvous with a camera bag she didn’t think she still owned. But this wasn’t the first time that what some would call a coincidence had shattered my notion that life is composed of mere random events, both lovely and terrible.”

Taryn here struggles to stay in her in-between place, which has served her well for 10 years. She wants to believe, needs to believe, that what happened on 9/11 was random, nothing more than a series of coincidences. However, the reappearance of these photos, so close to the 10-year-anniversary, causes her to question that belief and brings back painful memories. 

“The sky that Tuesday morning was the sweetest shade of robin’s egg blue, cloudless and smooth. Rays of a promising saffron sun were creeping over the bedspread as Kent walked across the bedroom to kiss me good-bye, a red travel mug in his hand. His dress shirt was celery green, and his tie a silky charcoal.”

Taryn’s description of the morning of 9/11 illustrates Meissner’s skilled use of imagery; here, she paints a beautiful and moving portrait of what should have been another ordinary day. Furthermore, the colors Taryn describes are bright and cheerful, and this provides a terrible contrast for what the reader knows is coming: the black smoke and jagged holes in the buildings, the gray ash and smoke billowing out of the ground. 

“My hand closed around the […] scarf, and it seemed that it reached for me, caressed my fingertips, urging me to draw it out. I pulled it free and brought the ancient fabric to my face to catch my tears. I caught a thousand different scents in its threads, some, it seemed, as old as love itself. At that moment I wanted to fall into those marigolds and never emerge.”

Just as Clara does when she first sees the scarf, Taryn too attributes human characteristics to it, describing it as seeking her out, rather than the other way around. This foreshadows Taryn’s eventual understanding of the scarf as an agent of fate, appearing to help save Kendal’s life and then reappearing to help save Taryn from her in-between place of numbness and despair.

“You don’t want to believe even for a minute that the enemy is your own body, this weak tent of flesh that cannot stand up against a speck of contagion, this fragile weave of muscle, bone, and soul that also cannot resist the power of flame nor the pull of the ground below it.”

Clara’s thoughts on disease and infection give way to a meditation on mortality. As a nurse, Clara understood all too well that all humans must die eventually. However, she was young enough when she came to New York to not realize that applied to her as well. Edward’s death not only traumatizes her through the loss of what she believes is true love, but also through the loss of her belief in her own immortality.

“[T]houghts are not things you can give or not give. Thoughts are thrust upon you. You can only hope that thoughts you don’t want will tire of you at some point and flutter away.”

Clara’s father has asked her to come home, and tells her that she does not have “to give any of this another thought” (124). However, Clara knows that after a traumatic experience, it is difficult to think of anything else. She does not say this to her father directly, perhaps to hide exactly how upset and hurt she was by the events of the fire and losing Edward.

“I want to be able to remember and have it not hurt. I think it’s possible to remember someone you loved and lost and feel blessed that you knew them, even for just a short time, without it hurting.” 

Here, Clara attempts to explain to Andrew why she is on Ellis Island. Her goal is reasonable, but she wants to avoid the pain at all costs. Unfortunately, grieving is painful, and avoiding the pain means never making it to the moment when you can “feel blessed that you knew them.” Clara, in fact, does not seem to realize just yet that by hiding on the island, by refusing to feel the pain and grief, she will never get to that sense of peace she desires.

“You were meant to open that trunk, Clara! Have you thought about that? What if fate wanted you to open it because it was the only way that good man would know the truth? Nobody should have to spend the rest of his life grieving something he never had!” 

During one of their many conversations about whether Clara should tell Andrew the truth about Lily, Dolly declares that Clara must tell Andrew, that she was destined to open the trunk so that he would know the truth. However, Dolly fails to understand that the workings of fate or destiny are not that clear-cut. Eventually, Clara realizes that she was fated to open the trunk not for Andrew’s sake but for her own. It marked the first step in her journey back to health and off the island.

“The person who completes your life is not so much the person who shares all the years of your existence, but rather the person who made your life worth living, no matter how long or short a time you were given to spend with them.” 

This quote comes from the letter Andrew’s father wrote to Andrew and his brother, Nigel. Clara is moved by the sentiment, and clearly sees the parallels between his father’s words and Clara’s love for Edward, as well as Andrew’s love for Lily. It also foreshadows Andrew and Clara’s relationship: They will play important roles in each other’s lives but only for a brief time.

“After the roar of the tower’s fall and the first screams of terror, there was a massive hush that nearly seemed appropriate, since no words could describe those moments. There would have been cries for deliverance but our mouths and lungs were filled with a million fragments of former lives and purposes. No one could move air past their lungs.”

Taryn describes the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack, struck by the silence, as many were that day. The enormity of the act and of the losses suffered by the United States that day are impossible to describe in words. Taryn’s words pay tribute to the lives lost, and parallel the ways in which the event is memorialized in real life, with overwhelming sorrow and respectful silence.

“Time ceases to have substance when you are flattened by despair.” 

Taryn’s description of how she reacts after receiving what she thinks is the last message from Kent also describes her life after 9/11, flat and colorless. She never moves out of that despair, not until the photos resurface. Only then does her life become whole and three- dimensional, a real life, rather than a flat simulation. The same is true for Clara, who flattens her life as well by limiting it to Ellis Island.

“He deserved to believe love was worth the flattening ache of grief. Love was both the softest edge and the sharpest edge of what made life real.” 

Clara’s thoughts about Andrew also reveal her own recovery from grief. She wants Andrew to have the time she had to come to terms with her grief, to move through its stages and ultimately realize that no matter how much it might hurt to lose the one you love, that does not mean one should try to avoid love to avoid pain. Life without love, Clara realizes, is not worth living at all. 

“And I realized that while I couldn’t beautify what was ugly, I could hide the hideous under the cover of mercy. What is mercy for if not to cloak ugliness?”

Clara’s thoughts as she prepares once again to protect Andrew from the truth about Lily parallel Taryn’s revelation about her own guilt over Kent’s death. Taryn acted out of love, and thus cannot be held responsible for what happened to Kent. When Mick tells her that “[o]nly God knows what would have happened if [she] hadn’t left that message” for Kent (354), he allows her to see a way to share this story with Kendal, to see God’s mercy in the survival of Taryn and her own birth. This mercy is what Clara wants for Andrew as well, and she is glad she can give that to him.

“I wanted to dream about loving again before I embraced the reality of it, in all its wonder and risk.”

Clara rationalizes why she wants to go to Scotland despite her knowledge that Ethan loves her. She seems to recognize that though she is feeling better, she is not completely healed. She wants to give herself time to fully heal before she can be with Ethan. As the reader learns later in the text, however, Clara does not need the full year and returns to be with Ethan much sooner.

“The heart always wants to believe the best. About everything. I wouldn’t change that for the world. But the heart doesn’t run the show.” 

Mick’s words to Taryn relieve her of some of the guilt she carries for Kent’s death. She admits to him that she believes that if she had not left that message for Kent to meet her for breakfast that Kent would still be alive. Mick explains here that Taryn cannot know that for sure. Just as Clara realizes eventually that love comes from God, so too does Taryn realize here that some things must be left up to God.

“[L]ove is not a person. It is not of this earth at all. […] I realized I had mistakenly come to believe that love came from a place inside me and therefore I had to protect that place. It comes from heaven […].”

Clara’s words to Eleanor mark the central message of the book: Love is always a force for good, a gift from heaven. Clara is realizing here that it would not have mattered if Edward had not loved her, just as it did not matter that Lily did not love Andrew—their love was enough.