Flowers of Darkness by Tatiana Rosnay (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📗

to give in to them, huddled up, holding her breath. They finally left, like a storm moving on. How could she put an end to her loneliness? She had no idea. She didn’t feel like knocking at the doors of the other artists in the residence, introducing herself. She wasn’t up to it. She remembered that young student who had written to her. Mia White. She hadn’t answered her yet. Was meeting her a good idea?

Clarissa’s flat still seemed empty, incomplete. Jordan and Andy had found it beautiful. “Slightly inhospitable, don’t you think?” Jordan had said cautiously. “Not quite ‘you.’” Her daughter had gazed at her keenly, with a speck of concern. She had asked her several times if all was well. Jordan was always worrying about her mother. Clarissa had said yes, of course, everything was fine. Yes, she slept badly. That was just settling into a new home. No, she hadn’t yet gotten to know the other tenants of the residence. Just a few of them in the lobby. She’d changed the subject, asking her daughter about her job. Jordan was a hydrologist, working for a major research center on flood risk management.

Jordan had always been essential to her. Even more so since the breakup. Clarissa didn’t express this out loud, but she was aware deep down of how much she needed her daughter right now. Jordan had captured the best of both her parents, Cla-rissa felt. Physically, she had inherited her father’s dark hair, his green eyes; she had her mother’s startling height, her powerful yet graceful shoulders. She had Toby’s kindness, his interest in other people. She had Clarissa’s belligerence, her sense of humor. But she was also very much herself: both clever and dreamy, tolerant and yet demanding. You couldn’t fool Jordan. She was shrewd and highly intuitive. Clarissa knew that one day, she’d have to tell her about why she’d left François. It was too early. She couldn’t face it.

As she prepared a quick lunch in her new kitchen, she listened to Jordan, with the cat perched on her knees, discuss her latest conference. Climate change continued to wreak havoc on meteorological conditions, producing torrential rains, which regularly caused all the rivers of the country to rise. Jordan’s specialty was inundation. She worked closely with meteorologists in order to develop preventive strategies for the most vulnerable regions. As a child, she had always been fascinated by water, especially rivers and lakes. Clarissa admired her daughter’s expertise and enthusiasm. Jordan was a respected figure in her field. She gave talks, lectures, was often seen on television. She spoke eloquently, with a husky voice that added to her charm.

Clarissa sometimes thought Jordan’s profession stemmed from her own interest in quantifying land and premises. In another life, she had been a property surveyor. It wasn’t water she used to measure, but houses and apartments. From an early age, Clarissa felt she needed to understand the lay of the land. Her dad had given her a luminous world globe for her desk when she was seven, and she’d spent hours watching it rotate under her finger. Later, she’d developed a fascination for maps, papering the walls of her rooms with them. It was cities she’d found captivating as a teenager: how they emerged, how they expanded, how they were destroyed by fires, bombings, how they were rebuilt. She’d pored over ancient photos of London to see what neighborhoods looked like before the Blitz. In her early twenties, she’d walked around with a measuring tape tucked away in her pocket. Houses attracted her—their stories, their evolution. Her mother had been convinced that Clarissa was going to become an architect. But she hadn’t.

While she paid attention to her daughter, slicing bits of mozzarella cheese that Andy promptly put into her mouth despite her grandmother’s remonstrance, Clarissa could not help thinking of her firstborn, and what he would have looked like today. He would have been forty-six. Tall and dark, she supposed. But that was all she could conjure. She had not thought of her son for so long, had banished the sorrow to the back of her mind. Her newfound fragility had resurrected it, nurturing it back to a throbbing vitality she found impossible to combat.

When she had started hypnotism, all those years ago, to keep the pain at bay, to not let it destroy her, Elise, her hypnotherapist, had asked her to think of a soothing, restful image. The first thing that had come to mind was a lake. Elise had asked her to describe the lake. Why a lake? She had no idea. She simply knew that the image of the lake soothed her, instilling a prodigious calm into her veins. She had tried to describe the lake to Elise; it was vast, she had the feeling it was deep, and its depth did not worry her. On the contrary, the fact that it reached so amply into the earth, forcing its path into the ground, gave her an unprecedented reassurance. The lake’s surface gleamed silver, its smoothness burrowed by steady wavelets. Clarissa could see herself soaring above the lake like a glider, arms outstretched; she could feel the cool wind nip at her cheeks and slide down her back; then she could also discern herself swimming, diving into the watery green abysses, palms stroked by the strange caress of weeds. It seemed to her the lake absorbed her pain, her sorrow.

She often dreamed of the lake. In the middle of the night, when she couldn’t sleep, she sometimes asked Mrs. Dalloway to display lake videos on her bedroom ceiling. Half-asleep, she let herself be carried off by eddies, lulled by soft splashing. She didn’t know where the water would take her. A peculiar, lacustrine ballet whirled her away; her skin becoming scaly, fishlike, her fingers merging to form pink fins.

In the blue opaqueness at the bottom of the lake, hazy shapes emerged, hands reached out toward her, while spools of black hair slowly unraveled like flowers of