Chapter Text
“Mama would say it ain’t right.”
Darlene Wilson glares at her sister. There isn’t much heat in her expression, though, just like there wasn’t really any disapproval in Ruth’s voice.
“Mama’s not here.”
Ruth hums quietly, not looking up from where she’s bathing Samuel in the sink. Darlene watches her closely from the comfort of the couch. Ruth knows what she’s doing, of course, with three little ones of her own. But Sam is only a few weeks removed from the safety of her body, and as grateful as she is for the chance to sit down, rest doesn’t come easy when he’s outside of her or Paul’s arms.
“Eliza didn’t get her first blossom till she was six. A daisy on her knee. Daniel got his at… must’ve been around two; some kind of lily over almost his whole palm. And Louis still hasn’t gotten one. I don’t know if he will.”
“Everyone’s different,” Darlene replies. She can’t remember her first flower, no more than Paul could remember the first time he got hurt.
“Their marks always disappear after a couple days.”
“Some hurts last longer than others. I get plum blossoms all up my spine whenever Paul’s back starts acting up.”
“But they do fade.”
“He’s three weeks old,” Darlene says, irritation threatening to rise up at Ruth’s constant inability to leave things well enough alone. “Lots of things take longer than that to heal. Maybe his soulmate broke a bone or something.”
Ruth does glance over to her at that, eyebrow raised. But Darlene meets her gaze stubbornly, and so she just shrugs and turns back to the sink. For once, miracle of miracles, she doesn’t keep arguing.
The conversation stays with Darlene long after her sister has gone back home, lingering heavy as the smell of lilacs after a springtime rain. Mostly the first part. Mama would say it ain’t right.
It bothers her, of course, because she knows that Ruth wasn’t wrong. Their mother, God rest her soul, had practically collected superstitions. They clung to her like burrs, and she spread their seeds wherever she could.
By and large, Darlene hadn’t been fertile ground for her mother’s ideas. But maybe it’s different now that she’s a mother herself; maybe the desire to see portents and omens everywhere was a natural development, a way of trying to make sense out of the chaotic world and all the threats it holds for her son.
That night, as she readies Sam for bed, she finds herself tracing it with one finger. A ring of cypress branches, looking for all the world like a tattoo on his infant skin, fully circling the spot where his left arm meets his shoulder.
Marked since birth by the pain of a soulmate he’d yet to meet.
She shivers at the thought, not quite sure why it makes her feel like someone just walked over her grave. But Sam, for his part, doesn’t notice her upset. He blinks his big brown eyes at her and smiles a wide, gummy smile.
Darlene can’t help it: she smiles back.
“You’ll be okay, huh?” she murmurs as she buttons up his pajamas. “You and your soulmate both. Whoever they are.”
Still. She doesn’t quite fully relax until his arm is all covered up. And when she dreams that night, she finds herself on a boat in the bayou, surrounded on all sides by hulking cypress trees. A breeze stirs the branches, and among the sound of rustling leaves, she could swear she hears her mother’s voice, whispering out a warning too indistinct for her to heed.
“Darlene? Darlene!”
Darlene’s favorite pen slips from her fingers and falls to the floor along with the Sunday crossword puzzle at her husband’s cry. She’s on his feet and bolting up the stairs in seconds.
There’s only one reason her husband would ever sound so frantic, only one thing that could ever put such fear into his voice.
Sam. Sam. Sam, laid down for a nap. Left alone, but close enough for them to hear when he awoke.
Paul had said he’d check on him—he was just stirring in his crib; he’d rock him back to sleep; he’d done it hundreds of times—
But never once had he sounded so terrified, not even in those earliest days, when they’d both been so afraid they’d do something wrong.
If something happened to him while they were sitting on the couch, arguing over a crossword puzzle—
She skids around the corner, expecting the worst, not entirely knowing what that is, or maybe just unwilling to even think it.
But the minute Darlene looks into the nursery, she knows why Paul called her. And this—is not something she prepared for.
In Paul’s arms, Sam smiles and gurgles and flexes his tiny fingers.
And on his perfect little head, flowers flow in a dizzying spiral dance. Tiny blue and white blossoms with yellow centers streak across his skull. Spiky branches with long indigo petals fill the spaces between them, their long fingers sparking in and out almost too quickly to see.
The flowers run like rain, streaming along his crown, flashing beneath his dark curls. Twisting and twining, mesmerizingly, terrifyingly beautiful.
From his father’s arms, Sam coos and stretches his arms out towards Darlene. Such a happy baby; everyone always comments on it.
“What in God’s name,” Paul murmurs.
Darlene can’t answer him. Helplessness wraps around her throat like bittersweet, choking her silent. What kind of a mother is she, that she can’t even identify the threat that paints itself across her son—can’t even explain why it feels like a threat when the markings aren’t hurting Sam at all.
Paul reaches out and places his finger over one of the flowers. Of course, he can’t feel anything besides the softness of his son’s skin.
He looks up and meets Darlene’s eyes. She sees her own fear reflected back at him.
But before she can think of something, anything that might offer some semblance of comfort, the flowers just—stop. The dance ceases. Once or twice more, the flowers flash, just flickering in and out, not swirling anymore.
And then they settle like a crown. The blue and white flowers with the yellow centers, tiny and star-shaped, wrap around the spiky branches. Rosemary, she realizes with a start, recognizing it from the herb garden Ruth grows beside her house.
It’s Darlene’s turn now to shift her hold on Sam and carefully trace the pattern. She stops when her finger presses up against Paul’s.
“What was that?” she whispers. Paul just shakes his head, staring down at their son and the markings on his skull.
Sam smiles up at him, reaching out his arms again. The motion draws Darlene’s eyes to his shoulder, where that first mark rests in whorls of green. It’s probably—must be—her imagination, but the branches look especially vibrant today.
The crown of flowers lasts for five days. During that time, their eyes are rarely off of Sam. They never catch the swirling pattern again.
But other flowers crop up. A rhododendron blooms a garish shade of pink across his ribs. Marigolds dot his stomach orange-red. And the ring of cypress branches… it grows. The needles curl out, larger and longer than before. They stretch like veins, almost up to Sam’s delicate collarbone.
The marigolds and rhododendron fade, quicker than Darlene would have expected. The marks around his head and his shoulder remain.
By unspoken agreement, they don’t take Sam outside. Darlene calls Ruth and cancels their weekly lunch, saying that Sam had a cold she doesn’t want him spreading to Ruth’s children.
As she gives her excuse, lying seamlessly enough her older sister doesn’t suspect a thing, she thinks back suddenly to the conversation they’d had months before. Ruth, looking down at the branches on Sam’s shoulder. Their mother’s superstitions.
She wraps her arms around herself after she hangs up the phone. Something cold settles in her bones.
There’s no reason for the silent trepidation that hangs between her and Paul throughout the following days. Most people have soulmates. Regardless of if they meet in Ms. Bouchard’s first grade class like her and Paul, or if they never find each other; regardless of if they fall in love or if they can’t stand each other. Flowers are as ordinary as the waves that lap against the dock, the clouds that roll across the sky.
These feel different. They both know it, and neither of them can articulate why, and so it’s simply easier for them to not discuss it.
When Paul comes in from the sea, his usually joyous greeting is replaced by a quiet kiss on the cheek. She tries not to notice how Paul’s first reaction is to check and see if the flowers are still on Sam’s head. Silence fills their meals, the space between them in bed. Even Sam seems to pick up on the changes
It’s like this for a week. Until one day, when Paul has just finished giving Sam his bottle, Darlene hears him draw in a sharp breath.
She whirls around, prepared for a repeat of the sight she’s dreamed about twice since it happened, nightmares both times.
But this is… different.
Tiny white flowers spread across Sam like frost. Almost every inch of visible skin is overtaken by the petals: his tiny fingers, his neck, his round cheeks.
And then, as they watch, the flowers disappear. Not just the white ones: the crown around his head is gone too. Evaporated into nothingness, like the hurt just abruptly stopped.
Without a word, Darlene reaches over and unbuttons his onesie, tugging it down partway. Paul leans down to see, holding his breath.
But—no. The branches are still there. They’ve retracted somewhat, back to a simple circle around Sam’s shoulder rather than reaching further tendrils of pain out towards his neck. But the important thing is that they’re present at all, not vanished like the others.
Sam’s soulmate, whoever they are, whatever just happened to them, is still alive.
Darlene stares down at the solemn, sleepy eyes of her son, then back to the branches that mar his skin. She hates herself for wondering if that’s actually a good thing.
It happens the next time when Sam is 2 years old, and then again a few months later. The same thing, except—she and Paul, they must have missed it that first time. The white flowers that spread over his skin also appear shortly before the crown shows up. They stay longer in that pre-crown phrase than they do before its disappearance, a lingering sheet of ice that melts away after just a few minutes. And then, shortly after, the twisting, dancing crown.
Darlene does her research. She drives over to the St. Bernard Parish Library and pours though their reference collection for any information on unusual soulmate marks. She tries to bring the subject up in casual conversation after church or at the market. Never explaining why she’s asking; others will see Sam with those marks eventually, if they keep happening, but she knows full well how small communities, even one as warm as Delacroix usually is, can be prone to wariness around any signs that mark someone as different.
As the years stretch on without a recurrence, though, she starts to think—maybe the three times it happened weren’t a pattern after all. Just flukes. Perhaps Sam’s soulmate was sick, somehow, but had gotten cured, save for whatever ailment plagued their left arm.
She’s cured of that delusion shortly after Sam’s 5th birthday.
He and Sarah are playing with Sam’s Hot Wheels while Darlene prepares for dinner. She’s just about done chopping the lettuce for a salad when Sarah lets out an ungodly shriek.
She understands why seconds later, as soon as she’s in the living room. And maybe she should be used to this, but she has no control over the cold sweat that breaks at the sight.
Sam stares down at the white flowers spreading all across his skin, as mute as Sarah is distraught. Then he looks up at Darlene, eyes wide, lip quivering.
Darlene swallows, but by now she knows how this goes. It’s been the same the past three times; she has no reason to think that now will be any different. And that means that Sam will see the crown of rosemary and forget-me-nots that will settle across his skull, along with all the other flowers that only seem to sprout up in its wake.
She scoops up Sarah in one arm, shushing her wails as she reaches down to take Sam’s hand with the other. “Come here, baby. I want to show you something.”
She leads them into her bedroom and sits them down at the foot of her bed, in front of her vanity with the large mirror. Like this, Sam can see how the latticework of white flowers spreads everywhere, from the tips of his toes to the top of his head.
He reaches up and pats at the markings, tears momentarily forgotten. Darlene is grateful for that, at least; Sarah has her head buried in her shoulder, but has fallen silent. If her big brother started crying, she certainly would too.
“They won’t last too long,” Darlene says, rubbing Sam’s shoulder. “You’ve gotten flowers like these a few times before, when you were Sarah’s size. Just watch.”
“Why?” asks Sam.
He knows about soulmate flowers as a general concept, but this is the first time he’s been old enough to really experience them. The ring of cypress branches—that’s as natural to him as a birth mark.
“The flowers mean that you got a special connection with someone, somewhere in the world. That person is called your soulmate. And when they’re hurting, you get a flower where they’re feeling bad.”
She leaves out the details—how some soulmates meet and fall in love; how some are indifferent, or even outright dislike each other; how some soulmates never meet; how some people don’t have a soulmate at all. He’ll learn all that in time.
Sam frowns, looking at the small white flowers on his hands, then studying himself in the mirror. “But why’re there so many?”
“I don’t know for sure. You can ask them if you ever meet them. But it’s happened to you before, so it probably means that they have some kind of sickness that makes their body hurt all over.”
Sam looks up at her, eyes big. “I don’t want them to be sick!”
“Shh. I know, baby. I know.” She wraps her arm around him, pulling him closer. Sarah whimpers at the sound of her brother’s distress, and Darlene gently shushes her.
“Look. See? They’re fading already. So they didn’t hurt too bad. Some hurts last a long time, like the leaves at your shoulder. But sometimes they go away quickly.”
Sam nods, sticking his thumb in his mouth—a habit she’s been trying to break him of, but she lets it slide for the moment. Because as much as she’d like to distract him and Sarah with some toys or the television, she has a sneaking suspicion of what’s going to come next.
They sit in silent contemplation for a moment as the last of the white flowers melt away.
“When these flowers showed up before, you got some more not too long after. Around your—oh. See?”
As if her words had summoned them, the ring of swirling flowers blossoms across Sam’s forehead. His mouth drops open and he leans forward to stare in the mirror, rapt. Sarah, thankfully, has decided to stick with pressing her head against her mother’s shoulder. Darlene expects the spectacle would upset her.
Sam once again raises a pudgy hand to the marks, patting his forehead like he expects to be able to feel the movement beneath his hand. When he can’t, he looks down at his fingers, and then back into the mirror.
Then he bursts into tears.
“Oh, baby, no—”
Darlene pulls him into a hug as Sarah, unsurprisingly, also starts wailing again. Darlene strokes her hair, wishing that Paul would get back soon so that she could focus on one crisis at a time.
“I know it looks scary, huh? But it can’t hurt you. And it’ll stop soon, okay? It always does.”
Sam mumbles something unintelligible into her shoulder.
“You gotta speak up, Samuel. I can’t hear you.”
Sam pulls away and sniffles. “It’s bad. Whatever’s wrong with them is bad and I don’t like it!”
“You don’t like that they’re hurt?”
Sam nods, face scrunched up like he’s trying not to cry again. Sarah’s cries are also petering out, her face still pressed into Darlene’s now-damp blouse.
Darlene’s heart aches. Gently as she can, she says, “Everyone gets hurt sometimes, baby. It’s part of life.”
“But I don’t like it!”
“I know.” She hugs him tighter. The flowers have stopped swirling, settling into a still circle around his forehead. The blue and white of the forget-me-nots twine around the soft green of the rosemary.
It might be beautiful, under other circumstances. But as Darlene holds her children close, it seems more like a crown of thorns than anything. Her son, forced to wear a stranger’s suffering.
She closes her eyes. Prays silently for Sam, and for his soulmate, whoever they are. And deep down, she hopes too that she never meets them. It’s uncharitable of her, maybe even cruel. But the bitter truth is that she doesn’t know if she could look at them without resenting the pain that their pain brings to her son.
If asked, Darlene would be unable to pinpoint the moment when it happened. But at some point, between raising two children, running a business, and just generally living life, Sam’s strange flowers become… normal.
They don’t come often, rarely more than once or twice a year, and sometimes not even that. The crown remains for varying amounts of time—as short as two days; as long as 5 weeks. Its appearance is always bracketed by the strange white flowers that cover his whole body, and he only ever gets additional flowers when the rosemary and forget-me-nots bloom across his forehead.
The marks never cease to be unsettling, maybe even ominous. It always feels like the world slips into chaos when the flowers are on Sam, explosions in far-off countries, deaths reported on the nightly news that seem to unsettle the world a little more.
It’s her imagination, she knows, seeing patterns where none exist. People die all the time. War is always closer than anyone would like to admit.
Still, once the thought gets in her head, it’s hard to shake. Maybe just because imaging that the marks coincide with disasters offers justification for how much their appearance bothers her. She couldn’t say.
(Sarah gets her first flower when she’s 3 years old, a tiny, normal-looking primrose on her shin. Darlene breathes a sigh of relief, letting go of worries she hadn’t known she’d been carrying.)
She can’t keep the marks hidden away forever, of course. But when lack of a babysitter leaves her no choice but to take Sam with her while she sells their latest catch—and, later, when the flowers bloom on him one day in third grade—
Whatever vague fears she had about other people seeing the markings never manifest. People stare, of course. She suspects that they talk about it when her family isn’t around. And every now and then, someone will mention them—how unusual they are, how striking.
But there’s no cruelty. No one ostracizes Sam; from what he says, his classmates seem to think the marks are cool. She suspects that his naturally gregarious personality has made him popular in a way that staves off bullying, and she’s grateful for that.
Whatever unease she feels at the thought of Sam’s soulmate becomes a background noise, like ringing in her ears: omnipresent but easy enough to ignore, save for the rare nights when its pitch creeps up, driving sleep away.
Paul knows how she feels, of course. Probably Ruth too, though she never says anything. Just watches Sam carefully as he plays in her backyard while she and Darlene sit at her kitchen table, her eyes never giving away her thoughts.
Darlene’s focus is on her children now, not on whatever misfortunes befall a stranger whose path might never cross with Sam’s. Her preoccupations are celebrating their achievements, soothing their own hurts.
(Sam breaks his right wrist when he’s 8 years old, falling out of an oak tree his older cousins had him climbing on a dare. Darlene leaves their punishments to Ruth and drives him to the emergency room. As they wait for the doctor, she fishes around desperately for something, anything to say that might soothe the tears Sam is trying so hard to hide.
“Guess you’ve finally got a flower to give to your soulmate, huh?” she says gently, rubbing his back. She runs her other hand across his forehead and over his temples, tracing the line of rosemary and forget-me-nots that had blossomed last week. “What do you think they have on their arm now?”
Sam sniffs and rubs at his eyes. “A Venus flytrap,” he says decisively.
“A Venus flytrap?” she repeats, tempted to smile despite the worry still prickling at her skin. “Why?”
“Because they’re cool,” says Sam.
On the other side of the world, a man without a name sits in a cell, arms wrapped around his knees. He stares down at his hands, having nothing else to look at.
As he watches, from nowhere, something blooms on his human arm. Green leaves wrap around his wrist—oak, he thinks, though he doesn’t know where that knowledge came from. Like a tattoo, one his handlers have not permitted him to acquire.
The verdant color is at odds with the gray stone walls, the black of his clothes, the pale, sallow shade of his skin. Too vibrant, too alive.
The man tucks his sleeves inside his gloves. This, he knows, is not proper; he should report such a malfunction immediately.
But a seedling of disobedience unfurls somewhere deep inside his chest. He does not know what the leaves are—where they came from, what they mean. But he knows he does not wish for his handlers to see them.)
Seasons come and go in Delacroix: the long, hot summers; the hurricanes that threaten to make the waters spill from their banks; the gray skies and cool breezes of the short winters.
Sam and Sarah grow from being cheerful, easygoing children, into passionate, kind teenagers. Sarah meets her soulmate when she moves to the big middle school in seventh grade, a boy named Alan whose black eye from an errant baseball matches perfectly with the purple flower whose appearance before the first day of classes had caused much consternation.
There’s no sign of Sam’s soulmate, but he doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, it’s as if he’s accepted the flowers as an everyday part of life—which, Darlene supposes, they are, for him.
She and Paul discuss it in hushed tones sometimes, what the flowers could mean. But as the years go by and the flowers’ regular appearances bring no new revelations, there just isn’t much to say. Silence on the topic reigns once again
Darlene grows older. As the children need her less and less, she starts to fill her free time with gardening—not flowers or herbs like Ruth grows in the vast beds that fill her backyard. Just a small plot of vegetables. The business keeps the roof over their head, but it doesn’t allow for much extra. Everything she grows herself is a dollar she doesn’t need to spend at the grocery store.
Before she knows it, Sam is off on a scholarship to LSU, and then—then, he’s enlisting.
He hugs her tight before he leaves to go on his first deployment. She clings back, the hands that held him as a baby gnarled and calloused.
Paul died two years before—a heart attack while he was on the boat. She had been back on shore, dealing with some vendors when it happened. Never even saw that last flower bloom across her chest.
“I’ll be okay, Mama,” Sam promises, and she wants to weep at the childish name he reverts to using. “You know me. I’m always careful.”
She holds his shoulders and shakes her head. “You gonna let the last thing you say to me before you fly away be a lie like that?”
He laughs, showing the gap in his teeth, so similar to the one Paul had. “Nah. I mean it! I’m gonna come back home to you and Sarah in one piece, I promise. After all—” and here he taps his temple, along the crown of flowers that had blossomed the night before, “—I still gotta figure out what my soulmate’s deal is, right?”
Darlene swallows around the lump in her throat. She looks at it, and is reminded all at once of the first time it appeared—how Paul had called to her and she had come running; the terror that had gripped them both, even though there had been no real danger to Sam.
And then she thinks of the ring of cypress branches around Sam’s shoulder, how she’d traced it after he was born, the pad of her finger covering the leaves completely. She thinks of a conversation with her sister back when she’d measured Sam’s age in weeks, about omens and superstitions, and what it meant for a child to be marked since the day he was born.
“You got lots of reasons to come back,” she says finally, squeezing Sam’s shoulder and ignoring the curious look he gives her. “You stay safe. I love you, you hear?”
“I love you too.”
He hugs her one last time, and then—then he’s leaving, and then he’s gone.
Darlene covers her mouth and closes her eyes, holding in her tears. She understands now, fully and finally, all the superstitions that her own mother held. How she would give anything—anything—for a sign to let her know her child will be okay.