The Secret Book of Flora Lea

by Patti Callahan Henry

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going… MARY OLIVER

Not very long ago and not very far away, there once was and still is an invisible place right here with us. And if you are born knowing, you will find your way through the woodlands to the shimmering doors that lead to the land made just and exactly for you. HAZEL MERSEY LINDEN, 1939

Loss and gain. As nearly every myth told: birth, death, rebirth. One thing dying, another born.

She could always tell when a book had been saved for money or for love, and this was love.

The girls were waiting for their mum to come home from her shift at the Royal Voluntary Service. Mum absolutely would not, she’d told her daughters, allow herself to be useless when Britain needed her.

Every morning Hazel awoke safe and sound, yet she wondered, would this be the day? Would this be the day they prepared for at school, the day that posters on London lampposts warned about, the day when they sent the children away to safety, far from their mums and their flats and everything they knew and loved? It was called Operation Pied Piper, a nursery rhyme name for a horror of an idea.

Hazel had grabbed the edges of Papa’s stiff uniform’s sleeve, and four-year-old Flora had clung to his left leg, so that if he walked he’d drag them out the front door and they’d bounce down the marble steps to the rain-slick pavement facing the garden square.

Papa had crouched down and lifted Flora, the only way she’d release his leg, and she’d nuzzled his neck. His thick black hair, a blessing of the Irish he’d told them, hidden beneath his olive-and-brown cap.

Papa had pried Flora’s arms from his neck and kissed her cheeks before handing her to Mum. “I promise to return to my girls.” He’d looked to Mum with a gaze so fiercely desperate that Hazel couldn’t help but hope that someday a man would look at her the same.

Now Papa was gone for good and their knapsacks were packed and waiting, gas masks hanging from the straps like snout-nose monsters. They’d been fitted at school—Hazel’s dark black and Flora with the preschool version, which was a red-and-blue Mickey Mouse mask designed to keep young children from being frightened of them, but it didn’t work. They were scary.

Flora was so sweet with her wild blond curls, large brown eyes, and those lush eyelashes that almost touched her eyebrows. A sprinkle of freckles spread across her nose and cheeks. And the distinctive birthmark on the inside of her arm, two inches from the inside of her wrist. Hazel said the brown marks looked like rabbit ears; Mum said butterfly wings and Papa said angel wings. Mum once told Hazel that her grandmother had the same mark, and that it was an ancestral gift, not a mistake.

Stories seemed to be Flora’s pacifier, the way that Hazel could get her little sister to sit still, to stop thrumming with the live-wire energy that kept her restless. This was the answer to Flora’s distress and sleepless nights, her startling at every noise and siren—stories. This was how to get through the fear.

Naming was not to be taken lightly. Flora and Hazel and their mum, Camellia—they’d all been named after plants. Lea and Mersey, their middle names, born of their parents’ childhood rivers. “Don’t forget,” Papa had told his daughters, “you are of earth and water. Both of you. Also of love. Our love.” And then he’d pulled Mum to him so tightly that she’d blushed and swatted him away. The name of their new land came to Hazel right as prayer, a name that already existed, that had waited for them, a name of secrets, of the earth and its rivers, just like the two sisters. “It’s called Whisperwood and the River of Stars.”

Thank goodness it was Barnaby, with his wind-whipped black hair under his green felt cap, his kind blue-gray eyes, his cheery voice and sharp cheekbones, and the silver scar that ran along his left cheek that told a story of a bomb on his childhood street in Hampstead Heath. His parents had refused to send him away, taking their chances.

She tried to save her own life with words and she never was quite able to do so,

“I thought I was buying this for my father’s collection, but instead I was buying it for you.”

Hazel wondered if it was too late, if the path to Flora was long overgrown.

Keep your eyes open for hidden doorways! They’re everywhere, but visible only to those who are worthy. And

“I am marrying Tennyson next month. A small affair in his back garden with only family. A heart,” she told Hazel, “can hold much joy and great sorrow at the same time. It’s a mystery and it’s also true.”

“You are my fairy tale. You always have been,” he said.

haven’t let myself truly live the way I want, or love,

A heaviness Hazel had been carrying well over half her life lifted from between her shoulder blades, from the crevices of her heart.

“You didn’t give up, Hazel. You never surrendered to anyone else’s idea of who and what you should believe and do.”

“I don’t know, but I do know this—I believe I’ve always searched for the feeling I had with us.”

“We wrote a better ending.” “And so much more.”

“And you are one of my favorite stories.”