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Anna had always loved flowers. Maybe that gives the wrong impression though. We’re not talking about little Anna, on her chubby little legs, wandering through a pocket park, picking flowers and keeping them for herself.
Little Anna, walking with her family, hadn’t kept the flowers she picked with her chubby little fingers. No, she had run off ahead to pick a daisy out of the ground or something, and then she had hurried back to beamingly present the flower to her big sister Elsa.
Elsa had taken the flower, of course, and Anna had taken her other hand and walked with her for a little while, until another bush or flower or tree had taken her fancy and she had hurried ahead again. And then come back with a new flower to give to Elsa.
As Anna got older, she’d kept her fascination with flowers, had kept her desire to give them to Elsa. On her skinny, knobbly legs, a child Anna had cooed and picked a bunch of flowers as she walked, and given the bouquet to Elsa. Or she had sat near the playground and made a little crown, which she delicately placed on her sister’s pale locks.
When their parents would fight, when an argument would descend to a screaming match, the kids would go across the road and a little down the street to an empty lot where a new how had just never been built.
But, when their parents split up, there was no going to a park to pick flowers together. There were no little bouquets with the dirt still clinging for Elsa. The parents got one child each.
Their father moved himself and Elsa back to Sydney, where some of his family was, and the only concession he gave to the fact that she had a sister was to give Anna his new address, so that she could send flowers.
Their mother helped Anna send the occasional bouquets to Sydney, helped her order them locally when she got a little older, so that they would survive the trip. In return, they got little thankyou notes from Elsa. They got pleas to see them, to come back.
But it seemed like there was nothing to be done.
Over the years, the frequency of the bouquets Anna ordered her distant sister dwindled, though she never did stop. After a few years, Anna only sent flowers on Elsa’s birthday and on christmas.
It got to a point where she didn’t even think about it, didn’t even think if Elsa would like the flowers, or what sort to get her really. She would order some cheap bouquet from the online store of a florist in Sydney and input Elsa’s address and be done.
Until a few days later when the thank you note would arrive in the mail. The notes, too, got less complicated, had less thought put into them. Elsa didn’t relate details of her life anymore, she just sent ‘thank you for the flowers’.
Except that eventually, the routine changed. Anna was fifteen and she was vaguely scrolling through another florist’s website on the day before Elsa’s eighteenth birthday.
Iduna, their mother, had suggested maybe Anna wanted to give this bouquet a little more thought. An eighteenth birthday was pretty important, after all. It was the birthday that claimed you were now an adult.
Anna gave her selection a little more thought, but not by much. She couldn’t remember Elsa having a particular favourite flower of course, she’d just take everything Anna handed her.
With a shrug, Anna ordered a bouquet that was slightly more expensive than she usually went for, then went to get her mum to pay for it. Then she forgot about it, basically.
A few days later, there was a postcard addressed to Anna in the mail. It had a picture of Flinders Street Station on the face and on the back was the message ‘thanks, see you soon’.
Wouldn’t it just be a lovely coincidence if Anna had looked up from where she was reading the card to see Elsa, wandering down the street toward her? It would have been so lovely.
That didn’t happen, of course.
Anna frowned down at the postcard, looked up as if checking for hidden cameras, and went back inside. She was on holiday, Iduna was at work. And, realistically, there were a few things that needed to be tied up on Elsa’s end of things.
If she’d left at the same time as she’d posted the card, Elsa probably would have beaten it to Anna’s house. As it was, she didn’t miss it by all that much. Even though she could have, theoretically, done it in Melbourne, Elsa had waited in Sydney to get a Visa for her bank account, which she couldn’t have until she was eighteen, and for an 18+ Keycard.
Neither of those things took very long, but it meant that Elsa left Sydney on the same day that the postcard arrived in Melbourne. And the problem was that the train from Sydney to Melbourne took about twelve hours.
So it was about nine in the evening when Iduna and Anna, lounging about the living room, heard a knock at the front door. They looked at each other, as if to ask the other if she were expecting anyone, which Iduna was not.
‘Oh,’ Anna said. ‘I didn’t…’ She handed over the postcard, shrugged, and hurried for the door, which was not far.
And there, outside, was a tall woman with white-blonde hair, mostly obscured by a massive bouquet of roses. ‘Um… Anna?’ Her voice was not strong. ‘These are for you.’