The Language of Flowers (8 page)

She turned when she saw me, her profile sharp in the mirror.

“How did you sleep?” she asked.

I stepped forward, holding my hands so close to her face she had to lean back to focus.

She inhaled sharply. “Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

I shrugged.

Elizabeth sighed. “Well, give me your hands. I don’t want them getting infected.”

She patted her lap for me to sit down, but I took a step backward. Retrieving a small bowl from underneath the sink, Elizabeth filled it with peroxide and reached for my hands, dipping them one at a time. She watched my expression for pain, but I clenched my teeth and held my face perfectly still. My wounds turned white and frothy. Elizabeth emptied the basin, refilled it, and submerged my hands again.

“I’m not going to let you get away with anything here,” Elizabeth said. “But if you couldn’t find the spoon after a true attempt, I would have accepted a genuine apology.” Her voice was stern and direct. In the sleepy haze of early morning, I wondered if I had imagined her gentle tone of the night before.

She dipped my hands in again, watching the tiny white bubbles form for the third time. Running my hands under cold water, she patted them dry with a clean white towel. The small punctures looked deep and empty, as if the peroxide had eaten away perfect circles of flesh. With white gauze, she began wrapping my wrist, working her way slowly toward my fingers.

“You know,” Elizabeth said, “when I was six, I learned the only way to get my mother out of bed was to act out. I behaved atrociously, just so that she would get up and punish me. When I was ten, she tired of it and sent me to boarding school. The same won’t happen with you. Nothing you could do would make me send you away. Nothing. So you can go on testing me—hurling my mother’s silver around the kitchen, if that’s what you have to do—but know that my response will always be the same: I will love you, and I will keep you. Okay?”

I looked at Elizabeth, my body tight with suspicion, my breath lost in the steamy bathroom. I didn’t understand her. Shoulders tense, her sentences sharp and clipped, she spoke with a formality I’d never encountered.
Yet behind her words was an inexplicable softness. Her touch, too, was different; the thorough way she cleaned my hands, without the heavy, silent burden in the actions of all my other foster mothers. I didn’t trust it.

Silence stretched between us. Elizabeth tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and looked deeply into my eyes for an answer.

“Okay,” I said finally, because I knew it was the fastest way to end the conversation and leave the heat of the small bathroom.

The corners of Elizabeth’s mouth turned up. “Come on, then,” she said. “It’s Sunday. On Sunday we go to the farmers’ market.”

She turned my body and led me back to my bedroom, where she slipped my gauze-wrapped hands out of my nightgown and into a white smocked sundress. Downstairs, she made scrambled eggs and fed me small bites on a spoon that looked identical to the one I’d launched across the room the night before. I chewed and swallowed, following directions, still trying to reconcile Elizabeth’s contrasting tones and unpredictable actions. She did not try to start a conversation over breakfast, just watched the eggs travel from the spoon into my mouth and down my throat. When she finished feeding me, she ate a small plate of eggs herself, washed and dried the dishes, and put them away.

“Ready?” she asked.

I shrugged.

Outside, we crossed the gravel, and she helped me into her ancient gray pickup. The aqua plastic upholstery peeled away from the piped edging, and there were no seat belts. The truck lurched down the driveway, dust and wind and exhaust whipping through the cab. Elizabeth drove less than a minute before turning in to what had been an empty parking lot when I had passed in Meredith’s car. It was now full of trucks and fruit stands, families wandering up and down the aisles.

Elizabeth went from stand to stand as if I wasn’t there, exchanging cash for heavy bags of produce: pink-and-white-striped beans, tan-colored pumpkins with long necks, purple potatoes mixed with yellow and red. When she was busy paying for a bag of nectarines, I stole a green grape off an overflowing table with my teeth.

“Please!” exclaimed a short, bearded man I hadn’t noticed. “Sample!
They’re delicious, perfectly ripe.” He tore off a bunch of grapes and placed them in my wrapped hands.

“Say thank you,” Elizabeth said, but my mouth was full of grapes.

Elizabeth bought three pounds of grapes, six nectarines, and a bag of dried apricots. On a bench facing a long, grassy field we sat together, and she held out a yellow plum a few inches from my lips. I leaned forward and ate it out of her hand, the juice dripping down my chin and onto my dress.

When only the pit was left, Elizabeth threw it into the field and gazed to the far side of the market.

“See the flower stand over there, the last one in line?” she asked me. I nodded. A teenager sat on the open bed of a pickup truck, his feet in heavy boots hanging above the blacktop. At a table in front of him, roses lay wrapped in tight clusters.

Elizabeth continued. “That’s my sister’s stand. See the boy? Almost a young man now, it seems. That’s my nephew, Grant. We’ve never met.”

“What?” I said, surprised. From Elizabeth’s bedtime story, I’d assumed the sisters were close. “Why not?”

“It’s a long story. We haven’t spoken in fifteen years, except to divide up the properties after my parents died. Catherine took the flower farm; I kept the vineyard.” The teenager jumped off the back of the truck and made change for a customer. Long brown hair fell in front of his face, and he pushed it away from his eyes before shaking hands with an old man. His pants were slightly too short, his long, thin limbs the only feature I could find to resemble Elizabeth from the distance at which we sat. He seemed to be alone running the flower stand, and I wondered why Catherine wasn’t there.

“The strange thing,” Elizabeth said, following the boy’s movements with her eyes, “is that today, for the first time in fifteen years, I miss her.”

The boy threw the last bunch of roses to a couple passing by, and Elizabeth turned to me, snaking her arm around my back and pulling me closer to her on the bench. I leaned away, but she dug her fingers into my side, holding me still.

On my chest bone, the mistletoe rested. I studied its irregular rise and fall
. Neither my heartbeat nor my breath had returned to normal since reading the stranger’s response in my palm.

I didn’t remember what I’d done with the buckets of yellow flowers. I must have done something, though, because by noon they were settled in the back of Renata’s truck, bouquets of sunshine rolling down the freeway to brighten someone’s near-winter wedding, and I had stretched out alone on top of the worktable. Renata had asked me to keep the shop open, but no one came in. It was usually closed on Sundays, and I kept the door unlocked but the light off. I wasn’t technically disobeying Renata, but I wasn’t exactly inviting business, either.

My forehead was wet with sweat even though the morning had been cold, and I was frozen in a state of fascination resembling terror. For years my message-laden flowers had been faithfully ignored, an aspect of my communication style that gave me comfort. Passion, connection, disagreement, or rejection: None of these was possible in a language that did not elicit a response. But the single sprig of mistletoe, if the giver did indeed understand its meaning, changed everything.

I tried to sedate myself with rationalizations of coincidence. Mistletoe was thought to be a romantic plant. He had visions of me tying it with a red ribbon to the wooden frame of his stall and positioning myself
underneath it for a kiss. He didn’t know me well enough to know I would never permit such closeness. But even though we had exchanged only a handful of words, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he somehow did know me well enough to understand that a kiss was out of the question.

I would have to respond. If he presented me with a second flower, the meaning again perfectly matched, I would no longer be able to explain away his understanding.

My legs trembled as I climbed off the table and wobbled into the walk-in. Settling among the cool flowers, I debated my reply.

Renata returned and began ordering me around the walk-in. There was another job, a small one, to be delivered down the hill. She retrieved a blue ceramic vase while I gathered the leftover yellow flowers.

“How much?” I asked, because price guided our arrangements.

“It doesn’t matter. But tell her she can’t keep the vase. I’ll stop by for it next week.” Renata slid a scrap of paper toward me as I finished the arrangement, an address scrawled in the center. “You take it,” she said.

On my way out the door, my arms around the heavy vase, I felt Renata slip something into my backpack. I turned. She had locked the door behind me and was heading toward her truck.

“I don’t need you again until next Saturday, four a.m.,” she said, waving goodbye. “Be prepared for a long day, no breaks.”

I nodded, watching her get in her truck and drive away. When she turned the corner, I set down the vase and opened my backpack. Inside was an envelope with four pressed hundred-dollar bills. A note read:
Payment for your first two weeks. Don’t disappoint me
. I folded the cash and put it in my bra.

The address led me to what looked like an office building, only two blocks down the hill from Bloom. The glass windows of the storefront were dark. I couldn’t tell whether there was a business inside, closed on Sundays, or whether there was no business at all. When I knocked, the doors rattled on metal hinges.

A window opened on the second floor, and a disembodied voice
floated down. “I’ll be a minute. Don’t go anywhere.” I sat down on the curb, the flowers at my feet.

Ten minutes later, the door opened slowly, and the woman who opened it was not out of breath. She reached for the flowers.

“Victoria,” she said. “I’m Natalya.” She resembled Renata with her light milky skin and water-colored eyes, but her hair was acetaminophen-pink and dripping wet.

I handed her the flowers and turned to go.

“Change your mind?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

Natalya stepped back as if to let me through the door. “About the room. I told Renata to tell you it’s literally a closet, but she seemed to think you wouldn’t mind.”

A room. The cash in my backpack. Renata had staged an intervention, and all without letting on that she understood. My instinct was to walk away from the open door, but the reality of having nowhere to walk to was insurmountable.

“How much?” I asked, stepping backward.

“Two hundred a month. You’ll see why.”

I looked up and down the street, unsure what to say. When I turned back, Natalya had already walked through the empty storefront and was climbing steep stairs.

“Come or don’t,” she called, “but either way, close the door.”

I took a deep breath, exhaling through floppy lips, and stepped inside.

The one-bedroom apartment above the empty storefront looked as if it was designed to be office space, with thin commercial carpet over cement floors and a kitchen with a long bar and short refrigerator. The window over the kitchen was open and framed a view of a flat roof.

“I can’t legally rent this room,” Natalya said, pointing to a half-door positioned on the wall near the living room couch. It looked as if it would open to a crawl space or a small water heater. Natalya handed me a key chain with six keys, all numbered. “Number one,” she said.

Kneeling, I opened the low door and crawled inside. The room was too dark to examine. “Stand up,” Natalya said. “There’s a string hanging
down from the light.” I grasped around in the darkness until I felt the string on my face. I pulled.

A bare lightbulb illuminated an empty blue room, blue as a painter’s palette on a boat in the middle of the sea, bright as illuminated water. The carpet was white fur and almost looked alive. There were no windows. The room was big enough to lie down in but not big enough for a bed or a dresser, even if I could have found one that fit through the small door. One of the walls held a row of brass locks, and when I looked closer, I saw that the locks bridged the space between the wall and a full-size door. Light seeped through the seam. Natalya was right; the room was literally a closet.

“My last roommate was a paranoid schizophrenic,” Natalya said, gesturing to the deadbolts. “The door opens into my room. Those are the keys to all the locks.” She pointed to the key ring in my hand.

“I’ll take it,” I said. I reached out into the living room and set two hundred-dollar bills on the arm of the couch. Then I closed the half-door, turned the lock, and lay down in the center of the blue.

The sky felt bigger at Elizabeth’s. It curved from one low horizon line
to the other, the blue seeping into the dry hills and dulling the yellow of summer. In the corrugated roof of the garden shed it reflected, and in the round metal trailer, and in the pupils of Elizabeth’s eyes. The color felt inescapable and as heavy as her sudden silence.

I sat in a lawn chair on a garden path, waiting for Elizabeth to return from the kitchen. Earlier that morning, she’d made peach-banana pancakes, and I’d eaten until I’d folded onto the kitchen table, unable to move. But rather than her usual stream of questions, some of which I answered, some of which I ignored, she’d been eerily quiet. She’d only picked at her food, pulling out the grilled peaches and leaving the rest of her pancake in a pool of syrup.

My eyes closed, I’d listened to the squeak of Elizabeth’s chair pushing back, her socked feet crossing the wood floor, and our stacked plates settling into the kitchen sink. But instead of the sound of running water that usually followed, I’d heard an unexpected clicking noise, and when I looked up, Elizabeth was leaning against the kitchen cabinets, her attention on an old-fashioned telephone. She twirled the spiraling cord that attached the receiver to the base and then stared at the dial as if she’d forgotten the number. After a time, she began to spin the dial again, but when she reached the sixth number she paused, curled in her
lips, and hung up forcefully. The sound aggravated my full stomach, and I’d sighed.