The Language of Flowers

  Sunlight illuminated his profile. Circling, I captured his face in light and shadow. The camera clicked as I walked around him, starting at the top of his head and following his hairline down to the collar of his shirt. I rolled up his sleeves and photographed his forearms, the tight, protruding muscle in his wrist, his thick fingers and dirt-filled fingernails. I took off his shoes and shot the bottoms of his feet. When I ran out of film, I took off the camera.

  I unbuttoned my blouse and took it off, too.

  The bumps disappeared from the skin of my arms and appeared on Grant’s. I climbed onto the table.

  He folded his feet under him and moved to face me, then pressed his hands flat onto my stomach and held them there. His fingers lifted and fell as I breathed deep into my belly. My own fingers, clutching the edge of the table, were white.

  He moved his hands around my back to my bra, unhooking it gently, one clasp at a time. Peeling my fingers from the tabletop, he slipped the bra off one arm, then the other. I reached for the table’s edge again, squeezing as if trying to maintain balance on a rocking boat.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He lay me down on the table, supporting my head as it eased onto the hard surface. He removed the rest of my clothes, and then his own.

  Lying down next to me, Grant began to kiss my face. I turned my head toward the window, afraid I would be repulsed by his nudity. The only adult I had ever seen naked was Mother Ruby, and the image of her wet, hanging flesh had plagued me for months afterward.

  Grant’s fingers traveled my body with skill. He took as much care with me as he would have with a delicate sapling, and I tried to focus on his touch, the warmth he pulled to the surface of my skin, the weaving of our bodies together. He wanted me, and I knew he had wanted me for a long time. But directly below the window was the rose garden, and even as my body responded to his touch, my mind seemed to hover among the plants, thirty feet below. Grant moved on top of me. The rose garden was at the height of its bloom, the flowers open and heavy. I counted and categorized the individual bushes, starting with the reds, navigating up and down the rows: sixteen, from light red to deep scarlet. Grant’s mouth traveled to my ear, open and wet. There were twenty-two pink rosebushes, if I didn’t count the corals separately. Grant began to move quickly, his own pleasure eclipsing his attentiveness, and I closed my eyes at the pain. Behind my eyelids were the white roses, uncounted. I held my breath until Grant rolled off me.

  My body turned to face the window, and Grant pressed himself against my back. His heart beat against my spine. I counted the white roses bursting under the setting sun, thirty-seven in all, more than any other color.

  I inhaled deeply, my lungs filling with disappointment.

  16.

  For three frantic days we left messages for Catherine: Aloe, grief, taped in a row of spikes like a picket fence to her kitchen window; blood-red pansies, think of me, clustered in a tiny glass jar on her front porch; boughs of cypress, mourning, woven between the metal bars of the wrought-iron gate.

  But Catherine made no sign of having received them, and gave Elizabeth nothing in return.

  17.

  My clothes migrated to Grant’s in the trunk of my car. My shoes followed, then my brown blanket, and finally my blue box. It was everything I owned. I still paid rent to Natalya on the first of every month, and occasionally took naps on my white fur floor after work, but as the summer progressed, I spent less and less time in the blue room.

  My flower dictionary was complete. The photograph I had taken of Catherine’s drawing finished my set, and Elizabeth’s flower dictionary and field guide retired to a dusty existence on the top of Grant’s bookshelf. The blue and orange photo boxes sat side by side on the middle shelf, Grant’s alphabetized by flower and mine by meaning. Two or three times a week Grant or I would set the dinner table with flowers or leave a stem of stock on the other’s pillow, but we rarely consulted the boxes. We had both memorized every card, and we didn’t argue over the definitions as we had when we first met.

  We didn’t argue over anything, really. My life with Grant was peaceful and quiet, and I might have enjoyed it if not for the overwhelming certainty that it was all about to end. The rhythm of our life together reminded me of the months before my adoption proceeding, when Elizabeth and I disked the rows, marked my calendar, and enjoyed being together. That summer with Elizabeth had been too hot; this one with Grant, the same. The water tower, lacking air-conditioning, filled up with heat as if with liquid, and Grant and I spread out on different floors in the evenings and tried to breathe. The humidity felt like the weight of what went unspoken between us, and more than once I went to him with the intention of confessing my past.

  But I couldn’t do it. Grant loved me. His love was quiet but consistent, and with each declaration I felt myself swoon with both pleasure and guilt. I did not deserve his love. If he knew the truth, he would hate me. I was surer of this than I had ever been of anything in my life. My affection for him only made it worse. We had grown increasingly close, kissing in greeting and parting, even sleeping beside each other. He stroked my hair and cheeks and breasts, at the dinner table and on all three floors of the water tower. We made love frequently, and I even learned to enjoy it. But in the moments afterward, when we lay naked beside each other, he wore an expression of open fulfillment that I knew, without looking, my face did not mirror. I felt my true, unworthy self to be far away from his clutching grasp, hidden from his admiring gaze. My feelings for Grant, too, felt hidden, and I began to imagine a sphere surrounding my heart, as hard and polished as the surface of a hazelnut, impenetrable.

  Grant did not appear to notice my detachment in the midst of our connection. If he did, on occasion, feel my heart to be an unreachable object, he never mentioned it to me. We came together and parted ways in a predictable rhythm. Weekdays, our paths crossed for an hour in the evenings. Saturdays, we spent much of the day together, carpooling to work in the early morning and stopping afterward to eat or hike or watch the kites in the Marina. Sundays, we kept our distance. I did not accompany Grant to the farmers’ market and was always gone when he returned, eating lunch in a restaurant by the bay or walking across the bridge alone.

  I always returned to the water tower in time for dinner on Sundays, to take advantage of Grant’s most creative and complicated meals. He spent the entire afternoon cooking. When I walked through the door, there would be appetizers on the kitchen table. The finger food, he learned, would keep me from pestering him until the entrée was complete, often not until well past nine o’clock.

  That summer Grant moved beyond the cookbooks—which he carried upstairs and tucked under the love seat—and he began inventing every meal from scratch. He felt less pressure, he told me, if he wasn’t comparing his results to the photograph beside the recipe. And he must have known his meals were better than anything he could have created from a cookbook, better than anything I had eaten since leaving Elizabeth’s.

  On the second Sunday in July I drove home from a long walk down Ocean Beach hungrier than usual, my stomach turning from emptiness and nerves. I had walked past The Gathering House, and the young women in the window, none of whom I knew, made my stomach ache. Their lives would not turn out as they dreamed. I understood this, even as mine had turned out far better than I would have hoped, had I permitted myself to hope for anything at all. I was the exception, I knew, and even my own good fortune I believed to be a fleeting moment in what would be a long, hard, solitary life.

  Grant had set out slices of a baguette stuffed with something—cream cheese, maybe, or something fancier—with bits of chopped herbs, olives, and capers. The appetizers were arranged in rows on a square ceramic plate. I started at one end and went up and down the rows, popping each circle into my mouth whole. I looked up before I ate the last one, and Grant was watching with a smile.

  “You want it?” I asked, pointing to the last slice.

  “No. You’ll nee
d the sustenance to wait for the next course; the rib roast still has forty-five minutes.”

  I ate the last one and groaned. “I don’t think I can wait that long.”

  Grant sighed. “You say that every week, and then every week, after you’ve eaten, you tell me it was worth the wait.”

  “I do not,” I said, but he was right. My stomach digested the cheese with a loud churning. I folded over onto the table and closed my eyes.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded. Grant prepared the rest of the meal in silence while I dozed at the table. When I opened my eyes, the steaming steak was beside me. I rolled onto one elbow.

  “Will you cut it for me?” I asked.

  “Sure.” Grant rubbed my head, neck, and shoulders, and kissed my forehead before picking up the knife and slicing my meat. It was red in the middle, the way I liked it, and crusted with something peppery. The sauce was a combination of exotic mushrooms, red potatoes, and turnips. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.

  My stomach, however, did not agree with my mouth’s assessment of the quality. I had taken only a few bites when I knew, without a doubt, that my dinner would not stay within the confines of my stomach. Flying up the stairs, I locked myself in the bathroom and expelled the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl. I flushed and turned on the water in the sink and in the shower, hoping the noise would drown out the series of retches that followed.

  Grant knocked on the door, but I didn’t open it. He went away and came back a half-hour later, but I still didn’t answer his soft tapping. There wasn’t enough room to lie flat on the bathroom floor, so I lay folded over on my side, my legs pressed against the door and my back curved against the ceramic tub. My fingers traced the white hexagonal tile and drew patterns of six-petaled flowers. It was after eleven when I emerged, the shapes of the tile etched deeply into the flesh of my cheek and exposed shoulder.

  I hoped Grant would be asleep, but he was sitting upright on the love seat, all the lights turned out.

  “Was it the food?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what it was, but it definitely wasn’t the food. “The roast was incredible.”

  I sat down beside him, our thighs touching through matching dark denim. “Then what?” he asked.

  “I’m sick,” I said, but I avoided his eyes. I didn’t believe that to be the truth, and I knew he didn’t, either. As a child I had vomited from closeness: from touch or the threat of touch. Foster parents towering over me, shoving my uncooperative arms into a jacket, teachers ripping hats from my head, their fingers lingering too long on my tangled hair, had forced my stomach into uncontrollable convulsions. Once, shortly after moving in with Elizabeth, we had eaten a picnic dinner in the garden. I had overeaten, as I did at every meal that fall, and, unable to move, I had allowed Elizabeth to pick me up and carry me back to the house. She had barely set me down on the porch before I threw up over the side of the railing.

  I looked at Grant. He had been touching me, intimately, for months. Without being aware of it, I had been waiting for this to happen.

  “I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said. “I don’t want you to catch it.”

  “I won’t,” Grant said, taking my hand and pulling me up. “Come upstairs.”

  I did as he asked.

  18.

  The morning of my adoption hearing, I awoke at sunrise.

  Sitting up, I turned and leaned against the cool wall, the comforter pulled up to my chin. Light traveled lazily through the window, the soft beam illuminating my dresser and open closet door. In many ways, the room looked the same as it had when I’d entered a year before; it contained the same furniture, the same white comforter, and the same stacks of clothes, many of which I had yet to grow into. But all around me were signs of the girl I had become: library books stacked on the desk with titles such as Botany on Your Plate and The Ultimate Book of Mix-It-Yourself Concoctions for Your Garden, a photograph of Elizabeth and me that Carlos had taken, our bright pink winter cheeks pressed close together, and a wastepaper basket full of flower drawings for Elizabeth, none of which I’d deemed good enough to give her. It was my last morning in the room as a foster child, and I gazed around, as I always did—surveying objects as if they belonged to someone else. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I will feel different. I will wake up, look around, and see a room—a life—that is mine and will never be taken away from me.

  Moving quietly down the hall, I listened for Elizabeth. Though it was early, I was surprised to hear the house quiet, to see her bedroom door shut. I had imagined her to be as sleepless as I was. The day before had been my birthday, and though Elizabeth had made cupcakes and we’d frosted them with thick purple roses, the anticipation of my adoption had mostly eclipsed the celebration of the day. After dinner, we’d distractedly licked off the frosting, our gazes shifting out the window, waiting for the sky to darken so the new day would begin. Lying awake in bed, my body wrapped in the long floral nightgown Elizabeth had given me as a present, I’d been more excited than on every Christmas Eve of my life put together. Perhaps Elizabeth had been unable to sleep, too, I thought, and was sleeping in because she’d been up half the night.

  In the bathroom was the dress we’d purchased together, hanging in plastic on a hook behind the door. I washed my face and brushed my hair before pulling it off the hanger.

  It was hard to put on without Elizabeth, but I was determined. I wanted to see the look on her face when she awoke to find me dressed and sitting at the kitchen table, waiting. I wanted her to understand that I was ready. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I pulled the dress on backward, zipped it up, and then twisted it around until the zipper ran the length of my spine. The ribbons were thick and hard to tie. After multiple failed attempts, I settled for a loose square knot at the back of my neck. Around my waist I did the same.

  When I went downstairs, the clock on the stove read eight o’clock. Opening the refrigerator, I scanned the full shelves and chose a small container of vanilla yogurt. I peeled back the seal, poking at a layer of thick cream with a spoon, but I wasn’t hungry. I was nervous. Elizabeth had never slept in, not once in the year I’d been with her. For a full hour I sat at the kitchen table, my eyes on the clock.

  At nine o’clock, I climbed the stairs and knocked on her bedroom door. The knot around my neck had loosened, and the front of the dress hung too low, exposing my protruding chest bone. I didn’t look as glamorous, I knew, as I had in the store. When Elizabeth did not answer or call out, I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. Pushing the door quietly, I stepped inside.

  Elizabeth’s eyes were open. She stared at the ceiling, and she did not shift her gaze when I crossed the room to stand by the side of the bed.

  “It’s nine o’clock,” I said.

  Elizabeth did not respond.

  “We have to see the judge at eleven. Shouldn’t we go, to get checked in and everything?”

  Still, she did not acknowledge my presence. I stepped closer and leaned in, thinking she might be asleep, even though her eyes were wide open. I’d had a roommate who slept that way once, and every night I waited for her to fall asleep first, so that I could shut her eyelids. I didn’t like the feeling of being watched.

  I started to shake Elizabeth, gently. She did not blink. “Elizabeth?” I said, my voice a whisper. “It’s Victoria.” I pressed my fingers into the space between her collarbones. Her pulse beat calmly, seeming to tick away the seconds until my adoption. Stand up, I pleaded silently. The thought of missing our court date, of having it postponed for a month, a week, even just another day, was incomprehensible. I began to shake her, my hands clutching her shoulders. Her head wobbled loosely on her neck.

  “Stop,” she said finally, the word barely audible.

  “Aren’t you getting up?” I asked, my voice breaking. “Aren’t we going to court?”

  Tears leaked out of Elizabeth’s eyes, and she did not lift her hand to wipe them. I followed their path with my eyes and saw t
he pillow was already wet where they landed. “I can’t,” she said.

  “What do you mean? I can help you.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t.” She was quiet a long time. I leaned so close that when she finally spoke again, her lips grazed my ear. “This isn’t a family,” she said softly. “Just me and you alone in this house. It isn’t a family. I can’t do this to you.”

  I sat down on the foot of the bed. Elizabeth didn’t move, didn’t speak again, but I sat where I was for the rest of the morning, waiting.

  19.

  The nausea didn’t go away, but I learned to hide it. I vomited in the shower every morning until the drain started to clog. After that, I didn’t shower, racing to my car before Grant got up, blaming Renata and an impossible summer wedding schedule. The feeling followed me throughout the day. The scent of the flowers at work made it worse, but the coolness of the walk-in brought relief. I took afternoon naps among the chilled buckets.

  I don’t know how long things would have continued this way if Renata hadn’t confronted me in the walk-in. The heavy metal door closed behind her with a loud click, and she toed me awake in the darkness.

  “You think I don’t know you’re pregnant?” she asked.

  My heart beat against its nut-hard shell. Pregnant. The word floated in the room between us, unwanted. I wished it would slip under the door, onto the street, and into the body of someone who wanted it. There were plenty of women dreaming of motherhood, but neither Renata nor I was one of them.

  “I’m not,” I said, but without as much force as I’d intended.

  “You can stay in denial as long as you want, but I’m getting you health insurance before that baby is full term and you’re standing there birthing it in front of my store.”

  I didn’t move. Renata went to kick me again, but it turned into a gentle nudge on what I now noticed was my fattening middle.