The Language of Flowers

  She hadn’t needed to question my ability, and she knew that now. She kissed my forehead, and I rocked toward her on my toes. For the first time in months, I felt wanted, cherished. Elizabeth sat down on the hillside and pulled me to her. We sat together in silence, watching the moon rise.

  Our required focus on the approaching harvest had dulled Grant’s warning. There had been no time to think about Catherine or her threat. Now, surrounded by ripe grapes, our veins pounding with love for each other and for the vineyard, his words returned. I felt a rush of nerves.

  “Are you worried?” I asked.

  Elizabeth was quiet, her expression thoughtful. Before she spoke, she turned and brushed my bangs away from my eyes, stroking the side of my face. She nodded. “About Catherine, yes,” she said. “Not the vineyard.”

  “Why?”

  “My sister isn’t well,” she said. “Grant didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. He was terrified. You’d understand if you’d seen his face, and also if you knew my mother.”

  “What do you mean?” I didn’t understand how Elizabeth’s dead mother had anything to do with Catherine’s present condition, or the fear in Grant’s face.

  “My mother was mentally ill,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t even see her for the last few years of her life. I was too afraid. She didn’t remember me, or she’d remember some awful thing I’d done and blame me for her illness. It was horrific, but I shouldn’t have just left her alone, left Catherine with the burden.”

  “What could you have done?” I asked.

  “I could have cared for her. It’s too late now, obviously. She passed away almost a decade ago. But I can still care for my sister—even if she doesn’t want me to. I’ve already talked to Grant about it, and he agrees that it’s a good idea.”

  “What?” I was shocked. Elizabeth and I had tasted grapes twelve hours a day for a week. I couldn’t imagine when she’d had time to talk to Grant.

  “He needs us, Victoria, and Catherine does, too. Their house is almost as big as ours—there’ll be plenty of room for all of us.” I shook my head back and forth slowly, and then picked up speed as what she was suggesting sank in. My hair flapped around my ears and hit my nose. She wanted us to move in with Catherine. She wanted me to live with, help care for, the woman who had ruined my life.

  “No,” I said, jumping up and away from Elizabeth. “You can go, but I won’t.”

  When I looked at her, she turned away, and my words hung in the air between us.

  6.

  I wanted Elizabeth.

  I wanted her to hold me as she had among the vines, clean my sweat-drenched face and shoulders with the same thorough, gentle touch she had used to clean my thorn-punctured palms. I wanted her to wrap me in gauze and carry me to breakfast and tell me not to climb trees.

  But she was unreachable.

  And even if I did somehow reach her, she wouldn’t come.

  Without warning, I threw up into the sink and gasped for air. There wasn’t any time to breathe. The contractions hit me like a wall of water, and I was sure that I would drown. Picking up the phone, I dialed the number for Bloom. Renata answered. Through my desperate gasping, I heard her voice register understanding. She slammed down the phone.

  Minutes later she was in the living room. I had crawled back into the blue room on all fours, my feet sticking out the half-door. “I’m glad you called,” Renata said. I drew my feet into the room until I was curled into a ball on my side. When Renata tried to peek in, I closed the door in her face.

  “Call your mother,” I said. “She has to come get this baby out of me.”

  “I already did,” Renata said, “and she was nearby. Probably on purpose. She has premonitions about these things. She’ll be here any minute.”

  I screamed and rolled over onto my hands and knees.

  Without hearing her enter, Mother Ruby was there, undressing me. Her hands were all over my body, inside and out, but I didn’t care. She would get the baby out. Whatever she had to do, I was ready. If she’d produced a knife to slice me open on the spot, I wouldn’t have looked away.

  Reaching for me, she held a paper cup and straw to my lips. I sipped something cold and sweet. Afterward, she wiped the corners of my mouth with a cloth.

  “Please,” I said, “please. Whatever you have to do. Just get it out.”

  “You’re doing it,” she said. “You’re the only one that can get this baby out.”

  The blue room was on fire. Water is not supposed to be flammable, but there I was, drowning and burning simultaneously. I could not breathe; I could not see. There was no air; there was no exit.

  “Please,” I said, my voice breaking.

  Mother Ruby crouched down, her eyes level with mine, our foreheads touching. She placed my arms around her shoulders, and I moved from knees to feet as if she might pull me out of the blazing water, but she didn’t move. We were low to the ground, and she was listening.

  “The baby’s coming,” she said. “You’re bringing her here. Only you can do it.”

  It was right then that I understood what she was telling me. I started to cry, my moaning wails remorseful. This time, there was no escape. I could not turn away, could not leave without accepting what I had done. There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain.

  Finally, my body surrendered. I stopped fighting, and the baby began to move—slowly, excruciatingly—down the birth canal and into Mother Ruby’s waiting arms.

  7.

  It was a girl. She was born at noon, just six hours after my water broke. It felt like six days, and if Mother Ruby had told me it had been six years, I would have believed her. I emerged from the birth with a sense of peaceful exultation, and the smile that greeted me in the bathroom mirror hours later did not belong to the angry, hateful child who transported buckets of thistle from roadside ditches. I was a woman, a mother.

  Mother Ruby said it was a perfect birth and a perfect baby, and she told me I would be a perfect mother. She bathed her while Renata went to the store for diapers, and then placed the warm bundle in my arms for the first time. I expected her to be asleep, but she wasn’t. Her eyes were open, taking in my tired face, short hair, and pale skin. Her face twitched into what looked like a squinty smile, and in her wordless expression I saw gratitude, and relief, and trust. I wanted, desperately, not to disappoint her.

  Mother Ruby lifted my shirt, cupped my breast, and pressed the baby’s face against my uplifted skin. The baby opened her mouth and began to suck.

  “Perfect,” Mother Ruby said again.

  She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.

  “Does she have a name?” Renata asked when she returned.

  “I don’t know,” I said, stroking the baby’s fuzzy ear as she continued to suck. I hadn’t ever thought about it. “I don’t know her yet.”

  But I would. I would keep her, and raise her, and love her, even if she had to teach me how to do it. Holding my own daughter in my arms, only hours old, I felt that everything in the world that had been so far out of my reach was now possible.

  The feeling stayed with me for exactly a week.

  Mother Ruby stayed until almost midnight and returned early the next morning. In the eight hours I spent alone with the baby, I listened to her breathing, counted her heartbeats, and watched her fingers stretch open and close into fists. I smelled her skin, her saliva, and the oily white cream that had resisted Mother Ruby’s washcloth and nestled in the creases of her arms and legs. Rubbing every inch of her body, my own fingers became slick with the th
ick residue.

  Mother Ruby had told me the baby would sleep for six or more hours the first night, exhausted from the birth. It’s the first gift that a child gives its mother, she had told me before she left. Not the last. Take it, and sleep. I tried to sleep, but my mind was full of wonder at the existence of a child, a child who had not existed in the world only the day before, a child whose life had come from within my own body. Watching my baby sleep, I understood that she was safe, and that she knew it. I felt a rush of adrenaline at this simple accomplishment. The next morning, when I heard Mother Ruby fit a key into the downstairs lock, I hadn’t slept for even a moment.

  Mother Ruby pulled her great birthing bag up the steps and unzipped it at the door of the blue room. The baby was awake and nursing. When she pulled away from my breast, Mother Ruby listened to her heart and slipped her into a cloth sling with a metal spring that was somehow also a scale. She exclaimed at the ounces the baby had gained—unusual, she said, in the first twenty-four hours. The baby whimpered and began to suck air. Mother Ruby pressed her against my other breast, checking the baby’s latch with her index finger.

  “Keep eating, big girl,” she said.

  We both watched the baby nurse, her eyes closed, temples beating. It was the last thing in the world I had ever expected to do, breast-feed a baby. But Mother Ruby insisted it was what was best for us both; that the baby would thrive and we would bond and my body would regain its shape. Mother Ruby was proud, and told me so two or three times an hour. Not all mothers have the patience, she said, or the selflessness, but she knew I would. I had not disappointed her.

  I was proud, too. Proud that my body was producing everything my baby needed, and proud that I could tolerate the relentless clamping of the baby’s jaw, the sensation of liquid transferring from deep within my body to deep within my daughter’s. The baby nursed for more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. The feeding gave me time to study her face, memorize her short, straight eyelashes; her naked brow; the pinprick white dots scattering her nose and cheeks. When her eyes flitted open, I studied the dark gray, looking for signs of the brown or blue they would become. I wondered if she would resemble me or Grant, or if she would look like a maternal or paternal relative, none of whom I had met. I did not yet recognize anything about her.

  Mother Ruby scrambled eggs while reading aloud from a book on newborn care. She fed me small bites while quizzing me on the text. I listened to every word and repeated every answer verbatim. Mother Ruby stopped reading when the baby fell asleep and refused to continue, even when I pleaded with her to keep going.

  “Sleep, Victoria,” Mother Ruby said, closing the book. “It’s the most important thing. Postpartum hormones can warp reality if they aren’t tempered with generous stretches of sleep.” She reached her arms out for me to hand her the baby. Although sleep was already pulling me under, I was reluctant to hand her my daughter. Separation, I feared, could be irreversible. The pleasure I found in the baby’s touch was new and unreliable; I was afraid if I gave her up I wouldn’t be able to bear her touch when she was returned.

  But Mother Ruby did not understand my hesitation. She reached in and withdrew the baby, and before I could protest, I was asleep.

  Mother Ruby was not the only one to visit that first week. The day after the birth, Renata shopped for a featherbed for the blue room and a Moses basket for the baby, carrying them upstairs in two trips. She came back every afternoon with lunch for both of us. I lay on my new featherbed with the half-door open, the baby asleep with her cheek pressed against my bare breast, as I ate noodles or sandwiches with my hands. Renata perched on a bar stool. We rarely talked; neither she nor I could communicate in the presence of my nakedness, but our silence grew more comfortable as the days passed. The baby ate and slept and ate again. As long as she stretched across my body, skin to skin, she was content.

  On Tuesday, while Renata and I ate in our accustomed silence, Marlena came to the door. I’d stopped answering the phone, and we had an anniversary dinner the following day. Renata let her in, and she delighted over the baby. She held and rocked and shushed her with a naturalness that caused Renata to raise her eyebrows and shake her head. I asked Renata to retrieve cash from my backpack and give it to Marlena; she would have to do the flowers for the dinner herself.

  “No,” Renata said. “You keep her here. I’ll do the flowers.” She got out the cash and also my event calendar, where I had written the purchasing list and the address of the restaurant. Renata scanned the book. I had nothing else for thirty days.

  “I’ll be back with lunch tomorrow,” she said. “And I’ll show you the centerpieces. You can approve them.”

  She turned to Marlena and shook her hand awkwardly under the sleeping ball of baby. “I’m Renata,” she said. “Stay here as long as you can today, and come back tomorrow as well. I’ll pay you whatever hourly rate you usually make.”

  “Just to hold the baby?” Marlena asked.

  Renata nodded.

  “I will,” Marlena promised. “Thank you.” She spun in slow motion, and the baby sighed, sound asleep.

  “Thank you,” I said to Renata. “I could use a nap.” I hadn’t slept deeply in days, always aware, even in sleep, of the baby’s location and needs. It seemed I had inherited a maternal gene after all, I thought, remembering Renata’s words on the drive to our first dinner together.

  Renata walked over to where I lay on the featherbed, my hand reaching out the half-door and stretching into the living room. She stood over me as if trying to figure out how to hug me but gave up and nudged my hand gently with her big toe. I squeezed her foot, and she smiled. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Renata’s boots padded down the stairs. The metal frame of the door rattled as she walked out.

  “What’s her name?” Marlena asked, kissing the baby’s sleeping forehead. She settled onto one of the bar stools, but the baby stirred. Standing up again, she walked the length of the room and back with a slow sway.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m thinking about it.”

  I hadn’t actually thought about it, but I knew I needed to start. Even though I wasn’t doing anything but feeding and diapering and swaddling, there didn’t seem to be space, mental or otherwise, for anything else. Marlena moved into the kitchen, the baby nuzzling the length of her chest and pressing her pink cheek against Marlena’s shoulder. She began to cook with one hand. Easily. I couldn’t cook, and I definitely couldn’t cook one-handed with a baby on my shoulder.

  “Where’d you learn?” I asked.

  “To cook?”

  I nodded. “And babies.”

  “My last foster home had a daycare. The woman kept me because I home-schooled and helped with the infants. I didn’t mind. It was better than high school.”

  “You home-schooled?” I asked. My mind flashed back to the task list on Elizabeth’s refrigerator door; I checked my watch reflexively.

  “Yeah,” she said, “the last few years. I was so far behind, the county thought it might help me get caught up, but I just got further behind. When I turned eighteen, I gave up on school and moved in to The Gathering House.”

  “I was home-schooled, too,” I said. One o’clock. Elizabeth would have been just drying and putting away the last dish, drilling me on my eights, maybe my nines.

  Something simmered on the stove, and Marlena added salt. I was surprised she had found anything to cook in the empty cabinets. The baby startled awake, and Marlena transferred her to the other shoulder. She angled the baby so she could see what she was cooking and mumbled something soft, a prayer or a poem, that I couldn’t make out. The baby closed her eyes.

  “You’re better with kids than flowers,” I said.

  “I’m learning,” Marlena said, not appearing offended.

  “Yeah,” I said, watching her work. “Me, too.”

  As Marlena chopped, the baby’s head jiggled gently. “You should sleep,” she said. “While the baby is happy. Yo
u know she’ll be hungry again soon.”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Wake me up if she needs anything.”

  “I will.” Marlena turned back to the stove.

  I closed the half-door, waiting for sleep. Marlena’s soft lullaby floated through the crack, the tune familiar. As I drifted around the edge of consciousness, I wondered if someone had sung to me when I was a baby, someone who didn’t love me, someone who would give me back.

  On Saturday morning, a week after the birth, Mother Ruby arrived and began her daily routine. She asked me a hundred questions about my bleeding, after-pains, and appetite. She checked for evidence I had eaten dinner the night before, and listened to the baby’s heart before wrapping her in the cloth scale.

  “Eight ounces,” Mother Ruby announced. “You’re doing great.” She unwrapped the baby and changed her diaper. In the process, the baby’s umbilical cord, which I never touched and tried not to look at, snapped off.

  “Congratulations, angel,” Mother Ruby whispered into my daughter’s sleeping face. The baby arched her back and reached out, her eyes still closed.

  She cleaned the baby’s belly button with something in an unlabeled bottle. Re-swaddling her, she handed her back to me. “No infections, eating, sleeping, and gaining weight,” she said. “And you’re getting help?”