The Care and Handling of Roses With Thorns (9 page)

9

R
ILEY AND
I
BEGIN TO DEVELOP A ROUTINE.
G
ENERALLY, WE
go home in the late afternoon, after all our school duties are done. I handle the roses, Riley does homework. I make dinner, she does homework. We do laundry as needed. It’s a fairly normal life, except for the dialysis. It’s kind of nice to have someone around.

On Mondays, we stop at the grocery store after school. I let Riley plan the dinners, considering how she complains so much about them. The first week, she spent two hours on the Internet, looking up gourmet recipes. I take one look at her list (baby arugula, New Zealand lamb shanks, wild Alaskan salmon) and laugh so hard I lean on the shopping cart for support, drawing the stares of the other shoppers. “Riley, dear, we are not the Rockefellers.”

“Who are the Rockefellers?” Riley flushes all the way down into her shirt collar.

“We’re not the Hiltons,” I clarify for her benefit. I hand her the list back. It’s written on one of those free notepads that realtors hand out; Riley has adorned the man’s grinning face with horns and a mustache. “Please. Teacher budget.”

“But how can I change my menu? We’re at the store already.” She crosses her arms and looks like I just told her there’s an asteroid plummeting to Earth.

I take a grocery store circular, pushing the cart over to the side so I don’t block the strawberry display. “Buy what’s on sale. Plan from there. Things I know how to cook, preferably.”

We go through the store, choosing dry spaghetti and cans of sauce and pork chops on sale. “This actually isn’t so bad,” Riley says, putting a half pound of hickory-smoked bacon, wrapped in white paper, into the cart.

“Yep. No one got hurt.” I pick up a cantaloupe and have her smell it for ripeness. We check the expiration dates on the dairy, we look on the bottom shelves for the bargain brands, we decide what to freeze for later. I hadn’t realized how much grocery knowledge I had, just waiting to be passed on.

I grin at her as we go through checkout.

“What?” Riley says, putting back the copy of
National Enquirer
.

“Nothing,” I say, still grinning. “Just happy. Is that a crime?”

“Nooo.” She laughs, widens her eyes. “It’s just weird.”

During the second week of April, my parents come home from their trip, find out about Riley, and drive up even though they should be resting from jet lag. They arrive mid-morning on a Saturday, which means they left at dawn. Riley and I hear them and go into the driveway as they pull up. Mom opens the sedan door first, of course. She braces herself on the passenger door to get out and moves slowly toward me. Her right hip is arthritic and will need replacement soon. She’s dressed in one of her flowing maxis, her hair all over the place. “Gal,” she says, crushing me in a hug. She smells of something spicy, and I sneeze.

“Sorry, Mom. It’s your perfume.”

“Oh dear.” She steps back and looks more concerned than I meant her to. “I’ll take a shower right away.”

“No, no. It’s fine, Mom.”

“You look good.” She turns next to Riley. “Look at how big you’ve gotten, my granddaughter!”

“Hi, Gram.” Riley submits to a hug and rolls her eyes over Mom’s shoulder.

Dad steps out and puts his big arm around me. “Hey, Squirt. Got any projects this weekend that need doing?” Dad always fixes stuff for me while he’s here: leaky faucets, crooked pictures, drafty windows. He hates sitting still, for one thing, and for another, I’m hopeless at handyman tasks. I save them all up for him.

I think about it for a second. “There is one thing you could do. A project for the school.”

• • •

M
R.
M
ORTON ARRIVES
in an hour, dressed in jeans and a clean Lacoste shirt even though he’s here to work on the trebuchet with Dad. Today they’ll build a sample, cut the parts for a second, and then Mr. Morton will have the kids build another one during the club. He drives a black Audi convertible, too nice a car for a teacher to own. The trebuchet wood is strapped to the rack on top, a rack meant for skis. He sits in the car for a moment, as if he’s listening to the end of some song. Or maybe he’s hesitating. I imagine he didn’t think I’d make good on my trebuchet project so soon.

Riley bangs open the screen door and leaps down the two front steps. “Mr. Morton!”

“Riley.” He smiles easily at her. “You going to help out?”

“I don’t want her getting any fingers cut off.” I come outside and squint in the sun.

“That’s more likely to happen to me.” Mr. Morton grins and holds up a scratched-up fire-engine red tool box. It means he uses it. He and Riley undo the wood.

We go around the back to the garage, where Dad has set up a workstation across two sawhorses.

“Dad, this is Mr. Morton. Mr. Morton, my father. Tom.”

“Call me George.” Mr. Morton shakes my father’s hand firmly.

“By George, you’re George.” At Dad’s corny joke, I glance at Riley to see if she’s groaning, but she ignores it. I bet if I’d said it, she would have run screaming down the street. Dad takes the wood from him and sets it up on the worktable. “Gal says you’ve got plans for this thing?”

“Printed this morning.” He spreads the sheets on the table. I examine the diagrams. It’s a small catapult designed to launch beanbags into a bucket. Whoever can do this with the most accuracy wins the competition. He glances up at me with a raised eyebrow. “We should have made the students come over and help.”

“Too many cooks.” Dad gets out his electric saw. “I don’t want a bunch of kids over here in my way. Except for Riley. You’re going to measure.” He hands her the measuring tape.

“Me? Why me?” She takes the tape as though it were a live grenade. “How long?”

“Look at the plan.” I point to the measurement. Three feet, two-eighths of an inch.

She squints at the measuring tape as she pulls it out. “Is this it?” Randomly, it seems, she points to a measurement.

“Are you going to be on the science team, Riley?” Mr. Morton smiles gently.

She looks at me as though she expects me to answer. I do. “She’s more of an artist.”

“I might try it.” She glares at me. “I can do more than one thing, you know.”

“I know.” I never seem to know what this girl is thinking, except that it is the opposite of me. I don’t remember being such a pain when I was fifteen. I never had the whole angsty hormonal teenaged girl thing. I spread the plans out and double-check the measurement. “Riley, you’re over too far.”

Dad corrects her and she makes the mark.

“Measure twice, cut once,” Dad says.

She remeasures. “I can’t tell if it’s right.” She’s not even looking at the tape or the drawing. “I think it was wrong before.”

“You’re not even trying now.” I reach for the tape, but she pulls it away. “Let me show you how this thing works and what these little hatch marks mean.”

“I know what they mean. Inches.”

“No. The little tiny ones. If you knew what they meant it’d be easier.”

“I don’t want to know. I don’t care.” She throws down the tape. “Ugh. This is a stupid project.”

I glance at my father, who busies himself with another piece of wood. “Just give it a try.”

“I can’t do everything.” Her face contorts like someone sprayed lemon juice into it. I purse my lips. I am used to students being frustrated. I am not used to quite this much emotion involved.

I pick up the tape. “Calm down and try it again. You can do this.”

“You do it. I’m going in to help Grandma make lunch.” She tosses her pencil down, runs off. It bounces and skitters away under a shelf of Christmas decorations.

“Ah.” Dad starts up his saw. “Reminds me of her mother.”

“Unfortunately.” I bend over to look for the pencil.

“Allow me.” Mr. Morton squats and peers under the shelving unit.

I regret that I never swept the spiderwebs away. “Watch out for black widows.”

He gets on his belly and reaches far into the darkness to retrieve the pencil, then wipes the dust on his jeans. “Riley has a low frustration threshold, I’ve noticed.”

“You think?” We go outside, away from the saw noise and from the house, where I suspect Riley is standing with an ear to the window. I tell him about Riley’s background and how she came to be here.

“No contact with her father?”

“Used to have. She spent the first few years of her life with him. Basically, now he’s a sperm donor and an occasional wallet.” I cross my arms. “But my sister chooses to live a certain way. And her kid suffers.”

Mr. Morton looks at me full in the face. “It’s really good of you to let Riley live here.”

I think about when Riley arrived, how my initial thought had been to send her to live with my parents. Then I remember showing Riley the grocery store. I think about what Becky is missing. What she has missed, all this time. I’m not sure I want Riley to leave.

I clear my throat. Compliments tend to embarrass me. I shrug. “She’s my niece.”

His gaze focuses on the rose garden. I think he’ll ask me a question about the roses next, but he doesn’t. An expression of sadness crosses his face, more sadness than Riley’s story should have mustered. I consider asking him what’s wrong, but I don’t know him well. I don’t like it when people pry into my life, tell me I look tired or sick, want to know all the gory details. I wait. If he talks, I’ll listen.

He takes a breath and focuses back to where we are. He grins. “Let’s get back to our medieval weaponry.”

10

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING, MY MOTHER DRIVES ME TO MY
IVP
test.

“I don’t like this one bit.” Mom grips the steering wheel so hard her hands turn white. “You are allergic to that dye.”

“I don’t have a choice, Mom,” I say mechanically. We have been having this conversation for the past twenty-four hours, and longer than that. I am afraid Mom will unleash her full mother bear wrath on the doctor, and then I will never get my kidney.

“They’re idiots. Idiots.” She is practically spitting. Gone is the artist full of gentility and flowing robes. She has her hair pulled back into a knot and she’s wearing her cherry-red velour tracksuit, the closest she gets to a power suit.

“Stay calm, Mother.”

“Your doctor needs to be told what’s what.”

Great. “Please do not challenge Dr. Blankenship. She already hates me.”

Mom pulls into a parking space and turns to face me. “Gal. If I had been one-tenth as assertive as I am now when you were little, you’d still have a kidney.” She swallows hard.

I pat her arm. Mom will never get over this guilt, this feeling that she should have done more. It’s not her fault. She trusted the doctors to find out what was wrong, not let it destroy my kidneys. We will never consider doctors to be infallible again.

Inside, Dr. Blankenship waits. She extends her hand to my mother. “Mrs. Garner, good to see you again.”

Mom shakes her hand feebly. “I don’t like this. She had this dye done when she was twelve, and the doctor said she would die if they repeated it.”

Dr. Blankenship blinks. “We’re taking every precaution. Don’t you worry.”

Mom snorts. “If you had children, you would know that is a useless thing to tell a mother.”

Dr. Blankenship is at a loss for words, for once. She breaks away from my mother’s glare. I grin a little.

• • •

M
Y MOTHER AND
I sit in the waiting room until they are ready for me. This I’ve never understood about doctors’ offices: they tell you to come in early even if they don’t plan to do anything for hours.

Mom thumbs through the
People
and
Us
magazines fanned across the coffee table. “I have to say, I haven’t heard of half of these people.”

“I have, unfortunately.” I look for a
Scientific American
or even a
National Geographic
, but cannot find one. “It’s difficult to get my students to work hard when you can get famous by releasing a sex tape.”

“Gal!” My mother actually blushes.

“Hey, it’s not me. It’s them.” I gesture toward the magazines.

“I’m sure Riley doesn’t think like that.” Mom picks up an ancient
Good Housekeeping
and cracks it open.

Considering that Riley’s mother hasn’t even taught her how to grocery shop, I can’t imagine Becky offering much guidance in the area of pop culture and morality. “It depends on what her mother’s taught her, doesn’t it?”

“It’s up to you to teach her now.” Mom is pretending to read the magazine, keeping one eye trained on me.

“I try.” I think I’m not doing such a bad job. Riley is doing well in school, despite my initial misgivings. She is popular with the teachers. Kids treat her well, as far as I can tell. She hasn’t complained.

“It has to be difficult, going from zero kids to a teenager.” Mom pats my knee. “You know I’ll take her if you can’t handle it.”

I bristle. “I can handle it.”

My mother nods. I understand she is offering me an out, the option of admitting I cannot handle the responsibility of a child, even an almost fully grown child. But I am fine and Riley is fine. I think. Doubt swirls up now, a cyclone my very own mother has created in the way only fleshly female relatives can. I actually sigh with relief when the nurse calls my name and it’s time for my dreaded procedure.

I am set up on a bed. The nurse prepares the IV drip with Prednisone and Benadryl. Mom sits next to me. “Make sure they don’t kill me,” I say. I force myself to relax. This is for my kidney. I need this for my kidney. I picture healthy kidneys dancing in my head. My kidney functioning strongly, regenerated into a healthy organ instead of the essentially dead one inside of me.

I’ll try anything to get my kidney to work. I traveled to Santa Barbara several years ago to meet a hypnotist who treated me once a week in a glass-walled office overlooking the Pacific. Hypnosis worked well for pain, but nothing happened to make my kidney heal. I went to an acupuncturist over the course of a year and lay with needles sticking out of my back for half-hour increments in a bid to make the kidney restart. I’ve written to researchers who have grown new kidneys in mice, volunteering to be a human guinea pig; they all said it was too early to try out the procedure on me, that this technology is at least a good decade away. And my mother and I have prayed for help from every saint in the saint lexicon. My patron saint against kidney disease is St. Margaret of Antioch. There are prayer chains of elderly ladies across the U.S. asking for a kidney miracle for me, at the urging of my mother and her cronies, who e-mail chain letters about my illness.

“Saint Margaret, pray for me,” I say, probably only in my head, because I’m pretty sure my lips have stopped moving.

I used to wonder if God hated me. Then, around age twenty-four, I had an epiphany. God doesn’t hate me more than He hates anyone else. Good people die, horrible people live trouble-free lives. He’s a pretty hands-off type of deity. It’s the cost of free will. We’re not pawns in a game, like in
Clash of the Titans
.

So if this IVP test is what I have to do, so be it. Whatever happens will happen.

“I’m here,” I hear my mother say.

The IV goes in. I barely register it.

The Benadryl hits my system and I pass out.

• • •

I
AM STANDING
in my rose garden, only it’s a perfect rose garden. No bugs, not even any dirt, just perfect blooms. My house is gone. This doesn’t bother me, because the sky is so perfectly clear.

I see my two Hulthemia parents, the ones I started last year. I bend and sniff the mother I used. They are growing out of what should be the ground but is a sterile hospital floor.

Riley stands nearby, holding a black hose connected to nothing. “I’m watering the roses, Auntie.” She isn’t paying attention to what she’s doing, she’s flooding the flowers. They will die.

“Stop it, Riley.”

She ignores me. “I know what I’m doing.”

I try to move, to get to her and stop her. But I am rooted to my position. When I look down, I realize I have no feet. It is quite clear I am becoming a rose myself.

Byron appears before me, his chest nearly colliding with my eyeballs. “Ms. Garner?” He’s holding the rose I’m taking to the contest. His eyes look so very very blue, like exotic oceans I have never seen. “Congratulations. You have won the gold medal.”

“Yay! I won!” I turn my head and expect to see Riley, my mother, my father standing there. But there’s only an empty greenhouse.

I turn back and Byron is gone.

My roses have disappeared.

The rose in my hand grows hotter and hotter until it melts away into ribbons of molten lava colors and I drop it with a soundless cry.

• • •

I
OPEN MY EYES.
I hear my heart pounding in my ears. My mother is shouting from a distance. Dr. Blankenship is at my feet, new lines creasing her face. She is not as young as I thought. A nurse has an oxygen mask pressed to my face.

My first thought is to ask if Riley turned the water off. No, that wasn’t real. I wait for the dream to dissipate. Something bad has happened. But I’m still alive.

My eyes feel puffy and my throat aches. I’ve had another allergic reaction. They have stuck me with epinephrine to resuscitate me.

Mom yells indecipherably outside my room at whoever is keeping her from coming in and breaking the doctor’s neck.

Dr. Blankenship puts her thumb and forefinger on her temples. “Fuck,” she says, almost inaudibly.

“Doctors aren’t supposed to curse in front of patients.” My voice is hoarse.

She sags with relief. “You’re stable, Gal.”

I think about saying I told you so, and decide against it. Definitely, I will later. “So, do I get my kidney now?”

Her face is pained. “One thing at a time.” She strides over and puts her hand on top of mine. Hers is really cold again.

“Sheesh, Doc, what are you, a vampire?” I flinch but find I am not quite strong enough to move. “I have the rash on my face, don’t I?”

She nods. “You’re going to be fine. We used just a tiny bit of dye and stopped right away.”

“Did you do the X-ray?”

“No.”

I sigh. “That was completely useless, then.”

My mother finally busts in and runs to my side. “Gal! You’re all right.”

“Of course.” My throat opens up all the way. “Just tired. And cold. Can I get another blanket, please?”

“I’ll do it.” Dr. Blankenship leaves, glad to be doing something.

“She’s feeling guilty.” I relax into my pillows. I’m already feeling better.

“Serves her right. What did we tell her?”

“I know, Mom.” I’m still groggy, thinking about my dream. The medications will take a while to wear off. I’ll probably have to stay overnight. The thought angers me. I was supposed to water tonight, check on the seedlings again to see if any great new blooms appeared. Tomorrow I have to wash the bugs off the blooms. I was supposed to do it today, actually, but I didn’t have a chance before my appointment. I hate useless overnight hospital stays. They never let you sleep properly, always waking you up to make sure you’re still alive.

“Mom, call Brad and tell him to go do the roses, will you?”

“Is it just watering? Dad and Riley can do that.”

“No. Brad knows what to do. Tell Brad.” I drift off into sleep, thinking how funny it is that I’m in this life or death situation and I’m worried over some plants. “Do it, Mom,” I mumble. “Don’t forget.”