The Language of Flowers (28 page)

“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. You 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?”

“Renata brought food,” I said. “And Marlena was here for a few days.”

“Good.” Roaming the room, she packed up her books, blankets, towels, bottles, and tubes.

“Leaving?” I asked with surprise. I was used to her spending most of the morning with me.

“You don’t need me anymore, Victoria,” she said, sitting next to me on the couch and putting her arm around my shoulders. She pulled me to her until my face was pressed against her breast. “Look at you. You’re a mother. Believe me when I tell you there are many women out there who need me more than you do.”

I nodded into her chest and did not protest.

She stood up and took a final loop around the small apartment. Her eyes settled on the cans of formula I had purchased before the baby was born. “I’ll donate these,” she said, stuffing them into her already-full bag. “You won’t need them. I’ll be back next Saturday, and then two Saturdays after that, just to check the baby’s weight gain. Call me if you need anything.”

I nodded again and watched her walk lightly down the stairs. She had not left her phone number.

You’re a mother
, I repeated to myself. I was hoping the words would reassure me, but instead I felt something familiar trembling inside of me. It started deep in my stomach and picked up momentum as it tumbled into the cavernous space that had once held the baby.

Panic.

I tried to breathe, willing it away.

I regretted my ultimatum
.

Choose me or choose your sister
, my words had demanded. Elizabeth, by not running after me, had made her choice clear.

All night and well into the morning, I plotted. My desire was simple: to stay with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth alone. But I could think of no way to convince her. I could not whine or beg.
Do you even know me?
she would ask, her eyes amused, as I begged to eat her muffin batter. I could not hide; Elizabeth would find me, as she always did. I could not tie myself to the bedposts and refuse to move; she would cut the ropes and carry me.

There was only one possibility, and that was to turn Elizabeth against her sister. She had to see Catherine for what she was: a selfish, hateful woman unworthy of her care.

And then, all at once, I saw the solution. My heartbeat grew deafening as I lay still, turning the idea around in my head, looking for problems. There were none. As surely as Catherine had ambushed my adoption, she had provided me with the ammunition I needed to stay with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth alone. I would win the battle she had unconsciously waged, even before she knew she had waged it.

Slowly, I stood up. I slipped off my nightgown and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. In the bathroom, I scrubbed my face with cold
water and hand soap harder than usual, my fingernails scratching lines in the white soap residue. Looking at myself in the mirror, I searched for signs of fear, or anxiety, or apprehension of what was to come. But my eyes were flat, my chin set with determination. There was only one way to get what I wanted. It could not be ignored.

In the kitchen, Elizabeth washed dishes. A bowl of cold oatmeal sat on the table.

“The crews are already here,” Elizabeth said, motioning with her head in the direction of the hill on which we’d stood the night before. “Eat your breakfast and put on your shoes before I leave you behind.” She turned back to the sink.

“I’m not coming,” I said, and in the drop of Elizabeth’s shoulder blades, I could see disappointment but not surprise.

I opened the pantry and plucked an empty canvas bag off a hook.

It was warm on the front porch, even though it was still early. I walked slowly down the long driveway, toward the road. Again, Elizabeth did not come after me. I wished it was cooler, wished I’d packed a bagful of food. I would be hot and hungry as I sat in the ditch in front of the flower farm. But I would wait. As long as it took for Grant to leave, even if I had to spend the night by the side of the road, I would wait. Eventually, his truck would rumble through the open gate, leaving the farmhouse exposed.

When it did, I’d sneak inside for what I needed.

Renata did not come on Sunday. Neither did Marlena. I stayed in the
blue room for what I thought was most of the day, nursing the baby and sleeping, but when I emerged with a full bladder and an empty stomach, it was only ten o’clock in the morning.

Leaning against the bar stool, I debated between showering and preparing a meal. The baby was asleep in the blue room, and I was hungry, but the scent of my own body, sour breast milk mixed with apricot baby oil, was causing me to lose my appetite. I decided on a shower.

I closed and locked the bathroom door out of habit, stripping and stepping under the hot water. My eyes closed, and I guiltily enjoyed the brief moment of solitude. Picking up a bar of soap, I heard a high-pitched wail. It was muffled by the locked door but piercing all the same. Inhaling, I continued to soap my body.
Just one minute
, I thought.
Just a quick shower and I’ll be back. Hold on
.

But the baby couldn’t hold on. Her cry picked up both pitch and volume, and came around moments of quiet, desperate gasping. I began to shampoo my hair with frantic speed and let the water run into my ears, attempting to block out the sound. It didn’t work. I had a strange sensation that I could have walked down the stairs, out the door, and across the city, and I still would have been able to hear her, that her cry
was connected to my body through more than the physical waves of sound. She needed me, craved me like hunger, and the hunger spread from her body into my own.

Giving in to the sound, I jumped out of the shower, suds clinging to my hair and running in white rivers down my legs. I ran across the living room and reached into the blue room, picking up the rigid, screaming baby. I pressed her to my soapy breast. She opened her mouth and gasped and choked and sucked and repeated it all two or three times before she calmed down enough to nurse. In the shower, the water flowed into the empty ceramic tub and down the drain.

I slid down the wall and sat in the puddle at my feet. If I had owned a clean towel, I might have retrieved it. But there weren’t any, and there wouldn’t be any for a long time. I was no Marlena. I couldn’t carry the baby and a bag of laundry up the hill, pressing quarters into vibrating machines with a hungry mouth on my exposed breast. I wished I had thought about the laundry before the baby was born.

I wished I had thought of a lot of things, now that it was too late. I should have bought diapers, and groceries, and baby clothes. I should have gathered the take-out menus of every restaurant on the hill and memorized the number of a delivery service. I should have found a daycare, or a nanny, or both. I should have bought a stack of parenting books and read every one. I should have decided on a name.

I couldn’t do any of that now.

The baby and I would use dirty towels, sleep on dirty sheets, and wear dirty clothes. The idea of doing anything other than nursing and trying to nourish my own body was too overwhelming to consider.

We survived Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, alone except for a brief food drop from Renata. It was spring; business was picking up, and Renata had never replaced me. Marlena called to tell me she was taking the month to visit relatives in Southern California. She would be back, she said, in time for our April engagements. The phone did not ring again.

On Thursday the baby ate all day. She awoke for her first feeding just after six in the morning and nursed continuously, falling asleep mid-suck every half-hour. If I attempted to remove her from my breast, she startled awake with a deafening shriek. She would sleep only with her face pressed against my naked skin, and when I tried to set her down, no matter how deep in sleep she appeared, she would cry out for more milk.

I resigned myself to my own hunger, spending the morning listening to the sounds of spring enter the apartment through the open kitchen window. Birds, brakes, an airplane, a school bell. I stroked the baby’s soft shoulder as she slept, and told myself that physical hunger was a reasonable sacrifice to make for a baby as beautiful as she. But as the day progressed, the hunger traveled from my stomach to my brain. I began to hallucinate, not sights but smells: phantom meatballs, a sauce simmering, and something dark chocolate baking.

By mid-afternoon I had convinced myself of the existence of a multi-course meal in my kitchen. I climbed out of the blue room with the baby still attached to my breast. When I saw the stove turned off, the burners bare, and the oven empty, I almost cried. I placed the baby on the kitchen counter and patted her distractedly while searching for something to eat. At the back of the cupboard I found a can of soup. The baby whimpered and started to cry. The sound weakened the muscles in my hands until it was impossible for me to turn the dial of the can opener. Giving up halfway around the can, I pried the lid back with a spoon and drank the soup cold, without pausing for breath. When it was empty, I threw the aluminum can into the sink. The baby startled at the loud sound and stopped crying long enough for me to press her face back to my breast. I carried her back to the blue room, my hunger unappeased.

Friday began as Thursday had, except that I was twenty-four hours more exhausted and as hungry as the never-satisfied baby. I ate peanuts in bed while the baby nursed. Mother Ruby had warned me that the baby would go through growth spurts, and I comforted myself with this thought. The end must be growing near. I didn’t have much more
to give her, I thought, slipping my finger under the flap of skin that had once been a round, full breast.

At noon I pulled the sleeping baby away from my chest and saw that her lips were red. My nipples were dry and had cracked under the constant suction. The baby was drinking my blood as well as my milk; no wonder I was exhausted. Soon there would be nothing left of me. I eased her gently onto the bed, praying that just this once, she would stay asleep. There was one tray of Marlena’s cooking left in the freezer.