The Language of Flowers (30 page)

“Well, I’m done,” I said. “I need a break.” I set her on the couch and stretched. Her grunts became a series of soft cries. I sighed. I knew what she wanted, and I knew how to give it to her. It seemed like it should be so simple. Maybe it was simple for other mothers, but it wasn’t for me. I had handled her touch for hours, for days, for weeks, and I needed just a few moments to myself. As I walked to the kitchen, she began to cry harder. The sound pulled me back.

I sat down and picked her up.

“Five more minutes,” I said, “and then we’re leaving. You don’t need any more.”

But when I placed her in the basket five minutes later, she cried as if I was sending her downriver, as if she would never see me again.

“What do you want?” I asked, the despair in my voice bordering on anger. I tried to jiggle the basket like Marlena had done, but when I shook it, she bounced and cried harder.

“You can’t be hungry,” I pleaded, leaning close to her small ear so that she could hear me over the sound of her own cry. She turned her face to mine and tried to attach herself to my nose. A hysterical sound escaped my body; a snorting that would have been mistaken for a laugh by an observer unaware of my approaching implosion.

“Fine,” I said. “Here.” I lifted my shirt and forced her onto my breast. She struggled to open her mouth against the pressure of my hand. When she finally got it open, she stopped crying and began to suck.

“This is it,” I told her. “You better enjoy it.” My words were threatening, and I listened to them as if they were coming from someone else.

Still nursing, I held on to the baby with one hand and crawled into the blue room, reaching in for the bag of formula and dumping it out. Six cans scattered on the floor. I reached to pick one up, and the baby lost her hold on my nipple. She began her heartbroken wail.

“I’m right here,” I said as I crossed the room and set her on the kitchen counter, but my words didn’t comfort either of us. The baby writhed on the countertop as I poured the can of formula into a bottle and screwed on the lid. Resting the plastic nipple against the baby’s lips, I waited for her to open her mouth. When she didn’t, I opened her lips with my fingers and forced the nipple inside. She gagged.

I took a breath and tried to calm myself. Carrying the baby and the bottle to the couch, I sat down and adjusted her position until her head was tucked into my elbow. I kissed her between the eyebrows. She tried to latch on to my nose again, and I slipped the bottle into her open mouth. She sucked once and then turned away, the formula dribbling out of the side of her mouth. She began to scream.

“Then you aren’t hungry,” I told her, setting the bottle down too hard next to me. A thin stream of liquid shot out the top. “If you won’t eat this, you aren’t hungry.”

I set her back in the basket gently. I would let her cry for two or three minutes, just to prove I was serious. When I picked her up again, she would take the bottle. She had to.

But she didn’t. I let her cry another five minutes, and then another ten. I tried holding her. I tried feeding her in the basket. I tried laying her on my featherbed and reaching inside with the bottle, but still she refused to suck. Finally I gave up and closed the half-door. The baby cried out in the darkness of the blue room, alone.

Lying down on the living room floor, my eyes closed involuntarily. The sound of the cry became something distant and unpleasant but no longer overwhelming. For stretches I forgot the source of the sound or why I had tried to stop it. It passed over my body, leaving me untouched. The fog of my exhaustion was impenetrable.

It wasn’t until the crying stopped that I jolted awake. I felt a rush of fear that I had killed the baby. It was dark outside. I had no idea how much time had passed. Perhaps hours without food and a room without light was enough to kill a newborn. I knew so little about newborns, about children, about human beings. It felt like a horrible joke to leave me alone with a baby, responsible for another life. I threw open the door to the blue room, but before I could even reach out to feel for her pulse, she began to cry.

My body was flooded with emotion, relief but also undeniable disappointment, followed immediately by shame. I held the baby to my body, kissing her head in an attempt to mask the desperation I could no longer bury. I stuck the bottle in the baby’s mouth. She would learn to drink formula. Breast-feeding was too much for me. I would never be
able to maintain it, and if I wanted to keep the baby, I needed to find a way to be a mother that I could handle. This time the baby tried to suck, but her lips were weak with hunger and the plastic was stiff and unresponsive.

The nipple must be defective. It was the clear explanation for my baby’s stubborn refusal. Of the hundreds on the shelf, I had purchased the cheapest. I hurled the bottle into the kitchen, and it bounced off the wall and onto the floor. The baby began to cry.

I set her in the basket and walked away. My breasts were full and dripping onto the stained office carpet, but I would not give her milk from my body. It was too much. I would get her a new bottle, and she would take it. My panic would subside.

I took the steps two at a time, her cry growing louder as the distance between us increased. Running out onto the sidewalk, I sprinted the block faster than I ever had in my life. I crossed streets recklessly, running in the same direction I had to buy the formula just the day before. But when I got to Vermont Street, I turned left instead of right. I didn’t think about where I was going, and I did not stop running until I reached the steps of McKinley Square. Digging heavy feet into the mowed lawn, I fell into the white verbena, rolling into my cavern beneath the heath and closing my eyes. I would give myself five minutes. Just five minutes in the park, and when I returned to the baby, I would be able to handle it. I covered my head with my arm, searching in the darkness for the brown wool blanket that wasn’t there. Sleep pulled me under again, and I was protected, rocked, comforted. There was nothing but the darkness, the solitude, and the white petals of the verbena praying for me and for the child I wouldn’t let myself remember.

“I missed you today,” Elizabeth said when I walked into the room
.

She didn’t ask where I’d been, and I didn’t offer an explanation. I crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over my head and rolling onto my side, my back to the desk where she sat.

“I love you, Victoria,” she said quietly. “I hope you know that.” The first time she’d declared her love, I’d believed her. Now her words ran over my heart like water over a stone. The desk chair scraped against the wood floor as she stood, and I felt the mattress dip as she moved to the edge of the bed. She placed one hand on my shoulder.

“What did she do?” I asked.

The question was sudden and unplanned, and I felt Elizabeth’s body flinch. She was quiet for a long time. Finally, she lay down on her back next to me.

“I loved a man, once,” she said simply. “It was a long time ago. He was English, here for an internship with one of the bigger wineries, just a few miles up the road. I was happier than I’d ever been. And then Catherine—my sister, my best friend—took him away from me.”

Elizabeth rolled onto her side and draped her arm over my body. I stiffened but did not protest, waiting for her to continue. “A year later, Grant was born. For years I couldn’t look at him without remembering his father, without replaying in my mind everything I’d lost. But his father
was gone; I don’t know if he ever knew Catherine was pregnant. She raised Grant completely alone.”

Elizabeth inched closer until her bent legs tucked into the space behind my kneecaps. When she spoke next, her face was pressed into the blanket covering the top of my head so that I had to strain to hear her words.

“I had a chance to forgive her,” she whispered. “Once, when Grant was still a baby, Catherine approached me at the farmers’ market. She apologized, crying, and told me how much she missed me. It was my chance to have her back in my life, but instead I turned her away. I shouldn’t have done it. I said awful things, things that keep me up at night.”

She deserved it
, I thought. Catherine deserved everything Elizabeth had said and more. The idea that Elizabeth was about to move in to the home of the woman who had betrayed her made my chest fill with rage. I took a deep breath, willing myself to be patient.

For what seemed like hours, I waited for Elizabeth to speak, tense in her gentle grasp. But she was quiet, her story complete. Just as I began to worry that she had fallen asleep, she stood up and tiptoed out of the room. The faucet in the bathroom sink turned on and off, the toilet flushed, her bedroom door closed, and then all was quiet. I slipped out of bed.

Downstairs, I sneaked through the kitchen and out the back door. The canvas bag was underneath the steps where I had stashed it, full and heavy. I picked it up and hugged it to my chest. Inside, the glass jars clattered and resettled.

I had decided earlier, crouched in the ditch, exactly where I would go, and I walked quickly in the direction of the road. There was no moon, but the stars illuminated the property as I walked to the northeast corner. Here, wedged between the concrete of the farmers’ market and the highway, the grapes were dusty and constantly dry. In the fall, they remained sour long after the other acres had ripened.

I unscrewed the lid of the first jam jar. Lighter fluid seeped over the edges and spiraled through the ridges at the lip of the glass. Slowly, I
emptied it onto the trunk of the vine, holding the jar away from my body, so the fluid wouldn’t run back to my bare toes. When the first jar was empty, I opened the second, moving down the row. The bag felt bottomless, and I began to move quickly, sloppily, the lighter fluid a wild spray from my hands to the vines. When I reached the end of the row, I retraced my steps, picking up the empty jars that littered the ground.

On the top porch step—in the same place Elizabeth and I had once sat, stringing chamomile—I lined up the jam jars, one after the other, and then went into the kitchen for matches.

I started back toward the road, looking for the wet trail. It ended by the driveway. I stepped back. Holding a fistful of matches together, I struck them on the wide, sandpapery strip of the box. One lit, and the others followed in a rush, until I held a flickering, glowing orb. The flame descended toward the tips of my fingers, and I waited until the heat grew uncomfortable, and then painful, before flicking it onto the ground.

There was a pause, and then a rushing noise—like a river, tumbling—followed by a quick series of loud pops. Then the heat. Turning, I ran toward the house, as I had planned, for a pot of water. But the fire was faster than I was. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the flames fleeing away from me, following an invisible trail through the brush and vines. I had expected the fire to be contained to the trunks of the vines I’d soaked, to flicker there until I ran inside for buckets of water, but the fire didn’t wait.

I leapt up the steps three at a time, racing into the kitchen. Replacing the matches, I screamed for Elizabeth. She rose immediately. I heard her thumping into my bedroom, calling my name.

“Downstairs!” I yelled. I was at the sink, filling a soup pot with water. The pipes of the old house clanked, and water emerged slowly, in breathy waves.

Clutching the full pot, I crossed the kitchen at the same moment Elizabeth descended the stairs, and we turned, shoulder to shoulder, our gaze drawn to the light.

The sky was purple. The stars were gone. As we watched, the fire
dipped into the roadside ditch, a quarter-mile of dry thistle igniting in a single moment. The wall of flames that rose seemed to climb halfway to the sky. Beyond it, the surrounding properties disappeared, leaving Elizabeth and I completely alone.

Like electricity on wires, the fire spread in lines across the vineyard.

I awoke when the sun rose. My body was sore, my cheek textured with
the imprint of the forest. I’d slept six hours, maybe seven. Pushing up into a sitting position, I adjusted myself away from the two circular puddles under the heath.

The city was waking up. Engines sputtered to life, brakes screeched, birds sang. On the street below me, a school-age girl stepped off a bus. She was alone and walked quickly down the street, a bouquet of flowers in her hands. I couldn’t see what she carried.

I exhaled. I wanted more than anything to be that girl, to be a child again and carry crocus or hawthorn or larkspur instead of buckets of thistle. I wanted to search the North Bay until I found Elizabeth, and apologize, and beg forgiveness. I wanted to start my life over, on a course that would not lead to this moment, this waking up alone in a city park, my own daughter alone in an empty apartment building. Every decision I’d ever made had led me here, and I wanted to take it all back, the hatred and the blame and the violence. I wanted to have lunch with my angry ten-year-old self, to warn her of this morning and give her the flowers to point her in a different direction.

But I couldn’t go back. There was only now: this forest within a city and my own daughter, waiting. The thought filled me with dread. I did not know what I would find when I returned to the apartment. I did not
know if she still screamed, or if time, solitude, and hunger had collapsed my daughter’s lungs as completely as a rising tide.

I had failed my daughter. Less than three weeks after giving birth and making promises to us both, I had failed, and failed again. The cycle would continue. Promises and failures, mothers and daughters, indefinitely.

My arms began to shake violently, water from the soup pot sloshing
onto Elizabeth. The cold spray snapped her into action. She ran to the phone in the kitchen as I sprinted out the front door, tripping over the jam jars as I flew down the steps.

The water in the pot was not enough to save even one vine. Looking at the fire, I knew this. Yet I had to try. Acres burned, the heat dizzying. Everything Elizabeth had spent her life cultivating would be gone if I did not act. She would be left on scorched earth, homeless and alone. I had to put it out. If I didn’t, I would never be able to look at her again.