Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  A few days later, as I pedaled my bike up and down our sidewalk, my father’s girlfriend complained about my mother to the woman next door. I heard her say, “She’s a filthy little liar.” And as I turned my bike and glanced up at her face, I realized she was staring directly at me.

  When Teddy got hit by a car some weeks later, he dragged his broken body home—his two back legs struck useless and limp. He pulled himself around the apartment for a couple of days, and then he disappeared. My father’s girlfriend explained that this was what cats did—they crawled off somewhere to die alone.

  The sun was shining through the bedroom window when her son pulled me into his bed. His sister was jealous, standing over us. “Please don’t tell,” I begged. “You’re next.” But she ran out of the room to find my dad.

  I ran after her, but she had already told.

  My father grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned into my face and said, “Don’t ever let a boy touch you like that again.”

  I can’t remember what he did to the boy.

  Near the end of kindergarten, my grandmother showed up at our apartment with a police officer. He brought me into the back bedroom and closed the door. He tucked a stuffed animal into my hands and kneeled down and asked, “Do you feel safe here?”

  I was silent and nervously pulled at the stuffed animal’s fur.

  “Do you want to leave here with your grandmother?” he asked.

  I said yes.

  After the police officer left the room, my father’s girlfriend appeared beside me and grabbed hold of my arm and hissed, “How could you do this to your dad?”

  Guilt crawled down my throat and into my gut and sunk its fangs deep, but I didn’t know how to undo what I had done.

  On May 3, 1991, when I was five and my sister was three, the courts granted our grandmother full custody of my sister and me. My father surrendered his parental rights on the informal condition that if he could be sober for a year, we would be allowed to live with him again. My mother didn’t even get that much—there was no consideration for her future custody.

  * * *

  —

  IN HER HOSPITAL bed, my mother’s foot moves in a small, unending circle: still seizing, the nurse explains. I cup her foot in my hand and press my fingers against the soles of her feet, hard with calluses from the work boots she wore.

  The nurse watches me. I can feel her eyes. But when I look up, they are more gentle than critical. “Is anyone else coming to be with you?” she asks.

  I shake my head no.

  “No one?” she asks.

  “Her husband died last year,” I say. “And my sister can’t make it down.”

  She nods slowly as she works. She has started a collection of my mother’s blood on a metal tray. “I’ll let the doctor know you’re here,” she says.

  After the nurse leaves, I retreat to a chair in the far corner of the room to watch my mother from a distance. I can’t shake the feeling there is something expected of me. Some thing I am supposed to do; some word I am supposed to say. My sister has asked me to give her a kiss, but the thought unnerves me.

  When the doctor arrives, she is surprised to see me. Surprised I made it to Florida so fast. She pulls a chair across the room to sit beside me in the white light of the window. “I hope I made it clear how serious her condition is,” she begins.

  “You did,” I say. I try to hold eye contact with the doctor but find myself looking everywhere else: her legs, crossed one over the other; her hands, clasped over one knee; her hair, twisted into braids.

  The doctor offers me details she avoided over the phone: My mother came to the hospital after a seizure, and while she was awaiting evaluation, her heart attacked. My mother had tried to stop drinking, but she quit cold turkey, and the withdrawal was too much of a shock. “DTs,” my sister would announce later, by abbreviation alone. “I knew it.”

  My mother’s death was preventable. If she had sought care, of course, her death could have been forestalled. She was only forty-nine.

  “If we had known how sick she was,” the doctor says quietly, “we wouldn’t have revived her.”

  My eyes shift to the array of machines that are keeping my mother’s heart beating, her lungs breathing, and then my eyes drop to the floor. “Is there a reason to keep these machines on?” I ask.

  “Everything we are doing,” she says, a long sigh, “is futile.”

  Futile. The word sticks in my lungs. I exhale heavily and try not to cry. I tell the doctor I am ready to let her go, and she tells me she will send a woman from hospice care to speak with me later that day.

  After the doctor leaves, I slide my chair closer to the bed and take her hand, small and cold. Her eyes are swollen, her hair a tangle on the pillow. The sound of my mother’s mechanical breath fills the room—a forced and dry rush of air.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER OUR ADOPTION was finalized, my sister and I moved in with our grandmother and her partner, Don, who she met in a restaurant’s kitchen, where he was a chef. Don was a sun-brown old man who wore golf polos and plaid pants stuffed with loose change, and he jingled everywhere he walked. He wore a full set of dentures but dyed his hair jet black and claimed his potbelly was not fat but a watermelon, grown from a seed he swallowed years before. He cooked us dinner every night. He read the Sunday funnies to me every weekend, with me curled up in his lap.

  Don was always Don and never grandpa because our grandmother decided she would never marry him. “He’d be too controlling,” she told me more than once. “He was that way with his wives. If I married him, he’d suddenly think he could tell me what to do.”

  Still, they had been together as long as I had been alive, and after our adoption, they moved into a new trailer, a brown-and-tan double-wide, so my sister and I could have our own rooms. We lived in a trailer park called Meadowbrook, a ten-minute drive down Okeechobee Boulevard from Westgate, where our father still lived. There were no meadows or brooks in Meadowbrook—only a makeshift putting green and a sludgy canal full of shopping carts and soft-shelled turtles. And when it rained hard enough, walking catfish migrated from the canal to the puddles that spawned along the edge of the road.

  Our closest neighbors were boys: two Justins, two Ryans, a Shawn, a Josh, and a Pitt. We played dinosaurs, and cowboys and Indians. We climbed trees and caught snakes and lizards, whose tails broke off in our hands. If I held an anole next to my ear, it would clamp down and dangle there like an earring—my grandmother’s old clip-on earrings hurt more than they did. The boys let the lizards bite their tongues.

  One winter, a pair of tall, gray birds visited our trailer park. You could hear them calling to each other as they flew past, day after day. The boys, Eileen, and I learned to run after their voices, to chase them from a distance until they chose to land. Once, we found a father and his young daughter feeding the birds tuna fish out of a can, but the father told us to get out of his driveway when we ventured too close. One of the boys’ uncles gave us a name for the birds: sandhill cranes. He loaned us a book, and we crowded around its illustrations and descriptions. Our cranes wintered in Florida but migrated north to raise their chicks in the northern United States and Canada each spring. They mated for life. The cranes, stilted and gray with crowns of red, were the most strange and beautiful things I had ever seen.

  Eileen sometimes kissed the boys. Grandma called her boy crazy, like our mother—always more like our mother than me.

  I did not kiss the boys when they tried to kiss me. Once, while I played a videogame in one of the boys’ rooms, he leaned close to me and whispered, “I could rape you right now if I wanted to.” A group of them tried to catch me—to block me in with their bodies—but I was small and fast. They herded me in circles, and I ran myself into a fever, tears and sweat draining down my face. When I finally reached the sanctuary of my porch, they sto
od stupidly in the yard until Grandma chased them away.

  I spent less time with the boys and more time with Don. In the evenings, after school, I sat with him while he cleaned the fish he’d caught: catfish and young sharks, and flounder when he was lucky. We listened to a radio station that played pop hits from the eighties—songs by Cyndi Lauper and Eurythmics and Madonna—which was better than the oldies station Grandma listened to. After dinner, we took nightly walks around the whole trailer park. During the rainy season, we rescued the walking catfish in white buckets and carried them back to the canal. But our main project was the garden, a small, square patch beside the shed. I helped him weed and water the garden and the flower beds that cut around the trailer. We composted our kitchen scraps in a big black bin and mixed the rich soil into the earth every spring. One of my favorite photographs from our childhood is a picture of my sister and me, framed by the garden: I hold the gardening hose proudly over my head. My shorts are stained with water, and Eileen stands beside me in tears.

  One year, for Father’s Day, we bought Don three rosebushes to plant beside the porch. We hid them in Eileen’s bedroom closet and told her to keep them a secret, but as soon as he got home, she raced over to him and exclaimed, “Don! We got you roses!”

  My sister and I each wanted Don for ourselves. His love and his time and his care were finite, and our lives had not taught us to share. Eileen learned how to smile from him—the way he hugged his lips together over his teeth. When we went camping at Sebastian Inlet State Park, Don would take us fishing separately—motoring one of us out in his small orange boat while the other stayed at camp with Grandma. He taught us how to bait shrimp and cast a line and wait out the first inquisitive nibbles to hook a fish. I loved fishing with Don: the bob of the boat on the choppy inlet; his calm and solid presence; the joy and laughter when I, at last, reeled in a fish, even if it was an inglorious sea robin, to be cast back into the sea.

  When I was nine, Don got sick. Cancer, in his liver. Grandma took care of him for as long as she could. Their bed became his sickbed, and Grandma asked my father to take care of my sister and me for a while.

  Our father and his new girlfriend, Fran, lived in an old, dark house in Westgate. The four of us slept on mattresses in the living room, because the two bedrooms served as a workshop and storage. The workshop was lined with tables, strewn with the innards of broken electronics—televisions, microwaves, and computers—that my father reconstructed and sold at the flea market. He let me help tighten screws and connecting wires when the spaces were too narrow and his hands too big. The other bedroom was packed with clothing and toys and glassware that Fran salvaged from the trash.

  When Don was sick, we didn’t visit him at home, and we didn’t visit him in hospice when he was finally transferred there. We spent our time at school and at our father’s, running wild in the overgrown lot behind their house. We caught giant orange grasshoppers and created terrariums for them by stuffing grass and twigs inside two-liter soda bottles. We played with a neighborhood cat, whose kittens lived inside the engine of a derelict car. Grandma brought us a picture of Don, smiling behind an oxygen mask.

  One afternoon, as we sat under the canopy of the field’s only tree and stroked the cat’s sleek back, a yellow bird landed on the ground in front of us. Before Eileen or I had time to react, the cat pounced. I screamed, and the cat turned excited eyes toward me; the bird fluttered its wings in her mouth. I lunged at the cat, but she darted across the field, and I chased her to the edge of the space that crawled beneath our house. I kneeled down and stared into the dark, but I couldn’t force myself to follow. Instead, I ran inside to find Fran, who did not chase the cat but instead stroked my hair and wiped my tears as I wailed about the cat and the bird under the house. “Why did it do that?” I demanded.

  “It’s what cats do,” she said. Only, I didn’t mean the cat. I couldn’t understand why the bird had flown so close to danger.

  Later, I ventured back into the field, to the patch of ground beneath the tree. I found its feathers in the weeds and collected them in a small metal tin. Years after, I would find the tin, open it, and recognize the barring and shape of the bird’s feathers, still soft and yellow. It was a budgie—most likely, someone’s pet that had escaped and, seeing a familiar human shape, come to me for help.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THE HOSPICE worker arrives, she leads me down the hall to a dark room decorated with stiff floral loveseats. A crocheted blanket is draped over one, and empty cans and wrappers are scattered across the coffee table. Some families camp out here, the hospice worker explains. She sweeps the blanket over the back of the loveseat, and we sit at a diagonal, though she leans forward to close the distance between us.

  “Do you know anything about hospice care?” she asks.

  “My grandpa was in hospice,” I say, remembering Don, though I was too young and too far removed to understand what that meant.

  “Good,” she says, smiling. “Our program is connected to this hospital, so we won’t need to move your mother far. But the doctor has informed me that we can’t move her quite yet.”

  I frown. “Why not?”

  “It’s the blood pump,” she says, and she sits up, her back rigid. “If we remove it now, her blood would spurt everywhere.” She mimes the word “spurt” with her hands, her fingers splattering imaginary blood across the walls.

  I close my eyes to the room and ask when they think it can be removed.

  “We’re waiting to hear,” she says with a shrug.

  “My flight leaves tomorrow,” I say, cracking the knuckles of my fingers one by one. “I’m starting a new job, and I can’t really stay longer.”

  The woman tilts her head, surprised, but says in her gentlest voice, “We will do everything we can to take care of your mother.”

  It’s not my mother, I want to tell her. It’s just her body. I have not been able to find my mother in that room.

  * * *

  —

  I’M NOT SURE where our mother lived when we were at Meadowbrook. She spent years bouncing between her friends’ and boyfriends’ houses, and we weren’t allowed to visit her at home because our grandmother didn’t trust her boyfriends alone with us girls. Our visits were supervised and controlled. We visited her at work, sometimes—eating quick meals during her lunch break, or catching her at the end of a shift—but usually, we saw her on birthdays and holidays: Mother’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and our favorite, Halloween.

  My sister and I had birthdays two weeks apart, which meant that we usually celebrated them together. One year, my mother took us to see The Lion King. Afterward, we ordered lunch at McDonald’s and ate pressed together in the front seat of her car. She noticed me staring at the dream catcher that dangled from her rearview mirror, its twin feathers fluttering gently in the breeze. “They’re sacred,” she told me. “Only Native Americans are allowed to have eagle feathers.”

  One Halloween, my mother and her new boyfriend, Tony, took us trick-or-treating around our trailer park. They both dressed up like clowns. Tony tried to convince us there was an alligator snapping turtle hiding in a storm drain, just like the boys in our neighborhood always would; he made us laugh. One of our neighbors gave out cans of soda instead of candy—I picked orange, and Eileen picked grape.*1

  Another Halloween, she took us to a haunted house. Disembodied hands reached through the walls to grab at our hair. Beneath our feet, in backlit boxes, snakes coiled into knots. At the end of the haunted house, a man in a gorilla costume started chasing us, and our mother squealed in delight. But Eileen was scared. Our mother flirted with the man in the gorilla costume while my sister cried. For years after, Eileen couldn’t even walk past a haunted house at a carnival.

  One Easter, my sister and I decorated eggs with our grandmother: We traced hearts and flowers on the shells with white wax before dunking the eggs in cu
ps of dye. Little testaments of our love. We waited and waited for our mother to arrive. When my grandmother finally reached my mother on the phone, her voice was scalding. “You’re really disappointing these girls.”

  My mother showed up late, like always.*2

  I learned very young that my mother was someone not to be trusted—that she would break my heart if I let her. But for Eileen, our mother was the solution to a nameless unhappiness. “I want to live with Mommy,” Eileen would say unceasingly. And, always, “You don’t love me.”

  “You can’t live with your mother,” our grandmother would respond. She sighed it. She cried it. She yelled it. There was always yelling in our home.

  Eileen couldn’t understand why, but I did. Our mother was an alcoholic. Our father was an alcoholic. Our grandmother was an alcoholic, seventeen years sober. “You’re an alcoholic,” Grandma would tell me, even when I was very young. “You just haven’t had your first drink.”

  What I did not understand, or could not understand, was why my mother drank. I could not have known the depth of her loss: her brother, her mother, her father, us girls.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I PULL into the lot of the rental-car return at the airport, I am struck with the sudden, overwhelming thought that I’m not ready to go back to Boston yet. I circle the lot once, twice, and chew on the rough skin edging my thumbnail. All I can think of is the ocean. All I want to do is throw myself into the sea, rock with the waves, stare at the sun-filled sky, and watch floaters and seagulls vie for attention against the great, engulfing blue. All I want is to fall asleep with the smell of salt in my hair, to wake up in a new bed every day, to leave this place and all places far behind me.

  A shuttle bus drops me off at the terminal, and I wheel my mother’s suitcase to the baggage-check counter. Even though it could fit in the overhead compartment, it is too heavy for me to lift over my head. But when I approach the counter, the thought that they might open the suitcase or that it might get lost on a connecting flight sends me into a panic, and I dissolve into tears in front of the two men standing there. “These are my mom’s things,” I say, and when I think that this is it—her entire life in one suitcase—I cry even harder. I tell them my mother died—is dying—is gone, or leaving—and beg them not to open her suitcase. I don’t want anything to get lost.