Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  My homeroom teacher noticed. She kneeled beside my desk and whispered, “What’s wrong?”

  I stubbornly shook my head.

  She placed her hand on my arm and guided me to the counselor’s office. It didn’t take long for the counselor to convince me to tell her what had happened the night before. They called my sister to the nurse’s office, where they found the bruises his fingers had left around her neck.

  A woman from Children & Youth Services made the first visit to our apartment later that night. She interrogated our father in the living room, while my sister and I sat in the bedroom upstairs.

  After she left, he walked upstairs and stared at me with his serious, sober eyes. “How could you betray me like that?”

  I remembered his girlfriend asking me, years before, How could you do that to your dad? I wanted to tell him I didn’t mean to—that I was sorry—but he walked out of my room and downstairs before I could say anything at all.

  A few nights later, my father sat in front of our apartment drinking with one of our neighbors, a man in a wheelchair. They started harassing a group of young black boys. The boys ran to their older brothers, and soon there was a circle of teenagers around my father and the neighbor. I ran out the back door when I heard them shouting, and I circled around the apartment building to find my boyfriend and his little brother watching from the end of the sidewalk. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Your dad called them boys ‘n——,’ ” he said. He might have been one of the teenagers kicking my father if not for his leg.

  His little brother asked me to pick him up, and so I held him in my arms as we watched the teens beat my father bloody. I caught glimpses of his body between their kicking legs. They dumped my neighbor out of his wheelchair and onto the grass. My father went to the hospital that night, and then to jail.

  The next morning, Grandma took us to school to withdraw us. We would be moving back in with her and transferring to our old school. I found my boyfriend waiting on the steps before the bell. “We’re moving again,” I told him. I made no move to hug him, and he made no move to hug me. We made no promises to call, or to see each other after I left. Grandma called my name, and all I could think to say was “Bye.”

  * * *

  —

  LIFE SHOULD HAVE been easier when we moved back in with our grandmother, but in some ways, it was harder. Anything—homework, curfews, my sister’s friends—could start an argument between Grandma and my sister. “You’re just like your mother,” Grandma often told Eileen.

  In one of Grandma’s favorite stories about our mother, my parents were still living together on Nokomis Avenue. I was a baby, and while my father worked, my mother was supposed to be at home and taking care of me. But when Grandma came to visit, she found me crying alone in my crib. Half-dressed, my mother came running home from the neighbor’s apartment, where she had tried to seduce one of the two Indian men who lived there. When the other man came home, he’d chased my mother out.

  By “just like your mother,” our grandmother meant “irresponsible” and “boy crazy” and other worse things.

  Before the few months we lived with our father and Deb in York, Eileen hung out with the straight-edge kids. She drew X’s on the backs of her hands and listened to punk music and dyed sections of her hair cherry red. But after York, her friend group changed. She started partying with the stoners and skipping class.

  Children & Youth assigned our family a social worker. They scheduled family counseling sessions, during which our grandmother complained that Eileen constantly disobeyed. Part of the problem was that punishing Eileen didn’t seem to work. Grandma spanked us when we were younger. I was spanked once, then never again. But my sister found corporal punishment hysterical. Our grandmother didn’t have the strength to hurt her, and even after Grandma upgraded to a switch—the long, rubbery stem of some kind of Florida palm—I remember Eileen cackling as our grandmother tried to whip her into tears. “I wish I had the strength to bend you over my knee,” Grandma threatened Eileen, but even the threat made my sister laugh. As we grew older, Grandma resorted to grounding, but Eileen simply crawled out her bedroom window. And even after our uncle bolted her window shut, she climbed out of mine.

  My sister was in middle school the first time they sent her to a corrective boot camp, a place called VisionQuest. According to its mission statement, VisionQuest was a youth services organization for at-risk and troubled youth that offered programs “inspired by American Indian culture.” In the letters Eileen wrote to us, she described spending nights in a sweat lodge and making arts and crafts with feathers and beads.

  We drove to visit her every weekend on South Mountain, a two-hour drive west. During visitation, a counselor facilitated conversations between us, and Eileen cried about how much she wanted to change. She would listen to Grandma. She wouldn’t skip school.

  She was better the first few weeks after she came home. Then everything went back to how it had been.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE END of my eighth-grade year, our mother visited us in Pennsylvania. Grandma didn’t tell us she was coming—too worried she wouldn’t actually show. Our mother drove north with her boyfriend, Dale. He had family in northern Pennsylvania, and they’d planned a long road trip together.

  The day our mother arrived, my sister and I walked home from the bus like normal. Our grandmother was hopping around the yard.

  “What are you doing?” I laughed.

  “It’s a surprise,” she said, raising a camera to her eye.

  And then our mother stepped out of the apartment and onto the porch.

  In the first photograph Grandma took, my mother wraps her arms around my waist, and I wrap my arms around her neck, and Eileen stands beside us with both hands over her mouth. In the second photograph, Eileen and I embrace our mother between us. Our heads rest on opposite shoulders.

  In the kitchen, we crowded around our small table, and my mother brought out a box of photos of us as kids. She’d labeled each photo in her neat cursive, using our nicknames: Dani and Ling. In one picture, I stand next to my sister, who is bundled in a baby carrier; I am wearing a yellow cotton dress. “It’s like the one I wore when I was a little girl,” my mother giggled.

  After we went through her photos, she sketched her family tree on a small sheet of notebook paper—an elaborate web of her brothers and sister; aunts and uncles; nieces and nephews. Beneath the names of her parents, she wrote the names for our blood clans. “The blood clans are inherited from our mothers,” she explained. “You are born to the Tsi’naajinii, the Black-Streaked-Wood People. You understand?”

  I didn’t understand, but I nodded. I would keep my mother’s family tree locked in my fire-safe box until the day she passed.

  Our mother stayed part of two days with us. We worked on a circular jigsaw puzzle, a cherry pie with a lattice-top crust. The pieces were nearly identical, with only slight variations of red and golden brown. As I hunted pieces, my mother braided my hair and scolded me for how broken and dry it had become. “You shouldn’t wash your hair every day,” she complained.

  “How come?”

  “Becaaaaause,” she laughed. “It makes it all dry!” From her bag she fetched a red-and-white bandana with little pictures of Garfield on the border and tied it over my hair. “There,” she chirped, patting it against my head. “You can wear this on the days you skip washing your hair.”

  Later that night, our mother left with Dale to visit our uncle Marty and his girlfriend, Kerri, who had moved to Pennsylvania a few months after my dad. “We’re just gonna say hi!” our mother said.*1

  She was gone for hours. Finally, Grandma called my uncle’s house. “You’re really upsetting these girls,” Grandma said.

  But our mother didn’t come back. Eileen remembers going to my uncle’s house that night, but not me. I knew b
etter. Or rather, I had lost my stomach for nights like those.

  Our mother came by the apartment in the morning to say her goodbyes. She and Dale were headed north to visit his family in Perry County. They didn’t stop to see us on their return to Florida. Instead, a few weeks later, she mailed us a photograph from their trip: She stands on the side of a narrow road and offers an apple to a young, half-wild deer.

  * * *

  —

  OVER OUR YEARS in high school, my sister and I drifted further and further apart. I was awkward and a little bit weird, and I didn’t have many friends at school. I spent more and more time role-playing in an online fantasy world called Rhy’Din, which was scattered across member-generated chatrooms on AOL. I played a wolf, Kinia, who ruled a wolf pack called the Skeksis Wolves, and I recruited a small group of friends. Together we raised families, devised new storylines, and waged wars, fracturing and rebuilding wolf packs over years of our real lives.

  Playing wolves, I met my childhood best friend, Lexi, who lived a few hours south of me. We transferred our friendship to the real world when her mother drove her to visit me, and after I got my driver’s license, I would drive down to visit her. One year, I joined her family on their vacation in Ocean City; we binged every season of Gundam Wing, and we built a fort of blankets and pillows on the stairs to race through the Anita Blake books. We made a tradition of missing the New Year—playing videogames through the countdown. I would drive down to visit her so we could we play our latest favorite, Tales of Symphonia, Disgaea, or Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, in her basement.

  I also met my boyfriend online. He was two years older than me and lived in Idaho. We played a pair of vampires, Dove and Qat, who frequented Rhy’Din’s taverns and underground places. I bought calling cards with the money I earned at my job at Hardee’s, and we talked on the phone every night. When I was sixteen, I convinced my grandmother to let me visit him over Christmas break. The rest of my family thought she was crazy, but I flew out to stay with him and his father in Boise. He showed me around his city, and I met his mother and his older sister and his nephew and his piano teacher and believed I had found love.

  Eileen was more socially adept than I was, even if the friends she had chosen were walking her down our parents’ path. More than once, a police officer brought her home after curfew. One night, she and her friends tried to run from the cops for breaking curfew, but Eileen got stuck trying to climb over a tall fence when she failed to find the gate. The officer brought her home, and she hopped around the kitchen—giggling nervously to herself—while he tried to lecture her and our grandmother. Once she saw his car pull away, she pulled a small glass pipe out of her underwear and cackled out loud.

  “I don’t understand what’s wrong with you,” our grandmother groaned.

  After she was caught drinking underage, Children and Youth placed her in foster care, with a family an hour north. The family hosted a rotating roster of kids. Once a month, my grandmother and I met her and her foster mother in a restaurant off a highway exit halfway between our home and theirs.

  Eileen begged us to be allowed to come home, but it wasn’t up to us. She was in foster care for almost a year.

  After she came home, she pushed our grandmother onto the ground during a fight. I ran into the living room when I heard Grandma yell. As she used the couch to try to pull herself to her feet, I walked toward Eileen with clenched fists.

  “What are you going to do?” Eileen laughed at me.

  I swung at her once, and she swung back, and I grabbed her shirt in my hands and threw her against the wall. Eileen didn’t want to fight me, not really. Our grandmother screamed that she was going to call the cops. Eileen yelled her apologies, but she was sent to a second boot camp on South Mountain.

  She wrote us letters between visits and listed the growing number of push-ups she could do; the growing distances she could run. Grandma and I drove to South Mountain every two weeks, though I started skipping some weekends because of work. During our visitations, she promised she would change; that she would do better.

  “I love you,” our grandmother said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I just need you to behave.”

  I wanted to believe Eileen would change—that she would keep the promises she made—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand why she chose to drink, when drinking had already cost us so much. I knew that when she returned home, she would get mixed up with the same friends, and the years we had lived we would live again and again and again.

  * * *

  —

  I TRIED TO kill myself. No single event precipitated it—only the feeling that nothing would change. One night, after Lexi and my boyfriend and my sister and Grandma had all gone to bed, I swallowed all the Tylenol I could find in the cabinet, which wasn’t enough, and so I swallowed a bottle of liquid vitamins, too. I didn’t really understand how it worked. I sat in the bathroom and cried; my stomach tied itself in knots. When I realized I wasn’t dying, I walked into my grandmother’s room and gently woke her up.

  “I tried to kill myself,” I said.

  Grandma propped herself on one elbow and squinted at me through the dark. “Do I need to take you to the hospital?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Let’s go,” Grandma sighed, pulling herself up out of bed. She drove me to the emergency room, where a nurse, Michael, monitored my breathing and my heart. He asked me what I had taken and how much.

  “She didn’t do any permanent damage,” he assured my grandmother. “But keep an eye on her tonight.”

  I was assigned a counselor, and every other week, my grandmother picked me up from school and drove me downtown, where I talked with a white suburban woman whose life seemed very different from mine. I told her about my childhood, and when she asked me what I wanted, I told her I wanted my family to be happy; I wanted to be normal.

  “What is normal?” she asked.

  I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for her. She seemed to think that normal didn’t exist. I agreed, in theory, but also knew there was a version of normal my life could have been.

  I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and my counselor suggested I might also have post-traumatic stress disorder. My doctor prescribed me Zoloft, then Paxil, though nothing they gave me could change the chaos at home.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN MY BOYFRIEND turned eighteen, he moved in with my grandmother, my sister, and me. He proposed to me and gave me his mother’s ring. He hadn’t yet finished high school, but his mother agreed to let him finish his diploma online. The two of us shared a bedroom, my sister had the other, and my grandmother slept in the living room on a pull-out couch.

  I found a new job at a place called Checkered Past, a vintage clothing store and piercing studio in one. During the week, I went to school, came home, ate dinner, and worked most nights from four to nine. Then I finished my homework before I passed out. Most weekends I worked both Saturday and Sunday, sometimes opening the store by myself.

  My boyfriend didn’t work, and he didn’t try very hard to find a job. He couldn’t drive, either. He spent days playing videogames—Warcraft III and EVE Online—with his friends. He complained we didn’t spend enough time together and that we never went out.

  I was tired all the time. Sick all the time. I missed enough days of school to fail my senior year, but the women in the attendance office knew my sister, who missed even more days of school than I did, and when graded on a curve, I excelled.

  The day Eileen was expelled she laughed, “I was in the fucking bathroom. I just didn’t want to go to class.”

  They started shipping Eileen to a school for at-risk kids. Then she punched a teacher and they tossed her in juvenile detention.

  * * *

  —

  ONE NIGHT WHILE I was at work, my father stumbled into the store off the street. H
e had been living in Elizabethtown with Deb, who had inexplicably taken him back, but she had kicked him out again.

  “Danielle,” he yelled as he walked through the door. “Come say hi to your dad.”

  The store was empty except for my manager and me, but I rushed to meet him. “You have to leave,” I said, trying to block him from walking farther into the store.

  “Why?” he asked, pushing past me. “I’m not hurting anybody.”

  I could feel my manager’s gaze heavy on my back; my throat felt tight with tears. “You can’t come see me like this,” I said quietly, trying not to cry.

  My father stopped. He looked into my eyes, and I watched something close over his face. “Are you ashamed of me?”

  “I’m not,” I insisted.

  “Okay,” he said. He awkwardly patted my shoulder. “You know I love you, right?”

  I nodded. I watched him leave. I pressed my palms against my eyes to try and dry them before facing my manager again. I can’t remember what she could have said.

  Later that night, the cops picked up and tossed my father into a cell for public drunkenness. After he left me, he had walked down the street to a bar and started another fight.

  * * *

  —

  TWO WEEKS BEFORE my high school graduation, my uncle’s girlfriend died. She passed out in the bathtub and drowned. My sister was sitting in their living room while it happened—Eileen watched the paramedics carry her out of the house. They managed to revive her, but she never woke from her coma. Her religious mother flew into town from across the country and fought with my uncle about removing her from life support.

  Grandma called her death a blessing. After a lifetime of drinking, my uncle’s girlfriend had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, a disease my grandmother called a worse kind of hell.