Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  I decided to derail my return trip to Tucson. I rented a car in Maine and drove to Pennsylvania through a major thunderstorm. I should have stopped—there were times the rain fell faster than the wipers could clear the windshield; fell so hard I could barely see the brake lights of the car in front of me. I passed a fresh accident every few miles: fenders smashed and hoods crumpled and an RV tumbled cleanly onto its side. In the mountains, I detoured off the highway for miles—a semi had crashed, and gallons of sulfuric acid washed across the road. I should have stopped, but each time I felt my tires leave the ground, planing over the torrential rain, I simply lifted my foot off the gas pedal and held my course.

  “Did the storm pass?” my grandmother asked when I walked into her hospital room. She looked not at me but through me, as if I weren’t really there. “I feel like I was waitin’ on it.”

  I told her it had.

  My aunt pulled me into the hallway to update me on my grandmother’s condition: what the doctors had and hadn’t said, and what they wanted to do. They believed the hallucinations were the side effect of a medication, but that she also exhibited early signs of dementia. My grandmother’s oldest sister, Jessie, had Alzheimer’s; I remembered visiting her in the nursing home when we were kids. I told my aunt I understood.

  She asked me to stay the night with my grandmother in the nursing home, because she was worried Grandma wasn’t getting enough sleep, or that the nurses weren’t responding to her calls.

  I agreed to stay.

  After my aunt left, I sat in the chair beside my grandmother’s bed and watched the Westerns playing quietly on the far side of the room. My grandmother dozed until ten that night, then woke suddenly—her eyes wide and nervous. I offered her my hand, and she took it, stroking the back with her thumb. It was an intimacy that was foreign to our relationship, and it made me slightly uncomfortable.

  “It hurts,” my grandmother breathed through her teeth, all sharp ss-ss-ss’s. “Help me.”

  I told her I would be back. I paced the halls trying to find a nurse, but the nurse I found told me she couldn’t give my grandmother anything for the pain—she had already received her full dose earlier that day. I returned to my grandmother’s room and tried to explain, but she didn’t understand what I was saying.

  “Help me,” she repeated.

  I helped her turn, from her right side to her left to her right side again, but nothing seemed to help. Neither of us slept.

  The dawn flushed the windows pink, and I told my grandmother I would be back. I drove to her apartment to pick up my father, who agreed to stay with her that morning. I dropped him off and then returned to my grandmother’s apartment to sleep. I slept fitfully, my knees rattling the metal railing attached to the side of her bed each time I turned under the sheets.

  My aunt convinced the nurses to change my grandmother’s dosing schedule, but she asked me to stay the night again.

  Again, my grandmother slept until ten, and then she woke, complaining about the pain. “It hurts. I’m uncomfortable,” she repeated, the hard consonants of her words digging under my skin.

  If my mother had the patience to be a caretaker, I knew I did not. I tried to help her get comfortable. I shifted her weight back and forth with the sheet, like I’d watched the nurses do. But again, no position was right, and five minutes after I rested my grandmother on one side, she asked me to help her roll over again. The frustration turned to anger, and I dropped my head and groaned, “You aren’t going to be comfortable.”

  My grandmother slowly turned her head toward me and stared into my eyes. “When did you get so mean?”

  I shook my head and walked out of her room, down the hall, past the residents who were parked outside their rooms in their wheelchairs. I watched a woman creep past the nurses’ station, her shuffling feet pulling her wheelchair inch by inch. The nurse seated by the computer seemed to ignore the woman and stared at her screen.

  The next morning, I picked up my father again, but I didn’t even bother trying to return to my grandmother’s to sleep. My father wheeled my grandmother out of her room and outside, to sit beneath the shade of the porte-cochère. In the empty lot across the street, a bulldozer ripped the land open to sky. A flock of barn swallows dipped and dove above its hand. My grandmother fell asleep with her chin on her chest, her shoulders bowed in.

  I celebrated my thirtieth birthday in the nursing home with my grandmother. We sat together in her room and watched old reruns on TV. At lunch, I watched her try to pick up a toothpick off her tray, and just as I reached over to help, she pinned it between her two fingers and slid it into her mouth.

  “You got it,” I said, surprised.

  She leaned back to inspect the piece of food she excavated from between her teeth. “You never know when the next miracle’s going to happen,” she laughed.

  I left the nursing home early that evening; my aunt told me she didn’t think I needed to pull another all-nighter. I drove an hour north of the city and bought myself an ice cream cone. I had invited my father to join me, but he declined. He tried to call me later—drunk.

  He was already at the nursing home when I arrived the next morning. He had spent the night sleeping in the bushes outside. He asked me for a ride home so he could babysit my nephew, who flew past both of us and straight to the television when he arrived.

  My father sent me to the grocery store for peanut butter and jelly, one of the few things my nephew would eat. I spent ten minutes wandering, lost, unable to find the right aisle.

  That night, my nephew sat beside me on the couch. I sat very still and avoided his eyes, as if he were a cat. He took one of my hands and touched his side. “Tickle,” he told me, and I wiggled my fingers below his ribs and behind his knees while he played a game on his Kindle. If I stopped, he would grab my hand again.

  That night, as I tried to fall asleep, I listened to my nephew’s voice in the dark: “Don’t go. Wait. Espere. No se vaya. Don’t go.” English and Spanish, backward and forward. He sang, soft and quiet: “I love you. You love me. We’re a happy family.” I wondered what he understood of family, and if he missed his mother, too.

  [I Tried to Say]

  THEY SENT MY father to me again three months later. My aunt bought him a train ticket and sent him on his way. Eileen met him during his stop in Pittsburgh to bring him food, bottles of water, clean clothes, and a pair of work boots. All he had to do was get on the train. Instead, he sent me a text message to say he wasn’t coming. “I love you too much,” he said.

  Drunk, he called Eileen, who left work to go find him. She held me on the phone as she ran around the train station; crying, she kept repeating, “All he had to do was get on the train!” She finally found him, drunk and harassing a group of other homeless men.

  She started yelling at him, and he yelled back, “I just want to stay here with my new friends!”

  I imagined her waving the cellphone in the air with one hand while she pulled on him with the other.

  “We don’t know him,” an unfamiliar voice said, and I covered my mouth to try and muffle a laugh.

  I listened to the static thudding of something bumping against the phone’s microphone. Then the call dropped.

  Eileen called me back later to tell me she bought him a new train ticket. She bought him food and tried to help him find his luggage, which had gone missing, without luck. She sat with him in the station until his next train arrived.

  * * *

  —

  AN OLDER MAN I met on Craigslist lived with me. He was an engineer who’d lost his job, then moved back West to be near his son. He reminded me a little of “Weird Al” Yankovic, with his curly mop of brown hair, and he offered to pay three months up front, which I should have recognized as a warning sign. But he mostly kept to himself—closing himself in his room, brewing beer in the kitchen on the weekends. It took weeks for our relati
onship to unravel.

  He couldn’t find or hold a good job, and he spent more and more time around the apartment. One afternoon, after he’d had too much to drink, he cornered me in the kitchen and started ranting about his ex-wife and his mother-in-law, who pressed charges against him for physical assault. He didn’t deny hurting her—it was clear from the story he had.

  I marveled that I had found a man so like my dad.

  Not long after the three months he paid in advance, he stopped paying me rent. He promised that he was working on it. He offered to buy me groceries with his food stamps. He paid me portions of the rent he owed, but not all. It made me feel less guilty about my father crashing on our couch.

  Before my father arrived, I explained the situation to him. I told him he could continue brewing beer in the apartment, but I asked that he not give any to my dad.

  * * *

  —

  MY FATHER DIDN’T even pretend to stop drinking. He spent most of his days drinking downtown, and then would come back to my apartment to pass out on the couch. He met a woman at the public library, who he brought back to my apartment most nights. They slept in a pile of blankets on my floor, and they claimed to be in love. They told me they were going to get married.

  “I love you as much as I love your dad,” she told me.

  I refused to look at her, or even meet her eyes. The love of an addict is a trap.

  She told me she was my mother now. When I said I didn’t want a mother, she cried to my father, “She hates me!” She was always crying.

  My father called me a bitch.

  “Send him to me,” my mother had said. “I’ll take care of him.” But my father was too old, too grown, for any of that to make sense.

  My schoolwork suffered. I stopped writing. In class, I talked too often and too loudly about my father, because I did not know who or how to ask for help.

  One afternoon, I came home and found my father, his girlfriend, and my roommate all drinking together in my kitchen. As soon as I walked in the door, they scattered.

  I told my father he needed to leave. He tried to joke his way out of trouble, but I demanded he give me my spare key, and then I kicked him out.

  My roommate ventured into the kitchen an hour later to refill his glass, and I confronted him about giving my father alcohol, about his missing rent. He told me he had nowhere to go; that he couldn’t stay with his son.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I want you out.”

  “I could make this hell for you,” he said, his voice rising. He swung his glass above his head and bounced on his toes. “I could make you evict me and drag this out for a fucking month.”

  I didn’t move. I kept my voice even and looked into his eyes. “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m not threatening you,” he said, backing down. “I’m just telling you the way it is.”

  “No,” I said, standing. “You threatened me, and you need to leave. That’s what’s happening now.”

  The next morning, sober, my roommate tried to apologize—to wheedle his way back into my good graces—but it wouldn’t work. I gave him a few days to find another place to stay. I knew I would never see the money he owed, but I was willing to shoulder the cost to live, finally, alone.

  * * *

  —

  MY FATHER AND his girlfriend didn’t move far from my apartment—they slept in the park across the street, until the resident meth addict chased them out. They moved to the sidewalk in front of the library instead, a few blocks from my house.

  Every few days, my father brought me items in penance—packages of dried beans, ramen, and traveler-sized toiletries donated to the shelter. My spare key disappeared, but I didn’t bother to ask for it back.

  He stayed away until winter, when the nightly temperatures dropped below freezing. He called and begged to stay at my apartment, just for one night.

  I told him he could but asked him to please, please, please be sober.

  He brought his girlfriend with him. I retreated to my bedroom and cracked the door—just wide enough for my cat to come and go. I played a videogame with the headphones askew on my head so I could keep an ear on the door, their muffled voices. The toilet flushed. My father mumbled something, and his girlfriend whined his name.

  I set my headphones on the desk and crept closer to my door.

  “I’m horny,” I heard my father say.

  “I love you,” she said. When he didn’t answer, she said it again.

  “I want to stick my dick in your pussy,” he said.

  I closed my eyes. She repeated his name. The shower started to run, and the sound of the water interfered with their voices, but I thought I heard her say, “Please don’t hit me again.”

  I turned on my stereo, then turned it off. I paced to my window and then back to my door. The water turned off, and the bathroom door opened, and the door to the spare bedroom closed. The futon creaked under their weight.

  He told her he wanted to cum inside her.

  I wanted to stop listening, but I waited for her answer: She was trying to tell him no.

  I grabbed my keys and ran out of the apartment. I sat in my car behind my building and called the local police, but I didn’t know how to tell the officer what I heard.

  “My dad is drunk,” I said, aware of how small I sounded.

  “Is he violent?” he asked.

  “I just want him out of my apartment,” I said. “He won’t leave.”

  “Does he live there?”

  “No. Not really. He’s homeless. He’s just staying with me.”

  “Unfortunately,” he sighed, “if you want to evict him, you’re going to have to go through your landlord.”

  After my long silence he said, “We can send an officer to the house.”

  I didn’t really want the police to show up at my apartment. I didn’t want my father to know I was snitching on him, or for him to accuse me of betraying him again. He would deny everything, and so would she.

  “That’s okay,” I said, and I hung up the phone before I started to cry. The leaves of the gum trees whispered above my head.

  [Little Tweets]

  THE WOMAN WHO raised my sister Alex messaged me and Eileen a few days before Christmas. “I told her about you guys,” she said, adding, “but it’s her decision if she wants to talk to you.”

  When I opened Instagram, I noticed a new follow notification. Alex didn’t send me a message, but she liked a blurry photograph of a bird I posted, a Hutton’s vireo, its olive-yellow belly set in contrast with the bare white branches of a tree. She liked a photograph I took of a Gila woodpecker, its black-and-white-barred back peeking between the leaves of a mesquite.

  Eileen asked if Alex had contacted me.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Eileen copied a message Alex sent to her, warning Eileen she couldn’t just barge into her life. She told her she didn’t want a relationship with her, but especially with me, because we had gone behind her mother’s back. “She’s the world to me,” Alex had said. “She’s all I know, and it’s going to stay that way.”

  “Did you message her first?” I asked.

  “I liked a couple of her pictures and commented on one,” she said. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  I had noticed. Eileen had posted a memorial to her dead betta fish, Dexter.

  “She was like, ‘Good! I’m glad your fish is dead!’ ” Eileen laughed. “ ‘I hope everything in your life dies!’ ”

  I laughed, hysterically. “She’s prolly all fucked up over this,” I said, quieting. I realized I had likely pushed too hard—that I hadn’t considered what our sister might have needed.

  “I think she just needs time,” Eileen agreed.

  I had been used to the enthusiasm of our youngest sister, who I met—once—after finding her ad
optive mother’s phone number in a card they sent to my mother before she died. Her family was planning to visit Florida, and they asked if my mother would want to spend some time with them while they were there. I wasn’t sure they would want to hear from me—I spent days agonizing about whether I should call. But her mother sounded enthusiastic when she answered, and my sister sent me frequent text messages from her mother’s phone. She asked me to send her pictures of myself and my room in Tucson; she asked me to send her pictures of my cats. She sent me pictures of her bedroom and her dog, and she invited me to play games with her online, like Club Penguin. I followed her through the virtual town, and she proudly showed me her decorated igloo and introduced me to her pet, a cherry-red Koosh ball with eyes.

  For Christmas, I mailed her one of our mother’s turquoise necklaces, and I mailed Eileen a woven red-and-green belt. I wondered what I would have to offer any of them when there was nothing left of my mother to divide.

  [Solitary]

  FENTON JOHNSON, ONE of my professors, developed a theory about me through my writing: that I was a solitary, like other figures and writers he admired. I was flattered. In his essay “Going It Alone,” Fenton writes, “Spinsterhood is a calling, a destiny.”

  When I imagined my future unspooling before me, I pictured myself alone in the desert. I walk down a dusty trail; the sun warms my shoulders. I hear a rustle and turn my binoculars to leaf, to lizard, to bird. I watch the yawn of a pink mouth or the slow stretch of a wing within the peace of a millisecond, extended beyond the space of a millisecond. “The great, incomparable reward of being alone is the opportunity,” Fenton writes, “to encounter the great silence at the core of being, a silence that is both uniquely mine and one with the background hum of the universe.”