Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MONTHS after my sister Alex added me on social media, we took our first baby steps into a relationship with each other. Then I offered her a gigantic leap: a plane ticket to visit me in Tucson for a month. She accepted. She booked a one-way ticket to Tucson, arriving in April, and we planned a road trip through the states—through the mountains of Colorado, through Pittsburgh to see Eileen—for her return trip to Florida.

  I offered her the futon in the spare bedroom, still cluttered with the junk my father had carried home.

  I introduced her to some of my friends. We walked Fourth Avenue and investigated one of the local coffee shops. We visited the International Wildlife Museum, a taxidermy museum, where the stuffed animals were arranged in lifelike dioramas: wolves hunting; brown bears fishing for orange salmon in a fake pool; a bobcat reaching for a quail against a snowy backdrop. An entire room was dedicated to the mounted heads of dozens of species of antelope. Alex posed in front of each exhibit and asked me to take her picture for Instagram, but my enthusiasm quickly waned, and she could feel it.

  I was too busy with school. Too preoccupied with my father, who still existed on the periphery of my life. I was inaccessible, as if living in a state of hibernation, storing my energy for the next catastrophe.

  I did not know how to be a sister to her.

  We spent more time alone in our rooms. She talked on the phone with her boyfriend for hours. She missed him and couldn’t wait to be home. They argued—sometimes playfully, sometimes angrily—about the strength and virtue of their longing.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE ALEX AND I left for Florida, I went looking for my father downtown. I found his girlfriend sitting on a bench across from the library. She told me he would be back soon—he had left to sell some cans at the junkyard.

  “We’ve been sober two weeks,” she told me while we waited.

  “That’s good,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. It was the first time I had seen her without tears in her eyes.

  She looked down at her feet, and then at me. “You were right to kick us out.”

  I didn’t know if I should thank her. I nodded and then walked slowly toward the corner of the street to wait for my father. A few minutes later, he arrived, wearing the key to my apartment on a lanyard around his neck.

  “I wondered where that was,” I said, even knowing where it had been all along.

  “I didn’t use it,” he said, shrugging. “I kept it safe.”

  I told him I would be leaving for two weeks. One of my friends would be staying in my apartment and feeding my cats.

  * * *

  —

  ALEX AND I left for our road trip in the middle of the night so we could watch the sun rise over the Grand Canyon’s sandstone cliffs. We arrived in lavender, and I nosed carefully around the elk that foraged along the park’s roads. Recovering from a migraine, I napped in the car while Alex wandered the rim.

  From the Grand Canyon, we drove east toward our grandmother’s house on the reservation. We lost phone reception. She stared out the window at the rocks and the dirt and complained about being bored.

  We stopped at a canyon, advertised by a brown tourism sign, as we crossed onto the reservation. I took a short video of her sitting beneath the Navajo Nation’s flag. “It’s really hot,” she says, squinting into the sun and complaining, deadpan, through a smile. “My bangs are sweaty. I’m going to die at any moment.”

  I stopped filming and bent over laughing.

  We walked down a short path to another canyon. I handed her my binoculars and pointed at the swallows and the crows riding the wind.

  We arrived at our aunt’s by midafternoon, but she was at work, and all the lights in the house were dark. I parked along the road and walked around back and knocked on my cousin-sister’s window. She yelled my name in delight and ran to the back door to let us in. We wrapped each other in a tight hug, though her seven-months-swollen belly held us apart.

  For lunch we took her to McDonald’s, where she complained about her mother and her mother’s drinking; about her boyfriend and their constant arguments.

  We returned to my grandmother’s house. I told them I needed to sleep. I would be driving again all the next day because Alex didn’t have a license. I lay down on the air mattress in the living room and fell asleep listening to my aunt and my sisters talk.

  Early the next morning, we drove north. We stopped at a flea market in Farmington, where Alex tried her first frybread. We continued toward Denver, through mountains still packed with snow. I charged a fancy hotel in downtown Denver to my credit card, and we gorged on pasta and bread at an Italian restaurant. I returned to the hotel room early, but Alex went looking for Voodoo Doughnut and brought back one of their signatures for me.

  We drove long, slow hours across Nebraska, through the endless cornfields of Iowa and Illinois. We stopped in Chicago to stay with my childhood friend Lexi, who worked at the Adler Planetarium and gave us tickets to see her show. Alex and I walked the public gardens along the waterfront. I took a photograph of a seagull, perched atop the infamous silver bean.

  We arrived in Pittsburgh the next day. Eileen took Alex to the train yard where she’d squatted when she was homeless. I stayed behind and graded papers with her new betta fish.

  We only stayed in Pittsburgh for a day, and then we were off to Florida in a single sixteen-hour shot. We crossed the Florida border in the middle of the night. I parked at a rest stop to catch a few hours’ sleep, though Alex begged me to keep going. She was anxious to be home, to sleep in her own bed, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. We pulled into her driveway a little after ten.

  * * *

  —

  ALEX’S MOTHER MADE me uncomfortable. She seemed to talk around me and refused to meet my eyes. They offered to let me sleep on their couch, but I rented a hotel room instead.

  The next day, Alex and I drove to Lake Worth, to Bryant Park, where my mother had been living before she died. There was no one around. We wandered through the clean white pavilion, where my mother might have slept, but I found no evidence that anyone lived there at all. Alex and I sat together on the concrete seawall and watched a flock of ibis, pure white birds with pink faces and curved beaks, graze in the park’s green grass. I wondered if I should have come at night instead.

  The next day, we hardly saw each other. I drove around my old neighborhoods, searching for evidence of past lives.

  * * *

  —

  AMONG MY MOTHER’S photographs I found an envelope of negatives, slipped inside Eckerd’s plastic sleeves. They were numbered one through twenty-five, the number of exposures on a disposable camera. Frustrated by all the unrecognizable faces and places I encountered in her developed photos—frustrated by the difficulty of translating negative space into life and color—I almost threw them out. But as I held the strip of negatives up to the light, one frame in particular caught my attention. I recognized my mother’s and Fran’s silhouettes, side by side. I could make out, in caramel and cream, the distinct, pale hollow of their exposed breasts.

  I became obsessed with holding that photograph in my hands. I spent two hundred dollars on a special backlit scanner to digitize the negatives myself. The resulting images were grainy—the plastic film had already begun to degrade, the colors shifting and beginning to fade. I discovered the photograph belonged to a series of photographs, taken by my mother in 1995 at the house off Military Trail where my mother had lived with my father, my uncle, and Fran.

  That period of time was confusing to me as a child. My parents were separated but living together. My father was dating Fran, and my mother was dating my father’s brother, but when my grandmother took us to visit, everyone seemed happy there. My mother had given me copies of some of the photographs at one point; I recognized one someone had taken of th
e four of them posing together next to a concrete structure, which I came to realize was a grill. In another, my sister and I, smiling, stand in front of my father and the banyan tree. He squeezes us in his arms.

  At that house, my sister and I helped my father paint one of his vans. He gave us buckets of old paint and jars of glitter, which we threw in fistfuls across our metal canvas. We climbed on top of the van and slid around the roof on our asses. When our father sobered up, he repainted the van gray, but kept a panel of color and glitter around the middle.

  In my mother’s things I found physical copies of some of these photographs, but not all. She did not keep the pictures of her and my uncle—their relationship was short lived. She did not keep the pictures of my father or of Fran. But she did hold on to the negatives. Why I can never know, but it feels to me as if there were something she couldn’t let go of.

  Within her photographs, I recognize myself in my mother in strange places, in the perspective she chose—a pointed shadow, a rut of tires, the contrast of scrubby grass and pale gray sand. Not accidental exposures but a fraction of a moment that caught her eye.

  The final photograph in the series is candid; I can tell by the awkward angle. A rainbow-striped lawn chair dominates the foreground. My father, wearing a red flannel and holding a can of beer, stares at the ground and away from the photographer, my mother. The door leading inside the house, a shadow.

  * * *

  —

  I DROVE AROUND the neighborhoods on both sides of Military Trail, but I could not find the house where they lived. I found the lot of the apartment my uncle shared with his new girlfriend, Kerry, though the airport had bought and demolished the entire block. I drove in circles until I found a dirt road, chalky and white like Nokomis. I got out of the car and pressed the white dust between my hands.

  I texted Alex, asking if she wanted to visit one of the Everglades parks with me, but she declined.

  On the drive down, I unexpectedly passed and recognized Faith Farm, one of my father’s many rehabs.

  I arrived at the park in the late afternoon. I followed a boardwalk into cypress and fern. There were no birds, no bird songs. The waterlogged earth swallowed all sound except for a strange knocking, somewhere far away. A flash of red caught my eye, and I stopped to watch a lizard flare its dewlap, shining bright with its own blood, in a small patch of sun. I began to feel certain I would die.

  I hurried back to my car and drove down the road to the end of the park, where a wharf met the true swamp of the Everglades. A posted sign on a shuttered shack advertised kayak and fan boat rides. I walked down to the water, where families with coolers and fishing poles gathered, and leaned against the railing. I spotted the ridged head of a small gator floating toward the reeds like a piece of driftwood.

  I eavesdropped on the conversations around me. A man told a boy about the fifteen-foot alligator that lived beneath the wharf and sometimes stole fish. They called him George. I leaned over the railing and looked into the water, murky and dark, and could just make out the outline of his massive body: the swell of his stomach and the point of his snout. His eyes closed tight.

  I walked away from the families, to the other side of the parking lot, and sat cross-legged on a floating dock to watch the sun set over the cattails.

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING I left, Alex and I met at one of her favorite coffee shops. I sat down with her and her boyfriend for a few minutes while I ate a croissant. When I stood up to leave, she refused a hug and said, “I don’t want to watch you go.”

  I was surprised to hear the quaver of tears in her voice.

  I told her it was okay, that we would see each other soon. I cleared my plate and mug off the table and walked out the door. I did not glance over my shoulder to see if she had changed her mind, if she had looked for me.

  still cruising

  ON MY RETURN to Arizona, I drove through the pine forests of the Florida panhandle into Alabama, across water and marsh. I followed a route similar to the one my mother had taken when she and Alex’s father drove to Arizona for her brother Dundee’s funeral.*1 I stayed the night with a friend in Missouri, then picked up a hitchhiker at a gas station on the Mississippi-Louisiana border: a greasy kitten that I watched try to climb into the engine of a parked car. A woman with a van full of kids helped me catch him, though she told me she couldn’t take him home because of her dogs. On the road, he climbed onto my shoulder and cried out the window. I pulled over at a rest stop and considered letting him out, but after another hour, he stopped crying and fell asleep in the crook of my arm.*2 I stroked my thumb over his fish-bone ribs. I pretended he was the great- or great-great-grandchild of the cat we lost on the road trip my mother, my father, my sister, and I had taken to the reservation when I was a girl. I named him Miss. Always missing.*3 Every time I stopped for gas, I gave him extra time to use the litter box and eat.*4 Outside Dallas, I detoured to Petco and bought him a carrier and a toy mouse on a wire to chase in the footwell. I texted my aunt and warned her I had picked up a stray kitten. I was supposed to stay with her on my return, for a three-day weaving class in Gallup, but I told her I could find another place to stay. She told me not to worry and that she would see me soon. We stopped in Lubbock, where Nathan had moved, though he was out of state for fieldwork. He told me where to find the key and asked me to feed Goob, who growled at the kitten under the bedroom door.*5 The next morning, we left for our last leg of the trip through New Mexico.*6 The kitten fell asleep in the sun on the dashboard.

  *1  March 4, 1995. “Set out from Tallahassee. We slept in the van. That night, a cop scared the shit out of us becuz we had to move.”

  *2  “We still cruising through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.”

  *3  March 5, 1995. At the top of the entry, my mother crosses out the line “I’m off will be spending it with the girls.” Behind these words, she writes only: not! In the revised entry, she writes, “This morning I woke up thinking of Dundee. And were off what a trip through Texas.”

  *4  “And were off what a trip through Texas. First through Houston then Dallas after that straight up to Amarillo.”

  *5  “We wanted a beer that evening but we kept hitting dry counties. Boy was he upset.”

  *6  “then we reach New Mexico about 8:00 P.M. and we stopped at a convenience store for beer but no sale in New M. So we got a room went to dinner then to bed.”

  [Cat Killer]

  MY COUSIN-SISTER FELL in love with the kitten. She whirled the mouse around and around above his head, and we laughed as he tumbled around the living room floor. My aunt complained and told her not to pick him up—it would be bad for the baby; according to tradition, it was dangerous to handle animals during pregnancy.

  That night, while my aunt drank alone in the living room, my cousin-sister and I lay together in bed and talked behind the closed door while Miss chased our fingers, wiggling under the sheets.

  “We need to keep him away from my mom,” my cousin-sister said.

  I asked her why.

  “I used to call her a cat killer,” she whispered, scandalously. She told me she had had a kitten when she was younger, but her mother begged to let the kitten sleep with her. The next morning, my cousin-sister found the kitten dead, likely smothered, in her mother’s bed. She picked up Miss and waggled him in her hands. “We have to watch out for you!” she laughed.

  Though it was barely past eight, my aunt suddenly barged in the room and told me to leave my cousin-sister alone. “She’s pregnant!” she yelled. “She needs her sleep!” And before I even had time to get up, she slammed off the light switch.

  My cousin-sister giggled nervously in the dark.

  I told her goodnight and walked into the living room and sat opposite my aunt. We stared at the television screen and did not talk.

  * * *

  —

  I
LEFT FOR Gallup early the next morning; I had enrolled in a three-day Navajo weaving workshop run by Mary Walker out of the Richardson Trading Post. My cousin offered to watch my kitten while I was gone.

  The first day was full of introductions. I was surprised that all of the women taking the workshop were white, like Mary, though her fellow instructors—Jennie Slick and Lori Begay—were Navajo.

  Jennie sat beside me. She asked me where my family was from. By some brilliant and beautiful chance, Jennie was familiar with my great-grandmother—Jennie’s mother had also lived in Sanders, and the two of them had been friends.

  “She was very traditional,” Jennie told me, about my great-grandmother.

  When Lori heard, she smiled. “It was given to you,” she said of weaving. “That means you will pick it up quick!”

  By the end of the day, we finished building the warps on our looms, though we had only enough time to weave a few rows.

  When I returned to my aunt’s house, my cousin-sister told me she had given the kitten a bath. His fur was clean and soft and smelled faintly like dish soap. She had found a tick, fat and ugly, under his fur, but her boyfriend had picked it off.

  My aunt was angry when she found out. She repeated again that handling him was dangerous for her baby.

  My cousin-sister and I sat close together and googled other Navajo superstitions: If you tie knots while pregnant, you will have a hard labor; if you yell at a pregnant woman, the baby will be deaf; if you peel potatoes while pregnant, your baby will have a flat face.

  “I can’t peel potatoes anymore, Mom,” my cousin-sister yelled jokingly to her mother.

  My aunt glared at me and scoffed. “I never heard that.”