The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  Yes, I knew she would. The formula I had purchased was at my feet, still in the bag, evidence of my crime. I kicked it farther into the corner, rolled over, and crawled out feetfirst. Sitting on the couch, I waited for Mother Ruby to see the truth. But she didn’t look at my face. She lifted my shirt and rubbed something from a lavender tube onto my cracked nipples. It was cooling and numbed the stinging pain.

  “Keep this,” Mother Ruby said, closing my palm around the tube. She turned my chin and looked into my eyes, my guilty, drowning eyes. “Are you sleeping?” she asked.

  I considered the previous night. After finishing the sandwich, the baby and I had gone straight to the blue room, where she reattached herself to my body and closed her eyes. She sucked and swallowed and slept in an excruciating rhythm, and I let her, accepting the pain as punishment. I did not sleep.

  “Yeah,” I lied, “pretty well.”

  “Good,” she said. “Your daughter is thriving. I’m so proud of you.”

  I looked out the window and did not respond.

  “Are you hungry?” Mother Ruby asked. “Are you getting enough help? Do you want me to make you something before I leave?” I was starving, but I couldn’t take another compliment. I shook my head.

  Mother Ruby handed the baby back to me and put away her scale. “Okay, then,” she said. Her eyes were on my face, studying me as if for clues, and I strained my neck away. I didn’t want her to see me.

  She stood to go, and I jumped up to follow. Suddenly, I was not afraid she would look into my face and see my trespass; it was more terrifying to think of her leaving in oblivion, without knowing what I had done, without doing something to stop me from doing it again. But Mother Ruby only smiled and leaned in to kiss my cheek before walking away.

  I wanted to tell her, to come clean and beg forgiveness, but I didn’t know what to say. “It’s hard,” was all I could manage, my whisper directed at her back as she descended the stairs. It wasn’t enough.

  “I know, love,” Mother Ruby said. “But you’re doing it. It’s in you to be a mother, a good one.” She walked down the stairs.

  No, it isn’t in me, I thought bitterly. I wanted to tell her that I had never loved anyone, and ask her to explain how a woman incapable of giving love could ever be expected to be a mother, a good one. But even as I thought the words, I knew they were not the truth. I had loved, more than once. I just hadn’t recognized the emotion for what it was until I had done everything within my power to destroy it.

  Mother Ruby stopped when she reached the bottom of the stairs and turned around. She looked small and ignorant, and my reliance on her felt misplaced. She was an intrusive old woman, I thought, nothing else. A switch flipped inside me, and I felt the return of the angry child I had once been. I wanted only for Mother Ruby to leave.

  “Name?” she called up to where I stood. “Does that big girl have a name yet?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “It’ll come to you,” she said.

  “No,” I said harshly, “it won’t.”

  But Mother Ruby had already walked out the door.

  After Mother Ruby left, I set the baby in her Moses basket, and through a small miracle she slept peacefully for most of the afternoon. I took a long, hot shower. My body was filled with a palpable despair—a numb, tingling sensation—and I scrubbed my limbs as if the irritation was external and could be washed down the drain. When I got out of the shower, my skin was pink and scraped red in patches. The despair had moved to a deeper, quieter place. I pretended I was clean and renewed, ignoring its low, persistent buzz. Dressing in loose pants and a sweatshirt, I rubbed the cream from the lavender tube on the patches of raw skin on my arms and legs.

  I poured myself a glass of orange juice and sat on the floor, looking into the baby’s basket. When she awoke, I would nurse her, and when she was done eating, we would go for a walk. I would carry the basket down the stairs and out the door, and the fresh air would be good for us both. Maybe I would carry her up to McKinley Square and give her a lesson in the language of flowers. She wouldn’t respond, but she would understand. She had the kind of eyes, when they were open, that made me believe she understood everything I said and much of what went unspoken. They were deep, mysterious eyes, as if she was still connected to the place from which she had come.

  The longer the baby slept, the more the despair subsided until I could almost make myself believe I had overcome its gravity. Perhaps my brief escape to the grocery store had not caused permanent damage, and I was, as Mother Ruby insisted, capable of the task before me. It was unrealistic to think I could make a clean break from the way I had lived for nineteen years. There would be setbacks. I had spent my life being hateful and solitary, and I could not, overnight, become loving and attached.

  Lying down on the floor next to the baby, I breathed in the damp-straw smell of the basket. I would sleep. But before I had closed my eyes, her rhythmic breathing was replaced by the familiar sound of her open, searching mouth.

  I peered into the basket, and she looked at me, her eyes wide open, her mouth moving. She had given me an opportunity to sleep, and I had wasted it. There would not be another for hours, if not days. I picked her up. My eyes welled, and when her jaw clamped down, the tears leaked onto my cheeks. I brushed them away with the back of my hand. The relentless suction on my breast pulled the despair up from wherever it was that it had receded, whistling forth like the quiet roar of a conch shell, a reflection of something greater.

  The baby nursed for an eternity. Transferring her from one side to the other, I checked my watch. It had been a full hour, and she was only half done. My sigh became a low moan as she latched on again.

  When she finally fell asleep, I tried to replace my nipple, still tight between her lips, with my pinkie finger, but she cracked her tired eyes open and began to grunt in complaint.

  “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 h
er 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.

  12.

  “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 othe
rs 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.

  13.

  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.