The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  A nurse examined my body, recording my injuries. I had burns on my scalp and in a ring where the elastic of my cotton underwear had melted into my stomach. A dislocated arm fell limp at my side, and my chest and back were bruised where Elizabeth had kicked. Meredith recorded the nurse’s findings in a notebook.

  Elizabeth had hurt me. Not in the way that Meredith believed, but still, she had hurt me. The marks were indisputable evidence. They would be photographed and recorded in my file. No one would ever believe Elizabeth’s story: that she had been trying to save me from running headlong into a raging blaze. Even though it was the truth.

  And suddenly I saw, in the markings on my body, an undeniable escape route, a path away from Elizabeth’s pain-filled eyes; a path away from the guilt, the regret, and the scorched vineyard. I could not face the pain I had caused Elizabeth. I would never be able to face it. It wasn’t just the fire; it was a year’s worth of transgressions, many small, some unforgivable. Mothering me had changed her. A year after I’d moved in to her home, she was a different woman, softened in a way that allowed suffering. With me in her life, she would only continue to suffer. She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of it.

  The nurse walked into the hall. Meredith pulled the door of the small room closed behind her, and we were alone.

  “Did she beat you?” she asked.

  I bit my bottom lip so hard it split. When I swallowed, it was blood and saliva, both. Meredith stared at me. I took a deep breath. My eyes scanned the holes in the acoustic tile before dropping to answer her question in the only way I could, in the way Meredith expected.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She left the room.

  One word, and it was over. Elizabeth might try to visit, but I would refuse to see her. Meredith and the nurses, believing her to be dangerous, would protect me.

  That night, for the first time, I dreamed of fire. Elizabeth hovered above me, wailing. The sound was almost inhuman. I tried to move toward her, but my toes were sealed to the ground, as if my flesh had melted into the earth. She began to shout then, her words blurred with agony. My body was charred black before I understood her to be proclaiming her love for me, over and over again. It was worse than the wailing.

  I woke up burning, my body wet with sweat.

  17.

  I spent three days in the hospital, recovering from mastitis. The paramedics found me with a temperature of 105 degrees. My fever did not break until after a full forty-eight hours of intravenous antibiotics, which, the doctors discussed as I fell in and out of sleep, they had never seen. Mastitis was a common infection for breast-feeding mothers, painful but localized and easily treated. For me, mastitis had become an inflammation of nearly my entire body. Skin boiled on my breasts, but also on my arms, my neck, and the insides of my thighs. The doctors said there were no cases like mine on record.

  When the fever subsided, the aching for my daughter replaced the burning. My face, my chest, and my limbs blazed with longing. Worried the doctors would ask questions about a new mother alone in the hospital, with no baby in sight and no visitors, I fled before being released, pulling out my IV and sneaking down a back staircase.

  I took a taxi back to the empty apartment and called a locksmith to change the locks. If Natalya returned, I would make her a key. Until then, I didn’t want Mother Ruby or Renata, both of whom had taken to walking in without knocking, stopping by to see the baby. I didn’t have the strength to tell them what I had done.

  That very afternoon Mother Ruby came. She knocked until I was sure the glass doors would break. I peeked out the window in Natalya’s room, then returned to the kitchen to take the phone off the hook before crawling into the blue room and closing the door. In the evening it was Renata, who pounded even harder and threw a small stone against the upstairs window. I gave no sign that I had returned. The next morning a different, softer knock woke me from a deep sleep and I knew that Marlena was back. It was time to go back to work. I would tell her the truth.

  Stumbling down the stairs, I squinted in the bright light. Marlena burst though the doors. “She must be enormous!” she exclaimed. “What’s her name?” She flew up the stairs, and I followed slowly behind. When I got to the top, Marlena was spinning in a circle in the living room, the emptiness of the apartment settling over her. She looked at me, her eyes holding a single question.

  “I don’t know,” I said, answering her spoken question but not her unspoken one. “Her name. I didn’t name her.” Marlena’s eyes did not move from my body, the question they held the same: Where is she?

  I started to cry. Marlena came to me, placing a soft hand on my shoulder. I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to know that the baby was safe, and would be loved, and might even be happy.

  Minutes passed before I could speak, and when I did, I told the story simply, without embellishment. I left her with her father, who would raise her. I wasn’t able to be the mother I wanted to be. The loss was incapacitating, but I had made the best decision for my daughter.

  “Please,” I said when I had finished. “Let’s not talk about her again.” I walked across the room for a box of tissues and my appointment book. I scrawled a short list on a lined sheet of paper and folded it into Marlena’s fingers with enough cash for the purchase. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. I did not wait for her to leave but crawled into the blue room and locked the door.

  The spoken truth rocked me to sleep.

  It was not Marlena’s quiet tap that woke me the following morning but Renata’s punctuated pounding. I covered my head with a pillow, but her voice reached me though the feathers.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Victoria,” she called up. “I just saw Marlena at the flower market, and I know you’re inside. If you don’t open up, I’ll just sit here until Marlena arrives, and she’ll let me in.”

  There was no way to avoid it any longer. I had to face her. Walking downstairs, I unlocked the double glass doors and inched one open.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “I saw her,” Renata said. “This morning, at the market. I thought you had left with the baby, left without telling any of us where you were going, and then there she was in his arms.”

  My eyes filled, and I lifted my shoulders by way of asking what she wanted from me.

  “You told him?” Renata asked. “You gave him the baby?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything,” I said. “And I don’t want you to tell me anything. Ever.” I swallowed hard.

  Renata softened then. “She looked happy,” she said, “and Grant looked tired. But—”

  “Please,” I said to Renata as I inched the door closed. “I don’t want to know. I can’t take it.”

  I closed and locked the door. Renata and I stood on opposite sides of the glass in silence. The doors were not thick enough to block conversation, but neither of us spoke. Renata looked into my eyes, and I let her. I hoped she could see the longing, the loneliness, and the despair. It was hard enough to let my baby go. It would be harder with constant updates from Renata. She had to understand that the only way I could survive my decision was to try to forget.

  Marlena drove up in my car, the hatchback open and flowers spilling out. Midway through unloading, she stopped, examining Renata and me.

  “Everything okay?” she asked. Renata looked at me, and I turned my face away.

  Renata didn’t answer. She turned up the hill to Bloom, her arms defeated at her sides.

  1.

  Message grew exponentially in the months that followed. I accepted only cash, up front, and the underground quality attracted a cultlike following. I did not advertise. After the first few buckets of tagged iris, my phone number spread faster than it would have if I’d purchased a blinking billboard on the entrance to the Bay Bridge. Natalya did not return from her tour, and I took over the apartment, sending an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills to the landlord on the first of June. Marlena continued to work as my assistant, organizing the calendar, answering ca
lls, filling purchase orders, and making deliveries. I supervised the flower arranging and met with clients on the folding flea-market chairs in the empty office space, the shoeboxes open under the harsh fluorescent lights.

  My pre-wedding consultations were as in demand as my arrangements. Couples treated their appointments like visits to a fortune-teller or a priest; they told me, often for hours, the many hopes they held for their relationships, and also the challenges they faced. I recorded only a couple’s own words, taking notes on a sheet of transparent rice paper, and when they finished speaking, I handed them the paper, rolled into a scroll with a ribbon. Yet as the couples referenced the scroll to choose their flowers and craft their wedding vows, they credited me with forecasting their life together. Bethany and Ray were happily married. Countless other couples sent me cards from their honeymoons, describing their relationships with words like peace, passion, fulfillment, and an infinite number of flower-inspired qualities.

  The rapid growth of Message—combined with an outpouring of florists offering consultations in the language of flowers to the streams of brides Marlena and I turned away—caused a subtle but concrete shift in the Bay Area flower industry. Marlena reported that peony, marigold, and lavender lingered in their plastic buckets at the flower market while tulips, lilac, and passionflower sold out before the sun rose. For the first time anyone could remember, jonquil became available long after its natural bloom season had ended. By the end of July, bold brides carried ceramic bowls of strawberries or fragrant clusters of fennel, and no one questioned their aesthetics but rather marveled at the simplicity of their desire.

  If the trajectory continued, I realized, Message would alter the quantities of anger, grief, and mistrust growing in the earth on a massive scale. Farmers would uproot fields of foxglove to plant yarrow, the soft clusters of pink, yellow, and cream the cure to a broken heart. The prices of sage, ranunculus, and stock would steadily increase. Plum trees would be planted for the sole purpose of harvesting their delicate, clustered blossoms, and sunflowers would fall permanently out of fashion, disappearing from flower stands, craft stores, and country kitchens. Thistle would be cleared compulsively from empty lots and overgrown gardens.

  Summer afternoons, as I worked in the rooftop greenhouse I’d constructed with PVC pipes and plastic sheeting, tending hundreds of small ceramic pots on wire racks, I tried to take solace in this small, intangible contribution to the world. I told myself that someone, somewhere, would be less angry, less grief-stricken, because of the rampant success of Message. Friendships would be stronger; marriages would last. But I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t take credit for an abstract contribution to the world when in every tangible human interaction I’d ever had I’d caused only pain: with Elizabeth, through arson and a false accusation; with Grant, through abandonment and an unnamed, unsupported child.

  And then there was my daughter. That I had abandoned her did not leave my mind, not even for a moment. I could have moved in to Natalya’s old bedroom, but instead I still slept in the blue room, curled up alone in the space we’d once occupied together. Every morning upon waking, I counted her age to the month and day. Sitting across from chatty brides, I tried to remember her nearly hairless eyebrows, curved up at me in question, her lips opening and closing in rhythm. Her absence in the empty apartment began to feel as real as she’d once been, rattling the plastic sheeting of the greenhouse, seeping like light under the crack of the blue room’s door. In the tap of the rain on the flat roof, I heard her ravenous suck. Every twenty-nine days the moonlight traveled in a slow square across the futon where we sat on our last night together, and each month I half expected it to bring her back to me. Instead, the moonlight illuminated my solitude, and I sat upright in its pale glow, remembering her as she had been, imagining her as she had become. Miles and miles away, I felt my daughter changing, each day growing and developing, without me. I longed to be with her, to witness her transformation.

  But as much as I wanted to be reunited, I would not go to her. My desire for my daughter felt selfish. Leaving her with Grant had been the most loving act I had ever accomplished, and I did not regret it. Without me, my daughter would be safe. Grant would love her like he had loved me, with unearned devotion and tender care. It was everything I wanted for her.

  I had only one regret, and it had nothing to do with my daughter. In a life of trespasses, many violent and most undeserved, I regretted only the fire. A collection of jam jars, a fistful of matches, and an absence of judgment had created an inferno that blazed well past the extinguishing of the final flame. It burst forth into the lie that had taken me away from Elizabeth, ignited fights throughout eight years of institutional placements, and smoldered in my mistrust of Grant. I had refused to believe that he loved me, or that he would continue to love me if he knew the truth.

  Grant believed his mother had lit the fire that ruined both our lives; though he didn’t talk about it, I knew he had not forgiven her. But she wasn’t the one to blame. It was my fault the vines went up in flames, my fault Elizabeth did not go to Catherine, my fault Grant spent the following year alone, caring for his sick mother. I didn’t know the details of Catherine’s unraveling, but they were clear in the way Grant loved me, delicately and in isolation. He had needed Elizabeth as much as I had.

  Now it was too late. The vineyard had ignited. Grant spent his entire life (with the exception of the six months with me) alone. I’d lost the only woman who had ever tried to mother me, and it was too late to go back, too late to salvage my own childhood. But even though it was too late, it was this thought that plagued me: I wanted to go back to Elizabeth. I wanted, more than anything, to be Elizabeth’s daughter.

  Mid-August, exhausted from an unrelenting summer wedding schedule and equally unrelenting thoughts of my daughter, Elizabeth, and Grant, I retreated to the blue room. For the first time since starting Message, I locked all six locks and slept through every appointment on our calendar. Marlena covered for me. The whistle of the kettle drifted into my dreams as she prepared tea for our clients, but I didn’t emerge. The locks kept me from climbing into my car and driving straight to the water tower, racing to the third floor, and taking my baby back. In my fantasies, she still lay helpless in her basket, staring up at the ceiling. In reality, she would be six months old, sitting up, reaching out, and maybe even crawling across the floor.

  I stayed in the blue room for nearly a week. Marlena did not disturb me, but each morning she slid a photocopied sheet of paper through the crack under my door. It was our September calendar, the squares growing increasingly crowded as the days passed. I had expected business to taper off as the weather cooled, but if anything, we seemed to be getting busier, and my anxiety over the mounting work finally surpassed my depression. I grabbed a banana from a fruit bowl Marlena had filled and walked downstairs.

  Marlena sat at the table, chewing the end of a pen. She smiled when she saw me.

  “I was about to go to The Gathering House,” she said, “and hire another assistant.”

  I shook my head. “I’m here. What’s first?”

  She scanned the calendar. “Nothing major until Friday. But then we have to work sixteen days straight.”

  I groaned, but in reality I felt relieved. Flowers were my escape. With flowers in my hands, perhaps I could survive the fall. And maybe, as the months passed, things would get easier. It was what I had expected, but so far it hadn’t proven to be true. In fact, the opposite seemed to be occurring; with each passing day, I felt more desolate, the consequences of my decisions less bearable. I turned to walk back upstairs.

  “Going back to your cave?” Marlena asked. She sounded disappointed.

  “What else would I do?”

  Marlena exhaled. “I don’t know.” She paused, and I turned back around. It seemed she did know but was having trouble finding the words. “There’s a new sandwich shop next to Bloom,” she said finally. “I thought maybe we could grab some lunch and then go for a drive.”
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br />   “A drive?”

  “You know.” She looked out the front windows to the street. “To see her.”

  Marlena meant my daughter. But for a split second before I realized this, I thought she meant Elizabeth, and it seemed to me to be exactly the thing I needed to do. I knew where she lived, and I knew how to get there. It might be too late to be a child in her home, but it wasn’t too late to apologize for what I had done.

  When I didn’t respond right away, Marlena looked to me, her expression hopeful.

  I shook my head. I’d asked her never to speak of my daughter, and until now, she’d done as I’d asked. “Please don’t,” I said.

  Her chin dropped to her chest, and she looked for a moment as neckless as a newborn.

  “I’ll see you on Friday,” I said, turning to walk up the stairs.

  All night I imagined driving to see Elizabeth. I pictured the long, dusty driveway, the late-summer grapes heavy on the vines. The afternoon sun would cast a rectangular shadow from the peeling white farmhouse, and the porch steps would squeak as I climbed them. At the kitchen table, Elizabeth would sit with her arms folded, her eyes on the door, as if she’d been waiting for me.

  The vision shattered with the realization that all this could be gone. Not only the acres of vines but also the kitchen table, the screen door, the entire house. In all the time I’d spent with Grant, I’d never once asked him how much damage the fire had caused, and I’d never driven down the road past the entrance to the flower farm. I hadn’t wanted to know.

  I couldn’t go. I couldn’t bear to see it, not even to apologize to Elizabeth.

  But once sparked, I couldn’t let go of the idea. If I could apologize, then maybe, finally, I could forget. Maybe my dreams would cease and I could settle into a quiet, if lonely, life, knowing Elizabeth understood my remorse. Huddled in the blue room, I thought about how to accomplish the task. It would be simple enough to write a letter. Once I’d learned the address, I’d never forgotten it. But I couldn’t write my return address on the envelope without fear of Elizabeth showing up at my door, and without a return address, Elizabeth couldn’t answer my letter. Though I didn’t think I could live looking constantly out the window, half expecting her old gray truck to pull up to the curb, I wanted desperately to know her response. Written, I could handle her anger, her disappointment. It might even bring some relief from the years of guilt.