If they look different from any other rose you’ve seen, it’s because they are. They are not a true rose. These roses are hybrids of flowers called Hulthemia persicas, which the Persians considered weeds, with barbed vines running amok. In 1836, an accidental Hulthemia hybrid growing in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris caught the attention of rose breeders. They coveted the red hearts for regular roses.
It took one hundred forty-nine years to get there. The first Hulthemias, including that specimen in the Paris garden, were homely and infertile. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that an Englishman named Jack Harkness, of the famous Harkness Roses, was the first to get a breakthrough. His friend Alec Cocker decided that if the flower could exist by accident, it could exist if he bred it. He got more Hulthemia seeds from Iran and gave some to Harkness. In 1985, Harkness finally got a Hulthemia variety that could reproduce: Tigris. These early Hulthemia were crossbred with true roses, a project taken on by multiple other breeders, and eventually we got what we have now.
There are specific attributes a Hulthemia needs to be successful with the casual rose grower. People want a rosebush that will not get too gigantic for their small backyards. They also want a fragrant bloom. They want a rosebush that will produce dozens of blooms over and over again throughout the season. This repeat blooming is something that was only fairly recently bred into our modern roses, obtained from Chinese roses. The French began to cross Chinese roses with European roses around 1798.
In short, the consumer, as always, expects the impossible. At a mass-market price.
To date, this Hulthemia doesn’t yet exist. Whoever is the first Hulthemia grower to bring this kind of consumer-friendly plant on the market will make a fortune. Her (because I plan to be the winner) name will be sung by the rose-breeding bards.
Of these assets, fragrance is the most difficult thing to come by. It’s been bred out of modern stock. Generally, rose breeders wanted hardiness and disease resistance at the expense of fragrance, which ensures growers can massively produce and ship roses all over the world, at any time of the year.
Fragrance tends to appear more randomly, not always linked to a recessive gene, not always predictable. For example, if a rose’s grandparents were all fragrant, it doesn’t mean the grandchild will be. Perfumed roses also tend to be more delicate, and most casual breeders do not want to attempt them.
I have a repeat-blooming Hulthemia on my hands, a fifth-generation plant I’ve created after five years of crossing its ancestors. Last year, it bloomed in the spring, summer, and fall, generating bloom after bloom as I clipped it. I’m going to take it to a rose show in San Luis Obispo next month.
I haven’t officially named the rose yet. It is only G42 to me, an orange Hulthemia with that crimson center. This year, I hope to have the scent as well. If it does make it to trials, it will be known as the “Gal.”
The rose is top secret, occupying a special spot in my greenhouse. My father, a retired contractor, built this greenhouse for me from a kit during a visit five years ago. Here I have workbenches, built to my modest height, and a rolling seat. No bees are allowed inside, though a few, like the aphids, find their way in. Bees are not my friends. I am the only one who will pollinate these roses. I am their mad scientist.
I have always been somewhat of a mad scientist, beginning in my teen years when I bred roses as a science project. In one season, I was hooked. I turned my parents’ garage into a de facto breeding center. Though none of my creations were unique enough to go to a rose show, I could never stop. The hobby is addicting.
Now, with Dara perspiring next to me, I clean my tweezers with a sterilized cotton ball and alcohol and return them to their plastic case, where they rattle with the other tweezers. “But now that you’re here, you might as well take me.”
Dara grins and pops pink bubble gum. “You can’t get home alone.”
I smile at my friend and punch her lightly on the arm, tomboy-style. “Thanks, kiddo.” I don’t know what I’ll do if Dara ever gets her own life.
“Let’s get going.” She shifts her water bottle in her hand. I know she wants to take a drink, but she remembers I cannot have any liquid before the procedure, and so she won’t. Dara is too polite like that. She shouldn’t be. Yet I do not encourage her to take a drink, because it really will make me thirstier. My mouth is dry and sticky and I wipe my chapped lips with the back of my hand.
I point to the black notebook on the table. “Brad’s coming in today. Remind me to leave the greenhouse key under the mat.” Brad is the football team quarterback, the starting pitcher on our baseball team, the student body president, and inexplicably the best student in my AP Biology class. As his required community service project for high school, Brad helps me with the roses. Brad is, of course, my favorite student, on some days the only reason I make myself go into the classroom.
Brad has the ability to remember the Latin names for things, the groups, the subgroups, the phylum and the subphylum, and the grouping. He does this as easily as some young boys do baseball statistics. He has an attention to detail I appreciate. Our brains work alike, though I would never tell him so. I considered naming the rose after him, though I decided not to. Roses aren’t usually named for men. No man wants to buy his wife a bunch of Brad roses.
It’s because of students like Brad that I got into teaching in the first place. Shaping young minds and all that. It’s fun, as long as they’re willing to be shaped. That and the summers off, plus the early day, make teaching perfect for me. It leaves me time to tend to my roses, in spite of my other problems.
“Come on,” she says, extending her hand to help me up, though privately I think she’s the one who needs help, clad as she is in an impractical, impossibly tight pencil skirt.
“I’m pretty sure your skirt is against school dress policy.” I get up as she totters back.
She rolls her eyes and pops her gum again. “It’s called ‘style.’ You should get some.”
“Form follows function, Dara. An art teacher should know that.” I shut the greenhouse door and lock it. From the other side of the fence, I see my neighbor, Old Mrs. Allen, watering her lawn in her black silk kimono robe with her big black straw hat, looking like an extra from a silent film. From here, I can see the red slit passing for her mouth. I lift my hand in a wave and she almost waves back, then remembers who I am and lowers her hand with a scowl. The stinky fish emulsion I used on the roses caused a police visit to my door last year, courtesy of her. The neighborhood kids call her the Old Witch. If I were a kid, I probably would, too. I wonder what the kids call me. Nutty Rose Lady?
I smile at Dara and slide into the front seat of her car.
• • •
THOUGH SHE KNOWS THE DRILL, Dara insists on staying put in the waiting room. I check in with all the seven layers of hell security slapping wrist tags on me like they’re tagging wildlife. Then again, I wouldn’t blame me for running off. The hospital’s been my second home since I was a kid. Two kidney transplants and years of dialysis will do that.
The paper pusher, who must be new because I’ve never seen her before, pauses in her typing to actually take me in. “Galilee Garner?” She can barely spit the name out.
“Yep.” I sit back on the hard chair. “You can call me Gal.”
Galilee is the name my parents chose to saddle me with after a hippie trip to the Holy Land back in the 1970s. The Sea of Galilee.
By the time I was two, it was clear I was not a Galilee. “Galilee” rolls off the tongue, a musical of notes, meant for a curly-haired little girl in pink dresses with bows. Not me. So they called me Gal for short.
My older sister had it much better. Becky. No one has ever misspelled my sister’s name or asked her to repeat herself.
“You all right?” the woman asks, eyeing my sallow skin, my tired eyes, the scars on my forearms.
I nod. I make hospit
al workers nervous, if they don’t know me. If I go to the emergency room, I get pushed to the head of the line, even if someone else’s leg is sitting in a cooler beside him. I have that look about me, I guess. The look of impending doom.
The woman asks me all the standard questions about where I was born and what my insurance is.
Today, in the Miami Vice–like waiting room, there’s an elderly woman with hair resembling light pink cotton candy swirled atop her head, and a middle-aged man with an impressive potbelly, who belches every minute or so. I wonder if the hair is pink on purpose, or if her red-haired dye job didn’t do the work.
Then there’s Mark Walters, an older man who is holding Road & Track up to his face because he forgot his reading glasses. Everyone calls him Mark Twain, because he sports a full white handlebar mustache and has a head of wild white hair. I think he looks more like Einstein. He’s always wearing some uniform of white, as if he fancies himself an angel. Today it’s white jeans, a loose white V-neck shirt that shows his white chest hair. I wish he’d cover up. Even from here, across the room, I can smell the Old Spice aftershave. It makes my nose itch.
As if he feels my eyes on him, he looks up from the magazine and winks, one bushy eyebrow almost covering his wrinkled eye. This does not embarrass me. I’m always staring sternly at people, particularly at my students. A nurse comes in to fetch him. I recognize her as Nurse Sonya, a large Russian woman who seems to take about as much joy in her work as an undertaker.
“Mr. Walters, you’re looking fit as a fiddle!” she singsongs.
My eyes pop wide open.
“A fiddle that’s been left out in the rain at the beach, perhaps.” His voice is raspy, his breathing a little strained. He gets up slowly and she holds out her arm.
Mark. Mark is here because he did not take his blood pressure medication. He was too busy eating steak and boozing it up to bother. Lost his liver first, got a transplant for that. And now, because he caused his own kidneys to fail, he is on the waiting list.
And he just got higher priority than I.
I was born with reflux. This means the flap at the end of the passage from the kidney to the bladder didn’t close properly. My mother could not change my diapers fast enough, I made so much urine. Constant bladder infections were the result, then kidney infections. By the time the doctors figured out what was wrong, when I was four, one kidney had already withered away. The other one, already on its way to failing, went when I was twelve. My mother was the first donor; that one lasted for twelve years. The second was from a cadaver, someone who checked the box on their driver’s license. That one lasted only four before my body decided it was definitely a foreign object. I’ve been on dialysis for eight years.
Dialysis basically cleans your blood, like a kidney. You’re hooked up to a machine attached to a vein, and all your blood pumps through and gets filtered. There are different kinds of dialysis, but I do the kind where I have to go in every other day. You can do dialysis overnight or during the day. I do dialysis overnight because it’s simpler and I can sleep. If you skip a treatment, you will feel like you have the flu and your brain will stop working so well. If you stop dialysis altogether, eventually your organs will all shut down and you’ll die.
There are more than half a million Americans on dialysis. Theoretically, people can survive for a very long time. It depends on the accompanying problems of a patient. During the first year of dialysis, twenty percent of dialysis patients die, half within the first three months. These folks most likely have more pressing problems, like high blood pressure or diabetes, which caused the kidneys to fail in the first place. Infections are another issue; your immune system is nonexistent, so a little cold can turn into a deadly problem.
The odds of death go up with each year you spend on dialysis. In year two, the survival rate is sixty-four percent. Year five, thirty-three percent. By year ten, it drops to only ten percent.
I am approaching year ten statistics.
Thus, it’s vitally important to get a kidney as soon as possible, but there simply aren’t enough to go around. People don’t line up to donate kidneys like they do to donate blood.
Today, I’m at the hospital for a blood flow test, to show how well my blood will move around a new kidney. The doctors would not want to give me one of those precious kidneys, only to have it expire because it can’t get any blood.
I take my place in the waiting room chair. The same nurse returns to take me back.
“You ready, Ms. Garner?” Nurse Sonya is already walking away.
I try to think of a joke, something to make her laugh. Nothing comes to mind. I’ve seen Sonya for the past five years, and she’s never commented on more than my blood pressure and pulse.
I decide to hell with it, and her, and Mark. I don’t care. I shuffle along behind her, painfully aware that my gait is no better than Mark’s, though he’s at least thirty years older.
2
IT IS NEWLY DARK WHEN DARA BRINGS ME HOME, THE AIR chill. A California chill. People from the East would be wearing shorts; I have on a heavy jacket. I thread my hands together on my lap. Dara and I have been avoiding talking about the test. We generally do not speak about the severity of my situation. If I dwelled on that garbage, I’d be more of a basket case than I already am. I say it anyway. “If I ever have to do that again, it’ll be too soon.”
The MRA test I’d just had was more like a medieval torture chamber than a modern medical exam. First, they injected me with a protein-based dye. Then they strapped me to the top of an iron frame and stuck me in the machine. Turns out I’m claustrophobic, because it wasn’t long before I was hitting the panic button. They gave me a sedative, so I was able to lie still for the ninety minutes I had to listen to the machine whirring around, hoping no one had left metal in the room that would go flying. The only way I got through it was by closing my eyes and visualizing my rose breeding. It worked. I came up with an idea for a new parent combination to try out when I get the seeds this fall.
“You got through it. You always do.” My friend glances at me.
Dara pulls onto my street. I’m glad to see the lights blaze in the greenhouse and a beat-up faded red Honda Civic is parked on the street. Brad’s silhouette is inside and the hose rushes water.
“He’s here late.” Dara frowns. “Doesn’t watering at night make fungus?”
“Drainage is what matters. As long as your soils drain well, you can water at night.” He was supposed to be out and done by six. It’s seven.
We make our way up the front walk as the lights turn off and the greenhouse door closes. Brad bounds up, his teeth shining in the porch light, the bright light of his cell phone shining open in his hand.
“Sorry. Practice ran late.” He flips his hair out of his face, worn in that fashion requiring such constant flipping, one bang over one eye. It’s a little girly-looking to me. Brad himself is almost too pretty for a boy, with a finely turned nose and very light green eyes marked by lashes so black it looks like he’s wearing eyeliner. He’s got the strong chin of his father, though, and the big ears, which offset the femininity.
Brad Jensen is a scholarship student. At some schools, this might mean he would be an outcast. At our school, he’s the most popular. Hardworking, bright, and polite. Everything you want your kid to be. Every mother of every girl he’s dated has practically adopted him. No one begrudges him his scholarship, not when his mother died in Iraq when he was a toddler and he’s being raised by his single dad, the school janitor.
“I’d rather have you home studying than here too late.” I take my key out, fumbling for the lock. Dara watches for a second before taking it out of my hand. “Hey, I can do that.”
“Don’t want to wait all night.” She undoes the deadbolt.
“It’s no problem, Ms. Garner. I told you I’d do it and I did.” Brad shakes his hair back a
gain. I really don’t know why the girls love it so.
“You should get a haircut. You’ll see better.” I go inside. “Good night, Brad.”
“G’night.” Before I get all the way inside, his car has started.
“That kid. What isn’t he interested in?” Dara turns on the light. “Do you know what he was talking to me about in study hall? French cinema.” She snorts. “As if he knows anything.”
“Trying to impress you, I expect.” Dara’s the prettiest and youngest teacher at the school, a mere thirty-two. Of course all the boys have crushes, though she is never anything except professional. I put my hand on the hallway wall, making my way to the bedroom, past the very clean and nearly unused powder room. If you’re on the kind of dialysis I am, you don’t have to pee. Ever. The one convenient thing about it. “He’s a very well-rounded kid,” I continue. “I think he’ll have his pick of colleges. I’m only sorry he’s graduating.”
She goes ahead of me. The bedroom is pale green with pink accents. The bed is my four-poster from childhood, with a white canopy I’ve replaced with gauzy white curtains. I’ve spent more money in here on bedding than I have on my living room furniture. It’s the place where I spend the most time.
She turns down my covers. “There you go. All ready.” Dara sags against the door frame.
Suddenly I realize how tired she must be. Almost as tired as I am. “Thanks for staying with me, Dara.”
“I’ll stop by and see you tomorrow.” It is Friday night.
She’s got too much to do as it is. I am time-consuming. “No. I’ll be fine. I’ve got cans of chicken soup to eat.”
“You’re ridiculous if you think I’m not checking in.”
I wave her away. “Get along, now.”
I hear the front door latch as she leaves.
The red light is blinking on my machine, and I know it’s my mother before I check. I am not ready to talk to her. I get up and turn on the strong outdoor porch lights that lead the way into the greenhouse.
The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns Page 2