The Language of Flowers

by Ванесса Диффенбау

  Grant pinched the skin along his hairline with the fingers of one hand, and when he spoke, his words were slow and careful. “Don’t lie. Tell me you’ll never forgive me for what my mother did, or tell me every time you look at me you feel sick. But don’t sit here and lie to me, talking about how it’s your fault we can never be together.”

  I picked up the chicken bones, peeling fat away from the tendons. I couldn’t look at him, needed time to process what he was saying. “What my mother did.” There was only one explanation. When I’d first met Grant, I had searched his face for anger, and when I didn’t find it, I claimed forgiveness. But the reality was something else entirely. Grant was not angry with me because even he didn’t know the truth. I didn’t know how it was possible that he’d lived with his mother at the time and still didn’t know, but I didn’t ask.

  “I’m not lying.” It was all I could think of to say.

  Grant dropped his fork, the metal clattering against the ceramic plate. He stood up. “You’re not the only one whose life she ruined,” he said, then walked out of the kitchen and into the night.

  I locked the door behind him.

  10 .

  July was crowded at the farmers’ market. Strollers heaped with produce and nectarine-smeared toddlers blocked aisles, and elderly men with pushcarts waved impatient arms at distracted mothers. Under my feet, discarded pistachio shells crunched. I skipped to keep up with Elizabeth. She was making her way toward the blackberries.

  After lunch, Elizabeth told me, we would make blackberry cobbler and homemade ice cream. It was a bribe to keep me inside the house, away from the record-breaking heat and her quickly ripening grapes, and I had reluctantly agreed. All spring, Elizabeth and I had worked side by side at the vineyard, and I didn’t want to leave the plants alone now that there was little to do but wait. I missed the long mornings suckering the vines, trimming shoots that sprouted from the base of the trunk to keep the strength of the vine focused. I missed carrying a kitchen knife and following behind the small tractor Elizabeth used to disk the rows, pulling the remaining weeds by hand as she had taught me to do: first loosening the roots with the sharp point of the knife, then extracting the plants from the soil. I had been wielding the knife for more than three months before I told Elizabeth that allowing children in foster care to use knives was against the child-welfare code. But she didn’t take it away. You’re not a foster child, she had said simply. And though I no longer felt like a foster child (felt, in fact, so different from the girl who had arrived almost a year before that most mornings I studied my face in the bathroom mirror long after Elizabeth called me to breakfast, looking for physical signs of the change I knew to have occurred), this was not entirely the truth. I was still a foster child, and would be until after my court appearance in August.

  Pushing my way through a thick crowd, I reached Elizabeth’s side. “Blackberries?” she asked, passing me a green paper tray. On a red-cloth-covered table the vendor had displayed tall stacks of blackberries, ollalieberries, raspberries, and boysenberries. I plucked one from the tray and put it in my mouth. It was fat and sweet, and stained my fingertips purple where I touched it.

  Elizabeth dumped six paper trays in a plastic bag and paid for her purchase, then moved on to the next stand. I followed her around the hot market, carrying the bags that wouldn’t fit in her overflowing canvas sack. At a dairy truck, she handed me a milk jug, the glass of the bottle sweating. “Done?” I asked.

  “Almost. Come,” she said, beckoning me toward the far end of the market. Before she had even passed the Blenheim apricots, the last vendor in the line we knew, I understood where we were going. Tucking the slick bottle under my arm, I skipped to Elizabeth, holding her sleeve and pulling her back. But she only walked faster. She didn’t stop until she reached the flower stand.

  Bunches of roses lined the table. Up close, the perfection of the flowers was startling: each petal stiff and smooth, pressed one on top of the other, the tips a neat coil. Elizabeth stood still, studying the flowers as I did. I gestured to a mixed bouquet, hoping she might choose a bundle, pay, and turn to leave without speaking. But before she could make a purchase, the teenager swept the remaining flowers from the table, tossing them into the back of his truck. My eyes widened. He would not sell to Elizabeth. I watched her face for a reaction, but she was unreadable.

  “Grant?” she said. He did not respond, did not glance in her direction. She tried again. “I’m your aunt. Elizabeth. You must know this.” Leaning over the bed of his truck, he arranged a tarp over the layer of flowers. His eyes focused on the roses, but his ears peeled back slightly, his chin raised. Up close, he looked older. Light fuzz covered his upper lip, and his limbs, which I’d believed to be spindly, were defined. He wore only a plain white undershirt, and the curve of his shoulder blades caused a rise and fall in the thin material that I found mesmerizing.

  “Are you going to ignore me?” Elizabeth asked. When he didn’t respond, her voice changed, the way I remembered it from my first few weeks in her home: strict, patient, and then unexpectedly angry. “Look at me, at least, won’t you? Look at me when I speak to you.”

  He didn’t.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with you. It never has. For years I’ve watched you grow up from a distance, and I’ve wanted more than anything to run over here and scoop you into my arms.”

  Grant secured the tarp with a rope, the muscles in his arms taut. It was hard to imagine anyone scooping him up, hard to imagine he wasn’t always this strong. Tightening a final knot, he turned.

  “You should have, then, if that’s what you wanted to do.” His voice was cold, unemotional. “No one was stopping you.”

  “No,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her words were low, underlined by a deep vibration I recognized from previous foster placements as the predecessor to an attack. But she did not leap at him, as I half expected her to do. Instead, she said something so surprising that Grant spun to face me, his eyes meeting mine for the first time.

  “Victoria’s making blackberry cobbler,” she whispered. “You should come over.”

  11 .

  The image of Grant’s face, disappointed and desperate, kept me awake. I gave up trying to sleep before dawn and sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the sound of the truck’s engine. Instead, I was startled by a quiet knock. When I opened the door, Grant walked sleepily past me and up the stairs. The water started in the shower. I realized it was Sunday.

  I wanted to return to the blue room, to Renata, to payday and the approaching frenzy of holiday arranging. I had stayed at Grant’s too long. But he wouldn’t be driving to the city. I sat down on the bottom step and thought about how to convince him of the three-hour round trip on his day off.

  I was still thinking when Grant’s foot pushed on the triangle between my shoulder blades. The unexpected pressure caused me to slip off the bottom step and onto the kitchen floor. I scrambled to my feet.

  “Get up,” he said. “I’m taking you back.”

  His words were familiar. I flashed on the variations of the phrase I’d heard throughout the years: Pack your things. Alexis doesn’t want to share her room anymore. We’re too old to go through this again. More often than not, it was simply Meredith’s coming, with an occasional I’m sorry.

  To Grant, I said what I always said: “I’m ready.”

  I grabbed my backpack, heavy with his camera and dozens of rolls of film, and climbed into the truck. Grant drove quickly down the still-dark country roads, swerving into oncoming traffic to pass pickups loaded with produce. He took the first exit south of the bridge, and then pulled onto the shoulder of the busy off-ramp. There wasn’t a bus stop in sight. Unmoving, I looked up and down the street.

  “I have to get back to the farmers’ market,” he said. He wouldn’t look at me.

  Grant cut the engine and walked around the front of the truck. He opened the passenger door and reached inside to
grab my backpack from where it rested on my feet. His chest brushed my knees, and when he pulled back, the heat between our bodies dispersed in a cold rush of December air. I jumped out and grabbed my backpack.

  So this is how it ends, I thought, with a camera full of images of a flower farm to which I would never return. I missed the flowers already but would not permit myself to miss Grant.

  It took four buses to get back to Potrero Hill, but only because I took the 38 in the wrong direction and ended up at Point Lobos. It was mid-morning when I arrived at Bloom, and Renata was just opening the shop. She smiled when she saw me.

  “No work and no help for two weeks,” she said. “I’ve been bored out of my mind.”

  “Why don’t people marry in December?” I asked.

  “What’s romantic about bare trees and gray skies? Couples wait for spring and summer, blue skies, flowers, vacation, all that.”

  Blue and gray were equally unromantic in my opinion, I thought, and harsh light was unflattering in photographs. But brides were irrational; I had learned this from Renata, if nothing else.

  “When do you need me to work?” I asked.

  “I have a big Christmas Day wedding. Then I’ll need you every day through the first weekend in January.”

  I agreed, and asked Renata what time I should arrive.

  “On Christmas? Oh, sleep in. The wedding’s late, and I’ll buy the flowers the day before. Just make sure you’re here by nine.”

  I nodded. Renata withdrew an envelope of cash from the register. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  Later, in the blue room, I opened the envelope and saw that she’d paid me twice as much as she’d promised. Just in time to buy holiday gifts, I thought wryly, tucking the money into my backpack.

  I spent most of my bonus on a case of film at a wholesale photography supplier and the remainder at an art store on Market. My dictionary would not be a book; instead, I bought two cloth-covered photo boxes, one orange, the other blue, archival black cardstock cut in five-by-seven-inch rectangles, a spray can of photo mount, and a silver metallic marker.

  There were ten days until Christmas. With the exception of shooting my neglected garden in McKinley Square—the heath and helenium surviving despite the bad weather and desertion—I took a break from photography. I had taken twenty-five rolls of film at Grant’s, and it took me the full ten days to have the film developed, sort the prints, mount them on cardstock, and label them. Under each flower photograph, I wrote the common name, followed by the scientific, and on the back I printed the meaning. I made two sets of each flower and placed one in each photo box.

  On Christmas Eve, every photo had been mounted and dried. Natalya and her band had gone wherever people go for the holidays, and the apartment was deliciously quiet. Carrying the photo boxes downstairs, I spread the cards out in the empty practice room in neat rows, with aisles wide enough for me to walk down. The cards for the orange box I placed flower side up, the cards for the blue box flower side down. I paced the aisles for hours, alphabetizing first the flowers, then the meanings. When I was done, I replaced all the cards in the boxes and opened Elizabeth’s flower dictionary to admire my progress. It was the middle of winter, and my illustrated dictionary was already half finished.

  The pizzeria at the top of the hill was deserted. I took my pizza to go and ate it on Natalya’s bed, looking down over the empty street below. Afterward, I lay down in the blue room. Even though it was quiet, warm, and dark, my eyes kept popping open. A sliver of pale white light shone from the streetlight into Natalya’s room and pushed its way through the crack in the closet door. The light was pencil-thin and drew a line down the wall opposite and through the middle of my photo boxes. The blue box was exactly the same color as the wall, and the orange box, sitting on top of it, looked like it was floating in air. It didn’t belong there.

  It belonged on Grant’s bookshelf, across from his orange couch. I had chosen the color specifically for that purpose, even though I hadn’t admitted it to myself. Grant was gone. The need to avoid flower-language miscommunications no longer existed, yet I had purchased an extra box, an orange box, and made a second set of cards. I unlocked the half-door leading to the living room and put the orange box out.

  12 .

  Grant did not come over for blackberry cobbler. He should have, I thought, licking the bottom of the dish the next morning. It was delicious.

  As I set the dish in the sink, Elizabeth swept through the back door, breathless. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and I realized that I had never, in nearly a year, seen her without a tight bun at the back of her neck. She smiled, her eyes filled with an unrestrained happiness I’d never seen.

  “I’ve figured it out!” she said. “It’s absurd I didn’t think of it sooner.”

  “What?” I asked. Her joy made me inexplicably nervous. Licking congealed blackberry juice off a spoon, I watched her.

  “When I was at boarding school, Catherine and I wrote letters—until my mother started intercepting them.”

  “Intercepting?”

  “Taking. She read them all—she didn’t trust me, thought somehow my letters would corrupt Catherine, even though I was a child and Catherine was already nearly an adult. For years we didn’t write at all. But just after my sister’s twentieth birthday, she discovered a Victorian flower dictionary on my grandfather’s bookshelf. She started sending me drawings of flowers, the scientific name printed neatly in the bottom right-hand corner. She sent dozens before following with a simple note that read, ‘Do you know what I’m telling you?’ ”

  “Did you know?” I asked.

  “No,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head as if remembering her adolescent frustration. “I asked every librarian and teacher I could find. But it was months before my roommate’s great-grandmother, visiting one day, saw the drawings on my wall and told me about the language of flowers. I found my own dictionary in the library and sent my sister a note immediately, with pressed flowers, not drawings, because I was a hopeless artist.”

  Elizabeth walked into the living room and returned with a stack of books. She set them on the kitchen table. “For years it was the way we communicated. I sent poems and stories by connecting dried flowers on strings, intertwined with typed words on little slips of paper: and, the, if, it. My sister continued to send drawings, sometimes whole landscapes, with dozens of floral varieties, all labeled and numbered, so I would know which flower to read first to decode the sequence of events and emotions in her life. I lived for those letters, checked the mailbox dozens of times a day.”

  “So, how will this help you win her forgiveness?” I asked.

  Elizabeth had started toward the garden but stopped suddenly and whirled to face me. “I’m forgiving her,” she said. “Don’t you forget that.” After a deep breath, she continued. “But I’ll tell you how it will help. Catherine will remember how close we were; she’ll remember how I understood her better than anyone else in the world. And even if she’s too remorseful to answer the phone, she’ll answer with flowers. I know she will.”

  Elizabeth went outside. When she returned, she held a bouquet of three flowers, all different. Retrieving a cutting board from the counter, she set it on the kitchen table, the flowers and a sharp knife arranged on top.

  “I’ll teach you,” Elizabeth said. “And you’ll help me.”

  I sat down at the kitchen table. Elizabeth had continued to teach me flowers and their meanings but not in a formal or structured way. The day before we’d passed a handmade purse at the farmer’s market, the fabric printed with small white flowers. Poverty for a purse, Elizabeth had said, shaking her head. She pointed to the flowers and explained the defining features of clematis.

  Sitting next to her now, I was thrilled at the prospect of receiving a formal lesson. I pushed my chair as close to Elizabeth as possible. She picked up a walnut-sized dark purple flower with a yellow sun center.

  “Primrose,” she said, twirling the pinwheel-shaped flower be
tween her thumb and index finger before placing it, face up, on her smooth white palm. “Childhood.”

  I leaned over her hand, my nose only inches from the petals. The primrose had a sharp scent, sugared alcohol and someone’s mother’s perfume. Pulling my nose away, I pushed the air out of my nostrils with force.

  Elizabeth laughed. “I don’t like the smell, either. Too sweet, as if it was trying to mask its true, undesirable smell.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “So, if we didn’t know this was a primrose, how would we find out?” Elizabeth put down the flower and picked up a pocket-sized book. “This is a field guide of North American wildflowers, divided by color. Primrose should be with the violet-blues.” She handed me the book. I turned to the violet-blues, flipping through the pages until I found the drawing that matched the flower.

  “Cusick’s primrose,” I read. “Primrose family, Primulaceae.”

  “Good.” She picked up the second of the three flowers, large and yellow, with six pointed petals. “Now this. Lily, majesty.”

  Searching the yellows, I found the drawing that matched. I pointed with a damp fingertip and watched the water mark spread. Elizabeth nodded.

  “Now, let’s pretend you couldn’t find the drawing, or you weren’t sure you had found the right one. This is when you need to know about flower parts. Using a field guide is like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It begins with simple questions: Does your flower have petals? How many? And each answer leads you to a different set of more complicated questions.”

  Elizabeth picked up a kitchen knife and sliced the lily in half, its petals falling open on the cutting board. She pointed to the ovary, pressed my fingertip against the sticky top of the outstretched stigma.

  We counted petals, described their shape. Elizabeth taught me the definition of symmetry, the difference between inferior and superior ovaries, and the variations of flower arrangements on a stem. She quizzed me using the third flower she had picked, a violet, small and wilting.