Desert Flowers

by Paul Pen

  Rose would have preferred to hug the thorn-covered cactus beside her than continue discussing her daughter’s sexual desire. “When she’s an adult, she’ll be able to go with whoever she wants,” she said—more loudly than she intended, the mere idea of Iris leaving home making her head spin—“and satisfy those desires you say she has. But right now she’s a child who lives with her parents.”

  “Then don’t be surprised by what she decides. And I tell you from experience. We live in a beautiful place to bring up a family. But young people want other things now. They want cars. They want to watch movies from their cars. They want to eat hamburgers while they watch movies from their cars. There’s nothing here for them.”

  Socorro invited Rose to look around her. Only rocks, cacti, and various types of spiny shrub covered the landscape as far as the eye could see.

  “Your daughters see no one outside of the family.”

  “Nonsense. They go with their father to the town once a month.”

  “One at a time,” the teacher pointed out. “How many times has Melissa been in total? And who’s she going to talk to if she doesn’t speak Spanish?”

  “They go to town more than I do. I never leave here. And I couldn’t be happier.”

  “But you and your husband, you chose this way of life. They didn’t.”

  “Do anyone’s children choose their way of life?”

  Socorro seemed ready to respond but in the end said nothing. She transformed whatever words she’d considered saying into a smile that unsettled Rose. It was the smile of someone remaining silent because they know that sometimes one must make one’s own mistakes in order to learn the lessons. Rose gave her daughters that smile.

  “Thank you for the class,” Rose said.

  They walked to the teacher’s truck without saying anything else, hearing Daisy yell under the jet from the hose. When Socorro climbed into the vehicle, Rose wished her a pleasant summer.

  “You, too,” she replied. “Make the most of these summers. They’ll be the best of your life.”

  With her hands on the wheel, she gestured at the girls. Rose saw Daisy in her underwear, spinning around in a puddle with her arms outstretched. Over her, a rainbow glistened in the atomized water coming from a split in the rubber of the hose. Iris was aiming for the little girl’s face with the jet and laughed each time she hit her target, while Daisy tried to protect herself with her hands. Rose smiled at the scene until her eyes found Melissa, sitting alone in a kitchen that seemed so dark from outside. She was moving her mouth. Something caught Rose’s attention on the second floor. The curtain in the twins’ room had moved.

  She banged twice on Socorro’s hood to speed up their parting. “See you in September.”

  The truck moved off along the track, sending up a column of smoke and dust. Rose strode back to the house, ignoring Daisy’s yells for attention. It was Dahlia who needed attention. She climbed the stairs two at a time and turned the key in the lock. When she opened the door, she found the little girl sitting on the floor, her head hidden between her legs. The jar of orange beads, also on the floor, was empty, some distance from her, the contents scattered all over the room.

  “Honey . . .”

  “That’s not class.”

  More laughter reached them from Daisy and Iris outside.

  “I always miss the best stuff.”

  “It was the last day. The teacher wanted to do something special with your sisters.”

  The little girl took her head out from between her knees, looking straight at Rose. Dahlia’s jaw dropped when she saw her.

  “You went to pick flowers without me?”

  She swallowed as she finished asking the question, as indignant as the time she discovered that it was Mommy who made her toy rabbit talk. Rose touched the necklace hanging on her chest, as if she needed to check that it was still there.

  “Dahlia, it was the teacher. I didn’t—”

  Rose was unable to finish the sentence before her daughter burst into tears. She sat on the floor opposite Dahlia, crossing her legs.

  “Honey . . .”

  Dahlia grabbed the necklace and pulled. The blade of grass broke without difficulty. The little girl left the bedroom. Rose followed her. On the stairs, they came across Melissa. Dahlia broke her necklace in the same way, scattering flowers all over the steps. Rose wouldn’t have had time to offer an explanation to Melissa, who, at any rate, didn’t ask for one. She continued up the stairs, whispering to her rock.

  Dahlia ran outside. She stopped when she found her sisters playing with the hose. She looked at Rose as if she couldn’t believe that she’d allowed her to miss out on so much fun. The little girl discovered her sister’s necklace hanging on the hose’s faucet, by the clothes she’d taken off before surrendering herself to the water. She broke it. Then she went up to Daisy and pushed her into the mud.

  “You did it without me.”

  “It was my turn to take class today.” Daisy wiped the wet earth from her face. “I don’t complain when it’s your turn.”

  Dahlia didn’t reply but stripped down to her underwear, like Daisy. She sat with her in the puddle and replicated as accurately as possible the spots of earth her sister had on her body. She crossed her arms, angry with everything around her.

  “I wanted to pick flowers, too,” she sobbed.

  Rose knelt beside her, trying to avoid the mud.

  “Would you like us to pick some more? Tomorrow?”

  Dahlia turned away.

  “Tomorrow we can pick flowers again, all of us together.”

  She pinched Dahlia’s elbow but the little girl snatched it away. Then Rose thought of something. She held out an arm to Iris, asking her to hand over her still-intact necklace. Iris gave it to her with a frown.

  “Dahlia, listen to me.”

  The little girl resisted but finally turned around.

  “Smell this necklace,” said Rose.

  Dahlia held her nose near the flowers. “It doesn’t smell.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. Because it’s daytime. But do you know what we’ll do tomorrow? Pick the flowers at dusk, which is when they smell good. Tomorrow we’ll make much better necklaces than these ones.”

  Dahlia sniffed the flowers again. “They don’t smell,” she said with a smile. Then she turned to Daisy. “Your necklaces don’t smell. We’re gonna make better ones tomorrow. Necklaces that smell.”

  Daisy pulled a face.

  “And I’m beating you with my sunset picture,” Dahlia added. “I’ve already colored in the sky.”

  The twins got into one of their arguments, this time debating which of the two was the fastest at sticking on colored beads. Rose stood up without interrupting the dispute. She whispered to Iris, who aimed the hose at the little girls. Stealthily, she reached for the faucet and turned it on full blast. The jet of water hit Dahlia’s face first, then Daisy’s. The initial screams quickly became laughter, and the twins got up and jumped in the water, trying to splash Rose and Iris, who laughed from a safe distance.

  Dahlia used some leaps to stamp on the flowers of the necklace that had fallen in the mud. “They don’t smell!”

  Rose asked Iris to finish washing the little girls and headed back into the house. Before she reached the porch, she turned around. She had Iris’s necklace in her hands. She fingered it, feeling the texture of the flowers. Seeing her daughters so happy, she couldn’t help thinking of Edelweiss.

  She had an idea. She modified the necklace by bunching the flowers together in her fist, then gathered up the ones that had fallen from Melissa’s necklace onto the steps. In the twins’ room she recovered the flowers from her own necklace. As she did so, she heard Melissa talking in her bedroom.

  “It’s a good thing I have you,” she was saying to the rocks.

  Rose went down to the kitchen. There, she formed the flowers into a centerpiece, using some cactus spines to keep the arrangement together. She put it in a bowl filled with water. One of the peta
ls tore, like a wound opening up. The fragility of that flower made her think of her girls, and she felt like crying. She also wanted to yell Edelweiss’s name, to make her come back from wherever she was. She suppressed the urge to throw the bowl against a wall. She delicately knotted the long blade of grass from Iris’s necklace and smiled as a tear slid down her cheek.

  The puddle almost completely dried up before sunset. A late butterfly was sucking up the last of the liquid from the mud until the twins startled it with the tremor of their footsteps as they ran out to welcome Dad, arriving home on cue just as the sun fell. Daisy and Dahlia deafened him with their yelling while the butterfly, the cacti’s shadows, and the moisture on the ground disappeared with the day. Only the shadows returned soon after, when a first-quarter moon appeared among the dark columns that the cardones had become, projecting their silhouettes across the earth. New shadows were also cast—by a beetle searching for food, by a bat finding the nectar of the flowers that seduced it with their nocturnal scent.

  In the kitchen, Rose finished washing the dishes from dinner. She heard the stairs creak under her husband’s weight as he came down from the bedrooms.

  “They’re all in bed,” he said behind her.

  She shook the water from the last piece of cutlery before leaving it to dry on top of the rest of the wet dishes. She cleaned the sink, wrung out the cloth, and turned off the faucet, turning around in time to receive Elmer with a kiss.

  “I made something,” she said. From the top of the refrigerator, she took the floral arrangement that she’d prepared in the morning. “It’s for Edelweiss.”

  He smiled. He opened the back door and took his wife by the hand, inviting her to go out with him.

  The cross with Edelweiss’s name carved into the horizontal plank was to the right. It could be seen from the living room’s large window. Though it was still hot enough that the sweat would evaporate on the skin rather than moisten it, the hair stood up on Rose’s arms. She felt her stomach shrink, her heart expand—the mixture of love and anguish that visits to Edelweiss tended to spark in her. Together, they placed the centerpiece on a rectangle of earth marked by colored stones. Daisy and Dahlia had decorated them with beads to make the place where their eldest sister rested more cheerful. At night, the colors weren’t visible. Everything was a dark, matte gray.

  Rose rested a cheek against her husband’s shoulder.

  “Nothing’s hurt me more than not seeing Edelweiss continue to grow”—she sniffed—“but now I don’t want our daughters to get older anymore. Iris is so grown up . . . everything’s gone so fast.”

  He squeezed her against his chest, kissed her hair.

  “My daughters are going to want to leave this place,” Rose said. “Why did we choose somewhere so lonely? So remote?”

  Elmer didn’t respond. There was no need. They both knew the answer to those questions. Her husband just rocked her with a slight sway of his body. He shushed softly in her ear to reassure her, but she made his shirt damp with tears.

  They remained there, in front of Edelweiss’s grave, while a shining gray moon climbed the sky. The screen door’s hinges creaked. Dozens of insects rattled against the glass of the single bulb, alight on top of a post, that flickered due to some unevenness in the flow of electricity.

  The pencil whistled against the paper as Melissa colored in the cacti’s shadows. Sitting by the window in the kitchen, she was drawing Daisy and Dahlia, who were playing outside imitating the shapes of the cardones. They held their arms out, perpendicular to their bodies, and bent them with their hands pointing upward. Dahlia touched Daisy and pretended to hurt herself on the needles. Melissa laughed when she saw it.

  “What’re you laughing at?” Iris asked from near the stove. She was making agua de Jamaica, the cold tea they drank in the afternoons. When the water began to boil, she added four handfuls of dried hibiscus flowers. The liquid quickly turned dark red. “What are those two doing?”

  Melissa invited her over to see for herself. The twins were now pointing at the horizon, using their hands as visors. Dahlia lay on the ground, her body lost in the shadow of one of the cactus branches.

  “It’s longer than it was before,” Daisy said. “The shadow’s bigger than you now.”

  Dahlia got up and together they celebrated the discovery with claps and little leaps.

  “Mommy, the sun’s going down fast!” they yelled at the same time. “It’s not long now!”

  Iris laughed over the shoulder of Melissa, who added a detail to her drawing. She pressed the pencil’s tip down hard, making the cracks in the earth appear deeper.

  “In the end, I’ll be forced to admit you possess some talent,” Iris said. “It’s looking nice. I like the shape you’ve given the sun”—she pointed at it—“and I love the sense of movement the girls give off. They look happy even in pencil.”

  “Nice?” Melissa asked. “That depends on how you look at it. If you see two girls playing among the cactuses at sunset, then sure. But if you look at the parallel shadows of the cactuses, they’re like the bars of a prison that keeps them locked up here.”

  Iris exhaled. “And Mom says I’m the melodramatic one, the one that makes stuff up.”

  Melissa closed the sketchbook.

  “Hey, don’t get angry,” Iris said. “It’s just you get so tragic, so melancholic and over the top sometimes. Do me a favor and just look at that landscape. Look where we live. Living here is the opposite to being locked up. If there’s one thing we have enough of, it’s space.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Melissa looked around outside, hoping to find something different. A cactus she didn’t recognize. A rock formation whose outline she hadn’t seen every day of her life. She daydreamed of a building erected right there. Imagined other houses nearby. A person she didn’t know. A street with people on it. A movie theater like the ones she saw in her magazines. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong in this place. That I should be somewhere else.”

  “Oh, sis, that’s what all humanity thinks. Almost every book you see there”—she gestured at her library on the bookcase—“reflects on that theme in one way or another. But where do you belong, if not here? Here you’re with me, with them”—she touched the twins in the drawing—“and with Mom and Dad.”

  “Sure, as if you don’t think about leaving.”

  “First off, I’m older than you, and that’s why I have to start thinking about my future. And second, more than leaving, I’m thinking about how to meet a boy. If you bring one here for me, I’ll stay in this house forever.”

  Melissa was about to complain that Iris always steered the conversation toward the same subject, but a hissing sound interrupted from the cooktop. The water had overflowed the saucepan. Iris went to deal with it. She strained the red liquid, filling a pitcher halfway up. The other half she filled with ice. She squeezed lemon into the mixture and stirred it with a wooden spoon.

  Melissa turned her attention back to the twins. It took her a while to understand why they were going from cactus to cactus with their noses stuck out. Until they started yelling.

  “Mommy! They smell! The flowers smell! Hurry, Mommy!”

  Mom came into the kitchen through the back door. She was carrying a large wicker basket. Several pairs of gloves poked out from the edge. “That’s them shouting, right?”

  Melissa and Iris nodded.

  “Boy, am I glad you made that,” Mom said, indicating the drink. “I’m so thirsty. I feel as if I’ve been eating sand.”

  Iris went to serve her a glass, but Mom said it would be better outside. They only had an hour before it was dark. Melissa took the men’s clothes that Dad had brought her from the town. She piled the shirt on top of the pants and put the cap on her head. She also picked up some scissors.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Mom said.

  Iris held a tower of glasses in one hand, the pitcher in the other. As soon as they went out onto the porch, Daisy and Dahlia ran to Mom. They snatched two
pairs of gloves from the basket and laughed when they put them on. They were enormous on them. They whispered to each other before speaking.

  “We’ve got giant hands!” they said. “We’re gonna be able to pick millions of flowers!”

  “OK, OK, hold on,” Mom said. “How many necklaces are we going to make?”

  Daisy spoke in Dahlia’s ear. Dahlia answered her, also in her ear. They looked at Melissa, then Mom, then Iris. They pointed at the house, or something beyond it, probably Edelweiss’s grave. They reached an agreement.

  “Six,” they said at the same time.

  Melissa had the feeling Mom was going to say something—perhaps remind them that there were no longer six girls living in this house, or thank them for still thinking of Edelweiss—but the twins shot off toward the cacti, leaving her without the chance to speak. In midflight, Dahlia’s gloves came off. When she stopped to pick them up, Daisy’s came off. They decided to leave them lying there.

  “I knew they wouldn’t be any use.”

  Mom ran after the little girls when they went to move the folding ladder themselves. Dad had gotten it out at breakfast so they could reach the highest flowers. Iris and Melissa came down the porch stairs together, the tower of glasses clinking with each step. On the way they found a rock with an interesting shape. Melissa squatted to examine it up close.

  “It has cheeks,” she said to her sister. Then she addressed the stone: “I’ll collect you later, I have my hands full.” She showed the folded clothes to the rock.

  “Where’re you going to belong if not here?” Iris said with a smile. “Making the rocks and the cactuses come to life.”

  Melissa stuck out her tongue. She changed direction, separating from her sister, who continued toward Mom and the twins.

  Daisy and Dahlia were fighting over the ladder when Iris arrived with the pitcher of agua de Jamaica. She offered a glass to the little girls.