The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  “How do I know you won’t come back in the middle of the night?”

  Grant pulled his keys out of his pocket and detached the key to the water tower. He handed it to me and walked down the stairs. I followed him out.

  In the kitchen he grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer and a flannel jacket off a hook. I opened the door, and he walked out, lingering under the cover of the stoop. Rain ran in sheets around the protected step. “Good night,” he said.

  “Spare key?” I asked.

  Grant sighed and shook his head, but he was smiling. He leaned over and picked up a rusted watering can, half full of rainwater. He poured the water through the spout as if he was watering the sodden gravel. In the bottom was a key. “It’s probably rusted beyond use. But here you go, just in case.” He handed me the key, and our hands clasped around the wet metal.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Good night.” He stood still as I inched the door closed and turned the lock.

  I breathed in the emptiness of the water tower and climbed the stairs. On the third floor, I pulled the blanket off Grant’s bed and returned to the kitchen, curling up underneath the picnic table. If the door opened, I would hear it.

  But all I heard, all night, was the rain.

  Grant knocked on the door at half past ten the next morning. I was still asleep under the table. It had been twelve hours, and my body was stiff and slow to rise. At the door I paused, leaning against the solid wood and rubbing my eyes, my cheekbones, and the back of my neck. I opened the door.

  Grant stood in the clothes he’d worn the night before and looked only slightly more awake than I felt. Stumbling into the kitchen, he sat down at the table.

  The storm had passed. Outside the window, under the cloudless sky, flowers glistened. It was a perfect day for photography.

  “Farmers’ market?” he asked. “On Sundays I sell down the road instead of in the city. You want to come?”

  December was a bad time of year for fruit and vegetables, I remembered. Oranges, apples, broccoli, kale. But even if it had been midsummer, I wouldn’t have wanted to go to the farmers’ market. I didn’t want to risk seeing Elizabeth. “Not really. I need film, though.”

  “Come with me, then. You can wait in the truck while I sell what I have left over from yesterday. Then I’ll take you to the drugstore.”

  Grant changed his clothes upstairs, and I brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger. Splashing water on my face and hair, I went to wait in the truck. When Grant joined me a few minutes later, he had shaved and put on a clean gray sweatshirt and only slightly dirty jeans. He still looked tired, and he pulled up his hood as he locked the door of the water tower.

  The road had flooded in places, and Grant drove slowly, his truck swaying like a boat in deep water. I closed my eyes.

  Less than five minutes later, he stopped the truck, and when I opened my eyes, we were in a crowded parking lot. I slunk down in my seat while Grant jumped out. Pulling his hood low over his forehead, Grant slid the buckets out of his truck. I closed my eyes and pressed my ear against the locked door, trying not to hear the noises of the busy market or remember the many times I’d been there as a child. Finally, he returned.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  Grant drove to the nearest store, a country drugstore with fishing gear and pharmaceuticals. Being out in the world, in such close proximity to Elizabeth, made me nervous.

  I paused, my hand on the door of the truck. “Elizabeth?”

  “She won’t be here. I don’t know where she shops, but I’ve been coming here for over twenty years, and I’ve never seen her.”

  Relieved, I walked inside and went straight to the photo counter, dropping my canisters in an envelope and pushing them through a slot.

  “One hour?” I asked a bored-looking clerk in a blue apron.

  “Less,” she said. “I haven’t had any film to print in days.”

  I ducked into the nearest aisle. The store was having a sale on T-shirts—three for five dollars. I picked the top three off a tall pile and put them in my basket with rolls of film, a toothbrush, and deodorant. Grant stood at the checkout counter, eating a candy bar, watching me walk up and down the rows. I poked my head out of the aisle. When I saw that the store was empty, I joined him at the counter.

  “Breakfast?” I asked, and he nodded. I picked up a PayDay and ate out the peanuts until it was nothing but a gooey caramel strip.

  “Best part,” Grant said, nodding to the caramel. I handed it to him, and he ate it quickly, as if I would change my mind and take it back. “You must like me more than you let on,” he said, grinning.

  The door opened, and an elderly couple walked toward us, holding hands. The woman’s back bent forward, and the man had a stiff left leg, so it looked as if she was dragging him through the door. The old man looked me up and down, and his smile was youthful and out of place on his age-spotted skin.

  “Grant,” he said, winking and nodding in my direction. “Good work, son, good work.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Grant, looking at the ground. The man wobbled past, and after a few steps, he stopped and slapped his wife on the backside. He turned and winked at Grant.

  Grant looked from me to the old man and shook his head. “He was a friend of my mother’s,” he said when the couple was out of earshot. “He thinks that will be us in sixty years.”

  I rolled my eyes, picked up a second PayDay, and walked to the photography counter to wait. There was nothing in the world less likely than Grant and me holding hands in sixty years. The clerk handed me the first roll, which had already been printed, the negatives cut and pressed into a clear envelope. I lined up the photographs on the bright yellow counter.

  The first ten were blurry. Not indistinguishable white blobs, like my first attempt, but blurry. Beginning with the eleventh, they became passably clear, but nothing of which I could be proud. The clerk continued to pass me one roll at a time, and I continued to line them up, being careful to maintain the order.

  Grant stood nearby, fanning himself with five empty candy wrappers. I walked over and held up the print. It was the sixteenth shot on the eighth roll—a perfect white rose, bright and clear, the contrast with the dark background a natural frame. Grant leaned over as if to smell it, and nodded. “Nice.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. I paid for the things in my basket and Grant’s candy wrappers, and began to walk out the door.

  “Your photos?” Grant asked, pausing and looking at the sea of prints I had left on the photo counter.

  “This is all I need,” I said, holding up the single image.

  8.

  I listened to the click of Elizabeth’s rag mop, my spine pressed against the trunk of a thick vine. I was supposed to be out for my morning walk, but I didn’t feel like walking. Elizabeth had opened every window in the house to let in the first warm spring air, and from my position in the row nearest the house, I could hear her every movement.

  For six months I’d been home with Elizabeth, and I’d grown accustomed to her concept of home-school. I did not have a desk. Elizabeth did not purchase a chalkboard, or a textbook, or flash cards. Instead, she had posted a schedule on the refrigerator door—a wispy sheet of rice paper with delicate script, the corners curling around silver circular magnets—and I was responsible for the activities and chores on the thin sheet of paper.

  Elizabeth’s list was detailed, exhausting, and exact but never grew and never changed. Every day, after breakfast and my morning walk, I wrote in the black leather-bound journal she had purchased for me. I was a good writer and an excellent speller, but I made purposeful mistakes to keep Elizabeth by my side, sounding out words and proofing pages. When I finished, I helped her prepare lunch, and we measured, and poured, and doubled recipes, and halved them. Silverware in neat stacks became fractions and cups of dry beans complicated word problems. Using the calendar by which she tracked the weather, she taught me to calculate averages, percentages, and probabilities.

  At the
end of each day, Elizabeth read to me. She had shelves and shelves of children’s classics, dusty hardcovers with stamped gold titles: The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But I preferred her viticulture textbooks, the illustrations of plants and chemical equations clues to the world that surrounded me. I memorized vocabulary—nitrate leaching, carbon sequestration, integrated pest management—and used them in casual conversation with a seriousness that made Elizabeth laugh.

  Before bed, we marked off each day on a calendar in my room. Throughout January, I simply scratched a small red X in the box underneath the date, but by the end of March, I wrote the high and low temperatures, as Elizabeth did on her own calendar, what we had eaten for dinner, and a list of the day’s activities. Elizabeth cut a stack of Post-its the size of the calendar’s squares, and many evenings I filled five or six sheets before crawling into bed.

  More than a nightly ritual, the calendar was a countdown. August second—the day after my supposed birthday—was highlighted, the entire box colored pink. In black felt-tip, Elizabeth had written eleven a.m., third floor, room 305. The law mandated I live with Elizabeth for a full year before my adoption could be finalized; Meredith had scheduled our court date for a year to the day from my arrival.

  I checked the watch Elizabeth had given me. Another ten minutes before she would let me back inside. I leaned my head against the vine’s bare branches. The first bright green leaves had sprouted from tight buds, and I studied them, perfect, fingernail-sized versions of what they would become. Smelling one, I nibbled a corner, thinking I would write in my journal about the taste of a grapevine, before the grapes. I checked my watch again. Five minutes.

  Out of the quiet, I heard Elizabeth’s voice. It was clear, confident, and for a moment I thought she was calling me. Scampering back to the house, I stopped midstride when I realized she was on the phone. Though she had not mentioned her sister once since our visit to the flower farm, I knew in an instant she had called Catherine. I sat down in the dirt beneath the kitchen window, shocked.

  “Another crop,” she said. “Safe. I’m not a drinker, but I have more sympathy for Dad these days. The appeal of waking up to a shot of whiskey—‘to numb the fear of frost,’ as he used to say—I can understand it.” Her pause was brief, and I realized that, again, she was speaking only to Catherine’s answering machine. “Anyway, I know you saw me that day in October. Did you see Victoria? Isn’t she beautiful? You obviously didn’t want to see me, and I wanted to respect that, to give you more time. So I haven’t called. But I can’t wait any longer. I’ve decided to start calling again, every day. More than once a day, probably, until you agree to talk to me. I need you, Catherine. Don’t you understand? You’re all the family I have.”

  I shut my eyes at Elizabeth’s words. You’re all the family I have. For eight months we had been together, eating three meals a day at the kitchen table, working side by side. My adoption was less than four months away. Still, Elizabeth did not consider me family. Instead of sorrow, I felt rage, and when I heard the phone click, followed by the gushing sound of dirty water being poured down a drain, I pounded up the front steps. I struck the door with clenched fists, trying to knock it in. What am I, then? I wanted to scream. Why are we pretending?

  But when Elizabeth opened the door and I looked into her surprised face, I started to cry. I could not remember ever having cried, and the tears felt like a betrayal of my anger. I slapped at my face where tears ran down in streams. The sting of each slap made me cry harder.

  Elizabeth didn’t ask why I was crying, just pulled me into the kitchen. She sat on a wooden chair and drew me awkwardly into her lap. In a few months I would be ten. I was too old to sit on her lap, too old to be held and comforted. I was also too old to be given back. Suddenly I was both terrified of being placed in a group home and surprised that Meredith’s scare tactic had worked. Burying my face in Elizabeth’s neck, I sobbed and sobbed. She squeezed me. I waited for her to tell me to calm down, but she didn’t.

  Minutes passed. A timer on the kitchen stove buzzed, but Elizabeth did not stand up. When I finally lifted my head, the kitchen was filled with the scent of chocolate. Elizabeth had made a soufflé to celebrate the turn in the weather, and the scent was rich and sweet. I wiped my eyes on the shoulder of her blouse and sat up, pushing myself back to look at her. When our eyes met, I saw that she had been crying, too. Tears clung and then dropped from the edge of her jawbone.

  “I love you,” Elizabeth said, and I started to cry all over again.

  In the oven, the chocolate soufflé began to burn.

  9.

  Grant left for the flower market early Monday morning, but I did not go with him. When I awakened hours later, I was surprised to find I was not alone on the property. Men shouted to one another between rows, and women knelt on the wet soil, pulling weeds. I watched it all happen from the windows: the pruning, tending, feeding, and harvesting.

  It had never crossed my mind that anyone but Grant tended the acres and acres of plants, but once I saw the workers in action, it seemed ridiculous that I ever imagined it any other way. The job was enormous; the tasks were many. And while I didn’t like having to share the property with anyone, especially on the first day Grant had left me alone, I was grateful for the workers who coaxed the hundreds of varieties of flowers into bloom.

  I changed into a clean white T-shirt and brushed my teeth. Grabbing a loaf of bread and my camera, I walked outside. The workers greeted me with a deep nod and a smile but didn’t attempt to make conversation.

  I entered the first greenhouse. It was the one Grant had opened for me on our first walk, and it contained mainly orchids, with a single wall of hibiscus varieties and amaryllis. It was warmer, and I was comfortable in my thin T-shirt. I began on the top shelf of the left wall. Numbering my notebook, I took two photographs of every flower and recorded the scientific name of each one instead of the camera settings. Afterward, I used one of Grant’s gardening books to determine the common name for each flower, scrawling it in the margins and opening my flower dictionary to put an X by the flowers I photographed. I shot four rolls of film and put sixteen X’s in my dictionary. It would take me all week to shoot what was in bloom, and all spring to wait for what was not. Even then, I would likely be missing flowers.

  Only steps from the back wall, my eye buried in the viewfinder, I tripped on a large object in the middle of the aisle. When I looked down I saw a closed cardboard box. The word Jonquil was scratched onto the top in thick black marker.

  I peered inside the box. Six ceramic pots were packed side by side, their sandy soil wet, as if they had been watered that morning. I stuck my finger an inch into the dirt, hoping to feel a shoot on the verge of emerging, but there was nothing. Closing the box, I continued on my path, the camera clicking and the film advancing every time I found a new plant with an open bloom.

  The days continued this way. Grant left before I awoke in the mornings. I spent long afternoons alone in the greenhouses, passing courteous laborers on my walks between my work and the water tower. Most nights Grant would bring home takeout, but other nights we would eat canned soup and whole loaves of bread or frozen pizzas.

  After dinner we read together on the second floor, sometimes even sharing the love seat. On these nights, I would wait for the dizzying need for solitude to overcome me, but just as the air in the room would start to thin, Grant would stand up, bid me good night, and disappear down the spiral staircase. Sometimes he would come back an hour later, sometimes not until the next evening. I didn’t know where he went or where he slept at night, and I didn’t ask.

  I had been at Grant’s nearly two weeks when he came home one late afternoon with a chicken. Raw.

  “What’re we going to do with this?” I asked, holding up the cold, plastic-wrapped bird.

  “Cook it,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘cook it’?” I asked. “We don’t even know how to clean it.”

  Grant held up a lon
g receipt. On the back he’d written instructions, and he read them aloud to me. They started with preheating the oven and ended with something about rosemary and new potatoes.

  I turned on the oven. “That’s my contribution,” I said. “You’re on your own from here on out.” I sat down at the table.

  He got out a baking sheet and washed the potatoes, then cut them into cubes and sprinkled on rosemary. Putting them on the tray with the chicken, he rubbed the whole thing with olive oil, salt, and spices from a small jar. Washing his hands, he put the tray in the oven.

  “I asked the butcher for the easiest recipe possible, and that’s what he came up with. Not bad, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “The only problem,” he added, “is that it takes over an hour to cook.”

  “Over an hour!” The thought of waiting made my head hurt. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and my stomach was empty to the point of nausea.

  Grant lit a candle and produced a deck of cards. “To distract us,” he said. He set a kitchen timer and sat down across from me.

  We played war by candlelight, the only game either of us knew. It kept us just entertained enough to avoid passing out on the table. When the timer buzzed, I set plates on the table and Grant cut the breast of the chicken into thin slices. I pulled a leg off the golden-brown bird and started to eat.

  The meal was delicious, the flavor inversely proportional to the amount of effort that had gone into the preparation. The meat was hot and tender. I chewed and swallowed huge mouthfuls, then pulled off the other drumstick before Grant could reach for it, eating the seasoned skin first.

  Across from me, Grant ate a slice of breast with his knife and fork, cutting bites one at a time and eating slowly. His face showed both the pleasure of the food and the pride of the accomplishment. He put down his knife and fork, and when he looked across the table, I could see he was enjoying the sight of my ravenous hunger. His watchfulness made me uncomfortable.