The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  He turned toward me, his thick body wedged between the wall and my side. “I wanted so much to make her happy,” he said. “But I kept making mistakes. I’d feed her too much or forget her diapers or leave her too long in the sun while I worked. She never cried, but the guilt kept me up at night. I thought I was letting her down, and you, too. I couldn’t be the father I wanted to be, not alone, not without you. And I was afraid, even as I named her, that you weren’t ever coming back.”

  Grant lifted a heavy hand and ran it through my hair. He pressed his cheek into my scalp, and I felt his unshaven jawbone tickle my skin. “I took her to Elizabeth,” he said. “It was the only thing I could think of to do. When I showed up on her front porch with the baby in the basket, she cried and took us into her kitchen. I didn’t leave her home for two weeks, and when I did, I didn’t take the baby with me. Hazel smiled for the first time in Elizabeth’s arms; I couldn’t bear the thought of separating them.”

  Grant wrapped his arms around me and leaned his face into my ear. “Maybe it was just my excuse for leaving her,” he whispered. “But I couldn’t do it.”

  I slipped my arm under his chest. When he squeezed me to him, I squeezed back.

  “I know,” I said. I couldn’t do it, either, and he knew it without me having to say it. We held on to each other as if we were drowning, neither looking for shore, and we stayed that way a long time, not talking, barely breathing.

  “You told Elizabeth about me?” I asked.

  Grant nodded. “She wanted to know everything. She thought I should be able to recite every moment of every day you’d lived since the last time she saw you in court, and kept getting frustrated when I couldn’t.” Grant told me about sitting at Elizabeth’s table, a pot roast in the oven, Hazel asleep in his arms. Why didn’t you ask? she would say, when Grant didn’t know what I’d done for my sixteenth birthday, if I’d gone to high school, or what I liked best for breakfast. “She laughed when I told her you don’t like lilies, and she told me you don’t much care for cactus, either.” I pulled my face out of Grant’s chest to look at him. The corner of his mouth turned up, and I knew he had heard the whole story.

  “She told you everything?” I asked. Grant nodded. I dropped my head back down, speaking my next words into his chest. “Even about the fire?”

  He nodded again, his chin pressing into my forehead. We were quiet for a long time. Finally, I asked the question I had long held. “How could you have not known the truth?”

  Grant didn’t answer right away. When he did, the words came out with a long sigh. “My mother’s dead.”

  I believed his statement to signal an end to my questioning, and did not press. But after a pause, he continued.

  “It’s too late to ask her. But I think she thought she lit the fire. By that time, she didn’t recognize me most days. She was forgetting to eat, refusing her medicine. The night of the fire, I found her in her studio, watching. Tears streamed down her face. She began to cough spastically, and then choke, as if she had smoke in her lungs. I went to her, put my arms around her shoulders. She felt so small. I’d probably grown a foot since the last time I’d been in her arms. Between sobs, she muttered the same sentence, over and over again: I didn’t mean to do it.”

  I imagined the purple sky, Catherine and Grant’s silhouette in the window, felt the return of the despair I’d experienced in the heat of the fire. Catherine had felt it, too. In that moment, we were the same, each of us destroyed by our limited understanding of reality.

  “And after?” I asked.

  “She spent a year drawing hyacinth; in pencil, charcoal, ink, pastel. Finally, she began to paint, on everything from huge canvases to tiny postage stamps, tall purple stalks with hundreds of small blossoms. All for me, she said. Not one was good enough for Elizabeth. Every day, she tried again.”

  Hyacinth. Please forgive me. I remembered the jars of purple paint on the top shelf of Catherine’s studio.

  “It was a good year,” Grant said. “One of the best we had. She took her medicine, tried to eat. Every time I crossed the grounds below her broken window, she called down that she loved me. I still look up sometimes when I cross the front of the house, expecting to see her.”

  Catherine had never, not even in illness, left Grant. Unsupported and alone, she had managed what neither Grant nor I had been able to do: keep and raise a child. The respect that hit me was deep and unexpected. I looked at Grant, to see if he felt it, too. His eyes, glassy and full, were fixed on his mother’s drawings.

  “She loved you,” I said.

  His tongue curled out of his mouth, pressed against his upper lip. “I know.”

  There was a hint of surprise in his voice, and I didn’t know if he was surprised that his mother had loved him so much or surprised that he finally understood the depth of her feeling. Her mothering had been far from perfect. But Grant, grown now, was strong, loving, and a successful farmer. Sometimes he was even happy. No one could say she hadn’t raised him well, or at least well enough. I felt a wave of gratitude for the woman I would never meet, the woman who had created the man I loved.

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  “One day she didn’t get out of bed. When I went to her, she wasn’t breathing. Alcohol and her prescriptions, the doctors said. She knew she wasn’t supposed to drink, but she often snuck a bottle to bed. In the end, it was too much.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I was. I was sorry for Grant, and sorry I wouldn’t meet her. Sorry Hazel would never know her grandmother.

  I squeezed Grant a final time. Inching my arm out from underneath him, I kissed his forehead.

  “You’ve been good to Hazel,” I said, my voice unsteady. “So good. Thank you.” I crawled over his body and stood up.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “Stay here with me. Please. I’ll cook you dinner every night.”

  I scanned the drawings on the wall: crocus, primrose, and daisy, flowers for a young girl. I could not look at Grant, could not think about his cooking. If I looked into his eyes even one more time or smelled anything in the oven, it would be impossible for me to leave.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Please don’t ask me to stay. I care too much about my daughter to interrupt her life now, when she’s happy, cared for, and loved.”

  Grant stood up. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me to him. “But she doesn’t have her mother,” he said. “Nothing makes up for that.”

  I sighed. His words were not guilt-ridden, forceful, or said to be persuasive.

  They were true.

  I walked down the stairs, and Grant followed close behind. He passed me in the dining room and swept open the front door. I walked through the passageway quickly.

  “Come for Thanksgiving,” he said. “There’ll be roses.”

  I started walking toward the road, my steps slow and heavy. Though I’d refused Grant’s invitation to stay, I didn’t, in fact, want to leave. Having heard my daughter’s giggle, having witnessed Elizabeth as a mother, again—her voice as firm and gentle as I remembered—I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I didn’t want to drive back across the bridge and retreat into my blue room. More than anything, I realized with surprise, I didn’t want to be alone.

  I waited for the front door to click shut. When it did, I turned and ducked into the first greenhouse.

  I needed flowers.

  6.

  The bouquet I had assembled at Grant’s bobbed between my knees as I drove the short distance back to Elizabeth’s.

  I parked at the entrance to the property, jogging up the long driveway. From the kitchen window, soft orange light glowed. This late in October, I had expected to find Elizabeth already on her nightly tasting tour, Hazel in tow, but it looked as if they were still finishing dinner. I wondered how she had managed the vineyard with a baby, and whether the quality of the harvest would suffer as a result. I couldn’t imagine her allowing it.

  On the porch, I paused, peering in the front window
. Hazel sat at the kitchen table, buckled into a high chair. She’d been bathed and dressed since I’d glimpsed her in the garden. Her wet hair, darker and curlier, was parted on the side and pulled back with a clip. A glossy green bib fastened behind her neck was splattered with something white and creamy, and she licked the remains of what she’d eaten from her fingertips. Elizabeth’s back was to me, washing dishes at the sink. When I heard the water turn off, I stepped behind the closed front door.

  Bowing my head, I dipped my nose into the bouquet I’d assembled. There was flax, and forget-me-not, and hazel. There were white roses and pink ones, helenium and periwinkle, primrose, and lots and lots of bellflower. Between the tightly wrapped stems I’d packed velvety moss, barely visible, and I had sprinkled the bouquet with the purple and white petals of Grant’s Mexican sage. The bouquet was enormous, and not nearly enough. Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door.

  Elizabeth crossed in front of the window and swung the door open. Hazel straddled her hip, her cheek against Elizabeth’s shoulder. I held out the flowers.

  A smile spread across Elizabeth’s face. Her expression held recognition and joy but not the surprise I had expected. As she looked me up and down, I felt like a daughter returning from summer camp to a mother who had worried unnecessarily. Except instead of summer camp it had been my entire adolescence, emancipation, homelessness, and single parenthood, and I couldn’t rightly say that Elizabeth’s worry had been unwarranted. But now, the years that had passed since I’d left her home felt short and far away.

  Pushing open the screen, she reached past the bouquet and wrapped her arm around the back of my neck. I fell against the shoulder Hazel hadn’t claimed, and we stood there, in an awkward embrace, until Hazel began to slip off Elizabeth’s hip. She jostled her back up, and I pulled away to look at them both. Hazel’s face was hidden; Elizabeth wiped tears away from the corners of her eyes.

  “Victoria,” she said. She closed her hand around my fingers, and we clutched the bouquet together. Finally, she took it from me. “I’ve missed you.”

  Elizabeth held the screen door open and motioned with her head for me to come inside. “Have you eaten? There’s leftover lentil soup, and I made vanilla ice cream this afternoon.”

  “I just ate,” I said. “But I’ll have ice cream.”

  Hazel lifted her head from Elizabeth’s shoulder and clapped her hands together.

  “You had yours already, little one,” Elizabeth said, kissing the top of Hazel’s head and walking into the kitchen. She set her down on the floor, where the baby clung to the backs of Elizabeth’s legs. Leaning from the freezer to the cupboard without taking a step, Elizabeth succeeded in retrieving a metal tub of ice cream, a dish, and a spoon.

  “Up you go,” she said when the bowl was full. Hazel reached up, and Elizabeth bent down to scoop her up with one arm. “Let’s sit at the table with your mother.”

  My heart raced at Elizabeth’s casual reference to my motherhood, but Hazel, of course, did not flinch.

  I washed my hands at the sink and sat down. Elizabeth slid the high chair to face me, but when she bent to put the baby inside, Hazel shrieked and held on to the back of Elizabeth’s neck.

  “No thank you, Aunt Elizabeth,” she said calmly, cutting Hazel’s scream short. She pulled the high chair out of the way and slid a chair into its place, then sat down with Hazel pressed against her, chest to chest.

  “She’ll get used to you,” Elizabeth said. “It takes her a minute to warm up.”

  “Grant told me.”

  “You saw Grant?”

  I nodded. “Just now. I came here first, but when I saw you out in the garden, with Hazel, I was so surprised I turned and ran.”

  “I’m glad you came back,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  Elizabeth pushed the bowl of ice cream across the table, and our eyes met. I had come back. Maybe it wasn’t too late, after all.

  I took a cold, creamy bite. When I looked up, Hazel had turned. She peered shyly at me, her thin lips parted. I refilled the spoon, lifted it in slow-motion to my lips, and just before taking a bite, turned the spoon to her waiting tongue. She swallowed, smiled, and hid her face in Elizabeth’s chest. Then, looking up, she opened her mouth again. I scooped up a second bite of ice cream and slipped it between her lips.

  Elizabeth’s gaze flicked from the baby’s face to mine. “How’ve you been?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said, avoiding her stare.

  She shook her head. “No way. I want to know exactly how you’ve been, since the moment I last saw you in court. I want to know everything, starting with where you went when you ran from the courthouse.”

  “I didn’t get far. Meredith caught me and put me in a group home, as she’d promised.”

  “Was it awful?” Elizabeth asked. There was dread in her eyes, and I knew she was waiting for me to confirm her worst nightmares of what my life had been like for the past decade.

  “For the other girls in the home,” I said wryly, remembering the adolescent I’d been and all the harm I’d caused. “For me, it was only awful because I wasn’t here, with you.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes welled. In her lap, Hazel banged impatient fists on the table. I fed her another bite, and she reached out, as if she wanted me to pick her up. I looked at Elizabeth.

  She nodded, encouraging. “Go ahead.”

  With trembling hands, I grasped Hazel underneath her armpits, lifting her up and pulling her to me. She was heavier than I expected. When I set her down in my lap, she wiggled her diapered bottom back against my abdomen and tucked her head under my chin. I dipped my face into the back of her hair. She smelled like Elizabeth: cooking oil, cinnamon, and citrus soap. I inhaled, wrapping my arms around her waist.

  Hazel reached into the bowl, submerging her fingers in the melted cream. Elizabeth and I watched her eat, the ice cream dripping onto her bibless linen dress. Her brow, in concentration, was as serious as her father’s.

  “Where do you live?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I have an apartment. A business, too. I arrange flowers for weddings, anniversaries, that kind of thing.”

  “Grant says you’re amazing. He told me women line up for blocks, wait months to buy flowers from you.”

  I shrugged. “Everything I know,” I said, “I learned here.”

  I looked around, remembering the afternoon Elizabeth sliced open a lily on a cutting board at this same kitchen table. Everything was exactly as I remembered—the table and chairs, the clean countertop, and the deep white porcelain sink. The only addition was a painting, a matchbox-sized rendering of purple hyacinth, floating in a blue glass frame and placed in the windowsill next to the row of blue bottles.

  “From Catherine?” I asked, nodding to the painting.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “From Grant. Catherine died before painting a hyacinth she liked well enough to give me. But this was Grant’s favorite, and he wanted me to have it.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “I love it.” She stood and brought it to the table, setting it between us. I studied the way the individual flowers clustered around the single stalk, their sharp points fitting together like pieces of a puzzle. Something about the configuration of the petals made me believe that forgiveness should come naturally, but in this family, it hadn’t. I thought about the decades of misunderstandings, from the yellow rose to the fire, the thwarted attempts at forgiving and being forgiven.

  “Everything’s changed,” Elizabeth said, as if responding to my thoughts. “Grant and I, after so many years, are a family again. I hope you’ve come back to be a part of it. We’ve all missed you enough, haven’t we, Hazel?”

  Hazel’s attention was on the bowl, empty now. She turned it upside down, picking it up again and studying the creamy ring on the table. With her fingers, she spread the cream around in circles, a wild, sugary abstraction on the wood.

  Elizabeth’s hand inched toward mine on the table. She offere
d it to me, and in doing so it felt like she was offering me a path back into the family, the family in which I was loved, as a daughter, as a partner, as a mother. I reached for her hand. Hazel slipped hers, sticky and warm, between our palms.

  But even with the clear forgiveness in Elizabeth’s words, I had one more question.

  “What happened to the vineyard?” I asked. The dread I felt was the same as the dread in Elizabeth’s voice when she had asked me about my adolescence in group homes. We had both imagined the worst.

  “We replanted. The loss was substantial, but it was overshadowed completely by losing you. For years the new vines were thin, the weeds thick. I left the house only in the fall, to do the tasting, and only because Carlos practically broke down my door every evening.”

  The trailer was gone now. Carlos, too.

  “He moved back to Mexico a year ago, after Perla went to college,” Elizabeth explained. “His parents were old, and ill. I’d finally learned to manage my grief, and my vineyard, too. I didn’t need him anymore.”

  The loss of my own daughter would have gotten easier, then, if I had waited long enough. But a decade is a long time to wait. I pressed my nose down into Hazel’s curly hair, inhaling again her sweet smell.

  “The grapes must be close,” I said.

  “Probably. I haven’t checked for three days. It’s harder now”—she nodded toward Hazel—“but worth it.”

  “Do you want my help?” I asked, gesturing to the vineyard.

  Elizabeth smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go.” She picked up a damp dishcloth from the drying rack and wiped Hazel’s hands and face as she squirmed.

  Outside, we climbed onto the red tractor. Elizabeth first, then, after passing up Hazel, I followed. Hazel sat in Elizabeth’s lap, her arms reaching out to touch the steering wheel, but when the engine started, she turned and buried her face in Elizabeth’s chest, pressing one ear into her armpit to muffle the sound. We bumped up the road past the place the trailer had been, onto the hill where I’d found the ripe grape, the year I started the fire. Elizabeth cut the engine.