like visits to a fortune-teller or a priest; they told me, often for hours, the many hopes they held for their relationships, and also the challenges they faced. I recorded only a couple’s own words, taking notes on a sheet of transparent rice paper, and when they finished speaking, I handed them the paper, rolled into a scroll with a ribbon. Yet as the couples referenced the scroll to choose their flowers and craft their wedding vows, they credited me with forecasting their life together. Bethany and Ray were happily married. Countless other couples sent me cards from their honeymoons, describing their relationships with words like
The rapid growth of Message—combined with an outpouring of florists offering consultations in the language of flowers to the streams of brides Marlena and I turned away—caused a subtle but concrete shift in the Bay Area flower industry. Marlena reported that peony, marigold, and lavender lingered in their plastic buckets at the flower market while tulips, lilac, and passionflower sold out before the sun rose. For the first time anyone could remember, jonquil became available long after its natural bloom season had ended. By the end of July, bold brides carried ceramic bowls of strawberries or fragrant clusters of fennel, and no one questioned their aesthetics but rather marveled at the simplicity of their desire.
If the trajectory continued, I realized, Message would alter the quantities of anger, grief, and mistrust growing in the earth on a massive scale. Farmers would uproot fields of foxglove to plant yarrow, the soft clusters of pink, yellow, and cream the cure to a broken heart. The prices of sage, ranunculus, and stock would steadily increase. Plum trees would be planted for the sole purpose of harvesting their delicate, clustered blossoms, and sunflowers would fall permanently out of fashion, disappearing from flower stands, craft stores, and country kitchens. Thistle would be cleared compulsively from empty lots and overgrown gardens.
Summer afternoons, as I worked in the rooftop greenhouse I’d constructed with PVC pipes and plastic sheeting, tending hundreds of small ceramic pots on wire racks, I tried to take solace in this small, intangible contribution to the world. I told myself that someone, somewhere, would be less angry, less grief-stricken, because of the rampant success of Message. Friendships would be stronger; marriages would last. But I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t take credit for an abstract contribution to the world when in every tangible human interaction I’d ever had I’d caused only pain: with Elizabeth, through arson and a false accusation; with Grant, through abandonment and an unnamed, unsupported child.
And then there was my daughter. That I had abandoned her did not leave my mind, not even for a moment. I could have moved in to Natalya’s old bedroom, but instead I still slept in the blue room, curled up alone in the space we’d once occupied together. Every morning upon waking, I counted her age to the month and day. Sitting across from chatty brides, I tried to remember her nearly hairless eyebrows, curved up at me in question, her lips opening and closing in rhythm. Her absence in the empty apartment began to feel as real as she’d once been, rattling the plastic sheeting of the greenhouse, seeping like light under the crack of the blue room’s door. In the tap of the rain on the flat roof, I heard her ravenous suck. Every twenty-nine days the moonlight traveled in a slow square across the futon where we sat on our last night together, and each month I half expected it to bring her back to me. Instead, the moonlight illuminated my solitude, and I sat upright in its pale glow, remembering her as she had been, imagining her as she had become. Miles and miles away, I felt my daughter changing, each day growing and developing, without me. I longed to be with her, to witness her transformation.
But as much as I wanted to be reunited, I would not go to her. My desire for my daughter felt selfish. Leaving her with Grant had been the most loving act I had ever accomplished, and I did not regret it. Without me, my daughter would be safe. Grant would love her like he had loved me, with unearned devotion and tender care. It was everything I wanted for her.
I had only one regret, and it had nothing to do with my daughter. In a life of trespasses, many violent and most undeserved, I regretted only the fire. A collection of jam jars, a fistful of matches, and an absence of judgment had created an inferno that blazed well past the extinguishing of the final flame. It burst forth into the lie that had taken me away from Elizabeth, ignited fights throughout eight years of institutional placements, and smoldered in my mistrust of Grant. I had refused to believe that he loved me, or that he would continue to love me if he knew the truth.
Grant believed his mother had lit the fire that ruined both our lives; though he didn’t talk about it, I knew he had not forgiven her. But she wasn’t the one to blame. It was my fault the vines went up in flames, my fault Elizabeth did not go to Catherine, my fault Grant spent the following year alone, caring for his sick mother. I didn’t know the details of Catherine’s unraveling, but they were clear in the way Grant loved me, delicately and in isolation. He had needed Elizabeth as much as I had.
Now it was too late. The vineyard had ignited. Grant spent his entire life (with the exception of the six months with me) alone. I’d lost the only woman who had ever tried to mother me, and it was too late to go back, too late to salvage my own childhood. But even though it was too late, it was this thought that plagued me: I wanted to go back to Elizabeth. I wanted, more than anything, to be Elizabeth’s daughter.
Mid-August, exhausted from an unrelenting summer wedding schedule and equally unrelenting thoughts of my daughter, Elizabeth, and Grant, I retreated to the blue room. For the first time since starting Message, I locked all six locks and slept through every appointment on our calendar. Marlena covered for me. The whistle of the kettle drifted into my dreams as she prepared tea for our clients, but I didn’t emerge. The locks kept me from climbing into my car and driving straight to the water tower, racing to the third floor, and taking my baby back. In my fantasies, she still lay helpless in her basket, staring up at the ceiling. In reality, she would be six months old, sitting up, reaching out, and maybe even crawling across the floor.
I stayed in the blue room for nearly a week. Marlena did not disturb me, but each morning she slid a photocopied sheet of paper through the crack under my door. It was our September calendar, the squares growing increasingly crowded as the days passed. I had expected business to taper off as the weather cooled, but if anything, we seemed to be getting busier, and my anxiety over the mounting work finally surpassed my depression. I grabbed a banana from a fruit bowl Marlena had filled and walked downstairs.
Marlena sat at the table, chewing the end of a pen. She smiled when she saw me.
“I was about to go to The Gathering House,” she said, “and hire another assistant.”
I shook my head. “I’m here. What’s first?”
She scanned the calendar. “Nothing major until Friday. But then we have to work sixteen days straight.”
I groaned, but in reality I felt relieved. Flowers were my escape. With flowers in my hands, perhaps I could survive the fall. And maybe, as the months passed, things would get easier. It was what I had expected, but so far it hadn’t proven to be true. In fact, the opposite seemed to be occurring; with each passing day, I felt more desolate, the consequences of my decisions less bearable. I turned to walk back upstairs.
“Going back to your cave?” Marlena asked. She sounded disappointed.
“What else would I do?”
Marlena exhaled. “I don’t know.” She paused, and I turned back around. It seemed she did know but was having trouble finding the words. “There’s a new sandwich shop next to Bloom,” she said finally. “I thought maybe we could grab some lunch and then go for a drive.”
“A drive?”
“You know.” She looked out the front windows to the street. “To see her.”
Marlena meant my daughter. But for a split second before I realized this, I thought she meant Elizabeth, and it seemed to me to be exactly the thing I needed to do. I knew where she lived, and I knew how to get there. It might be too late to be a child in her home, but it wasn’t too late to apologize for what I had done.
When I didn’t respond right away, Marlena looked to me, her expression hopeful.
I shook my head. I’d asked her never to speak of my daughter, and until now, she’d done as I’d asked. “Please don’t,” I said.
Her chin dropped to her chest, and she looked for a moment as neckless as a newborn.
“I’ll see you on Friday,” I said, turning to walk up the stairs.
All night I imagined driving to see Elizabeth. I pictured the long, dusty driveway, the late-summer grapes heavy on the vines. The afternoon sun would cast a rectangular shadow from the peeling white farmhouse, and the porch steps would squeak as I climbed them. At the kitchen table, Elizabeth would sit with her arms folded, her eyes on the door, as if she’d been waiting for me.
The vision shattered with the realization that all this could be gone. Not only the acres of vines but also the kitchen table, the screen door, the entire house. In all the time I’d spent with Grant, I’d never once asked him how
