The Language of Flowers

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 souffle 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 souffle 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 long 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