Lying down next to me, Grant began to kiss my face. I turned my head toward the window, afraid I would be repulsed by his nudity. The only adult I had ever seen naked was Mother Ruby, and the image of her wet, hanging flesh had plagued me for months afterward.
Grant’s fingers traveled my body with skill. He took as much care with me as he would have with a delicate sapling, and I tried to focus on his touch, the warmth he pulled to the surface of my skin, the weaving of our bodies together. He wanted me, and I knew he had wanted me for a long time. But directly below the window was the rose garden, and even as my body responded to his touch, my mind seemed to hover among the plants, thirty feet below. Grant moved on top of me. The rose garden was at the height of its bloom, the flowers open and heavy. I counted and categorized the individual bushes, starting with the reds, navigating up and down the rows: sixteen, from light red to deep scarlet. Grant’s mouth traveled to my ear, open and wet. There were twenty-two pink rosebushes, if I didn’t count the corals separately. Grant began to move quickly, his own pleasure eclipsing his attentiveness, and I closed my eyes at the pain. Behind my eyelids were the white roses, uncounted. I held my breath until Grant rolled off me.
My body turned to face the window, and Grant pressed himself against my back. His heart beat against my spine. I counted the white roses bursting under the setting sun, thirty-seven in all, more than any other color.
I inhaled deeply, my lungs filling with disappointment.
For three frantic days we left messages for Catherine: Aloe, grief, taped in a row of spikes like a picket fence to her kitchen window; blood-red pansies, think of me, clustered in a tiny glass jar on her front porch; boughs of cypress, mourning, woven between the metal bars of the wrought-iron gate.
But Catherine made no sign of having received them, and gave Elizabeth nothing in return.
My clothes migrated to Grant’s in the trunk of my car. My shoes followed, then my brown blanket, and finally my blue box. It was everything I owned. I still paid rent to Natalya on the first of every month, and occasionally took naps on my white fur floor after work, but as the summer progressed, I spent less and less time in the blue room.
My flower dictionary was complete. The photograph I had taken of Catherine’s drawing finished my set, and Elizabeth’s flower dictionary and field guide retired to a dusty existence on the top of Grant’s bookshelf. The blue and orange photo boxes sat side by side on the middle shelf, Grant’s alphabetized by flower and mine by meaning. Two or three times a week Grant or I would set the dinner table with flowers or leave a stem of stock on the other’s pillow, but we rarely consulted the boxes. We had both memorized every card, and we didn’t argue over the definitions as we had when we first met.
We didn’t argue over anything, really. My life with Grant was peaceful and quiet, and I might have enjoyed it if not for the overwhelming certainty that it was all about to end. The rhythm of our life together reminded me of the months before my adoption proceeding, when Elizabeth and I disked the rows, marked my calendar, and enjoyed being together. That summer with Elizabeth had been too hot; this one with Grant, the same. The water tower, lacking air-conditioning, filled up with heat as if with liquid, and Grant and I spread out on different floors in the evenings and tried to breathe. The humidity felt like the weight of what went unspoken between us, and more than once I went to him with the intention of confessing my past.
But I couldn’t do it. Grant loved me. His love was quiet but consistent, and with each declaration I felt myself swoon with both pleasure and guilt. I did not deserve his love. If he knew the truth, he would hate me. I was surer of this than I had ever been of anything in my life. My affection for him only made it worse. We had grown increasingly close, kissing in greeting and parting, even sleeping beside each other. He stroked my hair and cheeks and breasts, at the dinner table and on all three floors of the water tower. We made love frequently, and I even learned to enjoy it. But in the moments afterward, when we lay naked beside each other, he wore an expression of open fulfillment that I knew, without looking, my face did not mirror. I felt my true, unworthy self to be far away from his clutching grasp, hidden from his admiring gaze. My feelings for Grant, too, felt hidden, and I began to imagine a sphere surrounding my heart, as hard and polished as the surface of a hazelnut, impenetrable.
Grant did not appear to notice my detachment in the midst of our connection. If he did, on occasion, feel my heart to be an unreachable object, he never mentioned it to me. We came together and parted ways in a predictable rhythm. Weekdays, our paths crossed for an hour in the evenings. Saturdays, we spent much of the day together, carpooling to work in the early morning and stopping afterward to eat or hike or watch the kites in the Marina. Sundays, we kept our distance. I did not accompany Grant to the farmers’ market and was always gone when he returned, eating lunch in a restaurant by the bay or walking across the bridge alone.
I always returned to the water tower in time for dinner on Sundays, to take advantage of Grant’s most creative and complicated meals. He spent the entire afternoon cooking. When I walked through the door, there would be appetizers on the kitchen table. The finger food, he learned, would keep me from pestering him until the entree was complete, often not until well past nine o’clock.
That summer Grant moved beyond the cookbooks—which he carried upstairs and tucked under the love seat—and he began inventing every meal from scratch. He felt less pressure, he told me, if he wasn’t comparing his results to the photograph beside the recipe. And he must have known his meals were better than anything he could have created from a cookbook, better than anything I had eaten since leaving Elizabeth’s.
On the second Sunday in July I drove home from a long walk down Ocean Beach hungrier than usual, my stomach turning from emptiness and nerves. I had walked past The Gathering House, and the young women in the window, none of whom I knew, made my stomach ache. Their lives would not turn out as they dreamed. I understood this, even as mine had turned out far better than I would have hoped, had I permitted myself to hope for anything at all. I was the exception, I knew, and even my own good fortune I believed to be a fleeting moment in what would be a long, hard, solitary life.
Grant had set out slices of a baguette stuffed with something—cream cheese, maybe, or something fancier —with bits of chopped herbs, olives, and capers. The appetizers were arranged in rows on a square ceramic plate. I started at one end and went up and down the rows, popping each circle into my mouth whole. I looked up before I ate the last one, and Grant was watching with a smile.
“You want it?” I asked, pointing to the last slice.
“No. You’ll need the sustenance to wait for the next course; the rib roast still has forty-five minutes.”
I ate the last one and groaned. “I don’t think I can wait that long.”
Grant sighed. “You say that every week, and then every week, after you’ve eaten, you tell me it was worth the wait.”
“I do not,” I said, but he was right. My stomach digested the cheese with a loud churning. I folded over onto the table and closed my eyes.
“You okay?”
I nodded. Grant prepared the rest of the meal in silence while I dozed at the table. When I opened my eyes, the steaming steak was beside me. I rolled onto one elbow.
“Will you cut it for me?” I asked.
“Sure.” Grant rubbed my head, neck, and shoulders, and kissed my forehead before picking up the knife and slicing my meat. It was red in the middle, the way I liked it, and crusted with something peppery. The sauce was a combination of exotic mushrooms, red potatoes, and turnips. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.
My stomach, however, did not agree with my mouth’s assessment of the quality. I had taken only a few bites when I knew, without a doubt, that my dinner would not stay within the confines of my stomach. Flying up the stairs, I locked myself in the bathroom and expelled the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl. I flushed and
