The Language of Flowers

“Are you worried?” I asked.

Elizabeth was quiet, her expression thoughtful. Before she spoke, she turned and brushed my bangs away from my eyes, stroking the side of my face. She nodded. “About Catherine, yes,” she said. “Not the vineyard.”

“Why?”

“My sister isn’t well,” she said. “Grant didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. He was terrified. You’d understand if you’d seen his face, and also if you knew my mother.”

“What do you mean?” I didn’t understand how Elizabeth’s dead mother had anything to do with Catherine’s present condition, or the fear in Grant’s face.

“My mother was mentally ill,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t even see her for the last few years of her life. I was too afraid. She didn’t remember me, or she’d remember some awful thing I’d done and blame me for her illness. It was horrific, but I shouldn’t have just left her alone, left Catherine with the burden.”

“What could you have done?” I asked.

“I could have cared for her. It’s too late now, obviously. She passed away almost a decade ago. But I can still care for my sister—even if she doesn’t want me to. I’ve already talked to Grant about it, and he agrees that it’s a good idea.”

“What?” I was shocked. Elizabeth and I had tasted grapes twelve hours a day for a week. I couldn’t imagine when she’d had time to talk to Grant.

“He needs us, Victoria, and Catherine does, too. Their house is almost as big as ours—there’ll be plenty of room for all of us.” I shook my head back and forth slowly, and then picked up speed as what she was suggesting sank in. My hair flapped around my ears and hit my nose. She wanted us to move in with Catherine. She wanted me to live with, help care for, the woman who had ruined my life.

“No,” I said, jumping up and away from Elizabeth. “You can go, but I won’t.”

When I looked at her, she turned away, and my words hung in the air between us.

6.

I wanted Elizabeth.

I wanted her to hold me as she had among the vines, clean my sweat-drenched face and shoulders with the same thorough, gentle touch she had used to clean my thorn-punctured palms. I wanted her to wrap me in gauze and carry me to breakfast and tell me not to climb trees.

But she was unreachable.

And even if I did somehow reach her, she wouldn’t come.

Without warning, I threw up into the sink and gasped for air. There wasn’t any time to breathe. The contractions hit me like a wall of water, and I was sure that I would drown. Picking up the phone, I dialed the number for Bloom. Renata answered. Through my desperate gasping, I heard her voice register understanding. She slammed down the phone.

Minutes later she was in the living room. I had crawled back into the blue room on all fours, my feet sticking out the half-door. “I’m glad you called,” Renata said. I drew my feet into the room until I was curled into a ball on my side. When Renata tried to peek in, I closed the door in her face.

“Call your mother,” I said. “She has to come get this baby out of me.”

“I already did,” Renata said, “and she was nearby. Probably on purpose. She has premonitions about these things. She’ll be here any minute.”

I screamed and rolled over onto my hands and knees.

Without hearing her enter, Mother Ruby was there, undressing me. Her hands were all over my body, inside and out, but I didn’t care. She would get the baby out. Whatever she had to do, I was ready. If she’d produced a knife to slice me open on the spot, I wouldn’t have looked away.

Reaching for me, she held a paper cup and straw to my lips. I sipped something cold and sweet. Afterward, she wiped the corners of my mouth with a cloth.

“Please,” I said, “please. Whatever you have to do. Just get it out.”

“You’re doing it,” she said. “You’re the only one that can get this baby out.”

The blue room was on fire. Water is not supposed to be flammable, but there I was, drowning and burning simultaneously. I could not breathe; I could not see. There was no air; there was no exit.

“Please,” I said, my voice breaking.

Mother Ruby crouched down, her eyes level with mine, our foreheads touching. She placed my arms around her shoulders, and I moved from knees to feet as if she might pull me out of the blazing water, but she didn’t move. We were low to the ground, and she was listening.

“The baby’s coming,” she said. “You’re bringing her here. Only you can do it.”

It was right then that I understood what she was telling me. I started to cry, my moaning wails remorseful. This time, there was no escape. I could not turn away, could not leave without accepting what I had done. There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain.

Finally, my body surrendered. I stopped fighting, and the baby began to move—slowly, excruciatingly—down the birth canal and into Mother Ruby’s waiting arms.

7.

It was a girl. She was born at noon, just six hours after my water broke. It felt like six days, and if Mother Ruby had told me it had been six years, I would have believed her. I emerged from the birth with a sense of peaceful exultation, and the smile that greeted me in the bathroom mirror hours later did not belong to the angry, hateful child who transported buckets of thistle from roadside ditches. I was a woman, a mother.

Mother Ruby said it was a perfect birth and a perfect baby, and she told me I would be a perfect mother. She bathed her while Renata went to the store for diapers, and then placed the warm bundle in my arms for the first time. I expected her to be asleep, but she wasn’t. Her eyes were open, taking in my tired face, short hair, and pale skin. Her face twitched into what looked like a squinty smile, and in her wordless expression I saw gratitude, and relief, and trust. I wanted, desperately, not to disappoint her.

Mother Ruby lifted my shirt, cupped my breast, and pressed the baby’s face against my uplifted skin. The baby opened her mouth and began to suck.

“Perfect,” Mother Ruby said again.

She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.

“Does she have a name?” Renata asked when she returned.

“I don’t know,” I said, stroking the baby’s fuzzy ear as she continued to suck. I hadn’t ever thought about it. “I don’t know her yet.”

But I would. I would keep her, and raise her, and love her, even if she had to teach me how to do it. Holding my own daughter in my arms, only hours old, I felt that everything in the world that had been so far out of my reach was now possible.

The feeling stayed with me for exactly a week.

Mother Ruby stayed until almost midnight and returned early the next morning. In the eight hours I spent alone with the baby, I listened to her breathing, counted her heartbeats, and watched her fingers stretch open and close into fists. I smelled her skin, her saliva, and the oily white cream that had resisted Mother Ruby’s washcloth and nestled in the creases of her arms and legs. Rubbing every inch of her body, my own fingers became slick with