The Language of Flowers

I drifted around the edge of consciousness, I wondered if someone had sung to me when I was a baby, someone who didn’t love me, someone who would give me back.

On Saturday morning, a week after the birth, Mother Ruby arrived and began her daily routine. She asked me a hundred questions about my bleeding, after-pains, and appetite. She checked for evidence I had eaten dinner the night before, and listened to the baby’s heart before wrapping her in the cloth scale.

“Eight ounces,” Mother Ruby announced. “You’re doing great.” She unwrapped the baby and changed her diaper. In the process, the baby’s umbilical cord, which I never touched and tried not to look at, snapped off.

“Congratulations, angel,” Mother Ruby whispered into my daughter’s sleeping face. The baby arched her back and reached out, her eyes still closed.

She cleaned the baby’s belly button with something in an unlabeled bottle. Re-swaddling her, she handed her back to me. “No infections, eating, sleeping, and gaining weight,” she said. “And you’re getting help?”

“Renata brought food,” I said. “And Marlena was here for a few days.”

“Good.” Roaming the room, she packed up her books, blankets, towels, bottles, and tubes.

“Leaving?” I asked with surprise. I was used to her spending most of the morning with me.

“You don’t need me anymore, Victoria,” she said, sitting next to me on the couch and putting her arm around my shoulders. She pulled me to her until my face was pressed against her breast. “Look at you. You’re a mother. Believe me when I tell you there are many women out there who need me more than you do.”

I nodded into her chest and did not protest.

She stood up and took a final loop around the small apartment. Her eyes settled on the cans of formula I had purchased before the baby was born. “I’ll donate these,” she said, stuffing them into her already-full bag. “You won’t need them. I’ll be back next Saturday, and then two Saturdays after that, just to check the baby’s weight gain. Call me if you need anything.”

I nodded again and watched her walk lightly down the stairs. She had not left her phone number.

You’re a mother, I repeated to myself. I was hoping the words would reassure me, but instead I felt something familiar trembling inside of me. It started deep in my stomach and picked up momentum as it tumbled into the cavernous space that had once held the baby.

Panic.

I tried to breathe, willing it away.

8.

I regretted my ultimatum.

Choose me or choose your sister, my words had demanded. Elizabeth, by not running after me, had made her choice clear.

All night and well into the morning, I plotted. My desire was simple: to stay with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth alone. But I could think of no way to convince her. I could not whine or beg. Do you even know me? she would ask, her eyes amused, as I begged to eat her muffin batter. I could not hide; Elizabeth would find me, as she always did. I could not tie myself to the bedposts and refuse to move; she would cut the ropes and carry me.

There was only one possibility, and that was to turn Elizabeth against her sister. She had to see Catherine for what she was: a selfish, hateful woman unworthy of her care.

And then, all at once, I saw the solution. My heartbeat grew deafening as I lay still, turning the idea around in my head, looking for problems. There were none. As surely as Catherine had ambushed my adoption, she had provided me with the ammunition I needed to stay with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth alone. I would win the battle she had unconsciously waged, even before she knew she had waged it.

Slowly, I stood up. I slipped off my nightgown and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. In the bathroom, I scrubbed my face with cold water and hand soap harder than usual, my fingernails scratching lines in the white soap residue. Looking at myself in the mirror, I searched for signs of fear, or anxiety, or apprehension of what was to come. But my eyes were flat, my chin set with determination. There was only one way to get what I wanted. It could not be ignored.

In the kitchen, Elizabeth washed dishes. A bowl of cold oatmeal sat on the table.

“The crews are already here,” Elizabeth said, motioning with her head in the direction of the hill on which we’d stood the night before. “Eat your breakfast and put on your shoes before I leave you behind.” She turned back to the sink.

“I’m not coming,” I said, and in the drop of Elizabeth’s shoulder blades, I could see disappointment but not surprise.

I opened the pantry and plucked an empty canvas bag off a hook.

It was warm on the front porch, even though it was still early. I walked slowly down the long driveway, toward the road. Again, Elizabeth did not come after me. I wished it was cooler, wished I’d packed a bagful of food. I would be hot and hungry as I sat in the ditch in front of the flower farm. But I would wait. As long as it took for Grant to leave, even if I had to spend the night by the side of the road, I would wait. Eventually, his truck would rumble through the open gate, leaving the farmhouse exposed.

When it did, I’d sneak inside for what I needed.

9.

Renata did not come on Sunday. Neither did Marlena. I stayed in the blue room for what I thought was most of the day, nursing the baby and sleeping, but when I emerged with a full bladder and an empty stomach, it was only ten o’clock in the morning.

Leaning against the bar stool, I debated between showering and preparing a meal. The baby was asleep in the blue room, and I was hungry, but the scent of my own body, sour breast milk mixed with apricot baby oil, was causing me to lose my appetite. I decided on a shower.

I closed and locked the bathroom door out of habit, stripping and stepping under the hot water. My eyes closed, and I guiltily enjoyed the brief moment of solitude. Picking up a bar of soap, I heard a high-pitched wail. It was muffled by the locked door but piercing all the same. Inhaling, I continued to soap my body. Just one minute, I thought. Just a quick shower and I’ll be back. Hold on.

But the baby couldn’t hold on. Her cry picked up both pitch and volume, and came around moments of quiet, desperate gasping. I began to shampoo my hair with frantic speed and let the water run into my ears, attempting to block out the sound. It didn’t work. I had a strange sensation that I could have walked down the stairs, out the door, and across the city, and I still would have been able to hear her, that her cry was connected to my body through more than the physical waves of sound. She needed me, craved me like hunger, and the hunger spread from her body into my own.

Giving in to the sound, I jumped out of the shower, suds clinging to my hair and running in white rivers down my legs. I ran across the living room and reached into the blue room, picking up the rigid, screaming baby. I pressed her to my soapy breast. She opened her mouth and gasped and choked and sucked and repeated it all two or three times before she calmed down enough to nurse. In the shower, the water flowed into the empty ceramic tub and down the drain.

I slid down the wall and sat in the puddle at my feet. If I had owned a clean towel, I might have retrieved it. But there weren’t any, and there wouldn’t be any for a long time. I was no Marlena. I couldn’t carry the baby and a bag of laundry up the hill, pressing quarters into vibrating machines with a hungry mouth on my exposed breast. I wished I had thought about the laundry before the baby was born.

I wished I had thought of a lot of things, now that it was too late. I should have bought diapers, and groceries, and baby clothes. I should have gathered the take-out menus of every restaurant on the hill and