The Greenhouse

Seventy-five

The last night is like a long and excessively slow memory. It’s a blue night, and I move cautiously in the bed to avoid waking Anna. She’s breathing deeply. I try to slow down my own breathing to bring it into sync with hers, without falling asleep myself. I’m right up against her, but no matter how tightly we lie together, there’s an ocean between us because we’re not one. I feel like I’m losing her like I lost Mom on the phone, like black sand running through my fingers, no, like a wave leaking through my fingers. And I’m left sitting there, licking my salty fingers.

I can’t sleep a wink, but instead try to slow down time and devise something that will stop her from leaving. I can’t lose Flóra Sól either. I feel like I have to guess something, anything really, to be able hold Anna back. I might unexpectedly get the right answer, like on those TV quizzes, and end up taking the jackpot home.

Hang on, hang on, hang on, I try to reason with myself. I feel like I’m in the middle of a swarm of crazy arctic terns, being assailed from all sides and unable to think of any way of protecting myself. Since I can’t chain myself to her like a pacifist to a tank, it occurs to me that I could maybe show her some place she would be unable to resist and that would make her quickly change her mind.

She has to get the train at nine, but at seven she’s still mine to hold, and I grope under the sheets, stalling the menace of the rising dawn. Day breaks through the curtains in the same violet as that of the skinned wild boar at the butcher’s. Then she’s suddenly awake and I haven’t slept all night. She seems confused. Our daughter is still sleeping soundly.

— I had a really weird dream, she says. I dreamed your were in new blue boots with Flóra Sól in your arms and she was also in identical new blue boots, except they were tiny. You were in the rose garden but there was no other color in the dream, not even the roses, just the blue boots. Then I was suddenly in a narrow alley and I could see you going up a long stairway and disappearing behind a door. I knocked on the door and you answered with Flóra Sól in your arms and invited me in for tea.

Then it just blurts out of me without warning:

— Maybe we’ll have another child together, later. I say this without daring to look at her.

— Yeah, she says. We might.

We both get out of bed. I’m standing right in front of the mirror and I take Anna’s arm and gently tow her until we’re both reflected in the mirror, like a studio family photograph, set in a carved gilded frame, as if we were formally acknowledging our forty days of cohabitation. I’m pale and skinny and she’s pale, too. Our daughter stands behind us, having just woken up in her cot, and smiling from ear to ear, with her rosy cheeks and dimples on her elbows, so the whole family is in frame now.

— You can have Flóra Sól, she says suddenly in a low voice, as if she were reading a new script for the first time, as if she were trying to fit the words to the circumstances. She’s looking me in the eye through the mirror.

I say nothing.

— When I see how well you get along and how responsible you are, then I know that I can leave her with you without any worries. Of course, I’ll always be her mom, but you don’t have to be worried about me turning up one day and taking her away from you. But I’ll still help you bring her up as best I can. I’d do anything for her, she ends up saying.

— Sorry, she says finally. She kisses me. Give me six months, she ends up saying.