The Language of Flowers

1.

Like Elizabeth, Grant was hard to forget. It was more than the intersection of our pasts, more than the drawing of the white poplar, which, in its obscurity, had led me to the truth about the language of flowers. It was something about Grant specifically, the seriousness with which he regarded the flowers, or the tone of his voice when he argued, simultaneously pleading and forceful. He’d shrugged his shoulders when I expressed sympathy at the death of his mother, and this, too, I found intriguing. His past—with the exception of the moments I’d glimpsed as a child—was a mystery to me. Group-home girls divulge their pasts relentlessly, and on the rare occasion I’d met someone unwilling to expose the details of her childhood, it was a relief. With Grant, I felt different. After only one night, I wanted to know more.

For a week I rose early and spent the library’s open hours comparing definitions. I filled my pockets with smooth stones from a display in front of the Japanese teahouse in Golden Gate Park and used them as paperweights. Lining up dictionaries on two tables, I opened each to the same letter and placed rocks on the corners of the pages. Moving from one book to the next, I compared the entries flower by flower. Whenever I found conflicting definitions, I had long, drawn-out debates in my mind with Grant. Occasionally, I let him win.

On Saturday I arrived at the flower market before Renata. I handed Grant the scroll I had created, a list of definitions through the letter J, including revisions I’d made to the list we compiled together. When Renata and I returned to Grant’s stall an hour later, he was still reading the scroll. He looked up to watch Renata finger his roses.

“Wedding today?” he asked.

Renata nodded. “Two. Small, though. One is my oldest niece. She’s eloping but told me because she wanted me to give her flowers.” Renata rolled her eyes. “Using me, the doll.”

“An early day, then?” Grant asked, looking at me.

“Probably, the way Victoria works,” she said. “I’d like to close the shop by three.”

Grant wrapped Renata’s roses and gave her more change than she deserved. She had stopped bargaining with him; there was no need. We turned to leave.

“See you then,” he called after us. I turned, my eyes quizzical. He held up three fingers.

The space below my rib cage expanded. The room felt unnaturally bright and filled with too much oxygen. I concentrated on exhaling, following Renata’s orders without thinking. We had loaded everything into her truck before I remembered my promise of the week before.

“Wait,” I said, slamming the truck door and leaving Renata inside the cab.

I raced through the market, looking for red roses and lilac. Grant had bucketsful, but I passed him without looking up. On the way back to the car, I passed him again. Shielding my face with a stalk of white lilac, I peeked in his direction. He held up three fingers again and cracked a shy smile. My face was hot, embarrassed. I hoped he didn’t think the flowers in my arms were for him.

I worked all day in a nervous haze. The door opened and closed, and customers came in and out, but I never looked up.

At half past one, Renata lifted the hair off my forehead, and when I raised my head, her eyes were inches from mine.

“Hello? I’ve called you three times,” she said. “There’s a lady waiting for you.”

I grabbed the roses and lilac from the walk-in and went into the showroom. The woman faced the door as if she might leave, her shoulders low.

“I didn’t forget,” I said when I saw her. She turned.

“Earl said you wouldn’t.” She watched me work, arranging the white lilac around the roses until the red was no longer visible. I wound sprigs of rosemary—which I had learned at the library could mean commitment as well as remembrance—around the stems like a ribbon. The rosemary was young and supple, and did not break when I tied it in a knot. I added a white ribbon for support and wrapped the whole thing in brown paper.

“First emotions of love, true love, and commitment,” I said, handing her the flowers. She handed me forty dollars. At the register I made change, but when I looked up, she was gone.

I returned to the worktable, and Renata examined me with a half-smile. “What were you doing out there?”

“Just giving the people what they want,” I said, rolling my eyes the way Renata had the first day we’d met, when she stood on the sidewalk with dozens of out-of-season tulips.

“Whatever they want,” Renata agreed, clipping a row of sharp thorns off a yellow rose. A yellow rose for her niece’s wedding: her fugitive, eloping, using niece. Jealousy, infidelity. The specifics of the definition didn’t matter much in this case, I thought. The outcome did not look good. I finished my last table arrangement and looked at the clock. Two-fifteen.

“I’ll just load these up,” I said to Renata, grabbing as many vases as I could carry. They were too full, and water soaked into my shirt where it spilled over the tops.

“Don’t worry about it,” Renata said. “Grant’s been waiting on the stoop for two hours. I told him if he was going to sit there, he better not scare away my customers, and he would do my heavy lifting as payment.”

“He agreed?”

She nodded, and I set the vases down. Pulling on my backpack, I waved goodbye to Renata, avoiding her eyes. Grant sat on the sidewalk, leaning against the sun-warmed brick wall. He startled as I walked out the door, jumping to his feet.

“What’re you doing here?” I was surprised by the accusation in my voice.

“I want to bring you to my farm. I have disagreements with your definitions, and you’ll understand better with my flowers in your hands. You know I’m no good at debating.”

I looked up and down the hill. I wanted to go with Grant, but being with him made me nervous. It felt illicit. I didn’t know if the feeling was left over from my time with Elizabeth or if it was just too close to romance or friendship, two things I’d spent a lifetime navigating around. I sat down on the curb, thinking.

“Good,” he said, as if my sitting down was an act of assent. He held out his car keys and nodded across the street. “You can wait in the truck, if you want, while I carry Renata’s flowers. I brought lunch.”

With the mention of lunch, I overcame my reluctance. I grabbed his keys. In the truck, a white paper bag sat on the passenger seat. I picked it up and climbed inside. The truck was filled with the remains of flowers: Stem clippings littered the floor, and wilted petals worked themselves into the upholstery. I sunk into the seat and opened the bag. A sandwich on a thick French roll: turkey, bacon, tomato, and avocado, with mayonnaise. I took a bite.

Across the street, Grant carried vases two at a time up the hill. He paused only once at the top, looking downhill to where I sat in the parked car. He smiled and mouthed the words Is it good?

I hid my face behind the sandwich.

2.

The driver leaned away from me as I climbed onto the school bus. I recognized the look on his face—pity, dislike, and more than a little bit of fear—and I slammed my backpack against the empty seat as I sat down. The only reason he should feel sorry for me, I thought angrily, was because I had to look at his ugly, bald head all the way to school.

Perla sat down across the aisle from me and handed over her ham sandwich before I could demand that she do so. Two months into school, and she understood the drill. I ripped off large chunks and forced them into my mouth, thinking about the way Elizabeth had hurried out of the house that morning, leaving me alone to put my lunch in my backpack and find my shoes. I hadn’t wanted to go to school—had begged to stay home for the first day of harvest. But she had ignored my appeals, even when they turned violent. If you loved me, you’d want me here, I said, hurling my math book at the back of her head as she hurried out the door. I wasn’t fast enough. She disappeared through the doorway and jogged down the front steps, not even turning around at the sound of the book hitting the door frame. I could tell by the way she walked that she wasn’t thinking of me. She hadn’t been all morning. The stress of the harvest was all-consuming, and she wanted me gone, out of her hair. It was the first time I felt that I understood Elizabeth, and in my anger I yelled after her that she wasn’t any different from all my other foster mothers. Stomping all the way to the bus stop, I ignored the stares of the workers arriving by the truckload.

The bus driver glared at me in the rearview mirror, following each bite of sandwich into my mouth with the same two eyes that should have been watching the road. I opened my mouth while I chewed, and the bus driver’s face pinched in repulsion.

“So, don’t watch!” I yelled, springing to my feet. “If it’s so disgusting, just don’t watch.” I picked up my backpack, thinking vaguely that I would jump off the moving bus and walk the rest of the way to school, but instead I swung my bag high into the air and brought it down on the driver’s shiny scalp. There was a satisfying smack as my full metal thermos collided with his skull. The bus swerved, the driver swore, and the children screeched at an almost deafening pitch. Somewhere within the layers of noise I heard Perla’s small voice begging me to stop, and then she started to cry. When the bus skidded to a halt on the side of the road and the driver cut off the engine, Perla’s sobs were the last remaining sound.

“Off,” the driver said. A large knot was already forming on his head, and he pressed the palm of one hand against it while he reached for a radio with the other. I put on my backpack and climbed off the bus. Dust from the road swirled around me as I looked up through the open doors.

“Your mother’s name,” the driver demanded, pointing down at me.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

“Your guardian, then.”

“The State of California.”

“Then who do you fucking live with?” The radio crackled with harsh words, and the driver turned it off. The silence on the bus was complete. Even Perla had stopped crying and sat motionless.

“Elizabeth Anderson,” I said. “I don’t know her phone number or her address.” My entire childhood I had refused to memorize phone numbers, so that I wouldn’t be able to answer questions like these.

The bus driver threw the radio on the floor in anger. He glared at me, and I held his gaze in defiance. I hoped he would drive off and leave me alone on the side of the road. I would prefer to be left than continue on to school, and I relished the thought that my abandonment would likely cost the bus driver his job. He tapped his thumbs on the horn, and my anticipation stretched down the empty road.

Just then Perla stood up and stepped out in front of the driver. “You can call my father,” she said. “He’ll come for her.”

I squinted my eyes at Perla. She looked away.

Carlos did come for me. He put me in the truck, listened to the bus driver’s version of events, and then drove me back to the vineyard in silence. I looked out the window as we drove, paying attention to every detail as if taking in the landscape for the last time. Elizabeth would not keep me, not after this. My stomach lurched.

But when Carlos told Elizabeth what I’d done, his rough hand clamped around the back of my neck, forcing me to face her, she laughed. The sound was so unexpected and fleeting that the second she stopped laughing, I thought I’d imagined it.

“Thank you, Carlos,” Elizabeth said, her face turning serious. She reached out to shake his hand and quickly released it, and the gesture was grateful and dismissive at once. Carlos turned quickly to leave. “Do the crews need anything?” Elizabeth asked as he walked away. Carlos shook his head. “I’ll be back in an hour, then, maybe more. Watch over the harvest, please, while I’m gone.”

“I will,” he said, disappearing behind the sheds.

Elizabeth walked directly to her truck. When she turned and saw that I wasn’t following, she walked back to where I stood. “You’re coming with me,” she said. “Now.” She took a step toward me, and I remembered the way she’d carried me into the house, just two months before. I had grown since then, and gained back the weight I’d lost, but I didn’t doubt she could still throw me inside the truck if it was her will to do so. Following her into the cab, I imagined what was to come: the drive to social services, the white-walled waiting room, Elizabeth leaving even before the social worker on call could check me in to the system. It had all happened before. Clenching tight fists, I stared out the window.

But as we started down the driveway, Elizabeth’s words surprised me. “We’re going to see my sister,” she said. “This feud has gone on long enough, don’t you think?”

My body turned rigid. Elizabeth looked to me as if for a response, and I nodded stiffly, the reality of what she had said sinking in.

She was going to keep me.

My eyes filled with tears. The anger I’d felt toward Elizabeth that morning dissolved, replaced immediately by shock. I had not, for even one moment, believed Elizabeth when she said there was nothing I could do to make her give me back. But here I was, only moments after having been sent home from school—a suspension would follow, if not an expulsion—listening to Elizabeth talk about her sister. Confusion and something unexpected—relief, maybe, or even joy—swirled within me. I sucked in my lips, trying not to smile.

“Catherine won’t believe you hit the bus driver over the head while he was driving,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, she won’t believe it because I did it, too—the exact same thing! Maybe I was in second grade, though? I can’t remember. At any rate, one minute he was driving, and the next minute he was glaring at me in the rearview mirror, and before I could stop myself, I was out of my seat, yelling, ‘Keep your eyes on the road, you fat bastard!’ And he was fat, let me tell you.”

I started to laugh, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Folded over, my forehead pressed against the dashboard, my laughter escaped in a series of choking gulps that sounded like sobs. I covered my face with my hands. “My bus driver isn’t fat,” I said when I had calmed enough to speak, “but he’s ugly.”

I started to laugh again, but Elizabeth’s silence quieted me.

“I don’t want you to think I’m encouraging you,” she said. “What you did was clearly wrong. But I feel bad that I ignored your anger, and that I sent you to school in the state you were in. I should have explained myself better, should have included you.”

Elizabeth understood.

I pulled my forehead away from the dashboard and shifted my head onto her lap, suddenly feeling less alone than I ever had in my entire life. The steering wheel was only an inch from my nose, and I nuzzled the crown of my head into her stomach. If Elizabeth was surprised by my sudden affection, she didn’t show it. She moved her hand from the gearshift to my hairline, stroking my temple and down the bridge of my nose.

“I hope she’s home,” she said, and I knew her thoughts had returned to Catherine. She switched on her blinker, waiting for a line of cars to pass before turning from the driveway onto the road.

Elizabeth had not stopped thinking about her sister in the weeks leading up to the harvest. I knew this because of the phone calls, dozens of them, all messages left on Catherine’s answering machine. The first few were similar to the one I had overheard on the porch: moments of scattered reminiscing followed by a statement of forgiveness. But lately her messages had been different—chatty, and long—sometimes so long that the answering machine cut her off and she had to call back. She rambled on and on about the minutia of our daily lives, describing the endless tasting of the grapes and the cleaning of the picking bins. Often she described what she was cooking as she cooked it, tangling herself up in the long, spiraling cord as she moved from the stove to the spice rack and back again.

The more time Elizabeth spent talking to Catherine, or, more specifically, Catherine’s answering machine, the more it struck me how little Elizabeth spoke to anyone else. She left the property only to go to the farmers’ market, the grocer, the hardware store, and, occasionally, the post office. These visits were only to pick up plants she had mail-ordered from a gardening catalog, never to mail or receive letters. It was obvious that in the small community, she knew everyone—she asked the butcher to give her regards to his wife, and when she approached the vendors behind the stands at the farmers’ market, she greeted each one by name. But she did not have conversations with these people. In fact, I thought, she had not had a single conversation that I had witnessed throughout the time I’d been with her. She spoke to Carlos as necessary but only about specific aspects of growing and harvesting grapes, and not once did their words meander off topic.

As we drove to Catherine’s, my head in Elizabeth’s lap, I compared my quiet existence at Elizabeth’s to all the things I had previously understood to compose a life: large families, loud homes, welfare offices, busy cities, violent outbursts. I didn’t want to go back. I liked Elizabeth. I liked her flowers, her grapes, and her concentrated attention. Finally, I realized, I had found a place I wanted to stay.

Pulling off the road, Elizabeth parked the truck and took a deep, nervous breath.

“What did she do to you?” I asked, suddenly interested in a way I had never been before.

Elizabeth looked unsurprised by my question but didn’t answer right away. She stroked my forehead, my cheek, and my shoulder. When she finally spoke, her words were a whisper. “She planted the yellow roses.”

Then she pulled the parking brake and reached for the door handle.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s time to meet Catherine.”

3.

Grant drove through the city, his oversized truck slowing for tight turns in crowded intersections.

“Grant?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

I searched the crumpled white paper bag for crumbs but didn’t find any. “I don’t want to see Elizabeth.”

“So?”

Like the white poplar, his response was unspecific. “So, what?”

“So, if you don’t want to see her, don’t see her.”

“She won’t come to the farm?”

“She hasn’t visited since the day you came with her, and that was—what?—almost ten years ago?” Grant looked out at the water, and I couldn’t see his face, but when he spoke next, his voice bordered on anger. “She didn’t come for my mother’s funeral, but you think she’ll just show up today because you’re here?”

He rolled down the window, and the wind became a wall between us.

Grant and Elizabeth had no contact. He had said this over donuts, but I hadn’t believed it to be possible. Grant must know the truth, and if he did, what would have kept him from telling Elizabeth? I tried to think of an explanation for the remainder of the drive, but when he stopped in front of the locked metal gate, I still hadn’t come up with anything. He parked and got out to open the gate, then returned to the car and drove through the opening.

The sight of the flowers eclipsed my contemplation. I jumped out of the car and dropped to my knees at the side of the road. There must have been a fenced property line somewhere, but it wasn’t visible, and the stretch of the flowers felt infinite. A gardening stake scrawled with a scientific name I didn’t recognize announced the genus and species of the nearest plant. I held fistfuls of the small yellow flowers to my face as if discovering water after many days in the desert. Pollen clung to my cheeks, and petals rained down on my chest and stomach and thighs. Grant laughed.

“I’ll give you a minute,” he said, climbing back into the truck. “When you’re done here, walk behind the house.” His truck kicked up dust as it bumped over the road.

I lay down in the dirt between the rows, disappearing from sight.

I found Grant behind the farmhouse, sitting at a weathered picnic table. On the table sat a box of chocolates, two glasses of milk, and the scroll I’d given him that morning. I sat down across from him and gestured to the sheet of paper with my head.

“So, what’s the problem?”

Reaching for the chocolates, I scanned the selection. Dark chocolate, mostly, with nuts and caramel. Exactly what I would have chosen.

Grant ran his finger along the paper, pausing on a line and tapping a word I couldn’t read upside down.

“Hazel,” he said. “Reconciliation. Why shouldn’t it be peace?”

“Because of the history of the Betulaceae family, divided for centuries into two families, Betulaceae and Corylaceae. Only recently brought together as subgroups within the same family,” I explained. “Bringing together—reconciliation.”

Grant looked down at the table, and I could tell by his expression that he already knew the history of the family. “I’m never going to win with you, am I?”

“You know you aren’t,” I said. “Did you really bring me here to try?”

He looked at the house and then out into the fields.

“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t.” He grabbed a handful of chocolates and stood up. “Eat chocolate. I’ll be right back, and then we’ll go for a walk.”

I drank my milk. When Grant returned, he had an old camera around his neck, black and heavy on an embroidered strap. It looked as if it belonged in the Victorian era with the language of flowers.

He took off the camera and handed it to me. “For your dictionary,” he said, and I immediately understood. I would create my own dictionary, and his flowers would illustrate the pages. “Make me a copy,” he said, “so that we’ll never have a misunderstanding.”

This is all a misunderstanding, I thought to myself, taking the camera. I don’t ride in trucks with young men and sit at picnic tables and eat chocolate. I don’t drink milk while discussing families, flower or otherwise.

Grant walked away, and I followed. He led me to a dirt road heading west, the sun setting over the hills in front of us. The sky was undecided, alternating orange and blue behind approaching thunderclouds, full of the nervous anticipation of rain. I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and lagged a step behind. Grant pointed to the left at a long row of wooden sheds, all padlocked. There had been a dried-flower business, he explained, but he’d shut it down when his mother became ill. He didn’t much care for the corpses of what had once been alive. On the right were acres of illuminated greenhouses, long hoses running out of cracked open doors. Grant approached one and held the door open for me. I slipped inside.

“Orchids,” he said, gesturing to shelves of staked pots. “Not ready for market.” There wasn’t a bloom in sight.

We stepped out and continued along the path, which climbed a hill and dipped down the other side. Somewhere beyond the fields of flowers the vineyard began, but the property line was too far away to see. Eventually, the path curved around the acres of greenhouses and back through open fields until we stood again in front of the farmhouse.

Grant led me down a gradual slope into a rose garden. It was small, carefully tended, and looked like it belonged to the house and not the farm. Grant’s hand brushed mine as we walked, and I took a step away.

“Have you ever given anyone a red rose?” Grant asked. I looked at him as if he was trying to force-feed me foxglove. “Moss rose? Myrtle? Pink?” he pressed.

“Confession of love? Love? Pure love?” I asked, to make sure we shared the same definitions. He nodded. “No, no, and no.”

I picked a pale blush-colored bud and shredded the petals one at a time.

“I’m more of a thistle-peony-basil kind of girl,” I said.

“Misanthropy-anger-hate,” said Grant. “Hmm.”

I turned away. “You asked,” I said.

“It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?” he asked, looking around us at the roses. They were all in bloom, and not one was yellow. “Here you are, obsessed with a romantic language—a language invented for expression between lovers—and you use it to spread animosity.”

“Why is every bush in bloom?” I asked, ignoring his observation. It was late in the season for roses.

“My mother taught me to prune thoroughly the second week of October, so we would always have roses for Thanksgiving.”

“You cook Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked, glancing toward the farmhouse. The window of the peaked gable was still broken, all these years later. Someone had put plywood behind it.

“No,” he admitted. “My mother did when I was young, before she began to spend most of her days in bed. I always pruned her roses just as she taught me, though, hoping the view from her window might beckon her into the kitchen. Only once did it work, the Thanksgiving before she died. Now that she’s gone, I just do it out of habit.”

I tried to remember whether Thanksgiving had already passed or if it was in the coming week. I paid little attention to holidays, although in the flower business they were hard to ignore. It must still be approaching, I thought. When I looked up, Grant was looking at me as if he was awaiting a response. “What?” I asked.

“Do you know your biological mother?”

I shook my head. He started to ask something else, but I cut him off. “Really. Don’t waste your time asking—I don’t know any more about her than you do.” I walked away and knelt on the ground, holding the camera’s viewfinder up to my eye. I snapped a blurry photo of knobby old wood and the tops of deep roots.

“It’s manual. Do you know how to use it?” I shook my head. He pointed to the buttons and dials, defining photography terms I had never heard. I was paying attention only to the distance of his fingers from the camera hanging around my neck. Whenever he got too close to my chest, I took a step back.

“Try it,” Grant said when he was done explaining. I held the camera up again and turned a dial to the left. An open pink blossom went from blurry to unrecognizable. “Other way,” Grant said. I turned the dial to the left again, ruffled by his voice too close to my ear.

His hand closed around mine, and together we turned the dial to the right. His hands were soft and did not burn where they touched. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.” He lifted my other hand to the top of the camera and pressed my index finger onto a round metal button. My heart stopped and started again. The lens clicked open and shut.

Grant withdrew his hands, but I did not lower the camera. I didn’t trust my face. I didn’t know if he would see joy or hatred in my eyes, fear or pleasure written on my bright-red cheeks. I didn’t know what I felt except breathless.

“Wind the film to take another picture,” he said. I didn’t move. “Want me to show you?”

I stepped back. “No,” I said. “That’s enough.”

“Too much information for one day?” Grant asked.

“Yes,” I said. I took off the camera and handed it to him. “Way too much.”

We walked back toward the house. Grant did not invite me inside. He walked straight to his truck and opened the passenger door, holding out his hand to me. I paused and then took it. He helped me inside and closed the door.

We drove back to the city in silence. It began to rain, slowly at first, and then with a blinding, unexpected ferocity. Cars pulled over to wait out the storm, but it only strengthened. It was the first strong rain of the fall, and the earth opened to its long-awaited watering, releasing a metallic scent. Grant drove slowly, guided by his memory of the turns rather than the sight of the road. The Golden Gate Bridge was deserted. Water rose from the bay and fell from the sky with equal force. I imagined the water coming into the car, the level rising over our feet, knees, stomachs, and throats as we drove.

Nervous to reveal the location of Natalya’s apartment, I asked Grant to drop me off in front of Bloom. It was still raining when he stopped in front of the store. I don’t know if he waved; I couldn’t see him through the water on the windshield.

Natalya and her band were setting up their instruments when I opened the door, and they nodded at me as I slipped up the stairs. Pulling my keys out of my backpack, I opened my small door, crawled inside, and curled up on the floor. The water from my wet clothes soaked into the fur carpet, and the whole world was wet and blue and cold. I shivered with my eyes wide open. I wouldn’t sleep that night.

4.

“Ready?” Elizabeth asked.

I was surprised to see the short distance we’d traveled. Elizabeth had parked behind a locked metal gate, in a driveway. To the right was the parking lot where the farmers’ market was held, and just beyond that, the vineyard. Somewhere beyond the vast expanse of asphalt, I realized, the two properties likely connected.

Stepping out of the truck, Elizabeth withdrew a skeleton key from her pocket. She slipped the key into the lock, and the gate swung open. I waited for her to come back to the truck, but she beckoned for me to get out.

“Let’s walk,” she said when I joined her. “It’s been a long time since I’ve set foot on this land.”

She walked slowly up the driveway toward the house, pausing to pinch wilted flowers and stick her thumb an inch into the soil. Surrounded by flowers, I was struck by what I now understood as the magnitude of the sisters’ quarrel. Nothing I could think of would make Elizabeth angry enough to give up not only her sister but also these endless acres of flowers for as long as she had. It must have been the worst kind of betrayal.

Elizabeth picked up her pace as she neared the house, smaller than ours, and yellow, but with a similar peaked-roof shape. As we walked up the front steps, I noticed the wood was soft, as if it hadn’t quite dried out from the past spring’s rain. The yellow paint was beginning to peel in large sections near the front door, and the gutter, knocked loose, hung low over the top step. Elizabeth ducked underneath it.

At the top of the steps, she approached the front door. A narrow rectangular window was set into the painted blue wood, and she leaned forward. Standing on my tiptoes, I pressed my head into the space below Elizabeth’s chin. We peered inside. The glass was warped and dirty, and gave the effect of looking at a scene through water. The edges of the furniture blurred; framed photographs appeared to hover above a mantel. A thin floral carpet disappeared under the steam of our breath on the glass. I took in the room’s emptiness: There were no people, dishes, newspapers, or any other sign of human activity.

But Elizabeth knocked anyway: softly, and then louder. She waited, and when no one approached, she began to knock continuously. Her taps grew punctuated with frustration. Still, no one came to the door.

Elizabeth turned and marched down the steps. Imagining the stairs caving under my feet, I tiptoed softly behind her. Ten paces away, she turned and pointed to a gable, the window shut but not curtained.

“See that window?” Elizabeth asked. “Inside used to be the attic, where we played as girls. When I was sent to boarding school—I was ten, so Catherine must have been seventeen—she converted it into a studio. She was talented, so talented. She could have gone to art school anywhere in the country, but she didn’t want to leave our mother.” Elizabeth paused, and we both looked up at the window. Water spots and dust reflected sunlight off the glass. I couldn’t see inside the room. “She’s in there right now,” Elizabeth said. “I know she is. Do you think maybe she just didn’t hear our knock?”

If she was inside, she had heard the knock. Though two stories, the house was not big. But Elizabeth’s eyes were hopeful; I couldn’t tell her the truth. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Catherine?” Elizabeth called up. The window did not open, and I saw no motion behind it. “Maybe she’s asleep.”

“Let’s just go,” I said, pulling on her sleeve.

“Not until we know she’s seen us. If she sees us and still won’t come down, then she’ll have made her feelings clear.”

Elizabeth turned, kicking the dirt in front of the nearest row of flowers. She folded over and picked up a stone, rough and round, the size of a walnut. Aiming for the window, she threw the rock gently. It bounced off the shingled roof of the gable and returned to the ground, just paces from where we stood. Picking it up, she tried again, and again, her aim unimproved with practice.

Growing impatient, I grabbed a stone and hurled it at the upstairs window. It hit its target and went sailing through, a sound like a bullet traveling through glass, the break a perfect circle in the center. Elizabeth covered her ears with her hands, clenching her teeth and closing her eyes. “Oh, Victoria,” she said, her voice pained. “Too hard. Much, much too hard.”

She opened her eyes and lifted her face to the window. I followed her gaze. Inside, a thin, pale hand reached up, fingers closing around a gathering of cords. A shade dropped behind the shattered glass. Beside me, Elizabeth sighed, her eyes still fixed on the place where the hand had been.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing her by the elbow. Her feet moved slowly, as if through sand, and I pulled her gently to the road. Helping her into the truck, I turned back and swung the metal gate closed.

5.

I was sleep-deprived and useless for an entire week. My fur floor didn’t dry for days, and every time I went to lie down, the moisture soaked through my shirt like Grant’s hands, a constant reminder of his touch. When I did sleep, I dreamt the camera was turned to my bare skin, capturing my wrists, the underside of my jawbone, and, once, my nipples. As I walked down deserted streets I would hear the click of the camera’s shutter and spin around, expecting Grant just steps behind me. But there was never anyone there.

My inability to form coherent sentences and work the cash register did not escape Renata. It was Thanksgiving week, and the storefront was packed, but she relegated me to the back room with overflowing buckets of orange and yellow flowers and long stems of dried leaves in bright fall colors. She gave me a book with photographs of holiday arrangements, but I didn’t open it. I wasn’t completely awake, but flower arranging was something I could now do in my sleep. She brought me hastily scrawled orders and came back when they were done.

On Friday, the rush of the holiday past, Renata sent me to the workroom to sweep the floor and sand the table, which was beginning to bow and splinter under years of water and work. When Renata came to check my progress an hour later, I was asleep on my stomach on top of the table, my cheek against the rough wood.

She shook me awake. The sandpaper was still in my hand, the pads of my fingers textured where they clutched. “If you weren’t in such demand, I would fire you,” Renata said, but her voice was filled with amusement, not anger. I wondered if she believed me to be love-struck; the truth, I thought, was much more complicated.

“Get up,” Renata said. “That same lady wants you.” I sighed. There weren’t any more red roses.

The woman leaned on folded elbows at the counter. She wore an apple-green raincoat, and a second woman, younger and prettier, stood next to her in a red coat of the same belted shape. Their black boots were wet. I looked outside. The rain had returned, just as my clothes and room had dried from the week before. I shivered.

“This is the famous Victoria,” the woman said, nodding in my direction. “Victoria, this is my sister, Annemarie. And I’m Bethany.” She reached her hand out to me, and I shook it. My bones melted within her strong shake.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I’ve never been better,” Bethany said. “I spent Thanksgiving at Ray’s. Neither of us had ever cooked Thanksgiving dinner, so we ended up throwing away a half-baked turkey and heating up cans of tomato soup. It was delicious,” she said. It was obvious by the way she said it that she was referring to more than the soup. Her sister groaned.

“Who’s Ray?” I asked. Renata appeared at the doorway with the broom, and I avoided her questioning stare.

“Someone I know from work. We’ve never shared more than complaints over ergonomics, but then Wednesday, there he was at my desk, asking me over.”

Bethany had plans again the next night with Ray, and she wanted something for her apartment, something seductive, she said, blushing, but not obviously so. “No orchids,” she said, as if this was a sexual flower and not a symbol of refined beauty.

“And for your sister?” I asked. Annemarie looked uncomfortable but didn’t protest as her sister began to describe the details of her love life.

“She’s married,” Bethany said, emphasizing the word as if the roots of Annemarie’s problems could be found in the very definition of the word. “She’s worried her husband isn’t attracted to her anymore, which—look at her—is ridiculous. But they don’t—you know. And they haven’t for a long time.” Annemarie looked out the window and did not defend her husband or her marriage.

“Okay,” I said, taking it all in. “Tomorrow?”

“By noon,” Bethany replied. “I’ll need all afternoon to clean my apartment.”

“Annemarie?” I asked. “Is noon okay?”

Annemarie didn’t answer right away. She smelled the roses and dahlias, the leftover oranges and yellows. When she looked up, her eyes were empty in a way that I understood. She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said as they turned to go.

When the door closed, I looked up to see Renata, still in the doorway with the broom. “The famous Victoria,” she chided me. “Giving the people what they want.”

I shrugged and walked past her. Grabbing my coat off the hook, I turned to leave.

“Tomorrow?” I asked. Renata had never given me a schedule. I worked when she told me to.

“Four a.m.,” she said. “Early-afternoon wedding, two hundred.”

I spent the evening sitting in the blue room, mulling over Annemarie’s request. I was well acquainted with the opposite of intimacy: hydrangea, dispassion, had long been a favorite of mine. It bloomed in manicured gardens in San Francisco six months out of the year, and was useful for keeping housemates and group-home staff at a distance. But intimacy, closeness, and sexual pleasure—these were things for which I had never had a reason to look. For hours I sat underneath the naked bulb, the light yellowing the water-stained pages of my dictionary, scanning for useful flowers.

There was the linden tree, which signified conjugal love, but this didn’t seem quite right. The definition felt more like a description of the past than a suggestion for the future. There was also the difficulty of identifying a linden tree, removing a small branch, and explaining to Annemarie why she should display the limb on her dining room table instead of a bouquet of flowers. No, I decided, the linden tree would not work.

Below me, Natalya’s band started up, and I reached for a pair of earplugs. The pages of the book vibrated on my lap. I found flowers for affection, sensuality, and pleasure, but none, on their own, felt like enough to combat Annemarie’s empty eyes. Growing frustrated, I reached the last flower in the book and turned back to the beginning. Grant would know, I thought, but I couldn’t ask him. The asking alone would be too intimate.

As I searched, it occurred to me that if I couldn’t find the right flowers, I could give Annemarie a bouquet of something bold and bright and lie about its meaning. It wasn’t as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead, it seemed that Earl, and then Bethany, walked home with a bouquet of flowers expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility instigated a transformation. Better to wrap Gerber daisies in brown paper and declare sexual fulfillment, I decided, than to ask Grant his opinion on the subject.

I closed the book, closed my eyes, and tried to sleep.

Two hours later I got up and dressed for the market. It was cold, and even as I changed my clothes and put on my jacket, I knew I could not give Annemarie Gerber daisies. I had been loyal to nothing except the language of flowers. If I started lying about it, there would be nothing left in my life that was beautiful or true. I hurried out the door and jogged down twelve cold blocks, hoping to beat Renata.

Grant was still in the parking lot, unloading his truck. I waited for him to hand me buckets and then carried them inside. There was only one stool in his booth; I sat down on it, and Grant leaned against the plywood wall.

“You’re early,” he said.

I looked at my watch. It was just past three in the morning. “You, too.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. I couldn’t, either, but I didn’t say anything.

“I met this woman,” I said. I turned my stool away from Grant as if I would help a customer through the window, but the market was nearly empty.

“Yeah?” he said. “Who?”

“Just some woman,” I said. “She came into Bloom yesterday. I helped her sister last weekend. She says her husband doesn’t want her anymore. You know, in a—” I stopped, unable to finish.

“Hmm,” Grant said. I felt his eyes all over my back, but I didn’t turn to face him. “That’s tough. It was the Victorian era, you know? Not a lot of talk about sex.”

I hadn’t thought of that. We watched the market begin to fill in silence. Renata would come through the door any minute, and I would think of nothing but someone else’s wedding flowers for hours.

“Desire,” Grant said finally. “I would go with desire. I think that’s as close as you’ll get.”

I didn’t know desire. “How?”

“Jonquil,” Grant said. “It’s a form of narcissus. They grow wild in the southern states. I have some, but the bulbs won’t bloom till spring.”

Spring wasn’t for months. Annemarie didn’t appear as though she could wait that long. “There’s no other way?”

“We could force the bulbs in my greenhouse. I don’t, usually; the flowers are so associated with spring, there isn’t much of a market for them until late February. But we can try, if you want.”

“How long will it take?”

“Not long,” he said. “I bet you could see flowers by mid-January.”

“I’ll ask her,” I said. “Thanks.” I started to walk away, but Grant stopped me with his hand on my shoulder. I turned around.

“This afternoon?” he asked.

I thought about the flowers, his camera, and my dictionary. “I should be done by two,” I said.

“I’ll pick you up.”

“I’ll be hungry,” I said as I walked away.

Grant laughed. “I know.”

Annemarie looked more relieved than disappointed when I told her the news. January would be fine, she said, better than fine. The holidays were busy; the month would be a blur. She wrote down her phone number, wrapped her body tightly with the red belt of her coat, and walked out the door after Bethany, who was already halfway up the block. I had given her ranunculus: You are radiant with charms.

Grant was early, as he had been the week before. Renata invited him in. He sat at the table, watching us work and eating chicken curry out of a steaming foam container. A second container, unopened, sat beside him. When I finished the table arrangements, Renata said I could go.

“The boutonnieres?” I asked, looking into the box where she was lining up the bridesmaids’ bouquets.

“I can finish them,” she said. “I have plenty of time. You just go on.” She waved me out the door.

“You want to eat here?” Grant asked, handing me a plastic fork and a napkin.

“In the car. I don’t want to waste light.” Renata looked at us with curiosity but didn’t ask. She was the least meddlesome person I had ever met, and I felt a twinge of affection for her as I followed Grant out the door.

The curry and our breath fogged the windows on the long drive to Grant’s house. We drove in silence, the only noise the constant hum of the defroster. It was wet out, but the afternoon was clearing. By the time Grant opened the gate and drove past the house, the sky was blue. He went inside for the camera, and I was surprised to see him enter the square three-story building and not the house.

“What’s that?” I asked when he returned, gesturing to the building from which he had just come.

“The water tower,” he said. “I converted it into an apartment. You want to see inside?”

“Light,” I said, looking to where the sun was already starting to descend.

“Right.”

“Maybe after.”

“Okay. You want another lesson?” Grant asked. He stepped toward me and dropped the camera strap around my head. His hands brushed against the back of my neck.

I shook my head no. “Shutter speed, aperture, focus,” I said, turning dials and repeating the vocabulary he had thrown at me the week before. “I’ll teach myself.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be inside.” He turned and walked back into the water tower. I waited until I saw a light flip on in the third-story window before I turned toward the rose garden.

I would start with the white rose; it felt like a good place to begin. Sitting in front of a flowering bush, I dug a blank notebook out of my backpack. I would teach myself photography by documenting my successes and my failures. If, next week, I developed the film and saw that only one photo was clear, I needed to know exactly what I had done to produce the image. I numbered a sheet of paper from one to thirty-six.

In the waning light I photographed the same half-opened white rosebud, writing down in descriptive, nontechnical terms the reading of the light meter and the exact positions of the various dials and knobs. I recorded the focus, the position of the sun, and the angles of the shadows. I measured the distance of the camera to the rose in multiples of the length of my palm. When I ran out of light and film, I stopped.

Grant was sitting at his kitchen table when I returned. The door was open, and inside was as cold as outside. The sun had disappeared, and with it all warmth. I rubbed my hands together.

“Tea?” he asked, holding out a steaming mug.

I stepped in and closed the door behind me. “Please.”

We sat across from each other at a weathered wood picnic table identical to the one outside. It was pushed up against a small window that framed a view of the property: sloping rows of flowers, the sheds and greenhouses, and the abandoned house. Grant stood up to adjust the lid on a rice cooker that was spewing liquid out of a small hole. He opened a cupboard and retrieved a bottle of soy sauce, which he set on the uneven table.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. I looked at the stove. Nothing was cooking except the rice. “You want a tour?”

I shrugged but stood up.

“This is the kitchen.” The cupboards were painted a pale green, the countertops gray Formica with silver trim. He didn’t appear to own a cutting board, and the counters were dented and scraped from slicing. There was an antique white-and-chrome gas stove with a folding shelf, and on the shelf sat a row of empty green glass vases and a single wooden spoon. The spoon had a white sticker with a faded price on its tip, leading me to think it had either never been used or never been washed. Either way, I was not particularly anxious to sample his cooking.

In the corner of the room was a black metal staircase, spiraling through a small square hole. Grant began to climb, and I followed him up. The second floor contained a living room big enough for only an orange velour love seat and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. An open door led to a white tile bathroom with a claw-foot tub. There was no television and no stereo. I didn’t even see a telephone.

Grant stepped back onto the staircase and led me to the third floor, which was covered wall to wall with a thick foam mattress. Crumbling foam was visible where the sheets had peeled away from the edges. Clothes sat in piles in two corners, one folded, the other not. Where there should have been pillows, there were stacks of books.

“My bedroom,” Grant said.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

“In the middle. Closer to the books than the clothes, usually.” He climbed across the foam mattress and switched off the reading lamp. I held on to the banister and climbed back down into the kitchen.

“Nice,” I said. “Quiet.”

“I like it that way. I can forget where I am, you know?” I did know. In Grant’s water tower, settled in the absence of all things automatic and digital, it was easy to forget not just the location but also the decade.

“My roommate’s punk band practices all night in the downstairs of our apartment,” I said.

“That sounds awful.”

“It is.”

He walked over to the counter and spooned hot, soggy rice into large ceramic soup bowls. He handed me a bowl and a spoon. We began to eat. The rice warmed my mouth, throat, and stomach. It was much better than I had expected.

“No phone?” I asked, looking around. I’d thought I was the only young person in the modern world not attached to a communication device. Grant shook his head no. I continued: “No other family?”

Grant shook his head again. “My father left before I was born, went back to London. I’ve never met him. When my mother died, she left me the land and the flowers, nothing else.” He took another bite of rice.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

Grant poured on more soy sauce. “Sometimes. I miss her as she was when I was a child, when she cooked dinner every night and packed my lunches with sandwiches and edible flowers. But toward the end of her life, she began to confuse me with my father. She’d go into a rage and throw me out of the house. Then, when she realized what she’d done, she would apologize with flowers.”

“Is that why you live here?”

Grant nodded. “And I’ve always liked being alone. No one can understand that.” I understood.

He finished his rice and helped himself to another bowl, then reached for mine and filled it up as well. We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

Grant got up to wash his dish and set it upside down on a metal drying rack. I washed my own and did the same. “Ready to go?” he asked.

“The film?” I grabbed the camera from where he had hung it on a hook and handed it to him. “I don’t know how to release it.”

He rewound the camera and unloaded the film. I pocketed it.

“Thanks.”

We climbed into Grant’s truck and started down the road. We were halfway back to the city when I remembered Annemarie’s request. I sucked in my breath.

“What?” he asked.

“The jonquil. I forgot.”

“I planted it while you were in the rose garden. It’s in a paper box in the greenhouse—the bulbs require darkness until the foliage starts to grow. You can check on them next Saturday.”

Next Saturday. As if we had a standing date. I watched Grant drive, his profile hard and unsmiling. I would check on them next Saturday. It was a simple statement but one that changed everything as completely as the discovery of the yellow rose.

Jealousy, infidelity. Solitude, friendship.

6.

It was dark out by the time I came in for dinner. The house was bright, and inside the frame of the open door, Elizabeth sat alone at the kitchen table. She had made chicken soup—the smell had reached me in the vines, the scent a physical draw—and she sat hunched over her bowl, as if studying her reflection in the broth.

“Why don’t you have any friends?” I asked.

The words escaped without premeditation. For a week I’d watched Elizabeth manage the harvest with a heavy, dejected quality, and the image of her sitting at the kitchen table, alone and so obviously lonely, pushed the words right out of me.

Elizabeth looked over to where I stood. Quietly, she stood up, dumping the contents of her bowl back into the soup pot. With a match, she lit the blue ring of fire beneath it.

She turned to me. “Well, why don’t you?”

“I don’t want any,” I said. Besides Perla, the only children I knew were from my class at school. They called me orphan girl, and it had gotten so that I doubted even my teacher remembered my real name.

“Why not?” Elizabeth pressed.

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice growing defensive. But I did know.

I had been suspended for five days for my attack on the school bus driver, and for the first time in my life, I was not miserable. Home with Elizabeth, I didn’t need anyone else. Every day I followed behind as she managed the harvest, steering workers toward ripe vines and away from grapes that needed another day in the sun, another two. She popped grapes into her own mouth and then into mine, spewing numbers that correlated to the ripeness: 74/6, 73/7, and 75/6. This, she would say, when we located a ripe bunch, is what you need to remember. This exact flavor—the sugars at seventy-five, the tannins at seven. This is a perfectly ripe wine grape, which neither machine nor amateur can identify. By the end of the week, I had chewed and spit grapes from nearly every plant, and the numbers began to come to me almost before the grapes entered my mouth, as if my tongue was simply reading them like the number on a postage stamp.

The soup began to simmer, and Elizabeth stirred it with a wooden spoon. “Take off your shoes,” she said. “And wash up. The soup’s hot.”

At the table, Elizabeth set out two bowls and loaves of bread as big as cantaloupes. I tore the bread in half, scooping out the soft, white middle and dipping it in the steaming broth.

“I had a friend, once,” Elizabeth said. “My sister was my friend. I had my sister and my work and my first love, and there was nothing else in the world I wanted. Then, in an instant, all I had was my work. What I lost felt irreplaceable. So I focused every waking moment on running a successful business, on growing the most sought-after wine grapes in the region. The goal I set was so ambitious, and took so much time, that I didn’t have even a minute to think about everything I’d lost.”

Taking me in, I understood, had changed that. I was a constant reminder of family, of love, and I wondered if she regretted her decision.

“Victoria,” Elizabeth asked abruptly. “Are you happy here?”

I nodded, my heartbeat suddenly racing. No one had ever asked me a question like that without immediately following with something like, because if you were happy, if you had the sense to know that you were lucky to be here, you wouldn’t act like such an ungrateful little brat. But Elizabeth’s smile, when it finally came, was only relieved. “Good,” she said. “Because I’m happy you’re here. In fact, I’m not looking forward to you going back to school tomorrow. It’s been nice having you home; you’ve opened up a little. For the first time, you’ve seemed interested in something, and while I admit I’m a bit jealous of the grapes, it does bring me joy to see you engaging in the world.”

“I hate school,” I said. Just uttering the word made my soup bubble up at the back of my throat, a sick, nauseous feeling.

“Do you really hate school? Because I know you don’t hate to learn.”

“I really hate it.” I swallowed once, and then told her what they called me, told her it was just like every school I’d ever been to, that I was singled out, labeled, watched, and never taught.

Elizabeth took her last bite of bread, and then carried her bowl to the sink.

“We’ll withdraw you tomorrow, then. I can teach you more here than you’ll ever learn in that school. And if you ask me, you’ve suffered enough for one lifetime.” She came back to the table, retrieved my bowl, and refilled it to the brim.

My relief was so expansive I finished the second bowl, and then a third. Still, an internal lightness threatened to lift me off the chair and throw me, spinning, up the stairs and into bed.

7.

My photographs were awful. They were so bad I blamed the one-hour photo lab where I had them printed and took the negatives to a specialty store. The sign in front boasted that they printed only the work of professionals. It took them three days to make the prints, and when I picked them up, they were just as bad. Worse, even. My mistakes were more pronounced, the blurry green-and-white blobs more defined within the muddy background. I threw the photos into the gutter and sat down on the curb outside the photography store, defeated.

“Experimenting with abstraction?” I turned. A young woman stood behind me, looking at the photographs littering the street. She wore an apron and smoked a cigarette. The ash floated down around the photos. I wished they would catch fire and burn.

“No,” I said. “Experimenting with failure.”

“New camera?” she asked.

“No, new to photography.”

“What do you need to know?”

I picked one of the prints up out of the street and handed it to her. “Everything,” I said.

She stepped on her cigarette and considered the print. “I think it’s a film-speed issue,” she said, motioning for me to follow her inside. She led me to the film display, pointing out numbers on the corners of the boxes I hadn’t even noticed. The shutter speed was too slow, she explained, and the film speed a poor match for the low light of late afternoon. I wrote everything she said down on the back of the prints and shoved the stack into my back pocket.

I was anxious to get off work the following Saturday. The store was empty; we didn’t have a wedding. Renata was doing paperwork and didn’t look up from her desk all morning. When I tired of waiting for her to release me, I stood close to her desk and tapped my foot on the concrete floor.

“All right, go,” she said, waving me away. I turned and was halfway out the door when I heard her add, “And don’t come back tomorrow, or next week, or the week after.”

I stopped. “What?”

“You’ve worked twice as many hours as I’ve paid you for, you must know that.” I hadn’t been keeping track. It wasn’t as if I could have gotten another job even if I’d wanted to. I had no high school diploma, no college degree, and no skills. I assumed Renata understood this and worked me as she wished. I didn’t feel resentful.

“So?”

“Take a few weeks off. Stop in the Sunday after next and I’ll pay you as if you’d worked—I owe you the money. I’ll need you again around Christmas, and I have two weddings on New Year’s Day.” She handed me an envelope of cash, the one she should have given me the following day. I put it in my backpack.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll see you in two weeks.”

Grant was in the parking lot of the market when I arrived, loading up a bucket of unsold flowers. I approached and held up the blurry photos, spread out like a fan. “Now you want a lesson?” he asked, amused.

“No.” I climbed inside his truck.

He shook his head. “Chinese or Thai?”

I was reading the notes I had scratched on the back of the embarrassing prints and didn’t answer. When he stopped for Thai, I waited in the car.

“Something spicy,” I called through the open window. “With shrimp.”

I had purchased ten rolls of color film, all different speeds. I would start with 100 in the bright afternoon light and work my way to 800 just after sunset. Grant sat on the picnic table with a book, glancing in my direction every few pages. I barely moved from a low crouch between two white rosebushes. All the flowers were open; in another week, the roses would be gone. As I had the week before, I numbered all my photographs and noted every angle and setting. I was determined to get it right.

When the darkness was nearly complete, I put away my camera. Grant no longer sat at the picnic table. Light shone from the windows of the water tower through a thick layer of steam. Grant was cooking, and I was starving. I gathered all ten rolls of film into my backpack and walked into the kitchen.

“Hungry?” He watched me zip up my backpack and inhale deeply.

“Are you really asking me that?”

Grant smiled. I walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. It was empty except for yogurt and a gallon of orange juice. I picked up the orange juice and drank it out of the container.

“Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks.” I took another swig and sat down at the table. “What’re you making?”

He pointed to six empty cans of beef ravioli. I made a face.

“You want to cook?” he asked.

“I don’t cook. Group homes have cooks, and since then, I’ve eaten out.”

“You’ve always lived in group homes?”

“Since Elizabeth’s. Before that I lived with lots of different people. Some were good cooks,” I said, “others weren’t.”

He studied me as if he wanted to know more, but I didn’t elaborate. We sat down with bowls of ravioli. Outside, it had started to rain again, a pounding rain that threatened to turn the dirt roads into rivers.

When we finished eating, Grant washed his dish and went upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for him to come back down and drive me home, but he didn’t. I drank more orange juice and looked out the window. When I grew hungry again, I searched the cupboard until I found an unopened package of cookies and ate every one. Grant still did not return. I put on a pot of tea and stood over it, warming my hands on the open blue flame. The kettle began to whistle.

Filling two mugs, I pulled tea bags from a box on the counter and climbed the stairs.

Grant was sitting on the orange love seat on the second floor, a book open on his lap. I handed him a mug and sat down on the floor in front of the bookshelf. The room was so small that even though I sat as far away from him as possible, he could have touched my knee with his toes by stretching his legs. I turned to the bookshelf. On the bottom was a stack of oversized books: gardening manuals, mostly, interspersed with biology and botany textbooks.

“Biology?” I asked, picking one up and opening it to a scientific drawing of a heart.

“I took a class at a community college. After my mother died, I thought briefly of selling the farm and going to college. But I dropped out of the class halfway through. I didn’t like the lecture halls. Too many people, and not enough flowers.”

A thick blue vein curved out of the heart. I traced it with my finger and looked up at Grant. “What’re you reading?”

“Gertrude Stein.”

I shook my head. I’d never heard of her.

“The poet?” he asked. “You know, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?”

I shook my head again.

“During the last year of her life, my mother became obsessed with her,” Grant said. “She’d spent most of her life reading the Victorian poets, and when she found Gertrude Stein, she told me she was a comfort.”

“What does she mean, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?” I asked. Snapping the biology book shut, I was confronted with the skeleton of a human body. I tapped the empty eye socket.

“That things just are what they are,” he said.

“ ‘A rose is a rose.’ ”

“ ‘Is a rose,’ ” he finished, smiling faintly.

I thought about all the roses in the garden below, their varying shades of color and youth. “Except when it’s yellow,” I said. “Or red, or pink, or unopened, or dying.”

“That’s what I’ve always thought,” said Grant. “But I’m giving Ms. Stein the opportunity to convince me.” He turned back to his book.

I pulled another book off the shelf, higher up. It was a thin volume of poetry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had read most of her work in my early teens, when I’d discovered the Romantic poets often referenced the language of flowers, and read everything I could get my hands on. The pages of the book were earmarked with notes scribbled in the margins. The poem I opened to was eleven verses, all beginning with the words Love me. I was surprised. I had read the poem, I was sure, but didn’t remember the dozens of references to love, only the references to flowers. I replaced the book and withdrew another, and then another. All the while, Grant sat, silently turning pages. I looked at my watch. Ten past ten.

Grant looked up. He checked his own watch and then looked out the window. It was still raining. “You want to go home?”

The roads were wet; the drive would be slow. I would get soaked in the two blocks between Bloom and the blue room, and Natalya’s band would be practicing. Renata did not expect me at work the following day. No, I realized, I did not particularly want to go home.

“Do I have another choice?” I asked. “I’m not sleeping here with you.”

“I won’t stay here. You can have my bed. Or sleep on the couch. Or wherever.”

“How do I know you won’t come back in the middle of the night?”

Grant pulled his keys out of his pocket and detached the key to the water tower. He handed it to me and walked down the stairs. I followed him out.

In the kitchen he grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer and a flannel jacket off a hook. I opened the door, and he walked out, lingering under the cover of the stoop. Rain ran in sheets around the protected step. “Good night,” he said.

“Spare key?” I asked.

Grant sighed and shook his head, but he was smiling. He leaned over and picked up a rusted watering can, half full of rainwater. He poured the water through the spout as if he was watering the sodden gravel. In the bottom was a key. “It’s probably rusted beyond use. But here you go, just in case.” He handed me the key, and our hands clasped around the wet metal.

“Thanks,” I said. “Good night.” He stood still as I inched the door closed and turned the lock.

I breathed in the emptiness of the water tower and climbed the stairs. On the third floor, I pulled the blanket off Grant’s bed and returned to the kitchen, curling up underneath the picnic table. If the door opened, I would hear it.

But all I heard, all night, was the rain.

Grant knocked on the door at half past ten the next morning. I was still asleep under the table. It had been twelve hours, and my body was stiff and slow to rise. At the door I paused, leaning against the solid wood and rubbing my eyes, my cheekbones, and the back of my neck. I opened the door.

Grant stood in the clothes he’d worn the night before and looked only slightly more awake than I felt. Stumbling into the kitchen, he sat down at the table.

The storm had passed. Outside the window, under the cloudless sky, flowers glistened. It was a perfect day for photography.

“Farmers’ market?” he asked. “On Sundays I sell down the road instead of in the city. You want to come?”

December was a bad time of year for fruit and vegetables, I remembered. Oranges, apples, broccoli, kale. But even if it had been midsummer, I wouldn’t have wanted to go to the farmers’ market. I didn’t want to risk seeing Elizabeth. “Not really. I need film, though.”

“Come with me, then. You can wait in the truck while I sell what I have left over from yesterday. Then I’ll take you to the drugstore.”

Grant changed his clothes upstairs, and I brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger. Splashing water on my face and hair, I went to wait in the truck. When Grant joined me a few minutes later, he had shaved and put on a clean gray sweatshirt and only slightly dirty jeans. He still looked tired, and he pulled up his hood as he locked the door of the water tower.

The road had flooded in places, and Grant drove slowly, his truck swaying like a boat in deep water. I closed my eyes.

Less than five minutes later, he stopped the truck, and when I opened my eyes, we were in a crowded parking lot. I slunk down in my seat while Grant jumped out. Pulling his hood low over his forehead, Grant slid the buckets out of his truck. I closed my eyes and pressed my ear against the locked door, trying not to hear the noises of the busy market or remember the many times I’d been there as a child. Finally, he returned.

“Ready?” he asked.

Grant drove to the nearest store, a country drugstore with fishing gear and pharmaceuticals. Being out in the world, in such close proximity to Elizabeth, made me nervous.

I paused, my hand on the door of the truck. “Elizabeth?”

“She won’t be here. I don’t know where she shops, but I’ve been coming here for over twenty years, and I’ve never seen her.”

Relieved, I walked inside and went straight to the photo counter, dropping my canisters in an envelope and pushing them through a slot.

“One hour?” I asked a bored-looking clerk in a blue apron.

“Less,” she said. “I haven’t had any film to print in days.”

I ducked into the nearest aisle. The store was having a sale on T-shirts—three for five dollars. I picked the top three off a tall pile and put them in my basket with rolls of film, a toothbrush, and deodorant. Grant stood at the checkout counter, eating a candy bar, watching me walk up and down the rows. I poked my head out of the aisle. When I saw that the store was empty, I joined him at the counter.

“Breakfast?” I asked, and he nodded. I picked up a PayDay and ate out the peanuts until it was nothing but a gooey caramel strip.

“Best part,” Grant said, nodding to the caramel. I handed it to him, and he ate it quickly, as if I would change my mind and take it back. “You must like me more than you let on,” he said, grinning.

The door opened, and an elderly couple walked toward us, holding hands. The woman’s back bent forward, and the man had a stiff left leg, so it looked as if she was dragging him through the door. The old man looked me up and down, and his smile was youthful and out of place on his age-spotted skin.

“Grant,” he said, winking and nodding in my direction. “Good work, son, good work.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Grant, looking at the ground. The man wobbled past, and after a few steps, he stopped and slapped his wife on the backside. He turned and winked at Grant.

Grant looked from me to the old man and shook his head. “He was a friend of my mother’s,” he said when the couple was out of earshot. “He thinks that will be us in sixty years.”

I rolled my eyes, picked up a second PayDay, and walked to the photography counter to wait. There was nothing in the world less likely than Grant and me holding hands in sixty years. The clerk handed me the first roll, which had already been printed, the negatives cut and pressed into a clear envelope. I lined up the photographs on the bright yellow counter.

The first ten were blurry. Not indistinguishable white blobs, like my first attempt, but blurry. Beginning with the eleventh, they became passably clear, but nothing of which I could be proud. The clerk continued to pass me one roll at a time, and I continued to line them up, being careful to maintain the order.

Grant stood nearby, fanning himself with five empty candy wrappers. I walked over and held up the print. It was the sixteenth shot on the eighth roll—a perfect white rose, bright and clear, the contrast with the dark background a natural frame. Grant leaned over as if to smell it, and nodded. “Nice.”

“Let’s go,” I said. I paid for the things in my basket and Grant’s candy wrappers, and began to walk out the door.

“Your photos?” Grant asked, pausing and looking at the sea of prints I had left on the photo counter.

“This is all I need,” I said, holding up the single image.

8.

I listened to the click of Elizabeth’s rag mop, my spine pressed against the trunk of a thick vine. I was supposed to be out for my morning walk, but I didn’t feel like walking. Elizabeth had opened every window in the house to let in the first warm spring air, and from my position in the row nearest the house, I could hear her every movement.

For six months I’d been home with Elizabeth, and I’d grown accustomed to her concept of home-school. I did not have a desk. Elizabeth did not purchase a chalkboard, or a textbook, or flash cards. Instead, she had posted a schedule on the refrigerator door—a wispy sheet of rice paper with delicate script, the corners curling around silver circular magnets—and I was responsible for the activities and chores on the thin sheet of paper.

Elizabeth’s list was detailed, exhausting, and exact but never grew and never changed. Every day, after breakfast and my morning walk, I wrote in the black leather-bound journal she had purchased for me. I was a good writer and an excellent speller, but I made purposeful mistakes to keep Elizabeth by my side, sounding out words and proofing pages. When I finished, I helped her prepare lunch, and we measured, and poured, and doubled recipes, and halved them. Silverware in neat stacks became fractions and cups of dry beans complicated word problems. Using the calendar by which she tracked the weather, she taught me to calculate averages, percentages, and probabilities.

At the end of each day, Elizabeth read to me. She had shelves and shelves of children’s classics, dusty hardcovers with stamped gold titles: The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But I preferred her viticulture textbooks, the illustrations of plants and chemical equations clues to the world that surrounded me. I memorized vocabulary—nitrate leaching, carbon sequestration, integrated pest management—and used them in casual conversation with a seriousness that made Elizabeth laugh.

Before bed, we marked off each day on a calendar in my room. Throughout January, I simply scratched a small red X in the box underneath the date, but by the end of March, I wrote the high and low temperatures, as Elizabeth did on her own calendar, what we had eaten for dinner, and a list of the day’s activities. Elizabeth cut a stack of Post-its the size of the calendar’s squares, and many evenings I filled five or six sheets before crawling into bed.

More than a nightly ritual, the calendar was a countdown. August second—the day after my supposed birthday—was highlighted, the entire box colored pink. In black felt-tip, Elizabeth had written eleven a.m., third floor, room 305. The law mandated I live with Elizabeth for a full year before my adoption could be finalized; Meredith had scheduled our court date for a year to the day from my arrival.

I checked the watch Elizabeth had given me. Another ten minutes before she would let me back inside. I leaned my head against the vine’s bare branches. The first bright green leaves had sprouted from tight buds, and I studied them, perfect, fingernail-sized versions of what they would become. Smelling one, I nibbled a corner, thinking I would write in my journal about the taste of a grapevine, before the grapes. I checked my watch again. 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 soufflé 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 soufflé 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 slowly. His face showed both the pleasure of the food and the pride of the accomplishment. He put down his knife and fork, and when he looked across the table, I could see he was enjoying the sight of my ravenous hunger. His watchfulness made me uncomfortable.

I put down my second drumstick, all bones. “You know it won’t, right?” I asked. “Be us?”

Grant looked at me with confusion.

“At the drugstore, the old couple, the slapping and winking; it won’t be us. You won’t know me in sixty years,” I said. “You probably won’t know me in sixty days.”

His smile faded. “Why are you sure?”

I thought about his question. I was sure, and I knew he could tell. But it was hard to explain why I was so sure. “The longest I’ve ever known anyone—unless you count my social worker, which I don’t—is fifteen months.”

“What happened after fifteen months?”

I looked at him, my eyes pleading. When he realized the answer, he looked away, embarrassed.

“But why not now?” It was the exact right question, and when he asked it, I knew the answer.

“I don’t trust myself,” I said. “Whatever you imagine our life would be like together, it won’t happen. I’d ruin it.”

I could see Grant thinking about this, trying to grasp the chasm between the finality in my voice and his vision of our future, and bridging the divide with a combination of hope and lies. I felt something, a combination of pity and embarrassment, for his desperate imaginings.

“Please don’t waste your time,” I said. “Trying. I tried, once, and failed. It’s not possible for me.”

When Grant looked back to me, the expression on his face had changed. His jaw was clenched, his nostrils slightly flared.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“What?” I asked. It was not the response I had expected.

Grant pinched the skin along his hairline with the fingers of one hand, and when he spoke, his words were slow and careful. “Don’t lie. Tell me you’ll never forgive me for what my mother did, or tell me every time you look at me you feel sick. But don’t sit here and lie to me, talking about how it’s your fault we can never be together.”

I picked up the chicken bones, peeling fat away from the tendons. I couldn’t look at him, needed time to process what he was saying. “What my mother did.” There was only one explanation. When I’d first met Grant, I had searched his face for anger, and when I didn’t find it, I claimed forgiveness. But the reality was something else entirely. Grant was not angry with me because even he didn’t know the truth. I didn’t know how it was possible that he’d lived with his mother at the time and still didn’t know, but I didn’t ask.

“I’m not lying.” It was all I could think of to say.

Grant dropped his fork, the metal clattering against the ceramic plate. He stood up. “You’re not the only one whose life she ruined,” he said, then walked out of the kitchen and into the night.

I locked the door behind him.

10.

July was crowded at the farmers’ market. Strollers heaped with produce and nectarine-smeared toddlers blocked aisles, and elderly men with pushcarts waved impatient arms at distracted mothers. Under my feet, discarded pistachio shells crunched. I skipped to keep up with Elizabeth. She was making her way toward the blackberries.

After lunch, Elizabeth told me, we would make blackberry cobbler and homemade ice cream. It was a bribe to keep me inside the house, away from the record-breaking heat and her quickly ripening grapes, and I had reluctantly agreed. All spring, Elizabeth and I had worked side by side at the vineyard, and I didn’t want to leave the plants alone now that there was little to do but wait. I missed the long mornings suckering the vines, trimming shoots that sprouted from the base of the trunk to keep the strength of the vine focused. I missed carrying a kitchen knife and following behind the small tractor Elizabeth used to disk the rows, pulling the remaining weeds by hand as she had taught me to do: first loosening the roots with the sharp point of the knife, then extracting the plants from the soil. I had been wielding the knife for more than three months before I told Elizabeth that allowing children in foster care to use knives was against the child-welfare code. But she didn’t take it away. You’re not a foster child, she had said simply. And though I no longer felt like a foster child (felt, in fact, so different from the girl who had arrived almost a year before that most mornings I studied my face in the bathroom mirror long after Elizabeth called me to breakfast, looking for physical signs of the change I knew to have occurred), this was not entirely the truth. I was still a foster child, and would be until after my court appearance in August.

Pushing my way through a thick crowd, I reached Elizabeth’s side. “Blackberries?” she asked, passing me a green paper tray. On a red-cloth-covered table the vendor had displayed tall stacks of blackberries, ollalieberries, raspberries, and boysenberries. I plucked one from the tray and put it in my mouth. It was fat and sweet, and stained my fingertips purple where I touched it.

Elizabeth dumped six paper trays in a plastic bag and paid for her purchase, then moved on to the next stand. I followed her around the hot market, carrying the bags that wouldn’t fit in her overflowing canvas sack. At a dairy truck, she handed me a milk jug, the glass of the bottle sweating. “Done?” I asked.

“Almost. Come,” she said, beckoning me toward the far end of the market. Before she had even passed the Blenheim apricots, the last vendor in the line we knew, I understood where we were going. Tucking the slick bottle under my arm, I skipped to Elizabeth, holding her sleeve and pulling her back. But she only walked faster. She didn’t stop until she reached the flower stand.

Bunches of roses lined the table. Up close, the perfection of the flowers was startling: each petal stiff and smooth, pressed one on top of the other, the tips a neat coil. Elizabeth stood still, studying the flowers as I did. I gestured to a mixed bouquet, hoping she might choose a bundle, pay, and turn to leave without speaking. But before she could make a purchase, the teenager swept the remaining flowers from the table, tossing them into the back of his truck. My eyes widened. He would not sell to Elizabeth. I watched her face for a reaction, but she was unreadable.

“Grant?” she said. He did not respond, did not glance in her direction. She tried again. “I’m your aunt. Elizabeth. You must know this.” Leaning over the bed of his truck, he arranged a tarp over the layer of flowers. His eyes focused on the roses, but his ears peeled back slightly, his chin raised. Up close, he looked older. Light fuzz covered his upper lip, and his limbs, which I’d believed to be spindly, were defined. He wore only a plain white undershirt, and the curve of his shoulder blades caused a rise and fall in the thin material that I found mesmerizing.

“Are you going to ignore me?” Elizabeth asked. When he didn’t respond, her voice changed, the way I remembered it from my first few weeks in her home: strict, patient, and then unexpectedly angry. “Look at me, at least, won’t you? Look at me when I speak to you.”

He didn’t.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with you. It never has. For years I’ve watched you grow up from a distance, and I’ve wanted more than anything to run over here and scoop you into my arms.”

Grant secured the tarp with a rope, the muscles in his arms taut. It was hard to imagine anyone scooping him up, hard to imagine he wasn’t always this strong. Tightening a final knot, he turned.

“You should have, then, if that’s what you wanted to do.” His voice was cold, unemotional. “No one was stopping you.”

“No,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her words were low, underlined by a deep vibration I recognized from previous foster placements as the predecessor to an attack. But she did not leap at him, as I half expected her to do. Instead, she said something so surprising that Grant spun to face me, his eyes meeting mine for the first time.

“Victoria’s making blackberry cobbler,” she whispered. “You should come over.”

11.

The image of Grant’s face, disappointed and desperate, kept me awake. I gave up trying to sleep before dawn and sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the sound of the truck’s engine. Instead, I was startled by a quiet knock. When I opened the door, Grant walked sleepily past me and up the stairs. The water started in the shower. I realized it was Sunday.

I wanted to return to the blue room, to Renata, to payday and the approaching frenzy of holiday arranging. I had stayed at Grant’s too long. But he wouldn’t be driving to the city. I sat down on the bottom step and thought about how to convince him of the three-hour round trip on his day off.

I was still thinking when Grant’s foot pushed on the triangle between my shoulder blades. The unexpected pressure caused me to slip off the bottom step and onto the kitchen floor. I scrambled to my feet.

“Get up,” he said. “I’m taking you back.”

His words were familiar. I flashed on the variations of the phrase I’d heard throughout the years: Pack your things. Alexis doesn’t want to share her room anymore. We’re too old to go through this again. More often than not, it was simply Meredith’s coming, with an occasional I’m sorry.

To Grant, I said what I always said: “I’m ready.”

I grabbed my backpack, heavy with his camera and dozens of rolls of film, and climbed into the truck. Grant drove quickly down the still-dark country roads, swerving into oncoming traffic to pass pickups loaded with produce. He took the first exit south of the bridge, and then pulled onto the shoulder of the busy off-ramp. There wasn’t a bus stop in sight. Unmoving, I looked up and down the street.

“I have to get back to the farmers’ market,” he said. He wouldn’t look at me.

Grant cut the engine and walked around the front of the truck. He opened the passenger door and reached inside to grab my backpack from where it rested on my feet. His chest brushed my knees, and when he pulled back, the heat between our bodies dispersed in a cold rush of December air. I jumped out and grabbed my backpack.

So this is how it ends, I thought, with a camera full of images of a flower farm to which I would never return. I missed the flowers already but would not permit myself to miss Grant.

It took four buses to get back to Potrero Hill, but only because I took the 38 in the wrong direction and ended up at Point Lobos. It was mid-morning when I arrived at Bloom, and Renata was just opening the shop. She smiled when she saw me.

“No work and no help for two weeks,” she said. “I’ve been bored out of my mind.”

“Why don’t people marry in December?” I asked.

“What’s romantic about bare trees and gray skies? Couples wait for spring and summer, blue skies, flowers, vacation, all that.”

Blue and gray were equally unromantic in my opinion, I thought, and harsh light was unflattering in photographs. But brides were irrational; I had learned this from Renata, if nothing else.

“When do you need me to work?” I asked.

“I have a big Christmas Day wedding. Then I’ll need you every day through the first weekend in January.”

I agreed, and asked Renata what time I should arrive.

“On Christmas? Oh, sleep in. The wedding’s late, and I’ll buy the flowers the day before. Just make sure you’re here by nine.”

I nodded. Renata withdrew an envelope of cash from the register. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

Later, in the blue room, I opened the envelope and saw that she’d paid me twice as much as she’d promised. Just in time to buy holiday gifts, I thought wryly, tucking the money into my backpack.

I spent most of my bonus on a case of film at a wholesale photography supplier and the remainder at an art store on Market. My dictionary would not be a book; instead, I bought two cloth-covered photo boxes, one orange, the other blue, archival black cardstock cut in five-by-seven-inch rectangles, a spray can of photo mount, and a silver metallic marker.

There were ten days until Christmas. With the exception of shooting my neglected garden in McKinley Square—the heath and helenium surviving despite the bad weather and desertion—I took a break from photography. I had taken twenty-five rolls of film at Grant’s, and it took me the full ten days to have the film developed, sort the prints, mount them on cardstock, and label them. Under each flower photograph, I wrote the common name, followed by the scientific, and on the back I printed the meaning. I made two sets of each flower and placed one in each photo box.

On Christmas Eve, every photo had been mounted and dried. Natalya and her band had gone wherever people go for the holidays, and the apartment was deliciously quiet. Carrying the photo boxes downstairs, I spread the cards out in the empty practice room in neat rows, with aisles wide enough for me to walk down. The cards for the orange box I placed flower side up, the cards for the blue box flower side down. I paced the aisles for hours, alphabetizing first the flowers, then the meanings. When I was done, I replaced all the cards in the boxes and opened Elizabeth’s flower dictionary to admire my progress. It was the middle of winter, and my illustrated dictionary was already half finished.

The pizzeria at the top of the hill was deserted. I took my pizza to go and ate it on Natalya’s bed, looking down over the empty street below. Afterward, I lay down in the blue room. Even though it was quiet, warm, and dark, my eyes kept popping open. A sliver of pale white light shone from the streetlight into Natalya’s room and pushed its way through the crack in the closet door. The light was pencil-thin and drew a line down the wall opposite and through the middle of my photo boxes. The blue box was exactly the same color as the wall, and the orange box, sitting on top of it, looked like it was floating in air. It didn’t belong there.

It belonged on Grant’s bookshelf, across from his orange couch. I had chosen the color specifically for that purpose, even though I hadn’t admitted it to myself. Grant was gone. The need to avoid flower-language miscommunications no longer existed, yet I had purchased an extra box, an orange box, and made a second set of cards. I unlocked the half-door leading to the living room and put the orange box out.

12.

Grant did not come over for blackberry cobbler. He should have, I thought, licking the bottom of the dish the next morning. It was delicious.

As I set the dish in the sink, Elizabeth swept through the back door, breathless. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and I realized that I had never, in nearly a year, seen her without a tight bun at the back of her neck. She smiled, her eyes filled with an unrestrained happiness I’d never seen.

“I’ve figured it out!” she said. “It’s absurd I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“What?” I asked. Her joy made me inexplicably nervous. Licking congealed blackberry juice off a spoon, I watched her.

“When I was at boarding school, Catherine and I wrote letters—until my mother started intercepting them.”

“Intercepting?”

“Taking. She read them all—she didn’t trust me, thought somehow my letters would corrupt Catherine, even though I was a child and Catherine was already nearly an adult. For years we didn’t write at all. But just after my sister’s twentieth birthday, she discovered a Victorian flower dictionary on my grandfather’s bookshelf. She started sending me drawings of flowers, the scientific name printed neatly in the bottom right-hand corner. She sent dozens before following with a simple note that read, ‘Do you know what I’m telling you?’ ”

“Did you know?” I asked.

“No,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head as if remembering her adolescent frustration. “I asked every librarian and teacher I could find. But it was months before my roommate’s great-grandmother, visiting one day, saw the drawings on my wall and told me about the language of flowers. I found my own dictionary in the library and sent my sister a note immediately, with pressed flowers, not drawings, because I was a hopeless artist.”

Elizabeth walked into the living room and returned with a stack of books. She set them on the kitchen table. “For years it was the way we communicated. I sent poems and stories by connecting dried flowers on strings, intertwined with typed words on little slips of paper: and, the, if, it. My sister continued to send drawings, sometimes whole landscapes, with dozens of floral varieties, all labeled and numbered, so I would know which flower to read first to decode the sequence of events and emotions in her life. I lived for those letters, checked the mailbox dozens of times a day.”

“So, how will this help you win her forgiveness?” I asked.

Elizabeth had started toward the garden but stopped suddenly and whirled to face me. “I’m forgiving her,” she said. “Don’t you forget that.” After a deep breath, she continued. “But I’ll tell you how it will help. Catherine will remember how close we were; she’ll remember how I understood her better than anyone else in the world. And even if she’s too remorseful to answer the phone, she’ll answer with flowers. I know she will.”

Elizabeth went outside. When she returned, she held a bouquet of three flowers, all different. Retrieving a cutting board from the counter, she set it on the kitchen table, the flowers and a sharp knife arranged on top.

“I’ll teach you,” Elizabeth said. “And you’ll help me.”

I sat down at the kitchen table. Elizabeth had continued to teach me flowers and their meanings but not in a formal or structured way. The day before we’d passed a handmade purse at the farmer’s market, the fabric printed with small white flowers. Poverty for a purse, Elizabeth had said, shaking her head. She pointed to the flowers and explained the defining features of clematis.

Sitting next to her now, I was thrilled at the prospect of receiving a formal lesson. I pushed my chair as close to Elizabeth as possible. She picked up a walnut-sized dark purple flower with a yellow sun center.

“Primrose,” she said, twirling the pinwheel-shaped flower between her thumb and index finger before placing it, face up, on her smooth white palm. “Childhood.”

I leaned over her hand, my nose only inches from the petals. The primrose had a sharp scent, sugared alcohol and someone’s mother’s perfume. Pulling my nose away, I pushed the air out of my nostrils with force.

Elizabeth laughed. “I don’t like the smell, either. Too sweet, as if it was trying to mask its true, undesirable smell.”

I nodded in agreement.

“So, if we didn’t know this was a primrose, how would we find out?” Elizabeth put down the flower and picked up a pocket-sized book. “This is a field guide of North American wildflowers, divided by color. Primrose should be with the violet-blues.” She handed me the book. I turned to the violet-blues, flipping through the pages until I found the drawing that matched the flower.

“Cusick’s primrose,” I read. “Primrose family, Primulaceae.”

“Good.” She picked up the second of the three flowers, large and yellow, with six pointed petals. “Now this. Lily, majesty.”

Searching the yellows, I found the drawing that matched. I pointed with a damp fingertip and watched the water mark spread. Elizabeth nodded.

“Now, let’s pretend you couldn’t find the drawing, or you weren’t sure you had found the right one. This is when you need to know about flower parts. Using a field guide is like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It begins with simple questions: Does your flower have petals? How many? And each answer leads you to a different set of more complicated questions.”

Elizabeth picked up a kitchen knife and sliced the lily in half, its petals falling open on the cutting board. She pointed to the ovary, pressed my fingertip against the sticky top of the outstretched stigma.

We counted petals, described their shape. Elizabeth taught me the definition of symmetry, the difference between inferior and superior ovaries, and the variations of flower arrangements on a stem. She quizzed me using the third flower she had picked, a violet, small and wilting.

“Good,” she said again, when I had answered an uninterrupted stream of questions. “Very good. You learn quickly.” She pulled back my chair, and I slid down. “Now go sit in the garden while I cook dinner. Spend time in front of every plant you know, and ask yourself the same questions I asked you. How many petals, what color, what shape. If you know it’s a rose, what makes it a rose and not a sunflower?”

Elizabeth was still rattling off questions as I skipped toward the kitchen door.

“Pick out something for Catherine!” she called.

I disappeared down the steps.

13.

Renata looked surprised to see me sitting on the curb at seven a.m. when she parked her truck on the empty street. I had been up all night, and looked it. She raised her eyebrows and smiled.

“Stay up waiting for Santa?” she asked. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you the truth?”

“No,” I said. “No one ever did.”

I followed Renata into the walk-in and helped her pull out the buckets of red roses, white carnations, and baby’s breath. They were my least favorite flowers. “Please tell me this was at the request of a dangerous bride.”

“She threatened me with my life,” she said. We shared a disdain for red roses.

Renata left, and when she came back with two cups of coffee, I had already finished three centerpieces.

“Thanks,” I said, reaching for the paper cup.

“You’re welcome. And slow down. The faster we finish, the more time I’ll have to spend at my mother’s Christmas party.”

I picked up a rose and cut off the thorns in slow motion, lining up the sharp spikes on the table.

“Better,” she said, “but not quite slow enough.”

We worked with exaggerated sluggishness for the rest of the morning, but we were still finished by noon. Renata picked up the order and checked and double-checked our arrangements. She set down the list.

“That’s it?”

“Yes,” she said, “unfortunately. Just the delivery and then the Christmas party—you’re coming with me.”

“No thanks,” I said, taking a final sip of cold coffee and putting on my backpack.

“Did that sound optional to you? It’s not.”

I could have fought her on it, but I was feeling indebted for the bonus, and I was in the mood for holiday food if not holiday cheer. I didn’t know anything about Russian food, but it had to be better than the processed ham I had planned on eating right out of the package.

“Whatever,” I said. “But I have somewhere to be by five.”

Renata laughed. She must have known it was inconceivable that I had anywhere to be on Christmas.

Renata’s mother lived in the Richmond District, and we took the longest route possible across the city.

“My mother’s too much,” Renata said.

“In what way?” I asked.

“In every way,” she said.

We pulled up in front of a bright pink house. A Christmas flag flew on a wooden pole, and the small porch was crowded with glowing plastic creatures: angels, reindeer, chipmunks in Santa hats, and dancing penguins with knit scarves.

Renata pushed the door open, and we walked into a wall of heat. Men and women sat on the cushions, arms, and back of a single couch; school-age boys and girls lay on their stomachs on the shag carpet, toddlers crawling over their skinny legs. I stepped in and took off my jacket and sweater, but the path to the coat closet, where Renata greeted someone about my age, was completely blocked by small body parts.

As I stood by the door, an older, softer version of Renata pushed her way through the crowd. She carried a large wooden tray with sliced oranges, nuts, figs, and dates.

“Victoria!” she exclaimed when she saw me. She handed the tray to Natalya, who was lounged on the couch, and climbed over the children blocking her way to where I stood. When she hugged me, my face pressed into her armpit and the flared sleeves of her gray wool sweater wrapped around my back like living things. She was a tall woman, and strong—and when I finally wriggled away, she grasped my shoulders and tilted my face up to look at her. “Sweet Victoria,” she said, her long, wavy white hair spilling forward and tickling my cheeks. “My daughters have told me so much about you—I loved you even before I met you.”

She smelled of primrose and apple cider. I peeled myself away. “Thank you for inviting me to your party, Mrs.—” I stopped, realizing Renata had never told me her name.

“Marta Rubina,” she said. “But I only answer to Mother Ruby.” She reached forward as if to shake hands, then laughed and hugged me again. We were wedged into the corner, and only the thick plaster walls behind my back kept me standing. She pulled me forward, her arm around my shoulders, and led me around the room. The children scattered out of the way, and Renata, perched on a folding chair in the corner, watched with an amused smile.

Mother Ruby guided me into the kitchen, where she sat me at a table with two heaping plates of food. The first held a large baked fish, whole, with spices and some kind of root vegetables. The second held beans, peas, and potatoes with parsley. She handed me a fork and a spoon, and a bowl of mushroom soup. “We ate hours ago,” she said, “but I saved you food. Renata told me you’d be hungry—which pleased me greatly. I love nothing more than feeding family.”

Mother Ruby sat down across from me. She boned my fish, poked her finger in my peas, and reheated them after exclaiming over the temperature. She introduced me to everyone who walked by: daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren, boyfriends and girlfriends of various family members.

I looked up and nodded but did not put down my fork.* * *

I fell asleep at Mother Ruby’s. I hadn’t meant to. After dinner, I escaped into an empty guest room, and between the heavy food and the previous night’s insomnia, I was unconscious almost before I lay down.

The smell of coffee pulled me out of bed the next morning. Stretching, I wandered down the hall until I found the bathroom. The door was open. Inside, Mother Ruby was in the shower behind a clear plastic curtain. When I saw her, I spun around and ran back down the hall.

“Come in!” she called after me. “There’s only one bathroom. Don’t pay any attention to me!”

I found Renata in the kitchen, pouring coffee. She handed me a mug.

“Your mother’s in the shower,” I said.

“With the door open, I’m sure,” she said, yawning.

I nodded.

“Sorry about that.”

I poured a cup of coffee and leaned against the kitchen sink.

“My mother was a midwife in Russia,” Renata said. “So she’s used to seeing women naked just moments after meeting them. America in the seventies worked for her just fine, and I don’t think she’s noticed that times have changed.”

Mother Ruby came into the kitchen then, tied up in a bright coral terry-cloth robe. “What’s changed?” she asked.

Renata shook her head. “Nudity.”

“I don’t think nudity’s changed since the birth of the first human,” Mother Ruby said. “Only society has changed.”

Renata rolled her eyes and turned to me. “My mother and I have been having this argument since I was old enough to talk. When I was ten, I told her I wouldn’t have kids because I never wanted to be naked in front of her again. And look at me—fifty and childless.”

Mother Ruby broke an egg into a pan, and it crackled. “I delivered all twelve of my grandchildren,” she told me with pride.

“You’re still a midwife?”

“Not legally,” she said. “But I still get two a.m. calls from all over this city. And I go every time.” She handed me a plate of eggs over easy.

“Thank you,” I said. I ate them and then walked down the hall to the bathroom, locking the door behind me.* * *

“A little more warning next time,” I told Renata as we drove to Bloom later that morning. We had a full week of weddings ahead of us, and we were both rested and well fed.

“If I had warned you,” Renata said, “you wouldn’t have come. And you needed a little rest and nutrition. Don’t try to tell me you didn’t.”

I didn’t argue.

“My mother’s a bit of a legend in the midwifery circle. She’s seen everything, and her outcomes are far better than the outcomes of modern medicine, even when they shouldn’t be. She’ll likely grow on you; she does on most people.”

“Most people,” I guessed, “but not you?”

“I respect my mother,” Renata said, pausing. “We’re just different. Everyone assumes there’s some kind of biological consistency between mothers and their children, but that’s not always the case. You don’t know my other sisters, but look at Natalya, my mother, and me.” She was right; the three couldn’t have been more different.

All day, as I organized orders and made lists of flowers and quantities for upcoming weddings, I thought about Grant’s mother. I remembered the pale hand reaching out of the darkness the afternoon Elizabeth and I visited. What had it been like to be Grant as a child? Alone except for the flowers, his mother slipping from the past to the present as she walked from room to room. I would ask Grant, I decided, if he would talk to me again.

But he wasn’t at the flower market that week, or the week after. His stall stood empty, the white plywood peeling and abandoned-looking. I wondered if he would come back, or if the thought of seeing me again was enough to keep him away permanently.

Consumed by thoughts of Grant’s absence, the quality of my work suffered. Renata began sitting beside me at the worktable, and instead of our usual silence, she told me long, humorous stories about her mother, her sisters, her nieces and nephews. I only half listened, but the constant narration was enough to keep me focused on the flowers.

The new year came and went, a flurry of white weddings and silver-bell-trimmed bouquets. Grant still had not returned to the flower market. Renata gave me the week off, and I holed up inside the blue room, coming out only to eat and to use the bathroom. Every time I emerged through my half-door, I came face-to-face with the orange photo box, and I was flooded with a vague sense of loss.

Renata had not requested my help until the following Sunday, but on Saturday afternoon there was a knock on my door. I poked my head out and saw Natalya, still in her pajamas, clearly annoyed.

“Renata called,” she said. “She needs you. She said to take a shower and come as fast as you can.”

Take a shower? It seemed like an odd request from Renata. She probably needed me to accompany her to a delivery, and rightly assumed I’d been asleep and unbathed for most of the week.

I took my time in the shower, soaping and shampooing and brushing my teeth with mouthfuls of water as hot as I could stand it. When I dried myself with a towel, my skin was red and splotchy. I put on my nicest outfit: black suit pants and a soft white blouse, the material sewn in tucks like an old-fashioned tuxedo shirt. Before leaving the bathroom, I trimmed my hair with precision and blow-dried the snips of hair off my shirt.

As I neared Bloom I saw a familiar figure sitting on the deserted curb, an open cardboard box in his lap. Grant. So that was why Renata had called. I stopped walking and took in his profile, serious and watchful. He turned in my direction and stood up.

We walked toward each other, our short steps matched, until we met in the middle of the steep hill, Grant looming above me. We were far enough apart that I couldn’t see the contents of the box, which he held below his chin.

“You look nice,” he said.

“Thank you.” I would have returned the compliment, except he didn’t. He had been working all morning; I could tell by the dirt on his knees and the fresh mud on his boots. He smelled, too, not like flowers but like a dirty man: equal parts sweat, smoke, and soil.

“I didn’t change,” he said, seeming suddenly aware of his appearance. “I should have.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I meant the words to be gracious, but they sounded dismissive. Grant’s face fell, and I felt a flash of anger (not at Grant but at myself, for never having mastered the subtleties of tone). I moved a step closer to him, an awkward gesture of apology.

“I know it doesn’t,” he said. “I just stopped by because I thought you’d want these—for your friend.” He lowered the box. Inside I saw the six ceramic pots of jonquil, the yellow flowers tall and open in bouncing clusters. An intoxicating sweetness wafted from the blossoms.

I reached inside and grabbed the pots, attempting to extract all six simultaneously. I wanted to surround myself in the color. Grant lowered the box, and through a gentle tug-of-war I succeeded in lifting all six. I buried my face in the petals. For only a moment they balanced in my arms, and then the middle two slipped out of my grasp. The pots shattered on the sidewalk, the bulbs coming unburied and the stalks bending at angles. Grant dropped to his knees and began to gather the flowers.

I hugged the remaining four to my body, lowering them so that I could watch him over the petals. His strong hands cupped the bulbs and straightened the stems, and he wound long, pointed leaves around the stalks where they had been weakened by the fall.

“Where do you want these?” he asked, looking up.

I dropped down, kneeling beside him.

“Here,” I said, and motioned with my chin for him to lay the flowers on top of the ones I held. He parted the clusters and set the exposed bulbs on top of the soil, the broken flowers nestled among the rest. His hands idled among the stems, and in his slow, regular breaths, I could feel him preparing to leave.

I loosened my arms, and the flowerpots slid out of my lap as if in slow motion, settling by my thighs on the steep sidewalk. Grant’s hands fell onto my knees. I picked them up and brought them to my face, pressing them to my lips, my cheeks, and my eyelids. I wrapped his hands around the back of my neck and pulled him closer. Our foreheads touched. I closed my eyes, and our lips touched. His lips were full and soft, even as his upper lip scratched my own. He held his breath, and I kissed him again, harder this time, hungry. On my knees, I shuffled up the hill, knocking over the pots in a desire to be closer to Grant, to kiss him harder, longer, to show him how much I’d missed him.

When we pulled apart, finally, out of breath, a single pot had rolled to the bottom of the hill, its blossoms straight and tall and almost blindingly yellow in the winter sun.

Maybe I was wrong, I thought, watching the clusters sway in the breeze. Maybe the essence of each flower’s meaning really was contained somewhere within its sturdy stem, its soft gathering of petals.

Annemarie, I knew, would be satisfied with the jonquil.

14.

Sitting on the front porch, I sifted through the pile of tiny white chamomile blossoms at my feet. A five-foot string connected Elizabeth and me, a needle on each end. We worked quickly, spearing spongy yellow centers and pushing flowers into the middle. Every few minutes I stopped, distracted by an insect or a splinter of wood, but Elizabeth did not pause in her movements. After an hour the task was complete, a delicate, petaled ribbon connecting us.

“Definition?” I asked. Elizabeth was folded over, stringing a square of paper onto the end of the ribbon. I glimpsed August and the number 2, along with a repetition of the word please, and a line that struck me as a lie: I can’t do this without you.

Elizabeth coiled the flowered rope. “Energy in adversity.”

Nothing could have more succinctly captured her mind-set. Since deciding to communicate with her sister through flowers, Elizabeth had been constantly in motion, planting seeds, watering, checking the progress of half-open buds, and waiting—a waiting that was like an action itself, dynamic and pacing—for a response.

“Come with me,” Elizabeth said, climbing into her truck and setting the coiled chamomile between us.

We drove to Catherine’s. Elizabeth left the engine running as she hopped out, wound the flowered string around the wooden post of Catherine’s mailbox, and tucked the note inside. Climbing back into the truck, she continued driving down the road, away from the vineyard.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Shopping,” Elizabeth said. Her hair flapped around her face in the wind, and she pulled it back into a rubber band quickly, steering with her knees. She shot a mischievous smile in my direction.

“Where?” I asked. There was a general store less than a mile away, where Elizabeth had purchased my rain parka and gardening shoes, but it was in the opposite direction.

“Chestnut Street,” she said. “San Francisco. They have a whole row of children’s boutiques, the kind with two-hundred-dollar velour sweat suits for newborns, toddler dresses made out of silk organza—that sort of thing. One dress for your adoption will cost me more than what I can get for two tons of grapes—but if not now, when? You’re ten, you know? Next week you’ll be my little girl, but you won’t be a little girl much longer. I have to dress you up while I can.” She smiled at me again, her smile an invitation.

I inched closer to her, pressing my head into her shoulder as we drove. She’d taught me to sit up straight and away from her in the truck, so that we wouldn’t get pulled over for a seat belt violation, but today, her smile said, was an exception. She drove with one arm on the steering wheel, the other around my shoulders, squeezing me to her. I’d never been taken shopping for new clothes, not once, and it seemed to me the perfect way to start my life as someone’s daughter. I hummed along with the oldies on the radio as we drove over the bridge and into the city, struggling with the conflicting emotions of wanting the day to last forever and wanting the day to be over and the next two as well. My court date was only three days away.

On Chestnut Street, Elizabeth parked the car, and I followed her into an open doorway. The shop was empty except for a saleswoman standing at a glass counter, arranging diamond-studded clips to a felt cutout of a tree. “May I help you?” she asked, her smile taking me in with what appeared to be genuine interest. “Looking for something special?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Something for Victoria.”

“And how old are you, sweetheart? Seven? Eight?”

“Ten,” I said.

The saleswoman looked embarrassed, but her words didn’t offend me. “I was warned never to guess,” she said. “Let me show you what I have in your size.” I followed her to the back of the store, where a single row of dresses hung opposite a mirror with a wooden ballet bar. Elizabeth grasped the bar and did an exaggerated squat, her knees bending deeply at angles, her toes pointed out. She was thin and pointy like a classical ballerina, but not even close to graceful. We both laughed.

I thumbed through the dresses once, then a second time. “If there isn’t anything you like,” Elizabeth said from behind me, “there’re other shops.”

But that wasn’t the problem. I liked all the dresses, every single one. My hand settled on the velvet ribbons of a halter. Pulling the dress off the bar, I held it up against my body. It was only a size eight but reached well below my knees. The light blue top was separated from the patterned skirt by a brown velvet ribbon that tied behind the back. It was the pattern of the full skirt I was drawn to: raised brown-velvet flowers over a background of blue. The concentric petals reminded me of hundred-petaled roses or chrysanthemum. I looked at Elizabeth.

“Try it on,” she said.

In the small dressing room, I took off my clothes. Standing in front of the mirror in my white cotton underpants, Elizabeth seated behind me, I took in my pale image, skin light and unmarked, my waist straight over narrow hips. Elizabeth studied my body with such pride I imagined it to be the way a mother looked at a biological daughter, whose every limb had been formed within her body.

“Arms up,” she said. Slipping the dress over my head, she tied the ribbons of the halter-top under my hair and the second set of ribbons above my waistline.

The dress fit me perfectly. I gazed at my reflection, my arms held out stiffly on either side of the full skirt.

When my eyes met Elizabeth’s, her face was so full of emotion I couldn’t tell if she would laugh or cry. She pulled me to her, her forearms under my armpits, hands clasped over my chest. The back of my head pressed into her ribs.

“Look at you,” she said. “My baby.” And somehow, in that moment, her words spoke the truth. I had the vague sense of being a very young child—a newborn, even—tightly held and cradled in her arms. It was as if the childhood I had lived belonged to someone else, a girl who no longer existed, a girl who had been replaced by the one in the mirror.

“Catherine will love you, too,” Elizabeth whispered. “You’ll see.”

15.

Before the start of wedding season, Renata hired me full-time. She offered me benefits or a bonus—not both. I was perfectly healthy and tired of relying on Grant to drive me to and from the flower farm, so I took the cash.

The drummer in Natalya’s band sold me his old hatchback. His new drum kit—which seemed significantly louder than his old one—did not fit inside, so he took my bonus and gave me the pink slip. It seemed like a fair exchange, but I knew nothing about the value of cars. I didn’t have a license and didn’t know how to drive. Grant towed the hatchback from Bloom to the farm on the back of his flower truck and didn’t let me out of the front gate for weeks. When he did, it was just to drive to the drugstore and back. Still, I was terrified. It took another month before I was ready to drive into the city alone.

That spring I spent mornings working for Renata and afternoons searching for the remaining flowers for my dictionary. After capturing everything on Grant’s farm, I moved on to Golden Gate Park and the waterfront. All of Northern California was a botanical garden, with wildflowers springing up between busy freeways and chamomile thriving in sidewalk cracks. Sometimes Grant accompanied me; he was good at plant identification but tired quickly of small, square-block city parks and skinny sunbathers.

On weekends, if Renata and I finished in time, Grant and I went hiking in the redwoods north of San Francisco. We always sat in the parking lot long enough to see which hiking trails were the most crowded before choosing our direction. Alone in the forest, Grant was content to watch me photograph for hours, and he would talk in detail about every plant species and its relation to the others in the ecosystem. When he finished telling me what he knew, he would lean back against the soft moss covering the trunk of a redwood tree and look up through the branches to the pale sky. Silence stretched between us, and I always expected him to bring up Elizabeth, or Catherine, or the night he accused me of lying. I spent hours thinking of what I would say, how I would explain the truth without turning him against me forever. But Grant did not bring up the past, not in the forest or anywhere else. It seemed he was content to keep our life together confined to the flowers and the present moment.

Many nights I slept in the water tower. Grant had taken up cooking in a serious way, and his kitchen counter was stacked with illustrated cookbooks. As I sat at the kitchen table and read, or looked out the window, or told an obnoxious bride story, Grant chopped and seasoned and stirred. After dinner he would kiss me, only once, and wait to see my reaction. Sometimes I kissed him back, and he would pull me to him, and we would stand intertwined in the doorway for half an hour; other times my lips remained cold and unmoving. Even I didn’t know how I would react on any given day. About our deepening relationship, I felt fear and desire in equal, unpredictable parts. At the end of each night he walked outside to wherever it was he slept, and I locked the door behind him.

On a weeknight in late May, after months of this ritual, Grant leaned forward as if to kiss me but stopped just inches from my lips. He put his hands on the small of my back and pulled me to him so that the length of our bodies touched but not our faces. “I think it’s time,” he said.

“For what?” I asked.

“For me to have my bed back.”

I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth and looked out the window.

“What’re you afraid of?” he asked, when I had been quiet for a long time.

I thought about his question. He was right, I knew, that it was fear that kept us apart; but of what, specifically, was I afraid?

“I don’t like to be touched,” I said, repeating Meredith’s long-ago words. But even as I spoke them, I knew they sounded ridiculous. Our entire bodies were pressed together, and I didn’t pull away.

“Then I won’t touch you,” he said. “Not unless you ask me to.”

“Not even when I’m asleep?”

“Especially not then.” I knew he wouldn’t.

I nodded. “You can sleep in your bed,” I said. “But I’m sleeping on the couch. And I better not wake up with you beside me or I’m driving straight home.”

“You won’t,” Grant said. “I promise.”

That night I lay awake on the love seat, trying not to fall asleep until Grant did, but he wasn’t sleeping, either. I heard him rolling around above me, rearranging the covers, knocking over a stack of books. Finally, after a long period of silence, when I was sure he had fallen asleep, I heard a soft tapping on the ceiling above me.

“Victoria?” A whisper came spiraling down the stairs.

“Yeah?”

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night.” I pressed a smile into the orange velour.

After a full season of jonquil, Annemarie was a different person. She came in every Friday morning for a fresh bouquet, and her skin was pinker and her body, finally free from the belted jacket, curved underneath thin cotton sweaters. Bethany, she told me, had gone to Europe for a month with Ray and would come back engaged. She said it with certainty, as if it had already happened.

Annemarie brought her friends, many with frilly-dressed little girls and all with disappointing marriages. They leaned on the counter while their children pulled flowers out of buckets taller than they were and spun around the room. The women discussed the details of their relationships, trying to reduce their problems to a single word. I had explained the importance of specificity, and the ladies clung to my words. The conversations were sad, and amusing, and strangely hopeful all at the same time. The relentlessness with which these women tried to repair their relationships was foreign to me; I didn’t understand why they didn’t simply give up.

I knew that if it were me I would have let go: of the man, of the child, and of the women with whom I discussed them. But for the first time in my life, this thought did not bring me relief. I began to notice the ways in which I kept myself isolated. There were obvious things, such as living in a closet with six locks, and subtler ones, such as working on the opposite side of the table from Renata or standing behind the cash register when I talked to customers. Whenever possible, I separated my body from those around me with plaster walls, solid wood tables, or heavy metal objects.

But somehow, over six careful months, Grant had broken through this. I not only permitted his touch, I craved it, and I started to wonder if, perhaps, change was possible for me. I began to hope my pattern of letting go was something that could be outgrown, like a childhood dislike of onions or spicy food.

By the end of May I had nearly completed my dictionary. I captured images of many of the remaining, elusive plants at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. After printing, mounting, and labeling each photo, I put X’s in my dictionary and scanned the pages to see how many flowers were left. Only one: the cherry blossom. I was upset with myself for the omission. There were plenty of cherry trees in the Bay Area, dozens of varietals in the Japanese Tea Garden alone. But their bloom period was short—weeks or even days, depending on the year—and I had been too distracted by spring to capture their brief moment of beauty.

Grant would know where to find a cherry blossom, even now, long past its season. I wrote the single missing flower on a scrap of paper and taped it to the outside of the orange box. It was time to bring it to him.

I put the box in the backseat of my car and strapped it in with a seat belt. It was Sunday, and I got to the water tower before Grant got home from the farmers’ market. Letting myself in with the spare key, I opened the cupboard and helped myself to a loaf of raisin bread. The box, bright orange on the weathered wood table, took up more space than it should have. It felt loud and new in the small kitchen of quiet antique appliances. I was about to take it upstairs when I heard Grant’s truck settle into the gravel.

He opened the door and went immediately to the box.

“Is this it?” he asked.

I nodded, handing him the scrap of paper with the missing flower. “But not quite complete.”

Grant let the scrap of paper fall to the floor and opened the lid. He flipped through the cards, admiring my photographs one at a time. I turned one over to show him the printed flower meanings, then replaced it and shut the lid on his fingers.

“You can look later,” I said, retrieving the note from the floor and flapping it in the air in front of him. “Right now I need help finding this.”

Grant held up the paper and read the missing flower. He shook his head. “A cherry blossom? You’ll have to wait until next April.”

My camera tapped against the table. “Almost a full year? I can’t wait that long.”

Grant laughed. “What do you want me to do? Transplant a cherry tree into my greenhouse? Even then, it wouldn’t bloom.”

“So, what can I do?”

He thought for a moment, knowing I wouldn’t give up easily. “Look in my botany textbooks,” he suggested.

I wrinkled my nose and leaned forward until I was close enough to kiss him, but I didn’t. Instead, I rubbed my nose against his stubbly cheek and bit his ear. “Please?”

“Please what?” he asked.

“Please suggest something more beautiful than a textbook illustration.”

Grant looked out the window. He seemed to be debating something internally. It was almost as if he had possession of a late-blooming cherry blossom in his pocket and was trying to decide if I was important and trustworthy enough to receive it. Finally, he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Follow me.”

Grant walked out the door. I put my camera around my neck and walked in his footsteps. We crossed the gravel and climbed the steps of the main house. He withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the back door, which opened into a laundry room. A pale pink woman’s blouse fluttered on the drying rack. Grant led me into the kitchen, where the curtains were drawn, and the counters were dusty and dark. All the appliances were unplugged, and the absolute quiet of the refrigerator was unsettling.

From the kitchen we walked through a swinging door to the dining room. The table had been pushed to the side and a sleeping bag was spread out on the wood floor. I recognized Grant’s sweatshirt and balled socks beside it.

“When you had evicted me from my own home,” he said, smiling and pointing to the pile.

“Don’t you have a bedroom here?”

Grant nodded. “I haven’t slept there for a decade, though,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve only been upstairs once since my mother died.”

The stairs loomed on my left, a wide wooden banister curving up the side of the room. Grant took a step toward them.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.” At the top of the stairs we came to a long hall, with doors shut on both sides of the corridor. The hallway ended in front of five steps. We walked up and ducked through a low door.

The small room was hotter than the rest of the house, and filled with the smell of dust and dried paint. I knew before locating the gabled, boarded-up window that we were in Catherine’s studio. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I took in the paneled walls, the long drafting table, and the shelves of art supplies. Half-empty glass jars of purple paint lined the top shelf, paintbrushes frozen in hard pools of lavender and periwinkle. A string circling the room displayed drawings—large, intricately rendered flowers in graphite and charcoal—hung with wooden clothespins.

“My mother was an artist,” Grant said, gesturing to the work. “She spent hours of every day up here. For most of my life, she drew only flowers: rare ones, tropical ones, or short-blooming, delicate ones. She had a fear of not having the right flower to express what she wanted to say at any given moment.”

He led me to an oak file cabinet in the corner of the room and opened the middle drawer. It was labeled L–Q. Every file was marked with a plant name, and each held a file folder with a single drawing: parsley, passionflower, peppermint, periwinkle, pineapple, and pink. He thumbed through the P’s until he got to poplar, white. He withdrew the file folder and opened it; it was empty. The drawing was in the blue room, still wrapped in a silk ribbon with the inked day and time of our first date.

Grant closed the drawer and opened another, looking through the files until he found a drawing of a cherry blossom. He placed it on the empty drafting table and disappeared through the door.

I sat down, admiring the work. The lines were quick, confident, the shadows deep and complex. The blossom filled the entire paper, and its beauty was nearly overwhelming. I bit my lip.

Grant returned, watching my expression as I studied the paper. “Definition?” he asked.

“Good education,” I said.

He shook his head. “Impermanence. The beauty and transience of life.”

This time, he was right. I nodded.

Grant held up a hammer he had retrieved and pried the board off the window. Light flooded through the broken glass and onto the tabletop like a spotlight. He placed the drawing in the rectangles of light and sat on the edge of the table. “Shoot,” he said, caressing first the camera and then my body beneath it.

He watched as I extracted the camera from its case and turned to the image. I shot from every angle: standing on the floor, on a chair, and then in front of the window, blocking the harsh light. I adjusted the shutter speed and the focus. Grant’s eyes were on my fingers, my face, and my feet crouched on the tabletop. I went through an entire roll. His eyes did not waver as I loaded a second roll and then a third. My skin lifted under his gaze as if the surface of my body were reaching toward him without the permission of my mind.

When I was done, I returned the drawing to the file folder. The next day I would have the film developed, and my dictionary would be complete. I turned the camera to where Grant sat, unmoving, on the table, and studied his face through the viewfinder.

Sunlight illuminated his profile. Circling, I captured his face in light and shadow. The camera clicked as I walked around him, starting at the top of his head and following his hairline down to the collar of his shirt. I rolled up his sleeves and photographed his forearms, the tight, protruding muscle in his wrist, his thick fingers and dirt-filled fingernails. I took off his shoes and shot the bottoms of his feet. When I ran out of film, I took off the camera.

I unbuttoned my blouse and took it off, too.

The bumps disappeared from the skin of my arms and appeared on Grant’s. I climbed onto the table.

He folded his feet under him and moved to face me, then pressed his hands flat onto my stomach and held them there. His fingers lifted and fell as I breathed deep into my belly. My own fingers, clutching the edge of the table, were white.

He moved his hands around my back to my bra, unhooking it gently, one clasp at a time. Peeling my fingers from the tabletop, he slipped the bra off one arm, then the other. I reached for the table’s edge again, squeezing as if trying to maintain balance on a rocking boat.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded.

He lay me down on the table, supporting my head as it eased onto the hard surface. He removed the rest of my clothes, and then his own.

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.

16.

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.

17.

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 entrée 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 turned on the water in the sink and in the shower, hoping the noise would drown out the series of retches that followed.

Grant knocked on the door, but I didn’t open it. He went away and came back a half-hour later, but I still didn’t answer his soft tapping. There wasn’t enough room to lie flat on the bathroom floor, so I lay folded over on my side, my legs pressed against the door and my back curved against the ceramic tub. My fingers traced the white hexagonal tile and drew patterns of six-petaled flowers. It was after eleven when I emerged, the shapes of the tile etched deeply into the flesh of my cheek and exposed shoulder.

I hoped Grant would be asleep, but he was sitting upright on the love seat, all the lights turned out.

“Was it the food?” he asked.

I shook my head. I didn’t know what it was, but it definitely wasn’t the food. “The roast was incredible.”

I sat down beside him, our thighs touching through matching dark denim. “Then what?” he asked.

“I’m sick,” I said, but I avoided his eyes. I didn’t believe that to be the truth, and I knew he didn’t, either. As a child I had vomited from closeness: from touch or the threat of touch. Foster parents towering over me, shoving my uncooperative arms into a jacket, teachers ripping hats from my head, their fingers lingering too long on my tangled hair, had forced my stomach into uncontrollable convulsions. Once, shortly after moving in with Elizabeth, we had eaten a picnic dinner in the garden. I had overeaten, as I did at every meal that fall, and, unable to move, I had allowed Elizabeth to pick me up and carry me back to the house. She had barely set me down on the porch before I threw up over the side of the railing.

I looked at Grant. He had been touching me, intimately, for months. Without being aware of it, I had been waiting for this to happen.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said. “I don’t want you to catch it.”

“I won’t,” Grant said, taking my hand and pulling me up. “Come upstairs.”

I did as he asked.

18.

The morning of my adoption hearing, I awoke at sunrise.

Sitting up, I turned and leaned against the cool wall, the comforter pulled up to my chin. Light traveled lazily through the window, the soft beam illuminating my dresser and open closet door. In many ways, the room looked the same as it had when I’d entered a year before; it contained the same furniture, the same white comforter, and the same stacks of clothes, many of which I had yet to grow into. But all around me were signs of the girl I had become: library books stacked on the desk with titles such as Botany on Your Plate and The Ultimate Book of Mix-It-Yourself Concoctions for Your Garden, a photograph of Elizabeth and me that Carlos had taken, our bright pink winter cheeks pressed close together, and a wastepaper basket full of flower drawings for Elizabeth, none of which I’d deemed good enough to give her. It was my last morning in the room as a foster child, and I gazed around, as I always did—surveying objects as if they belonged to someone else. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I will feel different. I will wake up, look around, and see a room—a life—that is mine and will never be taken away from me.

Moving quietly down the hall, I listened for Elizabeth. Though it was early, I was surprised to hear the house quiet, to see her bedroom door shut. I had imagined her to be as sleepless as I was. The day before had been my birthday, and though Elizabeth had made cupcakes and we’d frosted them with thick purple roses, the anticipation of my adoption had mostly eclipsed the celebration of the day. After dinner, we’d distractedly licked off the frosting, our gazes shifting out the window, waiting for the sky to darken so the new day would begin. Lying awake in bed, my body wrapped in the long floral nightgown Elizabeth had given me as a present, I’d been more excited than on every Christmas Eve of my life put together. Perhaps Elizabeth had been unable to sleep, too, I thought, and was sleeping in because she’d been up half the night.

In the bathroom was the dress we’d purchased together, hanging in plastic on a hook behind the door. I washed my face and brushed my hair before pulling it off the hanger.

It was hard to put on without Elizabeth, but I was determined. I wanted to see the look on her face when she awoke to find me dressed and sitting at the kitchen table, waiting. I wanted her to understand that I was ready. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I pulled the dress on backward, zipped it up, and then twisted it around until the zipper ran the length of my spine. The ribbons were thick and hard to tie. After multiple failed attempts, I settled for a loose square knot at the back of my neck. Around my waist I did the same.

When I went downstairs, the clock on the stove read eight o’clock. Opening the refrigerator, I scanned the full shelves and chose a small container of vanilla yogurt. I peeled back the seal, poking at a layer of thick cream with a spoon, but I wasn’t hungry. I was nervous. Elizabeth had never slept in, not once in the year I’d been with her. For a full hour I sat at the kitchen table, my eyes on the clock.

At nine o’clock, I climbed the stairs and knocked on her bedroom door. The knot around my neck had loosened, and the front of the dress hung too low, exposing my protruding chest bone. I didn’t look as glamorous, I knew, as I had in the store. When Elizabeth did not answer or call out, I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. Pushing the door quietly, I stepped inside.

Elizabeth’s eyes were open. She stared at the ceiling, and she did not shift her gaze when I crossed the room to stand by the side of the bed.

“It’s nine o’clock,” I said.

Elizabeth did not respond.

“We have to see the judge at eleven. Shouldn’t we go, to get checked in and everything?”

Still, she did not acknowledge my presence. I stepped closer and leaned in, thinking she might be asleep, even though her eyes were wide open. I’d had a roommate who slept that way once, and every night I waited for her to fall asleep first, so that I could shut her eyelids. I didn’t like the feeling of being watched.

I started to shake Elizabeth, gently. She did not blink. “Elizabeth?” I said, my voice a whisper. “It’s Victoria.” I pressed my fingers into the space between her collarbones. Her pulse beat calmly, seeming to tick away the seconds until my adoption. Stand up, I pleaded silently. The thought of missing our court date, of having it postponed for a month, a week, even just another day, was incomprehensible. I began to shake her, my hands clutching her shoulders. Her head wobbled loosely on her neck.

“Stop,” she said finally, the word barely audible.

“Aren’t you getting up?” I asked, my voice breaking. “Aren’t we going to court?”

Tears leaked out of Elizabeth’s eyes, and she did not lift her hand to wipe them. I followed their path with my eyes and saw the pillow was already wet where they landed. “I can’t,” she said.

“What do you mean? I can help you.”

“No,” she said. “I can’t.” She was quiet a long time. I leaned so close that when she finally spoke again, her lips grazed my ear. “This isn’t a family,” she said softly. “Just me and you alone in this house. It isn’t a family. I can’t do this to you.”

I sat down on the foot of the bed. Elizabeth didn’t move, didn’t speak again, but I sat where I was for the rest of the morning, waiting.

19.

The nausea didn’t go away, but I learned to hide it. I vomited in the shower every morning until the drain started to clog. After that, I didn’t shower, racing to my car before Grant got up, blaming Renata and an impossible summer wedding schedule. The feeling followed me throughout the day. The scent of the flowers at work made it worse, but the coolness of the walk-in brought relief. I took afternoon naps among the chilled buckets.

I don’t know how long things would have continued this way if Renata hadn’t confronted me in the walk-in. The heavy metal door closed behind her with a loud click, and she toed me awake in the darkness.

“You think I don’t know you’re pregnant?” she asked.

My heart beat against its nut-hard shell. Pregnant. The word floated in the room between us, unwanted. I wished it would slip under the door, onto the street, and into the body of someone who wanted it. There were plenty of women dreaming of motherhood, but neither Renata nor I was one of them.

“I’m not,” I said, but without as much force as I’d intended.

“You can stay in denial as long as you want, but I’m getting you health insurance before that baby is full term and you’re standing there birthing it in front of my store.”

I didn’t move. Renata went to kick me again, but it turned into a gentle nudge on what I now noticed was my fattening middle.

“Get up,” she said, “and sit at the table. The stack of papers you have to sign will take most of the afternoon.”

I stood up and walked out of the walk-in, past the papers stacked high on the worktable, and out onto the sidewalk. Dry-heaving into the gutter, I started to run. Renata called my name, repeatedly and with increasing volume, but I didn’t look back.

When I reached the grocery store on the corner of 17th and Potrero, I was exhausted and out of breath. I collapsed onto a curb and heaved. An old woman with a bagful of groceries stopped and put her hand on my shoulder, asking me if I was okay. I slapped her hand away, and she dropped her groceries. In the commotion of the gathering crowd, I slipped into the store. I bought a three-pack of pregnancy tests and walked back to the blue room, the light paper box a stone in my backpack.

Natalya was still asleep, her bedroom door open. She had stopped closing it months ago, when I’d all but stopped living there, and slammed it shut whenever I surprised her with an appearance. Closing her door silently, I shut myself in the bathroom.

I peed on all three sticks and lined them up on the edge of the sink. It was supposed to take three minutes, but it didn’t.

Sliding open the bathroom window, I threw them out one at a time. They bounced and settled on the flat gravel roof just a foot below the window, the results still readable. I sat down on the lid of the toilet and put my head in my hands. The last thing I wanted was for Natalya to know; Renata was bad enough. If Mother Ruby found out, she’d be living in the blue room with me, feeding me fried eggs day and night, and placing her hands on my stomach every five minutes.

I walked into the kitchen and climbed onto the counter. Natalya and her band often climbed onto the roof this way, but I’d never tried it. The window over the kitchen sink was small but not impossible to get through, even with my body in its widening state.

The roof was littered with cigarette butts and an empty vodka bottle. Crawling over them, I gathered the pregnancy tests and put all three in my pocket. I stood up slowly, dizzy from the exertion and the height, and looked around.

The view was astounding, as much because I had never noticed it as for the actual sight. The roof was long—the distance of an entire city block—and surrounded by a low concrete wall. Beyond the wall was the city, from downtown to the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, a perfect illustration of itself, the motion of taillights on freeways the blur of red pigment. I walked to the edge of the roof and sat down, breathing in the beauty, forgetting, momentarily, that everything in my life was about to change, again.

The pads of my fingers traveled from my neck to my navel. My body was mine no longer. It had been inhabited, taken over. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I didn’t have any options; the baby would grow within me. I couldn’t have an abortion. I couldn’t go to a clinic, and undress, and stand naked in front of a stranger. The thought of anesthesia, of losing consciousness while a doctor did whatever he would with my body, was an offense beyond consideration. I would have the baby, and then I would decide what to do with it.

A baby. I repeated the words to myself again and again, waiting for warmth or emotion, but I felt nothing. Within my paralysis, I held only a single conviction: Grant could never, ever know. The excitement in his eyes, the instant vision he would hold of the family we would be together, was more than I could bear. I could picture exactly the way it would unfold: me, sitting at the picnic table, waiting for Grant to sit down so that I could choke out the life-changing words. I would begin to cry before I finished speaking, but still, he would know. And he would want it. The light in his eyes would be proof of his devotion to our unborn child, and my tears would be proof of my unfitness to be a mother. The knowledge that I would let him down (and the unknown of how it would happen, and when) would keep me far from his excitement, sealed from his professions of love.

I had to leave, quickly, silently, before he discovered the reason for my departure. It would hurt him, but not as much as it would hurt him to watch, helpless, as I packed my bags and took his child away from him forever. The life he desired with me was not possible.

It was better for him never to know how close we had come.

20.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Elizabeth was still in bed. I sat at the kitchen table, eating peanut butter out of a jar with my thumb. I’d thought about making her dinner, chicken soup or chili, something with a magnetic scent. But so far I’d only learned how to make desserts: blackberry cobbler, peach pie, and chocolate mousse. It didn’t feel right to eat dessert without dinner, especially today, when we had nothing at all to celebrate.

Putting the peanut butter away, I began to rummage through the pantry when I was surprised by a knock. I didn’t need to look out the window to see who it was. I had heard the knock enough times in my life to know. Meredith. She pounded harder. In another moment she would try the door, and it would be unlocked. I ducked into the pantry. The sound of the front door slamming traveled into the darkness. The beans and rice lining the shelves rattled in their canisters.

“Elizabeth?” Meredith called. “Victoria?” She walked through the living room and into the kitchen. Her footsteps traveled around the table and paused in front of the window over the sink. I held my breath, imagining her eyes traveling over the leafy vines, looking for signs of movement. She wouldn’t find any. Carlos had taken Perla camping again, for their annual trip. Finally, I heard her turn and walk up the stairs. “Elizabeth?” she called again. And then, quietly: “Elizabeth? Are you all right?”

Creeping up the stairs, I stopped on the top step and leaned into the wall, out of sight.

“I’m resting,” Elizabeth said quietly. “I just needed a little rest.”

“ ‘Resting’?” Meredith asked. Something in Elizabeth’s voice had angered Meredith, and her tone had turned from concerned to accusing. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon! And you missed your court date. You left the judge and me sitting there staring at each other, wondering where you and Victoria—” She stopped midsentence. “Where’s Victoria?”

“She was just here a minute ago,” Elizabeth said, her voice weak. Hours, I wanted to yell. I was there hours ago; I’d left her bedside at noon, when I knew for certain we were not going to court. “Did you check the kitchen?”

When Meredith spoke next, she sounded closer to me. “I checked,” she said. “But I’ll check again.” I stood up and began to tiptoe down the stairs, too late. “Victoria,” Meredith said. “Come back here.”

Turning, I followed Meredith into my bedroom. I had changed out of the dress and into shorts and a T-shirt earlier in the day, and the dress lay across the top of my desk. Meredith sat down and began to run her fingers over the top of the velvet flowers. I snatched the dress from her, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it under the bed.

“What’s going on?” Meredith demanded, her voice as accusing as it had been with Elizabeth. I shrugged.

“Don’t think you’re going to stand there and say nothing. Everything’s going great, Elizabeth loves you, you’re happy—and then a no-show for your adoption proceeding? What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” I shouted. For the first time in my life, it was true, but there was no reason for Meredith to believe me. “Elizabeth’s tired, you heard her. Just leave us alone.” I crawled into bed, pulled up the covers, and turned to face the wall.

Exhaling a loud, impatient sigh, Meredith stood up. “Something’s going on,” she said. “Either you did something horrific, or Elizabeth isn’t mentally fit to be a mother. Either way, I’m not sure this is a good placement for you anymore.”

“It isn’t your place to decide what is or is not good for Victoria,” Elizabeth said quietly. I sat up and turned to look at her. She leaned heavily against the door frame, as if she would fall over without its support. A pale pink bathrobe crisscrossed her body. Her hair fell in tangled bunches over her shoulders.

“It’s exactly my place to decide,” Meredith said, stepping toward Elizabeth. She was neither taller nor stronger, but she towered over Elizabeth’s wilted figure. I wondered if Elizabeth was afraid. “It wouldn’t have been my place anymore if you’d appeared in court at eleven a.m. this morning, and believe me, I was ready to give up control of this child. But it seems that isn’t to be. What did she do?”

“She didn’t do anything,” Elizabeth said.

I couldn’t see Meredith’s face, couldn’t see if she believed her. “If Victoria didn’t do anything, I’ll have to write you up. Give you a written warning for missing a court date, for suspicion of neglect. Has she eaten anything today?” I lifted my shirt away from my skin, where streaks of peanut butter remained from my snack, but neither Meredith nor Elizabeth looked at me.

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

Meredith nodded. “That’s what I thought.” She moved toward the bedroom door, stepping past Elizabeth. “We’ll finish in the living room. Victoria doesn’t need to be a part of the conversation we’re about to have.”

I didn’t follow them down the stairs, didn’t want to hear. I wanted everything to be as it was the day before, when I believed Elizabeth would adopt me. Rolling to the edge of the bed, I reached underneath until I found my wrinkled ball of a dress. I pulled it into bed with me, squeezing it into my chest and pressing my face into the velvet. The dress still smelled like the store, new wood and glass cleaner, and I remembered the feeling of Elizabeth’s arms underneath my armpits and tight across my chest, the look on her face as our eyes met in the mirror.

From downstairs I heard snippets of an argument: Meredith mostly, her voice raised. She has you or she has nothing, she said at one point. It’s bullshit for you to say you want more for her. An excuse. Didn’t Elizabeth know that she was all I wanted? That she was all I would ever want? Huddled under the comforter, I found the summer heat thick and suffocating. I struggled for breath.

I’d been given a chance, a final chance, and somehow, without meaning to, I’d ruined it. I waited for Meredith to march up the stairs and deliver the words I never thought I’d hear: Elizabeth’s given notice. Pack up.

21.

On Sunday morning, I ate soda crackers and waited for the nausea to subside. It didn’t. I got into my car anyway and drove across the city, vomiting into storm drains on three different occasions. The worldwide population expansion was not a phenomenon I could comprehend as I rolled to a stop at one grate after another.

Grant wasn’t home, as I knew he wouldn’t be. He would be standing behind his truck, handing cut flowers to lines of locals. I had been away only three nights, not an unusually long time for me or for our relationship, and I imagined him hurrying through his work, thinking about the extravagant dinner he planned to create. It would never cross his mind that I would miss a Sunday-night meal. At least I’d warned him, I thought, as I let myself in with the rusty spare key. It wasn’t my fault if he’d forgotten.

Listening for the sound of his truck, I packed quickly. I took everything that belonged to me and many things that didn’t, including Grant’s duffel bag, a large, army-green canvas tube that would camouflage well beneath the heath. I stuffed in clothes, books, a flashlight, three blankets, and all the food he had in the cupboard. Before zipping the bag, I shoved in a knife, a can opener, and the cash he kept in the freezer.

I crammed my belongings into the backseat of my car and went back for my blue photo box, Elizabeth’s dictionary, and the field guide. In the car, I secured them into the front seat with the seat belt and then went back up the spiral staircase to the second floor. I pulled Grant’s orange box off the bookshelf. Opening it, I thumbed through the photos, considering whether or not I should take it. I had made it; everything inside belonged to me. But the idea of having an extra in a safe location comforted me, especially as the next few months of my life would likely be anything but safe. If something happened to my blue box, I could always come back for the orange one.

I left the box in the middle of the floor and withdrew a small square of paper from my backpack. It was folded in half so that it stood up on top of the box like a place marker at a formal dinner. In the center, I had glued a quarter-sized photo of a white rose from a pile of scraps in the blue room, having trimmed it with precision so that only the flower remained. Below the image, in the place where a name would go, I had written a single sentence in permanent ink.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Grant would understand, if not accept, that this was the end.