The Language of Flowers

“My last roommate was a paranoid schizophrenic,” Natalya said, gesturing to the deadbolts. “The door opens into my room. Those are the keys to all the locks.” She pointed to the key ring in my hand.

“I’ll take it,” I said. I reached out into the living room and set two hundred-dollar bills on the arm of the couch. Then I closed the half-door, turned the lock, and lay down in the center of the blue.

11.

The sky felt bigger at Elizabeth’s. It curved from one low horizon line to the other, the blue seeping into the dry hills and dulling the yellow of summer. In the corrugated roof of the garden shed it reflected, and in the round metal trailer, and in the pupils of Elizabeth’s eyes. The color felt inescapable and as heavy as her sudden silence.

I sat in a lawn chair on a garden path, waiting for Elizabeth to return from the kitchen. Earlier that morning, she’d made peach-banana pancakes, and I’d eaten until I’d folded onto the kitchen table, unable to move. But rather than her usual stream of questions, some of which I answered, some of which I ignored, she’d been eerily quiet. She’d only picked at her food, pulling out the grilled peaches and leaving the rest of her pancake in a pool of syrup.

My eyes closed, I’d listened to the squeak of Elizabeth’s chair pushing back, her socked feet crossing the wood floor, and our stacked plates settling into the kitchen sink. But instead of the sound of running water that usually followed, I’d heard an unexpected clicking noise, and when I looked up, Elizabeth was leaning against the kitchen cabinets, her attention on an old-fashioned telephone. She twirled the spiraling cord that attached the receiver to the base and then stared at the dial as if she’d forgotten the number. After a time, she began to spin the dial again, but when she reached the sixth number she paused, curled in her lips, and hung up forcefully. The sound aggravated my full stomach, and I’d sighed.

Elizabeth startled, and when she turned, she looked surprised to see me sitting there, as if in her focus on the phone call she couldn’t make, she’d forgotten my very existence. Exhaling, she pulled me off the kitchen chair and into the garden, where I waited.

Now she emerged from the back door, clutching a muddy shovel in one hand, a steaming mug in the other.

“Drink it,” she said, handing me the cup. “It’ll help your digestion.”

I grasped the mug between my gauze-wrapped hands. It had been a week since Elizabeth cleaned and wrapped my puncture wounds, and I’d grown accustomed to the helplessness of the gauze. Elizabeth cooked and cleaned while I lay around day after day, doing nothing; when she asked me how my hands were healing, I told her they felt worse.

Blowing on the tea, I took a careful sip and then spit it out.

“I don’t like it,” I said, tipping the cup forward and letting the liquid spill onto the path in front of my chair.

“Try again,” Elizabeth said. “You’ll get used to it. Peppermint blossoms mean warmth of feeling.”

I took another sip. This time I held it in my mouth a little longer before spitting it over my armrest. “You mean warmth of bad taste.”

“No, warmth of feeling,” Elizabeth corrected me. “You know, the tingling feeling you get when you see a person you like.”

I didn’t know that feeling. “Warmth of vomit,” I said.

“The language of flowers is nonnegotiable, Victoria,” Elizabeth said, turning away and putting on her gardening gloves. She picked up the shovel and worked the soil where I had uprooted a dozen plants in my search for the spoon.

“What do you mean, ‘nonnegotiable’?” I asked. I took a sip of peppermint tea, swallowed it, and grimaced, waiting for my stomach to settle.

“It means there’s only one definition, one meaning, for every flower. Like rosemary, which means—”

“Remembrance,” I said. “From Shakespeare, whoever that is.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, looking surprised. “And columbine—”

“Desertion.”

“Holly?”

“Foresight.”

“Lavender?”

“Mistrust.”

Elizabeth put down her gardening tools, took off her gloves, and knelt down next to me. Her eyes were so penetrating, I leaned back until my lawn chair started to tip backward, and Elizabeth’s hand flew out to clutch my ankle.

“Why did Meredith tell me you couldn’t learn?” she asked.

“Because I can’t,” I said. She took hold of my chin and turned my face until she could look directly into my eyes.

“Not true,” she said simply. “Four years of elementary school and you haven’t learned simple phonics, Meredith warned me. She said you’d be put in special education, if you could make it at a public school at all.”