The Language of Flowers

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.