The Language of Flowers

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.”