The Language of Flowers

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.