The Language of Flowers

“Then you aren’t hungry,” I told her, setting the bottle down too hard next to me. A thin stream of liquid shot out the top. “If you won’t eat this, you aren’t hungry.”

I set her back in the basket gently. I would let her cry for two or three minutes, just to prove I was serious. When I picked her up again, she would take the bottle. She had to.

But she didn’t. I let her cry another five minutes, and then another ten. I tried holding her. I tried feeding her in the basket. I tried laying her on my featherbed and reaching inside with the bottle, but still she refused to suck. Finally I gave up and closed the half-door. The baby cried out in the darkness of the blue room, alone.

Lying down on the living room floor, my eyes closed involuntarily. The sound of the cry became something distant and unpleasant but no longer overwhelming. For stretches I forgot the source of the sound or why I had tried to stop it. It passed over my body, leaving me untouched. The fog of my exhaustion was impenetrable.

It wasn’t until the crying stopped that I jolted awake. I felt a rush of fear that I had killed the baby. It was dark outside. I had no idea how much time had passed. Perhaps hours without food and a room without light was enough to kill a newborn. I knew so little about newborns, about children, about human beings. It felt like a horrible joke to leave me alone with a baby, responsible for another life. I threw open the door to the blue room, but before I could even reach out to feel for her pulse, she began to cry.

My body was flooded with emotion, relief but also undeniable disappointment, followed immediately by shame. I held the baby to my body, kissing her head in an attempt to mask the desperation I could no longer bury. I stuck the bottle in the baby’s mouth. She would learn to drink formula. Breast-feeding was too much for me. I would never be able to maintain it, and if I wanted to keep the baby, I needed to find a way to be a mother that I could handle. This time the baby tried to suck, but her lips were weak with hunger and the plastic was stiff and unresponsive.

The nipple must be defective. It was the clear explanation for my baby’s stubborn refusal. Of the hundreds on the shelf, I had purchased the cheapest. I hurled the bottle into the kitchen, and it bounced off the wall and onto the floor. The baby began to cry.

I set her in the basket and walked away. My breasts were full and dripping onto the stained office carpet, but I would not give her milk from my body. It was too much. I would get her a new bottle, and she would take it. My panic would subside.

I took the steps two at a time, her cry growing louder as the distance between us increased. Running out onto the sidewalk, I sprinted the block faster than I ever had in my life. I crossed streets recklessly, running in the same direction I had to buy the formula just the day before. But when I got to Vermont Street, I turned left instead of right. I didn’t think about where I was going, and I did not stop running until I reached the steps of McKinley Square. Digging heavy feet into the mowed lawn, I fell into the white verbena, rolling into my cavern beneath the heath and closing my eyes. I would give myself five minutes. Just five minutes in the park, and when I returned to the baby, I would be able to handle it. I covered my head with my arm, searching in the darkness for the brown wool blanket that wasn’t there. Sleep pulled me under again, and I was protected, rocked, comforted. There was nothing but the darkness, the solitude, and the white petals of the verbena praying for me and for the child I wouldn’t let myself remember.

12.

“I missed you today,” Elizabeth said when I walked into the room.

She didn’t ask where I’d been, and I didn’t offer an explanation. I crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over my head and rolling onto my side, my back to the desk where she sat.

“I love you, Victoria,” she said quietly. “I hope you know that.” The first time she’d declared her love, I’d believed her. Now her words ran over my heart like water over a stone. The desk chair scraped against the wood floor as she stood, and I felt the mattress dip as she moved to the edge of the bed. She placed one hand on my shoulder.

“What did she do?” I asked.

The question was sudden and unplanned, and I felt Elizabeth’s body flinch. She was quiet for a long time. Finally, she lay down on her back next to me.

“I loved a man, once,” she said simply. “It was a long time ago. He was English, here for an internship with one of the bigger wineries, just a few miles up the road. I was happier than I’d ever been. And then Catherine—my sister, my best friend—took him away from me.”