The Language of Flowers

In the corner of the room was a black metal staircase, spiraling through a small square hole. Grant began to climb, and I followed him up. The second floor contained a living room big enough for only an orange velour love seat and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. An open door led to a white tile bathroom with a claw-foot tub. There was no television and no stereo. I didn’t even see a telephone.

Grant stepped back onto the staircase and led me to the third floor, which was covered wall to wall with a thick foam mattress. Crumbling foam was visible where the sheets had peeled away from the edges. Clothes sat in piles in two corners, one folded, the other not. Where there should have been pillows, there were stacks of books.

“My bedroom,” Grant said.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

“In the middle. Closer to the books than the clothes, usually.” He climbed across the foam mattress and switched off the reading lamp. I held on to the banister and climbed back down into the kitchen.

“Nice,” I said. “Quiet.”

“I like it that way. I can forget where I am, you know?” I did know. In Grant’s water tower, settled in the absence of all things automatic and digital, it was easy to forget not just the location but also the decade.

“My roommate’s punk band practices all night in the downstairs of our apartment,” I said.

“That sounds awful.”

“It is.”

He walked over to the counter and spooned hot, soggy rice into large ceramic soup bowls. He handed me a bowl and a spoon. We began to eat. The rice warmed my mouth, throat, and stomach. It was much better than I had expected.

“No phone?” I asked, looking around. I’d thought I was the only young person in the modern world not attached to a communication device. Grant shook his head no. I continued: “No other family?”

Grant shook his head again. “My father left before I was born, went back to London. I’ve never met him. When my mother died, she left me the land and the flowers, nothing else.” He took another bite of rice.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

Grant poured on more soy sauce. “Sometimes. I miss her as she was when I was a child, when she cooked dinner every night and packed my lunches with sandwiches and edible flowers. But toward the end of her life, she began to confuse me with my father. She’d go into a rage and throw me out of the house. Then, when she realized what she’d done, she would apologize with flowers.”

“Is that why you live here?”

Grant nodded. “And I’ve always liked being alone. No one can understand that.” I understood.

He finished his rice and helped himself to another bowl, then reached for mine and filled it up as well. We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

Grant got up to wash his dish and set it upside down on a metal drying rack. I washed my own and did the same. “Ready to go?” he asked.

“The film?” I grabbed the camera from where he had hung it on a hook and handed it to him. “I don’t know how to release it.”

He rewound the camera and unloaded the film. I pocketed it.

“Thanks.”

We climbed into Grant’s truck and started down the road. We were halfway back to the city when I remembered Annemarie’s request. I sucked in my breath.

“What?” he asked.

“The jonquil. I forgot.”

“I planted it while you were in the rose garden. It’s in a paper box in the greenhouse—the bulbs require darkness until the foliage starts to grow. You can check on them next Saturday.”

Next Saturday. As if we had a standing date. I watched Grant drive, his profile hard and unsmiling. I would check on them next Saturday. It was a simple statement but one that changed everything as completely as the discovery of the yellow rose.

Jealousy, infidelity. Solitude, friendship.

6.

It was dark out by the time I came in for dinner. The house was bright, and inside the frame of the open door, Elizabeth sat alone at the kitchen table. She had made chicken soup—the smell had reached me in the vines, the scent a physical draw—and she sat hunched over her bowl, as if studying her reflection in the broth.

“Why don’t you have any friends?” I asked.

The words escaped without premeditation. For a week I’d watched Elizabeth manage the harvest with a heavy, dejected quality, and the image of her sitting at the kitchen table, alone and so obviously lonely, pushed the words right out of me.

Elizabeth looked over to where I stood. Quietly, she stood up, dumping the contents of her bowl back into the soup pot. With a match, she lit the blue ring of fire beneath it.

She turned to me. “Well, why don’t you?”

“I don’t want any,” I said. Besides Perla, the only children I knew were from my class at school. They called me orphan girl, and it had gotten so that I doubted even my teacher remembered my real name.

“Why not?” Elizabeth pressed.

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice growing defensive. But I did know.