Vanessa Diffenbaugh - The Language of Flowers

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.

But I couldn’t do it. Grant loved me. His love was quiet but consistent, and with each declaration I felt myself swoon with both pleasure and guilt. I did not deserve his love. If he knew the truth, he would hate me. I was surer of this than I had ever been of anything in my life. My affection for him only made it worse. We had grown increasingly close, kissing in greeting and parting, even sleeping beside each other. He stroked my hair and cheeks and breasts, at the dinner table and on all three floors of the water tower. We made love frequently, and I even learned to enjoy it. But in the moments afterward, when we lay naked beside each other, he wore an expression of open fulfillment that I knew, without looking, my face did not mirror. I felt my true, unworthy self to be far away from his clutching grasp, hidden from his admiring gaze. My feelings for Grant, too, felt hidden, and I began to imagine a sphere surrounding my heart, as hard and polished as the surface of a hazelnut, impenetrable.

Grant did not appear to notice my detachment in the midst of our connection. If he did, on occasion, feel my heart to be an unreachable object, he never mentioned it to me. We came together and parted ways in a predictable rhythm. Weekdays, our paths crossed for an hour in the evenings. Saturdays, we spent much of the day together, carpooling to work in the early morning and stopping afterward to eat or hike or watch the kites in the Marina. Sundays, we kept our distance. I did not accompany Grant to the farmers’ market and was always gone when he returned, eating lunch in a restaurant by the bay or walking across the bridge alone.

I always returned to the water tower in time for dinner on Sundays, to take advantage of Grant’s most creative and complicated meals. He spent the entire afternoon cooking. When I walked through the door, there would be appetizers on the kitchen table. The finger food, he learned, would keep me from pestering him until the entrée was complete, often not until well past nine o’clock.

That summer Grant moved beyond the cookbooks—which he carried upstairs and tucked under the love seat—and he began inventing every meal from scratch. He felt less pressure, he told me, if he wasn’t comparing his results to the photograph beside the recipe. And he must have known his meals were better than anything he could have created from a cookbook, better than anything I had eaten since leaving Elizabeth’s.

On the second Sunday in July I drove home from a long walk down Ocean Beach hungrier than usual, my stomach turning from emptiness and nerves. I had walked past The Gathering House, and the young women in the window, none of whom I knew, made my stomach ache. Their lives would not turn out as they dreamed. I understood this, even as mine had turned out far better than I would have hoped, had I permitted myself to hope for anything at all. I was the exception, I knew, and even my own good fortune I believed to be a fleeting moment in what would be a long, hard, solitary life.

Grant had set out slices of a baguette stuffed with something—cream cheese, maybe, or something fancier—with bits of chopped herbs, olives, and capers. The appetizers were arranged in rows on a square ceramic plate. I started at one end and went up and down the rows, popping each circle into my mouth whole. I looked up before I ate the last one, and Grant was watching with a smile.

“You want it?” I asked, pointing to the last slice.

“No. You’ll need the sustenance to wait for the next course; the rib roast still has forty-five minutes.”

I ate the last one and groaned. “I don’t think I can wait that long.”

Grant sighed. “You say that every week, and then every week, after you’ve eaten, you tell me it was worth the wait.”

“I do not,” I said, but he was right. My stomach digested the cheese with a loud churning. I folded over onto the table and closed my eyes.

“You okay?”

I nodded. Grant prepared the rest of the meal in silence while I dozed at the table. When I opened my eyes, the steaming steak was beside me. I rolled onto one elbow.

“Will you cut it for me?” I asked.

“Sure.” Grant rubbed my head, neck, and shoulders, and kissed my forehead before picking up the knife and slicing my meat. It was red in the middle, the way I liked it, and crusted with something peppery. The sauce was a combination of exotic mushrooms, red potatoes, and turnips. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.

My stomach, however, did not agree with my mouth’s assessment of the quality. I had taken only a few bites when I knew, without a doubt, that my dinner would not stay within the confines of my stomach. Flying up the stairs, I locked myself in the bathroom and expelled the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl. I flushed and turned on the water in the sink and in the shower, hoping the noise would drown out the series of retches that followed.

Grant knocked on the door, but I didn’t open it. He went away and came back a half-hour later, but I still didn’t answer his soft tapping. There wasn’t enough room to lie flat on the bathroom floor, so I lay folded over on my side, my legs pressed against the door and my back curved against the ceramic tub. My fingers traced the white hexagonal tile and drew patterns of six-petaled flowers. It was after eleven when I emerged, the shapes of the tile etched deeply into the flesh of my cheek and exposed shoulder.

I hoped Grant would be asleep, but he was sitting upright on the love seat, all the lights turned out.

“Was it the food?” he asked.

I shook my head. I didn’t know what it was, but it definitely wasn’t the food. “The roast was incredible.”

I sat down beside him, our thighs touching through matching dark denim. “Then what?” he asked.

“I’m sick,” I said, but I avoided his eyes. I didn’t believe that to be the truth, and I knew he didn’t, either. As a child I had vomited from closeness: from touch or the threat of touch. Foster parents towering over me, shoving my uncooperative arms into a jacket, teachers ripping hats from my head, their fingers lingering too long on my tangled hair, had forced my stomach into uncontrollable convulsions. Once, shortly after moving in with Elizabeth, we had eaten a picnic dinner in the garden. I had overeaten, as I did at every meal that fall, and, unable to move, I had allowed Elizabeth to pick me up and carry me back to the house. She had barely set me down on the porch before I threw up over the side of the railing.

I looked at Grant. He had been touching me, intimately, for months. Without being aware of it, I had been waiting for this to happen.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said. “I don’t want you to catch it.”

“I won’t,” Grant said, taking my hand and pulling me up. “Come upstairs.”

I did as he asked.

18 .

The morning of my adoption hearing, I awoke at sunrise .

Sitting up, I turned and leaned against the cool wall, the comforter pulled up to my chin. Light traveled lazily through the window, the soft beam illuminating my dresser and open closet door. In many ways, the room looked the same as it had when I’d entered a year before; it contained the same furniture, the same white comforter, and the same stacks of clothes, many of which I had yet to grow into. But all around me were signs of the girl I had become: library books stacked on the desk with titles such as Botany on Your Plate and The Ultimate Book of Mix-It-Yourself Concoctions for Your Garden , a photograph of Elizabeth and me that Carlos had taken, our bright pink winter cheeks pressed close together, and a wastepaper basket full of flower drawings for Elizabeth, none of which I’d deemed good enough to give her. It was my last morning in the room as a foster child, and I gazed around, as I always did—surveying objects as if they belonged to someone else. Tomorrow , I thought. Tomorrow I will feel different. I will wake up, look around, and see a room—a life—that is mine and will never be taken away from me .