My mother left us when I was eleven. A note on the kitchen table told us she wasn’t coming back. Within weeks of her absence, Dad turned into a saggy lump of silent despair, regret and hopelessness. He’d been off before Mom had gone away, too. He had never stopped being that lone wolf of a man who’d had fatherhood thrust upon him by an “accident” of his youth. I’d never seen him regard me with anything akin to fatherly pride or joy, and though he and my mother seemed to share a nostalgic kind of passion, it was plain to see he was unhappy with the direction his life had taken.
He tolerated me, sometimes making half-hearted efforts to show me affection and express what faint warmth he felt for me. When he was in a good mood, he’d run and snatch me up, spinning me around in his arms once or twice with playful force before holding me close and telling me that I was “the prettiest glue-trap he ever saw.”
I was too young to understand what he meant at the time.
My mother was “one hell of a woman”, he always said. She used to take me to work with her at the bakery when I was too little to stay at home by myself. Both my parents had to work, being poor as church mice. It was worth it, my mother always told me. It was worth it to be able to afford the house and the garden.
Mom was always tired. Even more so than Dad. She didn’t mind me existing as much as he did, though. Mom never had to tell me she loved me. It was right there in her eyes whenever she looked at me. But she’d tell me anyway. The two of us never had much time together, seeing as she had to take up a second job when I was old enough to go to school. It was worth it, though; she explained to me that me being able to wear the kinds of clothes the other kids had was worth it. I missed her terribly, even before she walked away. I think I would have preferred if I’d had only one set of worn sweatpants if it meant that I could see her more often. Who cares if my classmates would have made fun of me. I could have kicked their asses into next week.
After this description of my mother, it should be obvious why I was insanely confused at her abandonment. She had been a tad strange in the preceeding weeks, so perhaps I should have seen it coming; perhaps there’d been signs that I’d missed. I often wished I could have just gone back and asked her what the matter was. Maybe, if I’d shown her that I cared, she would have decided to stay. Those were the kinds of thoughts that plagued my eleven year-old mind, in waking as in slumber. For months, I had dreadful nightmares on a regular basis, but bit by bit, I came to accept my new reality. In my experience, grief is at its worst when one hasn’t come to face its cause yet; when the wound is still too fresh and you’re in too much of a shock to cauterize it. If Mom going away was my wound, accepting that she wouldn’t come back was me cleansing it. The actual healing process happened in our garden.
I only left the house to go to school and run errands from then on. Dad had to be fed and clothed, and since he hardly did anything but sleep when he was at home, I had to take over. I was young, but somehow, I fully understood that if he were to get fired from his job, we’d be penniless for certain. So I learned how to wash and iron his shirts, how to clean and how to cook, how to wake up my father and convince him to shower every other day. This, combined with my schoolwork, left me with little downtime and quite a bit of stress. My hair started falling out. Thankfully no one except for me seemed to notice; but if you’ve ever been a kid, you’ll know you would have simply gone mad over it. I sure did, and I wasn’t too ignorant to see the correlation. I figured I needed something to manage my nerves. And that’s how I got the idea with the garden. Mom had been very fond of it once upon a time, but now it was withered and altogether a picture of neglect. Never having cared much for the outdoors before, I hadn’t gone anywhere near it in ages.
I went to buy a shovel, a little hoe and a bunch of seeds after school. They were cheaper than grown plants and I wanted to raise something from the ground up anyways. I dug, watered and fertilized systematically, with passion and patience, and soon enough, my favorite times of day were those spent surrounded by the color green and the scent of fresh soil. I whipped up breakfast, I dragged my father out of bed and took care he didn’t leave the house looking like a neanderthal, I went to school, came back and sat down in the garden to do my homework; then I’d make something to eat in time for Dad’s return and go back to the garden as soon as I could. The fruits of my labor, or rather its blossoms, came in beautifully. Our garden was actually looking very nice come summer. One morning when I considered the array to look very pretty indeed, I took Dad by the hand and dragged him outside with me.
His gaunt face was paler than the white roses in the corner by the fence. “It’s all so pretty,” he said quietly. I was more than a bit surprised by the compliment, but I didn’t comment on it. Instead, I prompted him to sit down beside me in the closely trimmed grass between the various flower patches. Dad took a deep breath, filling his lungs with sweetly fragranted air. “You’re the craftiest little glue-trap I ever saw.”
I watched as he reached out to stroke the dewy grass. “You even managed to grow roses. Your Mom tried her hand at them all the time back when she cared. Never had any luck with it.”
“It wasn’t luck,” I corrected him. “It was good and fun, but it was still work.”
“Guess that’s another thing your Mom just had enough of.”
I looked my father over. Despite my efforts to keep him in good health, he had not only been visibly losing weight but also managed to age ten years in the span of just one. I braced myself. “I know you’re kind of broken, Dad, but can’t you at least try to pull yourself together? For me?”
“You don’t understand,” he muttered. “I need this.”
“What are you talking about?” I raised a puzzled brow.
“It’s okay. This is all very lovely, darling, but I think I’m gonna go lay down. Don’t bother me for the next couple hours, would you?” His voice sounded hollow and monotonous.
“I won’t,” I answered flatly.
“‘Course not. You never do.” With that, he patted me on the back and shakily rose to his feet.
This conversation would have likely seemed strange to anyone else, but to me, oddities such as this had long since become normalcy. My father wasn’t alive anymore. He was disjointed, discombobulated. Wherever his body was, his mind was in another place. I crawled over to the little white rose bush and started parting its twigs with my hands. Maybe I wanted to see if it was doing fine at the roots. Maybe I wanted to stick my head in and keep it there. It was dark inside the bush, but only a little, and pleasantly so. At that moment I was so disappointed and altogether empty that I felt compelled to cry. So I did. My tears came out big and round, rolling down my cheeks and disappearing into the dark earth as they fell.
“Don’t cry, honey.”
I jerked my head up abruptly, squeaking with pain as a couple thorny twigs trapped strands of my hair in between them.
“Be careful pulling back. Easy does it.”
My blood ran cold. A strange, all too common phrase that is, but I believe it describes the chilling, sinking sense of dread that had gotten a hold of me eerily well. Instead of drawing away from the roses, I remained very, very still, barely composed enough to keep on breathing. “Who said that?” I breathed, my voice a mere quiver. I didn’t dare look about. I felt as though any second, there’d be a ghostly hand on my shoulder, skeletal fingers gripping my arm or a low, icy inhale grazing the back of my neck. Nothing of the sort ever came.
“You can’t tell? That kinda stings. My own daughter.”
I finally found it within me to shrink back, ignoring the sting of the hairs being torn out. I stared at the rose bush in utter disbelief. My heart was racing. When I reached out to touch one of the flowers, I found that my palms were laced with sweat.
“No,” I muttered. “I’m going nuts. This is it,” I said to myself, aloud this time. I was going to have to admit myself into a clinic, so it didn’t matter if anybody heard me talking to myself. I was clearly losing my mind. “There we have it. I’ve gone and turned soft in the brain.” It was almost a relief to exclaim it that way.
“Please, baby, you’re not imagining this. Look at me. Listen to me. I’m here.”
I started gasping for air. I’d never hyperventilated before, so I was quick to panic, worsening the situation. My head was reeling. Fear’s cold grip and hope’s dear embrace were fighting to win the upper hand. And then there was my rose bush, shushing me sweetly and begging me over and over again to calm down. My roses that would not shut up.
“I don’t understand,” I pressed out. “How are you talking to me? Where are you?”
“Beneath you.”
My gaze dropped to the ground. Fearsome understanding was starting to bud in my mind.
“I love you. I would have never left you, and I never did.”
I hadn’t been in the garden for literal months after Mom had disappeared. Long enough for the grass to grow back. It did look a tiny bit younger over by the roses, but I’d never given that any thought.
“He faked the note.”
I had never even begun to consider it. I had accepted what Dad had told me, I hadn’t thought to question him. Nobody had. It was all too probable an overworked, tired woman like my mother would have walked away. Some of her friends had actually wondered why it had taken her so long. I let out one final gasp before my breathing slowed and I sank down, pressing my cheek, wet with fresh tears, to the soft earth.
“He had your handwriting down cold,” I whispered to the rose bush.
From then on, I spent even more time in the garden. I would sit and talk to my roses for hours on end, weeping both in joyful and mournful ways, laughing aloud at times as though I’d gone mad. Mom would tell me the strangest things. She told me to keep at it in school, not to lose my spirit at any cost and to be careful with how I acted around Dad. It was important that I didn’t let on what I knew. I guess my demeanor towards him did change at least a little bit; I couldn’t control my emotions that well. My father didn’t notice anyhow. Bit by bit, Mom began confiding in me, cautious with the truth in order to keep from getting me too angry to contain it. I knew I had to wait for that, and deep down I needed more time still, and she keenly understood. It’s crazy how a mother can know her child’s mind better than it does its own. That’s definitely how it was with us.
We bridged this span that was needed for healing by trying to get used to our newly changed circumstances. I told her how I was getting along with the housekeeping and she said she was quite proud of me. She explained how to get the clothes clean and dry faster, helped me with my homework when I needed it and told me stories she’d made up during her silent, lonely days as a mute sprout of a plant, back when her spirit had already taken possession of the seed but I had not yet enabled her to channel her voice with my tears. Then, one day, she decided I looked and sounded heartened enough.
“It was an accident. I don’t think he meant to hurt me, not particularly. But he was out of his head.”
“Like he is now? Sometimes I feel like he’s a ghost.”
“No, not exactly like he is now. See, a couple weeks before it happened, I found something in the drawer. He’d hidden it under a bunch of socks and shorts and stuff. It was this… this *baggie full of little pills. I didn’t confront him immediately; I waited to keep a closer eye on him first. After all, your father and I didn’t get to see all that much of each other due to our work sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I knew right away that something was up and that it was probably real bad, but I was in scared and, well… I guess I just wasn’t sure. Maybe I wanted to see how bad it was, or I didn’t wanna believe it was true. It made so much sense though. He’d lost a lot of weight, and he’d just been so off and irritable. I figured out in time that a lot of our money went into that baggie, money we couldn’t even afford to waste under any other circumstances. Those pills were getting less and less over the days, but there’d always be a refill before the last one was gone.
“I finally ended up confronting him about it. You were asleep, and I took him down to the basement so you wouldn’t hear it if we’d end up fighting. I saw too late that he was… out of it. Perhaps if we’d had this talk when he was sober, it would have all ended differently. Least I like to think so. He got… agressive. He kept on yelling, ‘I need this! I need this!’ That wasn’t my husband anymore, that beast that jumped me down there and started beating me. He didn’t stop until I didn’t feel the pain anymore.”*
I can’t describe how I felt upon hearing this story. I didn’t cry though. For the first time in days, I didn’t start to cry. “What should I do?” I asked flatly.
“I can tell what you’re thinking, and don’t. If he’s gone, you won’t be provided for. You’d have to… I don’t know, go into the foster system, I guess, but I don’t even know how that would work. Don’t tell anybody. Don’t hurt him. You don’t want his blood on your hands. Hell, I don’t want his blood on your hands. I reckon nobody cares enough about us to ask any questions if he were to be found dead, and I trust you could pull it off, but you’re my angel, and you’ve had it bad enough. It’d weigh on you, you might think it won’t but I know it will.” Mom’s voice was low, intense and breathless. Stern beyond measure. I knew I couldn’t go against her will. “I’d tell you to run, but Lord knows you got no place to go,” she continued gravely. “So, I’m sorry to say, but I have no idea what you should do.”
“I don’t want to go on like this,” I whined. “And it’s not gonna work! He’ll get worse, he’ll get fired at some point, and then what?”
“I know, I know…” For a while, Mom stayed silent. “Give me some time to think, please. I’ll try to come up with something; I might already have. And if you can… make me grow.”
From there on out, I went about watering, fertilizing and grooming my plants even more religiously. I took care of my mother-roses with such particular devotion that, if the other flowers could have noticed, they’d have been sure to feel jealous. My garden was becoming prettier and prettier, everything flourished, but the white rose bush especially. It reached my height in no time at all, and soon enough, its branches started reaching out towards the back door, crawling across the lawn like beautiful, prickly snakes. I talked to Mom on a daily basis, whenever my father wasn’t around to hear. She seemed to have developed a plan soon after we’d talked, but wouldn’t let me know any part of it. Not that she needed to. I trusted her.
Dad was starting to get worse. He seemed absent for the majority of the day now. I could only assume he was doing better at his job than at home seeing as he hadn’t been fired yet, but apart from that, he hardly left the house anymore. He had taken to shutting himself in even more; I was doing all the shopping now and he wouldn’t even run to the store for me when I was busy already. Whenever I asked him for anything, he’d dismiss me with something bordering on hostility. He was starting to let me know that I had become a burden to him; he ceased thanking me for my little acts of care and kindness, for cooking his food and washing his clothes on which I started noticing stains of blood and vomit more and more often. Even if my mother had never been able to reveal the details of her death, I would have become extremely wary of Dad at that point. Things being as they were, I not only feared him, I hated him with all my heart.
The vines and branches of the rose bush became longer and longer. I opened my bedroom window one morning to find them clinging to the wall of the house. No wind, no rainfall, no storm had been able to break them, their petals were as white as the freshest snow and the green of their leaves was deep and strong. I didn’t even have to leave the house to talk to Mom anymore. Knowing she was right outside my room, guarding my sleep, was the most comfortable sensation I’d experienced in a long time.
A week after the branches had framed my window, they had found their way inside. I had left the backdoor open a crack so Mom could come in. She had found Dad sitting on the couch, passed out with tears in his eyes, and, as if to console him, had wrapped her many many arms around his sleeping body. The embrace looked so peaceful to me. Loving, almost. My father, curled up inside his cocoon of thorns and blossoms, showed me a final smile as his soul left his body. When he opened his eyes and broke free from the green cage, he was changed. There was life in his features, warmth in his arms as he squeezed me against his chest. No, not he.
“Hi, Mom,” I whispered as I pressed my red cheek against her chest, not minding the stinking shirt that clung to it.
“I missed the feeling of you so much,” she murmured, holding me even tighter. Her voice, though deep and raspy now, still held that familiar soothing tone. “I was afraid you’d try to stop me. I’m so sorry. For everything.”
“Not your fault.” I wiped my nose on her belly. “I don’t care about nothing, I’m just… I’m just so glad you’re here. Like, here here.”
Mom let go of me, regarding me with bloodshot eyes that weren’t hers but held her gaze, her own true, devoted affection. “Why don’t you go back to bed, honey? I’ll see what I can throw together for breakfast.”
“Don’t you need to rest?”
Mom shook her head, cupping my face with one hand. “Right now, I just want to make my daughter something to eat.”