The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

My body was flooded with emotion, relief but also undeniable disappointment, followed immediately by shame.

Like Grant, my daughter deserved so much more than I could give her. I wanted her to carry hawthorn, laugh easily, and love without fear. But I could not give her this, could not teach her what I didn’t know. It would be only a matter of time before my toxicity would taint her perfection.

If the trajectory continued, I realized, Message would alter the quantities of anger, grief, and mistrust growing in the earth on a massive scale. Farmers would uproot fields of foxglove to plant yarrow, the soft clusters of pink, yellow, and cream the cure to a broken heart.

I told myself that someone, somewhere, would be less angry, less grief-stricken, because of the rampant success of Message. Friendships would be stronger; marriages would last. But I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t take credit for an abstract contribution to the world when in every tangible human interaction I’d ever had I’d caused only pain: with Elizabeth, through arson and a false accusation; with Grant, through abandonment and an unnamed, unsupported child.

And then there was my daughter. That I had abandoned her did not leave my mind, not even for a moment.

Her absence in the empty apartment began to feel as real as she’d once been, rattling the plastic sheeting of the greenhouse, seeping like light under the crack of the blue room’s door. In the tap of the rain on the flat roof, I heard her ravenous suck. Every twenty-nine days the moonlight traveled in a slow square across the futon where we sat on our last night together, and each month I half expected it to bring her back to me. Instead, the moonlight illuminated my solitude, and I sat upright in its pale glow, remembering her as she had been, imagining her as she had become.

But as much as I wanted to be reunited, I would not go to her. My desire for my daughter felt selfish.

“Do you really think you’re the only human being alive who is unforgivably flawed? Who’s been hurt almost to the point of breaking?” She looked at

Perhaps that girl had survived somewhere within me after all, preserved like a dried flower, fragile and sweet.