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The “orchid hospital,” as Samantha’s mother had called it, was in her bedroom, along the back window. After the shriveled blooms dropped, her mother took the plant up to the windowsill and left it in the indirect light until it bloomed again. She put ice cubes in the pots once a week, so water would melt into the soil. Why, she had once asked her mother, do you bother to keep anything alive when it’ll all be wiped out by Finis? Her mother had shrugged. Why take a shower when you’re just going to get dirty? Why eat when you’re just going to get hungry? Every flower dies eventually, Sam. But not
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She wished she could have told him that life was already full of dread, no matter who you were. That there was nothing you could have that you couldn’t one day lose. That autumn always gave way to winter, but it was her favorite time of year—those fleeting bursts of beauty before the branches went bare.
“Well, you can’t love everything equally,” she said. “You just can’t—and if you did, then it’s the same as loving nothing at all. So you have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.” She paused, testing out her next thought on her tongue before she spoke it aloud. “The way you loved your wife.”
The one in question was in bloom. The flowers were almost alien in appearance, the lip three lobed and glazed, with a fringe of red hair around the edges. The center of the lip looked almost blue. “It is cunning,” Hagen said, touching his finger to the center of the lip. “It has evolved to look this way in order to lure in one particular pollinator, a wasp, Dasyscolia ciliata. The male wasp lands, hoping to mate, and picks up the flower’s pollen in the process. Even the scent is similar to the female wasp’s pheromones.” He smirked. “Alicia loved this, the improbability of such a specific,
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He shrugged. “I suppose when I say that I am impartial, what I really mean is that I am partial—but to all orchids. They were not high on the priority list for gene storage, of course. They don’t provide sustenance, after all, and thus were deemed unnecessary for the initial launch. Which is fair, I suppose. But still . . .” He looked at Samantha. “What is necessary?” he said. “I’m no longer sure. I think that she was necessary, for me.”
If she went on, she would find herself talking about how she wasn’t suicidal, never had been, not even in the throes of grief. Instead, it was simply that her entire life had been lived in anticipation of loss, such that neither her mother’s death nor her father’s had surprised her in the least, but had rather seemed like the fulfillment of a promise.
“You’re young,” he said. “You could still have a family, a whole lifetime.” He frowned. She wanted to tell him that she no longer saw anything down that avenue. Couldn’t imagine herself loving someone as dearly as Hagen had loved Alicia, or touching hand to belly in anticipation of a flutter kick from a growing fetus, or even silver haired and lined, spraying orchids to keep their leaves moist in some distant greenhouse. “A lifetime on a ship,” she said finally. “Sounds like a pale version of life to me.”
Samantha wondered if, after the Ark launched, they would spend all their time looking backward—at Earth, at the life they had built there. If the Ark itself was all the time capsule they needed, its inhabitants living in their memories as they coasted toward a distant planet, and then dying with them.
as he talked to her about plants, plants, always plants, never the people and things they had both lost, or would soon lose.
There had been no point in going through his things or packing anything away. There was no selling the house; no one was buying. There was no consigning of old jackets, no reclaiming of valuable possessions, no hollowing out of spaces to get rid of the ghost of him. The world was ending, and the house would be consumed in the flames along with everything else.
