Chapter 47
— Chapter 47 —
After Lee leaves, I stand in my mother’s garden, looking at the lacework of slug snot sparkling in the sunlight. I’ve avoided her garden because I’m afraid it will be too difficult to care for and I’ll learn more than I want to about the texture of her hardships, or it will be easy and I’ll learn truth from another direction. Her garden was a personal failure that we were never supposed to mention. Fixing it feels like betrayal, even though I’m confused as to why my loyalty lingers in any form.
I remember all the names of her plants, how to ID them by pinching their leaves, then holding my fingers to my nose. Lemon balm, oregano, thyme, sage, chamomile, tucked into pockets of soil between outcroppings of bedrock. Hiding in their overgrowth are at least a dozen dead plants, still in plastic pots. I wonder how old they are. Two summers? Three? It is impossible to tell. At a certain point dead is just dead. My mother loved to buy plants, but once she got them home, she left them to languish, unwatered in the sun. Campanula and coreopsis, lavendula, and hummingbird mint. When she saw them thriving in other people’s gardens, she loved to say the names of the plants as if she were an expert, as if she hadn’t murdered her own.
A few weeks ago, while prepping to take the finish off her nightstand, I pulled out the drawer and found two orange medicine bottles jammed in the back. The labels had been peeled off; strips of white paper left behind like stratus clouds. I assumed the moving pieces inside were pills, but when I opened one of the bottles, they looked like bits of ivory, or seashells saved from a trip to the beach. I poured them into my hands, saw roots on one, and realized they were teeth. The other bottle held the same. Twenty each, more or less. Probably less in one bottle, because I remember swallowing at least one of mine. She didn’t label the bottles, but I had two teeth pulled, so I know the rooted ones came from my mouth. Steena had all her adult teeth by the time mine began to wobble, so my mother probably didn’t mingle our relics. I can’t picture the version of my mother who would have saved our baby teeth, who loved that part of our lives so much she didn’t know how to let go. I’d always thought she could only see motherhood as the great burden of her life. It would have been much more simple to keep believing that.
I try to imagine her from back when I was very young, handing her my loose tooth, asking for paper to draw a star for the tooth fairy. I can visualize myself and the action and the tooth in her hand. I can almost hear her voice, her nose always a little stuffy, her tone melodic when she wasn’t angry. But she’s shadowed in my mind. I can conjure the image of Step down to the direction of each curl on his head. I remember every line in Nonna’s face, and the changing ratio of salt and pepper stubble on Babbo’s chin as he got older. Their hair, their hands, their smiles all still exist to me, whole and vivid. I can picture Jam and Bee at every age I knew them. Steena is seared into my brain so deeply that I worry she will never fade.
But I hadn’t noticed until this moment that what’s left of my mother is only fragments. If I remember something she did or said, I might recall the flash of rage in her eyes or the tremble of her cheek, how her voice arched in a way that made me think of a snake rising from its coil. I can catch the faintest hint of the perfume she wore, imagining the scent of honeysuckle and hyacinth until I can almost taste it. But I cannot compile a memory of her as a walking, breathing person. She is always in pieces. The flower print of her dress, the crease in her shoes. She is how she made me feel: persistent unease, a cramp in my throat before tears, the crack of a slamming door echoing in my skull, the searing venom of words chosen carefully for optimal pain. She’s purple eye shadow and Rose’s Lime Juice and that thin gold watch and pretty hoop earrings and a kiss on my cheek when she gets home from dinner and thinks I’m sleeping, and my heart swelling with pride over her soft silk dress and the happiness she felt in a fleeting moment. She is tears, the electricity you feel in your blood before a thunderstorm, and soft hands, the clear diamond ring Step gave her, broken dishes, and a bottle of sherry in the back of the pantry that is full and empty and full again. She is an ache that exists in my heart on a cellular level. She is this untended garden.
The nursery pots are light when I carry them to the compost pile, their moisture and life long gone, dead plants breaking as I free them. I stack the empty pots in the shed and find her rusty garden tools hanging from nails on the wall. I trim the planted perennials down to their woody stems and rake up the decaying leaves. It doesn’t take long. Then I go inside to get the orange medicine bottles, scatter our baby teeth in the deep grooves the rake left behind, and gently cover them with soil.