Chapter 8
Venus
The Land Rover squeaks to a stop beside me, earning a long-winded honk from drivers scooting around it. Dad rolls down his window.
“Venus, please, get in. We don’t have to talk.”
My boots scrape against the concrete, my folded arms drop, and I take a cleansing breath. I shouldn’t have left him there, and as the sharp energy rush settles to a gentle current, I feel embarrassed for allowing words and memories to dictate my actions.
I climb into the passenger seat, buckle my seatbelt, and stare out the window as he maneuvers away from the curb. He keeps his promise, saying nothing as he navigates to our next destination.
Roma’s is busy, but we’re given a small table on the back porch. I tighten and loosen the scarf still tied around my wrist, focusing on the pressure, while my boots tap under the table.
Dad orders sweet tea for us and pushes a bowl of homemade pickles toward me. Then, he distracts me with a game we used to play, where we’d take turns pointing out living things in our natural surroundings using their scientific names.
Taxodium distichum. Bald Cypress.
Tillandsia usneoides. Spanish Moss.
Ardea herodias. Great Blue Heron.
Amused, he spots my discovery over his shoulder.
The tension leaves me, but slowly, like the fronds of a Henricus filicis detaching one by one and taking flight on a gentle breeze. This is a game he cannot play with Ivy, as she has never shown interest in plants, only in humans. This makes it our game.
We order our meals, and in the silence of waiting, I finally say, “Sorry, Dad.”
“Thank you, I accept your apology, and I’m sorry, too,” he says. “Ah, Lonicera sempervirens.” He points to the bank of the lake where white flowers protrude from a tangle of vines. “Remember when you used to sit on the fence post, sucking the nectar from the honeysuckle’s flower?”
“I’d do anything for sweets,” I smirk. “The yield failed to satisfy, though, considering the effort.”
“Remember how nervous Henry was the first time he tried it?”
“Poor inside person.” I shake my head. “He feared that the pollen might make his head explode. Though given his medical history and his mother, I don’t blame him. He did try one, eventually—a completely nonexplosive event.”
Dad chuckles. “Do you still think about him much?”
I untangle the blue scarf from around my hand and retie it in my hair, pulling my long waves into a messy bun. “I try not to.”
It’s the best answer I’m able to give, but Dad nods in quiet understanding and doesn’t push. I need time to consider his remarks—time when I’m not spun up in my energy vortex. Dad seems to understand that about me, almost like he can see when my edges start to fray.
It’s what he saw when I begged him to send me away, except it wasn’t a vortex that I was in, but a void I couldn’t free myself from without his help. He gave in, relenting to my sheer desperation.
I was desperate—a feeling I never want again. Desperate to free myself from the education I was supposed to receive, from cold shoulders and rolling eyes, from unfair expectations, from feeling trapped. Desperate to free Henry, too.
Still, given the day’s events so far, I decide to reach out to Dr. Broderick for an emergency session. I don’t enjoy discussing my feelings, but talking to a paid professional and an objective academic makes it easier. I need to regain my footing if I have any chance of surviving this summer.
I want to see this through. To live up to Dad’s expectations rather than be his disappointment. For once. It’ll also provide me with the opportunity to alleviate his misguided guilt. Succeeding this summer would reassure him that sending me away at eighteen was best for everyone.
It’ll make leaving again easier, too.
After Roma’s, we visit the new nursery. Upon seeing epiphytic fertilizers and authentic sphagnum peat moss, as their website claimed, Dad excitedly fills a flatbed cart.
Meandering down the rows of perennials, he explains that he’s agreed to a small carnivorous garden installation and asks me to help him remember everything he needs.
I recite the list from memory, in the order of application.
It’s not simply dirt in a pot for carnivorous plants.
“I’ve ordered the raised beds for the mini-bog, a filtration system, and a rain barrel and had them delivered to the site,” he says. “I’ll have these materials delivered as well. Now, all I need to do is gather the plants.”
“I can help with that.” Getting my hands dirty again fills me with unexpected excitement.
He smiles across the flatbed. “Sounds lovely.”
As he pays and makes delivery arrangements, I wander through the messy clearance racks where wilting and damaged herbs, annuals, and perennials are haphazardly shoved into metal shelves like canned vegetables at the back of a pantry, expired and unwanted.
I stumble at a crack in the floor, nudging the rack as I do, and witness a marigold blossom fall off its stem.
The most beautiful part of it, lost in an instant. Losing Henry felt like that.
I imagine these imperfect, broken plants, destined for the garbage, never given the care and space to grow, never belonging anywhere.
Dad finds me at the racks, piling weedy, unsightly plants into a cart.
When it’s clear that I mean to rescue them all, he helps, grabbing the ones on the highest shelves.
I don’t leave a single plant behind, though some are probably already dead.
They shall have a proper plant funeral, I decide, thinking of our composting bins—we have seven.
We load them into the Land Rover—this messy hodgepodge of mistreated and unwanted plants that make no sense together. It’s an impulse buy, for sure, but Dad doesn’t judge. Nor does he bring up my adamant refusal to plant a garden while I was here—words as impulsive as this act itself.
Instead, he declares, “The ones with the least expectations usually try the hardest.”
At home, it’s annoyingly obvious that I’ve overbought for the small, empty bed normally reserved for Henry and me. But I’ll get creative to ensure these unwanted plants have the space they need, somewhere in Dad’s perfect, overflowing garden.
Only, the next morning, Dad and Christie wake me with sounds of hammers hitting wood, and I discover that they’re constructing a new raised bed along the greenhouse’s exterior.
Together, we fill the ten-foot bed with composted dirt and natural fertilizers.
I don’t bother with gardening gloves. The cool, musty dirt feels good between my fingers.
I get lost in the work. Two days pass in planting, pruning, and watering, my skin sun-kissed and my clothes dirty. It’s the best I’ve felt in ages, especially when the plants show hints of revitalization, convincing me that there’s hope in even the most unlikely second chances.
On the third night, I sleep for a few hours in the loft bed and come downstairs to a mason jar of wildflowers perched next to my field journal with a note.
V —
Christie and I decided to take an earlier flight. Best of luck!
Love,
Dad
P.S. Please see to the museum’s garden installation this afternoon at the following address.
The house is eerily quiet in their absence.
I recall Dr. Broderick’s most recent advice: “Find opportunities to connect.” That was after lecturing me for running away from Dad instead of practicing the techniques she taught me.
I defended myself as usual. How can I think straight when I’m not thinking straight?
And Dad’s admission of regret made calling up the STOP acronym or any other mindfulness technique feel like being asked to recite the alphabet backwards when the only letters I could conjure were F-U-C-K.
Dr. Broderick got a kick out of that analogy. I like amusing her. But connecting will prove more challenging with no one here.
Folding the note, I notice more handwriting on the back.
My artful and sweet new bestie,
I left my favorite romance novels by my chair for you. It might be nice to read something without footnotes or a bibliography, right? Help yourself to any of my scarves on the hall tree and enjoy the fruit salad I made for you in the fridge.
XO,
Christie
P.S. Maybe have some fun with your sister? I know she misses you.
I groan. I love my sister, but it seems unlikely that she would consider me fun.
Over Christie’s fruit salad, which is quite delicious, I read Dad’s class notes and revise my resume. I update my necessary profiles, hoping for opportunities to start filling my sparse inbox.
I shower and dress in my usual work clothes: a tank top under jean short overalls paired with high socks and my delightfully worn-in hiking boots.
A red scarf with peonies tames my hair into a loose top knot.
I stick my gardening gloves in my pocket along with the note and grab the keys from the hook in the kitchen.
Behind the wheel of Dad’s Land Rover, I twiddle with my bracelets and rub my thumb over my pitch black mood ring.
I should stop calling it a mood ring. It’s probably onyx. It’s never been any other color than black, not that I care to have my mood detected by a piece of jewelry—that’s scientifically unsound.
But if it could reflect my mood, it’d be black anyway. Meeting and communicating with strangers is an unsettling chore. I recheck Dad’s note. He hasn’t even given me a name.
I huff. Unfortunately, this summer promises a distressing amount of awkward socializing.
“Let’s pretend it’s always summer for us.” Henry’s words echo through my thoughts.
Summers belonged to Henry and me. Free from teachers and classmates, we’d spend the day in the woods or on our bikes or, if it were raining, in his basement watching Maggie’s old DVDs.
Henry insisted that movies were vital to my education, and it was his duty to ensure I watched all the classics.
Though they were mostly absurd, they always gave us topics for discussion, and few things delighted me more than all-in-good-fun debates with Henry.
Of all the movies he showed me, the most illogical turned out to be my favorite—Little Shop of Horrors. Not only did the story grossly misrepresent Venus flytraps, my bitter namesake, but it did so in song.
“That’s your favorite?” Henry gawked. “What about A Fish Called Wanda?”
“Glorified prostitution.”
“Pretty Woman?”
“Same.”
“Clueless?”
“A Jane Austen retelling? As if.”
“The Breakfast Club?”
“Teenagers left unattended during detention? Please.”
“When Harry Met Sally?”
“Too much talking.”
“50 First Dates?”
“Statistically speaking, that type of head injury—”
“Fine. What’s so great about Little Shop of Horrors?”
“Seymour was stuck with a plant he hates, and in trouble for his misguided attempts to help Audrey—I relate,” I smirked. “At least I never resorted to murder.”
He looked concerned. “And you wouldn’t, right?”
“Of course, not,” I said with less conviction than he wanted.
“The fire ants were drastic enough,” he said, and we giggled, thinking about it.
The day I helped Henry in the woods, he confided that a classmate named Ruby Mack pantsed him on the bus that morning.
He’d been teased all day about his Batman underwear and couldn’t bear the thought of a second attack.
So, he’d texted his mother that he’d be walking home.
I could relate—not to themed underwear or being pantsed, but to the teasing. A day didn’t pass without someone calling me a know-it-all, a weirdo, or a plethora of other demeaning or dismissive words. I was used to being teased; Henry wasn’t. Not at school, anyway.
The next day, I covertly released a specimen jar of fire ants down Ruby’s backside and into her backpack to suggest she unknowingly brought them from home, and everyone believed it, though it’s entirely illogical.
A wiggle turned into uncomfortable scratching until Ruby finally jumped from her seat, did a strange dance, and pulled down her shorts in a desperate attempt to stop the stinging. She did, but not before revealing her Strawberry Shortcake underwear. Hypocrite.
All’s fair in love and elementary school.
I know now that my actions were extreme and that causing physical harm is wrong. I feel bad for the fire ants lost to my prank. But my strong sense of justice prevented me from sitting idly by. Friends stand up for each other. And I desperately wanted a friend in Henry.
Now that I think about it, I hope he wasn’t my friend out of fear. As I collected the survivors, Henry overheard me whisper in Ruby’s ear that next time she messed with Henry, it’d be snakes.
People have an irrational fear of snakes. But that was enough for Ruby to change her ways. And isn’t that better for everyone?
The Land Rover rumbles over cobblestone streets along the waterfront as I near my destination.
The red brick building strikes a familiar chord, though I can’t make out the whole melody.
Dad would bring us downtown for visits to the children’s museum, the natural history museum—my favorite—and, for historic tours—Henry’s favorite.
Maneuvering into a parking space, I huff. I’m not usually like this. Being home has instigated a resurgence of memories I’ve tried to leave behind—Henry is all around me. I almost feel him.
Distracting myself with manual labor is just what I need.
I exit the Land Rover, weave around parked cars, and cross the street. A cargo van sits outside the entrance, advertising Dot’s Home Improvement. I smirk at the words below the logo: Woman-Owned & Woman-Run. Ask About Our No Creeps Promise.
I reach the sidewalk and approach the glass front door, currently propped open by a paint can. I knock anyway and call out, “Hello?”
Inside the small foyer, a wooden blue jay sits on the counter, and again, an eerie feeling washes over me. I recall two men laughing. Have I been here before?
“Hello?” I call again.
Three voices answer.
“Yo!”
“Coming!”
“Oh, sorry. Be right there.”
A light commotion ensues, and a dark-haired woman wearing a tool belt appears, presumably Dot. Then, a smiling redhead carrying a Trapper Keeper.
“Can we help you?” she asks enthusiastically.
“Painter, plumber, or delivery?” asks Dot.
“Gardener,” I say simply, and the redhead’s face shifts from chipper to horrified in a blink.
“I’ll take care of the door,” a voice says, coming up behind them.
I know that voice.
As his name whispers through my thoughts, he appears. Tall, handsome, and utterly destroyed at the sight of me.
Henry.