Clay had a muted way about him, so when the new resident at Lightborne Nursing Home arrived, the staff figured he would take no objection to having a roommate again. They had let the bed opposite Clay lie fallow, cobwebs hanging like irreverent streamers above the space where Fred had breathed his last. Privacy was nice, but so was companionship, so when the nurses wheeled in the new man, his heart pulsed with nothing but cool, steady neutrality.
“Is right here okay, Mr. Hunter?” asked the intern Julie as she pushed him toward the middle of the room, her face flushed with youth and uncertainty. She had coiling golden hair that sometimes reminded Clay of a waterfall. Most times it reminded him of his Suzie.
“Perfect,” said the man, lifting his chin up from the valley it had pressed into his sweater. Turning to leave, Julie’s face was juiced of all its ruddiness as the man’s gnarled hand nudged her backside, pawing right below her streaming hair.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. I get tremors sometimes, and I can’t control where my hands go.”
Cherry-tinged horror burst through her cheeks, her lips fumbling around every unutterable word. Her hair escaped the room last as she tossed it behind her like a sorry sort of shield.
The door now shut, the man panned his head over to Clay, acknowledging him for the first time. What had been a stony expression splintered into a lip-licking grin.
“That’s the one good thing about this chair,” he said with smooth deliberation, blinking his hand open and closed as he manipulated it into all kinds of positions, “you are always at perfect brushing level with a beautiful lady’s bee-hind.”
He let out a laugh thick with phlegm and mischief. Clay swallowed hard, twisting his tarnished wedding band until the green residue settled itself into the grooves of his knuckle.
“Not much of a talker, I see,” the man sighed, “but that’s okay, I can talk enough for the both of us. I’m John Hunter. But everyone calls me Hunter.”
“Call me Clay,” he replied at last, as if he went by any other title. Easing himself out of bed, Clay walked toward him to shake hands. But as Hunter pulled his away, he winced, holding his hand covetously to his chest.
“I think your ring bit some of my skin there,” said Hunter, forcing his face into a smiling mask, “so, are you married?”
“Was.”
“Well, by the look on your face, I bet she was something fine, something real fine,” he winked, his staccato laugh conquering every corner of the room.
“She was my life.”
Hunter wheeled his way to the picture on Clay’s nightstand. His eyes sunk into the figure of the woman, fixing his stare as if to swallow her whole.
“Were you ever married?” Clay asked at last, shifting his weight as Hunter licked his chops.
“Oh, you couldn’t pay me to do that,” he snickered, rubbing the mossy residuals of hair on his own head as if to stimulate growth, “not even if you paid me back double for all the child support I’ve had to dish out.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Let’s see…five, yes, five.”
“Prolific.”
“But I’m only on speaking terms with one. What about you?”
“One.”
“Only on speaking terms with one? Or you only have one?”
“Both.”
“Well, we’ve almost got something in common there, pal,” Hunter crooned, slapping the small of Clay’s back as he wheeled his way over to his bed. Clay caressed the knobs on his spine, reading it like Braille, remembering the unholy contortion in his son’s own spine as his mouth hung open over the toilet those many, many years ago. His finger sweated beneath his ring.
“Well, I’m not sure how they expect me to get into a bed this tall,” he muttered, ramming his chair into the bedpost, “but maybe they know I won’t be here long.”
“They can lower the bed before tonight,” Clay offered, peeling back the blind and peering out the window. Sunlight sliced through the room, hovering like a knife over Fred’s, now Hunter’s, bed. Daylight savings time had just started, and a male and female cardinal were enjoying the early evening sun, sending endless ripples through the birdbath with their ruffled feathers. Clay wished it was not daylight savings time. He just wanted the day to end.
“What do you mean you won’t be here long?”
“Oh, it’s only a matter of time before they realize this was all a…misunderstanding. That there isn’t a single thing wrong with me.”
He roared, rolling his chair backward as if revving up. He then charged forward, moving closer and closer to Clay’s feet until he had to curl in his toes to keep them from getting plowed over. They crackled like dry twigs beneath him, the perfect kindling to fuel another round of his roommate’s howling laughter.
“Well, Clay, I’m going to go explore this place…maybe see if that blondie’s around,” he said, his eyes glinting, flint-struck.
“Hunter,” Clay started, but Lightborne’s newest resident had already made his way into the hall, his wheels writing themselves into the submissive carpeting. Leaning against the doorframe, Clay made sure to keep Julie within his line of sight as he breathed in the fetid odor of bouillon cubes and despair.
“Now, we have a very special surprise for you all,” cooed a voice the following day—that of Nancy, the preschool teacher turned assisted living aid who spoke to both demographics in the same saccharine voice—“we are going to start a community flower garden! Isn’t that fun?”
Nancy had many odd definitions of “fun,” such as a new initiative in which, as stewards of their common living community, the residents would be held equally accountable for making sure the doors leading outside were locked each night. Why should it be up to Nancy alone given all the other tasks already on her mind? About a third of the residents assembled in the common room were debating whether she had said garden or pardon, another third had no clue where they were, and the rest were asking if they could go back to their rooms. But there was an outlier—a woman named Ivy, who clapped her hands in delight.
“I think that’s a wonderful idea! I kept a garden back at home.”
“Don’t you all have landscapers for that?” groaned Hunter’s voice from the back. Rotating a toothpick methodically between his gums, he pulled out a pale, wadded up clump of turkey sausage from breakfast, studied it, then scraped it back onto the tip of his tongue.
Clay watched from his seat beside Hunter as Ivy turned around to face him. Her face was thoroughly wrinkled, yet her clear, crystal-green eyes were ageless. Her vision was so strong that she had never even needed glasses.
“What’s wrong, honey,” Hunter spat, “you wanted to go play in the dirt? Well, there’s plenty of old bags of dirt right here, you included.”
A few heads glanced back at him, but Ivy’s gaze remained fixed on Hunter, as if her eyes had thrust themselves out from their sockets, traveled the five-row difference between their seats, and threaded themselves into and out of his body until Hunter’s face resembled the split pea soup being mixed in the kitchen cauldrons for lunch.
In a matter of seconds, a pool of gray vomit piled up at Hunter’s feet like a mound of unmixed mortar. Remnants bubbled out from his nose, and while Ivy had the decency to look away, Clay could not help but watch his roommate stare at the sheeny substance as if into a mirror.
“Julie, go help Mr. Hunter get cleaned up,” Nancy commanded as she donned a smile, her nose twitching as the acidic smell assaulted her, “and the rest of us will take a trip out to our very own personal garden plots before lunch. How does that sound?”
The caravan made its way outside, but Clay sat with Hunter a moment longer, placing his hand on the man’s back the way he had remembered doing so when his son had woken up sick in the night, feeling as useless now as he did then. Jumbled words of reassurance fell limply from his mouth as Julie wheeled Hunter away. Clay walked outside, the image of the toothpick collapsing into the squishy sludge ironed into his brain.
By the time lunch came around, Clay had completely lost his appetite. He offered his bowl of soup to Hunter, who slurped both his and Clay’s down lustily.
“What you want to do is break up the soil here a bit,” instructed Ivy, who was assigned the gardening plot with Clay’s to the right and Hunter’s to the left. Sinking the trowel into the dirt, he felt the clumps of cool, moist earth fill the gaps between his bony finger and his wedding band.
“Hey, he doesn’t need you giving him orders,” barked Hunter, who swung his dangling feet over Clay’s and Ivy’s hunched bodies.
“You’re making a nice home for that cutting. Now, here is your rue, and here is your lily of the valley,” chirped Ivy, who was helping Clay plant the cuttings that the staff had assigned to him at random. Hunter had commissioned Ivy to plant his, too.
“How is Brian?” she asked, her eyes soft like the moss cushioning Clay’s aching knees.
“Good. I mean well.”
“And you said he is planning to come visit in a month with Heather and Johnny, right? After they got back from Niagara Falls?”
“Yes, yes they are. But how did you know that?”
“I just remember you telling me. And how you and your wife wanted to take Brian there when he was little but didn’t get around to it. That’s so great he gets to see it now!”
Shame bled like a bruise across his face.
“Right. Yes,” he assented.
“Well, I’m sure you’re very excited for the visit.”
“Yes,” Clay said huskily, striking at a rock hidden deep within the soil, “I believe I am.”
“Believe?”
Clay leaned his weight onto the trowel, feeling it wobble beneath him as he waged war against an anchored rock. Sweat cried from his brow, sliding into the patchwork earth. Panting, he surrendered the trowel to Ivy.
“I’m not sure what I mean exactly. Brian’s a great man. I’m proud to know him. But it feels impossible to call him mine. He was so close to Suzie. I’m sure he loved her more. And how could he not? She was everything. I was…there.”
Clay thought she must not have caught what he said or simply did not care to answer. She stared with scrutinizing eyes at her own garden plot, at Hunter’s shadow eating hers. She stayed crouched and still, barely breathing. Clay reached his arm out to touch her, to feel if there was still life inside her, when a crisp, vivifying breeze blew in. Unfurling herself, Ivy turned toward Clay.
“Sometimes, when I used to garden at home—before I was old—I thought that I was the one growing the flowers. That they weren’t just from me but of me. And I suppose they were, in a way. I broke up the soil. I made them a home. But the perennials—they learned how to live independently. The water bathed them, the sun fed them, and I had no part in it whatsoever. But they kept coming back to see me each year, and I let myself enjoy them.”
Rubbing the heels of her hand against her leathered face, she smeared the auburn soil like rouge across her cheeks. Clay had never seen someone look so satisfied. Placing his hands back onto the trowel, she folded her hands over his, and together they negotiated the unmovable stone until it dislodged itself like a tooth yanked deftly from its root.
“Ivy?”
“Yes, Clay?”
“You said that all flowers mean something. That you’ve got a book on it or something. What does rue mean?”
Her lips pulled thin, she probed him with moist, unblinking eyes.
“Regret.”
“And what does lily of the valley mean?”
“The return of happiness.”
Clay contemplated his mud-stained hands, deciding not to wipe them clean just yet. Above, the clouds separated like torn gauze, sunlight dripping through each crack onto the planted plots. Ivy craned her neck up toward the light, her palms open like leaves, her cheek slightly turned as if awaiting a kiss. Hunter was to the left of the light, swatting at the mosquitoes as they fed off him.
“What about mine?” he growled, squishing one mosquito in his hand, rolling its corpse into a neat ball.
“Your what?” the two asked.
“My flowers. What do they mean?”
The three heads turned toward the cuttings Ivy had just finished planting for him in his plot. With saggy stems, they shuddered uneasily before them.
“The columbine’s petals look like a jester’s hat. So, people associate it with foolishness. With the cowslip, there is a legend that St. Peter dropped his keys to the gates of heaven and that they turned into a flower. If you find a cowslip, you can cheat your way into paradise.”
An ugly smile spread across Hunter’s face, his canines bared, eager to cut something down. Mechanically, he closed his chapped lips over them.
“But are they pretty? Pretty to look at?” he asked.
“Sure,” Ivy said flatly.
That afternoon, after he and Hunter had returned to their room, Clay pulled up the blinds just a hair, letting the light crawl as closely as it dared toward him. He felt warm, sun-kissed, as if his veins had broadened and that, surging freely through him was the lush electricity of life itself. His hand stretched toward the picture on his nightstand but then, after studying the people within the frame, his finger recoiled, as if pricked by a thorn. A string of expletives from the desk across the room stole his attention.
“You got a pen I could borrow? This stupid thing ran out of ink.”
Clay rummaged through his drawer and found a pristine, unused pencil.
“That’s not a pen.”
“It’s all I have.”
“What sort of man doesn’t have a pen?”
“I might want to erase something. Correct something.”
Hunter wheezed, the buttons on his shirt trembling against his expanding chest. Only the seismic groan from his stomach could interrupt his laughter.
“That’s the difference between you and me, Clay. I mean, feel confident at least once in your life.”
Another wheeze. Clay nudged his head through the space between the window and blinds and looked out at the latent life churning in his garden plot. Two little brown birds were baptizing themselves within the birdbath. Another gut-gurgling squelch from across the room. Hunter’s chafed skin flaked into a devious smile.
“You know, if that old bag wanted me the way she wanted you out there—which I am thoroughly relieved she didn’t, I’ll let you know—I wouldn’t be in here talking with you. I’d be planting a different sort of seed, if you know what I mean.”
Clay retracted his head, the blinds slapping the glass on its fast return. He couldn’t deny his throbbing heart, the swell of passion she had breathed into him. But what had made him feel blissfully lightheaded—cosmic, even—was not so much her as much as the feeling that, through her, he had begun to experience everything that everybody had tried to get him to feel his whole life. Everything that had meant everything to those he loved but had evaded him so thoroughly that it began to mean nothing to them, too. And maybe it really was nothing if it could become so crude, so deformed as it drifted carelessly from his roommate’s lips. He peered out the window again—the birds had flown away.
“Who are you writing to?” Clay asked as he handed him the pencil.
“My son.”
“The one you still talk to?”
“Obviously. Besides, he’s now the one who really owes me.”
“How come?”
Hunter clenched his jaw.
“Well, I was living with my son—the one who still speaks to me—and he claimed I kept having these, these spells. I was sleeping on his couch, and he says that I would crawl into my chair in the middle of the night, wheel myself over to the fridge, and gorge myself on expired food.”
“Did you?”
Hunter clutched the twitching pencil in his hand as if to juice it.
“I…I suppose, but it’s not like he says. Maybe he should label his food better. Or maybe he should make me more substantial dinners so I’m not starving in the middle of the night, how about that?”
Hunter sneered, his fist shaking, his knuckles bone-white.
“What are you telling him?”
“Not telling. Demanding.”
“What?”
“Bulbs.”
“What bulbs?”
“The best ones he can find. Whatever the florist says is the most beautiful. I mean, did you hear the way she talked about my flowers? ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘sure, pretty if you put ten pounds of makeup on them.’ Maybe that’s what she needs. Then maybe she’d shut up.”
“I don’t think that’s what she said.”
“Subtext,” Hunter tsked, “subtext, my friend. Believe me, I’ve had much more experience with the conniving creature known as woman. And this particular one is going to plant my bulbs for me, and she’s going to like it.”
Clay retreated to his bed and turned to face the wall, the olive-green paint looking more like vomit. He was tired again. Plucking the picture from his nightstand, he pulled it into his chest, shielding it from the seething beast across the room.
That night, Clay dreamed of waterfalls. He and Suzie had gone to Niagara Falls a month after he had proposed to her, and she stood there, her arms wound tightly around his waist. Leaning on her like a crutch, he stared down at the gushing waters. It was as if he were hypnotized by it as it fell solidly like a stiff, untroubled blanket. Everything was shrouded in a veil of mist, and he wondered how close he would have to approach for the veil to thin, for him to see his own reflection in the waters. Mostly, he wondered whether the face reflected back would be still, stagnant, or whether it would slip past him, rushing zealously downstream to some great unknown.
“Clay!” Suzie shouted, her voice like that of a songbird’s projected just above the sound of the tumbling waters. She fidgeted with her fingers, having developed a new habit of slipping her engagement ring on and off, on and off, as if to prove it was still a good fit each time.
“Clay!” she beckoned again, pinching his waist so he would look down at her. Lost in the watery haze, Clay startled, his knees buckling slightly, and then he was gargling his heart, gazing down at the heaving rapids below, imagining what it would have been like to stumble then slip so unexpectedly into the subline. He shuddered.
“Clay, kiss me! Kiss me now!”
Suzie stared at him with her eyes closed, her lips ever so slightly parted, waiting for his to fit between. As if magnetized, his lips drew toward hers, and his breath bled into hers. But then he looked around him, at all couples, all the young families, and wished the gentle mist could shroud him within it. He could not possibly kiss her now, not with all the crowds, all the water, that life watching his performance. He pulled his face back and licked his own lips, coating them in saliva and shame.
“What did you say?” he bluffed, and when she opened her green eyes, they were already glazed with tears.
“You, you heard what I—” but her words, faint now, were greedily guzzled by the charging water. And then, as if it could no longer find anything to cling to, the ring slipped from her finger and rappelled down the rocks into the ripples below. That first ring—the better ring—was swallowed.
“Why, why can’t you say anything? Why can’t you do anything?” Suzie sputtered, and suddenly they were not overlooking a waterfall but were folded onto the bathroom floor, hovering over their son, Brian, as he spewed the refuse of his dinner from a panting mouth into the toilet. Suzie fixed her eyes on her child, but her words were aimed at Clay.
“Daddy, are you okay? I…I feel better. It’s not your faul—” but another surge of nausea turned him back to the toilet, where he purged himself of the faulty dinner his father had made.
Suzie had gone out with her sister for the evening, and she had already assembled a chicken casserole for Clay to just put in the oven to bake. Clay set the oven to 350 and stared at the kitchen sign that read, “Nourish the body, grow the soul.” Clay’s soul felt rather starved considering his own hatred for casserole. So, he ate a frozen pizza that night, waiting for the feeling of fullness to settle into his spirit. He could see it now, in the dream—the certain symbolism to it all, a sacramental reading to the squishy chicken mixture she had deliberately made that he could not, would not, ingest. Perhaps that was why he never realized that he had undercooked the casserole.
“Say something!” she shouted, but all he could do was nod his body side to side like a metronome, trying to slow the pace of it all.
“We’re just glad that it was quick…painless…probably,” Nancy consoled the residents in the common room after breaking the news to them. Julie was delegated the task of calling Ivy’s children.
Clay had no good words for how he felt. If it was grief over losing a friend or jealousy that she made it out before him, he could not say. But there was a dryness, a chafing in his soul, that no salve could ever soothe.
“How did it happen?” he asked, and like schooling fish the other residents turned their heads collectively to the virgin sound of a voice they almost never heard.
“Well, yesterday she was planting these mystery bulbs she had, who knows from where,” Nancy explained, “and already she must have been confused—it wasn’t even her plot. It was the one next to hers.”
Hunter cleared his throat then cleared it again.
“Now, the rain had already started, and I suppose it was unusually chilly for spring, but, as you all know, we value personal autonomy here in our living community, and she just kept saying that she had to, that she had to plant them and just be done with it all. And I kept peeking through the windows—I never took my eyes off her, I’ll have you know that. But you know her. She can take forever outside, even in the worst weather. There she was, pulling up a few strawberries to eat, licking all the juice off her fingers, never washing her hands first or anything.”
Clay turned his head to the window, willing the figure of a lady getting younger and spryer with every berry she ate to appear.
“We made sure she took a warm bath when she came in, but we noted something strange about her eyes—they were fixed up toward the ceiling as if she were seeing something beyond it. But, as I previously stated, she was likely confused before ever going outside, and we at Lightborne are not at fault…but it is a tragedy nonetheless.”
The words whished noiselessly in Clay’s ears. All he saw was a woman’s body bowing like a willow over the soil, droplets of dew beading on her skin as she sunk her fingers in the ground, softening the soil beneath. She must have hated having all of that washed off in the bath. He hoped some earth had wedged itself irretrievably beneath her fingernails.
“What about her flowers?”
Clay’s guts boiled as the voice beside him ruptured the solemn silence.
“Are they going to be dug up? That’s some prime real estate there, after all.”
“No!” Clay shouted with a strength that could have parted each wispy hair on every scalp in front of him. Before he knew where his legs were taking him, he stormed outside, out toward the garden plots, and lay his weary body down in front of Ivy’s sprouting universe. Only then could his heart breathe again, only when he let himself melt into the sodden ground until the sun sank.
Three weeks had passed, and Clay lay discontentedly within his bed, kicking his covers off one by one so that the midnight breeze seeping in from the cracked window might blanket him instead. His muscles had just relaxed, his mind unraveling into the welcome diversion of a dream, when he was roused by a plinking sound on the tile floor. He rolled over, hoping it would let up, but the drops pierced his mind, and after a few minutes he turned his head to the sound.
Across the room was Hunter, his head hanging off the side of the bed, his maw of a mouth opened wide. Stalactites of drool stretched down toward the floor beneath him. And in the veiled moonlight, Clay realized that Hunter’s eyes were stretched open as well, two bloodshot beacons calling everything in his line of sight toward him.
“I’m hungry,” he rasped, his voice tinny and his throat taut.
“I’m starving,” he croaked, and completely missing his wheelchair, Hunter tumbled from his bed onto the floor. The thud of his torso then legs rattled through the floor like an arrhythmia. Still, his caustic gaze ate at Clay.
“Hey, Hunter, easy now,” Clay shushed. He approached the crumpled figure on the floor, extending a hand to Hunter for him to take. A frothy lather had worked itself up at the corner of Hunter’s lips. For a moment, his eye shone clearly, spitting Clay’s bewildered face back at him. Then his eyes clouded over, and with swift matter-of-factness, he sunk his teeth into Clay’s hand. He clamped his jaw shut until Clay’s mouth fell wide open, his soundless wails permeating the room. But as soon as he drew blood, Hunter spat out the hand like a bone that had lost its flavor. Tugging himself across the floor like a serpent, he writhed toward the garden door, apparently unlocked as it yielded to his pushing body.
Clay sank to his knees, holding his purpled right hand before him. Without thinking, he seized the picture frame, holding it beneath his mangled hand as it developed a pulse, wondering whether it might pump life back into the static figures.
Gradually, Clay rose, the fingers of his good hand trembling as they opened the blinds. Beyond the pane, a prone shadow sidled its way toward the plots. The motion detecting lights flashed on, every speck of dust in the air interrogated by the white beams. And it was that same limelight that Hunter’s body edged itself across the walkway. Some moments, he seemed to drag himself; other times, it looked as if something else were hauling him forward as his flesh unspooled itself across the path, a greasy trail of blood following close behind. Rounding the corner, he inched toward his plot that was blooming with deep purple petals. Positioning his already opened mouth over the plants, he waited for the wind to animate them.
And there he feasted.
They found Clay first the next day, and other than a strange cut on his hand and a bump on his head he had gotten after falling faint, he was considered unaltered by last night’s events. As for Hunter, his son had been notified, and he would be coming to clear out his half of the bedroom that day.
Clay planted himself next to Julie that morning. Nobody should have to find a lifeless, crumpled-up body first thing in the morning, his pupils so dilated that they seemed as if they were devouring his own face. Nobody should have to see that, especially not a young lady.
Turning to the common room bookshelf, Clay spotted one of the volumes that had been Ivy’s, donated to Lightborne by her family after her passing. It was Flowers: A Book of Growth and Meaning. Squeezing Julie’s hand, Clay stood up, grabbed the book, and made his way silently outside. It was a foggy morning, and the low-hanging cloud covered Clay like a shawl as he marched into it, swerving around the crimson path Hunter had left in his wake. He examined the growth of the rue and the lilies of the valley that had woven in and out of each other in their growth. Beside them were the flowers Ivy had never been able to see grow. Scanning through the book, he identified the white, ruffled one as a carnation, the symbol of a mother’s sacrificial love. The sprawling ones that blanketed the plot were forget-me-nots.
Turning toward Hunter’s, Clay studied the one trumpeting bloom that shot up like a spear through the ground. Softening the pages with his sweaty hands, he turned to the book’s matching flower: Don’t be seduced by the belladonna, the “beautiful lady” that is perhaps better known as the deadly nightshade…
Clay’s room was once again barren, at least the other half of it. More cobwebs had laced themselves overhead, but he never hunted for the spider—a harmless companion was welcome. Filling the silence with the scritch of his pencil, he wrote to his son:
Dear Brian,
How are you? I am good. I hope you, Heather, and Johnny are, too. I cannot wait for all of you to visit. I grew flowers outdoors, and I’ve cut a few and put them in a vase next to the picture of you and your mother. I’d like for you all to pick some more from my plot and take them home. I would just ask that you try to pull up the roots with them and find them a good home in your earth. I want them to keep on living.
Marlene Elaine Brasco is a Virginia-based writer and a student at the College of William & Mary. When she is not writing, she is usually reading, baking, gardening, working with children with disabilities, or tending to her many pets.
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