Between the Petals

My husband Joe snores lightly beside me.

I drift off to sleep. I think of flowers.

Fields of pink, white, and yellow. Dozens of watering cans lined up in a row.

I pick one up and walk toward the blossoms. I begin to water. 

She appears in front of me. She is younger than I remember – closer to my age now than when she died.

Her green eyes are bright.

Her hair is curled just so, the way she styled it in the bathroom before she left for work.

She wears a jacket I faintly remember. Plaid, with buttons.

My mother.

We embrace. We apologize. We apologize for all we didn’t know how to untangle between us.

We never say the word estranged. It is a word best unspoken.

She asks how it happened, what we did for her last day.

I can’t bear to tell her the truth. I can’t tell her about the hospital bed, her once lovely hair lank and unwashed.

I can’t bring myself to describe the ventilator or the tubes. I don’t know how to capture the messy ending.

Instead, I tell her we watered her flowers. I hold up my watering can to show her. She picks one up too. Together, we walk amongst the rows of color. A sense of peace falls over me. At last, we are together. At last, we are calm.

Here, between the petals, we are briefly beautiful. We step in harmony, despite our difference in height.

Suddenly, we are in a small room. The floor is made of wood – wide planks polished bright.

She curls up near a small rug.

I know what is happening. I am desperate to stop it.

No, I tell her.

Don’t go.

No.

I scream.

She turns into younger versions of herself.

Yet when I look closely, they are younger versions of me. Together, we tumble backward in time.

At twenty, the wind in my hair. 

Ice cream at the beach, framed by the bluest sky.

Asleep in bed beneath a quilt of roses.

A red sunsuit trimmed in white.

I scream without sound.

I thought I had more time.

There is no more time.

I open my eyes. 

He shifts beside me.

It seems I never made a single noise at all.

He took the picture of me, of the wind.