The bell over the door rang as I stepped into the warm, moist confines of the shop. There was no one in sight. “Hello?” I called. The store’s orange tabby came strolling out from a rack of vases, his tail held in a high, relaxed position. I knelt to offer him my hand. “Hey, Tumbleweeds. How are you today? Where are your people?”
Tumbleweeds deigned to walk over and sniff my fingers before butting his head against the back of my hand. Then he turned and walked away again, having accomplished his duty as store greeter.
“You’re lucky,” said a voice. I lifted my head. The owner, Marya, was standing near the cooler where she kept the substandard but seemingly obligatory roses. She was a tall, solid woman with long black hair and a narrow waist that she kept cinched in a wide leather belt at all times. I sometimes found myself wondering whether she would explode if the belt was removed.
She kept smiling as she strolled toward the front of the store, adding, “Tumbles has been standoffish lately. People come in, and he snubs them. He even hissed at a poor woman yesterday. She’d come in to buy flowers for her husband, and here’s my cat, hissing at her.”
“Did you sell her flowers anyway?” I asked, straightening up.
“Four dozen of the long-stemmed red roses.” Marya clucked her tongue. “I tried to steer her toward something worth giving to a person who doesn’t feel his best—who wants my roses when they’re already unwell?—but eh, can’t steer a person who won’t be steered, now, can we? She seemed happy enough.”
I laughed. “You can’t save everyone,” I said.
“No, I suppose I can’t,” Marya mildly agreed. “What can I get for you today? Something sweet and covered in pretty blossoms?”
“I was hoping you had some new sundews, actually,” I said. “Nathan had a hard night last night. I wanted to bring him something pretty.”
“Ah! A discerning customer is the joy of a retailer’s heart.” Marya waved for me to follow her to the back of the store, where another glass door stood between the common flowers and the more exotic climate-controlled carnivorous plants. She held the door open for me, waiting until I was past her before closing it tight and flicking on the overhead lights. “Browse as you like, I’ve nothing better to do.”
Marya’s attitude wasn’t as odd as it seemed, despite the fact that she was the only one currently working. The bell over the door would ring if anybody else came in, and her true joy was selling her carnivorous babies. Having someone who actually wanted to look at sundews was worth any number of missed opportunities to sell bad roses to tourists.
“I have some gorgeous King Sundews,” she said, guiding me toward one of the trays of plants resting under their heat lamps, sticky petals spread toward the absent sun. The largest of the King Sundews was bigger than my palm, with beads of delicate pink “dew” clinging to the cilia of its long, green and orange fronds. “They just came in day before yesterday; you’re the first one who’s come in to see them.”
From her proprietary tone, I could tell what she wanted to hear, and I was happy to give it to her: “Oh, Marya, they’re gorgeous,” I breathed, crouching down to study the sundews with a careful eye. They were no less impressive up close. “What are the care notes?”
“Dormancy isn’t required, but it’s a good idea if you want your King to flower; they can handle pretty good-sized prey, even up to moths and large beetles. You still want to be careful with feeding, don’t feed live if you can avoid it—just don’t worry too much if your King snatches a few snacks without your approval. They actually wrap their leaves around the things that they’re digesting. Hard to grow, intermediate to care for.” Marya smiled slyly. “Your boy would love one.”
“You’re probably right.” I straightened. “How much are they?”
“For you, my darling, thirty dollars even, and you bring me a picture next time you come in, let me see how the new beauty is rooting into the office.”
“You’ve got a deal.” I looked over the tray again before pointing to a sundew near the back. “I’ll take that one.”
“A wonderful selection. Come now, you sweet thing, time to move to a new home…” She cooed to the sundew as she plucked its pot from the tray, mixing endearments in English and Ukrainian. I smothered a smile, following her out of the room.
Marya was a botanist before she moved to the United States. She probably could have continued working in the field, but instead, she’d chosen to do what she loved best: spend all her time with plants, and occasionally foist them off on people who promised to keep them alive. The cut flowers and cheap stuffed toys with “Get Well Soon” slogans were a sideline, another way of meeting expectations.
“Everything is well with you and your boy?” Marya asked, as she rang up my new sundew. “No more headaches, no more bad dreams?”
“Lots of headaches, lots of bad dreams,” I admitted. “SymboGen still has me under observation. I have to check in tomorrow for another review.”
“Such a shame. They should find something else to spend their time on.” Marya handed me the bag containing the sundew. “There’s a care sheet inside, and don’t hesitate to call if either of you has any questions. There are no bad questions in horticulture. There are only bad people who kill their babies through overwatering.”
“Thank you, Marya.” I took the bag, smiling.
“Now go on, see your boy,” she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hands. “He’ll be excited by what you have to give him.”
“If he’s not, he can’t have it.”
“Never ‘it,’ never ‘it,’ ” Marya chided. “None of God’s creatures is an ‘it,’ even if they’re not a boy or a girl or a mammal or a pretty bird. Call them ‘he’ or she’ and be a little wrong, but never take away their individuality like that.”
“Sorry, Marya,” I said, and waved as I left the store. Tumbleweeds followed me to the door and sat there, staring at me through the glass with his tail wrapped around his legs, as I walked toward the hospital. Nathan would be waiting for me.
The nice thing about spending most of my remembered life in hospitals is that it’s become virtually impossible for them to make me uncomfortable. They’re more like home than home is. I’d been awake for almost a year before I realized that normal people aren’t supposed to find the smell of bleach and floor wax comforting. I walked through the main doors of the San Francisco City Hospital, made my way to the elevator, and pressed the button for Nathan’s floor. All business as usual.
A few orderlies nodded to me as I passed. I nodded back, and kept going. Nathan’s lunch hour was never as long as we wanted it to be, and I’d already spent too much time at the florist’s to spend more in being social. I looked down at the brown paper bag in my hand. It was worth it.
Nathan’s research assistant wasn’t at her desk when I reached the ninth floor. I kept walking until I came to Nathan’s office. The door was open. I stopped, knocking on the doorframe. He raised his head and smiled.
“Hey there,” he said. “Come on in, babe. I’ll be done with this in just a second.”
“Babe, darling… this is one of those days where I don’t get to have an actual name, isn’t it?” I crossed to the chair in front of his desk and sat, making sure to hold the bag where he could see it. “Doctor, I’ve got a pain.”
Nathan ignored my joking attempt at a come-on, eyes going to the bag. “Someone called you ‘darling’?” he asked, in a carefully casual tone. “Was that someone by any chance black-haired, wearing a leather belt, and originally from the Ukraine?”
“Funnily enough, that’s a very good description of that someone,” I said. “How did you guess?”
“Experience and greed,” he said, and held up a finger as he turned back to his screen. “Just let me finish this before I get distracted by trying to convince you to let me look inside that bag.”
“Paperwork?” I ventured.
“Oceans of it,” he said. “Sometimes I think that’s the downside of going green—you can’t look
in and see how buried I am by measuring the piles on my desk. Now I look exactly the same whether I’m busy or not, and so people feel like they’re doing me a favor by giving me something to do. Some of them also—not you, you have a free pass at all times—feel like they’re allowed to intrude without asking whether I have time to deal with them.” He typed as he spoke, making quick notes on what had to be a seemingly endless succession of reports.
I quieted, settling in the chair and waiting for him to finish. He would answer if I talked to him—I knew that from previous attacks of unfiled paperwork—and so I didn’t need to verify it by bothering him. I’d have his undivided attention faster if I let him take care of work.
About five minutes slipped by in the sound of typing and the reassuring chill of the air conditioning. Finally, Nathan turned in his chair to face me across the desk, extending both hands in a palms-up “gimme” gesture.
“I beg you, be merciful, for I have just filed fifty-seven patient reports,” he said. “Let me see inside the bag of wonders.”
“I don’t know,” I began. “I mean, you did say that people kept interrupting you…”
“You are never an interruption, a distraction, or anything else of the sort,” he said, hands still outstretched. “Please. Be the most wonderful girlfriend in the world, and let me look inside the bag.”
“You’re lucky I’m soft-hearted,” I said, and passed the bag over to him.
Nathan placed the bag on his desk with proper reverence before reaching inside and pulling out the King Sundew. The light from his desk lamp glinted off the tiny beads of sticky sap coating its fronds, making them look like jewels. Nathan’s eyes lit up.
“You found a King Sundew,” he breathed. “Sal, it’s beautiful.”
“I bought a King Sundew,” I said. “Marya sold it to me.”
“You found Marya’s shop, something I hadn’t managed in eight years of working here. Ergo, you found the King Sundew, and you should get the credit. Let me give you the credit. Please.” Nathan stood, the sundew cradled lovingly in his hands. “This is an incredible plant. I mean, really remarkable.”
I smiled. “You like it?”
“I love it.” He paused. “And I’m being stupidly presumptuous again. Is this for me?”
My smile grew. I liked carnivorous plants as much as Nathan did—enough that I had a small terrarium filled with thriving flytraps and a few pitcher plants that were suitable for a gardener with more enthusiasm than actual skill. They were one of the things we’d bonded over. I’d come to meet him for lunch carrying a flytrap from Marya, and suddenly we had all these things to talk about. The walk we’d taken so I could show him Marya’s store was one of our first dates. He was a lot farther along in our mutual hobby than I was; there was no way I could keep a King Sundew alive. And yet the fact that he even felt the need to ask somehow made the gift all that much sweeter to give.
“All yours,” I said. “I figured you needed a new friend to make up for the night you’d had. There’s a care sheet in the bag, if you need it.”
“Best girlfriend.” He stepped around the desk, pausing to bend and kiss me quickly on the lips before he crossed the office to the terrarium where he kept the majority of his sundews—the ones pretty enough to pass muster for work. There were no pitcher plants, since the administration frowned on keeping dead bugs in your office, even if they were in the process of being digested. There were no flytraps, either. Thanks to hundreds of horror movies, everyone knew that flytraps ate meat. But the sundews, with their bright colors and glittering leaves, were just fine—never mind that they were, in some ways, the most vicious killers of them all. An insect that got stuck to a sundew could live for hours before it died, being slowly digested the whole time.
Carefully, so as not to jostle the plant in his hand, Nathan removed the lid from the terrarium and shifted the heating lamps to the side. Then he moved a few pots around, all one-handed, before lowering the King Sundew lovingly into the center of the display. Its fronds were still clumped together from their time in the bag. He picked up a long skewer—the kind people use for barbecues—and used it to gently tease the sticky leaves apart. Then he replaced the lid on the terrarium and stepped back, looking proudly at his modified display.
“Beautiful,” he said, and turned to walk back to me, bending to pull me to my feet.
“Me or the sundew?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, and kissed me.
Being kissed by Nathan was one of my favorite hobbies, and I was more than happy to stand, put my arms loosely around his neck, and kiss him enthusiastically back. We passed several pleasant minutes that way. Finally, Nathan pulled away, cheeks flushed and eyes a little overly bright behind his glasses.
“You are amazing, and I am starving,” he said. “Lunch?”
“Lunch,” I agreed. “Indian?”
Nathan grinned. “It’s like you read my mind. Let me get my coat.”
He left me in the office while he took care of the last few details required before he could leave the hospital. I walked over to the terrarium, bending to study the King Sundew. It was already relaxing into its new environment, fronds fully extending as it mapped out the limits of its space. It would have insects stuck to those leaves by the next morning, using the nutrients in their bodies to feed its own.
“You’re beautiful,” I murmured.
“Sal?” said Nathan, from the office doorway. “You ready?”
“I’m coming.” I straightened, smiling again. “Let’s eat.”
Nathan clicked the office lights off as he stepped out to the hall. The lights in the terrarium stayed on, casting a bloody red glow over everything. I grabbed my bag from the chair and followed him into the hall, leaving the silently growing plants behind.
The Indian restaurant we wound up in was half a mile from the hospital, tucked into one of those odd warrens of half-residential, half-commercial streets that seemed to spring up all over San Francisco. Every neighborhood had its own character, a mixture of city natives, transplants, and people who thought of themselves as just passing through, even though they’d been living there for longer than I’d been alive. On such blends are cities built.
Nathan took a sip of his mango lassi as he looked thoughtfully at his goat curry. I leaned over and poked him in the arm with my fork. He looked up, startled.
“What?”
“We’re supposed to be having lunch together, but I don’t know where you are,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”
An odd look crossed his face. Putting down his lassi, he reached up and adjusted his glasses—a sure sign that he was uncomfortable. “Did you know that curry powder is a natural antiparasitic? That’s probably part of why it was originally so popular in Indian cuisine. India has a warm, moist climate. That encourages high levels of parasitism, and the more parasites you have, the more ways you’ll need to keep them out of your population. Assuming you want to have a healthy population, that is.”
“And it’s not until recently that we’ve been put into the position of needing to add parasites for the sake of our health, rather than getting rid of them,” I said. “I know. You tell me things like that every time you don’t want to talk about what’s really on your mind. It’s a good thing I was never enthusiastic about developing a taste for sushi. I think you’d get us kicked out of any sushi restaurant worth visiting.”
“Just because people don’t want to consider the risks inherent in their food choices—”
“Nathan, what’s wrong? You don’t usually try to change the subject twice in one meal.”
He paused before sighing heavily. “If I say you really don’t want to know, Sal, will you believe me?”
“Yes, but I won’t stop asking.” I poked him with my fork again. This time the action earned me a brief smile. “I would be a terrible girlfriend if I didn’t make you tell me what was on your mind. You listen to me whine about dealing with SymboGen enough. I can listen to you.”
“It’s ab
out what happened last night.”
The words were simple, but still sent a thread of unease into my guts, where it curled and twisted like a parasite in its own right. Last night he’d been dealing with an accident. I hated hearing about accidents… but this was Nathan, and he deserved better than me shutting him out because I was uncomfortable. “I’m a big girl,” I said. “I can handle it.”
He sighed again. This time he took off his glasses, polishing them on the tail of his shirt as he said, “It was a nine-car pile-up on the Bay Bridge. The people who made it as far as the hospital said they had no warning at all. One minute, traffic was moving normally. The next, a big rig was jackknifing to block all four lanes of traffic, and cars were slamming into it before they had a chance to realize what was about to happen to them. Eleven people died before emergency services could even get to the scene.”
“That’s horrible,” I breathed, feeling the unease twist harder in my stomach. It was horrible, yes, and it involved a car crash, which was normally enough to make Nathan reluctant to discuss his work with me. But was it horrible enough for him to be this reluctant?
I didn’t think so.
Nathan heard my confusion. He looked up, putting his glasses back on, and said, “You said you were going to the mall with your sister yesterday. In San Bruno. Where those people started sleepwalking.”
“Yes. Joyce and I were both there. But what does that have to do with anything?”
“The driver of the big rig survived. So did the driver of the bus that capped off the accident. His passengers—the ones who lived—said he hit the gas when he came around the curve on the bridge and saw the wreckage. Not the brakes. The gas.”
The similarity to my own accident made me go cold. “What are you—”