Dead Roses

“Whaddya do with dead roses anyway?” He said, leaning on the counter, his cigarette bobbing at the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t smoke in here, Jeremy.” His sister spoke automatically; clearly it was something both said and ignored many times before. She was gently rearranging the covers over a supine form in a hospital bed. The only sign of life was the steady beep of a heart monitor standing by the bed. It was a simple room; the curtains plain white linen, the walls tan. Its simplicity drew the eye at once to its one extravagance: on a table beside the bed sat a large vase of red roses.

“It ain’t lit,” her brother informed her. “You told me yesterday. And the day before. Don’t change the subject. What use,” he said, “Are dead flowers?”

“They’re not dead.” Straightening, the woman faced him, her lips a thin line. There were resemblances between them; dark hair, heavy brows, brown eyes. The differences between them showed the person behind the face: a perpetual scowl versus the laugh lines around her eyes, her neatly brushed hair versus his rumpled mess.

“Yeah, sure they are. You cut ‘em off the bush. That’s the definition of dead, Agatha.”

“It’s not what they can do—it’s, well, they’re meaningful—”

He cut her off with a sneer. “Meaningful is a widdle warm fuzzy feeling. Nothin’ to do with the real world.”

She shut her eyes and sucked in a breath, her lips trembling. When she spoke again, she had regained control of her voice. “Don’t you care that she’s still alive? Don’t you care that there’s hope? And—Jenny isn’t fully conscious to appreciate the flowers right now, but maybe—some day—she’ll open her eyes and the first thing she will see are the roses—so she knows she’s loved. Just like she loved us. Don’t you remember—all the meals, all the holidays, all the normal days, for heaven’s sake, she made things beautiful—for us.” Agatha reached out and softly touched a vibrant pedal. “Wildflowers on the table at breakfast. A tiny little ragged poinsettia for Christmas. Nothing else about life was beautiful back then.”

Jeremy turned his back on her, twisting the unlit cigarette in his fingers around and around. “Nothing about life is beautiful. She tried to make us think it wasn’t miserable? Well, she lied.” He spoke harshly, as if grinding the pain of his words into his sister and himself. “She’s eaten up with cancer. She’s practically a vegetable. Give it a few years—nobody’s going to care what she was or did or how many flowers she put on a table. or ever did will matter. And that’s my point—all that junk she cared about—it didn’t matter. Just symbolic and pretty and useless—dead roses.”

Agatha paled with fury. “I never understood why she kept forgiving you and forgiving you and forgiving you. She loved you, and you—”

“I know a waste when I see one.” Jeremy snorted. “Ciao. I’m out.”

--

His apartment was a monument to sloth. Everything was slowly being covered up by grit and slovenliness. A pile of empty pizza boxes sat by the door. The sink was full of dirty dishes, cereal boxes lay out and open on the counter. Jeremy stomped in, head down, lighting a cigarette. It wasn’t until he’d lit it and inhaled before he saw the bowl of roses sitting on his kitchen counter.

A dirty plate was tilted up against it, as if the glass bowl had sprung from the counter and shoved aside everything lying there . There were twelve roses—soft purples, rich oranges, buttery yellows.

“What the—” He turned the bowl around, looking for a tag or note but it was just a simple glass bowl of water, stuffed full of flowers. He dropped his hands and stared at it like it was faintly disgusting and then almost unconsciously took a step back from it.

“Weird.” He muttered, scowling. Turning his back on it, he flopped down in the recliner, grabbed the remote and turned on the T.V. The rest of the night he avoided the bowl on the counter as if that might make it less real.

But in the morning, he woke up, dropped his recliner down to a sitting position, and found roses growing out of the carpet around his feet. He eyed them as they nodded gently from the movement of the chair. Wildly, he looked over to the counter, and the bowl of roses still sat there. A spot of color caught his eye and he saw another rose, this one outside his sliding door, growing out of a crack in the cement patio with all the fortitude of a dandelion. And he remembered, suddenly, Agatha’s words. She wanted her sister to wake up, to see the gift of roses, and immediately know that she was loved.

Cursing, he leapt up, grabbed the roses up out of the bowl and threw them into the trashcan. He picked up the scissors from the counter and chopped down each one of the flowers, muttering imprecations to himself the whole time. He even went to the window, opened it, and pushed the rose on the windowsill off into the air. Then he threw on his clothes and stomped out the door.

--

Agatha looked up from her desk to see her brother slam through the doors of Drs. McMillon and Frame, his face black with anger. She traded glances with the other receptionist behind the desk with her, an older Black woman. She stood up, gripping the desk, bracing herself for whatever invective he was about to hurl at her.

“Jeremy…” She said, as he got within speaking distance, “If you have something to say, maybe we should talk outside…”

He got in her face, his voice forced out through clenched teeth. “What kind of sick joke do you think you’re playing? Flowers? Huh? Guilt tripping me?”

Agatha stared at him, a complete blank. Whatever curt words she’d prepared to convince him to discuss their family business in private evaporated. “…Flowers?”

“YES!” He roared, slamming his fist on the counter. Agatha jumped. Her coworker gave him a pointed glare. He lowered his voice, slightly abashed but still seething. “On the table, coming up from the carpet, on the windowsill—”

Agatha’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry—did you say…up from the carpet?” She leaned forward and hissed, “Jeremy, are you on drugs?”

Hearing his own words from her mouth seemed to derail Jeremy’s rage. He colored slightly. “Well, yeah…but in a bowl, too. Cut roses. Damn flowers, you know, like she always wanted all over the place! And now you’re nagging me with them—”

Agatha took a deep breath, her hands shaking. “You know what this is, Jeremy? It’s guilt. You feel guilty for how you’re treating your sister. Jenny loved you and you wouldn’t accept that, but I’m not wasting my time, okay, Jeremy? You’ve cut everyone out of your life, and now you’ve got rid of me, too. So please leave. Just enjoy being a good-for-nothing, miserable jerk!”

Her coworker nodded and patted her hand sympathetically. Jeremy stood still for a moment, silent only because he couldn’t figure out which words to say first and then finally left with a wordless growl of rage and slammed out the door.

He drove aimlessly for hours before exhaustion and a certain amount of disbelief convinced him to go home. He opened the door cautiously and immediately the faint, sweet scent of flowers surrounded him, erasing any doubt about what was inside. He shivered and went in anyway like a man about to wrestle a bear in its own den.

The glass bowl of roses was still sitting on the counter. There was just enough light from the windows to catch the water and send clear, bright spangles of light all over the apartment, across the open pizza boxes, the clothes stuffed in the corner, the single framed photo hanging over the couch showing two girls and a boy, sitting on a porch, laughing.

“If Agatha isn’t doing it,” he said to himself, “Who is?”

So began a very strange period of Mr. Jeremy Hayte’s life. A time that he could speak about to none of his friends and none of his colleagues. The flowers continued to appear. In fact, every single day there were more. Mostly roses, but sometimes there were daisies, geraniums, carnations, lilies. Most of them appeared in bowls on his counter, in the bathroom, on the bedroom dresser, sitting on the windowsill. But some of them actually grew. They sprang out of his AC vents, grew along the walls, twined around the doorways. One day he woke to find that the fan and light in the living room had been festooned with a delicate cloud of Baby’s breath.

Another day he stumbled, bleary eyed into the bathroom to find that a green ivy had climbed up his bathroom walls and wrapped itself around the shower curtain. Pale yellow roses unfurled from the vines, nearly glowing in the morning light. He staggered to a halt, rubbing his eyes. Jenny had offered to paint his rooms for him when he moved in years ago. He’d mocked her for wasting time on prettifying stuff. Now he suddenly recalled she’d wanted to paint the bathroom yellow. With the haziness of sleep in his mind the thought came clearly to him:, she was right, it actually would have looked good in yellow.

It was a month since the first bowl of flowers had appeared. He’d thrown out the stack of empty pizza boxes at the door to make room for the gallon galvanized bucket that had appeared there, filled with fresh cut daisies. He found himself straightening the counter-top because of the bowl of roses there. He walked in from working and his apartment was a wilderness of flowers, sweet scents, with the evening sunlight making the petals glow like soft jewels.

The newest addition to the collection was a simple bundle of wildflowers lying on his coffee table over a pile of dirty plates and a stack of crumb-covered newspapers. They were tied with a simple hemp string.

His breath caught, and he was suddenly thirteen again, staring at his bruised torso in the narrow bathroom mirror, nausea twisting in his gut. Another day at school. Another day of torture. He put on a shirt quickly to hide the green and purple bruises all over his stomach and went down to breakfast. He knew, even as he left his room, that his mother was already out for the day. There was somehow more space for him when she wasn’t there—it was as if even her croupy smoker’s cough and the clack of her Pepsi being sat on the table communicated disdain for her children. She was no help. No adults cared if welfare recipient, C student, Jeremy Hayte was bullied.

He staggered down the stairs, tense with misery. There on their stained kitchen table, in front of his chair, was a small bundle of wildflowers, tied in a hemp string. Jenny, older than him by barely eighteen months, popped her head around from stove in the dingy kitchenette to smile at him. “Morning sleepyhead. Grits?”

“What’s this?” He said, pointing at the flowers.

Jenny twisted her fingers together, looking uncertain. “I know it’s not much…I know you’re having a hard time at school lately. I just wanted you to know I love you and I think what you’re going through is wrong.”

“Oh.” He said, and looked at the bundle. The enormity of his pain crashed over him like a tsunami at the sight of it. What good was a bunch of flowers? He wanted to hit them, throw them at her, demand that she do something real, force their mother to care, to just—be older. He wanted to be rescued and all she gave him was flowers. He looked away, holding back the hot words of fury. But it was no use. Jenny could read people, especially her siblings, and she saw what he wouldn’t say. He saw the hurt in her eyes as he met her gaze and she ducked her head, turning away from him. “I know it doesn’t…fix anything…”

And he had nothing to say, because it didn’t fix anything. It wasn’t good enough. And part of him wanted her to know that, to know how not-enough her concern was. But then Agatha was there, flouncing down the stairs in a helter-skelter flurry of half combed hair, untied shoes, and scattered papers. “Good morning!” She crowed. “Grits, Jenny? Again?”

Jenny pointed a spoon at her. “Your other option is, let me check—oh, it’s air. Or, we have a nice fried nothing. Your pick.”

Agatha bounced forward, hugged Jenny, said, “I’m kidding! You know I’d eat anything if you made it for me!”

And as usual, with Jenny and Agatha smiling and teasing one another, breakfast was got through, backpacks were packed, jackets were pulled on, and they went out in the cold—and he managed to leave the little useless bundle of flowers behind.

The memory of the hurt in her eyes came back to him now. Why hadn’t he taken them? He’d had so little love; why had he rejected what he did have? He cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes as if there was someone in the lonely apartment that might see the tears there. For a long time he just stared at the flowers around him. And then he dropped to the couch, pulled out his phone and wrote the text to Agatha: How is she?

But his finger hovered over the send button, hesitating. Then he deleted the message.

The next morning, the flowers were dead. Every single one of them withered and brown. His feet crunched on a bed of dead leaves when he got up from his bed. He went from room to room—every flower was dead, the water in the bowls was murky. And as he sank to his knees in the middle of the living room, his phone rang.

“Mr. Hayte? I’m so sorry to tell you this, sir, but your sister, Jenny Hayte, passed away last night.”

--

The funeral was done. The guests had gone away. The funeral tent still stood over the freshly filled grave. And one man stood by the grave, a single flower dangling limply from his fingers as he stared at the rectangle of red, clay dirt.

Agatha walked up behind him, her hands tucked under her arms to ward off the chill of the cold spring breeze. She stood beside him in silence for a long time. Finally, she said, “She woke up before she died.”

He didn’t respond.

Agatha continued, “She said, ‘Ask Jeremy if dead roses are any good.” She looked at him searchingly. “Jeremy, what good are dead roses? What do you do with them?”

When he finally spoke, his voice was low, almost inaudible, “You love people with them. And worthless jerks reject them.”

Agatha sighed and tucked a hand around his elbow. “No, Jeremy,” she said, “You never did understand that. Jenny never gave flowers to worthless people. She gave them to people she valued. People she loved.”