Grayspace

White Roses

For a day of death, Life electrified the moment. Such green in the grass and the trees. Such turquoise in the sky. Wind warm as a kiss. A chorus of birdsong fell from the cemetery trees in the early morning. She loved mornings. Clear up until her final moments she was an early riser.

WHITNEY ROSE IRVING

The sterile headstone of pink marble said, amidst neighboring slabs of stillborn infants and war veterans whose names were filled in with lichens and mosses so vibrantly green they were almost yellow.

I laid a bouquet of white roses on her slick varnished coffin. The rising sun made them a subtle peach.

I took one lone rose and handed it to her as she lay in the hospital bed. The instruments translated her heartbeat into a lifeless electronic morse code. That heartbeat that sang me to sleep as a young man as the sweat on our skin mingled and became crystals. That fluttered her eyelids when anger or irritation flashed in her face. All reduced to a binary flag of "1" -- ALIVE, "0" -- NOT ALIVE if the criteria programmed into the equipment wasn't met.

Her hair, the tubes in her skin, her gray eyes, and the rose I handed her were all awash in the golden hues of dawn. Her breathing had been strained for days. But the arrival of the rose had made the next breath into a sigh. When the day was fully established, the whites would be more precisely delineated. Her hair would be as white as bone. Dusty white. Dry white. A step away from blue.

The tubes in her veins, rising to the surface of her skin like dying jellyfish, would be a sterile, color key white. Mechanical. Easily categorized. With a serial number. An echo of a brilliant man's patent that the medical world snatched up to cut costs.

The rose, the mother-of-pearl ivory we see in life. The beginning of life. The very promise of life. The vanilla-scented promise in the wedding of two virgins.

The doctors were kind enough to open the window for her.

Her hair sustains a blow from a morning breeze. When it settles, it's a melody of gray and gold. I've just noticed how the hump in her nose is more prominent, as the skin is more taut. The blue is draining from the eyes, but that wild mare spirit still remains. She's in her favorite bath robe. The one I got her for our thirthieth anniversary. I've gotten her a few others in years after, but thirty was special somehow. She never said why. That was just the bath robe that showed up more than the others.

I eye that bath robe as it hangs on a wooden peg. Hanging by a thread. The lavender blossoms embroidered on the oversized cuffs. Thirty years of morning smiles, morning breath, morning sex, morning conversation, mornings rushed, on that lifeless peg, taut and still. She's held up in the East Bay area. Had to get a hotel room because of the weather.

Two weeks became two and a half.

I told Sarah about it. Sarah is in my arms.

Sarah wants to wear that empty skin of thirty years. She likes the floral print.

Whenever I do laundry, there's always one or two golden hairs still lodged in that robe. Sarah has auburn hair that almost turns orange at certain angles, like hellfire. It burns silently cold in the light of the full moon on the patio. A few feet away is a plastic table with a vase of white roses that have begun to nod off for good. A couple of wrinkled petals peer over the edge of the table at the flat, square stones below.

I feel a petal whisper against my wrist as it falls. The bouquet is behind my back. The sun is on the other side of her face, and her sharp nose and her wild hair remind me of a Collie. The sharp angle of her nose is both beautiful and powerful. The hair is like bleached hay. The eyes are just a shade of blue lighter than the summer sky. Heaven has drifted awfully close to the ground, and I want to hook it with a bunch of white roses I grew myself.

We explode out of the school doors. They knock two opposite rosebushes silly and the petals fall like feathers. Distressed pigeons scatter with a similar effect. We trample the fallen petals and feathers hand in hand. A few squeaky voices mock us but we don't care.

I fall down, crying. My knee is scraped. My blood smears the pavement, quickly going from crimson to cinnamon. Her eyes are so blue they're almost white. She dramatically puts her small hands on her chipmunk cheeks.

"Are you okay?" she gasps.

I am. But I milk the moment. The scratches from my mom's rosebushes looke like three even tiger scratches on my tender young calf. When you're five years old, that's a war wound, and somebody besides you better cry over it.

I cry for all I'm worth. I cry until my lungs ache. My mother holds me, smiling. She's exhausted. I'm exploding with a wet rage even I don't understand. I'm too loud to hear the crying of another newborn, a girl, down the hall. The band on my wrist says WALTER TIMOTHY IRVING.

The band on her's says WHITNEY ROSE THURLEY.

Our two wards are separated by a narrow hallway with a lacquered table holding a vase of artificial white roses.