In the Language of the Flowers

| 22 |

✾ Lavender ✾

The house phone rang, which confused me momentarily because I couldn't remember Ren and I having one. I answered anyway. "Hello?" I looked around and realized immediately.

"Hey, baby."

"Hey, mom." I smiled. It was a dream.

"You ok? You sound strange," she said. I closed my eyes, leaning against the wall. It was painted a faint, faded yellow color. Pictures of me when I was a kid, mom, and some of dad before he died covered the wall before me. I felt an ache that reached the deepest parts of me.

Losing them was not painful in the everyday sort of way. I could go without them in my life, could live without thinking about them constantly. No, what hurt most about it was all the important moments of my life to come. My future lost its luster without them in it. All the important things they would miss...

"I'm ok, mom," I reassured her. Though I knew it wasn't real, it felt like I was really talking to her. I wanted to tell her that I really was ok. Even if the world felt like it was falling apart and had been for a while, I finally had faith that I could withstand whatever was to come. I was terribly afraid to see Ren, but I wasn't afraid of whatever would come after. The way I looked at it, it was out of my hands at this point. The only thing I could do was tell the truth. "I'm good," I told her, hoping that wherever her beautiful soul was, she could truly hear me.

"Afraid my news might change that," she said. Her voice was a little too singsongy as if she were trying incredibly hard not to sound depressed.

"What's wrong?" I asked. This all felt really familiar, like bizarre deja vu.

"I'm in the hospital."

It didn't matter that it was a dream. My composure slipped and I panicked. "What do you mean? What happened? Are you ok?"

"I'm fine! I'm fine. Don't worry, ok?" she said, her voice rushed. "I was hit by a car."

"You WHAT?"

"Well, not hit necessarily. I was pushed out of the way! Can you believe that?"

"Someone saved you?" I asked.

"You betcha. A young man. I would have died without him, I swear," she said. She would have died without him; I knew why her words sounded familiar. This was a memory. It was a few years ago. She had called home with a broken arm, having shattered her ulna in the fall after the car missed her. I didn't know it at the time, but the fragility of her bones was the first sign of her cancer. 

"I'll come to the hospital," I said. I hadn't known, at the time, that I would go on to spend weeks in the hospital with mom after she got sick. I'd felt such relief that she'd only broken an arm and nothing worse. It was a funny kind of unfair.

"You don't need to get me, if you're busy. I'm just being fit with a cast," she said. "The hero who saved my silly self is still here and he's offered to help me home."

"Well, all the more reason for me to come so that I can thank him. And don't make him stay if he's got things to do, mom. He's probably a busy guy."

"Oh, you worry too much."

"I do, so please don't move a muscle until I get there because apparently I can't trust you to walk down the street without breaking something," I joked.

She laughed. "Apparently not!"

"I love you, mom."

A piercing ringing masquerading as a gentler sound emitted from the phone receiver. I held it away from my ear, wincing. When it came again, I realized that it was the obnoxious tone indicating that the captain was about to speak over the plane's intercoms. He announced our descent, finally.