Father always waited in the front yard for me to come home from the fifth grade, the grade I remember the most for all the wrong reasons. He usually kept his hands behind him, holding back some kind of present—almost always an orange, his favorite afternoon snack. The unspoken rules of our game: first my father would ask, “How was school?” and then I shared a good story before winning whatever he hid.
One day I didn’t want to play. I didn’t want to talk about fighting the girl who’d called me ‘foreigner’ and said she wished my mother died from her cancer. I brushed off his question and headed for our front door, books heavy in my arms.
“What happened?” He’d asked.
I’d stopped and stared at the grass and then shook my head, my braid whipping across my back. I yearned for a hug, but fifth grade was the year I decided to stop acting like a baby.
I felt a tug on my braid. “Here.”
I turned and saw my father offering me one of his hands. “Make a wish,” he said, and held out a wishflower even though I hadn’t followed any of our rules.
I imagined how my breath might release the feather-like pods to gallop into the air and travel a chaotic path away. But I felt too old to fall for these tricks anymore. I forced the spines of my textbooks to dig bruises into my arms. “This is stupid.”
“Okay. Try this.” He brought out his other hand.
Air caught in my throat. He held the largest bouquet of wishflowers I’d ever seen, inches from my face. Dozens of globes hung together by the barest of connections and blotted out the rest of the world. Each stalk contained potential, hundreds of seeds ready to tornado into the sky and then blanket the yard, maybe land on Mrs. Harrit’s grass and anger her when they sprouted in a week.
I took a deep breath.
Before I exhaled, my father used all his strength to blow.
A rushing wall of pods plunged into the air around me. Feathery tails twirled across my cheeks, eyebrows, into my open mouth. I smelled the oranges my father loved.
He blew again, hard enough to snuff out fifty birthday candles, his cheeks puffed into a pair of red balloons and I couldn’t prevent my smile or the giggle that materialized deep in my throat, because yes, he’d gotten me, was getting me, and, oh, what a good trick!
I dropped my books and searched the grass. Broken stalks poked from the yard like bent drinking straws. I laughed while brushing seeds out of my mouth. “Did you pick them all?”
He waved his hands at the pods still floating in the air. “Just about.”
The seeds settled into a white carpet on the grass and did not pay attention to property lines. I couldn’t wait for the look of horror on Mrs. Harrit’s face once hundreds of wishflowers grew up in her perfect lawn. Then I saw it—a scraggly stalk with half the seeds already blown off the flower head, hiding in the crack where the house met grass—it was enough. “Mrs. Harrit is going to be mad,” I said.
He looked toward Mrs. Harrit’s front door. “Promise you won’t tell on me?”
“Okay.” I picked the flower and hid it behind my back. “But only if you get my books.”
“Done.”
I crept closer and readied my attack stance. I blew at the wishflower as he turned, but he blew at the same time. The seeds twirled as if caught in a hurricane, some going this way, some going that way.
My father laughed. I giggled as a couple of seeds caught in his eyebrows and disappeared into his gray-streaked hair.
“I think your father wins this round.”
We froze at the sound of my mother’s voice. It came out of nowhere, reminding me we were still three, though no one knew how much longer that might last.
She leaned against the door post. I noticed she wore sweats, not a bathrobe. One of her good days.
“You both look like you’re wearing very silly white hats,” she said.
I ran fingers through my hair, pulled out a handful of white tufts and stuffed the seeds into my pockets for my collection.
My father stepped onto the porch and kissed my mother’s cheek. “Did I tell you how,” he said, turning back to where I stood in the grass, “when we first moved here, your mother returned to her old neighborhood to pick some wishflowers? She couldn’t find a single one growing on the whole block here. To your mother, this was a travesty.” He lowered his voice and glanced toward Mrs. Harrit’s house. “So your mother walked the neighborhood, under the cover of night, and blew an entire flower’s head of seeds into each front yard, for five houses down, in both directions and both sides of the street.”
“But I didn’t plant anything!” My mother laughed. “I was like a strong breeze, nothing more.”
“I don’t think the neighbors would agree.” He winked at me.
She replied, “Well, too bad.”
Rain beat against the roof of the store, startling my memory-rush—there was nothing else to call it except what Christopher had named it. Memories that wisped in and then away like weed-flowers turned into wishes.
“Yes, momma. I know you love me.” My throat spasmed and I wished for her to get better. I thought maybe if I made the wish over and over again, one wish for every wishflower pod that my father and I had ever blown at each other, that it would come true.
I woke enough to remember my mother had died six weeks after that day. All my wishing for nothing. It couldn’t stop my father from dying of pneumonia and grief two months after I turned thirteen. I went through several foster homes. I ended up at a group home that asked me to find a new place to live after I’d gotten into a bad fight at school. I moved in with Jane's parents. Got a job at the garden. Met Dylan.
Dylan.
The infection grew, swirling together old and older memories. I came out enough to drink a little water, and then I sweat it out, and then I fell back into it, but not before seeing Maibe lying next to me, and then the fever of memories settled on my brain like a humid blanket.
I lived my father dying. I lived my high school fights. I lived endless pasta dinners and tuna sandwiches, the calls to Jane that held me together, the classes and papers and bills. There was nothing particularly poignant about grief and poverty and loneliness. I’d folded those memories into a black hole of time, but they came back.
My father had died, but he’d done so slowly and his will asked he be cremated and shipped back to his family in the old country. There was no proper funeral for him, just an ache and emptiness. I lived much of my memory-rush time with him, and felt some gratitude to the virus for this.
I wondered if all of the memory-rushes would be so kind, and then I understood how people might get so lost in the fevers they never came back out.
Hours or days or weeks later, there was no way to know, the gnawing pain in my stomach cleared my head. Like the knife-edge feeling after a migraine has left. This sense of openness, yet fear, because the migraine might be waiting around the corner.
I lay flat on the floor. I tested my muscles. I stretched and felt the tingle of increased blood flow. The shoelaces no longer bound my limbs. I sat up and looked around.
“Jane?” No answer. I raised my voice. “Jane? Maibe?”
“Here,” Maibe said.
I saw a lump. Both of us had retreated to corners of the room, as if we’d turned into wild animals licking our wounds in privacy.
“Do you hurt still?” I thought about trying to stand, and tested putting weight on my feet. They held up okay.
“I guess. I feel kind of empty,” Maibe said.
I tried not to think about what might or might not be going on inside my body. My spine creaked as I forced myself to stand. My muscles felt weak, my bones fragile. I tried to take a step. “What the hell?”
“What’s wrong?” Maibe said.
I couldn’t tell her how everything was wrong. But it was, everything felt wrong. My skin felt tight, my joints ached, my entire body felt as if it was pulling my toes and my head into my middle. I tried to straighten my hunched back, pain seared up my spine.
“Corrina?”
“I’m okay,” I gasped. My body felt old and rickety. I feared taking a step. I feared I wouldn’t be able to take a step.
Pain lanced through my feet. I shifted my weight without moving an inch. Once I felt steady, I took another tentative step. More aches, but not as intense. I hoped the grinding feeling would disappear altogether once I moved around enough. I hoped all of it was caused by bad circulation and not something else.
“Maibe,” I said. “I want you to go very slowly. We’ve been sick and are both very weak. Be careful, but I want you to try standing up now and describe for me how you feel.”
I heard the scrape and shuffle of her shoes and then a small cry of pain.
“Maibe?”
“I’m okay,” she said in a small voice.
I stumbled over to her in the semi-darkness, pushing away the stinging in my joints, ignoring the way my body seemed incapable of standing straight. When I reached her corner she stumbled. I tried to catch her.
Both of us went down. My elbow hit the cement, shooting pain up my arm. Maibe sprawled across my stomach. I laid my head back on the ground and stared up at the ceiling. What was wrong with us?
“I’m scared,” Maibe said.
I shivered and wrapped my arms across my chest. “Me too.”
Maibe snuggled into the hollow of my armpit. I moved to embrace her and we lay still, together on that cold cement floor. I felt the warmth of her small body against my arm. The weight of her constricted my lungs, but I didn’t say anything. I just held her tighter and tried to find some comfort. Tried to tell myself to be happy that our hearts were still beating.
“Did it mean anything?”
Dylan paused for just a little too long. “No.”
“No? Then why did that take so long to say?”
“Why was it so easy for you to tell me?”
I didn’t know what to fire back with. I didn’t know how things had gotten so bad so fast. His knuckles turned white on the back of the chair. I feared he would break it and there wasn't any money left to buy another, but I didn’t dare say something and have him accuse me of nagging him.
After a long moment of looking at each other, tears pooled in my eyes and in the space of that pause, next to my anger, I felt what really lay underneath.
Loneliness.
I missed him. I missed him and I didn’t want any of this to end, but I didn’t know how to stop it either.
“Corrina.”
I held up my hand to give me time to fight the lump that had closed up my throat. “Just…let me cook the dinner. Just leave it for now. Please.”
He stood there as if about to argue with me and I steeled myself for the next round and told myself I would not cry in front him.
I waited for it, whatever was too much for him to keep in, whatever was going to hurt really bad and crush this moment of truce, this possible new beginning, and then the moment passed.
His dark eyebrows softened and a different light came into his eyes and it was his move and he kissed me. It was long and deep and tentative, like he feared guttering a candle. His five o’clock shadow scratched my cheek. He smelled like the almond-scented soap we both used. We made love as an offering to each other and we made love to banish the lingering ghosts. We made love as if we feared it wouldn’t be enough.