Out Stealing Flowers

I never thought that I could save people like she does. All I wanted was to be part of something.

 
Forsythia bloom first, yellow petals on bare wood. Then comes the white fragrance of dogwood and magnolia. Finally, lilacs, tulips, and daffodils with their green leaves, and we feel ourselves come back to life. That is when the trouble begins.

When we eloped in Italy, Leanne told me about a saint who spoke to birds and wolves. “Rad,” I said. It was a bizzarro fact like the ones our kids now list at dinner. Did you know an octopus’s mouth is in its armpit? A snail can sleep for three years? It didn’t occur to me that the saint would become part of our family.

I press my forehead into the cool bars and move my hands down as the metal warms. I exhale. It’s 2:45 a.m. The place smells of perfume, beer, and urine. Leanne lays curled up in the middle of the cell. A bare bulb hangs over her. Dark coils of hair spread over the cement floor like seaweed. Dirt stains the bottom of her feet. She rarely wears shoes outside the hospital. “Even in Walmart?” I heard Claire, our six-year-old, ask a few weeks ago. Leanne wrinkled her nose. I couldn’t remember the last time she ran errands, her free time so truncated. “How can I taste the ground in shoes?” Leanne said.

It is not the winter cold that gets us, but the deprivation of our senses. The lack of smell when the world freezes for six months. Snow muffles sound. Everything animate hides below ground, goes south, or stays indoors. Road signs are put up to navigate frozen lakes. Baseball fields are armed with hockey boards. We don’t realize we are part dirt and leaves until it is taken and then given back in spring.

Goosebumps prickle Leanne’s thighs, and I want to shout at her. The first few times, the sheriff just gave verbal warnings. People go through hard times. After several offenses, he escalated to fines. She’s a trusted figure in our community. But when I arrived at the jail, he shoved an envelope at me. Let me tell you what happens when people take the law into their own hands. I recognized her handwriting. Instead of paying her fines, she had donated the money to a food shelter.

The night before our wedding in La Verna, not far from Sienna, I woke at 3 a.m. to Leanne’s wet feet against me. “I got our flowers. Everything is ready!” She wiggled herself until the whole length of her naked limbs touched mine. “I can’t wait!” I kissed her hair and pressed myself against her. Saint Francis had received the stigmata here. I thought this detail was just part of making a good story. The story of us as man and wife forever. I was afraid of her disappearing back then. Not leaving me for another doctor but vaporizing.

Leanne looks so vulnerable in her blue shorts and t-shirt so worn I can see through to her black sports bra. It’s routine after her shift in the ICU burn unit to go on a long run. I know how tired she is, and I don’t want to wake her. I pray Claire and Giovanni are still asleep. I send out a silent thank you to Ms. Goulet for being a night owl, living next door, and never commenting on how rarely Leanne has been home the last couple of years.

My stomach churns at the thought of calling the Johnsons to apologize. They’d thought it was a teen prank the first time. Leanne is small, and, from a distance, childlike.

Up close, I see the lines on her face, and when she lets me undress her, I see lines, like so many sets of parentheses, around her belly button from the pregnancies: Claire, Giovanni, and the twins we lost at 24 weeks, a week shy of viable. We only got to spend an hour holding their small forms in our hands, Leanne warming them with her breath as they turned blue. The twins were the opposite of her burn patients: bags of skin without enough inside to live. At the 20-week ultrasound, Leanne had announced their names to the technician and me with such certainty, Linden and Holly.

“Can you imagine the fear that old couple experienced?” the sheriff asked me on the phone. “Hearing someone under your window! Private property exists for a reason. We deserve to feel safe sleeping in our beds.”

I imagine writing a note, folding it into an airplane, and throwing it through the bars. But I have no paper, no pen. I sit down on the floor. “Leanne?” I whisper. The fingers that perform such magic in surgery curl into a fist. I see the dirt in her nails and wonder what the sheriff did with her haul.

I recognized her handwriting. Instead of paying her fines, she had donated the money to a food shelter.

“What’s your problem?” a harsh voice whispers.

Startled, I stand. The dark walls are made up of shifting, rocking, clutching, foot-tapping figures. Light shines off their eyes like dozens of cats in a forest.

A woman in pink leather pants and hundreds of long dark braids steps forward. “You come here all up her grill. God’s sake, what you do to her?”

“I came to help. I’m her husband.” I shuffle back a little. I look down and realize my pajama bottoms are on inside out.

Floating eyes glow.

“She so tired when she got here, she asked our pardon for not being social and laid right down.” The woman puts a hand on her pink hip and nods to the walls.

“She got nice manners,” says a woman in her 40s. She reminds me of Claire’s mermaid doll: long blond hair and dilated blackholes for eyes.

The woman in pink makes a big gesture with her hands. “Someone taught her to ask for nothing.”

“I stay home with the kids,” I say.

“He stay home with the kids,” a sarcastic voice calls out.

“Yeah, my pimp stayed home with the kids until I found out he was touching the kids, too,” says the blond.

Someone lets out a howl of laughter. A few other women join, clutching their stomachs, hitting their legs. A pack of hyenas. The woman in pink spits on the floor. As if she were a conductor, the laughter stops. The room goes silent. Stillness settles.

In a cereal box-sized window, a cloud moves over the full moon. I try to find the words to describe how our kids worship Leanne. She is the hero who makes brief appearances with trash bags of donuts. “Can you believe they were going to throw these out?”

“What she do?” asks a woman with a black eye. “What did you make her do?” She juts out her chest and steps forward as if in challenge.

“She stole flowers,” I say to my feet. When no one responds, I look up.  The chorus of women hold my gaze, eyes blazing. I try not to flinch but can’t stop grinding my teeth.

“He make her steal flowers?” a woman says. She has the face of an angel, a stone angel.

“Make her work, make her have the babies, make her steal,” the woman in pink adds.

They gather in a crescent around Leanne and glare at me, Uhh huh, I think so, that’s the least, motherfuckers think they can make it up to us, like we all your god damn mamas, don’t notice when we anemic, when we cold, when we not okay. Don’t ‘ppreciate nuttin’. Don’t know shit is what it is.

“I do my best,” I plead to the chorus. But the verdict is clear. I know it is a failure of my intellect when I say, “Leanne, you have to promise me you won’t sneak into other people’s yards and pick the flowers they have carefully attended.” But maybe intellect isn’t the key ingredient of making a home.

“She’s a doctor,” I say. I take another step back from the bars. “I supported her during medical school. I gave up my job so she can reach her full potential.”

Leanne receives her patients smoldering. She weighs the choice to cut and graft or bandage and wrap. Petals are softer than fingertips. Her patients need natural smells to escape the industrial cleanliness of the rehabilitation center. Color, smell, and texture are sirens calling them toward revival, renewal, rebirth. Patients heal themselves, she tells me, the doctor’s job is to create a path worth following. They wake screaming from dreams of smoke, burnt hair, and roasted plastic. I must do everything I can, she says.

I grew a field of tulips and roses one year. Brought bouquets to the rehab center. But she dragged me past windows to see her patients in critical condition. They didn’t look human with their mess of tubing. Ashamed by my fear and disgust, I traced the network of managed streams through their bodies.

Skin is our portal, the barrier between our soul and the world. The loss of this barrier makes each burn victim a unique puzzle. A body can asphyxiate just from the swelling.

“I try to be supportive. To support her,” my voice whines.

A tall woman with high cheekbones and fake lashes steps forward with great care. She towers over my five-foot-ten frame. “Let him be,” she says. The crowd sinks into the shadows.

I unbutton my shirt, fumbling. The need to warm Leanne urgent.

“You gonna give us a show, sugar?” the tall woman asks in a quiet teasing voice. A voice just for me.

I hand it through the bars. She clasps my hand with both of hers. They are rough and clammy. My neck tingles. She holds my shirt between long lacquered nails. Laying it over Leanne, she tucks it in around her shoulders.

An image flashes of Leanne washed up on a beach. My breath catches again and again as if I forgot how to exhale. Small earthquakes move through me.

The tall woman runs a hand over her thigh-high lace up boots and winks. “I would’ve taken mine off, but then they wouldn’t know which cell to send me to.” She runs a hand over her groin, and I watch her Adam’s apple slide up and down. The smell of stale cigarettes rolls in my stomach.

It is a failure of my intellect, I whisper out loud. To not see that everything is really shared. To not appreciate what it takes to recover. The wild beckoning of tulips. The promise of reds and purples. I don’t appreciate the layers of scent in a single rose. Forsythia blooming. What it means to smell flowers when you have lost an ear or foot. For children with bandages on their faces months after the fire, the ones that might never see again, what it means to feel sensations in the places spared by the fire: the nape of a neck, a calf, a belly button.

“Maybe I shouldn’t disturb her,” I say. The chorus stands arms across chests or hands on hips. In her sleep, Leanne pulls my shirt up to her nose and tightens her body into a ball. I sit down to my vigil.

Skin is our portal, the barrier between our soul and the world.

“I hope this is a wake-up call for you both,” the sergeant says behind me. I turn, aware of the cat eyes on us. A thin white scar runs from ear to lip, making his smile asymmetric. I can’t tell if his expression is half serious or half joking. I scramble to stand as he sorts through a ring of ancient-looking keys.

It takes a moment to realize why he is holding the door open. I pick Leanne up off the floor. She doesn’t stir. It is 4 a.m.

“Ring the bell when you’re ready.” The sheriff leaves us alone in a bare room. Three windows slice the cement wall a foot above my head. Leanne stirs in my arms. I lay her on the table and hold her hands until she blinks awake.      

“The sheriff said that if you sign the guilty plea, it will just be a fine.” I hold the piece of paper out.

“I sold the house,” she says. Her face is devoid of emotion.

“No trial. Imagine if the media heard about this? I think he is doing us a favor,” I say.

“It’s a donation, technically. The foundation can use the house or sell it for revenue.”

“You sold our house?” I ask. The tornado in my head is so loud, I have to play back her words again and again.

After our wedding, we walked to Florence through oak forests and olive groves. At hermitages sites, small caves, Leanne read stories aloud about Saint Francis making wine. Over a meal of prosciutto and fresh bread she asked if I would consider joining the Third Order. I handed her a fresh fig split open, glistening pink and obscene. I didn’t know what the Third Order was, exactly, a type of monk who can marry and live out in the world. We made love not finishing the conversation with words. I didn’t need clarification. I thought it was a joke. Even if I didn’t, I would have agreed to anything.

Leanne sits up, crossing her legs on the table. “Don’t you want to truly live in service to others?”

“I live in service to you.” The slices of sky turn from black to a deep blue. I never thought that I could save people like she does. All I wanted was to be part of something.

“If we give everything away, we won’t worry about material things,” she says.

“But what about sending Claire and Giovanni to college?” I ask.

“How can we watch multitudes of children in our city, and around the world, go hungry?” she says. “Who are we to spend money on a lawn mower? On paper towels?”

“Survival of the fittest,” I say. I’m kidding, but what else is there to say? I hear the chorus of inmates, my jury. Don’t know shit is what it is.

“Too many kids don’t have anyone to care for them.” She is not asking. She is telling me.

I rub my shoe over a wad of gum smoothed into the floor. The kids would see the fun in living in a mobile home. I don’t mind simple or plain or eating muffins out of a dumpster. But I’m afraid for Leanne. For myself. For the world. She is trying to live up to a story about our life. I want to be brave enough to play my part.