mother’s references to her final days had quadrupled since her first hip surgery eight weeks ago. It’d gotten so bad, her parting line most evenings had been: you’ll need to look for me in the morgue tomorrow if you wish to visit me. After her second hip surgery, she’d revised her morgue commentary and now suggested suitable places to scatter her ashes depending on the season she’d arbitrarily determined would be her last. Fortunately, his mother hadn’t referenced pushing up daisies in the last three days, and every signal from the charge nurse had been positive.
Wyatt knocked on his mom’s door and entered the room. His mother wore her receiving pajamas, the ones with roses and vines that she’d deemed appropriate attire for visitors. That made three days in a row. Wyatt frowned as his mother muttered. Her face was pressed close enough to her notepad screen that her nose would leave an imprint. Even with her glasses on, the strain could trigger another seizure. He’d need to talk to her primary care physician about her seizure medications after her discharge.
“Mom.” He kissed her wilted cheek and imagined she leaned in for his greeting like she’d used to when he was a clumsy kid climbing onto her lap for a good-night hug. But mother and son had stopped leaning on each other years ago. He shoved his useless childhood memories aside and nudged her notepad lower before enlarging the image on her screen with his fingers. One quick glance confirmed the photographs that absorbed all of her attention. He’d forwarded that latest set of pictures he’d taken in her greenhouse to her email account last night.
“Well, that’s much better.” Her focus remained fixed on her screen, but appreciation tinged her voice.
While his mother continued to check the vitals on her precious plants, he took an inventory of her, searching for anything the medical team might’ve missed like last time: new bruises on her arms, involuntary winces of pain, signs of infection. Anything that might signal another unexpected decline.
“The begonia needs to be repotted before the weekend.” She flipped through several more photographs. “The snapdragon seedlings need more light.” She glanced at the window, her eyebrows pulling in behind her round glasses at the fog swirling against the pane. “Bring them into the house and put them under the lights for the next few days.”
“We already put the primrose seeds under the house lights,” he reminded her. Newborns with jaundice belonged under special lights. Preemies required such meticulous care and attention, not plants. But that wasn’t an argument he intended to revisit with his mother. Her greenhouse was a sacred place; everything inside those glassed walls was her family now.
She flicked her hand back and forth as if sweeping away his words like spilled soil. “The pots aren’t too big. They can share the space.”
If only everything in life was so easy and simple. Wyatt and his mother struggled to share the same space.
“You could buy a new light.” She lifted her gaze above her oversize glasses.
No way. He wasn’t adding another UV light. Soon enough the DEA would be knocking down the door to bust him for growing illegal substances, as he had too many lights going now. Either that or the neighbors were convinced he had a deep-seated fear of the dark. The lights matched his night-shift schedule: on all night, off in the morning. With his work schedule changing to days, he’d have to change the plants’ schedule, too. His mother preferred consistency, but it was the best he could do to keep everything alive. In another time, she’d concentrated on her family with the same meticulous consideration. Now her devotion belonged to her plants and the nursery she’d built in her backyard. Not that he wanted her fawning over him as if he was one of her struggling plants. “I’ll make it work.”
She smiled and pulled up another photograph. “The orchid has taken to the new food mixture. There’s happiness in the blooms now.”
But not in his mother. He hadn’t seen real joy in his mother in over five years, long before his brother’s unexpected death. He remembered the lightness in her laughter and happiness on her face when his father would come home and dance her to her seat at the dinner table every night. He’d even witnessed the same dance, the steps slower and more cautious, when he’d returned home from college, months before cancer stole his father and dimmed his mother’s light. Still there’d been moments after the grief had settled and the memories no longer stung. Then came Trent, when love had proved to be a poor antidote to his brother’s inner turmoil and anguish and nothing had slowed his downward spiral. Then not even Wyatt could reignite any sort of happiness in his mother.
He cracked his knuckles. The pop realigned his bones and his focus. He hadn’t slammed the door to Mia’s room, but he could slam the door on memory lane and lock it.
Besides, he needed his mother to concentrate on her recovery and talk about her living situation after room 326 on the transitional care floor at Bay Water Medical. After her discharge, all of his mother’s love could return to her flowers. He only cared that she was safe when she left the hospital. That was his duty as her son. He had her love as a child, that was enough. Something scraped across his insides like a dull razor, leaving deep gouges in its wake. He rubbed his chest and discarded the phantom ache. “Your neighbor in the Craftsman brought over his cactus last night. It’s dead.”
“You didn’t tell Samuel that, I hope.”
“I suggested that he drop it in the recycle bin on his way back home,” Wyatt said.
“I raised you with better manners than that.”
He smiled. He did consider dropping the pathetic plant in the recycle bin himself on his way to work. Even a tempered truth had less cruelty than false hope.
His mother eyed him. “Where’s the cactus?”
“Sitting beside the other neighborhood plants begging for resuscitation and prompt care.” His mother had a plant-based ER in her nursery. The neighbors and her so-called friends were obviously taking advantage of his mom’s green thumb skills. Her greenhouse wasn’t the local garden center at the hardware store or inside one of the city’s impressive parks with multiple staff to attend to it. She was one person, living alone, among her plants. In his opinion, her garden and greenhouse had gotten more than a bit out of control. She needed to say no more often.
“What kind of cactus is it?”
“The cactus kind.” Wyatt dropped his keys and cell phone on the window ledge and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Really, Wyatt. If you asked for details about a gunshot victim downstairs, you’d hardly accept bullet wound as an appropriate response.”
Bullet wounds and his patients were not even in the same stratosphere as a dying cactus. Especially a cactus that could be replaced with a trip to the local home improvement store and a five-minute walk through the garden center. Wyatt sighed, picked up his mother’s tablet and searched cactus images on the internet. “Maybe this one, if its shoots weren’t all shriveled up.”
“Ask Samuel if this is his great-grandmother’s Christmas cactus that he told me about,” she said.
“If you get on email, you could ask him yourself,” Wyatt suggested.
His mother waved her hand. “This is quite personal. You don’t talk to your patients’ family members through email when they come into the ER.”
He wasn’t adverse to the suggestion, especially given some of the family members who’d confronted him in the past few months. But again, plants and patients hardly belonged in the same
