The last orchid gives up in the early hours of a Sunday, tossing a crisp flower from its stony stem onto the bedroom floor, littered with other ghostly petals. The light is as paper thin as the blossom.

Covered in sheets, I watch its stiff stem let go. My eyes squint in jealousy. To release and not bend. To remain rigid. So easily.

I curl around my hips and form an arch, my back a shell. Afraid.

***

At first, they referred to it as a procedure and then they didn’t even call it that. They gave it no word.

If there was no way to explain what happened to me and the baby then it wasn’t real. Real things become something. An apple tree from a bud. A tulip from a bulb. Dandelion tendrils from a weed.

They gave me plants wrapped in cellophane, tied in wired bows, in clear vases of the same square shape. Until death hung in every corner of my house. Until the flowers themselves became the thing they were supposed to heal.

Heel was the word I most associated with my dog. Heel to keep her at my side. Heel to stop shouting at her for running out when I opened the door. She never listened. I lost her so many times in the poison oak behind our house that I got immune to it. I gave up training her.

***

I cut through the yard holding the orchid, dehydrated, its broad leaves a saturated sun.

I shake the box upside down over the compost bin. The orchid clings to the inside. My fingers dig into it until my nails break. A breeze of musty cherry blossoms blows like smoke across the yard.

I flip the box over, so that the plant’s thin, hollow shoot stabs at the sky. I could have used something sharp and pointy and let it drop into the recycling bin. But I didn’t.

I turn away from the recycling bin and drop the orchid on the side of the house, alongside a wheelless go-kart, a brushless broom, and a bucket without a handle.

These, too, were once real, but are missing pieces to make them whole.

***

I tucked a bucket between my legs during the ultrasound. Between dry heaving, the baby tilted sideways and I saw a ring of light circling its brain. I puked and thought, angel.

Angels consumed my daughter when she was three. From the backseat of the car, she spent weeks with her eyes squinting, searching trees and bushes and roadsides of garbage. When I asked what she was doing, she said, looking for angels.

I can’t see them so they must be really small and hiding everywhere, she said.

I wanted her eyes to go on looking forever. But she stopped, like you do with missing socks, four leaf clovers, Santa Claus.

***

All blooms at some point lose. Sometimes you pick them just before. They call this deadheading. I know this. I, however, have never done it.

That spring my garden is a graveyard of dead blossoms fallen, tiny headstones all over the grass.

They blow into the small gap between things in the side yard, burying the orchid.

***

A slim halo swallowed the baby.

A stack of papers arrived in the mail with micro writing of measurements, of probabilities. On page something-or-other it read Trisomy 18.

These were the decisions I thought big: To marry. To buy a house. To leave my job. To euthanize my dog when she was still licking my hand.

I could still get my jeans together with a rubber band. That is lucky for someone five months pregnant, the doctor said. Most women have already filled their closets with maternity clothes.

She patted my leg. Her touch was soft, like a stuffed animal falling on my thigh.

You won’t have to return them and you’re so small right now you won’t have to actually give birth, she said.

A live birth would be worse, the nurse said, threading tubing into my arm. The nurse opened a valve. Cold fluid vibrated up my arm to my neck, my head.

I think she said or I feel like she said or I’m almost certain these were the real words she used but my ears were frozen, turning language into fractions.

You have two other children.
There’s no reason to feel bad.
You are doing the right thing.

Right angles in geometry always gave me a hard time. I could never remember their degree.

Just before anesthesia the nurses asked me to count. I shook so much they held my legs down. They were their own thing. I never got to one.

When I woke up, I was lighter by a pound. I stood, the weight of questions cement in my legs.

The sex?
Did the baby have wings?
Which chamber of the heart do you bury the things you want and then willingly give up?

I once buried potatoes in our planter boxes. I forgot about them until I turned the earth in spring and discovered what I thought were dirty rocks. Then, I noticed white sprouts, like chords searching.

They smiled, toothless, their lips made of the same tubing in my arm. And they gave me plants.

***

We plant nothing in our yard that year. We let the weeds and the grasses overgrow. The planter boxes shrivel, the dirt becoming dust that blows and clings to our windows.

The fence collapses in a wind storm so fierce it lifts all the patio umbrellas from their holders and blows them through our yard as if they are tossed ballerinas. But when they land they aren’t soft-footed.

They crash into the side of our house, just missing our windows by inches. The wind turns our outdoor dining table over, rolls through the chairs as if they are bowling pins. It tears leaves from trees, snaps off branches, blows plants from pots.

Through all of it, the orchid sits between the go-kart and bucket and a clothless cushion. Nails from the fence. Cracked boards. Tree branches.

I write fiction about a woman who, under a heavy full moon, sleepwalks through gardens. Her hands reach for fleshy silver roses and pregnant evening primrose she can’t grasp. She wakes every morning with dirt under her nails, confused about where she’s been.

I read the story to a classroom with walls so plastered white and desks so steel. I am on a gurney under lights.

I’m hoping someone will know what to do with a hopeless character.

But the room is so quiet, it carves through me, like the dull edge of shame.

Shame is what I felt when my high school principal caught me going off campus to Burger King. I also felt it when I incorrectly used the word succumb in a news story; when I pooped my pants in fifth grade; when a raccoon’s body thumped under my car. Its hair attached to the front grill, tiny tendrils of wiry gray glued there with blood I couldn’t bring myself to wash off.

So I just let the wind take it over time.

***

I started graduate school. I held my dad’s glasses still warm in my hand outside an ER trying to remember how they sat on his face. A pandemic covered the globe. Fires took all that was left.

Our smoke alarms rang in the middle of the night yet the closest fire was a dozen miles away in hills above the ocean. We applied tape to the seams of our windows and blocked out all air.

I tried an audiobook on ambiguous loss. Ambiguous got stuck in my head, like something familiar, like a washing machine that can’t clean clothes.

This was what I thought ambiguity meant: Seaglass; what it’s like to see the road in a snowstorm; angels.

This was what it sounded like: Ambitious; Amsterdam; abortion.

I never finished the book.

I saw my gynecologist. When she said, your boy must be a year now. It was a clerical error, like when the DMV lost my car registration and the IRS lost my tax return. She smoothed her hand over the top page of the chart, the one that told a fable of a woman who was going to have a baby boy. I could see behind it, there were the other pages that said what was real. 

My back curled into a shell. Stiff, hard, impenetrable. I asked for the pill.

***

Eventually, sunlight slips between the cushion and the go-kart. Rain, too, in drips, to reach the orchid.

The cushion keeps it wet, humid, protected, so that it lives in a kind of rainforest.

This all takes years.

***

I graduated. The ceremony was on the small screen of my computer. I wear a purple cap in my bedroom, the space where the orchid once stood as a backdrop.

I saw no stage, heard no music, felt no speeches. I stare into the screen, watching the void behind me trying to calculate what’s missing.

Afterward, a classmate wrote: I liked that story about the woman with the flowers. Whatever happened to her?

Once I donated a red wallet to the Goodwill. It was missing skin and so overstretched the latch didn’t catch anymore. I don’t remember letting go of it. A man called weeks later.

He said, I have your kid’s photos. Your insurance card. You left all this stuff inside.

I never asked how he found me. My phone number wasn’t on anything. He could have thrown it all away. Or taken it, used it, buried it somewhere. But he didn’t.

I didn’t know I missed it until I felt it again. I remembered buying my daughter ice cream in a pink parlor with heart shaped chairs. I kept a milagro heart in the zipper pocket. At one time, its fullness felt like a promise of things to come.

These are the things that I thought were gone but later came back: Money; a suitcase lost in Amsterdam; the pearl from a ring. It flew off in a department store and landed on cream sweaters.

I keep the wallet in the bottom of my sock drawer.

That night I dreamt of silver petals on my fingertips. I woke and climbed through my computer and into the files. Until I found the story. Her name was Catherine.

The dialogue sucked. The descriptions were stale. The grammar was problematic. Reading something old always feels this way, like drinking milk that’s expired.

Expired means to leave. Past tense. Was. Aborted.

There are real things that are beautiful and terrifying. Black holes. Mountain lions. Atomic explosions. I use words for them.

I sat with Catherine in my lap, holding her pain, her confusion, her resiliency. She had enough ambition to go out in the dark and search for something real to hold. Again and again.

I whispered into the manuscript.

It’s okay. You weren’t bad. You were just written at the wrong time.

***

We get a new dog; a puppy we named August. He eats what remains of the garden: Fallen flax and all the crisp leaves of the Japanese maple. He even climbs into the planter boxes and finds twigs he cracks between his teeth and swallows.

I hate him. I write a for-sale ad. Then my daughter comes home. He drags his tongue across her lips and she smiles so broadly that I think of a waxing moon. I delete it.

I go into the yard to clean the mess so August doesn’t die because I was irresponsible.

These are irresponsible things I’ve done: forgotten my sister’s birthday; left my wallet in plain sight on the carseat; bought a sweater with no cash in my account.

The baby is not one of them.

In the backyard, there are nails everywhere and broken boards and jagged pieces of metal. I am wearing flip flops.

I put on tennis shoes, lacing them tight. I wear gloves. I get trash bags. My body takes a state between awake and asleep grabbing all the broken pieces of our lives. I prick myself. I bleed. I cry.

There are only four things, now whole, left in the side yard when I’m done. A bucket with a found handle. A go-kart with all its wheels. The broom, handle and bristles.

The orchid. Its stem is a bright green. When I place a finger on it, it bends easily. There are tiny knots along it. From each one, an opening. 

The sky blooms into twilight as the last stitches of sun shoot strands of purple through clouds.

My mom gave me the orchid. It had green buds dangling like ornaments on a Christmas tree. They became bright, plump fuchsia flowers.

***

I take the orchid inside. The box is broken and cracked. It shakes out easily.

A coastal farmer’s Brussels sprout field blooms into an oasis of yellow mustard plants. He charges $10 to stand in it. And people do, gathering around pockets of things they’d normally mistake as yellow weeds.

I buy: A cream ceramic planter, wood chips, moss, perlite, a mister.

I put it in my bedroom. I close my eyes and sleep.

One morning my husband points to buds hanging off one limb; one heavy arching limb, nimble and supple, giving and receiving.

It is spring. Cherry blossoms fall like snow. I can smell them through the window.

My heart expands.

Expands is what my body did for the baby. When I wrap my arms around my daughter I feel her breath expand into her back. When I lie on warm sand sometimes it feels like I’m expanding, an ambiguous figure flowing.

***

Two days later, the first flower emerges, born purple and veined, breathing and fleshy. Four others come days later.

Here are the things we will do with them: Stake them; mist them; and try to smell them, knowing orchids have no odor.

We may name them. And when they fall off, we’ll sweep the buds up and wait for the orchid to bloom again.