Hibiscus

Botany was a hobby that my mother had always pursued. In the spring, she’d spend her weekends tending to her vegetable garden for hours on end. My father would have to pry her from the soil just so that she would come and have dinner with us. In the winter, she would bring home armfuls of books from the local library devoted to flowers and trees. She’d read every last word before returning them the next week and checking out another stack.

I guess she’s the reason I bought a hibiscus plant last year. I saw it on the windowsill of an almost unnoticeable flower shop which was squished between a Starbucks and a Barnes and Noble and I bought it without thinking. I told myself that I was buying the plant for me and not her but I was most definitely lying. 

Hibiscus had always been her favorite.

As I was lugging the hefty pot of soil through the darkening streets of New York City and back to my studio apartment, I got a phone call. 

I set the plant down to my right, stretching my aching back, before answering, “Hello?”

“Is this Magnolia Armstrong?” the woman's voice rang through the phone.

“Yes,” I said hesitantly, “Who is this?”

“Miss Armstrong,” the woman began softly, “I'm calling about your father. I’m so sorry, he–” I dropped the phone before I could hear another word. I knew what she wanted to tell me but I would not allow her to. 

I collected myself and picked the phone back up to listen to my new reality. My father was dead and I hadn't visited him once in the ten years I had been gone.

I sprinted home as fast as I could with a twenty pound plant weighing me down. Frantically, I began to pack the things I needed without a concrete thought in my brain. The hibiscus somehow made it to the passenger seat of my car and I started driving. At first, I feared that I would have forgotten the way. Then I realized that I knew exactly where I was going.

I pulled into the narrow driveway and noticed the things that were the same. The weeping willow still stood tall in the front yard and the house was still big and made from bricks. I had yet to shed a tear for the loss of my father with the unexpectedness of it all but my childhood home pushed me over the edge. I sobbed for what felt like hours before entering the house.

Once inside, I noticed that the front door had been painted yellow. I put the hibiscus on the kitchen table as I breathed in the dead air that surrounded me. I knew that the life within this house died long before my father did.

My thoughts were a mess when I first arrived. I had to think about my fathers funeral for a few days until it was over. Then I thought about the things left in the house for a few weeks until they were gone. Finally, I thought about the house itself, and why I was still in it.

Maybe I was drawn to the familiar welcome carpet outside of the yellow front door. Maybe the weeping willow that we planted decades ago was holding me hostage. Maybe I was enjoying the constant memories of my adolescence flowing to my brain.

I spent my days remembering my parents' laughter floating from the kitchen to my room as they made me pancakes. They would put together a special breakfast every Sunday up until I was nine. I guess I didn't notice when they stopped. 

I remembered my mother planting the great weeping willow as a young sapling in our front yard. I had asked her why it was so small and she told me that it would grow, “You’ll just have to wait.” I wished she could see how the mighty branches now stood taller than I did and how the emerald green leaves danced in the wind. Maybe she would still be here if she knew.

I moved my stuff into my old bedroom. It looked nothing like it did years ago when I was obsessed with My Little Pony or when I went through my “I hate everything” phase. The walls were painted a hot pink when I was seven and a dark green when I was twelve. When I left, my dad painted my, and all of the walls in the house, white. He covered the years of height marks on the side of my door and the mural of water lilies that we’d spent hours painting together. 

At first, I was angry that he just erased the memories of my bedroom like they meant nothing. Then I realized how long I had been gone. I guess there’s no need for a daughter's room if there’s no daughter to live in it.

I spent my nights staring at the ceiling. It held the only proof that a teenage girl had once lived in the room: a brown stain from who knows where. I racked my brain and tried to remember how I had made that stain, or if I had at all. I was unsuccessful.

My days were consumed with exploring every square inch of the place I used to call home. I so desperately wanted to remember when it stopped feeling like a sanctuary and more so like a lion's den. The only conclusion I could come to was that it happened gradually. 

First, they stopped laughing and started yelling. I never understood how two people who loved each other so much could fall apart so fast. It was as if I blinked and they suddenly resented one another. Instead of “Special breakfast Sundays,” we had “Make your own food Fridays.”

Perhaps it was the day she left that broke my bond with my house. I was positive that she would come back, she loved the house more than any of us. She couldnt possibly abandon the weeping willow and her stupid vegetable garden and her house and her plants and me.

I was wrong.

I was bitter for a long time after she drove away in her green honda and never returned. I blamed her for everything bad that had ever happened in my life. Though my dad conveyed the same emotions, he did it in a different way. First, he dug up the flower beds and the vegetable garden. Then he threw out the numerous house plants that crowded every room of the house. Any sign of my mother was destroyed or thrown away by my father. I guess that was his method of forgetting the bad memories.

My idea of erasing a part of my life that I felt I could do without was much different. I decided that the one thing I hated my mother the most for was my best option. When I turned eighteen, I left the weeping willow and I left the blank walls. I left the painful memories and I left everything I had ever loved. I left my life behind and I left my father to get sicker and sicker until the end of his.

Now I was back in the place I wished to never return to and I could not leave. I was trapped like a mouse between the colorless walls of my house and the hibiscus on my kitchen table.

I decided that I would stay in that house until I had a daughter of my own to make pancakes on Sundays for and plant a vegetable garden with. I would never think of chopping down the weeping willow, we would plant another on the other side of the yard. We would laugh and cherish the time we did have with each other because everybody leaves, whether they mean to or not. We all find a reason to start a new life when it gets too difficult to live our own. 

I will not resent her when she leaves me to go to college or find a job. This is because I will always be in the big and beautiful house with a magnificent vegetable garden when she chooses to visit. I will live here and I will die here and be nothing like my mother. I will be better.