“Come on, kiddo, you’re too young to be so jaded,” he says, sounding truly disappointed. “There used to be a whole language of flowers, in Victorian times.”
“I know. Floriography.” Ora has a couple of old books that her mother owned. She keeps them in the back room, on a shelf above the counter where we prepare the bouquets. I’ve paged through one of them when I was bored and I guess I understand it—telling stories and expressing emotions through flowers. It’s not so different from art, except paintings and sculptures and photography live on. Flowers dry out and the petals shrivel up and people throw them away when the water starts to smell.
“Well, you might miss the shop a little when you go back to Massachusetts, right? If you go back?”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”
I haven’t labored much over whether or not to return to Dinsmore since Mom mentioned the choice is mine. Not directly, anyway. But lately it seems like I can’t do anything without being reminded of Iris; she’s wrapped up in the safety of Emil and my attraction to Rafaela and my complicated feelings of betraying Lionel. Everything goes back to her and I know, for sure, that it’s because I never apologized. I should have told those girls on our floor to go to hell. I should have been proud of what I had with Iris instead of trying to take the easy way out.
“Have you decided yet?” he asks after a pause. “We don’t mean to push you, but there’s always a lot of paperwork and phone calls involved with schools, and the summer is just about half over…”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t… I can’t decide.”
“How about you let us know by next week?” Saul says easily. He believes Lionel is fine, that his health is stable, so he must think my decision is based on trivial factors, like missing the food and sunshine of L.A. and the comfort of my bedroom tower.
“Okay,” I agree. In a week, maybe the choice will be made for me; maybe Lionel won’t even want to look at me after his secret is out in the open.
A couple of guys saunter by with skateboards under their arms, nudging each other as they look through the bars of the fence at the woolly mammoth.
“You know we miss you when you’re gone. So much, kiddo,” Saul says, rubbing a hand over his face. Stubble is cropping up on his jawline, a darker red than the hair on his head. “But you shouldn’t stay here for us, if you want to go back. We’ll all be fine… Lionel included.”
But he won’t, not the way he is now. And not if he goes off his meds again when I’m gone.
I look down at a stray leaf skittering by my feet. “I know, I just… It’s hard to know what to do sometimes.”
Saul’s arm goes around me. “I wish I could say that part of life gets easier.”
I lean my head against his shoulder and close my eyes and we stay like that for a while. When I open my eyes, I notice a couple of women giving us strange looks. I stare back until they look away. Sometimes I feel as if I should wear a sign that says HE’S MY STEPDAD!!!! to combat the baffled looks we get when we’re together. It’s fucking gross.
I tell Saul I want to go see the big boulder at the edge of the museum grounds, so we make our way over, stopping a few feet from the group of older people already congregated underneath. They walk through the tunnel super slowly, gazing up at the enormous rock suspended above. We stand back and wait, giving them space.
“Saul?”
“Suzette?” he says with a grin, imitating my serious tone.
I lick my lips and press them together before I ask him, “When Lion’s older, what if… what if he decides to go off medication?”
Even that question sends terror zipping through me, but I hope he reads between the lines, because I don’t know if I’m strong enough to blurt out what I want to tell him.
Saul turns to face me, his lips parted. “Well, I’m not sure there’s anything we could do about that when he’s an adult. Unless he was hurting himself, and then we could have him hospitalized, but that’s not a long-term solution. And if he’s still planning to go away for college, that’s not something we could actively control once he’s gone.”
I nod.
Saul looks at me a long moment, as if he’s trying to decide whether I’m mature enough to handle what he wants to say. I’ve noticed more looks like that from him and Mom in the last year or so, as if a line runs down the middle of my face, separating me into child on one side and adult on the opposite.
“You know, when Daphne and I split up, we had a lot of talks about our custody agreement. We both decided Lionel living with me would be the best thing for him at the time, and then he got along so well with you and Nadine that we decided he’d stay here permanently.”
“But why did you decide it was best for him?”
He puts his hands in his pockets and blinks down at the ground. “Daph was going through some issues of her own. Not as intense as what Lionel has, but similar. Cyclothymia, another mood disorder. Some people call it a cousin of bi-polar. A mild form. There’s no approved medication specifically for cyclothymia, and Daphne didn’t want to take a chance on the ones typically prescribed. She didn’t want to go to therapy, either, and… I didn’t feel like that was the best option with your brother around, so he came with me.”
I twist my fingers around the hem of my black tank. “But she seems like she does okay.”
He looks at me. “Daphne is a competent, amazing woman, just like Lionel is going to be a competent, amazing man. But I personally don’t see the value in refusing treatment that could help someone live a more stable life.”
I had no idea about Lionel’s mother. He’s never mentioned it, and I wonder if they’ve ever spoken about the choice to not medicate, if she influenced his decision to stop or if the inclination runs in their blood, similar to their illnesses.
The people ahead of us eventually tire of the boulder’s wonder and head toward the museum, leaving us to take our turn. I feel unsteady on my feet as we walk, too much new information swimming through my mind.
“Stay right there,” Saul says when I’m under the rock, and he jogs off a ways to take a picture of me with his phone’s camera.
The installation is called Levitated Mass. I will look tiny beneath it. Extraordinarily small because of the massive stone balanced over my head, my features indistinguishable because of the distance between Saul and me. I curl into an even tighter version of myself. Holding on to one wall of the tunnel as if the boulder above will come crashing down when I let go.
I don’t want to tell Saul yet. If Daphne can live and thrive without treatment, maybe Lionel can do the same. And maybe that means I need one more sign before I tell his secret and ruin everything between us. If he’s able to manage on his own, like his mother, maybe I was never supposed to tell on him at all. Maybe we can keep this secret between us, just like the others we’ve kept, stored in the invisible vault that assembled itself when we became brother and sister.