27. GIFTS
On that beach, he flared me open until I was bawling. It was my soul he exposed with the ferocity of his touch. Could a therapist have achieved what Ciro did?
It’s been a month since that night, and he understands what happened to us. It was in desperation, he says, a last rogue attempt at making me change my mind. But it was also him absorbing as much of me as he could before I left him one last time.
“I wasn’t going to pursue you after that. When you cried, I thought I’d gone too far, and I steeled myself, preparing to lick my wounds alone in my den.” He leans over dinner on the funkis-bunker balcony and directs my chin so his lips find mine.
I’d hurt for Ciro with his ignorant parents and sex-crazed drug-addict past. But suddenly, it was my own mud that exploded out.
“I lost it down there,” I remind him. “You were so strong, and I didn’t know how long you would keep possessing me. You even took over my brain. It made me see these things with crystalline clarity. And here I am, now. I’m taking my chances and cutting my losses.”
“Happy one-month anniversary.”
“Happy monthiversary, love.”
“I’ve got something for you.”
“Oh no, no, you don’t.” He’s going to flop to a knee with that ring again! I know he still has it. I’ve seen it in a drawer in the bedroom.
“Don’t look so scared.” He shoves a small jewelry box over the table while I shake my head.
“Come on, open it.”
“Can I open it in a few years?”
“No, it’ll go bad.”
I glance up quickly, oozing hope until I see that he’s joking. I suppress my groan. Can I turn him down a second time?
Only crazy people ask other people to marry them after a month. Only reckless people accept. So far, I’m already outside my comfort zone in the reckless department.
With trembling fingers, I pry the box open. And inside…
Is a beautiful necklace!
“Yes!” I exclaim.
“You like it?” He’s already brimming with pride.
“Of course I do!” As soon as I saw the chain, I was so relieved I forgot to study the pendant. I look down again. And frown. A hibiscus rests perfectly poised between two flamingo lilies. They’re so beautiful. Really, they are, down to the last intricately veined petal.
“It’s platinum, and the crusts of yellow stones you see are diamonds. They’re small, but there was no way to make them bigger on the spadix without taking away from it.”
“Spay… dicks?”
“Yeah, the tails in the middle of the flowers.”
“Ciro. Baby.” I know I don’t sound happy anymore. I sound chiding, and that’s okay with me, because yes, my boyfriend loves sex and clearly also sexual symbolism. But come on. He wants me to wear his bunch-’o-dicks around my neck now? I’m starting to miss the engagement ring after all. “Enough with the dicks already.”
“Spadix. Not dicks.”
“Whatever, you always give me dicks.”
He frowns too, but in an effort to understand me. I huff. “The flowers. You drowned me in these flowers for about a month straight.”
“Not straight. It was three different periods.”
“Okay, a total of a month. Anyway, no need to play coy, here. Sam told me. See?” I point at his spay-dicks, the proud, yellow cocks standing at attention on the pendant. “I know what you were doing. You were besieging me with an army of flower dicks.”
There’s a moment of stunned silence before Ciro crumbles. I don’t know if I should laugh with him or slap him back to his senses. He starts to repeat my words, a few here and there between his guffaws, while I sink back into my seat with my arms crossed.
“Oh baby girl. You’re priceless. ‘Bunch of dick,’” he repeats for the fifth time, and truly it’s not that funny.
A minute later, he’s apologizing, and I’m scowling. He loves me, he says. So much. It was cute, he says, and he wasn’t ridiculing my interpretation of it, and no, he doesn’t at all think it means I’m a complete deviant.
Unfortunately, he can’t keep an innocent expression on the last part. When I’m about to get mad again, he pulls me into his lap and kisses me. Funny how much easier it is for him to suck away my anger.
“So what’s with the hibiscus and the flamingo lilies?” I ask afterward.
“I’m superstitious. I believe in giving the right vibes to the surroundings, to maybe harvest what you need in return.”
He nuzzles my neck. “Hibiscus has different meanings depending on place and time, but it represents the perfect woman and perfect wife. Back in Victorian times, a man would give hibiscus to a woman to acknowledge her delicate beauty. So, you see, I had double reason to give them to you.”
I purse my smile under control. “And the flamingo lilies? Were they you?”
“Ha, no. I don’t feel like I need to represent myself.”
“Then what? Just flowers?”
“Not just flowers. From the beginning, I wanted to be the one who made you happy. I wanted you to look at me and smile with that gleam in your eyes, and I instantly knew that I couldn’t allow you to lack for anything.
“I want you to have everything you want. All you need is to point, and it is yours. That’s why the flamingo lily was perfect for you. It symbolizes abundance and happiness.”
Gah, Sam and his stupid twisted mind. I gave the sorority girls my perfect-woman, abundance-and-happiness flowers too! I want them back now.
I force a hot-cheeked smile and am rewarded with a chuckle. “Plus, they’re both red,” he whispers. “A deep, deep red, the color of love and passion and undiluted lust and a hell-of-a-lot of desire. I always want to fuck you senseless.”
“You ass. You almost had me crying, there, and bam, you ruin it.” I grin.
“Wait, I have another gift. I bought us a Bobo-the-Clown nose.”
“!”
The call doesn’t come in the middle of the night this time. I’d talked to my mother the night before, and she’d seemed fine. A little twitchy thoughtwise, but not too bad.
I’m cleaning my room. I’ve spent hardly any time at my own house over the last two months so it’s dusty here. It’s three in the afternoon on a perfectly fine Wednesday, and afternoon phone calls is just one of those normal things.
“Hey, Mom.” I pull a wet cloth along the bookshelf, appalled at the layer of grey fluff I amass. “What’re you up to?”
Labored breathing is my first sign that something is wrong.
“Mom. Hello?”
“Savannah?” She says my name like she wasn’t the one calling.
“Mom, are you okay? Where are you?”
She must be walking, because I hear the rhythm of her footsteps in her voice. Cars, lots of cars around her, honking.
“I don’t know!” There’s panic in her voice. “Savannah, I don’t want to be here. I was stopping them. They got mad.”
“Who were you trying to stop?”
“The cars, of course. They could hit the mountain lions.”
“What?”
A prolonged honk drowns her out, but then she’s back, hiccoughing with fear.
“Are you on the road somewhere?”
No answer, just hiccoughing.
“Did you just nod, Mom?” I try.
“Yeah.”
“Get off the road. Get to the side. Please, Mom! They’re going to hit you. I’ll come for you, okay? You cannot stand in the middle of the road.”
More cars, angry drivers careening by on honks and revved engines. Mom yelps.
“Are you okay?
“Listen to me.
“Listen to me!”
I start to hyperventilate. If I lose it too, who’s going to save her? One of the angry drivers? Where are people’s compassion? Can’t they see she’s not well?
“Yes?” Her answer is tentative.
“Are you walking to the side?”
“But the mountain lions.”
“They’ll see you at the side of the road and won’t pass you,” I say. “You’ll be like the school traffic guards.”
“Yeah...” She’s walking again.
“Are you on the side of the road now?”
“Uh-huh, by the ditch.”
“You don’t know where you are? I want to pick you up, but I need to know where to go, Mom. Think.”
“By the waves.”
“The ocean?”
“I’m on PCH.”
I call Ciro on the way down to the Pacific Coast Highway. Mom’s right where Topanga Canyon hits PCH. She’s still on her feet but low on her haunches. Cars blaze by her without a second look, and she holds her hands in front of her face, trying to breathe.
My mother, she looks like someone who could hold up a sign and beg for scraps. Everyone is someone’s mom, daughter, son, father, I think now. I wow to always be the one that stops.
I’ve got her in my arms when Ciro parks next to us. She’s thinner. I hadn’t noticed. I cry with relief that she’s not hurt.
“What were you thinking?”
I get no answer.
Ciro insists we take her to the ER. She’s too confused to object. It could be the sun. It’s hot today, and depending on how long she stood there...
We’re allowed in with her. When the physician is finished with her vitals and calmly tells us she just needs fluid, he adds that he wants a colleague to see her too.
The colleague is a psychiatrist.
The colleague thinks my mother is in the middle of a psychotic episode.
The colleague orders her hospitalized.
I am floored, can’t take it, have to take it.
It’s a day to bawl, especially when they’d rather I not stay with her right now. More fluids is all. Some meds to get her out of it. “She’ll get to rest up a bit. Why don’t you call again tomorrow?”
Tomorrow.
My mouth opens, because surely she’s not psychotic. That would be crazy. That would be that my mom was crazy.
But then my boyfriend is there, pulls me in, hums against my ear, rocks me. He answers the doctor’s remaining questions for me. He guides me outside. When it’s time to choose a car, he chooses his own and tells me he’ll send someone for mine. There’s no reason to object.
At his house and in his arms, the stress leaks out, the anxiety, the numbness of almost losing her. And then he whispers against my ear that she’s safe, that nothing can happen, now, except good things that make her better.
When he feeds me warm milk with sugar and cinnamon, my muscles ease into limpness, and in the end, I fall asleep in the smooth silk of red sheets that carry with them the scent of love.