Making new roses was a long process.
When it was spring, the first pollinating season, Francisco began work early, as soon as the sun appeared to give him light to work. He moved among his roses, finding the buds that were due to open that day, and then he removed every petal except the bottom five so that he would be able to find them again. Carefully, he detached the stamen from each bud and discarded it. These would be his seed parents, the mothers. They would dictate if the new roses would be bushes or climbers, dark-leaved or light-leaved. He would have already prepared the stud roses by cutting them a day or more before and leaving them to dry so he could shake the pollen from them onto a sleeve of white paper. The stud roses, the fathers, would tell his new roses what sort of blossom to have, lending their fragrance or shape or color.
Then, in the perfect silence of his greenhouse, he moved carefully with a small paintbrush and painted the pollen carefully on each of the rose mothers’ stigmas. In the language Beatriz had invented, he marked the potential rose’s father on a tag and attached it to the mother rose. And then he waited.
It took months for the roses to form rose hips full of seeds, and then those seeds had to be chilled and kept in the dark for nearly three more months. Those that he had not lost to fungus or poor spirits he carefully planted in pots marked with their origins. Then one leaf and two leaves and three leaves would appear, and Francisco carefully policed them for disease or pests that might have snuck into his greenhouse. Then, finally, six weeks later, each fragile rose plant would produce its first, hesitant flower.
If it was not the black bloom he was hoping for, he began all over again.
Sometimes, Francisco thought that people might be roses. It was not that he disbelieved Darwin and the classification of the species. It was only that every time he carefully applied the pollen, he thought about the process, how the pollen would work its way over the rose’s stigma and then enter the egg cell and fertilize the egg nucleus, and how wondrous and strange it was that it was the same process by which we were made. Many of his days, particularly in these slow summer months, were spent engrossed in thought clouds triggered by small actions, and he lost weeks to thinking about what it might mean that so many creatures under the sun, from roses to birds to trees to sharks, came to life by the same, complex process. Even those whose process often looked quite different from the outside—like the meiosis, or cell splitting, of the sea urchin—still used much of the same raw stuff: cells, fertilizations, sharing of chromosomes. He mused on why it might be that evolution had not instead designed most of the world to share the simple asexual process sometimes used by plants such as pelargonium, a flower known commonly as storksbill. A cutting was taken from the original plant, dropped into moist soil, and left to make another plant. By the same process, to create Beatriz, he would have merely planted one of his fingers and she would have emerged later, fully formed and independent.
Why indeed, he wondered, did we need life to make more life? We took it for granted that two creatures met and mated and made another creature, when we would not expect a cloud or a fire or a cooking pot to be fashioned the same way. Yes, all of those processes required combining other ingredients as well, but without the cell, the egg—? If there was a great creator who had fashioned us in his own image, why, then, was more life not made in the same way, by merely breathing a word over a handful of dust? Instead, reproduction and love became a messy process, and messy processes meant there were many places where it could fail.
These were the thoughts that occupied Francisco’s day.
An additional thought occupied the day following Beatriz and Pete’s all-night chase, however, because late in the morning, Beatriz tapped on the glass before letting herself into his greenhouse.
“Good morning, Papa,” she whistled in their language.
“Is it morning?” he replied in kind, not looking up from his notebook. He was not displeased that she’d come to visit. Francisco found it very difficult to work with certain forms of distraction, such as music or conversations with heightened emotions playing in the background, but he did well if people were reading to him in a fairly undramatic voice, or if the visitor had a quiet way about them. Beatriz generally had the latter, and had, upon occasion, read to him in the evenings when he had first moved out to the greenhouse.
“It is, though it doesn’t feel like it. I need to ask you a favor, and I don’t know if it is possible, so you can tell me now if it is not acceptable and I will be fine,” Beatriz said.
It had been some time since someone had asked Francisco for something he was capable of giving, but that was mostly because they had only been asking him to move back in with Antonia. He dearly hoped that Beatriz, a highly intelligent young woman, was not here to request that.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’d like for you to keep this chicken in your greenhouse for a while.”
Beatriz was referring, of course, to General MacArthur, the fighting rooster they had repurposed just hours earlier. He was missing feathers in places from his fights, and had a wicked scar across his chest from another bird’s blade, and still had a bit of blood streaked through the pale feathers around his head.
When Francisco turned to look, Beatriz added, “I didn’t know if he will bother your plants.”
Francisco divined immediately that there was an involved story to this rooster, but also that if his daughter had wanted to share it, she would have begun it already. He said merely, “I assume there is a reason why the rooster can’t stay outside with the other chickens.”
“He has a problem with aggression,” Beatriz said. “And Rosa would not be happy if he killed her rooster.”
Francisco considered the request. Chickens would eat rose petals, but he had plenty of discarded rose petals that could be fed to a chicken so it wouldn’t bother the blooms still on the plant. Chicken manure was messy, but also very good for roses. He did not want to have to look after an animal, but he also felt his younger daughter never asked anything of him, and this was a small sacrifice to make for her.
“Leave him for the day,” Francisco said, “and I will see how he does. What is his name?”
Naturally, Beatriz did not know the rooster was called General MacArthur, as they had stolen only the chicken and not his name. She held the bird out from her chest, his wings pinned to his body, as if he might somehow have his moniker somewhere about his person.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted.
She set him down. There was nothing about the rooster that particularly encouraged sympathy. He had been angry the night before and he was still angry now. Francisco clucked at him, but he strutted away, looking this way and that at the roses. Both father and daughter watched the rooster for several minutes.
“Is there something else on your mind, Beatriz?” Francisco asked eventually.
There was nearly always something else on Beatriz’s mind. She said the easiest of the options first. “Daniel.”
Francisco, too, had been thinking about his nephew—really, nearly his son. When Daniel had lost his parents, he had gained the combined parentage of the surviving adult Sorias at Bicho Raro. Francisco, Antonia, Michael, Rosa, and Nana had all pitched in to care for him, an unusual and excessive amount of love and ownership that led first to Daniel’s extremely bad behavior and then to his extremely good behavior. Francisco had been thinking about it in particular that day because the year had just reached the point where the sun came in bright and multicolored through the window over his desk. This window was unlike any of the other windows in the greenhouse, because when Daniel was still in his hell-sent stage, Francisco had forbidden him to spend all night out joyriding in other people’s cars. This might strike most people as a reasonable rule to make, but Daniel had found it both chafing and unfair, and to demonstrate his feelings, he had spent the night throwing rocks through every single pane in that particular window. The plants inside had perished in the night’s frost. Daniel had been sentenced the task of repairing the window as punishment. Because even that could not be done without rebellion, Daniel had sourced glass from the closest junkyard. Instead of restoring the window to its previous transparent existence, each pane was instead replaced with four or five or even six tiny tinted ones—scrounged from bottles, jars, car windows, vases, flowerpots, pitchers. He had meant to be difficult, but he had not known that in the full sunlight, the ferocity of his rebellion would be dazzling.
Now Francisco nodded as he sat in the church-like light Daniel had inadvertently created all those years ago, and he thought about how Daniel was somewhere in the wilderness with his darkness.
“There must be a way to communicate safely with him,” Beatriz said. Before Daniel had gone, she had been considering telling her father about the radio station, as she thought he would have found it an interesting thought exercise, too. But now that he had vehemently shared Antonia’s feelings about connecting with Daniel, she didn’t feel confident that he would allow them to keep doing it.
“If anyone can come up with a solution, I believe you can,” Francisco said. He had great faith in his daughter’s brain. “But I don’t want you putting yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“I don’t want to put myself in unnecessary danger either,” Beatriz reassured him. “But the doctor still treats the patient.”
This kind of talk would have infuriated Antonia if she had heard it. Francisco often mused about the scientific points of the miracle, but to Antonia, this was not only blasphemy but dangerous blasphemy. To treat it as something contained by logic was to get comfortable around it, which not only made such a thing more dangerous but also made it less holy and thus less important. Antonia’s kind of belief is not uncommon, but it has done both science and religion a disservice. By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability.
“Do you have any thoughts on that in your notebook?” she asked.
Francisco sat back down at his desk, hands crossed over each other, back straight. He was a comely and poised version of his daughter when he sat like this, the same eyes, the same nose, the same obsession with the handsomeness of thought.
“Only that there must have been a better way at some point,” he said. “Or the Sorias would have died out by now.” He turned his cunning eyes upon his daughter. “And is there something else troubling you?”
There was, but Beatriz was less comfortable with sharing this one, as she could not quite sort out its shape. Part of it had to do with Pete and herself. And the other part of it had to do with Francisco and Antonia, and if there had ever been a possible future for them that did not drive Francisco to live in the greenhouse and her mother to live alone. Beatriz wanted to know if people like herself and her father—people supposedly without feelings—could be in love, or if they were not capable of producing the correct quantity of emotion to fill an emotional partner’s glass for very long.
“Do you still love Mama?” she asked. This was a longer sentence in their language than it was in English or Spanish, as Francisco and Beatriz had developed several phrases to indicate all of the different forms of love they had identified in their study of humankind. The musical phrase that Beatriz used roughly translated to need of the sort that can only be fulfilled by one thing.
“Did Judith tell you to ask me?” Francisco inquired.
This was not an improbable question. In fact, through the window, Beatriz could see Pete at work on the stage that Judith had set him on. He was now creating upright pillars for hanging strings of decorations. While Beatriz appreciated Judith’s attempt at strategy, she did not think that either of her parents were so straightforward that they could be tricked into falling back into each other’s arms merely by re-creating the scene of their first moments together. “No. I’m not asking if you will move back in with Mama. I just want to understand why it doesn’t work.”
“Have you asked your mother this same question?”
“No.”
“Would you?”
She imagined this scenario. Antonia, angry, and Beatriz, merely puzzled, both of these expressions feeding the other. It was exactly the kind of conversation that Beatriz spent much time avoiding.
“No.”
“That is why it doesn’t work,” he said.
Beatriz took this information and put it into a projected future. In this projected future, she could not tell if she broke Pete Wyatt’s heart merely by being herself. She could not tell if they would be unable to have conversations because they would both want something from the other that was impossible. She could not tell if it was safer to stop a love story before it ever truly got under way.
When she thought this, she experienced a physical sensation as profound as the surges that had struck Pete’s weak heart. It felt like a blow, but it was actually a feeling. It was a feeling so sizable and so complicated that it would have been difficult even for someone with emotional practice to express, and for Beatriz, who was handicapped by her belief of not having them, it was impossible. The feeling was, in fact, a combination of relief that she might be able to use this conversation as an excuse to never speak to Pete again and thus protect herself from further complex emotions, and also the intense and heartrending disappointment that came from standing on the edge of something extraordinary and walking away from it. These seem like intractable opposites, but only if you are being logical about it.
Beatriz was being logical about it.
A tap came at the glass. This one made Francisco sigh heavily, as it was not someone who was a quiet soul. It was Joaquin, who did not wait for permission but pushed his way in instead.
“Beatriz,” he said urgently.
“Shut the door,” she said in her language, then, catching herself, again in English. “Don’t let the rooster out.”
Joaquin squeezed into the greenhouse. “Wyatt the Riot said Tony found something you need to see.”
With some difficulty, Beatriz sorted her thoughts back into their proper places. Love, especially new love, is gifted at disordering them. “I’m coming.”
“Beatriz,” Francisco whistled. “The answer to your question, though, is yes.”