“How was your first day?”
“Oh, it was fine. Busy. They’re in terrible shape, accounting-wise. Hence this.” She waved her hands over the small mountain of paperwork.
“They’re lucky to have you.”
“What about you, honey? How was school?”
“Not bad.”
“Good.” Ruth yawned.
“Can I pour you a glass of wine?”
Ruth laughed. “Do I look like I need it?”
“Kind of, yeah,” Jane said, smiling. She got up and patted Ruth on the top of the head. She got a wineglass down from the counter and poured a generous amount of Cabernet into it. She set it on the table in front of Ruth.
“Thanks, honey,” Ruth said. “I’m gonna go wash up. Be right back.”
Ruth left the kitchen and Jane stole a sip of her wine. It smelled rich and oaky, like some kind of deep fruit and…
Roses?
Jane put the wineglass down on the table. She sniffed the air. She could definitely smell roses, overpowering even the smell of the lasagna.
She walked over to the window and cracked it open; the smell of roses wafted in so strongly it almost took her breath away.
She went to the mudroom and opened the door. It was just after seven, and although the sky was dark, it had an almost-purple quality to it. The color of a bruise. She stepped out into the backyard and closed the door behind her.
Outside, the smell of the roses was so strong it made the back of her throat itchy.
It wasn’t a nice smell anymore.
There was something deeper about it, almost rotten. A thick, too-sweet odor that took up more space than it should have.
She started walking to the rose arbors.
Ruth had left big piles of the dead plants she had cut down. Jane could see them, rotting there—was that why the smell was so strong?
But no—
That wasn’t possible.
She took a few steps closer, then paused.
How was that possible?
Because she was close enough now to see that the arbors were covered with roses again, even thicker than before, twice as many blooms that crowded one another and fought for space—
But they weren’t the reds and pinks and oranges they had been before.
No, as Jane got closer she could see that every single rose was black—
A dark, thick black, a black like the night sky, a starless expanse of nothingness.
Jane stared at them.
She knew nothing about gardening. Was it normal for roses to grow back this quickly? Were they supposed to be black? Ruth had only just cut them, but they already covered the arbor again. Jane moved underneath the archway and it became instantly darker; all the light was blocked by the cluster of leaves and thorns above her.
The smell was even stronger than before.
Wrong and overwhelming.
It brought tears to her eyes.
As she stood underneath the rosebushes, a breeze blew through the arbor.
It gusted among the plants and sent a shower of black petals down around her.
She held a hand out and one petal landed in the center of her palm.
And as she held it, it curled dramatically in on itself, rotting before her eyes, drying up and dying in a matter of seconds.
She let it drop to the ground.
She suddenly found she didn’t like the smell of roses anymore.
Right in the middle of her forehead
Ruth refused to talk about the roses; in fact, she wouldn’t even go out to the backyard to look at them. She ate dinner without saying so much as a word, then she refilled her glass of wine, told Jane she was tired, and went upstairs to bed.
Jane cleaned the dishes and put away the leftovers and felt a growing pit of strangeness in her belly.
Why was Ruth acting so weird? Was it really just because she was tired? Or was something else going on?
She got her laptop out of her backpack and set it up at the kitchen table to facetime Salinger. It rang three times before Sal picked up; she was lying on her bed with her long brown hair spread out around her, and Jane felt her eyes well up with tears immediately. She wanted to be in that bedroom so badly, working on homework or trying on Sal’s clothes or making Sal braid her hair into a crown around her head.
“I’m sorry, who are you? I don’t have this number saved in my phone,” Sal said, not yet looking at the camera, rolling her eyes back in her head. When she did finally look, she sat up, her face instantly concerned. “Jane? Are you crying? What happened?”
“I don’t know. Everything. I hate it here. Everything sucks. I just want to come back to California.”
“Fuck, I picked the wrong time to guilt-trip you for not facetiming me sooner,” Sal said, softening.
“You really did.”
“Great, now I’m crying. Stop crying, you’re making me cry. I miss you so much.”
“I miss you, too.”
“What is going on?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just… Something isn’t right. About this house.”
“Janie, it’s just an old house. I understand wanting to find something to hate, something to blame, but—”
“Stop therapizing me,” Jane said. “I told you my mom went all Rambo on the rosebushes, right?”
“Yeah, she was clearly working through some stuff and took it out on those poor plants.”
“Well, they grew back.”
“Isn’t that what plants do?”
“No, like, not this quickly. And also—all the roses are black now.”
Salinger made a face. “Oh. That’s…”
“Weird.”
“Very weird. But there is probably a totally normal explanation for it. Like a plant virus or something. Or a fungus, you know?”
“Maybe,” Jane said. She was used to Salinger’s calm, rational explanations for things, and it was actually making her feel slightly better. If Jane was the one to overreact, let her emotions get the best of her, Sal was the one to take a step back and analyze things from every logical angle. She was like Greer, in that way. Always practical. Always calm. Basically, the opposite of Jane.
“Try and forget the roses,” Sal continued. “How is everything else? How is your mom?”
“She’s been fine. Really focused. You know how she has a tendency to kind of throw herself into tasks and ignore everything else?”
“I’m aware, yes.”
“So it’s been a lot of that. Organizing, cleaning, calling repair people. But today was her first day of work, and she just seems… off.”
“I’m sure she’s tired,” Sal said diplomatically.
“Tired, yeah. But she wouldn’t even go look at the roses. And she hardly said a word at dinner.”
“Look, I’m just trying to be the voice of reason over here. You’ve been through a lot, and it makes sense that you’re feeling all sorts of weirdness because of that. But I think you need to cut yourself a little slack, cut Ruth a little slack, chill a tiny bit, and just try and go with the flow for a while.”
“I wish I was there.”
“Me too.”
“So I could smack you in person for telling me to go with the flow.”
“Have you considered having some matcha and meditating in a room filled with crystals? It’s the Los Angeles way,” Sal said, smiling goofily.