You Love Most

When I was five years old, my mother told me a story about the peaches in Sevilla de Oro. My father had just thrown my only pair of sneakers out of the living room window. When I say throw, what I mean is launched them like a cannonball. I had been complaining every day that they didn’t feel right. My father asked if they were tight, and in the middle of my hysterics I answered that they weren’t. This enraged him and his yelling made me shake. He told me to take off my sneakers. He opened the window and threw them as far as he could. They landed in a construction zone.

This is the story my mother told me. When she was a child in Sevilla de Oro, she would walk around and around, up and down the terrain of the Andes, and eye the peach trees in the neighbor’s yard. 

One day, she decided to get closer, tiptoeing in the evening dusk up to the tree. Now or never. She grabbed as many peaches as her little hands could manage and filled her pockets. She folded the inside of her sweater and used it as a sack to hold more fruit. She ran across the street to her half-wooden, half-concrete home and dropped all her peaches near the chicken coop and sat on her sweater and began to eat. The juice of the fruit ran down her elbows and onto the dirt. Her little bird mouth was sore from the sweetness. 

When her brother found her, he swore on the strip of sunset to never speak of what she’d done—but only if she forfeited some peaches to him. They had a contest throwing the remains of the fruit from the top of the hill. 

I was no longer crying and my mother traced patterns on my forehead.

Go to bed and rest. Check your nightstand. 

She turned off the lights. Pitch black. I didn’t want to leave my mother’s embrace, but I tiptoed across the living room of our Queens apartment and into my room. Every step felt like bumping into my father, like walking into a wall, but he wasn’t in the living room. 

I checked my nightstand.

There was a peach pit.

* * * 

When I was six years old, we moved upstate and finally had a backyard. One day my mother and I bought flower seeds from the dollar store. I couldn’t wait to get home. I ripped open one of the packets and threw the seeds like confetti across the lawn. No, my mother said, I have a place for them, and pointed to the far end of the yard. 

We pulled weeds and dirt caked our skin. I yelped when a piece of wood from the aging rake lodged itself under my nail. My mother used her shirt to wipe away the blood and asked me to stay calm while she pulled out the splinter. 

I was frightened. I’d heard a story about amputation from an uncle on my father’s side who’d lost his hands in an accident. I didn’t know what kind of accident, so I tried my best not to move while my mother worked. She went through various needles and tweezers and I became more and more afraid I was going to lose my hand. 

I remember the splinter for one reason: this was the first time I didn’t expect a story from my mother during a frightening situation. My father’s rage had made her different. He traveled from the city to Utica every other week, still working in Queens while trying to fix a house for his family upstate. He was so stressed that most visits, we couldn’t look at him without upsetting him. When he was in the city, my mother was always busy, always tired. She didn’t have time for stories. 

When she did remove the piece of wood, I was so overwhelmed with relief that the only thing I could do was plop myself on the ground and watch her finish the raking. She sprinkled the seeds and poured water over them. Months later, I had the prettiest rainbow of blue cornflowers, pale pink and violet four o’clocks, white and purple cosmos, and orange marigolds. The only thing my mother ever told me about the garden was that my responsibility was to protect it from hungry squirrels. 

* * * 

After I found the peach pit, my mother told me a story about a stream in Sevilla de Oro. It was past midnight and my father had thrown my doll against the window. My mother had bought the doll for me when we’d been out food shopping that afternoon. My mother’s steady hands pushed me along Corona’s busy streets. People fast-walked around us as she deftly maneuvered the cart. She never ran into anyone, never hit anyone’s ankles. 

My father stood in front of the duplex, waiting for us to get home. He was too quiet. He hated not having his dinner served and ready, but my mother had not anticipated being out so late. That evening, his anger pulsed with every movement in the kitchen—the chairs scraping the floor, the faucet opening and closing. The microwave beeps each held a beat of his rage. I went to bed that night hugging my doll.

When they started yelling, I watched their moving feet against the sliver of light beneath their bedroom door. The door swung open and I felt the vibration of my father’s footsteps coming toward me. His hands yanked the doll from my chest. The smack of the doll’s plastic head against the glass window was loudest. That was the end of the argument. I listened to his snores for hours after he went back to bed. I always wondered why his snores were so gentle, too gentle for such a booming man. 

This is the story my mother told me when she came into my bed after my father threw my doll against the window. She huddled under my heavy blankets with me, her breath tickling my ear, blowing my bangs into my eyes. When she was older, after the peach robbery, she joined a sports team. This was mandatory at her school. For cross country, she ran miles and miles and up and down the hills. Her sweaty skin became a blotchy collection of sun burns. 

One afternoon, the sun was exceptionally bright and the mile was still so long. My mother remembered a path that led to a stream where her sister always met her lover. My mother waited for her friends to pass. Now or never. She ran to the right, jumped over the edge of the trail and onto round white pebbles. She followed the path to the stream, cupped water with her hands, and almost swallowed a water hyacinth. 

From a story her sister told her, my mother found the stream. From a story my mother told me, I found sleep. I dreamt about a child born in a river, the mother’s hair adorned with hyacinths.

The next morning, there were white pebbles the size of my fingernails on my nightstand.

* * * 

Nature. I was born from it, raised by it, learned how to take care of it. My mother has a rainforest of ferns in the kitchen and a desert of cacti in the bathrooms. She is trying to grow fruit trees in the backyard. Peach trees take around two to four years to bear fruit. I asked her once if it was ever tiring to wait so long for things to grow. No, she said, I love my plants. 

My mother has never owned an orchid. I read on a tea bag that orchids mean love, luxury, elegance, and strength. She tells me orchids need a precise environment to thrive and she’s worried she’d be unable to provide the right amount of water, the right temperature, the right position of indirect sunlight. They need perfection and are so used to it, they die when they don’t have it. They’re too much work, she says, I already have three children. She gives us all her affection, splendor, patience, and energy. The tea bag should say “Mom.”

* * * 

The same summer we planted the flowers, my mother complained that her arthritis felt like stones in her elbows, so my father agreed he’d be the one to mow the lawn. He put on an old pair of sneakers but didn’t wear them right—wore them like slippers, the backs of the sneakers folding in on themselves. He came inside stained Hulk green. Sweaty and tan, asking for water and a doctor if his heartbeat didn’t slow down. My mother rolled her eyes and went to the backyard to inspect his work. A scream. Why did you do this?

I ran outside expecting fire and saw pink petals and purple petals, light and dark green stems, leaves of all shapes spread across the grass. 

Why did you do this?

Not how but why.

Stories were a thing of the past between my mother and me. Whenever my parents argued, I imagined my mother exploding into flower petals. A tulip’s petals, to be exact. But I was never sure what my father loved most. I could not picture what his body would become.

* * * 

Before we left Queens for Utica, one morning I walked into our living room and saw my father crouched by the window, the same window out of which he’d thrown my sneakers. He looked as though he wished he could be far away, lost somewhere in the construction zone. The construction company still hadn’t finished the apartment building.

I heard heavy breathing.

My mother was lying on the couch. I first noticed her distant eyes and then her discolored nose. I knew something had been done that could not be undone. I had heard them arguing the night before, waited for the moment she would hop into bed with me, but she never did. Seeing her face, I felt I had betrayed her. How could I not have heard what happened? Looking at her on the couch, I had a choice. Now or never. 

I should have gone to my mother and whispered in her ear that standing under the infinite blue sky of Sevilla de Oro feels like standing under glass. I should have told her that the Andes encroach upon the parish like a mystical blanket made of shades of green, that the Andes feel like being carefully planted in a turtle’s glorious shell. I should have told her there are so many peaches that your lips turn sticky sweet. I should have held her up and pointed to the sky, showed her that it wasn’t clear, but it was still in motion. I should have told her about the child born in the river. 

I went back to bed, pulled the heavy blankets over my face, and hours later, when my father asked me to pray with him, I stared at the wall. After praying, he turned off the lights and left. I sensed he felt horrified at what he had done, but my fear of him lingered and I wanted to hide my mother under my bed. 

My father went to work, and my fear turned into exhaustion. I had a dream that I dashed to the nearest flower garden, ran back home, and dropped a rainbow of petals in my mother’s waiting palms. I never told her about this dream, either. 

I pretend to not know why she stopped telling me stories when I was scared, but the truth is she never received anything from me when she had needed it most. Not even a word. Faced with now or never, I chose never even though my mother had taught me to do the opposite. I may have been only five, but it felt like a choice. I had not been powerless and, a year later when I get a scar from a large splinter, I’ll be reminded of this choice. If only I had given her a token of my love as she lay on the couch, something to help her feel safe just as she had done for me with the peach pit and the stones, I’m sure we’d have more stories between us. 

When my mother woke me for lunch, she bent toward me and cupped my cheek. 

You are my most beautiful plant, my mother said.