Lew-Smith - Tia Rosalita's Botanic

Jodi Lew-Smith

Tia Rosalita’s Botanic Gardens

It’s a good thing Tia Rosalita is dead. She can’t see me squatting in the bushes in her gardens, trying to keep my lace out of the dirt and my heart goin’ all wylin. How come cops got to be so giant? 

But they don’t come into the gardens after me. Cause why would they? A Puerto Rican girl in the Botanic Gardens? Phht. It’s a white people place. Except for Tia Rosalita—who never got the memo. I swear she’s the only Puerto Rican from our neighborhood who ever bought a pass. Who walks fourteen blocks to wander in circles and stare at plants

I only ever came for the café, where the rich people leave all their food on the tables. Cause what did I know? There I am, small, like eight or nine, and I sit there so dumb and hungry, watching people walk around with their trays. Until I figure out all I gotta do is go say in a polite voice, “Are you done with this?” They’re so busy talking or looking at their phones that they nod without hardly looking up. I just carry off their plate like it’s mine. Sometimes sandwiches full of meat with only one bite out of them. So there I am, a moron kid who thinks it’s a miracle, like getting the manna they’re always talking about in church. Like God gave a shit and arranged a way to feed me. 

Course, I knew enough not to let Tia Rosalita catch me doing that. She’d have dragged me home fourteen blocks to yank open the doors and drawers in Mamita’s kitchen. She was always after Mamita for spending money on anything but food. It was one of God’s bad jokes that Tia Rosalita in her tiny apartment down the hall only ever wanted kids and never got any, and Mamita had four and hated every one.

It stinks of cat piss in this row of boxwood, cause maybe I’m not the only one who picked this spot to hide because it’s wider and not so prickly. But even when I move to a different part, it’s the same. Only if I slide over and shove my nose through the leaves do I get a better smell of flowers, roses I think after a second, though it’s been a long time. But that petaly rose smell, all full of sugar, I guess it never changes.

Then I have to pull my nose back cause the smell reminds me too hard of being here with Tia Rosalita. Of how it was to sneak away from Mamita so’s we could come here where no one was screaming and the car horns were far away. When it was all quiet like this, Tia Rosalita’s wide skirts would make that swishy sound I loved.

A few times when she’d stop to smell some purple flower—she always went to the purple ones first—she’d let go of the gold cross at her throat for a moment and lean over so the gold and the lace from her sleeve would both get all mixed into the flowers. Sometimes in my dream I’ll see lace and gold and purple petals and I’ll know it’s her, even when her face isn’t there. 

In the glass house she’d show me the flowers that grew wild in Puerto Rico. Flowers with names like Frangipani or Flamboyant, or Flame of the Woods. And they’re all gorgeous colors and luscious creamy like lipstick ads, not like what little measly things grow in parks in the City. Her stories of the island made it so beautiful, so real, I start wanting to go there—like nothing else I ever wanted. 

I would beg her to take me and how she’d look at me hard and say, “Ah, if I could, little pájarita, but you can grow up and go anywhere. If you work hard and learn to take care with things, like they do in Puerto Rico. Like I show you.” And she wouldn’t say, “Not like your mamita and her lazy ass ways,” but I’d hear it underneath.

And Tia Rosalita, she always talked soft, but everyone listened to her. Mamita she’s always screaming and acting like she knows everything—and no one pays her any mind. At least if they don’t have to live with her. My brothers got out of there as fast as they could, but I stuck it to tenth grade because Tia Rosalita said I needed school. 

I thought she’d be mad when I dropped out because I couldn’t stay one more day at Mamita’s, but instead it turned out Tia Rosalita was expecting it. She’d already found me a job with her friend Inez who sold beauty supplies and who let me sleep on a cot in the back. Inez’s little shop, where I started learning to keep books and organize the paperwork, was the first place where no one woke me up in the night to scream that I took her check from that lawyer, or that I had to go to the store for a pack of menthols, ultra slim. Don’t bring me back those fat-ass regular ones.

It’s like always being two people. The person I know is me and the one Mamita always says is me, who’s mean and sneaky like her, except worse. Which is what she tells the cops. She watches their Facebook page for when they’re asking for tips. Then if she’s found out where I’m working and there’s any remote chance I could have done whatever crime, she calls and says she’s sure I did it. 

You’d think they’d stop listening to her, those dickwads who show up at my job to say I gots to go with them for questioning. But I always know the fire exits and I’m gone as soon as I see them. They never chase me long—I think they know most of the tip calls are bullshit—so what’s worse is how the cops showing up means Mamita’s found where I’m working again. Which means I have to quit and also find a new place to stay, cause there’s no peace for anyone when Mamita can get to me. I think that’s why she keeps calling the cops, cause if she can get me in jail I won’t be able to get away.

A pair of old white-haired ladies walk by my cat-piss bush, and behind them walks a lady in the khaki uniform of the gardens staff—and I know her. Or at least, Tia Rosalita did. They used to talk all the time about the plants. I forget her name, but when she gets closer I read her nametag says, “Anita Archambeaux, Collections.”

She looks a little different than the last time I saw her, mostly because her hair got grayer and she cut it shorter. But she has that same wide flat face that looks like it has baby powder on the cheeks, and these blue eyes all friendly like a kid. 

I check no one is watching, then I squirm out the back side of the hedge and brush myself off as best I can. My lace hem’s all muddy, but I run my hands over my hair to get the twigs out. Then I round the corner and say, “Anita!”—trying to sound bright like Tia Rosalita. 

She starts to smile right off, but then her face goes sour because she’s not recognizing me. You can tell she’s not from the city, because even when she’s trying not to be too friendly her face is readable like a block-letter sign in kindergarten.

“I’m Rosalita’s niece—remember me? I used to come with her and you’d take us around. I was the one who liked the orchid house.” Truth is I’d forgotten all about that creepster orchid house, but I remember it as I say it. And it works—I see her start to remember me—so I reach out to shake her hand.

“Florrie Santiago.”

Her whole face changes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake—isn’t that too much? Why of course! Rosalita’s niece—it’s been so long. And aren’t you just a peach?” She steps closer and reaches out to rub my hair just like she used to do, like you’d pet a cute kitten. And it feels just like it used to feel, having my head patted like that. Like I was adorable and someone wanted me.

“The girl with the name that means flowers,” Anita’s saying. “Your aunt always got such a tickle from that. How is she, by the way? She hasn’t been here in . . . oh, gracious how long has it been? I . . . ” her voice goes funny when she sees she’s said something wrong. 

“She died six months ago,” I tell her. “Of a heart attack.” I don’t say any more than that, because . . . because, what’s to say, really? 

Anita says, “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry to hear it. Isn’t that just terrible, now? Such a lovely lady.” Then, after staring at me a second, she out of the blue says, “Come to the research center, I have something for you.”

I follow her through the big lobby to a door that says “staff only,” and then down a hall of  bright offices. At the end of the hall she pushes through a thick silver door and lets me pass into a room full of long narrow lights over shelves. Beneath the lights are rows and rows of baby plants, some with thick leaves, some dark green and some lime. Some even striped. Anita heads to a shelf near the back and lifts a little plant with two long, glossy thick leaves—and she hands it to me.

“An orchid?” I guess.

“It’s a Paphiopedilum. They’re easy as pie to grow. They take most kinds of soil and they don’t need a whole lot of humidity. Easy.”

“Um,” I don’t know what to say, so I ask, “what color will the flowers be?”

“The lip—that little cup at the bottom—is the darkest yellow part, and then it shades into white at the tips.”

I nod, thinking it sounds pretty, and also that I’ll have to throw it in the nearest garbage. Thanks to Mamita, I’ll never go back to my desk at Candy’s Virtual Assistants, Inc., or the latest fancied-up cubbyhole in the basement of the building. So no, I can’t take care of an orchid.

And something about that thought makes my heart start hammering all over again. It nearly brings me to my knees, this wild gush of fear, cause if I can’t take care of an “easy as pie” orchid after two and a half years out of Mamita’s house, I’m not getting anywhere. How long before I have to crawl back to her? I swallow hard as my heart keeps all wylin and I try to keep my face from showing it. 

I remember the bright offices we’d walked past in the hallway, and—I know it’s stupid—but right away I feel a little better. There’s something about offices, about how things are all in order and arranged alphabetical and by color that makes me feel things will be alright. Like gardens, I think sometimes, except with paper instead of flowers. 

“Anita,” I say as polite as I can, “is there . . . is there any chance you have work for me here? I’ve got experience and I’ll work harder than anyone you know.”

I watch her eyes go from being pleased to being sort of nervous. “Florrie,” she says with kind of a tired sigh, “I’d love to help you, you know I would, but there’s a stack of resumes on my desk that’d make a midget of Godzilla. It seems every student from every botany and horticulture program in the country wants to work here.”

“But I don’t want to work with the plants,” I say, relieved, “I want to organize your papers. I’m an administrative assistant.” I say this in a precise kind of way, because the words have such a good sound to them. 

Her faces gets a little softer. “Well, now, it’s true I get hardly any of those resumes. But we don’t pay well, sugar. You’d do much better working at one of the office buildings in the City.”

“Maybe, but I’d rather work here. I like it here.” And then, seeing she’s about to say no again, I say, “How’s about this? How’s about I organize your office and I don’t ask for anything unless you like it? If you don’t, I just walk away—no beef.” 

Her face is like one of those electronic billboards, where you read along as it changes. She looks guilty and annoyed with me, then she starts to think about it more and can’t make up her mind, and then it settles back into friendly again. 

“You haven’t seen my office,” she says at last. “In Missoura they’d call it a viper pit. I wouldn’t make my worst enemy work in there.”

“Just wait,” I say, “you ain’t seen nothin’ ‘til you see me order an office. The gardens are all about order, aren’t they? ‘Cept,” here I pause to make sure she sees I’m not for real, “how come you gots to have so much dirt in here? You could pave the place and paint flower murals—save you all kinds of trouble.”

I get to work sorting piles of papers and books and putting colorful little flags on things. This is my favorite kind of work—I’d do it for free. And Anita’s easily impressed. Turns out the woman can recite like ten thousand scientific names of plants but she can’t figure out how to put a file in a drawer. It’s like her brain shuts off for paper. Which is just about the opposite of me, so I’m thinking we’re a match. 

After two days she seems to think so too and starts introducing me to the staff. From the way she says my name, I can tell she’s proud of how she hired a Latina. I don’t point out that we’re surrounded by Latino neighborhoods and who else in here isn’t down on his knees grubbing weeds?

Which I know because it only takes two days to learn pretty much everything there is to know about this place. Especially since I stay here now—which I make damn sure Anita doesn’t find out. Also I’m determined Mamita won’t find me this time, which means not leaving the gardens unless I have to. Luckily the gardeners are mostly Mexican, with only one Puerto Rican and he’s from Queens. 

But I got this down, pretending to have someplace else to live. I know to go in the bathroom just after the janitor leaves it, then just how long to squat on top of the toilet until I’m sure everyone’s gone. And I can find food anywhere, just like a rat. Except this place makes it look too easy. I snag a key to the kitchen and the storerooms the first day I’m here and case the walk-in cooler, looking for expired dates or older labels—the things likely to get thrown out. Because whatever Mamita says about me, I try not to steal. You can have anything, Tia Rosalita told me a thousand times, if you stay a good honest person. Which is easy to say when you’ve got your dead husband’s money to live on. But somehow, in a way I can’t explain, I’ve always known she’s right and Mamita and all her sorry excuses for why she had to take this or that is wrong. 

Except Tia never told me the hard parts. Like how to be alright all alone. Cause most people can’t stand it and Puerto Ricans they’re worse than anyone, with all the family always around. So I had to learn for myself how being all alone is better than being leashed to a misery like Mamita. It’s hard but you can learn it, and by now I got it down too. I don’t need no one else. 

But I do need a real place to live. If I can save up two thousand dollars I can sign for an apartment on Court Street, which gets me to the edge of the neighborhood. Then if I keep saving and getting better jobs, I can someday move to one of the white neighborhoods—all the way out from under Mamita. 

So’s I need to keep this job. 

So’s the last thing I need is another stupid-ass kid trying to live in the gardens. 

It’s early morning, before opening time, when I’m pretending like I just arrived at work early and gots time for a walk in the gardens. There’s this flash of pink in the bushes in the Shakespeare Garden and I go stick my nose in and see it’s a little girl. She’s only maybe eight or so, but right away I peg her a runaway. And she’s Puerto Rican.

And I just want her gone. She’s trouble, nothing else. So I nudge her with my toe and try to get her up, but she’s curled in a ball on the ground with her back to me. 

I need to get to work, so I say, “Go back home, girl. You can’t stay here.” When she ignores me, I pull some branches of the bush across her so she’s harder to see, and leave her there.

Late morning I go out to check, hoping she’ll be gone. She’s still there, and the same after closing when everyone else is gone. Still curled in a ball. 

It makes me want to scream, seeing her there, so useless and so poisonous. Like a coiled snake. So I look away, up at the sky. The sun’s gone down and the sky’s getting that pink I love, like raspberry gelato. And it makes me even madder that this kid is ruining it for me. 

I go around to the other side of the bush and get closer to her, staring hard until she opens her eyes. And oh god she’s like a wounded animal you see on nature shows, her eyes all patient, waiting to be killed. There’s bruises all down one side of her face and on her arm, and little round burns on the back of her hand. And I know right away what they are. You don’t grow up with Mamita and not know cigarette burns.

But how come I gots to find her? 

Not so nicely I say, “Come with me, pájarita.” I reach into the bush to pull her up, but she just curls in a tighter ball and inches away. 

“Fine. Ser asi. When you get hungry come to the big gray building by the front gate and knock on a window. I’ll hear you.”

I try to forget about her, working late in Anita’s office on a spreadsheet to log the new plants that comes in the mail. The sheet they’re using now is like from the Civil War or something.

The kid never knocks and next morning. 

I don’t want to go out to look. When I finally make myself, she’s in the same place, curled all tight with her lips blue and her eyes shut hard. I want to kick her. I go back inside and fill a plate with food, mostly chips and fruit, and bring it back out. 

“You should eat something.” She ignores me. 

The rest of the day I’m annoyed but I keep sneaking out with more food. There’s a piece of chicken from the café, and later I take a chocolate chip muffin. 

When I go back after the gardens are closed, the light is fading but not so much that I can’t see the muffin is gone, and so is the fruit. 

“Come inside, pájarita,” I coax her. “It’s dirty here. Inside there are couches and it’s clean. So much better. I know this for true cause I started out the same way you did—hiding in the bushes.”

She looks up, startled. She almost says something, but instead turns over and crawls through the branches onto the gravel path. When she tries to stand, she almost falls and I grab her arm—but she shrieks and pulls away and I notice her arm’s bent strange. Oh, mother of God—it’s broken. 

“It’ll be OK, pájarita,” I tell her as I take her other arm, not knowing what else to say. As we walk I notice a nasty smell and look at her jeans, all wet and with dirt sticking to them. She’s been pissing in her pants. Probably some other time she’d be embarrassed, but now she doesn’t give a shit.  She’s been to somewhere out on the edge, somewhere she’s not sure she wants to return from. I know about that too.

Inside we go straight to the bathroom where I strip off her jeans and her pink Frozen t-shirt and wipe her with wet paper towels, trying not to touch her arm. The elbow’s all swollen and bruised and it must hurt like hell. On her back, over the shoulder blades, there’s a cut that looks sore. I find a little tube of Neosporin in the staff closet and put it on the cut and also the burns on her hands, and then I make her take Advil.

I clean up every bit of the bathroom, emptying the bins just like the janitors do, so’s it all the same as it was. These tiny details are the way you get caught—so I take care and never screw them up. 

I wrap her in one of the towels they keep around for cleaning up spills and put her on the couch in Anita’s office. I’ll have to wash her clothes and find some damn place to hide her before the work day starts—but that’s a bunch of hours away.

Her eyes close as soon as her head lays down. She hasn’t said a word and I still don’t know her name. And again I ask myself why I’m taking care of her. It’s stupid and could get me booted from here. It’s not worth the risk—I know it. So how come I don’t stop?

In the morning I’m up early, but the girl just sleeps and sleeps and won’t wake up. I wonder if maybe she’s done it and died. And God help me, when I think this I can’t help thinking maybe her being dead would solve a lot of problems—if all I had to do was put her body back where she was and stay out of sight while the police sort it out? 

Then she moves and opens her eyes and when she recognizes me, she looks relieved. And I feel guilty for what I’d been thinking, how I’d been ready to dump her like garbage—just like everyone other than Tia Rosalita would have done to me. And probably still would. A Puerto Rican girl who doesn’t get a husband and have kids might as well be a sack of trash. 

The girl flutters her eyes closed and then opens them again and her face squints in pain. I make her sit up and take more Advil, even though I know that kind of pain is probably too big for aspirin. I ask, “How about a hot chocolate, chica?” 

She nods and I go to the café to make some. When I come back and help her sit up again, I finally ask her name.

She doesn’t answer and I see she’s looking at me like from really far away. I try to read what she’s thinking and see a mess of thoughts behind her bruised little face, but she’s not readable like Anita. I know about that too, not letting people know what you think—because it can cost you. Maybe she thinks I want her to tell me what happened. But I know it already, or at least close enough. 

After a minute I say, “Be that way, then. I’ll guess your name. I think they call you Carmelita. No? How about Alejandra? Valeria?” I pause and then say, “Jennifer Lopez?” 

This makes her smile. Her teeth flash inside her sweet red mouth and I get a glimpse of the regular little girl beneath the bruises, the one who giggles secrets in school and sings the songs from Frozen. I don’t want to think about that. 

“I know,” I say, “your name’s Malia Obama, right? Did I guess it?”

With a shrug, she says tiredly, “It’s Juanita Ruiz. You’re a terrible guesser.”

“Nuh uh!” I protest. “How come you had to tell me? I was gonna say Juanita Ruiz next.”

She shrugs again, not amused. I can see her wince when she moves, but I don’t know what to do except give her more of the Advil. 

“So, little Juanita,” I tell her, “the people who work here gonna show up soon. We gots to move you. There’s a back storeroom that hardly anyone ever goes into. You just have to stay extra quiet if anyone comes in. We’ll make it so they can’t see you.” After a pause, I say, “Is there someone I could call or something?”

She shakes her head, looking grim and exhausted, and I see there’s not much time to get her into hiding before she passes out again.

In the storeroom I pull out two giant old desks from the back wall, leaving just enough space for her to squeeze behind them. I make a kind of bed for her and she lays down, curling in a ball again. I suddenly wonder if I’m crazy to be putting her in here, because probably no one will find her but it means I can’t go check on her. People will right away say I’m doing drugs or something if they see me going in and out of this back room. 

I bring her a mess of food from the kitchen and a bucket I tell her to use for going to the bathroom. I try to say it like it’s normal to piss in a bucket, so she won’t be embarrassed, the way Tia Rosalita used to do for me after Mamita finished coming after us. Tia Rosalita could  make any strange thing seem normal, just by talking like that.

I sneak in once when everyone else is at lunch and she’s sleeping, but I can’t risk it again until much later, when everyone else is gone. By now she’s not sleeping, but she’s also not really awake. Her skin looks kind of shiny and stretched and red, and when I touch her forehead, it’s crazy hot. Thinking of how Tia Rosalita used to do this, I reach in to feel the girl’s neck and then under her arms, where it’s even hotter. She’s got a massive fever. I look at her hands and see the round cigarette burns are all filled up with pus, and when I reach over her shoulder to feel her back, I can feel the cut there is flaming hot too.

She needs a doctor, is all’s I can think. But what do I know of doctors? Mamita never took us to one, she only ever let Tia Rosalita patch us up. It was the only time we got to stay over with Tia Rosalita in her apartment down the hall. 

Emergency rooms are all over TV, though, so I knows how you call an ambulance to take you. I get on Anita’s desktop and search for “emergency room near botanic gardens.” The computer knows where I am, because the search comes right back with a map of the gardens and then a dark blue line to a hospital. And there’s a name and a phone number for emergencies. 

Easy, right. You just call the number. I stare at it on the screen. 

There’s something wrong with me, because my head feels all foggy and confused. I can’t seem to sort out what will happen if I call that number. Usually I see right away what might happen and then I make a plan. It’s something I’m good at. It’s kept me alive all this time.

But this time I can’t make any plan come clear. Instead I keep seeing Juanita’s hot little face and thinking how maybe I did this to her—how thinking it would be OK if she died somehow made her get sicker. How many times has Mamita wished me dead? Ayii-yii, she’d say, my life would be so much easier if all you kids would get gone. And mostly you, she’d say to me, you’re like a punishment from God.

And I’d think maybe she was right. Maybe it’d just be better if I died. I’d keep thinking that until I went to see Tia Rosalita, who smiled wide but had tears in her eyes when she opened the door. Tia Rosalita, who would hold my little brown hand in her big fat-veined brown hand, and tell me how she wished more than anything in the world I’d been born her daughter. How I’d made her life a joy she wouldn’t trade for anything.

When the ambulance comes to the gates, I’ve already got the chains off because I know just where the keys are kept. The driver looks at me funny but drives through and pulls over where I direct him. I lead the people in the neon vests into the entryway and then back to Anita’s office, where I’ve managed to carry Juanita.  

It’s a relief to have the ambulance people check her over, feeling her skin and taking her blood pressure—just like they do on TV. They seem so sure of themselves. Juanita has hardly opened her eyes and I’m surprised when she does now. She ignores the ambulance people and looks directly at me. I can’t read her eyes. As they lift her onto the stretcher and begin to buckle the straps over her chest, her eyes stay on mine and suddenly the question in them is plain. Come with me?

I can’t, I refuse silently, with just my eyes. I can’t go to the hospital and give my name and try to answer all their questions. It would be the end of everything. For both of us. We’d never be able to come back to the gardens after that, I’m sure of it. No one made the gardens a shelter for homeless Puerto Rican girls. And I didn’t sign up to be this girl’s family. I hardly know her.

Except now her face is plain to read. She’s crazy scared, even more than when I first found her. She doesn’t want to go alone with these strangers to some big white-people place, where they’ll do things to her that will probably hurt.

Being alone is good, I say to myself. It’ll make her strong.

But her eyes are too wide and too scared and there’s a little brown hand stretching out to me. I stare at it until one of the ambulance people makes a cough sound. Then I take it and climb into the ambulance beside her, and we drive through the streets with the lights flashing. 

I hold her hand. And I don’t make any plan for what comes next.