Pinky Tickseed by Rick Byrne

Pinky Tickseed
by Rick Byrne

“Those damn bugs.”

Jo was on her knees rifling through the bar for another bottle when a red-eye jumped into that thicket of hair.  Things had changed so much: she was swatting wildly.  Jo loved bugs.  She loved all those ugly living, slippery, hard-shell crawly things with the eagerness of a four-year-old before they go to school and learn words like “icky” and “yuck.”  Jo had given that to our daughter Pinky, who rescued even the crispy, balled-up spiders from the windowsills, carrying them in those tiny porcelain hands out to the porch like she was trying to preserve a single drop of rain.

Jo had given it all to her, all the things that made Pinky an essential element of the natural world, like sunlight itself.  She had given her those flat-pan, blueberry eyeballs that in her last days had grown so large on her wilting face before pulling in on themselves like the final gasp of a dying star.  She had given her that mangrove of hair, black like fresh earth, too.  It was enough, all that beauty, to make you wonder if gravity had responsibility, if some drastic change in the moon’s mass or distance from the earth or some solar wind extinguished or ice cap diminished could have changed things.  Might there have been a trade?  Some inconsequential species of barrel cactus (Ferocactus wislizenii, perhaps) made extinct instead?  But that’s not the way it went—there was no intervention.  There was just Pinky’s death, the cicada onslaught, and the cruel order of things.  

It was that order that turned on Jo when Pinky got sick. Until then, she had been immutable energy, the kind of unrelenting force—her Ph.D., her teaching, her research, her publishing, her flower—that left no room for uncertainties. There even had been whispers of a Nobel, perhaps in natural product chemistry or plant cytogenetics. But in those last few months, the months when Pinky was almost always at Sloan Kettering in New York, Jo had taken up drinking Stoli with Indian tonic, lime, and a swizzle stick, the way she had during our last year at Cornell—the one when I silently determined my love was unfaltering, that I couldn’t live without her.  The one when she got pregnant. Then, as things got worse for Pinky, she stopped the limes and the tonic.  In fact, there wasn’t a crumb of anything in the house at all, hadn’t been for months.  Jo receded, and who could blame her, as Pinky sank away to a brittle little skeleton, a hairless seedling in a dust-bowl drought, barely enough weight to dimple the crisp hospital pillow.  Even the feetie PJs with eency beency pink dancing bears—the ones from a few years ago that Jo dug out of the hope chest, where she saved them for “our second”—swamped her, revealing the pale round nubs of her collarbone through translucent skin.  

Pinky’s birth had been too hard on Jo, a fragile flower herself, and so a second child didn’t come.  But the scientist in her was glad to have salted them away, those night-nights, perfectly preserved in vacuum-sealed plastic like some endangered beetle in a glass jar.  By now they had already been restored, uncontaminated and pressed like Jo’s infinite collection of preserved specimens, a lifetime of work, to the cedar box.  The smiley bears bent and slumped over on each other in the folds, dancing on PJs in the silent cedar dark.  

It was like the venation of leaves, what happened to me and Jo. An arrangement of lines (parallel, pinnate, palmate), chaotic and methodical, separate but committed. The quality of a leaf was the giveaway to me of a plant’s chances of survival, not the phylum or genus, although I knew them all. I had chosen to be a gardener, not a scientist. It was that choice Jo never understood. She thought it “a waste” of my photographic memory, but to me it was necessary—to be in the world of real, living things. 

“It was a beautiful service.” Jo managed half a glass of some hard stuff.  Her voice scraped like sand, her vocal cords whipped from the intractable sobbing that had become the ritual in our lives.  I couldn’t believe she said it, like she was some country club neighbor or one of her graduate students: “I’m so sorry for your loss”—and a kiss on the cheek.  I was exhausted from all the pity, fake and real.  Pity was climbing the wainscoting in the living room, insidious like English ivy (Hedera helix), by the time it was over.  

“God, Jo, is that the best you can do?”  There was no one else there.  “Christ, it’s just me.”

“Would you rather I talk about what it was like to put her in that—” She raised her hand up to her mouth and pushed the rest through her fingers, muffled, almost inaudible—“Is that what you want?”

“Something…anything.” I slapped my palm through the air. 

“We put her in the ground today, John.  After all this, we buried our baby.” She had her fists over her eyes as if she were holding them in.  “It wasn’t beautiful.  It was a nightmare, an ugly nightmare.  And right now she’s in that cold ground, in the dark, alone.  And what if she needs me?  What if she’s scared?  I can’t pick her up…and without her, John, I am nothing.  Do you understand?  I am nothing.”  Her voice traveled into one thin falsetto note until it ran out.  She turned to look at me, her eyes sunk in their sockets, her voice a breathy whimper.  “Is that enough for you, my permission? Is that what you wanted to hear? Are you satisfied?  Now, can you move on?  Can you?”  She took a step toward me, her head tilted as if she needed a closer look, as if I were unrecognizable. 

In the long silence that followed, there was rage.  It coursed up from deep inside of me, from that ugly well of bile that had soaked me through during that last year.  Saturated with resentment, it had finally seeped into my bones and flesh. Then all at once, split open by anger, and death, and cancer, it was released sharp like a whip crack. “If it weren’t for me, we never would have kept her.”  

Her hands over her ears, Jo pushed her way past me and ran from the room.   

I hated myself for saying it.  I could have cried if I had anything left, and wiped clean all the half-empty glasses, stale little sandwiches, and burning candles from the table with an explosive forearm.  But I said “it was beautiful” into the empty room instead and slid the doorjamb between my shoulder blades to take my weight until my knees gave out. 

It was a beautiful service, Pinky.  The kids from Mrs. Martin’s class sang a song: “Here Comes the Sun.” That’s the Beatles.  Mummy and I held your picture, that great one from Nova Scotia with you wearing the “say cheese” smile in front of Mummy’s flower, the Pink Tickseed, the one you carried all the way home on the airplane in your lap like buried treasure.  The one we named you for.  Mummy left that picture with you so you’d remember the story.   Do you remember the story?  How the flower had gone extinct, but then it was found again, pink and yellow faces peeking out from a sea of brown grass. How over a thousand years, the ice carried the seeds from Cape Cod, where Nana and Pop Pop live, all the way to Nova Scotia.  Do you remember how you reminded me about it when Mummy and I tried to explain to you about being sick, and you asked why?  You remember you said that I shouldn’t worry, that you too would follow the ice to Nova Scotia.  Do you remember?

By midnight, the battalion of cicadas had found their way through a tear in the screen door and had begun massing along the border of the jute rug on the back porch. Slumped down in the doorway to the kitchen, I was paralyzed. But I wasn’t numb like they said I would be. Just the opposite, I was a high-pitched whistle—a cicada scream—like an emergency signal from the heart rate monitor, a flatline.  

I didn’t sleep.  There was no sleep.  But I did slip away fitfully to another condition: dormancy, like bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis).  I could feel the hours pass, but I could not remember them.  There was nothing but the recurring nightmare.  I just saw Pinky, our little Pinky, standing in the door to her bedroom, shuddering with night terror—the violent spasm of a child chased by death.  “I want up, Daddy…pleeeeease pick me up.”  It was a hoarse, piercing note. A syringe tap. My Pinky, convulsing, the corners of her mouth drawn down to her chin, with a torrent of saltwater drenching her and collecting in that spot hollowed out by the chemo at the base of her throat.  Her spaghetti arms were up and out, on either side.  

“Pick…me…up…da…dee.”  

Five drowning syllables gasped out of airless lungs.  But I could not with all my fatherly might extract her from the shadow, my arms too weak, her hands too brittle.  I could not save her from the cancer.  She slipped down my legs, fingers open, my eyes locked on her, and succumbed to the cold soil as dark as spent coffee grounds, black and silent.   

I clambered up on spongy legs.  The house was alive, every light on, the television flickering blue and mumbling in the distance. I half expected to see Jo curled up in her chair with something from McClintock, Linnaeus, or Arber.  But Jo hadn’t read in months.  

It was as if I was suddenly standing in the middle of a party, like the ones we would throw when Pinky was in remission with the doctors, nurses, and brave little warriors from the clinic, all in various stages.  Those preternaturally courageous toy soldiers in the grip of cancer with terrifying names that parents learned to pronounce flawlessly, like the doctors themselves, as if it furnished some scrap of control: Kaposi’s sarcoma, myelomonocytic leukemia, diffuse intrinsic glioma.  

But, in fact, except for the brood closing in, the world was motionless, as if some shattering cosmic event had messed with magnetics, had popped it off its axis.  As if while I had drifted away, it had been given over from humans to bugs—the violent end of an age.  As if, Pinky gone, Jo and I were the last ones.  As if there was nothing left: a million red cicada eyeballs drawn to the last shred of incandescence—unaware of what used to be and what might have come—of that glowing little house in the photo on the fridge.    

I scuffed along the chair rail in the hallway to Pinky’s bedroom.  At the door I seized up a bit, gasping and forcing air through my nose to stay ahead of the approaching episode.  Illuminated in a sliver of light was a chrome IV stand, clear tubes strung over the post of her big-girl bed.  A bag half-full of clear liquid, a morphine drip, was fitted with a clown’s wig and a big red nose.  My shadow was superimposed on it, bleeding out like spilled ink across Babar the King of the Elephants and the Elmo bedspread tucked in Jo-tight and Jo-crisp in the corners.  I might have put my arm around that clown to steady it in its grief, a gesture of reconciliation for the bad blood between us, if I thought it would improve anything.  He delivered a broad, dumb clown smile, like an offer of some sort.  And for thirty seconds, perhaps a minute, I deliberated about the last jolt in that bag.  I could have done it.  I could have thrown the stopcock wide open and curled up in the fluorescent shine of her nebula of Day-Glo stars—Orion’s Belt and the Dippers—letting the catheter do the dirty work.  I said night-night and pulled the door tight. 

Jo was balled up on the floor in the bathroom.  Slender fingers of blood and vodka reached out like a rush of Parson’s juniper (Juniperus chinensis ‘Parsonii’), staining the grout around her hand where she came down on the glass. A small cut had given up threads of blood caked along the lines of her palm.  She rocked back and forth to the throbbing cicada rhythm, her cavernous sobs expended and now squeezed out as raspy squeaks.  She didn’t open her eyes to look at me, but gripped them tighter at my presence. Her cheek pressed on the floor, slid through the pink liquor.  I dropped to my knees and flattened myself over her like a blanket, wrapping my hands on either side of her face, still after all this, as soft as lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina).    

In a spear of early morning light, I found Jo, scrubbed and wet-poodle-haired at the metal table in the kitchen next to the window.  Her legs were tangled up under her white cotton nightdress.  She cradled her World’s Best Mommy cup in both hands, keeping it close to her mouth to drain off its warmth.  

The house was immaculate, as if nothing had happened, as if it were some day other than the one that it was.  For a moment, my heart hammered against its rib cage with the expectation of Pinky sliding across the hardwood in tiny socks. 

Am I still your daddy today, Pinky? 

I wondered what they would call me at big-girl school when I went to pick up her things.  Her last art project would be there—a hand-traced turkey with one big eye, red tissue gobbler, and pipe cleaner legs.

“Rain?” I said, moving toward the cupboard.

“Off and on.”  Her words discharged heavy and sluggish in an exhale.

“She loved the rain on the porch roof.”  

Jo let her forehead fall until it rested on the rim of the cup.  “Jesus, John, do we have to start?”  It was a quick burst, a cannon shot.  She unknotted her legs and twisted out of the chair, chucking the cup into the empty sink with a fat thud.  

“No, Jo, but I…if that’s what you—” I bobbled it, but before I finished, she said she was sorry and slipped her hand along my forearm on her way to the porch.  “Are you alright?” I said, but she was already out of earshot.  

Through the window I saw her pushing naked feet through the soggy morning grass.  I took the measure, in the silence of the vacant kitchen, of the growing distance between us.  Jo had hardened.  She was prepared.  In the last months, when it was clear about Pinky, it became some scientist’s calculation for her, some Mendelian equation.   A silver line snaked behind her, puffs suspended in the syrupy gray air.  I didn’t blame her for it, or perhaps I did.  Because as she calcified, pieces of me were cleaved off in chunks until I was nothing, cavities where my organs once were—my spleen, my guts, my heart.  

As the hem of her gown dragged along the flower bed at the side of the barn, I noticed the hosta (Undulata) was sagging and the pachysandra (Terminalis) had gone yellow at the edges.  It had been months since Jo had laid a hand on her garden—that plot of earth she called her heaven.  Her heaven: the scrap of land where just this spring a bony, patch-haired Pinky sat Indian-style in freshly dug holes, drawing fresh soil in around her like a sapling.   

“It’s going to be OK, Jo,” I said to the lifeless room.  “Tell me it’s going to be OK.”  

With a hand clamped over her mouth, she tried with that stubborn scientist’s persistence to stem the night’s leftovers, hemorrhaging a round of forceful rough heaves.  I collected all my strength not to go to her, not to throw my arms around her and gather what was left of us up inside of me. I knew it was not what she wanted.  I knew she didn’t want me to save her anymore, as I had too often failed.  She didn’t want me to need her the way I had so desperately, and she didn’t want to need me.  She didn’t want my love, not the way I gave it, and if it hadn’t been for Pinky she may never have.

  Balancing herself between the wrought iron gateposts, the entrance to the garden, she seemed so small.  Behind her the sun escaped from a cloud, backlighting the curtain of wisteria (frutescens) draped between the trees.  A huddle of scraggly, untended sunflowers, heads bent at the neck, considered her.  They must have been wondering what happened. Why had their flawless Eden gone derelict? Why hadn’t their Jo protected them against the unyielding cicada onslaught?  They were falling back in the face of the unthinkable, contemplating what had turned for good and what could be saved.

I couldn’t move.  Pinky was gone, and it was pinning me down like rushing water.  They came in surges, the images of her—the fragments of what could have been.  The home movies of what never would be.  On the porch with a mound of books, her mother’s mind, brilliant and curious, at work in her.  Then, in the back of the convertible, a teenager, sunglasses pushed up in the reckless tangle, neck on the seat back, curls dancing in the rush of air.  I saw her own garden, those fingers in the moist earth resting the seeds in one by one and nursing each to life.  With her own children, who looked up at her like she was the sun, the only star in the universe.  

—–

It’s been a week now and the cicadas are still raging.  

I have sealed every storm window and lodged newspaper and tufts of leftover tissue in every slit, duct, and crevice in wood, in mortar, in stone to keep them out.  I am holed up in that house, a prisoner of bugs. I lie on the covers at night, waiting for the last molecule of oxygen to expire in the decaying air.  

It’s been days since Jo and I have said anything to each other, days more since I have slept.  I wonder if my vocal cords have atrophied to the point of no return, if perhaps they’ve loosened and are hanging, slack strings in the back of my throat.  

Jo has taken her own course.  

She’s reading when I find her in the basement with a stack of crusty hardcovers. It suddenly becomes familiar to me, this snapshot of Jo, and the muscles around my eyes rest to take more of her in.  I see her in that undersized railroad apartment we shared in Ithaca in that last gray upstate winter before she delivered her dissertation.  She could go days without pulling her head up, and I could go days watching her jump through the pages, crackling across botanical illustrations like static electricity.  

Since Pinky’s first devastating symptom, that life-draining moment when she declared with the innocent matter-of-factness of a five-year-old (as if she had put her flip-flops on the wrong feet) that she saw spots—“pretty lights, Mummy”—in front of her eyes, Jo has derived some deep calm from it, from existing below the surface among the roots, the temperate earth sheltering her from the human world pounding away above.  As if she could somehow be insulated from the malicious fury of cancer.  

In that moment, I am envious of Jo, of her scientist’s mind, of her ability to find patterns of logic in the most illogical chaos.  It has helped her especially, perhaps, to find a passageway where none existed through this ruthlessly illogical last year, to divine some telltale of hope, to grasp how the absolute stillness of death fits in a frenetic natural world, orderly and fueled by the conveyance of energy.  I want to find it with her, to fulfill that promise we made in the stippled shade of the dogwood (Cornus florida), but I am seized up by the notion that Pinky’s life is eternally frozen, that she’ll always be a five-year-old.  And I am daunted by the idea that there will never be a day in the rest of my life when I will stop asking myself why.

Behind her on a black iron potting cart is the solitary flower in the red clay pot—the Pink Tickseed (Coreopsis rosea).  I see it now as I have not seen it before.  There it is: the glory of a scientist’s work, the brilliance and splendor of the perseverance of nature.  I stand there in the dark for a minute next to the oil drum, the faint tickle of kerosene and old wood hanging in the glutinous subterranean air, before I speak.  The Pink Tickseed, lost to the world, and then returned in part because of Jo’s diligence, because of her work, because of that mind.  There is a plaque at its base: From the citizens of Nova Scotia to Dr. Josephine Maher.  In appreciation of your dedication to returning this flower, a national treasure for both our nations, to the world.  I hear the mechanical hum of the water heater bass-lining the cicada symphony. 

“Do you remember, Jo?”

She looks up, her eyes on mine as I break into the sphere of light around her.  

Case-hardened combat soldiers, warriors that had engaged their own brutish enemy, we could decode each other in the silences.  We knew the secret language: the timbre of the voice, the arrangement of shoulders, the faint creasing of a forehead, or a hand slip on a knee—the practiced giveaways exchanged as an armada of doctors described the treatment scenarios for Pinky, each a seemingly medieval course, each possibility more sinister than the last.  We knew what we would do, what we would say. 

“Nova Scotia?”  She pushes her hand up underneath her glasses, covering her eyes with her palm. 

“You were a star.”  I step fully into the light.

“Pinky was the star.  Do you remember how happy she was?  How proud?”  She pulls one leg up under her and leans her head back.  I can see the lines around her mouth, embossed on the soft surrounding skin where it pulls back into a smile.  She is strikingly beautiful, my Jo—ringlets of fine filaments, like dandelion drift, descend along that graceful, slender neck—who is growing more beautiful with age.  I am lucky, I think in that moment, that she figured out how to love me.

“That was just before it all started,” I say, blowing air through my nose and mouth, puffing up my cheeks.  “You ever think about things, Jo?  You know…if it would have been better for her, maybe for all of us, if we didn’t have her?”

  “Oh, John, why do you do this to yourself?”  Her voice is milky.  She lays her glasses on the desk and pushes her hand, palm up, toward mine.      

“You remember, Jo?  How close we came?”  I touch the underside of her wrist with my fingers, traveling along the delicate veins.  “You ever imagine how things might have been different?”  I can feel the dead weight that has become my body lifting.  I am almost buoyant, filling with light, like helium, at the familiarity of her skin.

“It was a thousand years ago.” 

As I study her palm, I recognize every slender branch, where it veers off and ends or forks into tributaries. I remember her face, ashen and constricted, as she scrutinized the results of the pregnancy test, the pamphlet with the tiny writing unfolded on the counter.  I remember how she recited some statistic about chemical fallibility and did another, then another, before sliding down the white tile and landing in the heap of test sticks and wrappers, head in hands, and saying “dammit, dammit, dammit”—sweatpants around her ankles.  I remember sitting in the ratty clinic with her. How out of place she looked among the younger girls, some weeping, some heads down, some in a glassy-eyed fog.  I remember how, when the nurse called her, I dug my fingers in above her knee, pinning her to the seat.  It was an involuntary reaction, an electric current.  She turned to look at me and wiped the tears from my eyes with her thumbs before pressing her forehead on mine and saying, “Oh God, John, let’s go home.”  I remember how, at that moment, I knew she had done it for me.

When I look up, Jo is crying.  It’s soundless crying, not hard grief but something else, something cloudier, perhaps regret, perhaps emptiness.  She is right.  It’s as if a thousand years have passed and we have entered a new age of undiscovered species.  

“Let’s take it to her.” Jo’s eyes are waterlogged.  Clear streams slip down her cheeks, taking their familiar routes.  

“The—”

“Flower, yes the flower.”  She spins around in the chair.  “She should have it, John, shouldn’t she?”  Her trembling hands are on either side of the pot, lifting it off its base.

“She loved it so much.”  My breath is patchy.  “She loved it, Jo, because she knew what it meant to you.  We can go—“

“No, now…we need to plant it tonight.”  There is urgency in her voice as if there is time to repair some loose end, as if by some extraterrestrial occurrence—this moment—by this particular alliance of the moon and the earth, of their gravities, we could make a trade, one Pinky for another.

As the car leaves the driveway, I can see the cicadas hopping in front of the headlights, popping like fireworks, a circus act, like a celebration. It is the last moment of their emergence. The silence is coming. 

I look at Jo, her face bathed in the soft green dashboard light of the Volvo, her window down and her hair kicking up behind her.  She is craning her head into the rush of air to see the moon, a fat yellow summer moon hanging low in the sky, as if watching, as if it is there just for us.  The tickseed dances in the rearview mirror, head bobbing, in acknowledgment perhaps, as we pull through the stone pillars of the cemetery entrance.  

We climb the slope to Pinky’s grave, which is piled with dogberry roses (Rosa canina), candles, and construction paper cut-outs. One in the shape of a heart is flapping impatiently in the fidgety night breeze, waiting to be noticed.  In oversized crayon letters, it reads: We miss you, Pinky.  Jo leans in with the Polaroid from the fridge, our barefoot angel, and rests it in a featherbed of fallen petals.  From the rise, dyed in black silhouette against the infinite sky, I can see the perfectly unpruned trees—chestnuts, maples, and white oaks (Quercus alba)—standing guard along the pathways, offering a consoling whisper. 

Jo and I breathe together as we scan across the landscape of photographs and half-melted candles.  She is close to me now; her shoulder is fitted under my arm and pulled in tight.  At last, there is silence from the cicada brood and neither of us feels like crying. 

We are on our knees in the grass.  I feel along a seam with my fingers where the sod is knitting in, and I peel back the blanket.  Jo looks at me, her eyes gathering moonlight and widening, as she pushes her hands into the new, soft earth.

Bonus audio of Rick reading from his story:

About the author: