Reached

say.
    “He died while you were still,” Bram says to my mother. His smile is gone, and his voice sounds heavy and sad, weary with telling this terrible news.
    “I know,” my mother says, smiling through her tears. “He came to say good-bye.”
    “How?” Bram asks.
    “I don’t know,” she says. “But he did. When I was still, I saw him. He was there, and then he went away.”
    “I saw him dead, but not the way you saw him,” Bram says. “I found his body.”
    “Oh, Bram,
no
,” my mother says, her voice a whisper of agony. “No, no,” she says, and she gathers my brother close. “I’m sorry,” she tells him. “I’m so sorry.”
    My mother holds Bram tightly. I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can’t cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist. I want to do something to make this better, even though I know that nothing can change the fact of my father gone and under ground.
    My mother looks at me and her gaze is pleading. “Can you bring me something,” she says, “
anything
, that is growing?”
    “Of course,” I say.

    I don’t know plants the way my mother does, so I’m not even sure what it is I dig up in the little courtyard of the medical center. It could be a weed, it could be a flower. But I think she’ll be happy with either—she just wants,
needs
, something to combat the sterility of her room and the emptiness of a world without my father.
    I fold the foilware container I brought with me into a kind of cup, scoop the soil inside, and pull out the plant.
    The roots dangle down, some thick, others so thin that the breeze goes through them as easily as it does the leaves. When I stand up, my knees are dusty, my hands are dark with dirt. I am bringing my mother a plant because there is no way I can bring my father back for her. I understand why people wanted the tubes; I am also desperate for something to hold on to.
    And then, standing there with roots dripping dirt on my feet, the middle of the red garden day memory comes back to me. My mother, my father, Grandfather, his tissue sample, cottonwood seeds, flowers growing wild and made of paper, red buds folded up tight, the green tablet, Ky’s blue eyes, and suddenly I can follow Grandfather’s red garden day clue, I can take it and follow it up to leaves and branches
and
all the way down to the roots.
    And I catch my breath with remembering . . .
    Everything.

    My mother’s hands are printed black with dirt, but I can see the white lines crossing her palms when she lifts up the seedlings. We stand in the plant nursery at the Arboretum; the glass roof overhead and the steamy mists inside belie the cool of the spring morning out.
    “Bram made it to school on time,” I say.
    “Thank you for letting me know,” she says, smiling at me. On the rare days when both she and my father have to go to work early, it is my responsibility to get Bram to his early train for First School. “Where are you going now? You have a few minutes left before work.”
    “I might stop by to see Grandfather,” I say. It’s all right to deviate from the usual routine this way, because Grandfather’s Banquet is coming soon. So is mine. We have so many things to discuss.
    “Of course,” she says. She’s transferring the seedlings from the tubes where they started, rowed in a tray, to their new homes, little pots filled with soil. She lifts one of the seedlings out.
    “It doesn’t have many roots,” I say.
    “Not yet,” she says. “That will come.”
    I give her a quick kiss and start off again. I’m not supposed to linger at her workplace, and I have an air train to catch. Getting up early with Bram has given me a little extra time, but not much.
    The spring wind is playful, pushing me one way, pulling me another. It spins some of last fall’s leaves up into the air, and I wonder, if I climbed up on the air-train platform and jumped, if the spiral of wind would catch me and take me up twirling.
    I cannot think of falling without thinking of flying.
    I could do it, I think, if I found a way to make wings.
    Someone comes up next to me as I pass by the tangled world of the Hill on my way to the air-train stop. “Cassia Reyes?” the worker asks. The knees of her plainclothes are darkened with soil, like my mother’s when she’s been working. The woman is young, a few years older than me, and she has something in her hand, more roots