Prayer Plant

by Liz Breen

Finalist, Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize,
selected by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

It’s the beginning of my third trimester, and my back is killing me, a hungry, neon kind of pain; an awe-inspiring pain, my lungs so in awe they forget to breathe. But I’m not concerned about my back pain. Or rather, I’m less concerned about my back pain than I am about my houseplants. They are dying, all of them. The one in the living room, in the office, even the one in the baby’s room I brought home only a week ago. I’m attempting a triage of sorts—adding more water, draining excess water—but they only get worse.

I text my mother for advice, but she only gives voice to my anxiety. “How are you going to take care of a baby,” she writes, “if you can’t even take care of your plants?” She is joking, of course. And I know this, but still I panic. Because yes, how am I going to take care of this baby, whose growth requires so much more than light and water?

I toss the plants, get in the car and drive to Home Depot. I will buy more, trade them out the way a parent trades a child’s goldfish, the only trick being in this situation, I am the parent and the child. Each plant has a label, a plastic stake driven into the dirt, only slightly thicker than a hospital bracelet. I buy whatever promises to be “low maintenance” and “easy to grow,” enough to replace everything that was lost, everything except for the prayer plant which, with pruning and repotting, may just be salvageable.

The prayer plant was a gift from a neighbor, an offshoot of her own, with flat green leaves and orderly purple spots. Its name comes from the way the leaves curl inward at night, like hands come together in bedside prayer. The neighbor told me this. She is both religious and a gardener. I am neither, but she handed me the pot anyway. “You live the closest,” she said with a shrug.

And while I am not religious, now, as I sit at the kitchen table, I discover that my fingers might be. They move across the plant as if it were a rosary, quick and reverent, plucking yellow leaves from green; as if they believe in the power of redemption.

. . .

That weekend, the weekend of the plants, we assemble the bassinet, place it at the foot of our bed. Tiny, growing things, the books say, should be kept close. I move the prayer plant into our room, too. I cradle it in a macramé planter, hang it from the ceiling by an industrial strength hook. Seventy-five-pound weight limit. Excessive, I realize.

My husband catches me at eight months pregnant on top of the ladder, power drill in hand. “Get down from there,” he says. “You’ll fall.”

“I won’t fall,” I say, testing the hook with quick, hard tugs.

“Your back then,” he says. “You’ll hurt it worse.”

I tug on the hook again, feel the pain light up the soles of my feet. “I won’t fall,” I say again. Not from this ladder, anyway.

. . .

Weeks later, the plant is still in limbo. The same two stalks with the same six leaves shooting out of the soil. Every night, the leaves curl inward, but come morning, they never turn to face the sun. 

When I arrive at the hospital, I’m fifty percent effaced with a hand towel bulging from inside the crotch of my maternity pants. Water is coming out in bursts, enough water to care for a dozen prayer plants. Every time I think it’s done, I feel another wave soak the towel and run down my thighs. “Let’s see what’s going on,” the nurse says as she guides me into the exam room, like we both don’t already know.

That night, my husband and I peer at each other through the railing of the hospital bed. “Do they hurt?” he asks. 

“Not like I thought they would,” I say back.

Soon, he is asleep in the cot beside me, and I roll onto my side and tuck my knees up as far as they will go. I curl inward, and though I’ve never been one to pray, when a contraction hits, my hands clasp together, and I find myself pleading with something that isn’t there. “Please, please, please,” I think again and again until all at once, it’s morning. It’s time for me to unfurl, to face the doctor, this woman in scrubs who stands between my legs and waits for me to drop something into her open palms.

. . .

Time in those early weeks is not measured in days, but in check marks on a bottle sterilization bag, one check for each use, letting us know when it’s time to throw the bag out and start again. Everything in those early weeks is about starting again. Feed the baby. Change the baby. Swaddle the baby. Sway the baby. Start again. The baby becomes jaundiced, the skin around his eyes turned the color of cooked onions, so we shorten the cycles. We wake the baby if we have to, pump him with enough fluids to flush the bilirubin from his system. My husband sets an alarm on his phone for the middle of the night. When it goes off, one of us will grab the bottle that’s hidden in the nightstand and sit with the baby in the rocking chair, which we’ve moved from the baby’s room into ours.

Tonight is my night. When the alarm goes off, I lift the baby from his bassinet and place him on top of our bed. I need him to wake; I need him to eat, so I unwrap his swaddle, pulling the Velcro tabs that bind his chest. If the sound of the Velcro doesn’t rouse him, the night air does, and he cries. He only cries for a second, for as long as it takes for me to sit down in the chair and put the bottle to his lips, but it takes that entire bottle for my heart to stop pounding, for my mind to stop racing, for the voice in my head to stop pleading, “Please, please, please.” Please stop crying–though he did. Please eat—though he is. Please breathe—though I can hear his big, contended sigh as I pull him closer to my chest. My pleas are desperate and directionless. I feel desperate and directionless. This new love is not an anchor but an axe, severing whatever ropes were keeping me moored, the baby and I adrift together. Even though others can see him, can hold him, it is still just him and me. I worry it will always be just him and me, the two of us unknowable. Unreachable.

Even now, it feels like we are being pulled away, a current spinning us round and round. The baby is asleep, has been asleep, but I cannot bring myself to stand and walk him back to his bassinet. While I am no longer panicked, I am still dizzy from the panic. When I look down at the ground, it is black. There is nowhere for my feet. But when I look up, there is the prayer plant, its leaves curled into little straws, tighter than I’ve ever seen them. I imagine tucking every wish, every terrifying thought into those leaves, with the hopes that when the sun rises and the leaves unfurl, they reach someone who can help.

. . .

We bathe the baby on Mondays and Thursdays because the nurse at the hospital told us he only needs baths “a couple of nights a week” and what is a couple if not two exactly? We drop a syringe filled with 5mL of Vitamin D into the second bottle of the day, always the second bottle because we—I—am still too tired to remember to do it for the first bottle, and the pediatrician told us Vitamin D must be given every day. We track the number of poop diapers, the number of pee diapers, the ounces of expressed breast milk the baby eats on an app that we share, the first either of us has ever paid money for. Because good parents, we were told by no one in particular, track these kinds of things.

The prayer plant’s care is not measured in days or with apps, but by those sterilization bags. I realize as I am checking off another use that it’s been one bag, maybe two, since I’ve given it any water. So I pull a bottle from the drying rack, fill it with water, and pour it over the plant. I watch as the roots guzzle it down with all the fervor of a newborn.

. . .

Despite my neglect, the plant begins to grow. I notice it the night after we receive the all-clear from the pediatrician. The jaundice is gone, the baby’s skin restored to a perfect, rabbit-nose pink. “Goodbye, alarm,” my husband whispers in bed that night, swiping his phone screen with a triumphant flourish. And yes, the alarm does not go off, but still, I am awake.

I wake and my mind immediately goes to why the baby isn’t waking with me. I try to listen for the slow, heavy cadence of his breath but the white noise is so loud—the baby likes it loud—so I get out of bed and I creep to his bassinet and I watch his chest. And even though I can see it rising and falling, I put my hand in front of his nose to feel his exhalation on my skin.

Even with this assurance, I cannot fall back asleep. I think about the walk we took earlier that morning—the pediatrician emphasized the importance of getting the baby outside, even in February—and I think about the hill. From the top, you could see Downtown, the spire of the Pru sticking into of the low, winter clouds like a toothpick from an hors d’oeuvre. I think about the effort it took to slow the stroller as we descended, to prevent gravity from exerting its will. What if I had not been able to? What if I had slipped on a patch of ice and my hands had left the stroller and it went rolling down, down, straight into traffic?

Or worse, what if I simply chose let go?

I imagine my hands releasing the stroller, imagine me standing there, calmly, as it rolls faster and faster away from me. Over and over I imagine this. Sometimes, the baby cries out before he is slammed by a pick-up. Other times he does not; other times it’s just silence, the horn, the crash, then silence again.

I want to stop the images, but I can’t. I know I don’t want to do this, could never actually do this, but it still feels plausible. Everything is a danger to this baby. A virus, a slightly inclined mattress, a loose blanket, gravity. Why not me?

Finally the baby wakes. Or rather he grunts—perhaps just moving out of one sleep cycle into another—and I go to him because I feel the need to atone. I take the bottle I have tucked away, just in case, and bring it to his lips. He takes a polite ounce before falling back asleep. I could cry for what feels like his acceptance of my unspoken apology, but I don’t. I tip my head back to keep the tears from running over, and when I finally open my eyes again, I notice it. The new leaf emerging from the center of the prayer plant. 

My mind immediately starts to go. Please don’t let him suffocate. Please don’t let him stop breathing. I’m reciting each fear like I’m reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, eyes up, hand over heart. Please don’t let him drown in the tub. Please don’t let me crash the car. I tuck each of my pleas into the leaves of the prayer plant. Please don’t. Please don’t. Please. And when I get to the end, there is room for one more. Please don’t let me let go. I tuck it away in the new leaf, and I finally let myself sleep.

. . .

The plant grows quickly after that, another leaf, then another. The baby smiles his first smile, and a new stalk shoots out from the dirt, and that stalk, too, grows leaves with spots so dark they resemble an exposed heart.

Soon, the plant has doubled in size, its stalks grown long past the pot, resembling the baby’s legs when I accidentally dress him in newborn-sized pants.

The baby now sleeps without a swaddle, sleeps through the night. “It’s a miracle,” my husband whispers that first morning with an indulgent stretch, and I don’t know whether to laugh or to scream at the disparity, these two parallel universes we have come to occupy. It’s a miracle, yes. But not an accident. Because who receives a miracle besides the devout? And what can you call what I’m doing—what we are doing, the plant and I, night after night—except devotion? While the house sleeps, we are awake, laying ourselves at the feet of a spiteful God, a spiteful…something, and asking that it take its wrath elsewhere, away from this house, away from this child. And because we do this, only because we do this night after night, does it listen.

. . .

The week the baby turns five months, my mother buys us tickets to a show. Little Shop of Horrors, finally revived. It’s my first time away from the baby. Only a few hours, but still the last thing I do is pump, though we have plenty of milk already in the freezer, and leave it in a bottle on the counter as a kind of peace offering. A way to tell both the baby and the God-something that I have not forgotten my job.

. . .

The cheap-expensive wine everyone drinks at the theater reeks of baby poop, though no one seems to notice but me. Fortunately, this crowd doesn’t care much for sipping, and soon the smell is gone because the wine is gone. People are tucking their empty plastic cups under their seats and listening to Seymour croon to the strange, new plant that’s arrived in the shop, begging it to grow so that his life can grow with it.

Of course, Seymour discovers this plant does not need light or water, but blood to survive. So every night, he cuts himself, nurtures the plant by way of his own wounds. This is enough, until it’s not, until it is the second act and the plant is impossibly large, shouting, “Feed me, Seymour,” demanding a full, human sacrifice.

I hear the teenage boy behind me snicker at what I imagine is the plant’s felt mouth flapping open and shut, like he could ever be afraid of such simple, obvious puppetry. But I find that I am afraid.

“Was that as good as the last time you saw it?” my mother asks as we wait for the Uber outside the theater. “Last time?” I ask, watching as the little car icon on my phone turns and begins its crawl down Washington Street. I am anxious to get home, but like all my anxiety lately, I’m doing my best to conceal it. 

“Yeah, didn’t you see it in high school?” I had, but not like this. Because what did I know back then about these things? About the seeds we choose to nurture? About beasts that can’t ever be fed? About the probability of being swallowed alive?

. . .

That night, I wake, like usual, and the prayer plant is waiting, its many leaves—so many leaves now—turned inward. Though perhaps not so tightly, I think, their shape less of a straw than a wide, sloping funnel.

Regardless, my mind gets to work. Please don’t let him suffocate. Please don’t let him stop breathing. Please don’t. Please don’t. Please. Into the newest leaf I tuck, Please don’t let him choke. We are—I am—working up the courage to start solids.

With every thought accounted for, I close my eyes, wait for sleep to come. But for once it doesn’t, and that’s when I hear it. The creak. I mistake it for the spring of the mattress, creaking as someone moved. But our mattress does not have springs, and no one has moved.

Again it happens, and I can tell now it’s coming from above. It’s coming from the plant. The plant is creaking. Or rather, the hook that is holding the plant is creaking, straining against the weight of what it’s holding. It can’t be, I think, but then I hear it again. And again. I calculate the weight of the pot, the dirt, of each individual leaf, subtract it all from the hook’s weight limit. We’re fine, I think. We’re fine.

But of course, there’s another weight that I can’t calculate. The weight of everything else. The kind of weight that can’t be measured in ounces or pounds but threatens to pull down the very rafters holding me together. The weight of the words I recite desperately in the night. The weight of my responsibility. Of my love.

Is it more than a heart or an industrial strength hook can bear?

In that moment, I can’t know the answer. I can’t know that the plant—that I—can bear the weight of this child, then another, my husband declaring six months from now as he tosses the baby’s birthday leftovers into the trash, “I was thinking we can start trying again soon.” I can’t know that still, two years from then, I will drop the baby—both babies—off each morning with people I know very little about, that they will run into these people’s arms, and I will walk away without turning back.

I can’t know any of this.

All I can know is that there is faith and doubt, two equally tiny seeds lying dormant inside. And I must choose to nurture the one that leads to salvation. Because to nurture the other is to one day be swallowed alive.

Liz Breen is a writer living outside of Boston whose work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Lunch Ticket, Columbia Journal, and Cleaver Magazine, among others, and has been included in the Wigleaf Top 50. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and can be found online at lizbreen.com.