The View from the Window

She didn’t buy me. She didn’t place me here, near the window. She barely noticed me for a week and a half.

I arrived with a roomful of people, some with flowers, others with food platters. The person who brought me had found me in the nursery, where I had lived since the first sprouts pushed up from my bulb. My life had consisted of morning water, afternoon sun, and the occasional passerby, glancing momentarily at me before choosing one of my more developed friends. I was only a collection of sprouts at that point; there was a plastic stick with a photo of how I would someday look, but most of these visitors chose one that had already become that. They were plentiful around me; I was tiny and unproven. I watched this happen every day, until this person arrived, picked me up, paid for me, and left.

I heard the conversations but didn’t understand the words. They were a muddled flow that sounded sad, or confused, or bored—maybe all three. After greeting the person everyone else had come to see, the person who brought me set me down near the window. Most of the people wore dark colors, but the sun slipped through the blinds, so I turned my attention there instead. Outside, I recognized the kind of life I had known from my brethren at the nursery: some shorter and colorful, others tall and green. Much taller than I was. My growth was still new, but I felt it every day: the rush in my roots, the slow stretch upward, and the growing need for sun. Whenever it appeared, I turned toward it, and every few days it touched a little more of me.

I went a while without seeing it much, in those early days. After everyone left, I heard her walking around the house, but I didn’t see or hear her much. The drapes were drawn, and her presence was short and wandering. Sometimes she came into the room to get something from the kitchen and then leave and close a door behind her, not to be seen again for many hours. Sometimes she came into the room, looked around blankly, then retreated behind the door again. Sometimes the door closing would cause the drapes to blow open a little, just enough to catch a stream of the sun. Just enough to know it was still there.

By the time she stayed in the room long enough to open the drapes all the way, I had managed to grow in the faint light that slipped through them. Three new sprouts had appeared, and the others had stretched nearly a foot.

“Sorry about that, little one,” she said. “I’ll try to do better.”

Her voice was soft and low. I don’t know if I would have been there if I hadn’t been kind of dropped there by someone else. She didn’t light up at the sight of me. This might have been the first time she registered that I was there, at all. But she was trying to take care of me, and that was good for now.

I didn’t see her again for a few more sun-ups and sun-downs.

“I have to go back to work tomorrow,” she informed me, as she carefully poured slightly warm water around the edge of my pot and then gradually to my middle. “Time to go back. Life goes on.”

The water softened the drying soil and soaked into my bulb and stems, and I felt the water travel through my stems to my leaves. It felt like a deep breath and a relieved exhale. I could feel more comfortable with the exposure to the sun. Craved it even, without the worry of drying up.

She did leave the house the next morning. I trusted she would be back, but didn’t know how long she would be. The room looked the same: a few other plants on the windowsill, the window blinds and curtains open now, so I could see what was outside. The rest of the space tidy and functional.

But as I looked around the newly sunlit room, someone else entered my view: a creature covered in fur, with a steely stare and a way of moving that made it clear this was someone best avoided. Where had it been before now? Behind that door with her, I guessed. I hoped she was safe with it. It walked by me briefly and sniffed my leaves. I didn’t hold its interest though, so it kept walking, and eventually it curled up on the floor in a wide stream of sunlight.

It liked the sunlight too. Maybe we’d be okay with each other.

She left and came home every day with a regularity I grew accustomed to. At first, she was in and out of the room behind the door, only to see me for a few minutes. It was days of sharing the sun with the furry one, mostly, but she did care for us both when she came home. I learned from her calling him at his feeding time that his name is Arthur, and that he must like what she feeds him, because his feet launched him into the air and toward the kitchen when she called out that dinner was ready.

I could also tell he was Arthur, because the one she made the sad sounds for every night seemed to be named Roger. That’s what it sounded like, anyway. The name was usually broken up by the sad sounds. But what was her name? Arthur made sounds that never really formed words, and while he seemed enthusiastic about feeding, he was otherwise indifferent. And Roger wasn’t there to call her anything back.

The next few weeks were the same. She came and went, and Arthur and I shared the sunlight. I realized I didn’t need to fear him. He was focused on other things. I could hear him crunching the food left for him in the kitchen, and occasionally he would stretch, and scratch against the side of the sofa. He didn’t notice me at all. No one noticed that I had grown four inches in the time I had been here, my sprouts becoming taller shoots and filling out with tiny leaves. I bent toward the sunlight, and listened for the door.

The night she came home later, the sun had been less present. Watery streaks ran down the windows where the sun usually warmed the room, and a soft, rhythmic thud on the leaves of the outside plants. There had been a lot of sun. I imagined they were hungrily absorbing the water.

The door opened with a gust of cold air when she arrived. She took off her coat, shaking off the wet, and hung it up on a hook by the door. She breathed a loud, “Oof! That rain!” Even Arthur seemed startled by her entrance. Either that, or he just hoped there was food on the way.

She set out his dinner and called him into the kitchen. While he ate, she filled the water holder, to feed me, too.

“Sorry to be late, little one,” she said, as she poured the water into my soil. “The rain made everything slower. But also, Wendy caught me as I was trying to leave, and you know how that one can talk!”

I didn’t know, but I was ready to hear about it. I felt something new in the water. It felt good in my stems as it traveled to my new growth.

“I saw you’ve been growing, so I added some vitamins and plant food to your water,” she said, not knowing she was answering my question. “You’ll be feeling even better soon!”

She put the watering can away and started to straighten the room.

“Wendy said she wanted me and Sheila and Marcy to go away for the weekend,” she said. “I’m not really ready for that though. And I’m not up for a weekend of gossip. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone tells her anything. They’ve barely left the room before she’s telling everyone.”

She went back behind her door. This was the most I had heard from her in all the time I had been here. And now I knew about Wendy, Sheila, and Marcy. I wondered what they called her.

Over the next several weeks, I heard more about them, and the other people she saw when she wasn’t here. Morris the grocer helped her pick out the best mangos, and Alice stopped her outside her boutique and told her she had the perfect new dress for her. But she wasn’t really interested in a new dress at this time, she had told me: where would she wear it?

She was more involved with Arthur too. One morning, after his first feeding, she brought a carrier into the room, and called him over. Arthur looked confused, and in no hurry to go to her.

“Come on, silly cat,” she said. “We’re just going for a drive.”

Cat. He’s called a cat. A cat who doesn’t seem to like the sound of this idea. She gently picked him up and placed him in the carrier and closed its door. Arthur made sounds that suggested he was less enthusiastic about whatever was happening here. They were gone for a while, and when they returned, she put the carrier on the floor and opened it so he could get out. He emerged a different cat than I had come to know: his usually fluffy orange fur was shaved down to his body, except for a tuft of fur at the end of his tail and a collar of hair still fluffy around his face. I don’t know if he had seen himself, but he did not seem amused. I was glad I had no face to reveal an expression. He would have torn at me for sure. And not as covertly as he managed to tear at the sofa.

She looked at him and made a sound that seemed happier than the ones I had heard from her since I had arrived. If this annoyed Arthur, he didn’t react. She was the food giver. He wasn’t going to tear at her.

She sounded happy for the rest of that evening, even making the musical sounds I remembered from my waterer at the nursery. He was always smiling while he made those sounds, and while I couldn’t see her, it sounded like maybe she was, too.

Not so much for Arthur. He slumped on his spot on the floor and watched the rain streak down the windows, occasionally pawing at the long ginger fur that framed his bemused and unimpressed face.

But his fur did grow back, the sunbeams lingered longer, and the rain stained the windows less. I learned more about her outside time, and the people she saw there. And one day, while she was feeding me, she mentioned someone I had almost forgotten about: Roger.

“Roger would have liked you, I think,” she said. “You grow with patience and intention. No haphazard leaves here; they grow one by one, right where they are supposed to be.”

I thought she might be giving me more credit than I deserved. As far as I knew, I wasn’t doing anything on purpose. If anything, I hoped I wasn’t growing a face that would annoy Arthur. But it was nice to hear her talking about Roger. His name wasn’t as broken up by the sad sounds anymore.

She started talking about him more. Over the next few months, I learned how they met, how long they had been together, and about his weird sense of humor—her words, not mine; I couldn’t tell a weird sense of humor from a grumpy cat. She told me that sometimes she would ramble about something that interested her, certain he had stopped listening, only for him to surprise her later with the very thing she had been talking about. She told me how often he smiled at her and told her she was beautiful.

When she finished talking to me, she would cook food and eat it from a tray on her lap as she watched television. Sometimes her phone would ring, and she would talk to that person for a while. The last thing she said before she hung up was usually some form of, “I’d love to, but I’m busy this weekend. Maybe another time?”

My leaves had grown taller and stronger over this time. Sometimes at night, I felt them stretching. My stems and leaves shivered a little, and I felt uneasy. The room wasn’t cold; she kept it very nice inside. It wasn’t a feeling I recognized. Just when I thought I understood my world, something seemed to be changing.

One night after she went to her room, I felt the shivering again, and an ache in my crown. I looked around the room: it was dark, Arthur was snoring on his fluffy blanket on the chair. Nothing was out of what I knew as ordinary. But there was an ache at the top of my stem that wouldn’t go away.

Over the next few days, I didn’t pay much attention to what was happening around me, and I couldn’t get enough water. I heard Arthur scratching the sofa when he thought she wasn’t in the room. I heard her talking to me about Roger’s love of old cars and how he would talk to them the way she was talking to me. I heard her turn down invitations to leave the house for more than work.

But all I wanted was more water.

While she was at work one day, the pain grew stronger and then I felt a rush of air through my stem, and finally some relief. I felt myself sigh, and then realized why Arthur did it so much. It felt really nice.

She came home later that night and came over to water me, and then I saw her eyes widen.

“You’re growing a flower! Oh, and it is so pretty.” She was smiling more than I had ever seen her do before. No wonder Roger told her she was so beautiful. “Good job, little one.”

Her phone rang. She answered it as she watered me.

“Oh, thanks for the invitation, but…” she started to say, and then touched my new flower. “You know what? Yes, that sounds lovely. Let’s do that! Pick me up Saturday morning.”

On what must have been Saturday, I heard a loud knock on the door, and she came out of her room. She was wearing a dress I hadn’t seen before. It was a soft color, and it flowed when she walked over to let her friend in.

“Wendy!” she said, when she opened the door, and they hugged. “One moment, I just need to get my purse.”

Wendy, I thought, and Arthur looked up at her, as though he were wondering the same thing: Does she have some office gossip for us, too?

She walked around the room and looked at everything. She even tried to pet Arthur, but he recoiled, and found a warm, sunlit spot on the rug. I wondered what Marcy and Sheila would hear about this place on Monday? After a few minutes, she looked toward the bedroom, and called out:

“Fiona? You coming?”

“On my way!” she called back.

Fiona.

They left together a few minutes later. I could hear their happy sounds through the front window, as they got into Wendy’s car, and drove away.