Calla’s grandmother always brought flowers when she came to visit. When Calla was little and time flew from one adventure to the next, when worn-out stuffed animals and Barbie dolls with choppily cut hairdos littered her room, cold dread filled her at the sight of a fresh bouquet on the living room table. In this particular case, it was one made up of white roses; and during this particular visit, it was a sunny afternoon in August, when the world was all but screaming at her to go outside to play. And for as long as Calla stared longingly through the window beside her, eyes lovingly painting over the lush green grass she wanted to run in and the tall oak tree she wanted to climb up, no adult said the magic words: “Well, Calla, you don’t have to stay here for this; why don’t you go run on outside and have some fun?” Nope. Instead, the buzzing of conversation continued at a snail’s pace. Calla had lost interest at first mention of a podcast, and with the foreboding presence of her grandmother, she had tried to turn away as much as possible from the discussion so, at the very least, she might be accidentally forgotten. And therefore never mentioned, nor made to speak or participate. “...and so then, what is Calla up to?” her grandmother asked her mother. Calla whipped her head around. Drats. Her grandmother was preening at the lace collar adorning her neck with a manicured hand, her posture immaculate in her seat on the olive upholstered chair in the front parlor. Beneath her coiled grey curls, green eyes pierced like the slits in the vents of the air conditioner, narrowed and cold. Calla started jostling her knees up and down, grinding her heels into the rug, as each beat of silence passed from the question. Her mouth was clamped like a clam, her eyes were locked on her grandmother. “She’s doing well,” her mother said. “She’s starting second grade next year.” The green eyes blinked slowly, no immediate judgement evident. “I hope that in the future, Calla will be taught how to sit still around other people.” The grinding stopped. After the visit was over, her mother eased the newly gifted white roses into a water-filled vase by the front door. She fingered the dark, winding leaves. “These are her favorite,” Calla’s mother said. “My dad asked her out on their first date with white roses, and after that, she said that nothing could compare to them.” “Hmph,” said Calla, blowing a stray red curl out of her eyes. “I hate flowers.” When Calla started middle school, she was called upon to read to her grandmother on Sunday afternoons. It was supposed to be a win-win situation — Calla’s grandmother’s eyesight was deteriorating, and she couldn’t read as much as she wanted to, and Calla’s grades in English were dreadful — she found learning about figurative language mind-numbing. No books interested her in the same way numbers or basketball game results ever could. Calla’s grandmother lived in an old brown brick house that was a 30 minute drive away. During the car rides to each session, mounting trepidation fell on Calla with the passing of each familiar landmark. The slightest glimpse of Gwen’s Ice Cream store, which appeared just before the last right turn, came with cold sweats and a butterfly disco dance hall in her stomach. On that first October day, however, Calla had not known the route by heart. She had forced herself into some sort of comatose state to calm herself down, mind blank and ears tuned in to the radio, her palms sweaty against her knees but showing no outward sign of fear. She even sang along in her head to the pop song crooning in the car. Oh baby, you’re the only one. And then her mother turned down the radio. And out Calla’s window loomed the building of her nightmares, tall and russet-colored, with rows of windows that peered down at her like a hawk. The comatose state vanished. Her heart beat like the dribble of the opposing side down the court just as they were about to win with a buzzer beater. It was now or never. Calla thrust open her car door and fell out onto the sidewalk. Stomping up those grey front steps in her Converse, her knuckles white and gripping the iron railing to her left, Calla willed some small bit of courage to rise into her throat. She held it there so that when she had to speak, her voice wouldn’t croak like a frog and tremble over every word. “Have a good time!” her mother yelled from the car. “I’ll pick you up at 4:30!” With a wave and a rev of an engine, any possibility of an early return vanished into thin air. Calla was alone, beside that great big wooden door, with all the desire in the world to be in any other place besides the one she was in. She sneaked a glance at her watch, and clucked her teeth. The session would last two and a half hours. Not even the Chicago Bulls vs. the Los Angeles Lakers could make that up. After what felt like an eternity, she pressed her finger to the cold engraved doorbell beside her. The entrance swung open. “What took you so long?” said her grandmother. Was she talking about the car ride, or had she seen Calla’s hesitance in ringing the doorbell? “Traffic,” Calla said. “Hmm,” her grandmother said. “Come along now, we have a lot to do.” Following a thrown bejeweled hand, Calla entered the house, almost tripping over a forgotten can of cat food at the edge of the precipice. Books and antique trinkets piled themselves high on top of an assortment of tables, old paintings hid behind stacks of newspapers and puzzle boxes, and a crumb-encrusted china plate lay on the cluttered dining room table beside a half-empty cup of hot coffee. By each window a vase of roses rested, white petals thrown against the chaos of the rest of the house. “Don’t break your neck from staring,” her grandmother said. “Oh,” Calla said. “I was just-” Her grandmother’s coarse sandpaper laugh snipped through her excuses. “No need for explanation. I wasn’t a kid so very long ago.” They stepped into the study — small and dark but for one window on the left side. Crammed into almost every space imaginable were books. Above the mantle of the fireplace they rested (fire hazard!), blanketing the carpet they climbed, forming towers, and into the great bookcase in the middle of the room they squeezed themselves. They leaned against each other in an outstretched line like the barcode on the back of a store bought candy bar. “Pick one,” her grandmother said, moving a stack of books off of a salmon armchair to sit down. Calla’s eyes swam with the hundreds of titles before her. “Any of them?” she asked. “Yes,” her grandmother said. “And be quick, I want to make the most of the time we have available.” Calla staggered towards the bookcase and stabbed blindly at the spines in front of her. She unearthed a thin blue book with white lettering across the front and aged yellow pages. In her hands it felt like a bomb. “Go along then,” her grandmother said. Calla sat down on the carpet, her knees narrowly avoiding a mountain of careening books. She flipped to the first page, her heart in her chest. The text was tiny and curled, and littered with words Calla had never heard before, never mind read. A familiar thickness lodged itself at the back of her throat. Heat rose to her cheeks. “Come along then,” her grandmother said. “We don’t have all day.” Calla ripped her tongue from the roof of her mouth and spat out the first line. “There lies a special place in purg-a-to-ry for people who trap others in false opinions.” Calla looked up to her grandmother. The green eyes betrayed nothing. No corrections came. She gripped the blue binding once more. “For what is there in life to do besides live? How can one’s cons-science rest in knowing that they have limited other’s oppor-toon-iti-es so blat-ant-ly?” In this way, Calla stumbled through the passages over the course of those two and a half hours. Her eyes were glued to the page, she couldn’t stomach the look of pity and disappointment from her grandmother that she was all too familiar with from the classroom. It was only her and those squiggly black-inked beasts. Every word came like a wild animal, and in each syllable she did her best to tame them, calming their wrangled messes of fangs and jaws to the best of her abilities. She only knew that it was time to stop when her grandmother made a little cough. “Thank you so much for that, dear Calla,” her grandmother said. Calla was surprised to find tears peeking out of those sharp green eyes. “Oh, I know that I messed up on-” She was silenced with the raise of a hand. “Don’t continue with whatever that sentence was going to be,” her grandmother said. The two of them made their way back down the hallway to the front door. Calla offered the book to her grandmother, but was waved away. “Keep it,” her grandmother said. Down the grey steps, Calla descended, bursting into the freedom of the open air. She raced into the safety of the car, savoring the warmth of the air-conditioning and crooning of familiar tunes on the radio. On the ride home, Calla’s mother told her that the book had been a gift from her father to her mother. Visit after visit continued. Calla still hated the drive to her grandmother’s place. She still hated the silence in the study over the course of those two and a half hours. The blue book lay buried under mountains of schoolwork on her desk. But as the gripping freeze of winter dissipated, and the humid warmth of spring flushed in the air, Calla felt roots beginning to anchor themselves in her mind. Printed black swirls signified shapes and images more than just recited sounds. She found she could picture the descriptions that she read. The last day of the sessions came at the end of the school year. Calla felt at her jacket pocket to make sure she was carrying what she had planned to. She shifted at her position on the front step to press her finger to the doorbell. Passing each jumble of media and scrap as she entered the house came with a weird feeling of familiarity. The cats, Millie and Cameron, two fat white and black blobs, snaked their way between her legs as she walked, their previous shy aloofness long since discarded. Calla took up the book they were finishing from a side table by the door, and assembled her position on the carpet. That day, the words seemed to flow from her mouth like water unleashed from a stream. Before she knew it, there came the familiar cough from her grandmother. “Grandmother,” she said, rising from the ground, placing the closed novel onto a stack beside her. She rubbed against her pocket. “I have something for you.” Calla fumbled between her hands the blue book, that first book, as she passed it over. Her grandmother’s fingers caressed the cover and slid it open. Pressed between each page, Calla had put white roses — faded yellow brown, their dark stems melding into the paper. When Calla met her grandmother’s eyes, she felt the warmth of green, the warmth of new leaves and new beginnings, of fresh sprouts against frozen earth. Calla’s grandmother didn’t speak, but she didn’t need to. The two of them hugged each other for a long time. In silence, they separated and made their way back to the door, although both could feel that something, some weight, had been lifted. Before Calla exited, she was handed a small thin brown paper bag. She clutched it between her fingers, all the way to the car. She didn’t need to look to know what it was. Next spring, she would have her own white rose by her bedroom window.