The Plant in the Dark Room

A year ago my mom showed up at my apartment with a mayonnaise jar full of water and two stems inside. "It's a pothos," she said, "it doesn't die." She said it with the same certainty she uses to claim atole stays hot if you put a lid on it. I set it on the window shelf in my bedroom because it was the only shelf I had, and there it stayed, behind the bunker curtains I described when I talked about how I sleep.

Everybody knows a plant needs light. My bedroom is deliberately kept dark between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, which is exactly when I'm in it. My plan was a discreet funeral in January.

The light there is

It didn't die. At four-thirty I open the curtains, barely awake, and the afternoon sun hits it from the side for about two hours, until it drops behind the building across the street. That turns out to be enough. It's a night nurse's plant: it puts up with the dark, makes do with little and doesn't complain.

I water it on Sundays, the day I remember because it's when I call my mom. First the phone call, then the glass of water for the plant. She asks, "Did you give my granddaughter something to drink?" and I say yes, even if I watered it Saturday and I'm about to drown it. I haven't told her that sometimes I forget for two weeks. I also haven't told her I call it Chela, after the nurse who taught me to drink water even when I'm not thirsty.

A new leaf

This week, with the free afternoons my knee gave me (you know the story), I actually looked at it. A year ago it was two stems, eight inches long. Now it has one arm that reached the nightstand and another that wrapped itself around the phone charger cable, and I'm not untangling it; let it hold on to whatever it wants.

On Sunday, while my mom told me she'd named the cat at the corner store, I noticed a rolled-up leaf at the tip, a green so pale it was almost yellow, tight like a baby's fist. By Tuesday it was open, shiny, smaller than the others and cleaner. I sent my mom a photo. She answered in under a minute, in the big letters she has learned to use: "See, it doesn't even need light."

That isn't true; it does need light. But I didn't correct her.

This afternoon I opened the curtain, the last orange ray slid across the shelf and the new leaf lit up like a bulb. I stood there with my hair in a nest and an empty mug in my hand, looking at a plant at five in the afternoon while someone in the street yelled "¡el gas!". All I could think of was to say good morning to it.