Drowned by Therese Bohman

could deal with absolutely anything, and the thought of Gabriel in the car makes me feel ashamed, I think once again that it wasn’t my fault, but I should have protested, I should have refused. I shouldn’t have wanted to do it.
    We walk through the town center, which isn’t all that big. Stella’s office is in the town hall, but the greenhouses are a few blocks away.
    “I’d like to be there all the time,” she says. “Then I’d have everything in one place.”
    “Yes, that sounds better.”
    “But they want all the departments together. I know everything about garbage now, I share my office with waste disposal.”
    She continues her monologue about the organization of the town council. I find it difficult to concentrate on what she is saying, we have stopped in front of a gate and I look at the dense cypress hedges, they are dark, they look cool in spite of the heat, shady. The ground beneath them must be damp,I think of a poem by Christina Rossetti that appealed to me when I read her for my assignment, I can hear it in my head: “When I am dead, my dearest, / sing no sad songs for me; / plant thou no roses at my head, / nor shady cypress tree,” there is a faint smell of resin, turpentine, an acrid smell, yet pleasant. Stella opens the gate and lets me in. There are three huge greenhouses behindthe hedges, surrounded by flower beds and vegetable plots.
    “Isn’t it wonderful?”
    Stella looks thrilled.
    “Absolutely.”
    She opens the door of one of the greenhouses, I follow her inside. Even though it’s warm outside the heat in the greenhouse is completely different, humid and sticky, it’s hard to breathe at first. I can almost feel my hair beginning to curl. There is a damp smell and I can hear the faint sound of running water, I look around. In one corner of the greenhouse there is a little pond with mosaic lining the inside, different shades of blue, like Gabriel’s ashtray, I think, like a little pool. Two big carp are swimming around in the pond, it is surrounded by rhododendron bushes, there are still a few flowers but they consist mostly of thick dark-green leaves, they look hard.
    “You’ve got fish?”
    Stella smiles.
    “They’ve been here for a long, long time. This greenhouse goes back to the turn of the last century, that was when they made the fish pond, although at some point it had been covered over and built on, they found it when they were carrying out renovation work in the eighties. I’m sure those fish have been here since then, I think they can get pretty old.”
    I am breathing heavily from the heat, I can feel the dampness on my back. “God, it’s hot.”
    “It’s like South America. Peru, maybe. Look.”
    She points to a bench covered in orchids. It looks like a little forest, stalks poking up out of green moss, the flowers in every shade from white and pale pink to a wine-red so dark it is almost black. Their petals are velvety, some of them patterned with spots or blotches. There is a faint scent in the air, perfumed, sweet.
    “That’s my orchid collection,” says Stella.
    She looks proud, she leans toward one of the flowers, touches it gently.
    “Nobody thought growing them in here would work,” she says. “They’re so sensitive. The temperature and humidity have to be perfect for them to flourish. We had a power outage last spring, I think it was in March when the temperature was still below freezing, we had a late spring last year. The power was only off for about half an hour, so they nearly all survived, but they reacted immediately. I’ve sorted out an emergency generator that kicks in if we have a power outage now, I don’t know why there wasn’t one here already. Although they used to grow mainly pansies and pelargoniums before. And heather, rows and rows of heather for those pizzeria containers … Heather can cope with most things.”
    I nod, although I know nothing about heather. I gently press the green moss surrounding the orchids with my