"Violet Syrup" by Kathryn O'Day
Violet Syrup
In my dream, you are five again.
We are alone in a dark room, a blanketless bed in its center. You lie there, face up, eyes closed. I stand above you gazing down. Your face the shape of a summer fruit, framed by glossy blonde hair in a bowl cut. Your body, swathed in fuzzy red pajamas. How tiny you are—shoulders, hands, tummy, toes.
An abrupt coldness halts my thoughts. It travels up my spine and into my skull, carrying with it the realization that you are not sleeping, but dead.
***
Anguish shakes me awake. Still, I am left with the terrible fear that the dream is a portal spanning the distance between our respective homes.
You’re alive, though. You’re alive even now, more than a dozen years after the dream’s first appearance.
And yet, the dream haunts me, reappearing over time like a postcard in a box of old mementoes. Sometimes I summon it, contain it with language, subdue it with conscious thought. Other times, it ambushes me—a bag over my head, blinding me, disarming me, hurling me into space. Bewildered, I hover there, until the dawn releases me, a spent balloon.
One such haunting occurs in April, ushered in by an overnight frost that wilts the daffodils and whitens the turf.
How strange to think that the day before, I was plucking violets in that same yard, taking in the gentle air, the earthy smell of spring, the chirrup of cardinals, the coo of doves. I was determined, you see, to make violet syrup.
Have you ever tasted violet syrup before? It’s more of a cordial, really, better suited to drinks than to pancakes. The flavor is subtle but quite lovely. Sweet but not fig-like. Vaguely verdant, like a long-forgotten herb. Gentle, like a kindly specter of spring.
Violet syrup is not something you find in stores, but it’s easy enough to make, so long as you have enough violets. You’ll need at least one cup of blossoms, stripped of stems and leaves. Separate, rinse, and steep overnight in simple syrup.
The solution will be ready to strain in the morning. Don’t be disappointed by its insipid tint. A squeeze of fresh lemon juice will awaken the cordial’s color, purple blooming before your eyes with each drop. It’s an awesome sight, like a storm bottled in a jug or an antique x-ray of a consumptive lung.
***
I often wonder if you remember that dream. Not that you witnessed it. Not that you were there. Not that the little boy lying there was really you. It was your likeness, only. A simulacrum of a past self. A conditional state. A metaphor.
That’s what I was trying to tell you when I called you the morning after it first appeared.
“It’s okay,” I reassured you. Or ranted, really—I was still wild-eyed, possessed by the memory of your precious corpse. “You’re not dead-dead!” I continued, idiotically. “You’ve simply grown up. It’s only your child-self who’s gone. The dream is a message from my subconscious to stop treating my little brother like a child. He’s thirty years old, for God’s sake!”
“Thank you,” you said, and then hung up.
More than a dozen years have passed since that conversation. It was the last time I heard your voice.
***
The night of the frost, I stream an old made-for-TV-movie called Anna to the Infinite Power. The plot centers around Anna, an eleven-year-old prodigy tormented by mysterious and vivid nightmares. Early on, she learns the secret of her birth and her dreams: she is not her parents’ natural daughter, but an experimental clone of a famous scientist and Holocaust survivor who died of cancer at an early age. Anna’s dreams are not figments of an over-active imagination. Nor are they manifestations of overblown fears. Rather, her nightmares are actual memories of real-life atrocities in a concentration camp. The host’s trauma was so severe that it altered her DNA, returning to haunt her descendent.
So far, Anna learns, the experiment is going as planned, the clone following the same path as the host. Anna is brilliant, with a mind that could potentially change the trajectory of the human race. Still, the scientist Anna knows as Mother fears adolescence, what she calls the “unknown variable.” What will happen as Anna enters puberty? Will she mature into a replica of her host? Or will she individuate, relinquishing science to pursue another passion? Does she even have a choice in the matter? Perhaps her fate is stamped on her genetic code, scarred by an inherited trauma? And what about that cancer that killed the host? Will it kill Anna, too?
What bombs lurk in Anna’s genetic code? And what occurrences, bold, inadvertent, or random, threaten to detonate them?
***
Perhaps this is what summons the ghost of your child-self. This question of genetics and its role in our estrangement.
People rarely ask me about you. Is this because they know you cut me off? Or have they forgotten that you are alive?
You are alive, though.
You are alive, despite auto-immune hepatitis, the bomb buried in your genetic code. It ticked, undisturbed, throughout your childhood, exploding just before your voice broke. A burst appendix detonated it, toxic fluids rushing into your liver like waters from a broken dam. It took almost a year for the doctors to discover the extent of the damage, your urine darkening to the color of rust, your eyes yellow with jaundice. Still more time passed rendering you bed-bound, your body emaciated, your face mottled and moon-like from Prednisone.
You survived, nevertheless.
You survived past your teens and into your forties, now.
You survived, even if we didn’t.
You are alive, despite auto-immune hepatitis, the bomb buried in your genetic code. It ticked, undisturbed, throughout your childhood, exploding just before your voice broke.
***
Why didn’t we?
Was it because of the dream? Or because of my reaction to it, because I told you that I was “okay” with your death? Was it because I yammered on about it without even pausing to ask how it made you feel?
Or was it because of an earlier time—like when you got stuck in the snow and I failed to save you? Or when I laughed at you when you said you needed the better seat to watch the room? Or when I rolled my eyes at you when you complained about the buzz from the television? Or when you traveled hundreds of miles when I had my first baby, and all I could do was carp that you couldn’t find the house?
Or was it something I did earlier still—when we were kids and I was supposed to be babysitting you? Calling you names? Pinching you in church? Locking you in the basement until you agreed to “behave?”
Or was it because of a force beyond our control—a failing liver, a bump on the head, a volatile home?
And yes, it was a volatile home.
And yes, I failed to protect you from it.
And yes, maybe sometimes you needed to be protected from me.
Was our estrangement inevitable? Was it written in our DNA, pushing us apart like shared polarities ricocheting off one another and into space?
“You’ve hated me ever since I was born,” you wrote in your last email. I’m still not certain what prompted the message, a question that haunts me as the years pass.
I suppose I could have emailed you back to ask. Better yet, I could have denied it. I don’t know why I didn’t.
I guess I was too busy, guarding my heart.
***
I don’t hate you, though. I never have.
It is true that I sometimes resented you when we were young. I resented you for stealing my glory when you were born (I had just made my First Communion). Eight years later, I resented you for misbehaving when your own First Communion came around. For misbehaving in general, now that I think about it. That’s why I locked you in the basement and pinched you in church.
Still, I loved you. I loved you with a love that was an active verb.
I read to you before bedtime, I shielded you from the dogs that barked at you in the park, I cajoled you to join your friends when you didn’t want to leave the car. I drove you to school and appointments and met with your counselor when you were struggling.
Years later, I drove hundreds of miles to celebrate your graduation. It should have been a joyous occasion—survival and a diploma! But like your First Communion, the ceremony was mirthless, grim, even. You had survived, yes, but the poking and poison that saved your life had embittered you, and at the end, you stormed out, shaking me away when I begged you to come back.
Was this when my love grew dormant?
Not that it died—like you, my love has survived.
Still, I must admit that my love for you is no longer the stout action it once was. It has shrunken, I am sorry to say, into a noun.
And love as a noun is a thing that only hurts.
***
Once upon a time, western doctors believed that all ailments, mental and physical alike, could be traced to a deficit or oversupply of four essential fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. All humans were born with unique blends of these “humors,” as they were called, and maintaining a balance of all four was essential for good health. Without it, an individual was vulnerable to disease, even death.
The liver was the organ primarily responsible for producing and processing the humors. This meant that the liver was thought to be key to all health. A dysfunctional liver would not simply impact a person’s digestion, it was certain to impact every aspect of their well-being. A dysfunctional liver could lead to scarlet fever, to cancer, to the bubonic plague. It could also lead to melancholy, or depression, in today’s parlance, which was thought to arise from an excess of black bile.
One treatment for melancholy was violet syrup, dissolved in water. Once ingested, the sad scent of the flower could release melancholy from the afflicted, thereby rebalancing the humors. Shakespeare’s Ophelia alludes to this just before her suicide: “I would give you some violets,” she says, “but they withered all when my father died.”
Soon after, she drowns herself.
Could a healthy dose of violet syrup have saved her life?
Or was she doomed from the start to die young?
***
I am entirely ignorant of this history on the day of the violet harvest. A childhood friend once told me that violets could be processed into a syrup, but I forgot all about it until a recipe popped up on social media. I probably would have forgotten it, again, had I not been struck by the sight of a peppered lawn when I stepped outside for an afternoon walk.
I trot into the house an hour later, my pockets stuffed with blossoms, calling down my two children to see if they’d like to help me make the syrup. My daughter declines. She’s fourteen, busy perfecting the art of guarding her heart.
My twelve-year-old son doesn’t mind joining me, though. We sit at the table, silently removing the petals from the stems and leaves. I glance over at his intent face, the shape of a summer fruit, and I remember how you once looked turning the pages in your Busy, Busy World book, or piecing together Legos to build a castle, or scrutinizing the workings of a hard drive.
By the time we’re finished, the sun has set. We pour simple syrup over the violets and leave them to steep overnight.
Outside, the frost descends. It chills the soil, coats the foliage, wilts the blooms.
Violets are weeds, however. Hardiness is built into their DNA. Days after the frost, they will spring up in empty lots and along the train tracks. At some point, they’ll expire, but next year, their descendants will take their places, vanishing and returning like strains of an ancient virus.
Kathryn O'Day is a nonfiction writer and former teacher. She writes about work, friendship, politics, and cities. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Northwind Writing Award. Her work has been published in The Good Life Review, Chicago Story Press, Pangyrus, Another Chicago Magazine, Prose Online, and The Northwind Anthology. She also reads fiction submissions for TriQuarterly Magazine, which published her interview with Aram Mrjoian.