Chapter Thirteen
“ You disappear, except for your name,” explains Sandra Durant. “I’m just a name on a passenger manifest. In the newspaper. On a crawl on the cable news.” She motions with her finger-and you notice the polish is salmon, every bit as vibrant as Valerian’s but perhaps more girlish and childlike-toward Ashley, who is sitting rather primly on the couch. “She used to love to eat canned peaches in heavy syrup. She tells me she mastered the can opener in first grade and would snack on them after school and on weekends. Now no one will ever know that. Soon, no one but her mother will recall that she could make an origami swan-and eventually her mom will forget that detail, too. She’ll forget what it was like watching Ashley learn to ride her bicycle. And some new technology will replace the video that her father made of her doing cannonballs into a swimming pool one afternoon, and no one will duplicate the disk onto whatever comes next. And so that splash and the girl’s laugh will be gone, too. Gone forever. Eventually, all that will remain is her name.”
You ask, “And you?”
“And me? Orange marmalade. I loved it.”
“There’s more.”
“Of course there is.”
“Tell me one more. Tell me one more thing that no one will know from your name on the passenger manifest.”
“No one will ever know that at the end of my life my favorite color happened to be pink.” She holds up her hands and spreads wide her fingers, her palms facing her, so you can see those nails you already have noticed. “But who knows,” she adds, raising her eyebrows in mock earnestness. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I was already too old for Barbie pink.”
G arnet watched Hallie crushing the small purple seeds with the mortar and pestle, a little surprised by how much pleasure her sister was deriving from the chore. The seeds were about the size of sesame seeds, but they smelled like blueberries when they were mashed: The more of them Hallie turned to powder, the more the kitchen smelled like a fruit smoothie. Garnet had a sense that a big part of her sister’s contentment came from the obsessive amounts of attention Anise and Clary and Sage were lavishing upon the two of them. Garnet, on the other hand, found the women slightly annoying; their presence was growing invasive. She and her sister seemed to spend three or four days a week after school with them. The only days they didn’t wind up at Anise’s or Clary’s or Sage’s (and most frequently it seemed to be Sage’s) were those days when they had dance class or music lessons. Again today Clary Hardin had picked them up at the school entrance precisely at three o’clock and brought them to Sage Messner’s home to make tinctures or bake or tend to the seemingly endless tables of plants in that massive communal greenhouse. Garnet thought that she and Hallie spent more time in Sage’s kitchen or greenhouse than they did after school with kids their own age.
Which, maybe, was okay. Maybe they were fortunate to have the attention of these ladies. After the stories that Molly and her mother had told everyone of the blackout and their father’s disappearance-and then, far worse, his reappearance covered in blood-there was no way that any kids were going to be allowed to come to their house anytime soon. Maybe forever. And now the girls (and even the boys) in their classroom seemed to be a little scared of her and her sister. It was like they were the ones who made the strange potions-not the women.
Their mom had tried to reassure them that over time the kids in their class would come around, but Garnet wasn’t so sure. She saw how they kept away at dance class and school. Still, her mom was confident. In the meantime, she and Hallie spent time with their mother’s new friends, either this group of women or Reseda-and sometimes Reseda and Holly. It seemed there were two separate cliques. Clearly Reseda was an herbalist and a friend of these other, older women, but there was also some tension. She kept her distance; it was like she didn’t completely approve of them. And while Reseda’s greenhouse was much cooler-it had a comforting shape and small statues that reminded Garnet of fantasy creatures-she found that she had to be careful about what she was thinking when she was around Reseda. It was as if Reseda knew.
One time Garnet had asked her mom why she and Hallie didn’t just go home after school when they didn’t have dance class or music lessons, the way they had before that night when Dad tumbled down the basement stairs and fell on the knife. And her mom had explained that their father was working hard on the house and his stomach needed to heal. Garnet didn’t completely believe this: Either he was working on the house or his stomach needed to heal. Not both. It was like the old joke about why the little girl didn’t turn in her homework: Either she forgot it at home or the dog got sick on it. Both were overkill.
In any case, Garnet had now decided that she would ask her mom that night about moving. She decided that she’d had enough of Bethel. Maybe they could go back to West Chester. Sure, she and Hallie were always going to be the kids whose father’s plane had crashed into a lake. And she would always be the kid who had the seizures. (It hurt her feelings when kids would talk about her that way, but they did. Sometimes people presumed she was in a trance when she was having one, but she wasn’t. She was just, as one doctor liked to say, in her own world.) But at least she and Hallie had friends there.
“Lovely, Rosemary,” Sage Messner was saying to her sister. “The powder is finer than salt, isn’t it? It’s as wispy as talc.” The woman was hovering over Hallie with her hand on the girl’s shoulder. It still left Garnet feeling a little uncomfortable and disloyal in some way when these women called her and her sister by their new names. Mom didn’t seem to mind. And Hallie said she actually preferred being called Rosemary. But Calandrinia-and Cali for short? Over the last couple of weeks, she had grown to hate both the long and short versions of her new name.
“Now, your turn, Cali,” Sage said, her voice that singsong river of condescension. She always talked to Hallie and Garnet like she thought the two of them were preschoolers. So did Ginger and Clary. Anise tended to speak to them more like grown-ups. But she was also far more stern with the two of them.
“My turn to do what?” she asked. “I think the seeds are all ground up.”
“The hypnobium seeds are. But we still need to add the yarrow and the rose hips. If you only add hypnobium to a tea, you are likely to give someone a headache along with very scary-”
“Sage, that’s a lot more information than the girls need at the moment,” Anise said, cutting the woman off before she could finish her sentence. Garnet hadn’t realized that Anise had returned to the kitchen from the greenhouse.
“Along with what?” Garnet decided to ask, partly because she was curious but also because it was clear to her that Anise didn’t want her and Hallie to know.
“Instead of making them feel better, Cali,” Anise said simply but firmly. “Now you want to wash your hands thoroughly after working with hypnobium and completely rinse both the mortar and the pestle.” She barely glanced at Sage as she carefully poured the powder into a small glass spice jar. The ground-up seeds now resembled the old-fashioned sugar candy that some people gave away in straws on Halloween.
“I’m sorry, Anise,” Sage murmured, her voice low and soft, as if she hoped that no one else would hear her. But Anise seemed to ignore her as she screwed the lid on the spice jar and then ran hot tap water over the mortar and pestle. The moment the water hit the wood, the room was infused with the aroma of the herb and the kitchen smelled like someone was baking a blueberry pie.
“Next we need to prepare the rose hips,” Anise said, gazing out the kitchen window. “I think Sage thought that might be a nice task for you, Cali.”
“My name is Garnet.” It was an impulse; correcting Anise had been as instinctive just now as batting a mosquito. Still, she regretted the short sentence the moment the words had escaped her lips. Her sister poked her surreptitiously in the side.
“It is,” Anise agreed, turning off the water and using a dish towel with a rooster on it to dry the inside of the pestle, and for a second Garnet thought she might have worried for naught. But then Anise leaned over her, her face only inches away-Garnet could inhale the mint on the woman’s breath-and said, “But not when you’re with me.”
“Why?” Again, it was a reflex, and Hallie turned to her and silently mouthed her regular name, drawing out each of the syllables: Gar-net. Garnet didn’t usually like confrontations, but she didn’t understand the desire these women had to change her and Hallie’s names. She simply didn’t get it.
“I’ve told you, it’s a term of endearment. A term of inclusion. Of solidarity. Do you know what those words mean, Cali?”
She couldn’t have defined them in a spelling test, but she understood more or less what Anise was saying.
