she turned to Reseda, though she did not meet her eyes. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You pretend you’re above that sort of thing: It’s too dark, it’s evil, it’s cruel.”
“A boy died. That seems to me far too high a price.”
“You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened. You’ve only heard the story from Clary and Ginger.”
Reseda gazed at a pair of water droplets descending the glass window near the steamer. “I know what Clary saw,” she said.
“You know what Clary thinks she saw,” Anise corrected her. “You know what Clary recalls. There is a big difference, Reseda. Remember, I was there, too; you weren’t.”
“I don’t want you to try again. They’re little girls.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t even know which one we would use. I really don’t,” Anise said, and she strolled over to a long table with cooking spices, inhaling the aroma from the basil. “But you know something?”
Reseda waited.
“If you were my age-good heavens, if you were Clary’s and Ginger’s and Sage’s age-you would view the twins more the way I do. You really would. It’s human nature.”
“Tell me: What are you feeding the captain?”
Anise smiled, but then she shook her head and her eyes grew narrow and reptilian. “You really think I’m a witch, don’t you?”
“Are you?”
“I just like to bake,” she said, refusing to answer the question. “That’s all. I just like to bake.”
G arnet had both books that Anise had given her sister and her open on the rug in the living room. She was lying on her stomach before them, near the warmth from the radiator, resting her chin in both hands. The books were so old and so heavy that the pages wouldn’t flip shut when she laid them flat on the floor. Whole sections had thick pages with nothing but handwriting-somebody’s cursive lettering. Recipes and formulas and diagrams, and some beautiful watercolor illustrations of flowers and ferns. They were more like scrapbooks than published books, she decided. They smelled a little musty and a little like one of the plants from Sage Messner’s greenhouse: maybe the one that had the red leaves that were shaped like the points on the wrought-iron fence by the cemetery. She found a picture of it in the book that had been presented to her, The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs, but it didn’t appear in the botany book that had been given to Hallie. The plant was called Phantasia. Much of the biology in her book was over her head, but Garnet found the elegant and precise drawings more interesting than she might have expected and the uses for the plants absolutely fascinating. She had, of course, thought about flowers as decorations and gifts; she had been aware that her mother used herbs as seasonings when she cooked; and certainly she understood the role that fruits and vegetables played in her health. But this was completely different: It was as if some plants and some herbs were medicines. It was as if others were-and the word lodged itself in her mind- magic. They affected how people behaved if they ate them or drank them. But it wasn’t like the way alcohol or drugs might change your behavior; that was random and unpredictable. She had seen adults drunk at her parents’ parties, and she had seen what alcohol did to people on TV shows and in movies. According to this book, however, some plants or combinations of plants, properly cured or steeped, could make people fall in love. Grow violent. Have visions. The book talked about making people act on their dreams, and dreams in this case had nothing to do with ambition. It was as if, with the right herbs in the right doses-the right tinctures -you could make someone’s nightmares feel real by the light of day.
Moreover, she realized that her book was part of a small encyclopedia. It said VOLUME I on the spine. She went to the back of the book to see how many volumes there might be and had to read something twice because it looked so strange. It seemed there was at least a second book. This one was called The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. It was Volume II. She made a mental note to ask Anise about that, if she ever got out of Anise’s doghouse. These women seemed to be interested only in plants-just look at all those greenhouses. But maybe she was mistaken. Maybe they did have other… interests.
Over her shoulder she heard Hallie coming down the stairs in her clogs and then joining her in the living room. Her sister sat on the carpet beside her and glanced at the books, but she wasn’t especially interested. She rolled her fingers around her bracelet and then touched Garnet’s wrist.
“How come you’re not wearing your bracelet?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m just not.”
“You should.”
Garnet put her forehead down on the rug and closed her eyes. She breathed in the aroma of the books. She was home, the women weren’t here right now. What did it matter if she wasn’t wearing her bracelet?
“How does Dad seem to you?” Hallie asked. “He seems to talk less than ever.”
“I know.”
“He talks even less now than he did, like, two or three weeks ago,” said Hallie.
“Since the night he got hurt in the basement.”
“Yup. But you know what’s weird?”
Garnet waited. Everything these days was weird.
“He’s changed, but maybe it’s just who he is now. I’m getting used to it. In some ways, it’s like when he was still flying planes and gone a lot of the time. Know what I mean?”
Garnet knew precisely what Hallie meant. Before Flight 1611 had crashed, it was more normal having their father gone than it was having him home. Or, at least, it was as normal. The reality was that, for most of their childhoods, their father had been away from home three or four days a week. They-Mom and Hallie and she-were accustomed to being a household of three, and their mother had the single-mom drill down to a science. She knew how to run the house just fine when Dad was flying. In some ways, things even went a little easier when it was just the three girls. Dad wouldn’t suddenly be there wanting to bring them to and from dance class when their friend Samantha’s mom was already planning to pick them up at school and bring them to her house until Emily was finished at work. Dad wouldn’t suddenly want dinner to be a perfect replica of what the school nurse said dinner was supposed to look like, with just the right combination of meat and vegetables and grains. They could eat dinner in the den and watch TV. And Dad wouldn’t suddenly be checking to make sure they had made their beds before going to school or practiced the violin or the flute before going to sleep. The truth was, regardless of whether Dad was flying or he was sitting silently at the table and staring at something no one else seemed to see, the three females had figured out long ago how to manage.
Still, Garnet felt guilty even thinking such things, and so she found herself answering, “I know what you mean. But Mom says it just takes time. He’ll get better. You think he will, right?”
“Yeah. I’m sure he will,” Hallie said, but she sounded dubious. Then: “Want me to get you your bracelet?”
Garnet pushed herself to a sitting position. “Fine. Get me my bracelet. It’s on the top of my-”
But before she could finish, Hallie handed it to her. She had already retrieved it and brought it downstairs. “I saw it on top of your bureau,” she said. “And I figured you should be wearing it. You just never know when Reseda or Anise or someone is going to drop by the house.”
I t had been clear to Emily throughout dinner that something was troubling the girls, though Garnet had seemed more out of sorts than her sister. (But wouldn’t it be worse, she asked herself, if something wasn’t troubling her children?) She watched them pick at their food, Garnet always seeming on the verge of bringing something up. Now Emily was going through their vocabulary words with them in Hallie’s bedroom on the third floor, helping them complete the workbook pages they had been assigned as homework. Chip was downstairs taping the frames of the doors in the entry foyer, because he was planning to paint it tomorrow. His stomach, he insisted, felt pretty good.
But she studied her girls as they worked. Hallie was sitting on her bed, while she and Garnet sat on the floor with their backs against it. She tried to focus, but as she watched the twins together in a moment of such comforting normalcy-upstairs in a bedroom doing their homework-she found herself wondering how so much of their life as a family had gone so terribly wrong. Actually, not how. The how was easy. It was the why. The why seemed almost Job-like. Inexplicable. Unreasonable. But the how? A person could trace the steps with ease. There was the plane crash, of course, that was where it all began. It was Flight 1611 that had led to Chip’s depression and PTSD, which in turn had resulted in their moving to northern New Hampshire. And then it was here in Bethel
