What started off as occasional experiments with Tabby’s remedies on Robert Morgan turned into a regular onslaught. Soon I was trying out a new element on the doctor almost every day, incorporating Tabby’s dangerous herbs into the doctor’s meals the way you disguise medicine in horse feed. I gave him minuscule but repeated doses of oleander, nightshade, and even a little hemlock. At first, nothing seemed to happen. He slurped down his herb soups and scooped his berry pie with relish and then left the table whistling. One morning, though, about a month after I began fooling with his food in earnest, he appeared in the kitchen looking drawn and exhausted, the skin around his eyes pulled into shadow, his neck a wrinkled sack of tired blood.
“I think I’m going to take the day off today, Truly,” he rasped, wrapping his dressing gown tighter. “Cancel my appointments, if you please, and could you bring me up some tea?”
“What’s the matter, Robert Morgan?” I asked, trying to hide my smirk behind an expression of concern. “Feeling under the weather?” I knew I was. Maybe it was all the pills the doctor had me swallowing, but my stomach always felt sour these days. I tried brewing some of Tabitha’s teas off the quilt, but even they were no help. My joints ached in spite of the arnica I took, and my eczema just persisted under the cream I’d made up for it. It was as if the more I used the quilt’s ingredients for malice, the less they worked for the good.
He coughed into his fist. “Must have caught some sort of bug. Say”—he frowned—“does this porridge taste funny to you?” Moments before his appearance in the kitchen, I had personally pounded a clutch of wormwood leaves—so renowned for their hallucinogenic properties—into a pulp and scraped their juices into the cereal.
“No,” I said around my teeth as I made a show of swallowing one tiny bite. “Tastes regular to me.”
“My tongue’s been feeling funny lately.” The doctor scowled. “Like it’s swollen or something. Maybe it’s just this infection.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, “but you never know, do you? Maybe it’s witchcraft.” I winked.
Robert Morgan appeared stupefied for a moment, then he snickered. “And maybe fairies frolic on the lawn at night. Still…” His smile faded. “A checkup wouldn’t hurt. I have a colleague over in Hansen. Maybe I’ll give him a call. I haven’t been feeling myself lately.”
I smiled, the picture of ignorance. “Sure, Robert Morgan. Sounds like a good idea. You medical men should stick together.”
He gave me an odd look, but then another coughing spasm rattled his bones. He’d lost so much weight over the past three weeks that even his bedroom slippers looked too big. If I wanted to, now would be the time to finish him off, I thought. Half a jar of Tabby’s potion would probably do it.
But what would happen to me if I did that? For one thing, whether I liked it or not, he was the only one who knew what was wrong with my body, the only one with half a chance of curing me, and I wanted to get better, I decided. Marcus had given me a reason to hope. And there was always Bobbie.
I rinsed the pulped wormwood leaves out of their bowl and then emptied the doctor’s half-eaten cereal into the sink. Maybe I would ease up on using Tabitha’s cures, I mused. It was true that I still had a kettle of resentment against the doctor set on hard boil in my heart, but fanning the flames of it hadn’t really made me feel any better. It hadn’t changed anything at all, in fact. I was still stuck in Robert Morgan’s house, still big as a barn, and for all they were worth, Tabby’s herbs were lately proving about as useful to me as a dram of water pulled up from a tainted well. Maybe it was time to come clean again.
W
hen it was clear that Bobbie really wasn’t coming home, I knew it was time to do what Robert Morgan was urging and pack up his belongings as neatly as I could in cardboard boxes. Amelia came over to help me take them to the farm for safekeeping. I promised myself that one day Bobbie would get them back, but as we bumped along the road to the open fields and weather-eaten barn, I temporarily forgot all about Bobbie and stared around me in amazement.
This was the first time I’d been back since I’d left. Two years before, Brenda had married one of her creditors and moved to Saratoga Springs, where she drove a Cadillac, learned to drink wine, and routinely tried to convince Amelia to sell off the farm. Amelia wasn’t likely to, though, not while August’s bones were still sunk in the fallow fields. There are some things in life too painful to let go of, much as we want to. Instead, Amelia had somehow found the means to mend the fences, patch the chicken coop, repair the windmill, and rewire, repaint, and refurbish the house. The only thing that looked remotely similar was the old barn. In August’s time, it had already been an open proposition for owls and mice, but now I found the sight of its rotten beams and exhausted roof too melancholy to bear.
“How much longer do you think before it tumbles back to the ground?” I asked, unloading one of Bobbie’s boxes from the truck bed.
Amelia glanced over her shoulder and shrugged. Out here, away from the scrutiny of town, her lungs filled easily with air, and her voice rang true. “It’s leaning all right, but it won’t fall. Daddy’s ghost is still in there some.”
I saw what she meant. Just like August, the barn wasn’t quite ready to throw in its hand, even when all the odds looked to be bad. I set Bobbie’s box on the front porch. “Well, the place looks great. You must have worked so hard.”
Amelia blushed. “I didn’t do it all on my own. I had some help.”
“What do you mean?” Besides me, I couldn’t think of any of Amelia’s friends. There were her clients, of course—most of them people, like Vi Vickers, that we’d both known forever—but I don’t think any of them thought of Amelia as anything more than someone who scoured their homes and then slipped away for another week.
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
She took my hand and led me around the back of the house. As we rounded the corner, I sucked in my breath. Gone were the rusted auto parts that no longer fit any specific machinery. Likewise the rotten picket fence, the hillocks of weeds, and the bald patches of scratched-up dirt. Instead, a garden was just beginning to poke through the early spring ground—planted in a round, gentle spiral. I instantly recognized the design.
“It’s Marcus’s garden,” I breathed, and Amelia blushed again.
“He’s only been working on it a few weeks, but he’s sure got a lot done. He said he’s been scratching around for a place to plant, so I told him I had more than enough room. Look…” She walked in between a narrow row of sprouts. “We’re going to have peppers, and beans, and eggplant, I think.” In spite of the chilly air, her cheeks were a vivid pink, and her eyes were aglow. I thought I could suddenly see what had attracted Marcus to gardening out here besides a free plot of land.
Seething with jealousy, I turned my back on the plants. “Can we put these boxes inside now? I’m freezing.” It was a lie— nothing made me cold—but I didn’t want Amelia to see the envious set of my mouth.
She looked confused, then hurt. “Okay.”
What I really wanted to do was linger in the tidy lines that Marcus had scored into the earth. I wanted to sit in the exact center of the spiral and wait for the plants to unfurl themselves. I wanted them to climb and rove over my limbs until I burst into bloom with them. But it was Amelia who was going to get to harvest the thick-skinned peppers and gather up baskets of waxy beans. It was Amelia who would be waving to Marcus through the kitchen window, inviting him in for a plate of her fresh-cooked succotash and smoked ham. A column of bile rose in my throat.
“Truly, what’s the matter?” Amelia put a hand on my forearm, but I shook it off.
“I have to get back soon. I’ve got the doctor’s dinner to fix.”
Amelia looked as though she wanted to say something, but a lifetime of swallowing words is a hard sea to swim against. I wonder now if she recognized jealousy in my glare or if she chalked my mean mood up to some flaw in herself; but knowing Amelia, I figured it was the latter. She may have had a whole lovely garden spread out at her feet, but in her heart, she still thought of herself as a weed—unlovely, uncultivated, un- welcome even in her own backyard. Everything in the world has its two faces, however. Weeds sometimes blossom into artful flowers. Beauty walks hand in hand with ugliness, sickness with health, and life tiptoes around in the horned shadow of death. The trick is to recognize which is which and to recognize what you’re dealing with at the time. At any given moment, you can tip the balance just a little, one way or the other, if you’re paying attention, but that afternoon I wasn’t. I was too preoccupied with the hard stones rolling around inside my own heart.
“Come on,” I sighed. “Let’s go inside.”
After ten years away, the brass handle of the Dyersons’ back door still felt familiar in my palm. I wondered if the house still smelled like beeswax and vanilla, and the icebox still made a whining noise like a mosquito. I so badly wanted to take in one more gulp of Marcus’s garden before I entered, but I didn’t want to give Amelia the satisfaction, and truth be told, I didn’t want to give it to myself, either. For years I’d been caught up in my memory of the place, and now here it was in front of me, real, and I wasn’t sure what to think.
Amelia deserved an explanation for my mood, I knew, so I screwed up my courage and attempted to provide her with one. “It’s the garden,” I choked. “It’s the same one Marcus wanted to plant at the doctor’s. I thought—it’s just that… well, I thought it was supposed to be special.”
Amelia’s eyes filled with comprehension. “Special for you, you mean.”
I ducked my head. “Something like that.”
She smiled. “But it
is
special. Don’t you see that? Just because it’s planted here doesn’t make it any different. He still planted it. He still brought it into being.”
I raised up my head, still slightly dizzy with the swirling design of Marcus’s garden. “Oh,” I breathed. A tiny pulse of hope began to throb in my chest.
Amelia stepped closer across the porch to me. “Truly, he cares for you. It’s obvious. He always has. Why don’t you do something about it? Bobbie’s gone now. He’s not coming back—you know he’s not. What do you have left to stay at the doctor’s for? Why don’t you move back out here with me? It’ll be like the old days. Come home.”
Home
. The word reverberated down my bones. Most people had one definite place they called home, but for me, it was different. Did I choose the doctor’s house, where Bobbie used to be and where I’d lived so long? Or the Dyerson farm, where August’s bones lay and where there was enough space to make me feel small; or was it the cramped wooden house of my childhood, where my mother and father had both died? I reached again for the brass doorknob, anticipating the familiar wave of aromas that would envelop me when I opened the door. I thought one last time of Marcus’s garden, sorry to leave it behind me.
The only thing holding me at the doctor’s house now was the addictive bite of revenge, but its teeth were long and hooked, and I wasn’t at all sure anymore how to extricate myself from them. I was dependent on the doctor for the medicine he gave me, but I was also finding that I had sprouted unexpected roots under his roof, and the thought of tearing them up to move—even somewhere as familiar as the farm—gave me pause. I guess I was like a creeper strangling a tree with slow determination. Now that I had reached the very top branch, I saw, there was nowhere left to go but back the way I’d come.
When I arrived back at the doctor’s, Robert Morgan was sitting in the kitchen—unusual enough for him, but doubly so because all the lights were turned off. He was sitting so still, I almost didn’t see him. He waited until I had my coat off, and then his voice scraped the air with the precision of a razor. “You’ve been out a long time.”
I shook my black coat off my shoulders and laid it over the back of a chair before sitting down. Predictably, the wood groaned beneath me. I wanted to shout, to spit sparks and brimstone, but I was so tired, I managed only gruff irritation. “I took Bobbie’s stuff away.”
Robert Morgan didn’t reply, and I shifted my weight to my other hip. I still wasn’t used to the house in its new incarnation. Without Bobbie, the rooms felt positively funereal. I yearned to flip on some lights and start cooking, filling the kitchen with good smells and the happy sound of pots bubbling, but there was no need. The doctor had helped himself to a plate of cold beef, crackers, cheese, and celery.
I stared at the desiccated stalks on the doctor’s plate and thought again of the garden Marcus had planted, imagining how lush it would look when it was ripe and how good the tomatoes and peppers would taste straight off the vines. I imagined him feeding me sweet peas, pulled from their shells one by one. I thought about the rest of the farm, too—how there weren’t any horses left now, but maybe come spring I could raise a graceful foal I would train to gentleness. Nothing like the buckle-kneed animals I used to care for, though. I wanted a little elegance for a change. I flattened my hands on the table and looked the doctor in the eyes. Amelia was dead right, I decided. Perhaps it really was time for me to open the door to my own future. There was nothing keeping me here anymore but the ugly lure of comeuppance. It was time to leave. But informing the doctor was a different matter.
I thought about it and decided it was best to do it sideways. Butting your brains up against the doctor’s iron will was never a good idea. Better first to parrot what he wanted to hear. I took a breath and repeated, “Well, I did it. I took Bobbie’s things away like you wanted.” I didn’t mention what I’d done with them, and Robert Morgan didn’t ask, so I continued, throwing out more and more words as if I were filling up a pot for stew. “They’re gone now all right. His room’s empty. But, you know, he’s still right here in town.”
Robert Morgan scowled, and I backed off, guessing he wasn’t ready to entertain the possibility of reconciling yet. Time to get on with my own concerns, then. “Speaking of moving on, I’ve been thinking. You won’t really be needing me anymore, and this afternoon, Amelia offered to take me back at the farm. Not”—I raised a finger—“that I couldn’t still come in once a week or so to cook up some dinners for you, or tidy up. That kind of thing. And, of course, I’ll need to come back for my medicine.” I folded my finger back into my hand, wishing I could just make a clean break and leave the way Bobbie had but knowing that was impossible. I sat back and waited for the storm I was sure was coming, but it never arrived.