The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [107]
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
“Chip?”
You rub your eyes. You turn around. “I’m sorry,” you tell Valerian, wondering how it is that only you know Ethan is here with you. Valerian seems to be staring right at him.
“You looked a little peaked there,” she says. “A midafternoon sugar low?”
“I guess. My head hurts.”
She sighs. “Feverfew and cayenne,” she tells you. “I have just the tincture. Sadly, I have just the tincture at home. In the meantime, have another cupcake. You’ll feel so much better. I promise.” And she hands you another of those remarkable confections.
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.”
Garnet 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