The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [108]
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