The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [110]
She dipped two fingers into the compact and took some. She wondered if it was the same sort of cream Ginger Jackson had rubbed near her eyes that night at Reseda’s. “Did Ginger make this?” she asked.
“Nope. Clary.”
“Ginger makes something similar.”
“Of course she does. All the women do.” He paused and smiled. Then: “You must think we are all awfully vain.”
“No.” She decided to try a small joke, hoping she might learn from it. “But I do think you’re all witches.”
He laughed ever so slightly and shook his head. “More like chemists,” he said. “It’s not about spells and magic. It’s not about pendants and charms and”—he waved his hand dismissively—“crystals. It’s about chemistry. It’s about natural medicine.”
“Potions.”
He pretended to shush her, his eyes wide. “Tinctures,” he said, aware this was a semantic difference at best. Meanwhile, she felt her skin tingling where she had massaged in the cream. Already her hands looked better.
On the first spectacularly warm day of spring, you sit on the walkway outside your front door and watch the ants, which built a small hill between two edges of slate overnight. It is lunchtime, and you have brought with you a piece of banana bread that Anise baked. You decide that you really know nothing about bugs. Really, nothing at all. But in the past you have watched ants eat. Everyone has. You have watched them move crumbs that look proportionately like boulders. An efficient, almost robotic swarm. They break apart what they can and move what they can, carting the bounty above their heads and their trunks, disappearing either into anthills in the ground or nests behind the walls. They move in lines. You have seen it as you sat on the front stoop of your old house in West Chester and, years and years ago, as you would lie on the grass in Connecticut when you were a small boy.
And you are quite sure that you have never seen ants do this. Never. The small ones die within inches of the banana bread morsels. They take one of the minuscule crumbs you have broken off and collapse under its weight seconds after starting off. And the larger ones? They last a little longer. They stagger in circles as if they have grown disoriented—panicked—and then they wobble and crumple. It’s as if their tiny legs have just buckled.
You tell yourself that they were not really panicked. Not even scared. You know that an ant’s nervous system isn’t built that way. Most likely, they were merely confused, suddenly unsure of what they were doing or why they were dying. It just looked like they were scared.
Still, you cannot help but wonder what herbs would poison an ant—and what those herbs might do to a human.
It was sixty-five degrees outside, but Reseda could feel the temperature was about to plummet. The sun had been high overhead at lunchtime, but now a great swash of gunmetal gray clouds was darkening the sky, rolling in from the northwest and stretching deep into Canada. She gently shut the door to her greenhouse and turned toward Anise, who was misting the tentacles, nacreous as marble, that were branching out from the poisonous acedia. The acedia was spreading like a spider plant, and its tentacles were dripping over the sides of the pedestal on which it resided. Reseda knew that Anise didn’t approve; she felt it should be trimmed back, the shoots chopped and the toxins harvested. But Reseda was so pleased with her success with the plant that she couldn’t bear to don gloves and take a knife to it. Not yet. No one had ever had such a triumph with acedia. The plant was named after the Latin word for sloth because it was a sedative and, used improperly in a tincture, lethal. She wondered how she would feel about her achievement if it had been named for the Latin word for pride.
“What are you feeding the pilot?” she asked Anise now.
Anise continued to circle the plant, careful not to make