The nurse looked at him blankly.
Nurses are like cops, he thought. You can’t hide anything.
But then he remembered he had nothing, really, to hide.
Together, they sat on pastel chairs in the Critical Care waiting room.
The slump of Sheila’s body, so different from the Sheila of the other morning, or most of the times he saw her, always running on nerves and worry. Now there was a zombie sedation about her that made her easier to talk to, but much sadder.
Her hands, chapped, were folded in her lap, the nails lined red.
“Deenie was here,” Sheila said, the smell on her like a live presence. “I saw her. I think I did. The pills they gave me…”
“When?”
“An hour ago, maybe. I don’t know. My mom saw her too.”
“Do you know where she—”
“You know, I’ve only been home once. For an hour. The coffee table was still tipped over. I keep thinking about that coffee table.” She looked at him, eyes yellowed. “That’s what did it, in the end.”
Something ghastly turned inside him. “In the end? Sheila, is Lise…”
But she shook her head, over and over. “Nothing’s changed. Except everything. I don’t understand. Tom, who would hurt my girl?”
“Sheila, I don’t…what’s happened?”
“I told them Lisey doesn’t use drugs,” she said. “Is Deenie a drug user now?”
“Deenie? No.”
“That’s what I told them.”
“The police?” he asked, though he knew. “And they were asking about Deenie?”
“All day I’ve been talking to them,” she said.
“Detectives? A woman with a ponytail—”
“They found something in Lise’s thermos,” she said, taking a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket, reading from it. “Datura stramonium.”
Tom looked at the paper, a printout from the web. With a picture of a white flower like a pinwheel, smooth with toothed leaves.
D. stramonium—Jimsonweed; thorn apple; Jamestown weed (Family: Nightshade). A foul-smelling herb that forms bushes up to five feet tall. Its stems fork into leafy branches, each leaf with a single, erect flower.
For centuries, Datura has been used as an herbal medicine. It is also a potent hallucinogen and deliriant that can generate powerful visions. Legend has it that Cleopatra used the extract as a love potion in her seduction of Caesar.
Low recreational doses are usually absorbed through smoking the plant’s leaves. It can, however, prove fatally toxic in only slightly higher amounts, and reckless use can result in hospitalization and even death. Amnesia of the poisoning event is common.
Late signs/fatal reactions: convulsions, cardiovascular weakening, coma.
Tom tried to concentrate on the words, but the noise in his head wouldn’t let him.
“Jimsonweed. Someone gave her this?” he said. “Someone gave this to all these girls?”
“They gave it to Lise,” Sheila said, swallowing loudly, the paper shaking in her hand. “They couldn’t find it in the other girls.”
“Do they know why? And what about…” There were too many questions and she wasn’t listening anyway.
She looked down at the printout, turning it over, showing him the drawing of the plant’s chemical composition.
Looking up, she smiled vaguely, her voice rising and pushing the words out: “Blind as a bat, mad as a hatter…”
“Red as a beet,” continued Tom, an old memory, cramming for a long-ago exam, rising up in him, “hot as a hare, dry as a bone, and the—”
“—heart runs alone,” she finished. “The doctor told me that’s how they memorize it in med school. The symptoms. Toxic something. I forgot to write that part down.”
“Poisoned,” he said. “She was poisoned.”
“The heart runs alone,” she repeated, turning from the paper to Tom. “Isn’t that horrible?” Then, looking up at him. “Or beautiful?”
* * *
“Skye,” Deenie whispered loudly, moving closer. “What did you do?”
“Why would I tell you?” she said, arm lifting to the dark boughs of the tree above her. “What did you ever care about me? The only one who ever cared is Gabby.”
“Gabby cares about Lise,” Deenie said. “What did you do, Skye?”
And that’s when Skye’s mouth started its clicking sound again.
“I can’t believe you never knew,” she said. “About Gabby.”
“What does Gabby…” But already something was happening, a feeling.
“About Gabby,” Skye said. “About how fucking much she loves your brother.”
“What…” Deenie started, but she couldn’t make the words come. Because there it was, some private song she knew from far back in a cobwebby corner of her head. A song so faint she’d barely heard it, but now, the sound turned up, she couldn’t muffle it anymore.
Gabby, who always walked so fast by his bedroom door. Gabby standing beside her at the washing machine, her hand on Eli’s T-shirt. Her fingers. Deenie wanted to look away. A dozen times like that. The way her body battened tight when he came in the room. The way her face…
This song, she’d heard it so low and quiet so long, she never really heard it at all.
“She could never tell you,” Skye said. “She knew you wouldn’t understand, or help her. But she had me.”
Deenie felt something drag up her spine. Turning, she said, each word slow and raking up her throat, “Had you for…what? What did you do, Skye?”
And, stepping farther back under the black canopy of the tree, Skye seemed to draw herself into herself, a small white flower.
There, hidden, her voice low and forceful and insistent, almost a chant, she told Deenie a story, the way only Skye would tell it.
Of how she and Gabby became friends, true friends, because they both knew how to keep secrets. How one night last year, Skye caught her hiding in the tall trees by the school, watching Eli Nash skating by himself on the practice rink. She was so embarrassed, and Skye said she shouldn’t be and invited Gabby to her house to do the love tarot.
They sat for hours and Gabby told Skye she’d loved Eli since the day she met him, and he was all she thought about. And that she loved Deenie but that she’d mostly become friends with her because of Eli, whom she loved so much she wanted to die.
It never stopped, the feeling, and watching him with all those girls, once or twice hearing them in Deenie’s house, was almost too much for Gabby to bear. Sometimes she even thought that if it weren’t for Deenie…
But Skye had told her it didn’t matter. That was how guys were, trapped for years in the mindless mojo of lust. And together they cast love spells from the Internet, mixing honey, oils, and leaves with things—hair, pens, stick wax, a roll of grip tape—stolen from Eli’s backpack, his house.
Once, they used a dove heart Skye’s cat carried in from the backyard.
Once, they used menstrual blood.
And then one day it happened, or they thought it did.
I saw him in the hallway, Gabby said, and you should have seen it, the way he looked at me. I know it worked. I know it.
To bind it, Skye cautioned, they would have to send him a picture. If it stays on his phone for twelve days, the spell will work. And Gabby said she’d do it. She was not afraid.
But the spell didn’t work in time. Or it worked the wrong way. It worked for Lise.
Because one morning, a week ago, Skye was walking to school, late, head full of bad dreams like always, and she saw it all. Saw the secret. Behind the bushes. Lise and Eli Nash.
She told Gabby what she’d seen. And Gabby could think of nothing else: I want to die, she told Skye. I’m dying now.
The next day, they’d all gone to the lake.
Gabby was so angry, she couldn’t even look at Lise. Lise showing off her body in the water. And that spot on the inside of her thigh, like a moon, a kiss, a witch’s mark. The whole time, Gabby kept whi
spering to Skye, She stole him from me.
And so Skye promised to reverse it. And she knew just how.
Sulfur, honey, and dried jimson flowers from the bushes out back, the kind that bloomed at night. They’re called love-will. She’d found it in a book. A spell to scare a faithless lover into repentance.
She made the mixture and gave it to Gabby and Gabby put it in Lise’s thermos. It was important that Gabby do it herself. It was the only way the spell would work.
And they couldn’t be responsible for what happened. In fact, didn’t Lise’s reaction show that it was Lise who was a faithless lover? Was holding some bad energy inside that needed to be released?
Deenie listened and listened and finally broke in.
“But you gave Lise…sulfur?”
“Jimson. It runs wild back here. If you dry the leaves and smoke them, you can have visions,” Skye said, stepping back even farther under the heavy branches, only her mouth and chin visible now. “But it only makes visible a darkness that’s already there. Maybe eating it like that…”
She looked at Deenie, her voice like a pulse in Deenie’s brain. “Maybe you bring the darkness inside you. Maybe Lise has it inside her now.”
Deenie felt herself sinking, her hand reaching out for the tree beside her, knuckles pressing into its hard bark.
“They’ll find it,” Deenie said, huskily. “They’re finding everything.”
“I burned it all,” she said, head tilting toward the dredged ashes mixing with the sawdust by the rabbit hutch. That smell Deenie had caught, now nearly gone. “The plants were so beautiful. It’s all done.”
Pressing her hand to her chest, Deenie tried to get a breath that wouldn’t come.
“I’m going to tell,” she whispered.
“It doesn’t matter to me.”
A wind came and Skye’s head dipped down from the tree’s shadow and Deenie saw her face, hair blown back. Her face bare and clean as she’d never seen it. She looked small and dangerous.
“Skye,” she said, softly, “Lise is going to die.”
There was a pause. Deenie couldn’t look at her, her face so naked, her eyes like hard green marbles.
“I’m not sorry, Deenie,” Skye was saying. “And you shouldn’t be. We don’t owe anybody anything.”
Deenie couldn’t imagine anything less true. The hardest part was how much we owed everyone.
“You poisoned her,” Deenie said, feeling her neck throb from its seizing bursts, her body aching from it. “You poisoned everybody.”
“No,” Skye said. “She was the only one.”
Deenie looked at her, trying to puzzle it all out, including the long, fevered lurches of her own body, heart. How was it possible?
“And it’s not poison,” Skye said, stepping forward, so close to Deenie she could smell the sawdust, the ashes. “Your brother had some, he smoked some today and he didn’t get sick.”
Deenie lifted her head, eyes on Skye, the white smear of her face. It seemed to happen instantaneously, her body moving fast across the lawn.
* * *
“Sheila Daniels, please return to ICU.”
The crackle from the ancient PA system.
“Maybe she’s awake,” Tom said, rising, helping Sheila to her feet.
Her body bobbled between his forearms, her hair slipping from its clip, he grabbed for one shoulder to try to keep her upright.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “You…”
But she had pulled away from him and charged through the double doors with surprising suddenness and strength.
All Sheila Daniels’s constant, exhausting vigilance over the years looked different now. It made you wonder if, in some obscure way, she had known what was coming and spent all her days raising the ramparts, doing whatever she could to forestall it, or at least prepare for it.
Except what, or who, had she been protecting Lise from? He couldn’t imagine why anyone in the world would want to hurt that sweet girl.
And now he was bounding through the front doors, not stopping to think where he could find Deenie, just knowing he would.
His phone started ringing just as he reached his car.
“Hello?” he answered, not even looking.
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe and I…”
And it was Deenie’s voice, one he hadn’t heard in a thousand years, and she was saying things, frantically, breathlessly, but with the sound of everything in the world roaring in his ear, he could only hear “Daddy.”
* * *
It was five miles or more, even if she found the right shortcuts, iron spreading through her chest as she ran.
There was no guessing about it, but a picture kept coming: Eli’s head hitting the ice, like she’d once seen happen at a practice, his helmet shorn off, two teeth knocked out. Deenie had been there, felt her heart stop.
And her mom running onto the ice, arms around him in seconds. Scrambling to find both teeth. Deenie watched as she foisted them back in Eli’s open mouth. And he was fine. Because Eli was always fine, wasn’t he?
Running faster, breathing harder, her face slicked from the damp, her sneakers nearly twisting off her feet, she pressed her phone against her ear.
Her dad was telling her to slow down, to breathe.
“Where’s Eli,” she said and it wasn’t her voice now but her voice in an old home video, long-ago Christmas mornings, a canoe trip, the time she first rode a bike and fell elbow first onto the sidewalk. “Daddy, he’s poisoned.”
* * *
A two-liter nestled between his legs, Eli held Gabby’s letter in his hand.
He was drinking fast, trying to wake up, to shake off the final dregs of the smoke, to understand what he’d read and what it meant.
There were revelations tumbling through his head—so many moments that looked different now, how he’d read them all wrong—but he pushed them aside for the moment because of the sickly urgency he felt. Now I have to fix things, she’d written, a sentence that had a sense of purpose. And finality.
He picked up the kitchen phone again, realized he didn’t have her number.
Pulling his laptop out of his bag, he e-mailed Gabby, the first time he ever had.
Gabby, call me. come back.
Then he sat for a second, waiting, hoping.
All those times with Gabby, her stern and mysterious face. To matter so much to someone you hardly thought about. To care so much about someone who maybe didn’t even wonder about you, or check in much to see if you were okay because that person wasn’t thinking about you, not really, and maybe had moved far away, three hours or something, just far enough to be able to put you out of her mind whenever she wanted.
The phone rang.
“Eli, it’s Dad.”
“Hey,” Eli said. “Gabby left. And this thing happened. I don’t know—”
“Are you okay, Eli?” his dad said, his voice even more breathless than before. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, Dad, but Gab—”
“We’ll be right there, okay? Don’t—just sit still, okay? Just don’t do anything.”
“What?” Eli said, but all he heard was the smack of tires on a wet road, then a click.
* * *
She saw the car, the only car in the world, the streets desolate and haunted, like a town during a plague.
“Deenie,” her dad was shouting from the rolled-down window.
And the car nearly jumped the curb, spraying her with gathered water.
“You were supposed to go to Eli,” she shouted, holding her trapper hat on her head, heavy with rain.
“Deenie,” he said, “get in.”
She stood for a second, looking at her father, his face red and fevered, hands gripping the wheel.
She felt so sorry for him.
* * *
Eli kept trying to tell them he was okay, but they wouldn’t listen.
Knees up in the backseat, Deenie had her head buried in her arms, and he thought she might
be crying.
Dad drove faster than Eli had ever seen anyone drive, faster even than A.J. drag-racing by the old wire factory outside of town.
“Did you drink something?” his dad kept asking. “Did someone give you something? How about in your thermos?”
“What? No. I don’t have a thermos,” he said. “I’m okay, Dad.”
“You’re not,” Deenie said from the back. “You think you are, but you’re not.”
The hospital was there, lit so brightly it hurt his eyes, the parking lot like the school’s before a big game.
Their headlights skated across a pair of girls, maybe ten or eleven, in flannel pajamas, their mother with an arm around each of them, rushing them inside. They both wore big slippers—lobsters and bunny rabbits—oozing with gray rain, so heavy they could barely lift their feet.
Time shuttered to a stop as Eli watched them, their faces blue in the light, looking at the windshield, at him. He squinted and saw they were older than they’d first looked. The one with the bunny slippers he recognized as the sophomore girl everyone called Shawty, the one who’d snuck into his bedroom months ago, the one who’d cried when it was over, worried she’d done it all wrong. After, she’d stayed in the bathroom a long time. When she came out, her face was bright with pain.
Girls changed after, he thought. Before, she’d been texting him all the time, pulling her shirt up at games, saying all the things she wanted to do to him, flashing that thong at him.
And then after. But it changed for him after too. Growing up felt like a series of bewildering afters.
And now here she was, hair scraped back from her baby face, and she had stopped, and she was looking at him.
Recognizing him, remembering things. A hard wince sweeping across that soft face.
And he wasn’t sure what her real name was.
Then came the girl’s mother’s burly arm covering her face, hoisting her along, and the girl was gone, lost behind the hospital’s sliding doors.
“Deenie,” Eli said, turning around to face his sister, “did Gabby find you? Did you talk to her?”