Ana
This car has no spine. I press my foot to the pedal, and it hums along. It’s like driving a cell phone. No fuel. No combustion
engine. No guts.
In fact, it’s a lot like Brock. It looks like a car on the outside. But nothing under the hood where the muscle should be.
I zip along the highway, veering for the exit when it comes up. I press my foot to the “gas” and see how fast it will go when
I’m on the rural road. Pretty fast, surprisingly. The satellite radio is tuned predictably to an ’80s alternative station,
volume down low. The Cure—somehow mournful and upbeat all at once. Iggy’s into all that retro shit, like she was born in the
wrong decade. In the back, there’s Noah’s empty car seat, all padded and puffy for maximum comfort and safety for its screaming
little passenger.
Babies. The ultimate friendship killer. Once those little narcissists come along, it’s all about them.
My phone pings, and I glance at the screen face up on the seat beside me. My heart flutters a little. Fear. Something else.
We need to talk.
I don’t answer and the road stretches ahead of me, an unfurling black ribbon, lined by tall pines, bows dusted with snow.
I feel something. An unfamiliar ache in the center of my chest. Paul.
The last time I saw him—it was ugly. I was my worst self. There’s a part of me that stays caged most of the time. But every
once in a while, I unlock the door and let it out. Things rarely go well when that happens, and I know it. But you can’t keep
the beast in a cage forever, hard as you try, especially when it’s always screaming and rattling to get out. It goes mad,
becomes even more dangerous.
Things got out of hand.
But to be honest, with Paul, there had always been a kind of dark current beneath all the flowers and jewelry, the surprise
trips. Yeah, he took me to Aruba. And I wasn’t the first. It was apparently in his go-to seduction playbook. (Do I feel a tiny bit gratified that
he didn’t make it there a final time? I do.) It took about six months for that other layer to breach the surface. But I think
I knew it was there all along.
Sudden sharp words. Then fingerprint bruises on my upper arm. A cut under his eye.
The sex, which had always been shall we say edgy, got really rough. We started actually hurting each other. Both of us enjoying
the pain a little, giving and receiving.
He reminded me of my father.
The way Mac used to grab my mother hard by both her upper arms like she was a beer can he was trying to crush, how she jutted
her chin out at him, flashed a wicked grin.
“Do you feel like a man now?” she’d taunt.
And he’d either deflate, start to weep, or slap her or worse depending on his mood and how much he’d had to drink. And I swear
there was something about those encounters that they both enjoyed. Something about that razor’s edge between passion and rage.
Even as a kid, I saw it. I didn’t understand it until much later. But I saw the way their eyes gleamed, how utterly alive
and engaged they were.
And I liked it when Paul bit me so hard that it left a throbbing black and blue mark that I could feel under my clothes days later. That little pulse of pain hidden from everyone else beneath the silk of my blouse excited me somehow.
“That’s sick,” Vera said when I confessed this to her. “You need help, Ana. Like for real.”
Ha. Don’t we all? Little Mrs. Perfect Life. Vera has a beast, too. The difference is that she does keep it muzzled and caged and locked away. It never gets any light or air, nourishment. I shudder to think what happens the
next time it finally breaks free.
The familiar red mailbox tilts by the side of the road ahead of me. I stop and retrieve what’s inside through the window,
toss the pile in my tote to look through later. Then I pull up the long drive, Agnes’s house rising ahead as I make the final
turn.
The first time I saw this place, it filled me with dread. Now it’s home in a way. I don’t live here anymore, but sometimes
I retreat to the room I shared with Vera after our parents were gone. Vera thinks I should move back here, has been making
noise about how she’s paying my rent and paying all the upkeep on this place. Which is bullshit because I do pay my own rent.
Most of it. Most months. But so far I’ve refused to come back to Agnes’s house. You know, because I shouldn’t even be here in this one-horse town. That’s why my business is always floundering. There’s a real dearth of celebrity clients, which I
need if I want any real money. I should be in Paris or London, New York City. That was the plan. There’s more for me than
this. I’m sure of it. I just can’t seem to get where I’m going.
Paul said he was going to help me bag some bigger clients. He made promises. But they were all lies. That’s what unstitched
me most. All the lies he told me. That’s why the beast emerged.
I pull to a stop, and the old house seems to acknowledge my arrival. I remember asking Agnes if the place was haunted and
she said no.
But I feel her presence here now. And my mother’s, and all the women in my family who lived here since it was built in the early 1900s.
Not the men. They’re all dead and gone, barely made a mark on this earth.
All of them varying degrees of abusive or useless, weak or criminal.
It’s a family curse. The women in my family choose badly when it comes to men.
There are a million secrets and stories inside the walls of this house.
The car hums to a stop. There’s no difference in sound between on and off with this thing. My father loved muscle cars, big
machines in bold colors that roared and ate the road. Like women, he’d say, wild, untamable, thrilling.
What would he think of these electric cars?
My phone pings again.
Ana. Answer me.
Oh. We’re on a first-name basis now? I stuff the phone in my pocket and enter the house. There’s a scent when I enter the
front door, must and sage. The wood floor creaks, welcoming me.
In the kitchen, I drop my bag. I take a smudge stick from the jar by the sink, light it from one of the gas burners on the
old stove. Sage, its botanical name salvia meaning “to cure,” cleanses. Its antiseptic and astringent properties rid a space of negative energy, bring in clarity and
healing wisdom.
I walk through rooms, blowing gently on the embers, catching ash in an abalone shell. I fluff throw pillows, straighten blankets.
All the while I’m thinking about Paul, the words the detective used.
Dead. Buried. Foul play.
I breathe in the sage. Hoping to cleanse myself.
I can distance myself, push the bad things away and away, until it doesn’t seem real.
Finally, I find myself at the door to the library. Here I pause, because it’s usually locked, but this afternoon it stands ajar. I feel a little pulse of concern, push inside.
In the distance, windchimes tinkle softly on the back porch below. I notice right away that something is out of place.
Aunt Agnes’s Book of Cures sits on the desk, thick and leather bound. It’s open, not as I left it the last time I was here. I put my hand to the parchment
page.
The only other person who has keys to this place is Vera. I know she comes here, too. Sometimes we meet to talk, to tend the
garden, to go through the hundreds of old volumes, and boxes of books, letters. Sometimes we sit under the weeping willow
by the graveyard where both my mother and Agnes rest. Last autumn Vera and I came to winterize the garden, to harvest what
we could, mulch the beds.
This place is ours, hers and mine.
And Brad’s I guess. Since he pays all the bills. Or at least is aware that Vera pays all the bills involved in the upkeep,
taxes, insurance, etcetera. I don’t pretend to understand their relationship or how it works or what negotiations take place.
He seems more like a boy than a man. But he makes all the money and lets her do whatever she wants, doesn’t fight her, isn’t
violent. So, I guess that’s what she likes about him. Because if there’s one thing Vera needs it’s total control. And maybe
Brad needs to feel controlled. Marriage is a negotiation, Vera likes to say.
She’s all romance, that one.
I sit down in the leather chair and look at the page that’s open. There’s a colored pencil drawing and Agnes’s scrawling hand
filling the parchment.
Agnes was a gifted artist. The delicate green leaves seem to move; the white flowers like tiny clouds gathered at the top
of the plant bloom and billow. The telltale purple spots dot the stem. Like all flowering plants, it’s pretty, looks harmless.
Hemlock.
It’s meaning in floriography, the language of flowers, is death.
Its innocent appearance conceals the fact that it is viciously poisonous.
Common and hearty, it can find a home anywhere—by roadsides, in waste areas, by fences.
If ingested, depending on the amount, and the toxicity level of the plant, it can cause paralysis, renal or respiratory failure, and ultimately death.
It is particularly threatening to livestock, though its unpleasant odor tends to ward most creatures away unless there’s nothing else to eat.
Its leaves can be mistaken for parsley, which is a common mode of accidental ingestion.
There is currently no antidote for hemlock poisoning. You can only hope to stave off seizures, respiratory failure, and the
other grievous effects with modern medical intervention until the body repairs itself. If it does.
I touch my hand to the page. Outside the window, even through the glass, even though it’s the dead of winter there’s the faint
sound of birdsong. The room, overwarm and dusty, feels close; I lean against the leather back of Agnes’s chair, then swivel
to look at her wall of books, most of them older, leather bound, spines printed in gold.
Floriography: The Language of Flowers. Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide. Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine. Salves and Tinctures.