The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (22 page)

The Salem Common stretched out before her, bald in spots, cracked and shimmering with the heat. Connie spotted a tree with a suitably dense pool of shade under its branches and stooped to pluck a dandelion. She brushed the soft white puff against her upper lip, closed her eyes, and thought
I wish that Sackett auction house could tell me exactly where Deliverance’s book has gone
as she blew out a stream of hot breath. When she opened her eyes, the puff looked patchy, bedraggled, the flower stem still gripping its seed pods, giving away nothing. Connie tossed the dented stem aside and, reaching the tree, dropped her bag and then herself to the ground.

As she sat she felt a tight, uncomfortable lump occupying her rear cutoff pocket, and reached behind her to see what was pressing through the denim. She pulled out the offending object and discovered the packet of note cards found in Granna’s kitchen that morning. Connie smiled, anticipating Grace’s reaction when she opened an envelope in Santa Fe to find it full of Sophia’s voice. She flipped the top card to the back of the pile, revealing another recipe.

Chicken Fricassee
, it said.
Pluck and scald fresh chicken thoroughly and boil with a carrot and celery stick. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with cream and a little stock. Allow six hours. Good with white rice.
Reading the card, Connie could see Granna in the kitchen of the Milk Street house, steel gray hair pulled back, left hand curled in, resting the outer wrist on her thickened waist, dipping a long wooden spoon into a bubbling pot. The aroma of cooking chicken drifted through the imagined memory, and in her mind Connie saw Granna turn to look over her shoulder toward where Connie was standing, smiling, saying
Just another hour or so
. Connie flipped the card to the back of the pile to reveal a new one.

Boiled Lobster,
said the new card.
Wash live lobsters gently, then throw into pot of salted, boiling water with a tight lid. Add marjoram for the pain. Boil until
bright red, quite awhile depending on how big. Serve with lemon wedge and melted butter. You’ll need a nutcracker.
Connie pried each sandal off with her toes and rolled onto her stomach in the grass. As she held the note card, she imagined an older, bearded man with a bleached captain’s hat and burned, creased eyes raising his hand to knock at the screen door of the kitchen, and Granna setting aside her broom in the corner where it still stood, holding the screen door open with one hip to accept a rough wooden box from the man, saying,
I always feel so sorry for them,
and the man saying,
I ha’ liddle extrer in the catch this week, Sophier
.

“Granna,” whispered Connie, wondering what other image of her barely remembered grandmother might emerge from the scant writing in her hands.
Works especially well for tomats
, said the next note card, and Connie heard Granna’s voice in her ears saying “tomats” instead of “tomatoes,” but the writing underneath that heading was difficult to make out, so Connie leaned in, bringing the card close to her nose, squinting in the shade to make out the hasty forms of the letters. She formed each letter in her mouth, gripping the card between her hands on the grassy ground, letting the words assemble one syllable at a time.

“
Pater in
…
caelo
,” she began, wondering how Granna could have a recipe written in Latin. “
Te oro et obsec
…
obsecro in ben
…
benignitate tua
.” She narrowed her eyes, gripping the card tighter because her palms started to feel prickly and hot, as if brushed against a stinging nettle.

“
Ut sinas hanc herbam, vel lignum
.” The heat and stinging grew more acute, edging nearer to pain, and she blinked her eyes rapidly as the note card seemed illuminated by a round bluish glow. She grimaced against the improbable pain, finishing, “
Vel plantam crescere et vigere catena temporis non vinc tam
.”

The blue light condensed into a pulsing round orb between her hands, aiming crackling electric veins at a dry young dandelion seed on the ground. Connie’s lips parted, her eyes wide in astonishment as the seed started to throb and heave and bubble, shooting a slender, fragile stalk up, up, up until its very tip exploded into a yellow flower. Before she could fully grasp what
she was seeing, the yellow flower burst into a white seed puff.

Staring, transfixed, Connie dropped her hands, now suddenly freed from pain as instantly as it had appeared, just as the seed puff was caught up by a passing breeze, which lifted each tender white seed-cloud up and away until they all dissolved into nothing.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, frozen in place as the now-dead dandelion stalk abruptly withered back into the ground from whence it came.

Marblehead, Massachusetts
Mid-July
1991

T
HE CARDS SPREAD ON THE DINING TABLE LOOKED LIKE A GAME OF
solitaire, set out in careful rows one after the other. Connie adjusted the wick of the oil lamp to brighten its orange glow, pulled out one of the shield-back chairs, and sat at the table, sliding her hands under her legs, shoulders pulled up by her ears. Most of the cards were just dull recipe cards: the boiled lobster, a few kinds of pie, casseroles, the chicken, all of them smudged with flour and thumbprints like any kitchen tool in constant use.

But then there were the others.

Connie pushed back from the table and stood again, pacing across the dining room. She had been shuttling like this for the past hour, first sitting at the table, then standing up again, unable to settle. Her energy was frayed, bringing her into uncomfortable awareness of the throb of blood in her veins, of the tingle of her nerves, and of the flush of adrenaline in her chest.

Three of the cards were not recipes at all. She cast a wary eye at those three, sitting aloof on the table.

The thing to do, of course, was to react rationally. After sprinting out of the Salem Common in a panic and roaring home in the Volvo, she had told herself in no uncertain terms that the dandelion was a coincidence; that she was tense and scared and spending too much time alone. She had spread the cards out on the dining table where they could be inspected safely, clinically.

Connie turned back to the table, picking up the card that was labeled
Works especially well for tomats
. Frowning, she carried the card out of the dining room into the tiny front entryway and squatted next to the dead plant-shell in the cracked China-export pot. Keenly aware of her ridiculousness, Connie raised one hand, aimed it at the corpse of the plant, and read the words on the card aloud again.

Nothing happened.

“See?” she said to Arlo, who had materialized on the steps. “It’s fatigue, plain and simple.” He gazed back at her, eyes questioning, fur mottled the color of the paint in the stairwell. She watched him for a moment, then got to her feet and returned to the dining room, the animal trotting after her.

This time Connie stood before one of the hanging planters that held the remnants of a spider plant. It had been dead for so long that a hand brushed against its leaves caused them to dissolve into dust. A few tattered spiderwebs lingered in the hollows among the leaves, their occupants long since gone. The earth inside the pot had been sucked dry of all moisture, deep crevices yawning open between the tight knot of dead roots and the bowl’s edges.

“Okay,” said Connie, setting the card aside and turning her full attention on the dead plant. She raised her hands so that her spread fingers created a sort of spherical basket around it. She furrowed her brows, concentrating on the precise point at the center of the sphere, deep within the crumbling earth in the planter.

“
Pater in caelo
,” she murmured, and a hot prickling sensation stretched across the palms of her hands. “
Te oro et obsecro in benignitate tua
,” she con
tinued, as a subtle bluish glow coalesced in a swirling bubble between her outstretched fingers. Her nerves jumped and snapped in pain. “
Ut sinas hanc herbam, vel lignum, vel plantam, crescere et vigere catena temporis non vinctam
,” she finished. The blue orb of light grew more solid, its electrical veins snapping in jagged lines from her fingertips and palms into the center of the ceramic planter. In that instant, the dried spider plant leaves flushed with water and health, the fresh, waxy green of life crawling down each black leaf, lifting and twisting as the color returned, and sending out fragile little shoots bursting with new baby leaves up and over the edge of the planter. By the time Connie dropped her hands to her sides, the smell of moist earth filled the dining room, and the spider plant hung thick and lush, swaying a little in the close evening air.

She staggered backward, groping for the support of the dining table, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Hot tears sprang into the rims of her eyes, and she realized that with each breath she was also letting out a high, panicked whimper. Her hand found the back of one of the shield-back chairs, pulling it toward her just in time to catch her falling weight. Horrified, Connie wrapped her arms around her middle and bent over, resting her forehead on her knees, her breath breaking into hiccuping sobs.

Within her mind great puzzle pieces shifted, each with a different woman’s face, rotating and nudging together until a complete picture began to emerge. Across her mind’s eye drifted an image of Granna’s face, dark gray hair pulled tight, pale eyes shining as she held aloft a fat, glistening tomato from the plant outside. This image dissolved into a young, pink-cheeked woman, face framed with a perfect white linen coif, plain Puritan collar spread over her shoulders—Deliverance, or what Connie imagined Deliverance to have looked like, her mouth moving inaudibly as she read from a great open book. Then a careworn woman, tanned and mobcapped, tired—Prudence, sliding a package across a table into the hands of some unseen person. Last Connie saw Grace, straight hair falling over her shoulders, in the raftered kitchen of her Santa Fe house, her hands moving a few inches above a weeping woman’s head.

All of them with pale, ice blue eyes.

Connie sat up, rubbing her palms over her flushed forehead. When she dropped her hands she saw first Arlo, his chin in her lap, worrying, and behind him, on the wall, the woman in the portrait, which Connie had never noticed bore a tiny engraved plaque that read
TEMPERANCE HOBBS
—with her sloping nineteenth-century shoulders and wasp waist—watching her over a tiny, knowing smile.

“It can’t be true!” she whispered, clutching at herself and rocking to and fro in the dining chair. She thought first of Grace, that she must talk to her immediately. But Granna! Connie’s eyes darted crazily around the house, taking in the few blackened jars in the dining room, the little corn husk doll with its dimity dress and yarn bow resting on the mantelpiece, Deliverance’s name tucked deep into a family Bible.

The circle burned into her door.

Connie leapt to her feet, rushing to pick up the telephone.

At the instant that she arrived in the front hall, the telephone receiver clutched in her hand, the front door opened a crack. She froze.

“Connie?” asked Sam, peering into the entry hall. When she heard his voice, she dropped the receiver with a cry of relief, winding her arms around his neck and breathing in the salty smell of his skin, freshened by the chemical gloss of paint spatters still clinging to his ponytail. “Hey,” he said, uneasy, holding his arms in a tentative shell around her trembling back before lowering them onto her waist. She tightened her grip around his shoulders, trying to wring the resistance out of his muscles, digging her chin into the spot where his shoulder met his neck until she felt him overcome his surprise and relax. They stood like that, him holding her, for a moment, the front door still open. Arlo wandered from the dining room, around their four feet grouped together, and out into the yard.

“Sam,” she said, voice muffled. She had called him, she remembered now, as soon as she arrived back at the house, leaving a breathless, anxious message on his machine describing what had happened in the Salem Com
mon and asking if she could see him later. Until his arrival, she had forgotten completely.

“Let’s sit down,” Sam suggested, leading her into the shadowed sitting room. He settled her into the armchair, hands balanced on her knees, and pulled up a low needlepoint footstool to seat himself at her feet. He propped his brown forearms on his knees and looked up at her, waiting.

“So,” he began. “You were reading a note card out loud, and a dandelion blew away?” She read the concern in his face, but it was a concern that masked an underlying worry. Deep inside his eyes, behind the little glimmer in the retinas, she saw that Sam did not believe her. And why would he?

“It didn’t just blow away, Sam,” she said, impatient, unsure if she wanted him to be convinced of the truth of what had happened, or if she wanted him to convince her of the folly of what she now knew to be true. “I
made it
blow away. Just by reading some Latin from my grandmother’s recipe card, I made it appear out of nowhere, bloom, and die! All at once!”

“Okay,” he said. “But you can see why someone would assume that you just hadn’t noticed it before until you accidentally exhaled or something and made it blow away. You admit that it would be the logical explanation here?” he prodded her, not unkindly. His face looked tired, Connie noticed. Her inner voice proposed that he would certainly think that she had lost her mind if she pursued this subject any further. Any reasonable person would respond by distancing himself. He would pull away, inventing reasons that did not have to do with her directly, and soon enough he would disappear from her life. She swallowed, eyes wide.

“I suppose,” she said, drawing out the words.

Then she made a show of making up her mind. “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. That would be the logical explanation.” She did not meet his eyes, instead folding her arms tightly over her chest and looking at a spot on the threadbare carpet.

Sam leaned his head into his hands and massaged his temples with his fingertips, rubbing the skin over his forehead and jaw. It occurred to Connie
that she had not even asked how his work was coming along. He had been suspended overhead in an abandoned church building all day, up by the ceiling where the heat collected, alone, daubing paint in the corners of the cupola.

“How did the gilding go?” she asked him, reaching a hand forward to brush an escaped lock of hair away from his forehead. His brow was sheened with sweat, and as her finger met his skin, she suddenly felt the great mass of his fatigue seep from his scalp into her hand and forearm, dragging them down with an almost physical weight.

“It was fine, just fine. Hot. But fine.” He exhaled. Connie passed her thumb gently over the skin between his eyebrows; as an experiment, without even deciding to do so, she tried telegraphing intent along her neural networks, instructing his system to relax. With deepening surprise she felt the tissue under her thumb grow a little looser and heard Sam release an almost inaudible sigh. Connie pulled her hand away, gazing down at it with unconcealed wonder. A pale blue thumbprint glowed momentarily on his forehead, then vanished. She gaped, looking to Sam, who seemed unaware that anything unusual had just happened.

He moved from his seat on the footstool into one of the armchairs by the fireplace, pressing his palms to his eyes. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said from behind his hands. After a moment’s hesitation Connie climbed into his lap, threading her arm behind his neck. Sam wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her to him. “Your message sounded so freaked out! I was worried about you,” he mumbled into her hair.

She smiled. “You were?”

“Yes,” he admitted, tightening his grip. She felt the warmth of his hand pressing into the skin of her leg, secure and insistent.

Connie settled her head against his chest, hoping that she had deflected his curiosity for the time being. For the first time that day, her sense of confusion and anxiety began to ebb, subsumed in her delicious consciousness of Sam’s proximity. They sat like that for a moment, tangled together in the armchair, not saying anything. His thumb stroked the skin of her thigh, testing its texture.

“Sam?” she asked presently, her voice muffled by his paint-stained work shirt.

“Yes?” he said, moving his hand down her back. His lips brushed against the spot where her neck met the back of her ear, his breath stirring the faint hairs at the nape of her neck, causing the skin there to tingle. He shifted beneath her, resettling his weight in the chair.

She cleared her throat. “If you want to stay over tonight, you know, that would be okay.”

The invitation sounded pathetic in her ears, and Connie’s memory spiraled backward to all the stilted conversations that she had suffered through in college, with boys who had all worn a seamless layer of arrogance that Connie never knew how to penetrate. She waited for his response, afraid that he would laugh at her.

He did laugh, but it was kind, and as he did so he tightened his grip around her waist. Through the soft flannel of his work shirt Connie felt the radiating warmth of his skin, and the sound of his laughter echoed deep within his chest. His chin grated a little against her forehead. She exhaled softly, only now aware that she had been holding her breath. “What a relief,” he exclaimed, opening his eyes. “You just saved me from having to come up with some stupid line about protecting you from vandals.”

She turned her face to him, and he kissed her, then again, more deeply, drawing his thumb gently along her jaw.

Before she knew what was happening Sam was standing up, hoisting her legs around his waist and carrying her toward the stairs. “Enough of this,” he said, voice thick. Connie threw her head back with delighted laughter, ducking her head just in time to miss the joist as he started up the narrow staircase to the attic bedroom.