It was a little hard to believe that Saturday night was only a couple of nights ago. It was Tuesday morning, but in some ways Saturday night felt as far away as when her family had lived back in West Chester. Maybe it even felt as far away as before her dad’s plane had crashed in the lake. She and Hallie hadn’t been expected to go to school today, and now their mom was off meeting with doctors and bringing their dad home from the hospital, and Reseda had taken her sister and her here to Sage Messner’s to see the greenhouse. Sage and Clary had been fussing over her and Hallie for over an hour, giving them lemonade with chlorophyll-the greenest beverage she had ever seen in her life, but it turned out to be pretty good-and chocolate brownies. Then Sage had shown them the guest bedrooms in the house, where she told them they could stay whenever they wanted. When she had shared the bedrooms with them, it was like when Mom and Dad had taken them last summer to Mount Vernon in Virginia, where George Washington had lived, and they had been shown his bedroom: Sage’s enthusiasm was just about off-the-charts crazy as she went on and on about some amazing herbalist who had lived in the house before her. Garnet had half-expected the bedroom doorway to have a red velvet rope in front of it. Consequently, she had been a little relieved when Reseda had taken just her and her sister out here to the greenhouse, leaving Sage in the kitchen to make them yet another snack.
“And this is memoria,” Reseda was saying, running the tips of her fingers gently along the purplish leaves of the plant. The memoria was about five inches high, the leaves the size of her thumb and roughly the shape of the spade on a playing card. There were seven of the plants side by side in small terra-cotta vases.
“Feel the leaves,” she added, and so Garnet did and then Hallie followed.
“It feels like puppy fur,” Hallie said, and Garnet thought this was the perfect description. Indeed, there was a light down on the leaves that felt like it should have been the coat on a cute little animal, not a plant. Garnet was wearing a small silver bracelet that resembled ivy around her wrist-Reseda had given it to her a few minutes ago-and Garnet noticed it once more when she gazed down at her fingertips against the memoria. She loved the bracelet as much as she had loved any jewelry she’d ever been given-even more, she realized, than the unicorn choker her parents had gotten her at Disney World just about two years ago now. It felt like a more adult piece of jewelry. Hallie had been given a bracelet, too, also silver, though the design on hers looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Garnet could tell that Hallie appreciated her gift as well.
“What do you do with it?” Garnet asked Reseda, referring to the memoria.
“It’s a healing herb. Medicinal.”
“What does it cure?” her sister wondered.
Reseda smiled at the two of them. She was wearing a suede duster, unbuttoned and open, that fell below her knees and blue jeans that clung to her legs. She really didn’t need the coat because the greenhouse was heated and there were steamers hard at work in two of the corners. The glass there had filmed over with droplets of water. But it wasn’t a very heavy jacket, and she looked elegant in it: Garnet liked the way it billowed around her like a sail as she walked. “Bad dreams,” she said simply and then, after a moment, added, “And bad memories.” Then she walked beside the long table and paused at another plant, beckoning for the twins to follow. “This one is despairium,” she said, and for a second Garnet presumed the long tendrils were dead because they were as black as the moldering coal that sat in a dank corner of their basement. But apparently they weren’t. “I don’t want you to touch it,” Reseda said. “But have you ever felt shrimp? The stems here feel just like cooked shrimp, except they leave a resin on your skin that is a bit like poison ivy. Only worse. It lasts considerably longer. That’s why you shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands.”
“Then why does Mrs. Messner grow it?” Hallie asked.
“If you know how to harvest a pinch and steep it in tea-with a little honey and a little lemon-it can give a person a new perspective on life. It can cause a person to see things, well, differently. And some of us like to bake with it. Anise, for example, uses it.”
“Anise is always baking us stuff.”
“Is she now?”
“Uh-huh. She even labels the treats. Puts our names on them.”
Reseda nodded, a little pensive. “She just arrived.”
“You mean here at Mrs. Messner’s?”
“That’s right.” Garnet decided Reseda must have amazing hearing, because she herself hadn’t heard a car pull into the driveway.
“So, this greenhouse isn’t just for Mrs. Messner?” Hallie asked.
Garnet was glad her sister had asked this. It was beginning to dawn on her, too, that this was a sort of communal nursery. She had a feeling that Mrs. Messner wasn’t the only one who grew plants here.
“That’s right,” Reseda said. “Some of us have our own greenhouses, but not everyone. Holly, for instance, keeps her plants here. And none of us has a greenhouse quite this large. So, yes, this one is a sort of shared space. We all help tend the plants here. And you must call Mrs. Messner Sage. I know she’d prefer that.” She brought the girls slowly up and down the long rows of tables, and occasionally Garnet recognized the name of an herb or a flower, but more often it was a plant that she had never heard of before. Some looked a little frightening, even when their names were rather comforting, such as the hoja santa: The leaves were the size of her face, and she imagined being smothered by one. Her favorite names, she decided? Elderberry. Fenugreek. False unicorn. One corner of the greenhouse had a series of raised dirt beds instead of tables, and the magic here, according to Reseda, was beneath the soil. Eventually someone would pull up many of the roots that mattered, but in some cases-such as the dangerously poisonous mandrake-only select, very experienced gardeners would be allowed to handle the harvest.
“Did the woman who lived in this house before Sage share the greenhouse, too?” Garnet asked.
“She did. And she actually bred some of these plants. Some she brought from other parts of the world, but others she created herself-like this rather potent despairium.”
Just then the greenhouse door opened, and Sage entered with a plate of small tea sandwiches in her hands, and Anise and Clary beside her. Garnet decided she was right about Reseda’s hearing: She had never heard Anise’s pickup pull in or the truck doors slam shut. The sandwiches were made with watercress and chives and cream cheese, and some also had cucumber. The white bread was almost as thin as a cracker, and Garnet thought they were absolutely delicious.
“Is the watercress from this greenhouse?” Hallie asked, after Sage had listed for them the ingredients.
“It is, absolutely,” Sage told her, and she surprised Garnet by putting the tray of sandwiches on one of the long tables with plants and sitting down on the dirt floor of the greenhouse. Anise and Clary, despite their ages, sat on the ground, too, and Clary patted the earth, signaling Hallie and her to join them. Garnet looked at her sister and saw that the girl was already sitting down, so she did as well.
“Reseda?” Sage asked, when the younger woman remained on her feet. “Going to join us for our… our picnic?”