“I’m fine,” Reseda answered simply, but Garnet detected a slight sharpness to her tone. She noticed that Anise was staring intently at her, the woman’s face curious and probing.
“What have you shown the girls so far?” Anise asked.
Reseda motioned vaguely at the long columns of tables behind her.
“The rosemary and the calandrinia?”
“No. That felt rather premature to me. Remember, all we discussed was showing the girls some plants. We did not discuss a naming ceremony.”
“Not a ceremony. Just a…”
“A chance to eat finger sandwiches and learn our new nicknames,” Sage chirped agreeably, cutting Anise off, clearly desirous of easing the tension that seemed to exist between the two women. “All right then, Anise, do you want to begin?”
The women who had sat down only a moment ago all rose up to their full heights, Clary rubbing the small of her back but still grinning expectantly. Her eyes sparkled, and she and Sage held out their hands, and Garnet realized that she and Hallie were each supposed to take one. And so they did, Hallie taking Clary’s and Garnet grasping Sage’s slightly gnarled but soft fingers. Then Anise led them down an aisle between the tables from one end of the long greenhouse to the other. Reseda followed, but Garnet sensed it was only grudgingly. Finally they stopped almost at the farthest wall of glass, and Anise motioned toward a pair of pots beneath grow lights at the edge of the table. One held an herb and one a flower with a great fan of red petals. “Do you recognize either of them?” she asked.
Garnet looked at her sister. Hallie shrugged, as unsure of what the plants were as she was. “No,” Garnet answered simply.
“Well, we have a lot to learn then, don’t we?” Anise said, and there was a waft of judgment in the remark. “This is rosemary. Smell it. Inhale the aroma. Lovely, isn’t it? It looks like a little evergreen. And this is calandrinia. Feel the dirt it’s in: sand, peat moss, and loam. And the flower-this one in particular-has a coloring that reminds me a little of your hair, Garnet. Clary here was the first person in this area to grow it. She brought the seeds back from Chile.”
Anise used her thumbs to push her own untamed hair back behind her ears. “Hallie,” she said, bending over with her hands on her knees so she was face-to-face with the girl, “I appreciate the idea that you are named for your grandmother. It was such a lovely gesture on your mother and father’s part. I like genealogical legacies. And Garnet, I love the idea that you are named for that magnificent hair of yours. That was so creative of your parents and, at the time, so perfect.”
Garnet nodded and waited for more, well aware that this was a preamble to… something.
“But,” Anise went on, “when we’re together, I think we would all like to call you Cali-short for calandrinia-instead of Garnet. You are, like this flower, a little mysterious, and you clearly have a depth that is both grand and uncommon. And Hallie, how would you like to be Rosemary? You are fragrant and proud and make the world a little more savory.”
“But why?” Hallie asked. “Why these new names?”
“See what I mean? Already you are living up to the name. And the answer is simple: They’re terms of endearment. Of affection. That’s all. Many of us here in Bethel have taken names of interesting herbs and remarkable plants. It shows we’re… friends. You may have noticed. And we want you two girls to be our friends.”
Garnet didn’t mind having a nickname, though a part of her wished that she had been given Rosemary and her sister Cali. She had to hope it would grow on her. And it sounded like only her mom’s women friends were going to be using it anyway. She’d still be Garnet at school. Nevertheless, she wondered what Mom would think of this. Would her feelings be hurt? Would she feel it was some sort of intrusion into the family? Almost as if Reseda could read her mind, the woman knelt before her and said, “In time, your mother will be very happy with your names. Your father, too. And here is something that might make you feel a little more comfortable with this change. When your mother is with us, she is going to be called Verbena. Verbena is all about courage and friendship. Loyalty. It suits your mother.” She brushed a strand of her own lustrous hair off her forehead.
“Thank you, Reseda,” Anise said, but her voice was strangely curt. “I wasn’t planning on going into that much detail today.”
“And I wasn’t anticipating a naming ceremony.”
“Not a ceremony-just a preview. But I can’t tell you how much it pleases me that even around you I can be a little unpredictable,” she said. Then she reached for the leather shoulder bag that she had placed on the ground where they had been sitting and announced, “Girls, I have a present for each of you.”
“More jewelry?” Hallie asked.
Anise glanced at their wrists, noticing the bracelets for the first time.
“I can be unpredictable, too,” Reseda said, a wisp of a smile on her face.
But Anise only nodded agreeably and reached into the bag. “Do you two like to read?” she asked, and Garnet knew instantly that, instead of presents, they were both about to get homework.
Chapter Eleven
You contemplate all the hours you sat attentive and alert on the flight deck, and how you never grew less enamored of the niveous white magnificence of clouds as you gazed down at them from thirty or thirty-five thousand feet. Their exquisite polar flatness: fields of pillowy snow that stretched to the horizon. As the shadow of your plane would pass over them, you would imagine you were gazing down on an arctic, alabaster plain, and in your mind you could see yourself crossing them alone in a hooded parka and boots. (You wonder now: Why were you always a solitary man in this daydream?) If you were flying at the right time of the day and the sun was in the right spot, the vista would be reduced to a splendid bicolor world: albino white and amethyst blue.
And then there was that moment when you would skim across the surface of the great woolpack before starting to descend underneath it, and your plane would feel more like a submarine than a jet. It was like going underwater-deep underwater-right down to the darkness that abruptly would enfold the aircraft once you were inside the clouds. One minute the sky would be blue and the flight deck bright, and the next the world outside would be gray soup and the flight deck dim.
You know the technical names for clouds as well as a meteorologist, just as you know the federal aviation definitions for ice: Glaze. Inter-cycle. Known or observed. Mixed. Residual. Runback. Rime. You have always loved the alliteration that marks those last three, the poetry of the memorized cadence. And you can do the same thing with clouds. You know the names of the ones that grow in the low elevations and the ones that exist in much higher skies. Even now, sitting in the backseat of the Volvo as Emily and John Hardin drive you home from the hospital, you can see perfectly in your mind the leaden sheets of gray stratus as the nose of your plane would start to nudge through them; the fleece of the cumulus, bright and cheerful when lit by the sun, dark and shadowy when not; the ominous towers and anvil plumes of the cumulonimbus you would steer your plane around when the traffic and the tower permitted. You close your eyes and see once again the gauzy layers of cirrus, their wisps strangely erotic, or their cousins, the rippling cirrocumulus. (Some people call these clouds a mackerel sky, but a flight instructor you liked very much called it a lake sky because it reminded him of the days he would spend with his own father fishing.) You see the rain on the flight deck windows and feel the bump as you break the plane of a layer of dark nimbostratus.
And now you open your eyes and the clouds disappear and you stare at the back of John Hardin’s head. It is an indication of the toll your breakdown is having on Emily that she needed cavalry help to bring you home from the hospital. It is a sign of how ill they think you are that they have squirreled you into the backseat. John has pulled the passenger seat so far forward that his knees are pressed against the glove compartment, though you have told him over and over you are fine. You have been telling people precisely this all morning long. I am fine. Fine. Just fine.