Linda laughed, but her heart wasn’t in it. “It’s never without all the bad.”
“That’s true,” Charity admitted. “But it can be close. We have to believe that we—me and you—can get close.” Charity heaved a huge sigh. “Besides, those rooms? They were tricks anyway. Right?”
“Right,” Linda said, stepping again into an uncertain conclusion. “Just tricks.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Sabrina
As Sabrina watched over Tristan, her eyes watered from how wide she kept them as she studied his fading form. He had stopped shaking and was sprawled out, still and silent. Sabrina and Marion sat on either side of the frame while Deja paced at the foot. Overnight, his hair had grown and knotted into hardened dreadlocks. Sabrina had never seen an infection that affected hair, but she assumed there was precedent somewhere outside her medical textbooks. The infection seemed to have traveled through him. His veins had darkened into brown rivers that showed through his waxen skin.
“He looks fucked up,” Linda said as she and Charity stepped back inside. Their hands were empty.
Sabrina looked up. Her face was streaked with tears, and her chest burned angry to see them empty-handed. “Did you find anything?”
Linda reached into her pocket and pulled out the chamomile and garlic.
Sabrina took the root. It would be useless—his inflammation was beyond the folk remedies her mother used to push—but she didn’t want to cause panic. Marion was clearly on the verge of a breakdown, mental or physical. “Marion, make yourself useful and go grab a cup of hot water—and a mortar and pestle.”
“Mortar and pestle?” Marion’s speech betrayed the dryness of her mouth.
“I’ll get it.” Charity glanced at Marion. “It’s the thing witches use to mash herbs in movies.”
“That bitch has got some skeletons in her closet,” Marion muttered.
Skeletons lived in bodies, not closets. Sabrina had always understood that. If you wanted to get at the root of a person, check their skin and bone, not the place they kept their clothes. One reason she loved Tristan was that his body matched his words. He hid little. Sabrina needed to touch him, to experience the transparency of him once more. To hold him and know she was touching truth, when so much truth was falling away minute by minute. She took his hand in hers, despite her prior warnings. What was there to lose now? She squeezed him. His skin didn’t give to her pressure.
“His hands feel hard.” Sabrina squeezed it again with her gloved hand. “Like he’s got lumps under his skin. Like cancer.”
Charity returned and handed the items over. Sabrina pretended to smile, then unwrapped the garlic bulb, separating each wedge from its casing. She let the skin flutter to the ground, dropping the meaty hunks into the mortar. She pushed the pestle into the cloves, twisting it as her mother had done while she watched, an eager child, until the scent of garlic overwhelmed the smell of impending demise. The scent reminded her of home. She couldn’t go back empty-handed.
Sabrina took a fingerful of crushed garlic clove. She wasn’t sure what to do with it, but she had to do something, anything, to keep the women from losing their minds. She pressed the crushed garlic into Tristan’s mouth, remembering the softness of his tongue on her fingers, on her belly. She pushed it deep into him, her finger brushing his tonsils. He didn’t even stir. His lips brushed against her gloves, and she wished her hands were bare so she could feel his mouth once more. His teeth caught on the glove as she pulled free her fist. She tugged harder. Still, he didn’t stir.
She cupped her hand against his chin to close his lips, then massaged his throat. His Adam’s apple refused to move at her insistence. “He’s not swallowing.” She moved her hands from his face, then fished the garlic pieces out of his mouth with one finger. She couldn’t make even a hopeless remedy look encouraging. She’d look for supplies herself.
As Sabrina stood, Marion let out a confused yelp. “But the hot water?”
“The water is for you.” Sabrina opened the can of chamomile flowers and dumped several into the water. She handed Marion the mug. “Drink this down.” Sabrina bent to the level of Marion’s eyes, like a doctor might do for a troubled patient. “You need to sleep. When we get back, you’re going to the bedroom, like it or not.”
Her chest lifted at being allowed to boss Marion around, even for one measly moment. Marion scowled, but she held the hot mug between her hands regardless. As the other women left the room, Sabrina caught her sniffing the sweet brew.
• • •
As Sabrina marched down the long hall to the only room Linda didn’t check, the wood walls and floor creaked around her like an echo as she passed each strange portrait. At Deja’s closed door, she wrapped her clammy hand around the knob. She pushed the door open.
Deja’s room was similar to the others. The theme was “Joshua Tree,” and the color scheme was a deep hunter-green, expressed in the quilt stretched over her bed, the stain of the bed frame built of sturdy lumber, and the seaweed-colored wallpaper. Sabrina’s heart hammered as she slid open the drawer in the dresser. Inside, she found pages stacked on pages, yellowed with time. She shuffled through them to discover the many artworks of a child. She pulled out a couple of sheets. One portrayed a giant tree with a grandmotherly face, the ridges of its bark the woman’s wrinkles. Another showed the manor. In an upper window, a little girl screamed at the window.
“Yikes,” Sabrina muttered. Down the hall, the floor whispered. Sabrina checked quickly each drawer and cranny, but found nothing more of note. Finally, in desperation, she pounded her fist deep into the bottom of a drawer. The bottom snapped in half. Scowling, she broke free several planks of board, revealing the true bottom. Her hands closed upon a thick book. It felt like something Deja would take from her if she saw it, so Sabrina slipped quietly from the room. Linda and Charity were walking toward her. She grabbed Linda’s arm and pulled her into an empty room. Its bed was covered in old sheets that looked so brittle, they may crumble if touched. Charity followed.
“I found something,” Sabrina whispered. She slid to the floor, blocking the closed door from the inside. As she propped the journal open in her lap, Linda and Charity joined her. Scratchy cursive dripped down the pages. Sabrina couldn’t make it out no matter how much she squinted. Charity and Linda scooted to either side of her, leaning over the notebook and blocking the light from the lone window. Sabrina shot them a single irritated glance.
“Is this Deja’s?” Linda asked.
Sabrina shrugged. “Now, how on earth would I know that?” Sabrina handed the journal over. “It was in an old dresser. Could be Deja’s. Could be some previous occupant’s.”
Linda thumbed through until she came to a page of diagrams, then drawings of trees with cut lines down the middle of their trunks.
“Huh.” Linda studied the drawings. “This is weird as shit.”
“They were millers, remember?” Charity said, straining her neck to peep.
“Yeah, but look at this.” Linda traced an illustration on the right side, which showed some sort of burial rite: a prone body with its arms crossed over its chest being injected with a needle and syringe. “I can’t read any of this.”
“It looks like English, but some sort of bastardization,” Charity said. Linda raised an eyebrow. “Lit major. Dropped out.”
Sabrina peered around the room with its obscure tree theme. “These people were obsessed with the forest,” she said.
“Wouldn’t you be? If you were surrounded by it and nothing else?” Charity said.
“And if you lived in a house built with living fucking lumber,” Linda said.
“Wait, what?” Sabrina wrinkled her forehead. What Linda had told her about the vine wrapping Brandon’s neck had stuck. The mention of living lumber was altogether new.
Charity and Linda exchanged glances. Linda filled Sabrina in on the weird fact Deja had unloaded on them after their shower: that the forest’s roots kept the lumber in the house alive.
“Is that even possible?” Sabrina said.
“Is any of what we’ve seen possible?” Charity said.
