Spells for Forgetting(22)

Margaret smiled up at me with perfectly straight teeth, waiting for an answer. Behind her, posters for stamps dating back all the way to 1968 hung on the wall. No one had ever bothered to take them down.

“Just checking up on Albertine.” I gave her a version of the truth that would check out if she was comparing notes with anyone who saw me in that part of the woods.

“Ah. Well, all right, let me see if I can dig up that package for you.”

“Thanks.” The smile fell from my lips as soon as she shuffled to the back and my scarf twisted in my hands.

I knew how to play this game. I’d gotten very good at being watched, managing unspoken queries and indirect prying. Just when I thought things had finally settled, they resurfaced again in a rumor or a strange look cast in my direction in the market. People had been more forgiving of Dutch, chalking his sins up to youth, and when the town council made him the manager of the orchard, people had conveniently forgotten the past. I hadn’t been so lucky.

Margaret pushed through the door again with two packages stacked in her arms and set them down on the desk, almost dropping them. I sprang forward to catch the one on top before it fell.

“Oh!” She laughed, pushing her glasses back into place. “Thank you, honey. Don’t mind taking that one to Leoda, do you? Poor woman.”

Leoda would find a different kind of attention from the town now that the wound of that night had been ripped back open. With Lily’s parents gone, she and Hans were the only ones left of Lily’s family. I wasn’t sure which kind was worse—pity or suspicion.

“Not at all.” I shifted the packages on my hip, dropping the note into the trash bin. “I’ll see you, Margaret.”

The door closed behind me and I pulled up my hood, walking toward the steady stream of smoke trailing up from the crested roof of the apothecary. Grandparents or not, Leoda and Hans were among only a few people in town who seemed to remember that when Lily died, I’d lost my best friend. And soon after, I lost everything else.

Not a single light was illuminated in the dim shop when I ducked inside. The cool air seeped through the open windows, where colored bottles of plant medicines glowed like stained glass in the open cupboards. They held everything from foraged mushrooms, to scraped bark, to tangled roots that had been washed of the earth they’d once grown in.

“Right with you!” Leoda’s voice sang from the back room.

Behind the counter, an iron pot simmered on the little stove, filling the shop with the sweet scent of freshly cut sage and crushed juniper berries. Beside it, empty amber jars waited on the counter for the next batch of herbal honey.

“All right.” She rounded the corner with her wet hands wadded in her apron, and her steps faltered just a little when she caught sight of me. “Oh, it’s you, Em.” She exhaled, smiling.

I lifted the package before me. “This is yours. Margaret asked me to bring it by.”

She plucked up the glasses hanging around her neck and set them on her nose with a sigh before taking the box from me. “Good grief.”

Her fingers found the little knife in the pocket of her apron and she ran it along the taped edges in three quick strokes. I took it upon myself to open it when she set it down, reaching inside to take out the rolls of wrapped tissue and stack them on the counter. For a moment, we fell into an old pattern, dissipating the tension that had hung in the air moments ago. There had been a time when I didn’t know if Leoda would ever be able to speak to me again, much less look at me. But we’d all come a long way since then.

She picked up one of the bundles, half unwrapping it before she set it back down. The summers I’d worked here as a teenager, when the tea shop was closed for the season, came back to me in bright, shining colors. Each of those memories had Lily in them.

“Not there, honey.”

Leoda pulled at the chain around her neck when she saw the stack of rolled paper I’d unpacked and the old skeleton key appeared at its end. It fell into her palm and she went to the glass cabinet against the back wall. When the lock gave, the door swung open.

“Mandrake,” she said, almost to herself, “as medicinal as it is poisonous, I’m afraid.”

She crouched before it and I handed her the bundles one at a time until they were nestled in the little wire basket on the bottom shelf. A jar of bird’s feathers and a bowl filled with snake teeth sat above it alongside other items she’d collected from the island. They were the ingredients for a different kind of work than the cures and medicines she made. As kids, Lily and I had snuck the items in that cabinet for our own spells, hiding away in my grandmother’s greenhouse to utter old words over a candle’s flame.

“That smell brings back memories,” Leoda said, getting back to her feet with a grunt. She tipped her chin to the pot of bubbling herbal honey on the stove.

I smiled. “You paid us almost nothing to make those big batches and the honey was stuck in my hair for weeks.”

“Well, I had to keep you two busy. Trouble from the moment you were born, and I should know. I delivered you only three weeks apart.”

I’d heard that story spoken from her lips countless times, and it always bent her voice a little, the corners of her mouth turning down just slightly.

I leaned into the counter, watching her lock the cabinet.

“Saw you at the meeting last night,” she said, not looking at me.