“What’s wrong, Piper?” was all he could think to say.
Piper looked up at him, eyes bloodshot and watery, lip quivering, strands of wet hair slicked across her forehead. Brittle. This was the word that came to Tad’s mind. Hard, but likely to shatter easily. Brittle was a divot of soil that crumbles away from the base of an uprooted flower. Brittle was the brown leaves of the ficus plant Mr. Patel had forgotten to water while Tad was away on vacation. As an amateur botanist, he knew brittle.
She didn’t answer, so he asked again.
“Everything, Tad,” she choked out. “Just everything.”
Tad sat down across from her on the uncomfortable pea-gravel floor. “It’ll be okay. Take your time. Tell me what ‘everything’ means.”
Tad heard all the horrible facts: Piper’s parents had taken baby Grace to the emergency room. The doctor ran a blood test and concluded she had an infection. Antibiotics cleared that right up, but a few days later Grace was lethargic again, and this time the doctor called for a more thorough examination. She ran a battery of tests and determined that Grace had something called Alpers syndrome, a degenerative disease that attacks the nervous systems of babies and toddlers. “It’s horrible…” was Piper’s only added commentary.
And it was horrible; of course it was. But Tad, as was his nature, focused on the fix.
“Okay, your dad is retired military, which means he has awesome health insurance, right? Grace will get the very best treatment, and she’ll be back to crawling the walls in no time.”
Piper blinked hard, and a new surge of tears escaped her eyes. “You don’t get it.” She screwed the base of the clay pot into the loose gravel, jumped awkwardly to her feet, and loomed angrily over Tad. She yelled at him, just as she had a year ago as he tottered on her welcome mat. “This disease is always fatal! Grace is going to die, Tad! She’s going to die, and it’s all my fault! Because I broke my word! I broke the pact!”
Tad was confused. “What pact? What are you talking about?”
The cell phone in his pocket sounded. He knew from the ringtone—Darth Vader’s theme song—that it was his mother, calling from thirty yards away. The timing of the menacing music was embarrassingly inappropriate.
He leaped to his feet to make fishing the phone from his wet jeans pocket easier. “Yes?”
His mom: “Dinner, bud. Invite her or send her home.” Click.
Tad glanced back at the house. Through the slanting rain he saw his mother scowling at him from the kitchen window. What was it about mothers and bad timing? He snapped off a sarcastic soldier salute at her through the glass. “Jawohl, mein Kommandant.”
He turned back to Piper. “Um…my mom wants me to come in for dinner. You’re invited. Will you stay?” He figured she’d say no and fade from his life again, this time forever. He’d clearly failed to comfort her, and that was why she’d come, wasn’t it? “I wouldn’t blame you if you’d rather—”
“I don’t want to go home yet.” She sniffled. “Not right now.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He took the broken orchid from Piper and set it on a table. He didn’t ask her why it was broken. All things weighed, it didn’t seem important.
The Field Notes of Botanist Dr. Brisbane Cole
July 12, 1823
The Eastern Sun docked in Manhattan’s harbor early this rainy morning. I am home. The afternoon was spent supervising the transfer of my plant specimens from ship to shore, then on to their final destination, my private nursery on Staten Island. Although fewer than half of my samples survived the journey, I was pleased to find that any had endured the damnable salt air. During my absence, the plants will be cared for by a staff of horticulturists in my employ. I arrived at my brownstone in the early evening and was dismayed that my beloved Edwina was not able to greet me at the door. I found her laid up in bed, her illness far worse than Mrs. Muldoon’s tone had suggested. Still, our reunion was a joyous one. Edwina joined me in the parlor after supper and reminded me that today is my birthday, a fact that I, overwhelmed by my concern for her health, had plumb forgotten. She presented me with a magnificent gift. I decided right then to commission a portrait of myself holding it proudly. Mrs. Muldoon suggested we might hang the painting on the wall across from the fainting couch by the window, in the hope that it will coax Edwina to sit for a spell in the sunlight while I’m away. She looks so pale....
My beloved has requested I extend my visit. While I worry that delaying my quest will return to haunt me, I cannot say no, for fear that denying her wish may hasten her decline. She is certain that my trip to the Okefenokee Swamp will be a fool’s errand. She’d greatly prefer that I forgo the expedition so that we might spend her remaining days in each other’s cherished company. I will stay on in New York for an additional three weeks, but travel arrangements have been finalized. On the first day of August, I set sail for Savannah, Georgia. I must go, for the chance that I may yet save her. On the outskirts of the swamp lives a great Seminole chieftain named Micanopy, who claims to know of an extremely rare silver flower with the power to cure all ailments. Tension between the Creek Indians and the white settlers has been stoked by recent skirmishes in the Oke’s hinterlands. Regardless of the danger, I will go to Micanopy and ask for his help in finding the silver flower. Beg for it, if I must. If he takes my life, so be it. It is worth but a pittance compared to that of my darling wife.
Just this moment, Mrs. Muldoon informed me that Edwina has awoken from a fitful sleep and is calling for me. I make haste to her side.
Tad loaned Piper his dad’s rain slicker for the short walk to the house. “Don’t want you catching a chill,” he told her. “Even though it’s August, the drop in temperature from the greenhouse into the rain can be harsh.” He covered his own head with a plastic plant tray, but there were drainage holes in the bottom and the water pooled there and funneled through in thin streams, spattering on his ears and shirt. He barely noticed; his entire focus was on Piper.
“You don’t have to tell my mom what’s going on,” he assured her. “She’ll ask if you’re okay, but she won’t force you to talk if you don’t want to.” When it came to Tad’s personal life, his mother could pry like a crowbar, but she was surprisingly respectful of the boundaries of people who weren’t her son.
“Okay,” Piper muttered.
Tad was right. His mother asked generic questions at dinner, but when Piper wasn’t forthcoming, she didn’t press. They ate quietly, the clinking of dishware and the patter of rain on the domed skylight over the table substituted for conversation. After dinner, Piper excused herself and went to the bathroom. As soon as they heard the door creak shut, Mrs. Cole’s questions came in a hissing fury. “Why was Piper in the greenhouse? What’s wrong with her? Was she crying because of you? Is she in some kind of trouble? Are you in some kind of trouble? Start talking, mister.”
“Why were you spying on us, Mom? It was embarrassing.”
“Because I’m your mother and spying is my job, that’s why. And because I don’t trust that girl. It’s a small town—I’ve bumped into Piper and her gaggle enough times to tell that she’s changed, and not for the better.” She took a calming breath. “You’re a good kid with a big heart. When you lose people, it affects you deeper than most. I saw it when your dad died, and I saw it when Piper pushed you away. I don’t want you getting hurt again. Now spill.”
Tad kept it simple. He explained that one of Piper’s family members was very ill. He didn’t offer details, but this information alone was enough to change his mother’s attitude from suspicious to compassionate. “That girl” became “Oh, that poor girl.”
When Piper returned to the table, she was ready to leave. Mrs. Cole offered her a ride home. Piper declined, so Tad’s mom sent him to fetch a spare rain slicker from his bedroom closet. “I don’t want you catching pneumonia,” she said, and patted Piper’s hand. She didn’t even try to stop Piper from following Tad up the stairs. “Leave the door open, bud!�
� was her only condition, and that was a bona fide miracle. His mom was strict when it came to girls, but she knew Piper hadn’t come over for that kind of monkey business.
Piper found a spot on the corner of Tad’s bed that wasn’t buried in an avalanche of laundry, and sat down. Tad rummaged through the back of his closet and retrieved a blue rain slicker he’d outgrown last year. It would fit Piper perfectly. He’d sprouted nearly a full foot since their friendship went into deep freeze. If they hugged, his chin would rest squarely on the top of her head—and, yes, he knew this because he’d worked it out in his wild imagination.
“It’s weird.…” Tad hung the jacket over one of the bed knobs; he wasn’t ready for her to leave just yet. “You haven’t been in my room since we were, what, eleven?”
“Sounds about right,” she said. “Where’d all the Star Wars posters go?”
“I trashed them. I still love the movies, but the posters weren’t doing much for my street cred.” Glancing around his room, seeing it through a guest’s perspective for the first time, he realized that the shelves, groaning under the weight of science books, didn’t exactly scream gangsta. Neither did the lithographs of exotic plants painted by Walter Hood Fitch that decorated the walls where his movie posters had hung last year.
“I like the changes. They suit you.” Piper took a peek through the telescope on the tripod by the window, but the lens was capped, so she turned her attention to the metal globe on his nightstand. Tad had placed magnetic flags on the countries he’d visited personally—eighteen flags in total, not bad for a guy his age. He wasn’t exactly Indiana Jones, but he wasn’t sheltered either. Piper batted the globe, setting his world spinning.
“I didn’t get rid of everything,” Tad told her. “I still have this.” He handed her an ugly ceramic mug with THADDEUS, his full name, written on the side in blue sparkly paint. If it wasn’t for the writing, the mug could have been mistaken for something a caveman might have owned. It was little more than a sad, misshapen hunk of pottery with a handle.
“I can’t believe you kept that ugly thing,” said Piper.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked. “You made it for me.”
She turned the mug over in her hands. There was her signature on the bottom, glazed, fired in a kiln, preserved for all eternity. “But it sucks. If it were any more lopsided…Doesn’t it tip over when you fill it?”
“Nope, it works fine.” He didn’t tell her that he’d used it every day since she gave it to him for Christmas four years before, despite the fact that he’d chipped a tooth on the too-thick rim. “It was a thoughtful gift.”
“Not as thoughtful as yours. I’m really sorry I broke the flower.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sure it was an accident.”
She blushed. “I wish I could say it was. I was so angry when I got the news about Grace. I threw a blind tantrum. I broke my laptop and, worse, the orchid. That was days ago. I should have brought it to you sooner, but I was embarrassed. I didn’t want you to see what I’d done to your beautiful flower.”
His heart flickered. She valued his gift over an expensive laptop. She’d loved it after all. “It’s okay,” he told her. “I still consider it an accident. Or at least temporary insanity.”
“Can it be fixed?”
Tad examined the patient by memory. “Maybe. If I use pruning shears to cut the broken stem off at the base of the plant, then it might survive. But there won’t be any more flowers until the next blooming cycle. Plants are resilient, for the most part,” Tad told her. “As long as their roots are healthy, they can usually make a comeback.”
Piper stared down at her phone’s screensaver, a photo of Grace. “It’s strange, isn’t it? People think flowers are so delicate, but humans are the fragile ones. Or maybe it’s just me. Everything I care about seems to break.”
Tad burrowed his butt into the pile of laundry, creating a seat for himself next to Piper. He sat there quietly for a while, arms folded across his knees. Then he took a deep breath and asked the question.
“There’s nothing the doctors can do for Grace? Nothing at all?”
“No.”
“I’m so sorry, Piper.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
Of course it wasn’t his fault. Neither was the incident in Washington, yet she’d still blamed him for that. Severed their friendship over it. He was surprised to find a heartworm of bitterness living inside him, still gnawing away, despite having missed her desperately. But this wasn’t about him, and feeling sorry for himself at that moment would be shameful, so he pushed past it.
“There’s no medication that can help?” he asked.
“I mean, sure, they’ll stuff her with all kinds of drugs,” Piper told him, “but only to keep her from suffering. They can’t actually cure her.”
“I can recommend some holistic herbals if you’d like,” he offered. “Some of those hospital drugs can be harsh stuff with bad side effects. Herbals might balance them out a bit. I have some plants growing in the greenhouse that may help.”
“Thanks,” she said, “but what I really need is a plant that’ll save her life. Nothing like that in your greenhouse, I suppose.”
“A cure-all plant? No. I’m afraid not. Not inside my greenhouse, anyway.”
Piper tilted her head and studied him curiously. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?”
“Is there such a plant outside your greenhouse?”
“Huh?” It took Tad a moment to see what she was driving at, but when he understood, he backpedaled in earnest. “Piper, I didn’t mean to suggest that somewhere in the world is a magical plant that can fix everything, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Then what?” She leaned in close, locking on to his eyes. She’d found some kernel of hope in his words and had latched on to it like a starving bird. She was making him uncomfortable.
“There’s nothing,” he said. “Really.”
She didn’t believe him. “Tell me, Tad.”
“I just think there are plants we haven’t discovered…in the rain forest, on the mountaintops, in caves…that can cure specific diseases if we can find them before lumber companies tear them up or ranchers burn them to the ground to make grazing land for their cattle. There are examples—”
“Examples? What examples?”
“The yew tree, for one. The bark is used to make drugs that treat cancer. And the prickly burdock is great for poison ivy—can vouch for that remedy personally. Sage isn’t a cure-all, but it has more than one purpose. It relieves cramps, fights colds, and is a great salve for burns. It can even bring color back to graying hair—ask my mom and she’ll tell you I’m the cause and sage is the cure.”
Piper didn’t care about gray hair or poison ivy. She needed a plant that could eradicate the evil sickness that had settled into her sister’s tiny body. “Tad, think. Please. Is there anything growing in the wild? Something Grace’s doctors may have overlooked? If the yew tree can cure cancer—”
“I didn’t say cure,” he corrected her. “I said treat. The yew bark treats cancer. That’s a huge difference.”
“Still…” Piper got up off the bed and had a look at Tad’s bookshelves. She scanned his stacks of old textbooks. Most of them were written by stuffy dead guys like Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, and David Douglas, a Scottish botanist. All the books were thick and heavy. In Piper’s opinion, they’d make better nutcrackers than reading material. She ran her finger across a row of books. “Maybe there’s something in one of these old bricks that might help.”
Tad thought for a moment, then went to his cluttered desk. “None of those. But maybe this one.”
He moved some papers around and found a small square book with a plain brown cover. A blue tongue of silk ribbon lolled out from the pages. He handed it to Piper. “This was written two hundred years ago by my great-great-great…by an ancestor of mine.”
Piper read the title a
loud: “The Field Notes of Botanist Dr. Brisbane Cole.” She flipped the book over. “No author photo?”
“It’s a personal journal. Besides, Dr. Cole went missing a year before chemical photography was invented.” Tad hoped that bit of obscure knowledge would impress her.
Piper opened the journal to the title page and scanned the entry dates. “Eighteen twenty-three? That’s like…ancient.”
“Dr. Cole was a big-time plant hunter back in the early nineteenth century. He spent most of his time overseas looking for exotic species, but before he died he returned to the United States to search for a rare plant. One said to produce a single silver flower every year. The Creek Indians claimed it could cure anything. It grew in only one place, the Okefenokee Swamp.”
“That’s an hour’s drive!”
“Yes.”
“It’s okay if you want to spoil the ending of the book, Tad. Did Dr. Cole ever find the silver flower?”
“Nobody knows,” said Tad. “My ancestor went into the Okefenokee and never came out. Some people think he was killed by his swamp guides, two Seminole Indians. This all took place a year before the Seminole Wars broke out. Whites were moving into the swamp, cutting down trees and tearing up the land. Apparently, one of his guides disappeared with him. The other, a thirteen-year-old Seminole boy, fled. He was caught and interrogated by men from one of the timber companies. The kid claimed Dr. Cole had been dragged away by demons living in the swamp. Nobody believed him, of course. They made plans to hang him for my ancestor’s murder, but they never got the chance. He escaped and disappeared. If anyone found the flower, we’ll never know. This journal covers their expedition up until the point where Dr. Cole went missing. Some lumberjacks searching for clues found it at his abandoned campsite and delivered it to the authorities. They searched for him, of course, but his body was never found.”
“Do you think the flower might be there still, waiting to be discovered?” Piper asked. “Do you think we could find it?”
The Murk Page 5