Falling In (16 page)

The next part of this story is a blur. How can I describe a blur to you? Maybe I can’t. Maybe you should just close your eyes and think of clouds and, holding that thought, turn round and round and round.

Do you feel blurry yet?

Do you feel slightly ill and rushed and a touch out of sorts? A tad confused? Spin some more. Go faster, and while you do—

Take that picture of Grete you have in your mind. You’ve been reading about her for pages and pages now, so I know you have a picture. But it’s a picture of someone up and moving about, isn’t it? Someone lively and full of life? Well, change all
that. Picture her lying down, unconscious, very sick, dying, almost dead.

And then spin around some more.

You know, I’m not actually a trained storyteller. They have schools for storytellers in which they learn the tricks for describing these things, but I don’t want you just to see it, I want you to feel it, too, and I wonder if that’s something they can teach you at storytelling school. You’ve come this far, traveled more than a few miles, and you deserve a place of honor in the middle of these next scenes, right there in the center of the room, invisible of course, but watching it all and feeling it all, being caught up in the blur and the fear and the racing hearts—

Keep spinning.

Keep spinning—

Isabelle’s head was spinning and her eyes blurred with tears as she mashed the berries with her hands. But she refused to cry. No time for crying, no time to find the heavy pestle Grete used for crushing leaves and stems into a mush. No time for spoons or forks. Purple juice stained Isabelle’s fingers, ran down her arms. She didn’t know how many berries they needed, so she’d thrown all of them in the bowl, and now they were lumped together in a purple, juicy soup that jumped halfway up to her elbows each time she mashed down.

“Wake up, old woman,” Isabelle heard Samuel yell from Grete’s room. She could hear his knife tearing through the vines. “You need to wake up now!”

She hurried down the hall with the bowl of mush, trying not to spill, wishing as hard as she knew how that her hands would stop trembling. She’d never been so shaky, felt so helpless. When this was over and done with, she would learn everything in the world there was to know about healing herbs and plants, and then the next time someone was poisoned or deathly ill or had the slightest bit of tickle in their nose, the barest hint of fever, she’d be prepared. No more swirling, dizzy Isabelle, her hands a mess of mush.

By the time Isabelle reached the door, Samuel had untied Grete, but she was still unconscious. “She won’t wake up,” he reported. “I shook her and shouted at her, but her eyes won’t open.”

“Sit her up so her head’s leaning back against the wall,” Isabelle ordered, setting the bowl down on the table next to Grete’s bed. She was guessing what to do. She hoped that at any second Samuel would take charge and start shouting out instructions, but Samuel looked as lost as Isabelle felt.

“You sit next to her and hold her,” Isabelle continued.
Her throat tightened, but she forced herself to sniff back her tears. No time, no time! Besides, when had Isabelle Bean ever been a crybaby? Been afraid of anything (besides snakes, and practically everybody was afraid of snakes)? There was no time to wilt like a lettuce leaf. Isabelle took a deep breath, straightened her spine. “Tilt her head back, and I’ll spoon the stuff in her mouth,” she said, trying to sound less wobbly than she felt.

Samuel nodded.
He looks like he’s going to be sick,
Isabelle thought as she dipped the spoon into the berries. She thought this thought in a clinical sort of way, deciding to ignore the goings-on in her own guts, the churning and swirling, the acidy dance—

No. No time for that. Dip the spoon in the bowl. No trembling. No shaking. Just dip and lift to Grete’s mouth.

Isabelle did what she told herself to do. Her fingers only wobbled a little bit, her stomach only lurched halfway up her throat. The spoon slipped easily into Grete’s mouth, past her teeth, over her tongue. “Sip it all, Grete, the whole thing,” Isabelle
whispered, and Samuel tilted Grete’s head back to help the juice down her throat.

Again, the spoon over the lips and past the teeth. Down the throat. “Give her some water, don’t ya think?” Samuel asked calmly, as though he did this sort of thing every day, as though he weren’t scared to death too. He handed Isabelle a cup, and she tilted it above Grete’s mouth, poured some water in. Grete coughed, sputtered, swallowed.

“That’s the trick,” Samuel exclaimed, just as Grete’s stomach lurched. He quickly turned her on her side, held her head over the bowl he’d placed by her pillow. Grete heaved, and Samuel held on.

Isabelle held on to the bedpost, dizzy again, her head a swirl of noise, no words, just rush and buzz and tremble. Her knees buckled, but she caught herself, yanked herself up.

“More,” she told Samuel after he’d pulled Grete back to a sitting position and wiped her mouth with his sleeve. “We’ve got to get it all out.”

So they did it all again, and again, and after the last spoonful, the last hurl of purple mush, Grete’s
eyes opened. She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just lay there breathing, her eyes darting back and forth between Isabelle and Samuel.

“There’s an awful side to it,” she whispered when she was finally able to speak. She lifted her head up to take a sip of water from the cup Samuel offered. “To this healing business. A dark and terrible side. But I knew you wouldn’t be afraid.”

Isabelle slumped into the chair next to the bed. Not afraid? Not afraid of mashing berries or spooning mush, maybe, or even of holding Grete’s shoulders as the poison rushed out of her. She wasn’t afraid of doing what needed to be done.

No, it wasn’t the doing that made Isabelle afraid. It was the watching. Bad enough that Grete might die—but to watch Grete die? To sit there and watch as the life drained out of her face and hands? Isabelle’s brain reeled at the thought.

Grete reached over and touched Isabelle’s hand. “Everyone’s afraid of that, girl. The worst thing, to watch a bad death.”

The world blurred in front of Isabelle’s eyes.
Blurred and went spinning like it had been pushed off its axis—spinning into nothingness, blackness—

“But I’m not dead,” Grete reminded her in a raspy whisper of a voice. “A bit worse for the wear, mind you, but not dead.”

“You done good,” Samuel said to Isabelle. “Good as Hen would have done, I’d wager.”

She looked to the window, wishing Hen would appear. Grete wasn’t dead, but Isabelle knew there was more to do. How do you heal a stomach torn up by poison? Isabelle hadn’t the slightest idea, not a clue. Hen would have to take over from here.

It was early the next morning when the buzz began again in Isabelle’s ears. She’d been sitting with Grete, dozing off for short stretches, then waking to give Grete sips of water. She and Samuel had spent the night before cleaning up mush and muck and bile in a tub in the kitchen, having wiped the floor with rags and taken the spoiled sheets off Grete’s bed and exchanged them for clean ones. When
they’d finally finished, Samuel had lain down on a pallet of blankets at the foot of Grete’s bed and fallen into a hard, deep sleep. Isabelle sat in the chair next to Grete’s bed and kept watch until her eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer.

At first the buzz wove its way into Isabelle’s dreams without disturbing her at all. Her head had been so full of strange noises and happenings all day, the buzz wasn’t enough to catch her attention. But when she woke up, the buzz was still there. She turned quickly to Grete to see if she was breathing. When she was sure the old woman was fine, Isabelle stood, careful not to wake her, and walked to the porch.

The yard was empty. Still, the buzz grew louder in Isabelle’s ears. She sat down in a rocker and waited. The yard slowly filled with light. The buzz grew even louder. Isabelle kept waiting.

Hen was the first to crash through the woods into the yard. “Is she dead?” she cried when she saw Isabelle. “Jacob said she was half-dead when he left here.”

“She’s alive,” Isabelle reported, practically dropping out of her chair with relief at the sight of Hen. “She’s in the bedroom. Try not to wake her up, though. She’s pretty beat.”

Hen ran up the porch steps, nearly stumbling in her hurry to get through the door. The buzz grew louder. Isabelle turned expectantly toward the woods, and sure enough, here came Jacob, with Rat Face behind him, holding Sugar in his arms.

“Is she still alive?” Jacob called across the yard. “Did the berries work?”

“They worked, they worked,” Isabelle told him. “Boy, did they ever.”

“Is this where the witch lives?” Sugar asked sleepily. “Jacob says she’s a nice witch, but I never heard of a nice witch, have you?”

Isabelle stood and walked out into the yard. “She’s not a witch. Jacob, you didn’t go back and tell everyone you found a witch, did you?”

“Told ‘em I found the very witch we’d been hearing about all these years, but that she wasn’t bad at all. Pretty friendly, actually,” Jacob said, sounding
pleased with this bit of diplomacy. “Told ‘em they didn’t have a thing in the world to be scared about with this here witch, not a thing.”

But Isabelle felt the chill of fear close over her, and when she looked to the edge of the yard, she saw a dozen or so kids from the camp standing at the edge of the woods—she could see Elizabeth and Luke and Cornelia and some of the others she’d nursed, little and big, all standing in the warm light of the morning, shivering and hollow eyed, most of them with sticks in their hands.

“They came with you?” Isabelle asked, turning to Rat Face, who nodded. “But why?”

“Heard about the witch and wanted to see for themselves. Some of ‘em want to do more than just see her.” He gently set Sugar down. “They want to have at her, if you catch my meaning. Jacob’s been trying to talk ‘em out of it, but they won’t listen.”

“Elizabeth?” Isabelle called. “Elizabeth, what are you doing?”

“We just want to make sure that witch can’t do any more harm.”

“But you know she’s not a witch,” Isabelle insisted. “Samuel and I explained it.”

Elizabeth entered the clearing, a large branch in her hand. “But you’re her granddaughter. Why would you tell the truth about her? Too much of a risk to believe you, I decided.”

Just when you think you know somebody,
Isabelle thought, fighting the panic rising inside of her. “But why wouldn’t you believe Samuel?”

Elizabeth eyed Isabelle coldly. “You’re both strangers to me. And you’ve got witchy gifts, don’t you?”

Isabelle’s mouth fell open. “But so do you! You knew that my mom misses me!”

“It’s what you wanted to hear,” Elizabeth said with a shrug. “Anybody could have guessed that about you.”

As the two girls were talking, the other children had gathered behind Elizabeth, and they now formed a small army. Isabelle didn’t know if she could defend herself against them. She thought suddenly of the packet of spores Grete had given her before she’d left
for the camp. Where was it? She’d carried it back with her, she was almost positive.

Elizabeth moved toward Isabelle. “I want to see this witch for myself. And I want you to get out of my way.”

Isabelle stood where she was. She looked past Elizabeth to the others. “You look a lot better, Luke,” she said. “How’s your head feel?”

“Ah, ya know, pretty good an’ all,” he told her. He started to say something else, but Elizabeth glared at him and he shut his mouth.

“Cornelia?” Isabelle called to the little girl who’d once thought she was her dearest friend Dorie. “Did you drink your tea before you left camp?”

Cornelia nodded, then looked down at the ground. The branch she carried wasn’t much, more like a twig. Isabelle tried to imagine her using it to kill Grete. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Absolutely ridiculous—

In a flash, Elizabeth was trying to push past, butting Isabelle sideways with her shoulder. Isabelle barely managed to stay on her feet. She had to think
fast. How could she stop this girl and her stick and all the other kids and their sticks? She needed a stick—no, a tree, a forest—

“She’s sick!” she cried out in desperation. “If you go in there, you’ll wake her up!”

Rat Face came and stood beside her. “Like that’ll stop this lot,” he muttered under his breath, but shoulder to shoulder with Isabelle he helped make a wall against the invaders. “Why can’t you leave an old woman be?” he said to the others. “She’s half-dead inside there.”

“Like you were, remember?” Isabelle pleaded. “If she’s a witch, how could she be so sick? Hen’s in there giving her tea, just like we gave tea to you to bring down your fevers. Remember?”

“Has she got a fever, then?” a boy who looked about nine asked. “Does she have what we had?”

Jacob stepped forward. “Actually, I poisoned her. Completely by mistake. Didn’t mean to; it just happened.”

“You poisoned her because you knew she was a witch,” Elizabeth hissed.

“Nah, I was trying to make a pie. Wasn’t trying to put poison in it. Read the label wrong, is all.” Jacob looked embarrassed. “Honest mistake, anybody could make it.”

Luke raised his hand. “Could we see her? I mean, not to kill her or nothing. Just to see how she is? ‘Cause I never heard of a witch being sick. Feel sorry for her, if it’s true. I ain’t never felt so bad in my life, way I did with that fever.”

“Put down your sticks, and I’ll take you inside,” Isabelle told everyone. “But you have to be quiet. She needs to sleep.”

“I slept for days and days when I was sick,” Sugar said, making it sound like it had been years since she’d had the fever. “And I never heard of a witch who got sick either.”

“Witches don’t get sick,” said Isabelle, reaching out one hand to Luke and the other to Cornelia, who’d dropped her pitiful twig in the grass. She didn’t know if this was true or not, but it made sense. “That’s how we know Grete’s not a witch.”

“Or if she is, she’s a nice one,” Jacob said affably.

Isabelle turned and gave him the finger across the throat sign.
Cut it out,
she mouthed.
Ix-nay on the itch-way.