Page 110 of The Witch's Orchard
“What the hell’s going on out here?” Susan shouts as she swings the door open. She’s wrapped up in her thick black sweater and wide-brimmed hat. Her black eyes stare at me in alarm. Her hands go up beside her, empty.
“Shooter,” I say. “Shooter on the mountainside. Where were you?”
“On my way up the mountain. We had a soft frost, so I was going to pick the rose hips and—good God, have you been shot?”
“Yes. I need to call the police. Don’t stand near the windows.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she says. “And your cell won’t work here. This whole mountain’s a dead zone. I keep a satellite phone for emergencies.”
She gets the phone down from a high shelf and calls 911, tells them what’s going on. Then she goes to a cabinet and opens a drawer, gets out a fresh washcloth, goes to her line of jars on the back shelf, takes one down, and opens it.
“Do you think they’re done?” she asks. “I haven’t heard anything since I was on my way back.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “They might just be waiting for me to go back up the hill toward the cabin but… if they see the cops, they’ll probably split.”
Susan uses a spoon to dab some yellow-green ointment onto the cloth and then, before I can react, she tugs up my sweatshirt and T-shirt. There’s an angry line of red right above my hip bone. She presses the cloth to it and then grabs my hand and mashes it onto the rag. The rag is damp and smells like weeds.
“Grazed,” she says. “It ain’t pretty, but I’d say you got lucky. Hold it there.”
I watch as Susan goes around the house closing her shutters. She flicks on the lights and adds another hunk of wood to the woodstove in the middle of the house, then goes to the battered old couch and pulls an orange and burgundy afghan from it. She comes back to me and wraps it around my shoulders.
“You’re in shock,” she says.
“No,” I say. “No, I’m not. I’ve… I’ve been under fire before and this isn’t—”
But I can barely get the words out. It’s as if I’m hypothermic. My teeth chatter. I shiver. The blanket begins to fall, and Susan squeezes it tight again. She pulls a pin from her scarf and sticks it through the afghan, and now it holds as tight as she does.
“I’ve been shot at—” I say as much to myself as her. A reminder of who I am. What I can do. What I can recover from.
“Don’t matter,” she says, rubbing her rough palms over my shoulders. “Don’t matter. You burn yourself on the stove, you’re always wary of that stove. Days or weeks or months pass. You’ll never forget the stove—the pain it caused, the scar it left.”
She leaves me and puts a kettle on and picks a mortar and pestle up from the counter and brings it back. She pulls sprigs of dried things out of different jars and then sits at the table in front of me and begins grinding.
“You’ve got a fever,” she says. “Did you know you’re sick?”
“I was sort of trying to ignore it,” I say, my voice raspy.
“Running yourself ragged, I’d say.”
I cough. It’s an ugly, wet sound.
“I told you to take better care of yourself. But no. You ran off and blew up a meth lab instead. You go scampering around in the fog in the most ungodly hours with no socks on. You don’t take care of yourself, Miss Gore. It’s almost like you don’t care what happens to you.”
I cough some more. Susan pours the crushed herbs into a ceramic mug.
“Did you get a look at them?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Sounded like a rifle,” she says.
The kettle whistles. She gets up and pours a stream of steaming water into the mug. A green, herby smell rises in a cloud. She pulls a jar of honey, the comb within, down from another shelf and sets it on the table, dips in a big spoon. She adds it to the tea, stirs for a while, sets it in front of me.
“What—”
“Just drink it,” she says. “Just drink it and feel better.”
I’m too tired to argue. The tea tastes like summer. Like a meadow and like sunshine and flowers.
