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CHAPTER 1

Home Remedies

When Lena gets sick, June, her mother, doesn't notice for two days. It's a Kentucky January, bleak and rainy with an occasional paltry snow, and Lena's father, Patrick, from whom June has been divorced one year, has just announced his plans to remarry in March. Lena hears her mother talking to friends on the phone, her voice cheery and capable. "Oh, well, you know, it was bound to happen. We're both moving on. Now, six months ago? I would have been shaken to the core." But off the phone, June shifts around the house, teary-eyed at irrelevant things she brings to Lena's attention: a greeting-card commercial on television, the few dead leaves still stuck to the branches of the sycamore outside the kitchen window, a lumpy ceramic turtle Lena made for Patrick in kindergarten, four years ago. To cheer up, June gives herself a home perm, and her hair turns frazzly, separating into kinky hunks with straight, brittle ends. "What do you think?" June says, holding up the back of her hair with her hand, lowering her head for Lena to see.

Lena squeezes a fistful, says it feels like the pink roof insulation in the attic. This sends June to her bedroom for an hour.

At school Lena sits at her desk, listless and warm. The glands at the back of her throat swell to the size of peas, and when her teacher takes the class to the bathrooms, Lena pushes past the other girls to the mirrors over the sink, where under the fluorescent light she tries to see. She opens her mouth so wide that the corners crack into tiny grains of dry skin, but her throat lies in shadow. All day she probes the lumps with the back of her tongue, just to make sure they're still sore. She likes how her voice has gone husky.

At home June circles the wedding date, March twelfth, with a red pen on the calendar by the refrigerator. Since the announcement she's been talking to the pastor each week again, as she did just after the divorce, and has taken to repeating for Lena phrases he gives her: "You must learn to love yourself," and "All things work together for good."

"I want you to fully grasp that," she tells Lena. It's easy, she's said on the phone, to talk to Lena as though the girl is much older. It could have something to do with how Lena's eyes shrink behind thick glasses, how in sickness her skin has taken on a yellowish tint.

"Do you love yourself, Lena?" June asks, bringing her face so close that Lena can see every hair, every pore. This close, faces look like something else entirely, the nubbly surface of the planets Lena's seen on science shows.

"I guess," says Lena. She's never thought about feeling anything at all for herself, as though she were another person, but June seems to think it's important, which means it might be or it might not be. The problem with June, Lena once heard Patrick say, is that everything turns into a big production. A weepy federal case.

"What's that you're doing with your mouth?" June says.

Lena has been feeling her glands, and she bites her tongue to keep it still. On her hot forehead, June's palm is clammy.

"You're burning up, Lena. You're hot as can be. Have you been feeling bad?"

"I can feel my throat," Lena says.

"You're sick," June says. "Lena, you're sick. I didn't notice and you didn't say. Why didn't you say? You have to say, Lena." June's fingers disappear into her stiff hair. She closes her eyes and says, "I feel like a horrible mother."

IT TURNS OUT TO BE strep throat. June takes off from work, the doctor gives Lena some medicine, and after four days and a weekend Lena returns to school. But three weeks later, she's sick again. This happens sometimes, the doctor says. If the antibiotic doesn't kill all the bacteria, they come back with renewed force. Lena pictures it like tug-of-war in gym. All the bacteria on one team, lunging hard to make their comeback.

June is in a pinch. She processes payments at the electric company and has run out of days she can take off. The woman who used to sit for Lena during the day now has two toddlers of her own, and won't expose them to strep.

All the mothers of Lena's friends work, the teenaged girls are in school, and Patrick lives half a day away, over the border into Tennessee. So the pastor makes an announcement at church about a member needing a sitter, and the following Monday morning Mrs. Shefferd arrives. She is a small, bony woman, with short hair gone completely white, and she wears a faux leopard-print coat from Sears, some thirty years old. Because it doesn't button all the way, Mrs. Shefferd wears a jacket underneath, and several sweaters underneath the jacket.

"Lena, back to bed," June says. She clips earrings onto her earlobes and buttons her own coat. "Mrs. Shefferd, I've left directions on the counter."

"Go on, now," says Mrs. Shefferd, her voice throaty and sure. "You don't worry about a thing."

Each morning when Lena wakes up, Mrs. Shefferd greets her with a glass of water. The directions say for Lena to drink a glass of water each hour, even though after the fourth glass, fourth hour, she can hear her stomach sloshing and has to pee every ten minutes. The directions also say when the antibiotic is to be taken and what Lena is to have for lunch each day. The notes make it clear Lena should stay in bed, but Mrs. Shefferd allows her to lie on the couch in the front room and watch television. Mrs. Shefferd rocks purposefully in June's antique rocking chair, the one Lena's supposed to be careful of. During commercials she asks Lena questions. Not the questions Lena has come to expect from old ladies — nothing about school, or church, or her parents. Instead, Mrs. Shefferd offers choices. "Where would you rather live," she asks, "the beach or the mountains?" Lena says "beach" and Mrs. Shefferd reminds her of hurricanes and tidal waves. Lena says "mountains" and Mrs. Shefferd reminds her, cheerfully, that some mountains are volcanoes.

"If you could only eat foods that begin with 'r' or 'c,' Mrs. Shefferd says, "which would you pick?" "R," Lena says.

"No celery? No Cream of Wheat?" "I like roast beef," Lena says.

"Oh, yes, and rhubarb and rutabaga," says Mrs. Shefferd. "Good thinking."

When Lena feels like being up and around, she drags projects out from the back of her closet — crocheting that her grandmother tried to teach her on the last visit, a halffinished floral paint-by-number, the oils gone slick and runny inside their tiny plastic vials. Mrs. Shefferd comments politely on the painting and fingers the crocheting — just a granny square in tricolor pink yarn that Lena can't even remember how she made.

"I don't know how to crochet," Mrs. Shefferd says. She holds the square to the lamp, then rubs it against her face, eyes closed. "My mother was a different breed." Lena, kneeling at her feet, can smell cinnamon on Mrs. Shefferd's breath. On the television people exclaim and jump around, having won a prize for guessing something, but Lena has turned down the sound.

Lena brings out her shoebox of teeth from her father's office of orthodontics. They aren't real, are really just the molds he makes of patients' teeth, to display on before-and-after shelves in the waiting room and to take to conferences. These are the leftovers, and Lena lines them up on the living room floor for Mrs. Shefferd to admire, which she does; so many sets of jaws, incisors twisted in their sockets, or pushed into unnatural rows, and plaster gums that just end, the irregular shapes of upper mouths. There are also strips of wax in little boxes, miniature rubber bands of all colors that Lena and Mrs. Shefferd string on yarn for necklaces, and a black mouthpiece Lena's father uses to wedge open his patients' mouths, and to pin down their tongues. It's a durable plastic, so that if the hand of his assistant slips, or even his own — though this has never happened — and nicks a tongue or gouges the inside of a cheek with a wire, the plastic piece keeps the patient's jaw from clamping shut on anyone's fingers.

In the bathroom Lena and Mrs. Shefferd angle a flashlight so that Lena can see her throat in the mirror. Mrs. Shefferd points with the wrong end of a toothbrush. "Those are the glands you can feel," she says, indicating red nodules behind her teeth. They look smaller than they feel on Lena's tongue. Her throat and the inside of her mouth are all slimy pink, shot through with tiny purple veins. "And those," Mrs. Shefferd says, pointing just behind the first pair, "are your tonsils." Lena strains toward the light. The tonsils look like red raisins embedded in the veiny surface.

Mrs. Shefferd frowns when she doles out the antibiotic before making lunch. "It's not what they think," she says, standing over Lena at the table. "These make you weak. Next time you'll need more to do the same thing, mark my words."

Lena feels the capsule on the back of her tongue. Just last year she had to have syrup because she gagged, but now she can swallow a pill without flinching, though she feels its shadow in her throat for a minute afterward, no matter how much water she drinks.

"My mother would have done something different," Mrs. Shefferd says. "I'm not criticizing. Your mother does the best she can. She's good with the water. It flushes out your system."

For lunch Mrs. Shefferd heats canned soup, or spreads peanut butter and jelly. One day she makes toast, because that's what Lena wants, even though it's not specified in the directions. Mrs. Shefferd makes toast in the skillet, with butter, instead of in the toaster. Fried toast. Lena, who hasn't been eating well, eats twelve pieces. Mrs. Shefferd has six or seven, and then toasts the heels of the bread for dessert. When June comes home, she asks what happened to all the bread, but Lena just shrugs.

After the wedding announcement, June begins to appear beside Lena's bed in the middle of the night. "Lena," she says, shaking her awake. "Lena, we need to talk about your father getting married again. You're upset, I know. You can tell me how you really feel. What do you think of Mandy?"

June sits on the edge of the bed, looking fuzzy around the edges to Lena, whose glasses are on the dresser. On her lap June holds a handful of white Kleenex, which glow from the streetlight shining through the window.

"She's fine," Lena says, yawning.

"You can tell me," June says.

"She's fine," Lena says again. Mandy has a convertible, and at Christmas she put the top down and took Lena for a drive, even though it was only forty degrees out. Mandy likes country music and taught Lena the two-step. Mandy makes muscles in her own thighs and slaps at them, trying to see any jiggle.

"I know it's confusing," June says. "This is such a difficult time for both of us."

"Are you going to cry?" Lena asks. She likes to know in advance so she can prepare herself. The first few times she saw June cry, right after Patrick left, Lena just sat there watching until June said, through tears, "Could you hug me, do you think? Would that be such a chore?"

When Lena hugged her, too late, she discovered that June didn't smell the way she used to smell. She used to smell like lotion and the wind, but she'd begun to smell like coffee and dirty hair, even though she washed her hair every day.

"I don't know," says June now. "I might cry, I might not."

Lena can hear in June's voice that it was the wrong thing to ask.

"Would that be okay with you, Lena, if I happened to cry about something? Do you think you could tolerate that? If I happened to feel bad enough about something to cry?" June has indeed begun to cry, with her eyes open, looking at Lena while the tears gather and spill out.

"You can cry," Lena says. She feels achy in the back of her neck.

"Oh, thank you," says June. "Thank you, Lena, for your permission. I try not to burden you with my problems." She's stopped crying.

For a few moments they are silent. Lena closes her eyes. She memorizes where each thing in her room is. Her dresser under the window, her bookcase beside the bed, her trunk with the extra blankets and her summer clothes. She pictures the lamp on the dresser, the framed photos of her mother, father, and grandmother on top of the bookcase. She thinks that if she were blind she might be able to make it around the room just fine, locating each and every thing from memory, never running into corners or forgetting where she put something.

"Lena?" June says.

Lena opens her eyes.

"What were you thinking?"

"I don't know," Lena says.

"Just now. Tell me what you were thinking." June is looking at her closely.

"I can't remember," Lena says.

"Do you miss Daddy?" June asks, mangling the word "Daddy" with a special emphasis.

"I don't know," Lena says. June has asked this before, but the way things are now gets in the way of what Lena remembers. She talks to Patrick on the phone every other week, and it seems so long since he lived with them that Lena can't imagine things any other way.

"Were you thinking about Daddy?" June asks, wincing again at the word. She is working the Kleenex with her fingers, wadding them into a tiny ball.

"I was thinking what if I was blind."

"And?" June's hands stop.

"That's it," says Lena.

Mrs. Shefferd tells Lena that her mother's name was Harriet, but everyone called her Hat, even Mrs. Shefferd.

"She was fearless," says Mrs. Shefferd. "Against her parents' wishes, she ran off with a boy just discharged from the army. She was a Kentucky girl, like you, and only fifteen years old, and she ran with him all the way to Sandwich, New Hampshire, where they married."

They're standing by the kitchen sink. Mrs. Shefferd runs hot water into a glass and stirs in salt for Lena to gargle.

The boy's name was Henry, though Mrs. Shefferd heard Hat say it only once, years later. While Lena gargles, Mrs. Shefferd tells her how Hat loved him fiercely for over two years. Then how, during their third winter, she and Henry went out onto Squam Lake to the fishing hole hacked into the thinner ice out toward the middle, a rough circle about the size of a washtub. They set up their poles and Hat wandered off about fifty yards to watch a group of skaters scraping a patch of ice smooth with shovels. Then she watched them show each other how to spin, thick as bears in their bulky clothes, but graceful, too. Out there on the lake, under a low gray sky indistinguishable from the cloudy ice, it was easy to lose time, and when Hat turned to go back to her husband, she saw only their fishing gear, their tin lunchbox, and the burlap sack they'd brought to sit on. At the time she'd been a month pregnant with Mrs. Shefferd, but she didn't know it yet. Hat cried out and ran, skidding in her boots, toward the hole. She plunged into the frigid, dark water, where she remained submerged for a full minute, looking for him, before the skaters pulled her out.

The skaters didn't have to look for Henry. They'd seen him leave. Over by the shore, where the ice could get up to ten feet thick, there'd been a young woman learning to drive her father's Model A Ford. She'd been tracing a figure eight, and Henry had gone over to have a look at the engine. The skaters said he'd traced a couple of figure eights with her, then they drove right off the ice and onto the road, and, Hat found out later, kept driving to Manchester, where they lived together for years.

Lena spits the last of the salt water into the sink. Outside in the yard the snow has melted in muddy patches. She thinks of the nearest body of water, a reservoir across town that freezes only halfway, and that only twice or so a winter.

Pinned to her collar, Mrs. Shefferd wears a small plastic turkey left over from Thanksgiving. She reaches up and presses something on the turkey, and the part of its body with the feathers falls open to reveal a circle of Vaseline inside.

"Hat just dove in after him," Mrs. Shefferd says, absently spreading Vaseline onto her lips, offering some to Lena. "Of course he turned out to be no-'count, but she thought nothing of risking life and limb. That's just the way she was."

That night June comes home with a beauty magazine and gives herself a facial in the bathroom. She emerges once, towel wrapped around her head like a turban, and boils water on the stove to melt the wax she uses on her upper lip.

Lena sits at the kitchen table, working makeup multiplication problems from school. "If you're going to drown," she asks June, "which do you think is better, freezing water or warm water?"

"Drowning," June says. She lowers the jar with the yellow wax into the boiling water. "Where have you heard about drowning?"

"Freezing is best," says Lena. "Your body can freeze and you can go unconscious and still live on the oxygen you already have, because you need less oxygen anyway, when you're unconscious."

"Honestly, Lena," June says.

"But if you're in warm water, or even if you're in cold, and instead of letting yourself freeze, you keep trying to breathe and stay afloat, then your lungs fill up with water."

"I told Mrs. Shefferd to pay attention to what was on television. I don't like for you to watch those scary movies."

"It wasn't a movie. Mrs. Shefferd told me."

"Does Mrs. Shefferd make whole lists of preferable ways to die?"

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Excerpted from "Home Remedies"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Angela Pneuman.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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