Litani

I did. Some truths feel like they’ll kill you if you say them out loud.

It felt like ink and stars and magic, and I never wanted it to end.

You’re saying this is how my mom is telling me she loves me?” He shrugged. “Might be all she has to offer.

Dandelions were known as the elixir of life. Every part of them was edible—flower, stem, leaf, and root—and they were one of the most nutritional plants known to humans, containing fiber, protein, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. Although dandelion tea was good for nearly everything that ailed you, the most powerful benefit of dandelions was that if properly processed, their leaf and root extract fought the growth of cancer cells.

It’s better to live in the present, pumpkin. That’s where the good stuff is.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have found his dorky effort to cater to what he imagined I liked to be hilarious, but I was light-years from normal. This new, dark world felt pretend. I had no idea how to behave.

The plant he’d brought home wasn’t a currant, like I’d first thought. It was hawthorn, and while the blossoms had stronger medicinal properties than the berries, the bark and the leaves were what you really wanted. “For what?” My blood pumped with hope and fear. “For hearts!” he said, holding a ruby-colored berry between his thumb and pointer finger. The sun caught it just right, illuminating its heart shape and blood color, illustrating the rule that nature always showed us how to harvest its treasures. Walnuts, shaped like a brain, were exceptional for cerebral health. Slice a carrot crossway and what did you see? An eye, and there was no vegetable better suited to improving sight. Avocadoes worked wonders on the uterus, celery on the bones, grapefruit on the breasts. And this ruby berry, apparently, was a miracle cure for hearts.

Every person carried some bad, and we all had some good. Our job was to figure out how to let only the good stuff steer.

She paused, then sighed, a wet, hitched sound. “We all just get by to get by, and then we die,” she said.

I used to be pretty,” she said out of the blue. She glanced over at me and took a big drag from her cigarette, still walking toward her trailer. “Back then they used to call me Sunny, I was so full of sunshine. Happy all the time.” She chuckled her emery-board laugh. “Can you believe it? Me. Happy. A cheerleader. Knew right from wrong.” Looking at her now, knowing her daughter was in a foster home, did make it hard to believe. But I’d drawn her as a dandelion, and that meant something. Dandelions were known as the elixir of life. Every part of them was edible—flower, stem, leaf, and root—and they were one of the most nutritional plants known to humans, containing fiber, protein, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. Although dandelion tea was good for nearly everything that ailed you, the most powerful benefit of dandelions was that if properly processed, their leaf and root extract fought the growth of cancer cells. But most people saw them only as an invasive weed.

She chuckled her emery-board laugh.

Your mom’s a real ballbuster,” she said agreeably, sucking smoke out of her mouth and up her nostrils. She reminded me of a worn-out dragon.

She looked like she hadn’t slept in a year. Her dirty blonde hair was greasy, and her eyes had their own bags packed.

I will send every monster to prison, no matter what it takes.” She grabbed my wrist. Her touch shocked me. “That’s why I’ve stored them at the same house, you know. The children. So I can teach them to speak properly. Otherwise they’ll sound poor, and none of those fuckers ever believe poor people.

I was an apple crouching so close to the tree that I might as well have never dropped.

Well, hello there,” the man said around a toothpick, his eyes walking up my body like flies.

Dad always said that only a butt gave an apology with a “but.

The hot shower was a perfect blend of agony and ecstasy. The water stung every bit of wrecked flesh it licked, but it washed out the grit, black and red pooling at my feet and swirling down the drain in a marbled eddy.

I didn’t remember much about her except the smell of her rose-milk lotion and a faint recollection of her and Dad’s not-really fights, them going at each other like county theater actors at the end of the season, when everyone was tired of delivering their same lines.

Social scientists and media critics have attributed these 1980s “witch hunts” to a perfect storm of civic expediency and sociological factors, including women entering the workforce and the subsequent rise of day-care facilities, which led to fears about children being raised by strangers; an outcry from both feminists and conservatives over pornography’s move from theaters to homes, thanks to the growing popularity of VCRs; Freud’s theory of repressed memories experiencing a renaissance; and a judicial “tough on crime” approach, a backlash to the supposed lawlessness of the ’60s and ’70s. This storm was stoked by improperly trained and sometimes unscrupulous psychologists, police officers, and attorneys. The result all across the nation was families no longer trusting one another, neighbors turning on neighbors, and communities destroyed.

It was that she was wrong. We do need people, every one of us. In fact, it’s impossible to do the hard stuff alone. I was sorrier than anything that my mom didn’t know that.

Reading about Satan isn’t for children,” she said. “Kids should hang on to their innocence.” “Then grown-ups should let us.

Crane, do you wanna be my friend?” “It pay?” he asked, still smiling. “Nope, and the hours are terrible. Plus, you have to help me knock on doors.” He stepped alongside me, and we began to walk down the street together. “I suppose I don’t have anything better to do.

It had been too long since she knew where she ended and he began.

For god’s sakes! Not in my town. We’re all family here.” A cloud passed over Mom’s face. “Family is where it starts.

even when he was himself, Dad was delicate. He loved June, and she loved him—he was a good guy, anyone could tell it, and his kindness was a magnet—but he tired easily. That’s just how he was built.

Creeping Charlie was the real rock star, though, according to Dad. It thrived in the shade on the edge of forests and sometimes on rocky soil, and the world saw it as a greedy invader. They didn't know, Dad said, that creeping Charlie was a jack-of-all-trades. It kept soil from sliding, sure, but also its dry leaves could be made into a tea that was great for colds and coughs. Eaten fresh or boiled, the leaves were a delicious source of vitamin C. But that was just the start. Creeping Charlie, and most ground ivy, was magic. It had strong antibacterial properties, rid the body of excess mucus, was an astringent and diuretic, could be turned into a balm that sped up healing, and treated everything from tuberculosis to tumors to tinnitus.

The evil of what had been done to Crane and the choices he'd made because of it were living inside him, just like I'd have to carry around forever everything I'd survived and done. That's the way it was, I was realizing. Every person carried some bad, and we all had some good. Our job was to figure out how to let only the good stuff steer.

I didn’t know what to think, so I thought everything, my brain a blur, thoughts a big, fat green crayon scribbling to black.

I’m going to call you Motherwort,” I whispered, petting the baby fur as she scarfed down the food. “Wort for short, because motherwort is so good at healing girls, and this one right here”—I jabbed my thumb at myself—“has had a day.