The house was utterly silent when Sadie arrived.
Her feet carried her to the tea cupboard, and her fingers clumsily moved jars until she found a small vial of what she was looking for. Jerusalem cherry tea.
In small doses it could be used as a sleep aid.
In a medium dose it would knock you out.
In a big enough dose, you would fall asleep and never wake up.
“Never-wake-up berries,” she and Seth had called them when they were children.
The water was boiling before she realized she’d turned the kettle on.
She scooped in a big enough dose.
It would be so easy.
The sweet, bitter scent was like childhood and promises and fear.
She couldn’t do much. But she could do this. It would fix everything. And that had always been her specialty. Jake had been right: she’d make the hard choice if she had to. It wasn’t that the world would be better off without her, but that she would be better off without the world.
She’d shoved her grief aside as she tried to find a way to save Seth. But now, with the truth laid bare before her, that this was the only cure, it came roaring back. She didn’t want Seth to die. And she didn’t want him to live with this darkness. The emptiness. It was already killing her, even though she was still alive. And she could fix this for him.
The tea was too hot to drink so she went out to the back porch. A last look at her garden. Gigi’s cigarettes and lighter still lay on the glass table, and wanting any piece of her grandmother she could get, she lit a Virginia Slim 120 and inhaled. The smoke curled around her like comfort.
Stubbing the cigarette out a few puffs later, she went back inside.
The tea was cool enough to drink.
She swallowed hard. This is for Seth, she reminded herself. Still, the physical act of bringing the teacup to her lips was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.
The first sip made her throat itch as tears began to fall.
She would fall asleep at the kitchen table, where she had so many times before. Only this time she wouldn’t wake up.
She took another sip. The tears fell harder, each one bursting on the tabletop like a shattered dream.
And then another. She wished she could have kissed Jake just once.
Her eyes grew heavy, and somewhere, nagging in the back of her mind, a small voice asked if this was the right thing to do. But the darkness begged her to enter it. It curled around her like a promise of sweet release.
And Seth would be safe. That’s all that mattered.
The thought of what her future might have been without magic and curses and life debts settled into her. It was a dangerous daydream that she rarely let in, but the present was all she had left, and a little indulgence seemed safe. She thought of Jake and a pair of toothbrushes and water splatters on the mirror from little hands brushing too vigorously. Of cold feet under covers that found warmth when they snuck over to his. Of family dinners and dancing under the moonlight and the magic of found things that had been lost.
Half the tea was gone now, and her limbs grew heavier in the space between moments.
I’ll get to be with Gigi again, she thought.
And that’s when she wondered if maybe that was the real reason she was doing this. If perhaps this was the easy way out. But as she brought the cup to her lips and said goodbye to the future she’d never have, she knew that this was the hardest way to go.
She was swimming through honey, or maybe it was jam. Each thought was murkier than the last, every movement growing sluggish.
When she heard a door slam, she thought it was a metaphor made tangible.
But then a pair of very real hands knocked the mug out of her hands.
“Damn it,” a voice hissed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Seth.
“This is not the answer, you idiot,” he half shouted, shaking her shoulders. And then he was gone, and Sadie thought she could finally fall asleep in peace. She wanted to tell her brother it was for him. Everything was always for him. But the words were too thick on her tongue.
There was a clatter of jars clanking and being tossed aside and onto the floor. It sounded like music.
And then he was back, one hand on her neck as he pushed her head back and none too gently forced her mouth open.
She tasted jewelweed. Ironically, or maybe not, also called touch-me-not.
An antidote to poison.
Realization turned like rusted cogs, and she tried to spit it out.
“You’re an idiot,” Seth hissed again. And the hiss slithered its way into her ears and Seth himself became a serpent with arms and slit pupils. She’d forgotten hallucinations were a side effect of never-wake-up berry tea. “I’ll kill you for this,” snake Seth spat.
She heard his phone ringing on speaker.
Was that Jake’s voice?
Why was her brother calling her boyfriend?
Or wait. That wasn’t right. Was it?
And then she was flying. At least that’s what it felt like until the couch became solid beneath her and she realized that Seth had carried her there.
More jewelweed found its way into her mouth.
She knew somewhere that she wasn’t supposed to want it. But her throat opened obediently, and this time the bitterness choked her, and the tangled mess of thoughts started to untangle in a way that made her head pound harder than her heart.
“How could you be so stupid?” Seth demanded.
“Was trying to help,” she croaked, narrowing her eyes, trying to separate snake Seth from real Seth. And then she heard the labored breathing of someone who had been running. Even in a never-wake-up berry state she’d know his smell anywhere.
Warm, calloused hands took her pulse, checked her temperature, pried her eyes open to check pupils. His head rested on her chest and she wanted to smile. To sink into it. Run her hands through his hair and pull his lips up to hers. The future she could never have.
“Her breathing sounds stable,” Jake said.
Ah. Right. Paramedic Jake. Not impossible future Jake. Checking her breathing. Not tenderly embracing her.
“Everything checks out. We should keep her awake, though. Why? Why did she do this?” Jake demanded, and there were broken shards in his voice.
“Because she’s an idiot.”
Sadie listened for the broken shards in his voice but heard only a swarm of angry bees. Or perhaps they were hornets. Wasps?
“I have to go call Raquel before she has an aneurism,” her brother said. “I told her something was up. Stupid twin connection.”
“Thank God for that,” Jake said. “I’ll stay with her.”
The room swished with the air that Seth took with him as he left the room. And then the couch depressed as Jake sat next to her. She opened her eyes. How long had they been closed? She was hot but there were goose bumps on her skin. The ticking of the grandfather clock sounded like canons. She felt like Clara in The Nutcracker, everything around her growing impossibly large, stretching to dizzying heights and locked in a battle between gingerbread soldiers and the Mouse King. Only instead of sweets and rodents, it was life and death.
She reached out and touched Jake’s arm to make sure he was real. His skin felt like cotton candy. She was there and not there, and she thought how sad it was that this was how she felt most of her life. One foot in, one foot out. “Fold it in half, tuck it away.”
“Hey,” he said softly.
She trailed her fingers up his arm, and he stilled. As though the movement cost him a great deal of effort, he took her hand and laid it on her chest, giving it a pat for good measure.
“Jake,” she whispered. “I think Seth is mad.”
“I’d say that’s an understatement. I’m not too thrilled either. What the hell, Sadie?”
“I was trying to fix everything.”
“This is not what I meant when I said you’d sacrifice anything,” he practically growled.
She thought about answering, about telling him she’d been trying to save Seth’s life, but the words were too thick and dull.