Herbal Remedy

It started in the west elevator, the one with the kitschy old rug and the inner door with the hand-crank. Most people avoided the west elevator because of how much it creaked—like every trip it made might be its last. Nevaeh might have been the only one who consistently used it, and so, mercifully, she was alone when she spat up a frond of sage. Bushy, intact, slightly damp with stomach acid. She had been working late and had half a glass of white to finish the evening. Otherwise, nothing was out of the ordinary.

Nevaeh stopped drinking and didn’t step foot in the west elevator after that, but the plants kept coming. In the shower the next morning, she threw up a bundle of bright pink petals into the drain—coneflower, for colds. After that, there was the milkweed, which stuck in her teeth on the way out, and then a family of bile-drenched dandelion seeds, which she had to scoop up quickly to keep from taking root in her shoes. Then the cotton root, which she threw up in the drawer of her desk before immediately slamming it  shut, hoping the darkness would prevent the plant from growing.

She gave up keeping track after the elderberry ruined not one but two white tablecloths in a row, and she hid it for almost a month before unfortunately hacking up an entire cattail in the middle of dinner with Macon. She put one hand to her mouth and ran to the kitchen sink.

He stood up in place. “What’s going on? Are you sick?”

She grasped the rim and heaved, and her mouth filled with an explosion of fluffy white seeds. She coughed, spraying them into the basin.

“Are you choking?”

She shook her head, coughed again. This was horrible. Almost as bad as that time with the pinecone. It started to slow down, and with every retch her throat felt more empty. Then it was over and she stuck her head under the faucet.

When she stood up, Macon was beside her, wide-eyed. He reached for her back and she shook her head again. “I’m not sick.”

“What? But—”

“It’s not like before. I’ve been throwing up plants.”

He dropped his hand. “What?”

“Plants. Like, herbs and stuff.” The sink looked like someone had just savaged a stuffed animal. It was tinged with yellow and tiny drops of blood. Already, some of the cattail seeds were starting to sprout, searching for a place to anchor in the metal basin. Nevaeh detached the faucet head and rinsed them down the drain.

Macon looked gutted. “Herbs? Have you been—”

“No. No.”

“What does this mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you need a doctor.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m serious.” He seized the faucet head. “Nevaeh.”

“No.”

He went silent and stared not at her but at the now-clean basin. He looked small—even at thirty-seven, Macon was still on the skinny side. His hands, dark and prominently knuckled, had always looked too big for his body. The water hissed cleanly. Nevaeh went back to the dinner table and picked up her half-eaten plate. She vomited a final seed onto the porcelain, where it rolled around for a second before going still.

She returned to work the following day to find her desk drawer overrun with cotton root. Its veins had spread such that they were visible in thin spindles even when she held the drawer shut. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that the root had grown all over her copy of the file she was supposed to have been editing. Having to request a new copy was so humiliating that, going forward, Nevaeh started making a point of throwing up underneath her desk instead of inside it. Soon, ankle-deep vines seized the foot of her chair and rooted it in place.

She finally called her mother after the drain in the bathroom sink got so clogged with pokeweed that it was no longer functional.

“Maybe this is a good sign,” said her mother airily, when she explained. “You know pokeweed’s good for you.”

“I know.”

“Have you tested?”

“No.”

“And you haven’t been drinking?”

“Not since it started.”

“Do you want me to fly down?” her mother asked. “You know I can take care of you.”

“No. No. Please don’t.”

“I think this is good, baby,” she said firmly. Nevaeh’s mother was a sworn garden worshiper. She believed there was an herbal remedy for anything you could ever dream of experiencing—flu, hangover, cancer. To her, there was no such thing as too many plants. “You were nauseous before.”

“That was different.”

They were both silent for a moment. Nevaeh listened to her mother breathe. For the precious few generations that could be traced, her family had been full of herbalists. Nevaeh’s mother liked to rely on the wisdom of the ancestors, and as a result carried a long-held distrust for doctors. She preferred to see them as little as possible, and outside of enduring vaccines, she generally succeeded in steering clear of them entirely.

Nevaeh couldn’t see how a problem caused by plants could be solved with more plants. “You know that was different.”

Her mother heaved a sigh through the phone. “All right. All right. Let me know if it gets worse.”

Nevaeh stopped picking up after herself shortly after, reasoning that the plants weren’t going to stop coming so she might as well give up trying to get rid of them. It was in this fashion that they started to swallow the apartment from the inside. She left the seeds in the carpet, in the cabinets, on the doormat. Wherever they fell, they sprouted, feeding on nothing, hungry just to take up space. It was perversely satisfying—here, there, everywhere, was life she had created without even trying.

Macon took it silently, though it was obvious he hated it. During dinner they had less and less to talk about. He had always hated her mother, hated plants. When they had been married—which seemed like so long ago, now—he had only barely endured her mother’s insistence on showering them with witch hazel instead of flower petals. Now herbs were everywhere he turned. Sometimes multiple times a night, he’d wake up to the familiar sound of his wife’s retching. He felt haunted. He stopped looking her in the eye.

After three months, when Nevaeh still saw no changes in the mirror, she waded through the tangle of roots on the bathroom floor and sat on the toilet, which was mercifully still untouched by the garden the apartment had become. She peed on a stick and placed it gingerly on the counter next to the sink, then looked up at the ceiling. There was a crack up there that she hadn’t noticed before, surrounded by a halo of water stain.

She realized she was sweating, and she wrung her hands to keep them from shaking. Last time she had felt this sick, she let her mother take care of her, and she was convinced that it was all those herbal remedies that killed the first baby. She hadn’t touched a plant since they’d buried him. Her ears rang, and she chanced a look at the stick.

One clear line, vertical; negative. She couldn’t tell if she was upset or relieved. Maybe the plants were taking up all her capacity for life. She flushed the test down the toilet instead of throwing it away, and watched as it orbited the bowl.

That night, she perched on the bathtub, watching Macon get ready for bed. He shaved facing the mirror. “The Pinefields called.”

“Oh?”

“They’re having a cocktail party.”

Nevaeh said nothing.

Macon met her eyes in the mirror. “I think we should go. Just to be friendly.”

The Pinefields were the upstairs neighbors. Often in the mornings, Nevaeh heard Giselle humming as she filled the bird feeder outside their balcony window, and in the afternoons the twin boys would come home shouting and making a general ruckus. “I don’t know.”

“I know you’re not feeling great.”

Nevaeh swallowed. Something tickled her throat—she desperately hoped it wasn’t dandelions again.

“I think it’ll be good for us.”

“Okay. We’ll go. When?”

“Saturday.”

“Okay.”

Macon rinsed his face. Nevaeh swallowed again and the tickling feeling was gone. They finished getting ready in silence, then climbed into bed.

He looked at the ceiling. “Do you want the light off?”

“I’m not pregnant,” she blurted.

“What?”

“I’m not pregnant. I tested today.”

He turned to face her and looked in her eyes for a long moment. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“What do you want me to say?”

She looked at him. His face seemed older than it was. There was a faint white scar cleaving the left side of his bottom lip from when he had smacked himself in the face with a kitchen cabinet—had that really been so long ago? She remembered it well, laughing together in between paper towels and ice packs. She ran her thumb across the line.

When he kissed her, it was so soft that for a moment she wasn’t sure if she was already falling asleep and dreaming. They hadn’t done this in months, since long before the plants. She could tell he was still as afraid of her now as he had been when she’d coughed up that cattail. He moved on top of her and seized her waist, pulled her nightgown up three inches, and she felt so young and full and beautiful that she wanted to cry.

He started to kiss her neck and something kicked to life in her stomach. She sat up and heaved once, then spat into her hand. A single daisy writhed in her palm, slick with spit. She wiped her mouth and flung it to the floor.

“Sorry. I’m sorry.”

He looked at her for a moment, then rolled onto his back and reached for the light switch without speaking.

When Saturday came, Nevaeh slipped on an old black satin dress of her mother’s and walked upstairs with him. Chatter flowed from under the door.

Macon knocked. He was staring straight ahead. “Just be friendly.”

“Thirty minutes.”

“An hour.”

“Forty-five.”

“Fine.”

The door opened. Giselle and Eric Pinefield were standing side-by-side, wearing matching hopeful grins. Eric reacted first. “Welcome! We’re so glad you could make it—please come in—”

“Thank you—thank you—”

They’d been downstairs neighbors for going on two years, but this was Nevaeh’s first time inside the Pinefields’ apartment. It looked almost exactly like she imagined it would, although, in fairness, she hadn’t let her imagination go very far. It was roomy. There was a brown leather couch and coffee table, and an elaborate silver-and-gold centerpiece on the counter. Nevaeh caught a whiff of peppermint, quick and sharp, and her stomach quaked.

Giselle reached out for a hug. Her shoulders were warm and stiff. “Hi, hi, how are you?”

“I’m well, you?”

“Oh, you know.” Giselle arranged her hands by her sides and rolled her eyes a little, as if to appear relatable. “Just getting busier all the time. The boys are getting to be such a handful now—middle school is just that age, I guess.”

“They’re doing well in school?”

She shrugged. “Could be better, but—yes they are, I suppose they are. Their father’s been great at whipping them into shape.”

Macon and Eric had disappeared. Giselle turned towards the kitchen, then looked over her shoulder. Judging by the way her hair moved, she had recently gotten a blowout. “Do you want something to drink?”

“I—” Nevaeh stood still for a moment, then nodded. Giselle produced a glass of rosé, looked up, then poured a second serving. She handed it, brimming, to Nevaeh, who took it and drank obediently.

“How have you been?” said Giselle aimlessly.

“I’ve been all right. Working.”

”Remind me what you do?”

Nevaeh coughed. “Copyediting.”

”That’s nice. Are you interested in publishing?”

”I guess.” She thought. It had never really occurred to her to do anything else. “Maybe journalism. Probably journalism. I’d like to go around breaking stories. What about you?”

Giselle tapped at her own glass. “Real estate.”

“It’s going well?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “As well as it can.”

Nevaeh looked around. More than half the people, including Giselle, were wearing some kind of cable-knit sweater. This was a much higher ratio than she had expected, and her dress, which she had put on out of spite, was starting to make her arms cold. She reached for her glass again and finished it, and Giselle, without asking, refilled it.

Then Nevaeh caught sight of a plate of cocktail shrimp and, grateful for a release from the conversation, excused herself to follow it around the room. After two shrimp and a near miss with red sauce, her stomach settled slightly. As long as she stood in a close radius of the plate, the smell of peppermint became more bearable.

She was midway through her third shrimp before she processed the fact that there was a waiter holding it—the Pinefields had hired a waiter for this party. He was Black and looked young, short and stocky with near-immaculate cornrows. He nodded at her, chin high and tight, and she stuffed another shrimp into her mouth. Someone called him from across the room and he was gone before she finished chewing.

Nevaeh shook hands and nodded blankly and refilled her glass for what must have been hours. Small talk with Eric and Giselle’s friends was insufferable. It felt like nearly everyone at this party was a lawyer of some kind. When Nevaeh’s feet started to hurt, she wandered over to the couch. There was a redheaded woman sitting on it, leaning against one arm and swirling her glass idly. She didn’t look up.

“Hi,” Nevaeh ventured.

The woman looked up. “Evening,” she said quietly.

“I love your hair.”

“Thank you.” She took a sip. “How do you know Giselle?”

“I live downstairs. I’m Nevaeh.”

The woman held her hand out. “That’s a beautiful name. Allison.”

“Nice to meet you.” Nevaeh sipped her own glass and blinked slowly. Her face felt like it was falling asleep. “How do you know Giselle?”

“Oh, she works with my husband. Real estate.”

“Right. How is that?”

“I think it’s going well.” Allison shrugged. “He doesn’t like to talk about it much.”

Nevaeh laughed, although she wasn’t quite sure why. “Well, you know.”

“Yeah.”

A beat. Allison swallowed. “We haven’t really been talking much recently. I’m surprised he even brought me here.”

Nevaeh nodded sympathetically.

“I think we’re just going through a rut. I don’t know. It’s been hard since we lost Daisy.” She took another sip.

Nevaeh was stunned. “What?”

“Daisy—our baby—she died last month.”

“Oh, my God—I’m so sorry—”

“It’s okay,” said Allison hollowly, then laughed. A hiccup surfaced in the middle of it. “Sorry—mood killer—”

“No, no, it’s all right. I know how hard—”

“Yeah. It always is. But she had a good run.”

“What?”

“Yeah, lived a good life. She was really old, almost twelve. I guess her heart just slowed down.”

Nevaeh blinked.

“Now we’re starting to think about giving her stuff away—there’s not much in good shape, though—she kept chewing through her leashes—”

Abruptly, Nevaeh found herself on her feet. A rumble of nausea was building in her stomach. She swayed. “Excuse me.”

She pivoted on her heel and set off without any particular direction. Faces blurred as she passed, and she tightened her grip on her wine glass. After interrupting three different conversations to ask where the bathroom was, somehow, miraculously, she found it. Even more miraculously, it was empty.

She leaned against the door. The bathroom, like everything else in this apartment, was pretty and clean and edged with gold. It smelled and tasted like peppermint, which made her sicker. She couldn’t feel her face or hands or neck. She stumbled to the sink and planted her hands on the rim. She hadn’t been this drunk in years; she felt like a teenager. When she looked in the mirror, there was something moving beneath her face that she did not recognize.

It’s the plants, she thought. They were about to come bursting out of her skin, out of her face, and when the Pinefields cleaned up after the party they’d open the door and find her collapsed into the remains of a garden.

This was always meant to happen. This was why there had been no room for her baby. Nevaeh had known he was dead before he came out, but when they delivered him she had still allowed herself to be tricked into thinking, for a moment, that she had seen him breathe. But no. Now she knew. It must have been the plants all along.

By the time there was a knock on the bathroom door, Nevaeh was crumpled on the floor, wracked with nausea and holding her head over the toilet, waiting for the vomiting to begin. The door creaked open, and she looked up. It was Macon.

He looked surprised. “S—sorry. I knocked.”

She didn’t have the energy to reply. She was slick with sweat and the floor was cold. Macon idled at the door, looking unsure if he should leave, then stepped inside.

“You okay?”

Nevaeh managed a nod, then heaved once. Nothing came out. She opened her mouth to breathe, in, out. Her head spun.

He closed the door behind him and locked it, then edged over to her, as though approaching a bear. He stood by the toilet and looked down, and she pivoted her head on her forearms, turning to look up at him. The ceiling light shone behind his head.

They’d done this before, many times, long ago—her several months pregnant and spitting up bile, him holding her braids back and shouting like a football coach—come on get it all out you’re almost there let’s see some effort. Which would make her laugh while puking, which would make him laugh, and then she’d flush and chew some mint. She looked up at his face. Did he remember? Was he too afraid of her now?

Macon knelt beside her and gathered her hair slowly, reverently. He kissed the back of her neck, the small divot where the hair waned into nothing. He hadn’t kissed her there in over a year. She wanted to cry. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear it if she did. She heaved, once, twice, then opened her mouth.

Nothing came out. Slowly, the retching stopped. Macon rested his head on her shoulder and gathered her in his arms. The room smelled human and new, like something just born. They gazed into the blank white face of the bowl.