What I wanted to say each time was, Mama can be your friend.

What I wanted to say each time was, I wish I could be your friend, but this is too sad a start for friendship.

I was that age when I was not young enough to speak that frankly, yet I was not so old that I could pretend the sadness did not exist. So I raised my hand and smiled at him and then went home, to read the remedies and wonder what it meant to care. I had been so cavalier in my request to Mama, to be inducted into her world of secrets. It was overwhelming enough to care for bodies that had turned against themselves, that had sickened and soured on miasmas and disease, that had collapsed under the burden of fevers and chills.

It was still another thing to care for someone like Mr. Ben, who was of whole body, I knew, but of broken spirit.

But Mama said when the spirit broke like his had, it was not our realm.

I was not so sure.

Sometimes, I tried to talk to her about it. I would venture to her, as we sat side by side in her examination room, “What do you do with someone like a Mr. Ben?”

To which she would say quickly, “I do not know what you mean, Libertie.”

And we would be left in silence again.

Once, bored by the rows of flower names stretched out before me on a long night of study, I went out at night into the garden, to walk along the rows.

I absently rubbed my fingers along a yarrow bush’s leaves. After a few minutes, they began to swell and my tongue thickened. I looked down at my fattened fingertips in the moonlight and looked up and saw Mama through the window, sitting at her desk behind the muslin curtain, working through her ledger. As I watched her, I reached for the yarrow leaves and ripped five of them off the branch, stuffed them into my mouth, and chewed them. It did not take long before my cheeks and mouth began to itch. I ate three more leaves. Two more. And then I ran into the office, and finally Mama looked up from her ledger.

I had the satisfaction of seeing her startled, but she was not scared. She treated me as she would any other of her patients. I could not speak at that point, could barely breathe. I only held up the last few yarrow leaves that I clutched in my hand, and then she nodded and went to work.

She laid me down away from the fire. She went over to her shelves of medicine and reached for one glass jar—she didn’t even have to look at the label. She called for Lenore, her voice clear and strong, and when Lenore came in and saw my swollen face, she gasped.

“Keep her mouth open,” Mama said. “The danger here is losing air.”