Chapter 1: The Recipe
She'd found the vine the summer she was fourteen.
She'd been back in the creek bottom past the second bend — farther than her father said to go, which was exactly as far as she went every chance she had — lying in the shallows with her clothes on because the heat was that particular Alabama August heat that is less like weather and more like a judgment. The creek came off the spring-fed seep higher up and ran cold even in July, and she'd been lying in it with her face tilted up at the canopy, watching the light pattern through the leaves, when she noticed the vine.
It grew up the side of a water oak in a thick, rope-like twist, with small pale yellow-green flowers and five-lobed leaves. She knew most of the plants back there. She'd been learning them for years from the one book her grandmother had left her — an old, battered thing with hand-drawn illustrations called Roots and Remedies of the Southern Wilderness, by a woman named Hattie Crane, published in 1937. The book had spent ten years in a box in Anna's closet before Anna was old enough to understand it, and then she'd spent the next five years reading it so many times the spine gave out.
The vine was Passiflora incarnata. Maypop. Her grandmother's book called it the passion flower, or sometimes wild apricot, and said the Cherokee had used it for anxiety and for what the book called night-walking — sleeplessness that isn't really sleeplessness but a kind of thinning of the boundary between the waking mind and the other kinds. The book said the root and vine contained certain alkaloids that quieted the loudness of ordinary thought. It said this in plain language, with no mysticism, in the way that Hattie Crane said most things — matter-of-fact, like she was describing how to make biscuits.
Anna pulled a handful of the vine and the blossoms and carried them home in her shirt.
The mushrooms she'd known about for two years by then. They grew in the back pasture of the Rucker property, which ran along the west edge of the woods — a broad, low field where the Ruckers kept cattle, and where, every summer after the rains, small brown mushrooms with blue-bruising stems pushed up through the cow dung in rings. She had looked them up in three different books. She was careful. She was fourteen, but she was also, in the ways that mattered, very old.
Psilocybe cubensis. She'd taken the smallest possible amount the first time — no more than a half-gram, dried, on a Tuesday evening when her father was at his brother's in Guntersville and her mother was already unconscious. She sat on her bed and waited. What happened was not what she'd expected, which had been colors and shapes and the kind of cartoon strangeness she'd read about online. What happened instead was quieter and more terrible and more beautiful: the noise stopped. The low, constant broadcast of anxiety that she'd assumed was just the texture of being alive — the vigilance, the scanning, the body always braced — went quiet, and in the quiet she could hear something she hadn't known was there.
She could hear herself think.
Not thoughts about whether her father would come home drunk. Not the constant ledger of what might go wrong. Her actual self, underneath all that — curious and calm and interested in the exact specific pattern of the water stain on her ceiling, which turned out to be shaped like a bird in flight if you tilted your head, which she had never noticed in fourteen years of living under it.
She cried for about an hour. Then she got out her notebook.
It took her eight months of experimentation to find the combination.
Hattie Crane's book mentioned, in a footnote so small Anna almost missed it, that certain compounds in the passion flower vine could extend and deepen the action of other plant medicines — that something in the beta-carboline alkaloids acted as a kind of amplifier, lengthening the signal, smoothing it out. Anna read this four times. Then she did the research she could do — she was in the school library a lot that winter, which the librarian, Mrs. Pruitt, interpreted as studious ambition and which was in fact something more specific. She found papers, journal articles, fragments of pharmacology she barely understood but pushed through anyway with a dictionary and a stubbornness that would have surprised anyone who'd ever dismissed her as quiet.
She brewed the vine into a tea. She combined the tea with a careful, small dose of the dried mushrooms. She timed it, noted it, adjusted it.
The first time she got the ratio right, she was sitting on the creek bank in February, fifteen years old, with the cold water running over her bare feet, and the world opened up like a hand unclenching.
She could feel the creek. Not the temperature of it — the creek itself, its old intention, the way it moved without deciding to move. She could feel the trees in the particular alertness of their dormancy, waiting for a warmth that was six weeks away. She could feel something that she would spend years trying to describe and ultimately stop trying: a kind of orientation. Like a compass, except the compass didn't point north. It pointed at the truth of things. Toward what was real and away from what was performance or mask or lie.
She sat there for four hours.
Walking home through the woods in the purple late-afternoon light, she passed within twenty feet of a man she didn't know — a hunter in blaze orange, cutting through from the county road. They nodded to each other. And she felt, from him, something she had no word for yet: a warmth, an easy uncomplicated goodness, like morning sun on skin. He was a man who had never once gone to bed glad that someone else was hurting. She knew this. She didn't know how she knew.
Three days later she walked past Gary Odom, who lived in the white house at the corner of County Road 41, and what she felt from him was the opposite of what she'd felt from the hunter in the woods — a slow, oily, deliberate darkness that turned her stomach and made her cross to the other side of the road.
Gary Odom was arrested fourteen months later for things Anna was not surprised to hear about.
She understood, by then, what the brew was for. Not the pleasant dissolution of anxiety, not the ceiling's water stain. The brew was a tuning instrument. It made the signal clear.
She went back to Hattie Crane's book and read the footnotes very carefully this time. In the smallest print on the last page, barely visible, was a single line she had missed twice before: Some are born already listening. The plant medicine only removes the interference.
Anna tore that page out and kept it in her wallet for years.
