“Addiction,” I finally said. The simplest answer, but not the whole one.
“Don’t you think we’d know if we were addicted to Earthshine, like they’re saying?” Janie said. “Don’t you think we’d experience the ‘adverse health consequences’ they talk about on the news?”
“Maybe it doesn’t affect everyone the same,” Edith said.
“She left me something,” I said.
“Halley?” Edith said, now curious. “What?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “An old book of formulas.”
“Theformula?” Edith asked. She looked like she was trying to solve a complicated math equation in her head, allxs andys. “The one Bertie kept in the safe?”
A group of teenagers with cigarettes walked into the gazebo; then, noticing us, walked back out, trailing thin wisps of smoke behind them.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Medicines, I think.”
“For what?” she asked.
I hesitated for a moment. “All sorts of things. Gout. Indigestion. Depression. And… one for Comet Pills.”
As I said it out loud, I felt foolish. Comet Pills sounded as fanciful as pixie powder or star dust. Camille Flammarion, the scientist who theorized Halley’s could end the world in 1910, was also an author of science fiction. In his bookOmegaa comet threatens to destroy the Earth.
“Comet Pills?” Janie asked.
“Did Halley ever mention the name Opal Doucet to you?” I asked.
“That friend of Halley’s who visited her on the set? I think she was her drug dealer,” Janie said.
“No—not her,” I said. “She was a massage therapist.”
“The woman who died in the factory fire,” Edith said. “One of them, anyway.”
“Yes,” I said. “But did Halley say anything else?”
Janie rooted around in her bag and produced some ChapStick. She smeared it on her lips. “Why don’t you just ask Old Man Tuttle these questions,” Janie said. “You were always his favorite.”
“He’s grieving,” I said. “Did she say anything? Anything at all? This could be important. She left me a notebook—and I know it’s related to the Jane Does. To everything they’re saying. I’m beginning to feel… I think… there really is something in the soap. Something addictive or mind-altering or… I don’t know. Look, it’smyface on the package.”
“It’s our faces, too,” Edith said.
I had to admit, we did all look alike. Same brown eyes. Same hair we described as “coffee-colored” to add a layer of exoticism to brunette. When I looked at them, I imagined I was looking in a reverse time-lapse mirror. The unforgiving slack of my skin now tightened. The lines around my eyes disappeared.
“I have three kids,” said Janie. “I use Earthshine every day, and I’m not exactly infertile. The opposite.” She checked her watch. “Didn’t you ever want kids?”
“You can’t ask those kinds of questions,” Edith said.
“No,” I lied.
“Why not?” Janie asked.
“They’d get in the way,” I said.
“Of what?”
“My art.”
“You mean when you were an extra onWKRP? Or when you pulled lotto balls from that suction machine?”
