by Rory Power
Oh, bullshit. Your house, Gram. Your land. Your face. Your girl.
“I mean, I get it,” I say, even though I don’t. “Mom was young and there were two of us, and she could only handle one. You can tell me the truth. I already know.”
The only change is the furrow in Gram’s forehead. “I have told you the truth,” she says. “Are you feeling all right, Margot?”
“I’m fine,” I say. It comes out too sharp. “I’m confused, though. Because you said family is honest. And aren’t we family? Wasn’t she?”
“She who?”
“The girl,” and it’s nearly a yell. I didn’t think I would be here again. I didn’t think it would be just like with Mom, with the world right in front of both of us and me trying, trying, trying to prove to her it exists. “I saw her. Tess saw. The police saw. You can’t pretend she’s not what she is.”
“I am not trying to.”
“You are,” I insist. I have to say it. Let her try to get around this: “I saw the clothes in the dresser. Just like the dress that girl in the fire was wearing.”
Gram looks baffled. “I imagine we could go to the thrift store in town and find you a half dozen more like it. What’s this about, Margot?”
“It’s about her,” I say. “I’m not the only girl you’ve had here.” Trapped, that’s what I want to say. Hidden. But she wouldn’t like that.
“That’s right,” Gram says. “Your mother grew up at Fairhaven.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. She came from here. That girl was wearing one of Mom’s dresses.”
“But how can you be sure?” Gram asks. She sounds like she really wants to know. “Did you see your mother’s name in that dress?”
Even if i’d gotten a good look, that dress was too damaged for anyone to make out a little line of handwriting.
I hesitate. “Well, no, but—”
“Then it seems quite a fit to throw over nothing, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not a fit.”
“No?” She frowns, purses her lips. “I thought you’d be more mature than this. I really did.”
I can feel it, that rushing panic I know from every fight with Mom. Putting me on the defensive, when I came down here with what I thought was proof. “Okay,” I say, “then why were there so many clothes in the dresser? You said you brought me a few things, but that was—”
Gram waves me off. “They’re just left behind from when your mother lived up there.”
I stop short. Victory sweeping over me until I’m smiling. “You said that wasn’t anyone’s room. That’s what you told me yesterday.”
There it is. A lie I’ve caught her in. It never works with Mom, never gets her to back down, but Gram’s different. She has to be different.
“Did I?” she says. “Really?”
“Yeah.” I shift from foot to foot warily. She’s too easy, too curious. I know what to do with defensive, with angry. Not with this. “You didn’t say it was Mom’s, anyway.”
“I’m sure I must have.”
“You didn’t. I know what I heard.”
Gram tilts her head, eyebrows raised. “And I don’t?”
I can’t breathe right. Shallow and quick, a seizing in my lungs. How did I end up in this same fight? I’ve had it with Mom, over and over, and I left her, I left all that. This was supposed to be better.
“Margot?” Gram sets down her work boots and the bucket and comes toward me, her too-familiar face creased with concern. “Are you okay, honey? Come here. It’s all right.”
I just stare at her. Rooted to the spot, a hundred arguments playing all at once in my head. I’ve always told myself it’s just Mom, just Mom who can’t accept that things happened the way I know they did. But if it’s the same with Gram, maybe the problem isn’t either of them. Maybe it’s me. I’m the one who’s wrong over and over; I’m the one dreaming up hurts and picking fights. Maybe that notebook I kept in Calhoun was full of lies.
But it can’t be. I saw what I saw.
“Let it out,” Gram says. “Deep breaths.” She takes hold of my shoulders, squeezes them gently and draws me into a hug. I stand there rigid in the fold of her arms, exhausted, afraid. For a second I want to apologize. If it were Mom, I would.
That, at least, can be different here.
“Good girl,” Gram says, stepping back. “All right. Why don’t you go get changed?”
She’s smiling. The fight over, the conversation dropped. It’s a relief, really, and I go without another word. Back to my room. Back to that fucking dresser. And that dress still matches what I saw on that girl. But it doesn’t matter. It didn’t prove a single thing.
I was stupid to think it would be enough to get answers from Gram. I shouldn’t have played my cards so early. Shouldn’t have let her make me wonder if I ever had any in the first place.
It’s not giving up, I tell myself. I’ll try again. But I’m not going at Gram without a hell of a lot more in my pocket.
My clothes from yesterday are still dirty, so even though it stings, feels like defeat, I pull open the dresser drawers and grab a pair of shorts, along with a T-shirt worn through with small holes.
I don’t know for sure what Mom looked like at my age, but as I stand in front of the bathroom mirror wearing her clothes, in her house, I think it must have been exactly like this. Before her face narrowed. Before that scar marked her cheek. It’s easier today than it was yesterday, to know I’m only ever what she already was. I can’t have her here with me, but least I’ll have this.
Back downstairs Gram is waiting. She doesn’t say anything about the fight we had, if that’s what she’d call it. I know I would. Even the smallest thing can come back bigger. Instead she just nods to my shoes, dangling from my hands by their laces, and waits while I put them on. As soon as I’m ready, she’s leading me out the back of the house. We step onto the porch, and I watch her take the same moment I did. A breath, and a gaze, and the warmth of the sun.
“What’s the work?” I ask, eager to fill the silence. The farm is nearly dead, from what I can tell. I don’t know what there is to be done besides start it all over.
“Back acres need tending,” she says, stepping off the porch and making for the side of the house, where the truck is parked. I take one last look at the Miller house before I follow.
I wait until we’re in the truck, easing down one of the access roads, to ask her. The burned fields are off to the right, far enough that I can only taste the lingering smoke. The way the fire was burning, at least a third of her land must be gone, if it’s even all the way out. But she doesn’t seem worried. She hasn’t since I met her.
“How do you make it work?” I ask. I’m facing her instead of the road, neither of us buckled in as the fields slip by, each one just like the last, like the ones by the house. Corn too golden for this time of year, somehow dead and growing at the same time. “The farm, I mean. It’s just you, isn’t it?”
We both know what I’m not saying. The girl like a grave dug between us, and for a moment Gram hesitates. I didn’t mean to bait her. I didn’t mean to start this again.
Then she shrugs, and the tension breaks. “It is.”
I don’t know exactly, but a farm this size—it would probably take a good seventy or eighty people to keep it running the way it should. Instead it’s only Gram in a pickup, with crops that hardly seem like they’ll yield anything at all.
“So how do you manage it all alone?”
Gram gives me a sidelong look as she turns the truck onto a road running toward the Miller house. “I should think you’d know the answer to that better than anyone,” she says. And it catches in my throat, winds between my fingers like a hand to hold, because I know exactly what she means. Me, managing my own life, raising myself, alone in an apartment with Mom right there next to me.
“And the corn?” I want to ask in a way that won’t hurt her, but I don’t know where the mines are in her the way I do with Mom. I decide to try something broad. “It wa
sn’t always like this, was it?”
Gram doesn’t answer right away. It seems like an easy silence, but then I spot the white strain of her knuckles as she grips the steering wheel.
“Fairhaven’s been running a long time,” she says finally. “Things come and go. Money, family. It’ll be good again.”
Will it? She has no farmhands, no machines, no nothing. Whatever she’s living on must be from generations back. Something she had that nobody else in Phalene did, and when Fairhaven dried up, she kept on. The town couldn’t.
It’s not long before we’ve gotten where we’re going, and Gram brakes, dust catching us through the open windows. The corn presses in so close I can’t see the sprawl of the fields, and here, this far back, it seems a little healthier, a little more alive. The grove I saw from the porch must be nearby, if I’m picturing the farm right.
But up ahead, that’s what I’m staring at. The line between Nielsen land and Miller land. It’s clear as anything, and would be without the low, ramshackle fence that runs down the middle of the ditch separating the two. On our side, the corn is cracked and golden. On the other, drifting, green.
I open my mouth, then close it again. What am I supposed to ask Gram? How’d you mess it up so badly when they didn’t? What’s wrong with us that isn’t wrong with them? She wouldn’t answer, no matter how right I’d be to ask.
There’s a buffer on the Miller side of the fence, between the ditch and the crops. A stretch of maybe a hundred yards that’s just long grass and weeds. I can see the Nielsen sickness bleeding into it, the creep of brown grass and parched earth, but it’s gone, back to normal by the time the Miller corn starts.
I’m staring, but Gram’s clearly used to it. She gets out, comes around the front of the truck, flipping off the Miller crops absently, like she’s done it a thousand times and will do it a thousand more. Tess, the Millers, with land they bought off my grandmother, watching as she falls to pieces.
Gram raps her knuckles against the truck door as she passes, and I get out, follow her around to the flatbed. It’s empty, lined with a blue plastic tarp that Gram seems to have fixed in place with a nail gun and a handful of frail-looking zip ties.
“We’re doing what out here, exactly?” I ask.
She pulls the bucket out of the flatbed and slings it over her arm, waving me with her as she makes for the back field. “You made it just in time for the harvest,” she says.
Harvest. What must it have looked like those years back, when Fairhaven belonged to the people in those pictures I saw hanging in the dining room? How much of the town would have been here, working, living off what the Nielsens paid them?
And now it’s me and Gram.
There are no rows left in these fields. Nothing like what I can see of the Miller crops, where paths run between each furrow, as neatly kept as anything out here is. Gram’s plantings have spilled from their beds, have crept under the earth to wind around each other, choking off the roots, breaking the stalks in half. I cringe as we pick our way through, try to keep the leaves from touching me. It’s too much like the fire. The dry, papery brush, the slicing of the sky. I want to work at Gram, to get her to tell me what I already know, but I can barely keep myself halfway together.
“All right,” Gram says, when we’ve only gone in a few steps. I swallow hard, grateful I can still see the truck from here. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
She sets down the bucket and runs her hands up the stalk of the nearest plant. This one is just barely green, the velvet tassels starting to brown in the sun. The plant’s bearing an ear, but it’s small, nothing like what I expected. It could fit in the palm of Gram’s hand. She doesn’t seem bothered, though. She plucks it off the stalk, the husk making a terrible squeaking sound as it shifts.
“Open that up,” she says, handing it to me.
I shrink from it, but Gram’s watching me with her steady, dark eyes. Watching, and waiting, and if I’m not the girl she wants me to be, I don’t think I’ll be able to stay here very long.
Carefully, I start to peel the husk away. It’s thin, each layer nearly translucent as I drop it to the ground, leaving the ear underneath. Soon it’s bare, held loosely in my palm. Kernels blushing pink, same as the water from the kitchen sink, and crumpled, lined up like baby teeth. It’s not how it should be. None of it is. Especially not the fact that the ear is two ears, two offshoots from the same plant, curled around each other in a helix.
I stare at it, at the rot spreading where the split cobs are pressed against each other. With my thumbnail, I bear down on one of the kernels. The film of it is clear—it’s whatever is inside that’s giving it that color.
It pops. Something pink and liquid spills out, pale and thin and cold under my nail.
I drop the corn, stumble a step back. The spiraled ear cradled in the dirt. What the hell is happening here?
“That’s what I thought,” Gram says. Just like at the station. So calm. Nothing ever surprises her. “This plot’s no good.”
I press my hands to my face. I feel like I’ve gone numb. “Are they all like that?” I manage.
“Not all.” Gram touches my elbow, and the warmth of her, a real and living warmth, brings me back, urges me along with her deeper into the field. “Most. But not all.”
“What happened? To make them that way, I mean.”
She scoffs, and for a moment her steps take her out of sight. It lights a flare of fear in my chest. I rush after her.
“Look around,” she says. The plants brushing my skin, reaching down the back of my shirt. Writhing up out of the ground. “Phalene got hit with a drought some forty years back. But Fairhaven got a blight worse than that.”
“But the Millers—”
“Yes,” she says, almost upset. “Well, you can spare yourself all manner of things with a bit of luck and a bit of money.”
I don’t really think Gram is one to talk about money. Maybe she doesn’t own half the town anymore, but she’s not exactly hurting for it.
We find a few normal ears of corn. Those are the ones Gram drops into the bucket. It takes a long time to fill it. A long, long time, and we’re nearly at the edge of the farm before we manage it.
I can see the apricot grove ahead, the beckoning of the shade so strong it’s in my bones. I just want to sit, and rest, and feel something besides this pressing heat. But Gram starts back to the truck, and I follow her. Of course I do.
Years ago, a day’s work would’ve filled the whole bed of the truck. And before that, even more. But all these acres, they’ve dwindled down to Gram and me, and what we can carry. She drops the bucket into the bed of the truck with a pitiful thud and we both try hard not to look at the empty space around it.
“Will you sell it?” I ask.
Gram shakes her head. “Anyone buying is looking for larger quantities than we can harvest anymore. This is just for me. For us.”
“But you used to sell?” I try to fill in the pieces, try to sketch out what it was like when Mom was young. My hands braced on the side of the flatbed, corn silk stuck to a hangnail on my thumb. “When my mom was here?”
“Not even then.” She sighs. “The last time we were pulling a profit would’ve been when my parents ran this place.”
“What was that like?” I ask.
Gram waits a moment as the sun builds between us, staring over at the Miller house. Their corn grows too high for me to see the porch, to see the bright flowers I’m sure are gathered by every window. But we’re close enough that I can imagine that picture of Mom I took from the Bible laid over everything, snow and blue sky as she smiled at the camera. At her own mother.
“Like that,” Gram says, at last. “Just like that.”
At the top of the house, as I’m watching, a window opens. “Hey,” I hear, drifting over the field, before I realize there’s a person, there’s Tess, waving her arm so I’ll see, leaning so far out the window it makes my heart skitter into my throat.
Gram’s expression g
oes tight. They were polite to each other in the station. Even friendly, I think, by Gram’s standards. But being civil can’t go far toward easing the sting of living side by side.
“Margot!” Tess yells. I take a half step toward the house before I even realize it, my fists clenched with the urge to haul her away from the window before she falls out. “Come over!”
Gram is already opening the door of the truck, ready to get back to Fairhaven. But when I met Tess I didn’t get the impression that she ever let people tell her no, and that doesn’t seem to be any different even when she’s barely more than a shadow against the sun.
“Get in the truck,” Gram tells me quietly. “Before Theresa remembers her manners.”
It’s too late. “You too, Vera! My mom’s got brunch.” A pause, and then: “You can introduce Margot.”
That seems to do it. Gram shuts her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them again it’s to give me a sort of conspiratorial look of exhaustion. Two Nielsens, dealing with the Millers together. “All right,” she calls back. “Just a minute.”
Tess disappears from the window. I wait for Gram to get into the truck first. I don’t want to seem too eager. But I’m anxious to see Tess. To talk to her about yesterday. To find out what happened after I left the station, and just what I have to be afraid of.
THIRTEEN
If the outside of the Miller house looks something like Fairhaven, the inside is entirely different. Fairhaven feels like a honeycomb, rooms blocked off and cloistered, but the Miller house is open practically from one side to the other. The living room, the kitchen, the french doors and the sweeping view beyond. All of it done up in varying shades of white, and I catch myself wondering if anybody’s spilled anything anywhere in the last thirty years, if I might find tomato sauce and orange juice stains on the underside of every couch cushion.
Tess met us at the door and is just ahead of us now, wrapped in a blue summer dress and leading us across the plush white rug toward the kitchen. A woman is standing at the marble-topped island, wearing a stiff floral dress and staring down at a plate of fruit with a look of deep concentration. She must be Tess’s mom, but they don’t look much alike. Not compared to me and mine, at least.
