by Beth Neff
Sarah realizes that she knows next to nothing about her own family, doesn’t know where her grandparents came from or what they did for a living, never heard any childhood stories from her mom at all. Maybe everything just sucked and so nobody ever wanted to mention it. Maybe that sort of thing gets in your blood, a kind of legacy of failure and unhappiness, and it’s best not to talk about it since there’s not a damn thing you can do to change it.
Sarah suspects that the thing she wants to hear about is the exact thing that will make Grace stop talking. This is the most she’s ever heard her say in all the time she’s been here, though they’ve spent many hours working side by side. She’s afraid of being too nosy, getting too personal, and yet all of it seems to be leading to that, to bringing them closer and closer as if that is the only direction to go. It becomes suddenly clear to Sarah that this is what Ellie wants for the counseling sessions, to arrive at the place where they know each other’s pasts in order to become a part of a shared future. Sarah wonders if whatever secrets Grace is protecting feel the same as her own, sometimes just fuzzy and ticklish, like a litter of kittens trying to climb and paw their way out, and sometimes with claws bared, kittens grown to tigers, camouflaged but always ready to spring.
They have made it to the end of the row and are ready to turn back down the other side when Sarah sees Jenna crossing the bridge over the creek, heading their way. Lauren is watching her, too, until the drone of a distant jet reaches their ears, drawing their attention to the white exhaust trail in the sky.
To the west is a dark gray line, inching like a shade pulled slowly over the blue, and Grace bends to the next plant with a little more urgency, the sheet of newspaper formed into a cone around it by the time Jenna steps up to where they are working.
When Grace looks up to greet her, she scans Jenna’s hands, black up to the wrists, her knees the same down to her ankles, smiles, and comments, “Thought you’d bring some dirt along with you, I see.” Jenna glances down at her legs and makes a ghoulish cackle, wiggling her hands as if to wipe them on Lauren, who shrieks and raises her own hands in alarm.
“Need any help?”
“You can do my job.”
Both Grace and Sarah say, “Lauren!” in protest, and Lauren shrugs her shoulders, rolls her eyes.
Jenna says, “I finished the broccoli. Do you want me to start on the new lettuce?”
Grace stands up, stretches her shoulders. “Too hot. Just stay back here with us for a bit. Take a break.”
“Yeah, Grace was telling us all about her grandparents farming this place. Maybe you can get her to tell us all the juicy parts she’s leaving out,” Sarah says slyly.
“If you guys are going to gang up on me, I can still find something else for you to do,” Grace says in a teasing tone.
Jenna plops down on the ground and draws her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around her legs. There is suddenly a sharp nip in the gusty wind and it is no longer sunny.
With Jenna here, Sarah feels a bit braver. Her hands are free for the moment so she holds out a pretend microphone, angles it toward each of the others in turn, and says, “Okay, so, we’re each going to share our family’s deepest, darkest secrets, right? Um, let’s see. Here’s a question to get us started.” Sarah checks the reaction and everybody is looking at her with open faces so she continues.
“So, who here knows who their father is or has actually met him?”
Lauren is the only one who raises her hand. They all look around at the others and start to laugh. Sarah asks, “Does Cassie know who her father is? I don’t think she does.”
Jenna shrugs.
Sarah goes on. “This is important. We could actually be solving the nation’s adolescent crime epidemic.”
“But I thought you knew yours, Sarah.” Grace looks up at her questioningly where Sarah is looming above her, now back to her task, the dark green celery leaves poking out of the tops of her hands like a bouquet.
“Well, I know his name and everything, but I haven’t seen him since I was, like, two years old or something. He has a whole other family now, on the West Coast.” Sarah shakes her head. “I guess when you have a stepdad like mine, you’re not all that anxious to have another dad. What’s your dad like, Lauren, since you’re the exception here?”
“I don’t know. What do you mean? He’s a rich asshole who takes advantage of anyone stupid enough to cross his path and makes a killing doing it. Is that what you want to know?”
Sarah bites her lip, takes the baler twine that is hanging from the end of Lauren’s fingertips, and hands it to Grace who is reaching for it, their eyes meeting.
“I don’t know. Is he, like, a good dad or anything?”
“Like, played ball in the yard with me when I was a kid or bought me a puppy or something? You gotta be kidding. One time we were talking about my cousin’s baby and the name they chose for her and my dad couldn’t even remember my middle name. I’m sure we’re some kind of classic psychological syndrome. You know, like, absent father and drunken mother raises criminal daughter. Does that fit your experimental parameters, Sarah?”
Sarah avoids Lauren’s gaze. “Probably,” she responds.
“Worse for my brother, though. My dad totally expected him to go into the family business, you know, wear a suit and screw everybody in town. But my brother thinks he’s going to be an artist.” Lauren laughs bitterly. “Probably gay or something.”
Sarah is sure Lauren told them she is an only child. She wonders if Lauren is lying now, just made it up to get a dig at Grace, or if she was lying then. Sarah glances over at Jenna and sees that she is on her knees now, looks ready to spring into action. Her fists are clenched in the dirt at her sides, her forehead knitted into a deep frown.
“God, you are really obsessed with that, aren’t you?”
“Geez, Jenna. I’m just kidding. Don’t you think you’re a little oversensitive?”
Jenna jumps up, brushes off her knees, a little loose dirt trickling down around her ankles. “I’m going to go start on that lettuce, if it’s okay.”
“Hey, wait. I was just going to tell you about my dad. For the study, you know?” The girls all turn to Grace, see that she is smiling.
Jenna purses her lips sourly. “Okay, what about him?”
“Captain of the football team.”
Jenna’s face breaks into a grin. Sarah whoops out a loud, “No way!”
“Yup. My mom was seventeen. Still in high school. She graduated in like her seventh month of pregnancy, right before they probably would have kicked her out of school. She never told him directly, though everybody pretty much knew it was him. He never even asked her about it. I think she was afraid she’d have to marry him if she tried to make him responsible, and she always said she was fine with a baby but not with a husband. She took a year off, then she actually went to college, got her degree in teaching while my grandmother took care of me. Wouldn’t live out here at the farm with them though. She wanted to do it on her own, I guess, plus she and my grandfather didn’t get along all that well. We had a little apartment upstairs from a beauty parlor in Somerset. Stunk like hell, especially in the summer. I have kind of weird images in my head of looking down on the tops of those ladies’ hairdos when they came out of the store, making up stories for who they were and where they were going.” Grace shakes her head with the memory.
“What happened to your dad?” Sarah asks quietly.
“He went to some Podunk college somewhere to play football but didn’t do that great, I guess. I don’t know what happened after that. I think my grandparents considered finding him after my mom . . . when she died . . . but decided against it. He must have come back some time to visit his own parents but, obviously, never gave a damn about me. I was lucky though. Maybe because my grandparents felt more like a mom and dad, better than what most people hav
e, it didn’t matter that much.”
“But you didn’t become a criminal,” Sarah says.
Grace smiles sagely. “How do you know?”
Sarah and Jenna laugh, but Lauren is occupied tying one of the baler twine strings into little knots.
“What did happen to your mom?”
The voice is Jenna’s and the words crackle in the air like a bolt of lightning. Sarah is completely startled by hearing the exact question she has most wanted to ask. For just a second, Sarah thinks Grace is going to drop the newspaper cone she is holding in one hand and the baler twine piece she is holding in the other and walk away, never speak to any of them again. The silence is so heavy that Sarah feels like it is pressing down on all of them, with Grace the only one strong enough to lift it.
“My mom committed suicide.”
Sarah looks down at Grace’s head below her and believes she can see the fragile bubble that Grace has been so careful to maintain popping, leaving her open and exposed. But without that bubble, Sarah can also feel a sudden closeness, a connection she never expected. She wants to tell Grace that she understands how hard it is to lose someone, that she knows exactly what it’s like to be the one left behind and to live with the constant feeling that you have to somehow make up for it. But she can’t get any words to come out of her mouth.
Grace is reaching for the loose end of the newspaper, has her hand on it and is bending to wrap it around the next celery plant in the row when Sarah sees fingers folding over Grace’s shoulder, light at first, then firmer, causing Grace to look up and follow Jenna’s eyes as she kneels beside her. “I’m sorry. I bet it hurts every time you think about it. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, it’s okay.” Grace is nodding, turns back to the next celery plant in the row, but the newspaper hangs from her hand, fluttering in the wind.
“They thought my grandpa did it.”
Jenna is still kneeling beside her, a frown forming on her face. “What do you mean?”
Grace shrugs like it’s no big deal, but the celery seems to have been forgotten.
“She shot herself, in the head,” Grace says, motioning with her own head toward the barn so that all the girls turn to look in that direction. “My grandpa had a bit of a reputation around here, had even been arrested when he was a young man for an assault, though that was pretty much just two kids getting in a fight. Still, he and my mom had kind of a history between them, and everybody knows everybody else’s business around here. They thought it might be murder. The police came and hauled him away. He was in jail for, I don’t know, a week, maybe longer, until they finally ruled it a suicide. Even after they let him go, some people couldn’t seem to forget that he’d been suspected.”
Neither Sarah nor Lauren has said a word, but they are listening closely when Jenna says, “God, that must have been awful.”
Grace nods, begins to wrap the celery plant with the sheet of newspaper that the wind has been struggling to snatch out of her hand.
“It was. My grandparents, well, especially my granddad, never really recovered. He wasn’t the easiest person to live with even before that but after, well, he got pretty hostile toward . . . just about everything, and some people toward him as well. I’m pretty sure there’s almost nothing worse than being falsely accused, especially when it’s about someone you love.”
“How old were you?”
“I was twelve.” Grace pauses, glances at Jenna. Sarah has to lean in a bit to hear Grace’s next words, to catch the whispered grief before it is snatched away. “When you’re a kid, you don’t really understand exactly what’s going on. I think, for me, it was mostly hard because I’d always thought, you know, that if someone cares about you, they’ll take you with them when they go.”
Grace’s words slam into Sarah’s head with throttling impact and lodge there like a sharp stone.
She barely hears Grace say, “I guess that pretty much does it for the research, huh?”
Jenna is reaching to hold the corner of the newspaper down while Grace ties it on. “Yeah, I guess so.”
The first drops seem too large to be real. There is still a line of blue to the east, but the rest of the sky is quickly being taken over by scudding gray clouds overhead, followed by more slowly moving black thunderheads to the west. They have just a few plants to go, and Jenna takes the pile of newspaper from Lauren and spreads out a double sheet for Grace and then one for herself.
Sarah is trying to hold two plants at once.
“Lauren, for godsakes, can you help with this?”
Lauren sidles over, gingerly takes one of the celery stalks between her hands but is holding it much too loosely to be of any help.
“Aren’t we going to get struck by lightning or something?”
“Only if it takes us so fucking long to get this done that we’re still out here when the storm actually hits,” Jenna snaps. “Hold that tighter!”
They are across the bridge and halfway through the field closest to the house when the rain hits full force, falling so fast that they are getting as wet from water splashing up as they are from the rain coming down. They are just passing the prep shed when Donna comes out, stands in the doorway for a second, and then joins them on the path to the house, running a little clumsily with her basket full of produce for that night’s supper.
“Did you get everything done?” she yells to Grace over the sound of their feet splattering, the rain thudding down, the rumble of thunder in the distance.
Grace and Jenna glance over at each other. “Yep,” Grace answers. “I think we got her done.”
TUESDAY, JULY 17
“I USED TO THINK I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT MUSIC but, out here, I don’t think about it that much. Sometimes, I’ll hear a little snatch of some song in my head and then I kind of miss it.”
“I suppose you could always sing those songs yourself,” Cassie suggests.
Jenna laughs. “That is definitely something you do not want to hear. Plus, it’s not . . . well, you probably haven’t heard a lot of new music, have you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Did you listen to any music?”
“Well, Gram liked to listen to the radio sometimes. She mostly liked what they call oldies. What would that be, like, from the 1950s or something? It seemed like, as she got worse, things that brought up memories, like stuff from her earlier life, got her really agitated. So, I mostly played classical music. Sometimes that got too, I don’t know, loud and vibrant for her, and then I’d just put on one of those easy stations.”
“What do you mean, easy?”
“Isn’t that what it’s called? Easy music? They would say something like”—and Cassie tucks her chin into her neck, deepens her voice—“ ‘You’ve been listening to Easy 103.7 where all the music comes easy.’”
Jenna laughs. “Easy listening. That’s what they call it. Like mostly instrumental, no words.”
Cassie and Jenna are walking back to the river. Cassie is so light on her feet that she imagines herself hovering just a few inches above the grassy lane. Nothing is at all as she’d thought and, for the first time, that is good.
“So, did you like that classical stuff?” Jenna asks.
“Oh yes. Especially Mozart. And Beethoven. And I love Chopin. . . . One time Gordon brought me this book from the library, Big Book of the Symphony. I’m sure it was supposed to be for little kids but I really liked it anyway. It told about some of the composers and the history of classical music but mostly about the sections of an orchestra. It was really interesting, even though I couldn’t play the compact disc in the front because we didn’t have a player for that. But I followed along the descriptions and they told in the book how each instrument sounds so I listened when I heard the symphonies on the radio and tried to pick out the instruments. I figured out that it was the cello that I liked the be
st, especially when it played the melody. I think that may be one of the most beautiful sounds in the world, other than birds, of course.”
Cassie glances Jenna’s way and she still seems to be listening so Cassie says, “I do like people singing though. Maybe I would like some of your music. Could we try to find it on the radio?”
“I guess we could. I didn’t really think of that. And you can play me some cello music. We should ask.”
For a while there, Cassie had done everything she could think of to avoid the hurt of running into Jenna. She’d stopped walking at night because she was afraid Jenna might be waiting for her, signed up for work slots mostly in the house, though she couldn’t avoid the garden on harvest days. And she’d said no when Jenna did come around, asking her to go swimming or if she was planning to take a walk, had to almost bite her tongue not to tell Jenna to just leave her alone, that she wasn’t that easily fooled.
Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she’s ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away as she could, and then watching to see what would happen next, what would roll back to her, what would have gotten left behind.
To Cassie’s sheer amazement, what was left behind was Jenna. In addition to pleading Cassie’s case in the group, Jenna didn’t stop seeking Cassie out at all. In fact, she seemed more determined than ever to have Cassie’s company for her own walks to the river, her swims, their conversations.
And Cassie loves the swims, almost craves them in the same way she imagines some people must feel about drugs. She is teetering between memory and anticipation, just as she does in that moment when her feet are no longer resting firmly on the ladder, leaning treacherously far out into her curiosity—and terror—about what this raw nakedness will bring.
She wants to imagine, but can’t quite believe, that it might bring her baby back. She knows Ellie has made a few calls, knows as well that Ellie is still not completely behind the idea. The phone calls, the conversations about it, have pricked her senses to the point of pain, scraped her emotions so bare that her skin feels perpetually sunburned. More than once, she has considered telling Ellie to forget it, allowing her anxiety to prevail, and then collapsed in exhaustion, glad, for once, that her shyness prevents her from vocalizing her fears. Swimming with Jenna is one of the few things that successfully distracts Cassie from her agitation.
