by Tom Ryan
I hesitate. His deep, dark eyes keep staring hard at me.
“Bridget,” I say, reaching for my middle name. Then, because it’s hard to think this quickly, I grab at Sarah’s last name. “Bridget Cash.”
“Bridget Cash,” he repeats. “And how old are you, Bridget?”
“Eighteen,” I say without hesitating. If I’m going to get into this place, he needs to think that I’m at least eighteen.
He nods, very slightly, then smiles. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Bridget Cash,” he says. “I’m Barnabas.” He moves past me to the counter and begins laying his items out for the cashier to ring up.
I follow him to the cash register, surprised. “Wait,” I say.
He turns and looks at me, raises an eyebrow. “Yes?” he asks.
“What about your farm?” I ask.
“What about it?”
“I want to know about it,” I say. I sound desperate and try to hold myself back a bit.
He turns back to the cashier, who rings him up. I don’t feel like I’ve been dismissed exactly—more like he expects me to wait patiently, so I do. He pulls out a wad of dirty bills from his back pocket, counts them out, and slips a few across the counter. He takes his change and pockets it, then grabs his bags of groceries and walks to the door.
I turn to the cashier, who gives me a cryptic look.
“You coming?” Barnabas asks. I follow him out onto the covered porch.
Across the street, half a block away, Sarah is sitting in her car, the engine turned off. I force myself not to look at her, since Barnabas is staring straight at me, and I don’t want him to read anything into it.
“So,” he says, “what’s the deal? What do you want to know about the farm?” He sets his bags down on the wooden bench and shoves his hands in his pockets, as if he’s preparing to have a real conversation.
“I heard about it,” I say. “From a friend. Back in the city.”
“What city?” he asks, rocking slightly on his feet, back and forth in his big leather boots.
I tell him, and he nods. “We’ve had some guests from there. Word spreads, I suppose.”
“Guests?” I ask.
He holds his hands out, palms up.
“Everyone at the farm is a guest,” he says, “whether they stay a day or much longer. We’ve been there almost fifteen years, and a lot of the guests have stayed the whole time. Some people come and stay for a year or two, a month, even a couple of days. Just enough to learn about the farm, decide whether it’s the right place for them.”
“Oh,” I say. I’m unsure how to continue, whether I should be pushing the conversation forward or not.
“How did you get here?” he asks.
“I took the bus,” I tell him. At least this much I’ve figured out ahead of time.
“You came all this way to find out about the farm?” he asks. “Does that mean you want to be a guest?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I don’t know how this is supposed to go. Will it be as simple as entering the farm and finding Sibby? Alice told me that she’s probably not even there anymore. But she also said that she just left when she was done. And this man has said the same thing. There’s nothing holding me here. I can go to the farm for a little while. A few hours, even, and figure out if there’s anything else to figure out. Then I can take it from there.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I do?”
“Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out,” he says. He leans down and picks up his shopping bags, then steps down off the porch into the small dirt parking lot. He heaves the bags into the back of the van and then walks around to the driver’s side door.
I haven’t moved from the porch. “We don’t try to convince people to come,” he says. “People have to convince themselves. Find their way to us. You’ve made it this far on your own, and now here’s a ride just waiting to drive you the rest of the way. But it’s up to you.”
I step down from the porch and walk over to the van. As he climbs in, I turn quickly toward where Sarah is parked. From this angle, I can only see a thin slice of her car, and I can just make out her face, craned forward over the dash so she can see what’s happening.
Keeping my hands low, I give her a frantic, waving thumbs-up, trying to indicate that everything is okay. After a split second, she nods and I breathe out.
Barnabas turns on the engine, then reaches over to push open the passenger door.
“You coming?” he asks.
I turn and smile at him and then get inside and slam the door closed, obscuring Sarah from my sight line. With a shudder, he throws the van into drive and backs out of the parking lot. A couple of minutes later, Finley is gone behind us.
35.
“Tell me about your parents,” says Barnabas as we drive away from Finley.
I’ve been searching for Sarah’s car in the rearview mirror for the past ten minutes, but we’re more or less alone on the road—no muscle cars stealthily following behind us. Is it possible that she didn’t see what was happening, missed out on a chance to follow us?
“My parents aren’t really in the picture,” I say. I’m trying to steal a note from Alice’s story. Trying to keep him from digging too much into my past. “I mean, they’re around and everything. I’ve been living with them on and off, but they don’t really have a lot to do with me. Vice versa, I guess.”
He nods, makes a vague “hmmmm” sound. He doesn’t seem interested in pressing very hard.
“So is the farm religious?” I ask.
He smiles but doesn’t look at me. “Religious,” he repeats. He doesn’t answer, and the word just hangs in the air.
I think of my phone, sitting in my pocket, and wonder if I should just pull it out and pretend that I’m checking my email or something so I can send Sarah a quick text. But I worry it will look too conspicuous, and I don’t want him to know I have a cell phone, just in case I need it down the road. I leave it hidden for now.
He slows down and turns onto a gravel road that twists over the snow-covered fields in front of us like a whip. I take note of the sign: Brewster Road. In the distance, a cluster of birds lifts up from a hedgerow and spins through the clear January sky.
This is the world, I think. This is the empty space of the world. No people, no structures. As many fences as they build, it all comes back to this empty, empty space.
I wonder, did Sibby come to this place? Did she look out the window of some vehicle, maybe even this van, ten years ago? Did she see the field, then in spring, and wonder what was on the other side of this emptiness?
I’m so hypnotized by the field, by the sense of dread in the pit of my belly, that when Barnabas finally responds to me, I have to stop and think about what it was that I asked him in the first place.
“What we do isn’t religion,” he says. “What we have isn’t connected to an afterlife. It’s connected to this life. The present. Every day, every day, every day, every day.”
He stops, and I turn to him, mesmerized. Underneath the van, the road rumbles along, an erratic series of bumps that eventually turn into a pattern.
“Do you think about things like that, Bridget?” he asks. “Do you think about every minute when you’re in it?”
I smile, thinking he’s just bantering, that the stupid little rhyme is a joke. But he isn’t smiling. The van clatters on, but his attention isn’t on the road; it’s on me, his eyes boring a hole into my mind.
“I think about time,” I say uncertainly.
“Not time,” he says insistently, and he gives the steering wheel a gentle whack, as if to punctuate how important it is that I listen to him, that I understand what he’s trying to tell me. “I’m talking about the opposite of time. I’m talking about the space between moments. Being present in the pure empty space that is right”—he snaps his fingers—“now. Not who you used to be and not who you will be. Who you are.”
I don’t answer. I feel suddenly very afraid, and I have a sink
ing feeling deep in my stomach that tells me I might have made one of the biggest mistakes in my life.
He breathes out hard, shakes his head, lets out a little laugh. “Listen,” he says, his voice suddenly soft and kind. “I’m sorry. I take it seriously. We all do at the farm. You’ll understand more soon, I promise. And if you don’t feel like this place is a good fit for you, that’s fine. That’s just fine. I’ll give you a ride back to town, or someone will, and you can get back on the bus and you can leave.”
He reaches out and puts a hand lightly on my shoulder, and my muscles tighten. I don’t want him touching me, but his touch is gentle, and he quickly pulls it away.
In the distance, a house appears. It’s a classic Victorian farmhouse, neat and well maintained, and nestled back into a large square that’s been cut out of the forest. There are some outbuildings around the house, a giant woodpile under an awning. As we approach, I notice a Christmas wreath still on the door, and a nice sedan and a pickup truck in the driveway.
Barnabas begins to slow down the van as we approach.
“Is that the farm?” I ask.
He laughs. “No,” he says. “That is definitely not the farm. Those are our neighbors. We’ve had our differences over the years, but we’ve learned to keep on their good side, and they try to keep on our good side, which basically means we leave each other alone.”
A few minutes after we’ve passed the house, Barnabas slows down and makes a hard right turn into the forest, slowing to a crawl as we cross over a large bump at the foot of what turns out to be a long driveway. After a long drive, we approach a large metal gate. As he pulls up to the gate and stops the van, leaving it running, I see that the gate is part of a fence, and the fence is surrounding a massive clearing cut out of the forest: a huge square of land with buildings centered in it.
“Hang on a second,” he says. He jumps out of the van and opens the gate wide. It isn’t locked, which makes me feel a bit relieved, and when he gets back in and drives through, he says, almost apologetically, “We need to keep things fenced because we have animals.”
We go over a slight rise and into the huge square, and I’m able to make out the collection of buildings more clearly. A few large animal barns are at the back and several other outbuildings, some of them small and specific looking, others long and narrow. In the center of all of them is a farmhouse. It’s big, and in contrast to the other buildings, which look new, it looks like the kind of place that has been here forever.
As we approach the house, a door in the side of one of the smaller outbuildings opens, and a man steps out and begins to walk toward the house. He turns and gives a quick wave to the van as it approaches, and as we pull up outside the house, he stops and waits by the door.
Barnabas’s door is on the side of the house, and when he gets out, he greets the man with another wave, then turns to look into the van at me.
I step out and smile across the hood of the van. The man stares, his expression unreadable. I know I can’t be the only newcomer he’s seen at this place, but he looks like every new person is a warning.
“This is Bridget,” says Barnabas as he walks around to the back of the van to open the door and pull out his bags. Awkward, looking for something to do, I follow him, grab some bags.
The man comes to help. Closer, I can see that he’s actually older and shorter than I thought. His posture is perfect, and he holds himself high and straight. He nods at me.
“Pierre,” he says.
I smile at him, but it isn’t returned. His expression shifts slightly, and his eyes become wary and drop away from me.
As Barnabas and I walk toward the house with the bags of groceries, Pierre shuts the door to the van. I follow Barnabas onto the porch and through the front door, into the house. As I step across the threshold, I turn and look back at the driveway. Pierre is walking down the driveway to the gate.
He grabs onto it with both hands and, walking backward, pulls it closed as the inside door shuts behind me.
36.
A smiling woman, short and fat, with a tight-cropped haircut and thick, old-fashioned glasses, is walking down a hallway to meet us as we enter the house. She’s wiping flour off her hands onto her apron, and unlike Pierre, she doesn’t look wary at my arrival. Instead, she smiles broadly.
“Bridget,” says Barnabas, “this is Pearl. Pearl, Bridget.”
“Hi there, Bridget,” says Pearl, reaching out a hand. I shake, and she holds on to my hand for a moment longer than necessary. “Welcome to the farm.”
I follow them down the hallway. A staircase with a well-worn wooden banister runs along the wall to the left, and on the right, double doors open into a large living room, full of bookshelves and worn, mismatched, but comfortable-looking furniture.
At the end of the hallway, we step into a large, bright kitchen. Sunlight streams through the windows, pooling on a gigantic wooden table that dominates the center of the room. Barnabas and Pearl deposit their bags on the table, and I follow their lead.
“Pearl, would you mind taking Bridget upstairs, so she can get settled?” Barnabas says. “We’ll put her in the yellow room for the night and make a more permanent arrangement in the morning.”
Pearl looks at me and nods. “Come on.”
I follow her upstairs and across a landing into a small, quaint bedroom with yellow wallpaper and curtains, and a patchwork quilt on the bed.
“You’ll stay here tonight,” she says. “But don’t get too comfortable. You’ll be in the bunkhouse with everyone else after this.”
“Bunkhouse?”
“It’s not that bad,” she says. “Only the oldest of us live in the house: Barnabas; my husband, Noah and I; Pierre. Everyone else is in the bunkhouse. Women on one side, men on the other.”
“That’s fine,” I say, knowing it won’t come to that. Sarah and I have made arrangements for one night, but even if I haven’t learned anything by tomorrow morning, I’m out of here.
“Bathroom is across the hall,” she says, pointing.
“Can I use it?” I ask, and a flicker of hesitation crosses her face, then disappears.
“Sure,” she says. “I’ll wait here.”
I sit in the bathroom, and finally, finally, I’m able to pull my phone out. I only have one bar of service, but the screen is lit up with worried messages.
Dee where are you going with that guy?
Dee wtf what is going on?
Dee I’m giving you one more hour before I call my parents.
The time on the most recent one is about half an hour ago. I breathe out and text her back.
I’m okay—I’m sorry I couldn’t text, didn’t have an opportunity till now.
Three dots appear almost instantly, and her message appears after a few seconds
OMG where are u??? Dee this is really messed up!
I know. I can’t leave yet. I haven’t found anything out.
You can’t stay there! Dee that’s crazy
Sarah I’m totally safe, I promise. It’s fine. I need to spend the night. You have to figure out how to stay close by, so you can come get me.
??? wtf? Are you sure its safe???
There are voices on the landing. I need to hurry up.
I swear! Just hang tight until morning. Stay at the motel in Finley and I’ll find out what I can. I will be ready to leave in the morning. Don’t worry, Sarah. I can come and go as I please. I’m choosing to stay.
I know this is putting her on the spot, but I can’t leave now. I’ve made it this far, now I need to take advantage of being here and find out what I can.
The dots appear, and after a moment, I get a response.
Okay. Where are you?
I send her a pin and she responds immediately.
Please please be safe. I’ll see you in the morning.
I will. Gotta go c u tomorrow.
I flush and stand up, then run the water and wash my hands. I dry them on a towel and I’m about to leave when I think of Pearl’s
face when I asked to use the bathroom, and something tells me I should hide my phone.
There’s a knock on the door.
“You okay in there?” Pearl calls.
“Yep!” I call back. “Just coming out!”
I stare around the room, trying to figure out what to do with my phone. There’s a tall wicker shelf in the corner with piles of toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Underneath it is a gap of about an inch. I turn the water back on, then I quickly kneel and slide my phone underneath it.
I toss water on my face and run some through my hair, so it will look like I’ve been in here for a reason.
When I open the door, Barnabas and Pearl are standing outside, smiling at me.
“Sorry to rush you, hon,” says Pearl kindly. “You were just taking so long. We were just hoping you were doing all right in there.”
“You have to understand,” says Barnabas. “There have been…troubled people here in the past. People with drug issues, mental health issues…”
“Yeah,” I say, laughing nervously, my brain spinning as it looks for an excuse. “I’m sorry. I haven’t washed in a few days. I feel gross.”
Barnabas nods, his face serious. “We’ll make sure you have the chance to take a shower after dinner,” he says. “And I’m sorry about this, Dee, but we have to search you.”
“Search me?” I ask. Something about it doesn’t seem right. I’m happy I listened to my gut and hid my phone.
“For drugs.”
“I definitely don’t have drugs,” I say.
“I’m sure you don’t,” he says, but he still gestures toward Pearl, who steps over to me and begins patting me down firmly and efficiently. I don’t want this woman touching me, but I feel like I’m walking on thin ice—I need this to go as smooth as possible.
Pearl finishes quickly and steps back. “She’s clear,” she says. “Sorry, hon. It’s necessary.”
“No phone?” he asks, and Pearl shakes her head. “We don’t allow phones on the farm,” he explains. He smiles and tilts his head, curious. “You must be the only teenage girl in the world without one.”
