The Lost Queen of Crocker County: A Novel

by Elizabeth Leiknes

  I couldn’t stop smiling as I stared at True City’s only copy of Stripes. “You didn’t. Shut. Up.”

  “Well, I had more to say, but…”

  I looked up, fell deep into the moment. “Thank you,” I managed, but then unstoppable words came. “So…you’ve been in my dreams for, like—”

  “You made me want to go to kindergarten,” he blurted, confident, unapologetic.

  This was it. I was going to explode into tiny pieces, fertilize the corn maze, never to be seen again. “Kinder—”

  “You sat next to me.” He took my hand in his, like he knew what he was doing, like it was as natural as breathing, and followed my gaze even when I looked away in embarrassment. “You refused to take Miss McIntyre’s coloring book pages and drew your own. You shared your peanut butter sandwich with me every day, and you were the only girl who played baseball at recess. You smelled like lilacs and sometimes like motor oil. I wanted to listen to you read aloud all day.” His gentle hand touched my face when I turned away, blushing, telling me he wasn’t finished. “Kindergarten was lame. Except for you. You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Still are.”

  After that, I couldn’t feel my body. The smell of burning leaves wafted through the night air, and my inhibitions floated away with it.

  “Remember that time in fifth grade when—”

  “Shh.” I put my finger over his mouth, leaned in, and faked my way through knowing how to kiss a boy. My numb body came back to life, working on its own. First, I got on my tiptoes to reach him, then my head turned to the side and my hands cradled his head. My front teeth clinked into his, and when I flinched, he reassured me by pulling me into him. I don’t know what my mouth was doing, but I know I wanted all of his boy taste, all of his boy smell. The only other boy I’d kissed was Jacob Stevens in seventh grade, but it was for a dare, and I enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed helping Charlotte clean out the chicken coop.

  I finally pulled away, even though I didn’t want to.

  He smiled and touched my hair. “That…was a proper kiss.”

  “Was it?” I asked, not sure.

  He answered by giving me the kind of kiss I’d seen in movies, the kind people described feeling in their knees, their toes, their dreams.

  Within seconds, my childhood drifted away, and I suddenly felt the weight of a changed girl-woman. If this feeling existed, how did adults ever go to work or make dinner or do other boring things? Why wouldn’t people just do this all the time?

  There was something gentlemanly about the way he stopped kissing me, took my hand, and invited me to sit with him. He took off his coat, spread it out over the cold, hard ground, and we lay down together, watching the stars.

  He looked to the sky like some long-lost lover. “Ever wonder what the stars look like in other places?”

  I wanted to look into his eyes, but I remained fixed on the big dipper, fixed on the illusion that I was cool and collected. “Same galaxy, same stars, Joey Darnell.”

  “But how do we know, really? We’ve never left here, right? Maybe they look different somewhere else.”

  I turned toward him. “You joking?”

  “I would never, ever, ever joke in a corn maze,” he said, straight-faced. “It’s against the rules.”

  “Nope. Not a rule.” I linked my little pinkie finger with his.

  “Should be.” He verged on laughing.

  “You know what else should be?” I added, matching his ability to stay in character, “Mini movie theater inside the maze.”

  “Huh, interesting.”

  “Yep.” I readjusted my head so it fit into his coat hood.

  He abandoned my pinkie for my whole hand and shook his head. “Girl loves movies.”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. Movie night at the corn maze… What’s playin’, Janie Willow?”

  “The Thing.”

  “What?” His laugh made his chest move up and down. “No hesitation? The Thing? True City’s youngsters will never sleep again.”

  “And then a Stand by Me and Raging Bull double feature.”

  “Not much of a romantic, huh?”

  “Fine,” I said. “End-of-summer finale… Casablanca.”

  “Ooh, very nice. Unrequited love, cut short by…life.”

  “And Nazis,” I added.

  He turned to me, his whole face smiling. “When I get outta here, I’ll send you a picture of the stars from wherever I go.”

  My heart sank. I didn’t know where Joey Darnell was going, but wherever it was, I was going with him.

  “Well, just so you know, restless spirit, wherever you’re going will never be as glamorous as this.” I grabbed a handful of black Iowa soil, lifted my arms, looked around, grinning, and presented our perfect little house of corn.

  He whispered, “We’ll always have the corn maze.” And with the stars, our stars, as witnesses, he kissed me like we owned the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Rob Anderson is a broken man. This is obvious to any astute observer, and I can’t stop observing.

  “Don’t you have somewhere else…someone else…you could pretend to help?” He keeps his eyes on Bliss, leans forward in his chair, the only thing holding him up.

  I try for a moment to be offended by his comment, mean and biting and warranted, but his devastated voice and sad eyes make me want to fix this miserable disaster even more.

  “Faith is just pretending that…” I say, abandoning my sentence and resisting the urge to walk toward him.

  Still fixed on Bliss, he lets out one long, faithless sigh. “Well, I’m a bad pretender.”

  Go for it. Be Harold Hill. Make him believe we can wake her up. “Sometimes, you know, coma patients can sense—”

  “Sense?” He shakes his head, then with an angry twist, turns to me. “Hasn’t moved in forty-eight hours, but she can sense…” He stops, stands up. “I hope she can’t sense this utter nonsense.” He hangs his head, and we breathe in silence, the three of us. I wait for him to send me away, kick me out like I deserve, but he just stands with me, like he wants someone to yell at. This, in some perverse way, makes me feel useful.

  “Yesterday”—I tread lightly—“when I said her name, I swear there was a little flutter in her eyelids.” He stares me down with irritated disbelief, so I walk to her bedside and speak in a gentle voice. “Bliss?” When nothing happens, I try again. “Bliss?”

  “Just stop—”

  “Bliss?” I say one last time, pretending not to pretend.

  At first it looks like it might be nothing, but no, it’s something.

  Rob Anderson moves with a purpose toward Bliss and stands next to me. “How many times has she done that?”

  “Just these two,” I admit.

  A nurse comes in to check the feeding tube and gives us an apologetic look when she overhears us. “They do that sometimes. Their eyes may flutter. Just brainstem reflexes.” She touches Rob’s shoulder. “Sorry, Chief.”

  Chief? His ivory skin and blue eyes rule out any Native American heritage. I look around for context clues. Then I see it sitting on a small side table along with a worn, black wallet—a police officer’s badge, shiny, and for the moment, useless. So this is who I would’ve met if I’d turned myself in two days ago. All of the air left my lungs, and my mouth, a criminal’s mouth, is dry with guilt.

  When the nurse leaves, Rob slumps into the chair again, looking like he’s been broken before; the nightmare before him—Bliss, his only child, not yet dead, not really alive—has broken him in a new way. Like a fracture on an already broken bone, except this time, the fracture hasn’t made him stronger, it’s made him want to give up.

  “I can’t lose them both,” he says, barely audible.

  Before I can ask, he answers my question. “My wife, her mother… Cancer… Two years
ago.”

  “I’m so—”

  “I actually thought staying here, the smallest of small towns, would keep them both safe.” He takes a big, disappointed breath and turns to the window. “I used to watch them, Bliss and her mother, out in the garden—she loved her hollyhocks—and I’ll be goddamned if every time she told Bliss she’d find her a monarch butterfly, one would fly over, like she’d conjured it up. Magic Mommy, she’d call her, the bringer of butterflies. Every time I see one…”

  His emptiness, our emptiness now, settles into me.

  “All she ever wanted to be was a mother. I’m so grateful she can’t see this.”

  When he turns his attention back to Bliss, he bows his head, unable to look at her swollen face and closed eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t be sorry. Just don’t tell me she can hear you…because she can’t.”

  “She will,” I say, the unwanted, resident charlatan.

  “You’re the ‘expert,’” he fires, his hands erupting into angry air quotes. “I haven’t slept for two days, mind you, so I’m a little off my game, but tell me something.” His eyes widen and a desperate sigh escapes. “How many people have you saved with your little stories? That’s what they said you do, right? Tell stories to people who can’t hear a damn word you’re saying?”

  “I think you’re full of shit.” He watches me, curious. “Yeah. I think you’re full of shit,” I repeat, like I am even surer the second time. “Chief.”

  With this, he stands up. “Excuse me?”

  “Excuses are for pussies.” I sigh. “And I’ll have none of them in this room.” I shove my book in my bag and then stop to look into his eyes with a truth he is not prepared to hear. “I know why you don’t want me to tell you she can hear me…hear us.” I tell my eyes not to well up. “If I tell you she can hear us, I might be right.” I nod myself on. “And that’s a lot to hope for.”

  He lets the chair catch him, and he slumps into the cushion; his brokenness upgrades to full-blown shattered. “She is slipping away, and I can’t help her. I can’t bring her back. Three weeks, they said. Three weeks, and then the odds…”

  Together, we listen while Bliss breathes life into the silence. I walk to him, extend my hand. “Kate,” I say. “Altered state specialist. Storyteller.” I crack a smile. “Ballbreaker.”

  He doesn’t smile back—that’s asking for a lot—but he does something better.

  “What were you saying…about how she can sense things?”

  “It’s called salient stimulus,” I say, grateful for the question. “When something emotionally significant to the patient—a song, a voice, but usually words—prompt them to wake up.”

  His almost-nod indicates a hint of hope, but he suddenly looks like he needs rescuing. Words. Words will save the day.

  “Mr. Anderson, I’m going to come back here every day until you have your daughter back.” I let that rain down on us, three broken people, and wait to see if the chief is going to charge me with wrongful hope-giving.

  He looks back at me one last time. “How are we supposed to know which words will wake her up?”

  “We don’t,” I say and open the door to leave. “That’s where faith and pretending come in.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  1994

  “I’m pregnant,” I said, and then I puked into my mother’s country-blue kitchen garbage can.

  For once, Joey Darnell had no words. He came to me, touched my back as I retched into the Hefty extra-strong trash bag. “Do you… I mean, are you…”

  With my head still in the can, I threw up again, then turned back to Joey, pale and still, slumped onto a kitchen chair. “Yes,” I gasped. “I’m sure.” I pulled two positive pregnancy tests from my back pocket.

  “Shit, Janie. God… When…?” he stammered. “How…?”

  I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “Valentine’s Day. Your truck. The Simpsons’ cornfield.” In an attempt to address the “how,” I added, “Reckless hormones. Prince on the radio. Bad judgment.”

  My head pounded, and I leaned into the punishment. I couldn’t get enough air. “My God, what.…what are we gonna do?”

  He let out a defeated exhale, shut his eyes for a moment, like he was thinking it over, and then he sat down with me on the linoleum. What he did next made me want to cry. “Nothing.” He kissed my forehead. “We’re gonna do nothing. We are gonna do this. Together.” He cupped my tear-soaked face in his hands. “I love you, Janie Willow.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” I hid behind my hands. “Nightmare. Total nightmare.”

  “Not exactly what a guy wants to hear after bearing his soul, but okay, all right. Uh, let me regroup. On second thought, I don’t love you. Because you’re kind of gross.” He smiled. “And there’s a chunk of your lunch stuck to your lip.”

  With this, a conundrum of the human condition—a moment that’s simultaneously devastating and beautiful—I fell apart. After a year and a half of dating, a year and a half after our corn maze rendezvous, Joey and Janie had evolved into Joe and Jane, and Joe and I had become the happy couple that outwitted and outlasted other typical, fleeting high school romances. We weren’t your typical high school lovebirds only concerned with prom themes and Friday-night football games. Joe and I watched films together, studied together, cooked together. We even garnered the attention of True City’s grown-ups, who gave us the my God, Marge, they just might make it past high school look. But we weren’t looking for approval; we were looking toward the future. And now we were looking toward it together.

  “Where are your parents?” he asked, breaking eye contact.

  “Out flying.” My stomach knotted, realizing why he’d asked. I attempted to stand. “No. No, Joe, I can’t do it. I can’t tell them—”

  “You have to tell them. We have to tell them—”

  “It will kill them, Joe. You don’t understand. I’m all they have. All they’ve ever wanted is for me to…”

  He tried to hug me, but the idea of admitting to my parents that I was not who they thought I was made my body clinch into one giant, guilty knot, and I backed away.

  “Look, it will be weird and awful and probably be the hardest thing you’ll ever say, but we can tell them we have a plan.”

  “Plan?” I almost laughed, but I still felt like puking.

  “Yeah. Look, we’re graduating in a year. We’ll have the baby, I’ll help you with everything I can, and we’ll still go to school, maybe just part-time for a while, and it won’t be like we had always planned, but—”

  “Like we planned? This is nothing like we planned! This is not engineering! This is not film school! This is not making our parents proud…and don’t say that word.”

  He looked angry. “What word?”

  “Baby,” I whisper-cried.

  He exhaled from somewhere deep. “Janie, we screwed up, okay? And we’re gonna have to suck it up, try to make this right. As right as we can.” He offered me the other kitchen chair. “I’m gonna go home. Get my parents. When I come back, we’ll tell both of our parents together.”

  My silence screamed compliance.

  “Okay?”

  I nodded.

  • • •

  An hour later, the phone rang. “Joey, what’s taking you so—”

  “Janie?” Joey’s mother managed, but there was something wrong.

  “Did you talk to Joey?” My shame was palpable. “Are you guys on your—”

  “No… Joseph…never made it…home.” I heard a loud thump, the phone dropping to the floor, followed by crying.

  “Hello?” My voice grew more desperate.

  “Janie?” Joey’s dad said. “There was”—he cleared his voice, trying to push the emotion away—“an accident.”

  I held my breath. Began making deals with God. Anybody
but him. I will tell my parents everything. Anybody but him. I will make everything right. Anybody but him.

  Mr. Darnell let out a raw sound, an audible open wound, then changed my life forever. “He’s gone, Janie.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  For the first time in eighteen years, I am going to act like a friend. Something tells me Charlotte needs one right now. Showing up, late or not, is the least I can do. I owe her.

  Besides the wonderful childhood we shared, I owe her for leaving her. I always had the aching feeling I’d left a void in her life, but it wasn’t until last night, after leaving Charlotte’s house with the scrapbook she’d given me, that I realized how big the hole was that I’d left in her world.

  When I’d settled into my father’s rocking reading chair with the worn armrests and opened the cover on the scrapbook, I expected to find pictures of her last eighteen years—her wedding, her children, everything I had missed that she wanted me to know about. But when I flipped to the first page, the already big hole I’d left gaped wide open.

  Staring back at me on page one was a picture of me from the True City Gazette, a picture my mother had sent in of me after getting my PhD in film studies from UCLA. On page two was a clipping from the LA Times of the first film review I ever wrote for My Own Private Idaho. The next several pages were dedicated to my climb to fame as Cinegirl. When I saw my cartoon likeness staring back at me, the alter ego I’d taken on, I began to rock faster, as if I could somehow rock away the guilt. Page by page, my life unfolded before me, cataloged and highlighted by Charlotte Davis, the best friend I hadn’t bothered to send one birthday card to in eighteen years. The newspaper articles and pictures overlapped, just like the years.

  After I’d looked at the last page, and after I’d rocked alone in silence, the flashes of my life still fresh in my mind, I decided to do what my gut, what this place called home, told me to do.

  If ya screw up, kid, make it right.

  Work hard. Be nice.