“A trapeze in a barn?” I say, too loud. “So is this a thing now?” I had been gone so long. So many surprises in this place I thought I knew. Maybe the farmers had turned to circus acts due to hard times and hard labor.
Charlotte places a finger on her lips to quiet me. “When the Simpsons moved, Roland and Celeste Love moved in. Used to run Love’s Circus in Fort Dodge. Their daughter, Julia, does trapeze lessons here, and the occasional circus-themed birthday party.” Charlotte stops, smiles, as if she’s somehow proud of what comes next. “Only for the brave,” she adds. “For those who can learn to let go.”
I whisper, “Don’t you need two people to.…fly?”
Charlotte keeps her gaze fixed on the angelic flyer and nods. “Two is better,” she whispers back, but when she follows with an even softer “Two is infinitely better,” I suddenly understood. The woman flying through the air glances down at Charlotte, smiles at her in a knowing way, and yes, it is now as crystal clear as a crisp, starry night sky.
Love’s Circus.
Love is a circus. A scary, exhilarating, death-defying act. A leap of faith we all hope we’ll have the chance to dive into.
Well, I’ll be damned. I did not see this coming. Memories of Charlotte and I hanging up posters of heartthrob boys from Teen Beat, and crying over how Peter Stevens didn’t ask her to the Homecoming Dance, and now this? A new Charlotte. Or is this the real Charlotte we didn’t know existed? Reversals, opposites, mysteries everywhere. Is this Iowa? No, it’s just lesbian heaven. Charlotte’s favorite movie, The Way We Were, swirls in my head, in all its past-tense glory, and I realize that after all these years it isn’t Robert Redford in Charlotte’s dreams. Her Hubbell Gardiner isn’t wearing a beige trench coat and writerly turtleneck. Her Hubbell Gardiner has a vagina and is flying through the air in the Iowa night.
The woman releases her hands from the ropes and sits balanced on the bar.
My nerves resonate in my voice. “Should she be…”
Charlotte silences me with her hand. “Lista,” Charlotte whispers up toward the woman.
“Lista?”
“Ready. It means ‘ready’…in trapeze-speak.”
Suddenly, the woman flung her arms up and behind her.
“Oh God!” I grab Charlotte, calm and lost in the moment.
“It’s okay, Janie.” Charlotte’s body now mimics the woman’s as she watches her next move, a backward swan dive. Charlotte slightly arches her back and tilts her head back in sync with the woman, and just when I expect to see a stranger free-fall to her death, she catches the bar where her knees bend and swings upside down.
Charlotte floats on an invisible cloud. “Timing is everything,” she says, eyes still fixed on the woman who saw the world from the other side.
I let a few seconds pass, knowing that despite years of botched timing and faulty geography, at that moment, I am in the right place at the right time.
I turn to Charlotte. “Char?” I whisper. “So how long have you been in love with a trapeze artist?”
“About a year,” she says. “Forever,” she whispers. “Something like that.”
“The two of us are a mess, huh?” For some reason, despite how illogical it is for the circumstance, I feel compelled to be optimistic. For Charlotte. “Maybe there’s hope for us after all, Char.”
She nods, staring at me now with a newfound understanding, like maybe we can get through our messes together.
“Char, do you believe in second chances?” I whisper, wondering if Dad can hear me, if Dad is revising at this very moment.
A soft truth escapes, as sure as a birthday wish. “I’m banking on it. So should you.”
“Hallelujah,” I say, as all stars, all eyes, watch the unlikely angel soar through the night.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
1994
Janie Willow, the Before Jane, died on April 16, 1994, at 6:14 p.m. when Joey Darnell left this earth. While I was preparing to tell my parents they were going to have a grandchild, a semitruck carrying 1,100 bushels of corn crashed into the driver’s side of Joey’s Chevy on Highway 71, killing him on impact.
All that was left was Jane, a hopeless shell of Janie. The After version of my better, Before self. While Janie knew love was precious, Jane only knew its pain.
I went to Joey’s funeral with part of him growing inside me, and told no one. Maybe tomorrow, I thought, maybe tomorrow I would tell. But as the Methodists cried and sang “You’ve Got a Friend in Jesus,” I protected my secret and my belly while all of True City hugged me and attempted condolences for a life taken too soon.
Such a shame. Hug. Everything happens for a reason. Hug. Such a shame. Hug. Such a shame. He’s in a better place.
“No, he’s not,” I said to Mrs. Nelson after she’d tried to convince me that Joey Darnell from Crocker County, a land where a boy could be a girl’s King of the Stars, was in a better place. Janie would’ve walked away, but Jane bulldozed through the tension. “That’s what people say,” I snarled. “Better place… That’s what they say when they know the universe has totally screwed someone over.”
My mother scolded me, whisking me toward the front entrance of the house of God, but I continued my tirade by hollering, “And ‘everything happens for a reason’ is the biggest line of bullshit I’ve ever heard!”
Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones, or maybe it was the grief-induced posttraumatic stress disorder I’d heard people whispering about, but the Corn Queen was officially dead. Janie had been replaced by some bitch named Jane, and everyone was nonplussed. Look, if a pregnant girl at her baby’s father’s funeral can’t show a little frustration, where the hell can she? So just like that, Jane Willow was born. Born again in the house of God. Alongside Joey rested Janie Willow, the Corn Queen, the girl who believed in rain and love and the beauty of a place called home.
You’ll be okay, they said. You have your whole life ahead of you, they said.
That’s exactly what I was afraid of; this pain would have no expiration date.
I had planned on telling, but one day turned into five. Five days turned into twenty. Twenty days became a month. Every time I thought about Joey’s eyes, whether this baby would have the same blue, dreamy eyes that always seemed to know things, I pushed the truth—how much it would hurt to love this child without Joey—into a faraway place. Every time I thought about how many nights I’d have to see the stars without Joey, I realized this baby was Joey. If I attached emotion to this baby, it would mean saying goodbye to Joey all day, every day, forever.
“You feelin’ okay?” Mom asked one day, but I could tell she was concerned about my emotional health, not my physical health, suspecting nothing more than depression. My teenage boyfriend had died tragically and I was sad, Mom and Dad thought. So sad that every afternoon I ate half a pan of Mom’s corn casserole and then helping after helping of her chocolate chip bars. My parents, even Charlotte, viewed my personality change, my added weight, as a reflection of death, not life.
One afternoon, midbite, I finally spoke some truth. “I’m so sorry for everything, Mommy.” A hint of a childlike whimper snuck out, and Mother hugged me like a mother does.
She pooh-poohed my guilt as a what-could-you-possibly-have-done-wrong kind of ridiculousness, but she didn’t know a thing. Only I knew the truth: this was all my fault. It was my body that got me in this mess in the first place, and it was my lack of courage that sent Joey out the door that night to his death. If only I’d told my parents myself, and then told Joey, or maybe had him wait with me to confront my parents straightaway. He was distracted, in a hurry, thinking about me, when he pulled out onto that highway. This was all on me, and it always would be.
And this baby? She was pure happiness. Happiness I didn’t deserve. As I thought about how my mother used to sing to me each night, I mourned for a love I would never know. I said goodbye to the life ins
ide of me. I would secretly love her for the rest of my life, but she would never be mine.
For my parents, I found the strength to pretend to be Janie again, to be what my parents wanted me to be. “So, I think I need a change of scenery, Mom.”
I talked my parents into letting me spend the summer in California, taking a UCLA course offered to high school students interested in film history. By the time I got back, I hid my swollen belly under one of my dad’s old Carhartt jackets.
“You’ll die of heatstroke, kid,” Dad would say, but I told him I was cold—I’d gotten used to the California sun—which was partly true. Every day in Los Angeles had made me feel farther away from the only home I’d ever known. By the time I’d gotten back, it felt like Janie’s home, not mine, full of memories too painful to be near.
Charlotte reached out like a good friend should, but unlike her, I was not a good friend. I pushed her away, unable to tell her the truth. Charlotte was Janie’s friend, and being around her only made me miss what I’d already lost.
I was on my own. Telling my parents at this point would rob them of everything they’d ever wanted: for me to be a good, happy, midwestern girl with a future. If I told them, not only would Janie be dead for me, but for them too, and the Willow home couldn’t take any more disappointment. How could I not tell, you ask? How could I create the biggest lie imaginable? Shame. Contrary to popular belief, shame, not love, is the master emotion when you’re seventeen.
My eighth and nine months of pregnancy involved lying on a whole new level. Sorry, Mom, I’m just not ready to hug yet. Yes, I’m feeling fine, just tired, Dad. Charlotte and I just grew apart, Mom. Well, I need to read all these film books up in my room so I can be prepared for college. Um, dressing like an overweight truck driver is more comfortable.
Mom and Dad’s blind optimism was finally a benefit for me—we see what we want to see, I guess. A disaster of this magnitude didn’t even register as a possibility for them, so how could they see it? Dad had even mentioned, during one of his juvenile pregnancy cases, how irresponsible the parents of the teen must have been to not know their own daughter was pregnant. Thank God for his rose-colored glasses now.
I didn’t know the details of how I was going to pull this off, but I did have an idea what to expect, thanks to What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which I’d bought in California and threw away in a bathroom garbage can in the Denver airport on the way home. I tried not to think about episiotomies, mucous plugs, or the fact that poop coming out of a woman during labor was totally normal. Nothing about this was normal, and at night I lay awake, terrified of what could go wrong. But I had one job. Get this baby out safely. I owed that to her. To Joey.
By the time the Braxton Hicks contractions I’d read about had turned into full-blown contractions, I was sure I was going to have the baby right in the middle of some family meal. After a day and a half, I felt a warm rush of fluid, kind of like I’d peed my pants, and knew it was really happening. I told my parents I had bad cramps and needed to lie down, which wasn’t entirely untrue.
They always went flying in the afternoon, which meant my window was a few hours, and I prayed it would be enough. When the front door slammed and I heard Dad’s truck drive away toward the airport, though, I panicked.
“Come back!” I cried to nobody, in between wails of pain and sheer fear. “Please come back; I’m so scared,” I whispered, a child about to have a child.
This went on for forty-five minutes, the pain escalating with each minute, until the only way I could find relief was to crouch down on my hardwood floor and groan. Each contraction made the last seem like a mere spasm, a twinge. The dull aches turned into intense twisting and wrenching in my lower back, then subsided. But not for long. When it returned, it was the worst agony I’d ever experienced, like someone tugging at my organs from the inside, followed by a stabbing sensation. I was sure my organs were going to fall out, that they’d find us both here in a pile of guts and intestines.
That fear didn’t last long, because I suddenly felt immense pressure and a burning sensation, like someone had taken a blowtorch to my vagina. I’d read about this. The baby was crowning. I crawled into my bathroom, flopped into my claw-foot tub while pulling down the jogging pants that had been acting as my maternity pants, and fulfilled my urge to push. This felt surprisingly good. For a minute. Then my body ripped apart, hip to hip, bone to bone.
When I felt like pushing, I did, acting as my own uninformed and deranged birthing coach, but it seemed to never end. In the movies, it’s over in a couple of pushes, so I feared something was wrong. Thoughts of women in covered wagons dying while giving birth flashed through my mind, followed by nightmarish images of me dying in a bathtub wearing bad sweatpants with a baby sticking out of me.
“Come on!” I yelled. “You have to come out!” I wanted to cry, but I was so exhausted I could barely talk. I managed one last, breathless directive. “No one can help us. It’s just us.”
I drew on strength I didn’t know I had and mustered up one more push along with a guttural, universal, primal scream, the kind that puts you in the women-mother club, and I felt her come out, first her head, then, with one last push, her body. I reached down between my legs and pulled her slippery body up to me. She was a girl, but I’d known that all along.
Shaking, I tried to remember what I was supposed to do. Clean nostrils and airway, keep her warm, but all I could do was look at her blue eyes. When she first cried, I should’ve been worried someone would hear, but all I felt was an unexpected pride.
“You are beautiful. And strong.” A new emotion I’d never felt before showed up; perhaps it was extreme fatigue. “And perfect.”
I cleaned her off with a bath towel and quickly let her suckle on my breast—something about inducing a hormone that helps push the placenta out. Plus, I’d read that the buttery stuff that came out right after birth was full of nutrients. She’d already had a rough start; she needed all she could get.
Everything that seemed super gross from my reading now seemed natural, rooted in necessity. I knew I had to clean up the bathroom and try as best I could to get moving, but for one long moment, we just sat there, the two of us, breathing, living. For the first time in months, shame evaporated, replaced by the absolute miracle of what had happened. After cutting the umbilical cord with Mother’s Fiskars sewing shears, the first act of our inevitable separation, I prepared for the impossible. I retrieved the blanket I’d made thanks to my 4-H skills, a blanket I’d embroidered with hundreds of stars because I wanted her to be near Joey and my stars, her stars, always there to wish upon.
The rest is a blur. My weak, oozing body trudged through the motions, each step producing throbbing pain in my tender, swollen self. I washed all traces of what had happened down the bathtub drain and hid the bloody towel in a garbage bag. Then I wrapped her in a blanket, placed her in my canvas Gap tote bag I had prepacked in my closet, and made my way to the Aston Martin. We drove together first down the long lane, then down two gravel roads, before I could admit that I had no idea where I was going.
Where does one hide and protect something delicate and valuable in the middle of Iowa? I had no Nile River, no tall reeds of grass to hide her in…and just like that, I knew. Iowa had its own brand of tall grass. I turned around, headed back toward the outskirts of town toward the only place worthy of her. A perfect place for a child—equal parts rules, fun, and love.
Just one year ago I had been on this same road. No, Janie had been on this road. Now, a lifetime later, I arrived in the same place, but this time in the far back, a secret entrance that not many people knew existed. A small car path led to it, through the Stevens’ adjoining cornfield, so if something went wrong, Mr. Nelson could get to the center quickly without going through the crowd of customers in the height of harvest.
That’s what I was looking for, a way to get to the center without being seen. I grabbed a
baseball cap from the glove box and tucked my hair up in it. I lifted up the tote bag, got out of the car, and let her suck on my pinkie so she was quiet. Together, we walked into the back entrance of the corn maze, uninvited guests on hallowed ground.
I pulled the wall of corn back like a curtain, and we made our way through two lesser-traveled parts of the maze, until we reached the center, the heart, the goal of True City maze-goers, as if heartland heritage instinctively lured them to the centers of things.
Formerly muffled voices grew louder and clearer, which meant I was running out of time. I placed the bag down gently in an open part of the path where I knew she would be found. It was time to go, yet my feet remained still, heavy and frozen with the weight of leaving her.
The voices drew nearer.
My mind had already walked away, but there I stood, looking at her, unable to move. With the last of my strength, I ripped off a frayed corner piece of the blanket with multicolored stars I’d wrapped her in and clinched it in my sweaty palm.
I heard a child and her parents talking like families do, getting closer.
The Titanic was sinking, and I was leaving her behind. I prayed I’d drown and never be found.
“This way, baby.” A mother guided her child like a mother does. “We made it!”
They’d made it.
They’d made it.
I blinked tears away and squeezed the scrap of blanket in my fist, the only part of her that would make it out of here.
“I think there’s someone up there!”
All of the air left my lungs, and the weight of the world pressed down, stealing my breath. I gasped for air, forced my heavy legs to move, now just swollen, lumbering, guilty stumps, one foot after another until I’d exited the corn maze. All that stood between us was one temporary wall of corn.
“Mama, there’s a big bag, there’s a big bag!” the little girl called to her parents. “It’s a prize for making it to the center, I bet!” As I approached my car, I heard the little girl’s voice change. “There’s a baby in the bag, Mama. Mama? Mama, there’s a baby.”
The Lost Queen of Crocker County: A Novel Page 16
