The Lost Queen of Crocker County: A Novel

by Elizabeth Leiknes

  I picked up the shovel I’d left at the base of the tree two days earlier when I also left a pile of Dad’s sawdust. Iowa’s cold fall temperatures made it difficult to dig in half-frozen ground, but Dad had taught me that the sawdust would help it thaw. The sun began to retreat behind the golden stalks of corn lining the horizon. The tree was now a giant, black silhouette, surrounded by yellow and red leaves that covered the ground like a blanket of fire. I swiped away the leaves and dug a small hole right underneath my favorite bough, the one I long ago used to hoist myself up. I placed the little patch of blanket in the hole, piled the cold Iowa soil back on top until the one lonely star disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Janie! Thanks for doing this,” Connor says, waiting for me in front of the True City Community Theater.

  “Anything for your mom, Connor,” I say, looking around like a nervous fugitive who is standing next door to the police station. Main Street is fairly empty today, but Rob’s pickup is parked right in front of the Cop Shop, and my half-assed trucker-hat disguise will not suffice if Rob sees me.

  I whisk Connor inside the theater and we are greeted by Mr. Linart. “Well, I’ll be buggered! You came back, Janie!” He flies around the stage, passing out scripts. “I’ve got me Marion now, but Harold Hill’s out sick. I’ll have to be an actor today.”

  The stage and set are a mess, a symbolic reminder of everyone’s current status—a perpetual state of limbo until Bliss awakens. Different set pieces from signature scenes are strewn all about the stage. There is an unfinished wooden footbridge jutting out from the stage floor, and right where the unfulfilled footbridge ends abruptly, two-by-fours exposing its vulnerable innards, stands a tall bookshelf filled to the brim with what appears to be Mr. Linart’s personal library—including several volumes of Shakespeare and a worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye with curling Post-it Notes sticking out of it.

  “Miss Marion!” Mr. Linart directs me toward the half footbridge, and when I mistakenly go on the opposite side of the bookshelf, he yells in anger, “No, no, no, not there!” He is in the middle of throwing up his hands when he says, “Wait. On second thought, stay there.” He makes a camera with his hands and frames me hiding behind the bookshelf. “It’s bloody genius! Perfect dramatic irony!”

  Harold Hill and Marion Paroo separated by their Shakespearean wall.

  Mr. Linart is directing Connor to join the other horns in the orchestra pit and all of the actors to hide backstage when we all hear the front theater door open. I can’t see from behind the bookshelf, but I immediately know who it is. The deafening silence among the actors and crew give him away.

  “Hey, Chief!” Mr. Linart says, sounding uncomfortable as I hear Rob walk toward the stage.

  A nervous Mr. Linart tries to salvage the situation. “Here to check on our progress? You can tell Bliss we’re getting everything in place”—he stops, lost in the hopelessness of it all—“for when she comes back.”

  Rob doesn’t respond, and thank God, he doesn’t see me behind the wall. I hear footsteps travel up the small steps leading up to the stage, and then they stop. Seconds, minutes, lifetimes go by while we all wait for Rob Anderson to say something, but he doesn’t. How could he? How could he tell us all that he tried to walk by the theater door without walking in, but when he heard the music, the horns warming up, the actors practicing vocals, he was drawn inside where he could pretend that everything was okay.

  Mr. Linart can’t take the tension, and blurts, “So what do you want, Chief?”

  The horns are silent in their pit, the actors all quietly hiding behind True City’s clouds and storefronts, and I am frozen behind my literary wall of shame. I am not dressed as Kate Snelling, but as Jane Willow, and Jane Willow and Rob Anderson cannot be introduced.

  “What do I want?” Rob laughs, and in a sad, dreamy confession says, “I want to be Harold Hill.” We all know why. Harold Hill is in the business of miracles.

  Nobody moves. We swim around in the despair of it all until Mr. Linart surprises us all by doing the only possible thing that could make anything right. “Here,” he says, handing Rob the script, “you’re Harold Hill.”

  Mr. Linart guides Rob over to the other side of my wall and places him directly in front of the bookshelf, with nothing but The Tempest between us.

  I make deals with the gods. Please, whatever you do, don’t let Mr. Linart slip up and call me Janie—or, worse yet, make me speak and give myself away.

  Through a crack of space between books I see Mr. Linart point to a line on Rob’s script, but then disaster strikes. Some sort of crash, a scream, then a giggle. “What a load of cobblers!” Mr. Linart lets out and begins to storm away toward the orchestra pit. The rest of the musicians practice “Till There Was You,” but Rob and I have to leave River City behind us.

  We are stuck on two different sides of an unmoving wall in the heart of True City.

  “Well, don’t just stand there!” Mr. Linart yells back at me because he can’t yell at Rob the grieving father. “Break a bloody leg and do something, anything, until I sort out whatever mess they’ve made down there!”

  But all I can think about is how Rob looked when he woke up from falling asleep in the chair next to Bliss, that one fleeting moment when he’d forgotten the tragedy of his life, and he glanced at me with hope in his eyes, the corners of his mouth turned upward, ready for joy. I would trade everything I have to see that again. I would walk away, straight into oblivion, to lift the pain from this beautiful man.

  God, I am a disaster on a cinematic scale. I have done the impossible. I have actually made an abysmal situation, a truly messed-up-beyond-belief scenario, infinitely worse. I am falling for a man that I can never have, never deserve. Rob Anderson is the unlikely perspective I’ve been lacking. Rob Anderson is the lens I lost years ago, and the world never looked so good. Too bad it’s not mine to take.

  Here I am, on the verge of blowing my cover, but all I care about is getting through to Rob Anderson, somehow telling him that the mystery woman behind this wall is crazy about him. I glance down at the stage floor and see one pink, lonely Sweethearts candy, no doubt one of Connor’s that he dropped sometime on set.

  There it is. Crystal clear. Don’t think, Jane Willow. Just sing what’s in your heart. So I begin a song I sang in my fourth-grade talent show.

  “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you” comes out shaky at first but then finds its legs. There is enough background noise on the set that nobody stops to listen, so it’s just Rob and me.

  “Let me hear you whisper that you love me too.” I sound so sincere when I sing this, I surprise even myself, and I’m sure he can hear my heart thumping. I hear Rob’s feet shift a bit.

  When I sing “Keep the love-light glowing in your eyes so true,” I lose it. The word true falls apart at the end, and I clear my throat to disguise my almost-blubber. All of the emotion of the last few weeks unloads and reduces me to the desperate woman that I am.

  I hear Mr. Linart, coming back toward us. “Crikey!” he says, “Corn Queen can sing!”

  Through the small gap in between books I see Rob’s face soften, and his eyes tell me he wants to see this secret, singing sweetheart in person. I actually wonder if he’s hoping it’s me behind this wall. In my lunacy, I swear I hear someone finish the song with a whisper. “Let me call you sweetheart. I’m in love with you too.”

  Before he can get to me, before I can continue the ruinous streak I’m on, I slip out behind River City’s cardboard pool-hall window and dash past Winthrop Paroo crouching backstage, wondering where his sister is going.

  Connor’s brass and woodwinds swell, disillusioned with the hope of a reprise, and I crash through the theater’s back exit door while the soundtrack plays on.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “You need a break, Rob,” I say in the hospital room two hours after secretly s
inging to him on stage. I tuck my fake black hair behind my ear. “You’re exhausted, and you could use a shower.”

  “Don’t hold back, storyteller.” He runs his hands through his unkempt hair and then vulnerability sweeps over him. “Going home sounds—”

  “Lonely. I know. That’s why you’re not going to stay there.”

  I wonder if he’s thinking about Marian Paroo, and I feel a pang of jealousy. Even though I am Marian Paroo.

  Batshit crazy. That’s what this all is. Bat. Shit. Crazy.

  This poor man does need a break, and I need to find something to write about for Sid. I could review a James Bond film from Dad’s personal collection, but I’d already gone the classic route once. “Come on,” I say, and grab his hand, “it’s my professional opinion that you should go home, clean up, and I’ll come get you.” I tuck Bliss’s blanket under her. “We’re going to the movies.”

  “But what if she—”

  “I already talked with the nurse. She’ll call us if Bliss as much as flutters an eye. Besides, when Bliss wakes up—and she will wake up—you don’t want to look like a pile of shit. Teenagers are all about appearances.”

  “I should talk to your boss about your language,” Rob says, an almost-smile creeping in.

  “He already knows,” I assure him. “Let’s go.”

  • • •

  When I get to Rob’s house, I’m surprised to see the chief of police lives on a farm. “It was my parents’ farm.” He opens the porch’s screen door and invites me in. “They both passed a while back, but I promised them I’d keep it up.”

  So he is as good a son as he is a father. The last good man. Right here in Iowa. I imagine my parents knew him and knew this. I try not to think about what he will say when he finds out who I am. What I am. What I’ve done.

  He glances over at the entry side table that holds frame after frame of Bliss, from baby pictures to grade school pictures, and one recent one featuring a mouthful of braces. “Told her the farm is hers if she wanted it someday, and she rolled her eyes.” He smiles. “When she was little, she wanted to live here forever, but now she can’t wait to leave.”

  Sounds familiar.

  We both end up looking at the biggest picture on the table—a brown-eyed woman with long, brown hair pinned up on one side with two pink hollyhocks. She is mid-laugh, unaware of the picture being taken, a sneak-peek snapshot of a fulfilled woman.

  When our eyes meet, he says, “That’s Molly,” with a finality that sucks the air out of the room.

  Bliss’s mother. Beautiful. Happy. Gone. I can’t take my eyes off her.

  “Kate?” he says twice because I’ve forgotten that’s my name. “Just gotta do one last thing.”

  While he turns to walk down the hallway, I look at his kitchen tabletop. In between a pile of mail and some keys is a small leather journal. I wait until he’s down the hallway before I open it up to see it’s full of poems. His poems. Scribbled in pencil, sometimes pen. All brief. All in third person. I quickly close it, commit one to memory.

  Next to the journal I see last week’s Des Moines Register open to my review column. “What a Schmidt Hole” stares back at me along with Cinegirl’s caricature. I turn them both upside down.

  I glance over at the DVD cases piled up at the bottom of his entertainment center. Underneath the Indiana Jones trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars, and Return of the Jedi, near a math textbook, is Breakfast at Tiffany’s stacked on top of something. On closer inspection, I see that it’s the screenplay, its pages curled up from wear. On the top right-hand side of the cover showing Audrey in her signature black dress and pearls, it reads Property of Bliss Anderson, and I don’t doubt it. Rob had told me she’d memorized every line of dialogue and sometimes pretended life was one big screenplay by saying stage directions out loud. Dusts the bookshelf with aggression, she’d say while doing her chores, followed by actual, aggressive dusting, and then she’d ask, Was it good? Was it believable?

  Another DVD case is peeking out, barely, behind a stack of books just tall enough to hide it. I scoot them to the right enough to see the title, and when I do, warmth rushes through me, starting in my feet, working its way up toward my neck. I take it out to hold it in my hand, stare at the smiling faces on the cover, wonder what all that feels like.

  “It’s no Fellini,” Rob says, reentering the room and reaching for his coat, “but it’s a personal favorite of mine.” He looks at me for an extra beat, a few seconds longer than he has to, and I lean into the little piece of him he’s given me.

  Me too.

  I gently place the movie back where it belongs and try to figure out how not to look like a snoop.

  “You can come if you want,” he says and walks toward the front door.

  I follow him outside past a corncrib and barn, where we end up at an old John Deere tractor. He climbs up in one smooth, experienced move and extends his hand. This isn’t the first time I’ve been on a tractor, but it’s the only time I can recall when I’ve wanted to be.

  “If I don’t run her at least once a week, she won’t start next time I need her.”

  His use of the feminine pronoun makes me surprisingly jealous of this tractor, and a flush comes over me. Now I’m nestled tight behind him on a big, green metal seat, and my hands float aimlessly around, trying to land on his waist without seeming too forward.

  So we ride. The only sound is the hiccupping and spewing of the tractor, and although he could be asking me a thousand warranted questions—where am I from, how did I get into this line of work, do I have a boyfriend—he doesn’t say a word. We ride in silence, taking in the endless cornfields, limitless landscape, a respite from hopelessness.

  The tractor lurches forward, forces me to grab him tighter. “What’s your favorite flower?” he finally asks in between tractor noises. When I don’t say anything for a moment, he adds, “You can tell a lot about a woman by knowing her favorite flower.” I can hear he’s smiling, trying to make it seem less like he’s flirting and more like legitimate small talk.

  I think of Molly Anderson and her hollyhocks.

  “Lilacs,” I tell him.

  He wastes no time asking for a reason. “Why?”

  This is where I normally weave a lie, divert attention from truths that will make me vulnerable, but today I want to tell Rob Anderson the truth. This is a small, small thing, but he deserves some truth from me. “My mother’s favorite flower”—I catch my breath about that—“and”—I smile wide, exposing the underbelly of my exposed heart—“they are the flower of new love.”

  He nods his head slightly. We ride, comfortable in saying nothing, which says everything.

  He lets the tractor slow down, then come to a complete stop. He turns to me, gives me a look I’ve never seen from him—a long, knowing stare that seems to honor the solidarity we share in bringing Bliss back from wherever she is.

  With no noise now except the wind blowing through the cornstalks, I break the silence. “What do you want?” I smile, feeling a bit like Sid and I are exchanging movie lines again, except this is not Sid. This is a man who could make me want to never get off this damn tractor. Channeling my best Jimmy Stewart, I say, “Want the moon? Let me throw a lasso around it, pull it down for you.”

  He smiles. “No moon yet,” he says, looking up at the early evening sky. “Just a tired, tired sun.”

  “Right,” I say, stalling, because he places his hand on my shoulder and scoots me closer to him until there isn’t any tractor seat between us. Any adult accomplishment I’ve achieved evaporates in the crisp air, and I am reduced to the Janie I was with Joey, overanalyzing my facial expressions, where my hands are, my accelerated breathing.

  I strengthen my grip on his waist and hang on to Rob Anderson, part-time farmer, full-time father, all-time great Renaissance man who can read you your rights and mention Federico Fellini
in the same sentence. He moves his hand from my shoulder to my cheek, leans in and kisses me with the confidence of a man who knows exactly how to kiss a girl in the middle of a cornfield. I breathe in his warmth, let our bodies melt into each other for a moment, and close my eyes. Every look he’s given me since I’ve met him, every word, every brush of his hands moves through me, a new-love electricity, that universal voltage of a first kiss.

  When I open my eyes, I see his real smile, the fresh-aired kind, untainted by the sadness that awaits him back in the hospital room. He turns back around, starts up the tractor. Now thoroughly warmed up, she ignites with ease, makes her way through row after row of corn. I hang on to Rob Anderson, richest man in True City. I tuck this away while we ride through the endless cornfield and watch the sun retire, a reminder of what has passed.

  We show up at True View in Rob’s pickup truck, a less conspicuous choice than his police truck. We don’t want questions tonight, because we don’t have any answers. Darkness creeps in, and here we sit, two lost souls, one incognito, the other in his Sunday jeans.

  Tonight’s feature is Groundhog Day, and when I see Bill Murray, I feel at home, flashing back to my Stripes almost-monologue at the Corn Festival. Rows and rows of cars and pickup trucks, most caked with a day’s hard work, are lined up to forget the day. Rob adjusts the radio as the opening sequence begins.

  It takes me eight minutes to realize three things.

  One: This movie is a stroke of genius. How could I have never written a review of it before, and how many other films have I not given their due? In my head, I formulate draft one of the review I’ll send Sid, which features how deftly the oft-ruined theme of second chances is handled here, how right Dad was about the power of revision.

  Two: I am Bill Murray’s Phil Connors. He is suspicious of happiness, even when it stares him down, day after day, and he is a grade-A asshole on all accounts.