by Erica Boyce
And now I’ve got a headache, too, pressing behind my eyes. Please, please don’t let it be oxy. “Um, Advil not strong enough?”
She raises her eyebrows for a split second. Maybe it was too bold of me to ask. “Oh, you know.” She slips the bottle back into a pocket in her bag. “The doctor prescribes them. For my migraines.”
But I don’t know. At all, really. I suddenly wonder what I was thinking, leaving a project to head off on a chase with some girl I only just met. I’ll have to call Lionel again soon and cross my fingers that my story holds up. I hope to God I didn’t agree to this just because she watches my mouth when I talk like my words are magic. Just because her words ring in my head long after they’re spoken. Just because of those eyes.
She clears her throat, and I look down to see I’ve twisted my straw wrapper into a tiny little pellet. “Hey,” she says. “I’m not a pill popper or anything.”
“Oh. No, obviously not.”
“A kid in my class just overdosed. I know how nasty that shit is. How much it messes with your life.”
Thankfully, the waitress chooses that moment to return with our hamburgers and french fries. The smell of meat and hot oil reminds me of how hungry I am. Nessa crunches on her pickle.
When we’ve finished eating, I toss my napkin on the table. “So,” I say, “college?”
“Oh great, Twenty Questions,” she says, smiling her half smile so I can’t quite tell if she’s joking. “UNH. Full ride. I started out as an English major, but in my first lit class, the professor kept saying ‘Can you unpack that for us?’ like her words were luggage or something and this was her home. It sure wasn’t mine, so I switched to animal science.” She tilts her chin up, and I can tell she’s told this story before.
“And now you’re out working in California, way on the other side of the country,” I say, looking down at my water and stirring my straw.
She takes a sip of her Coke. “One of our seasonal interns in Georgia mentioned the foraging culture out there, and I had to see it. It sounds kind of ridiculous, I know, but people get really intense and professional about it, guarding their territory and all that.”
“Plus, I bet it’s nice to be close to Charlie.”
She shrugs. “Every few weeks, I go down to San Francisco, and Zach cooks dinner for us.”
“Zach?”
“His husband.” She takes another sip, her eyes daring me to react.
“Cool. Your parents, they didn’t mention he’s married.”
“No. They don’t know.” She sighs. “Charlie’s convinced the real reason Dad won’t talk to him is because he’s gay. He came out to my parents a couple weeks before he left, and he doesn’t believe that Dad would be so offended just because he left the farm. But…” She chews her lip, wiggles her straw wrapper back and forth on the table like a snake. “Charlie always holed up in his room studying while we all did the chores, and my mom would defend him and say we’ve all got our strengths. Farmers, though, we assume outsiders think they’re better or smarter than us. Or worse, that they picture us standing in the middle of a field of wheat, proud to provide food for our country. Bread basket of America shit.”
She braces her hands on the table like it’s a podium. “What they don’t show in truck commercials is that it’s really hard work. And you do that work every day because who else will? And at the end of the night, you crawl into bed, and you’re in so much pain, and just before you close your eyes, you think—”
“That there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.” The words slip out of me. For a second, I’m afraid I’ve stopped her, dammed up her voice.
But her eyes refocus on my face. “Yes. That’s exactly it. Anyway. Charlie became one of those outsiders over the years. He chose something else. And that’s always been fine with me and Mom—I mean, clearly, he’s happier there—but Dad always wanted to share that feeling with Charlie, and he never got to.”
“He’s got you, though,” I say as her eyes begin to fill.
“Yeah.” She dashes the edge of her sleeve across her face. “Yes. Of course he does. Should we get the check?”
* * *
At the motel across the street, we share a room with two double beds. It’s cheaper that way. While Nessa showers, I shove myself as far down under the covers as possible. I lie there, listening to the pipes clank and watching shadows move across the ceiling. The shower valves screech shut, and Nessa comes out in a towel and a cloud of steam. She makes her way over to her suitcase, tousling her fingers through her hair. She opens her toiletry bag and runs her fingers over the toothpaste, the bottles, whispering something. I see her reach for one corner of her towel, and I turn my back to her and close my eyes for good measure. I hear the towel drop damply to the floor. Maybe sharing a room wasn’t such a good idea, after all.
I clear my throat. “Are you going to call Charlie? Let him know we’re coming?”
“Not a chance. He’d tell us to turn right around.” Her voice is muffled by the shirt she’s pulling on.
“Okay, I’m decent,” she says.
I glance over, but she’s already tucked under the shiny brown hotel bedspread. She reaches for the remote, and the TV clicks to life. She finds a local news show, and at every mention of crime or violence or disease, she pulls at a chunk of her hair. I turn back to my side and let the news anchors’ voices drift into background noise as I close my eyes. Soon enough, I’ll be back in Vermont. I’ll finish the circle and go find a new life near Claire. For some reason, the thought doesn’t comfort me as much as it usually does.
“Hey,” Nessa says, sitting upright and pointing at the screen. “It’s another circle.”
Sure enough, there’s a woman clutching her mic at the edge of a field, looking confused and a little dismayed as a crowd of people mumble behind her. “That’s right, Fred,” she’s saying. “Just this morning, a farmer in Delaware alerted us to a formation that appeared in his wheat field, seemingly overnight.” She gestures behind her, and an inset of an aerial photo appears in the corner of the screen, three interlocking circles pressed into the greenness.
Becca and Jim must be psyched. It’s not often the news crews spring for an aerial shot. And on their first solo project, no less. They’re a quiet couple, married, just started coming to meetings about a year ago. Jim spends the whole time furiously taking notes. According to Leslie, who they’d been shadowing for months, the two of them mastered the methods faster than anyone she’d seen.
“That must be the guy who did it, right?” Nessa nods at the screen.
And then I see him. A man standing behind the reporter. While everyone else is either talking to their neighbor or staring at the field, he’s looking straight into the camera. He’s wearing a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a loosened tie, and his arms are crossed. And he’s almost, barely, smirking.
Ray.
Nessa’s waiting for me to answer. “Be right back,” I choke, and I race to the bathroom. I lock the door behind me. I fill the sink with cold water, my heart thumping in my ears. When the sink is finally full, I turn off the faucet and thrust my head into the water. Almost immediately, my pulse slows.
I was there for Ray’s first meeting. He had been fired the week before from some sort of finance position. His wife was starting to lose patience with his late nights on the computer, filling the gap his job had left with online farming RPG games and forum threads. One of those threads had directed him to Lionel, and then he showed up all bleary-eyed, his T-shirt wrinkled. He sat in the back and stared at his hands. But he didn’t stay quiet for long.
This must’ve been what Lionel was worried about, what he refused to tell me. Shit.
Chapter Thirteen
Nessa
I startle awake in the middle of the night, and it takes me a minute to figure out where I am. That the night-light flickering in the bat
hroom doorway is not dawn in Vermont or the semi-ironic lava lamp in Scott’s bedroom.
I was dreaming of Scott. He sat on his thrift-store couch while tears traced down his face.
I’m still feeling guilty about him, about the breakup call I made on my way to Vermont, not quite paying attention to his responses while I squinted at road signs. We were just having fun, I told myself. We crunched our way through the forest with our eyes on our feet, searching the wetly rotting leaves and logs for those telltale mushroom bumps. Nights ordering pizza and watching PBS through a film of his artisanal pot smoke. Our time together filled space. It had run its course.
They’ve always been that way, the relationships I find myself in. Even with Shawn.
When Shawn asked if I wanted to grab dinner the week before I left for college, I figured it would be just another night of drive-through burgers by the lake. The first sign of trouble was when he came to pick me up in a pressed button-down and khakis. I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt. My burbling stomach sounded like a warning. Things got even worse when he parked in the lot of the town’s one and only sit-down restaurant, a steak house with a salad bar the size of a small sedan.
“This okay?” Shawn said before we left his truck.
“Yeah. Um, Shawn,” I started, then coughed a little. “Is this a date?”
He studied his palms, resting in his lap. “Do you want it to be?”
I was about to say no, hell no, but then he looked up, and there was hope in his eyes. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
It was a disaster from the start. We couldn’t even figure out how to position ourselves around each other and almost ended up sitting side by side in a booth before Shawn shook his head and took the chair across the table instead. “Our waiter is kinda hot,” I blurted before I could stop myself, the way I would on any other night with Shawn, even though the kid waiting on us was only passingly attractive, with a sprinkling of acne across his chin. Shawn smiled painfully. When he dropped me off at the end of the night, I walked up the path as quickly as I could and didn’t notice that he was trying to escort me to the door until I was halfway there.
On the front porch, in the moment of truth, I bit my lip and looked up at him.
“This isn’t working,” Shawn said.
At last, I could breathe again. I laughed. “We’re much better as friends,” I said. You know way too much about me is what I thought.
“I’m not sure what I was thinking,” he said. I gave him a hug so I wouldn’t have to look him in the eye and see if he was bluffing. He patted my back, and I sighed. My boyfriends could only skim the surface of me. Dipping any deeper would never do, and that’s why Shawn and I could not be a thing.
I shift to one side and am almost startled to see Daniel in his bed. His face is as bunched up as his sheets. What could he be dreaming about? I haven’t figured him out yet. It might take me all the way to California to do so.
* * *
The next morning, we wake up with the sunrise leaking into our room and get ready mostly in silence, passing the cheap granola bars I’d packed from home. Daniel takes the first shift driving. A few minutes into the drive, he calls one of his crop circle friends to check in on things. He clenches the phone and glances at me as they talk about the man from the news report last night and what it means. I flick the lock on the door back and forth, once, twice, three times. It’s my fault he’s here, not finishing his circle. Why didn’t it occur to me that he might get in trouble for this? I want to ask him more, like it’s another night out in the field, and tell him he can turn around and go back if he needs to. His face when he hangs up doesn’t exactly invite questions, though.
It’s not until we’ve been on the road for an hour and the sugar’s pounding in my head that I break. I tap the window to crack the quiet, an opening shot. “That girl you used to work with, the one who taught you about making crop circles.”
Daniel shifts his hands on the steering wheel. “Claire.”
I wait a few seconds, but he doesn’t offer anything other than this perfectly normal name. “You guys were together.”
He pauses again, then pulls on one earlobe. “Yes.”
“But you’re not anymore.”
He’s silent. The windshield wipers squeak, sweeping away the fine drizzle on the windshield. “She was a high-functioning alcoholic.” A muscle pulses in his jaw like a cornered mouse. “I used to laugh at all her Irish coffees in the morning. But then I started to notice. She would always offer to go check our progress or to man the tractor or something, and she’d pull a flask out of her pocket when she thought I wasn’t looking.”
I maneuver in my seat so I’m facing him with my feet pulled up, one knee pressed up against the dashboard. I can tell he wants to say more, maybe has even forgotten I’m here. I don’t speak for fear of reminding him.
“Farming is dangerous enough when you’re sober,” he says.
“Drinking sure doesn’t make it safer,” I supply when his pause stretches on.
Daniel shakes his head quickly, erasing his words and mine. “It was more than that.” The muscle pulses again. “I wanted her to be happy. Happy and healthy.”
I nod, although he doesn’t see me. His eyes are fixed on the road.
“I started taking her to meetings. I’d drop her off, and she’d act like she was humoring me. She knew she could blow our cover if something happened while we were working on a circle, so she agreed to it. That’s what mattered to her more than anything. The work.”
He tilts his head one way, then the other, the joints in his neck popping softly. “And it worked, at first. She was real quiet whenever I picked her up afterward. She’d work harder than ever those nights, so fast, I couldn’t keep up with her.”
He smiles a little, and I try to picture it, this guy with his intense focus, with his shoulders tensed up to his ears all night in the cornfield. Did he laugh with Claire, catching his voice in one hand so it wouldn’t reach the sleeping houses beyond?
“She got her six-month chip, and then it was time for us to move. They had an AA group in the new town, too, but Claire said she was fine, didn’t need to stand up in a room of strangers and tell them about her first beer when she was fourteen. And I believed her. This one night, she kept pushing and pushing, and we worked for hours planning out our pattern. We snuck back into our cover job’s house like always, to grab an hour or so of sleep. And when I woke up, she was gone.” His voice stops short, like a radio flipped off in the middle of a song.
I can’t watch his face fall apart. I straighten out in my seat and lean my forehead against the window.
We pass an exit on the freeway, and there’s a man standing by the on-ramp, his thumb held out halfheartedly. The wind from passing cars blows over his muddy features and through his hair. I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose, hitchhiking in a spot where he can’t possibly be picked up.
“She didn’t leave a note or anything?” I say, watching the guardrail ribboning by.
“No. Haven’t heard a word from her since.”
I glance over at him. He is biting at a hangnail, chewing and chewing. I have no idea if he’s telling the truth.
Chapter Fourteen
Molly
I hang up the phone before Maggie can ask if I’ve talked to Sam about the bakery, telling her I’m fine, of course she’s right, it’s not my fault, and I’ll talk to her same time next week. I feel adrift without the tether of her voice. I should get back to bed, as sleep is like raindrops in a drought, something to be funneled into good use. Instead, I stay curled up on the couch, the deep silence of the house churning in my ears.
* * *
It was only supposed to be lunch, an innocent daylight meal between friends—acquaintances, really. That’s why I didn’t tell Sam. His mother still packed me a sandwich that morning, and I clutched the brown paper bag as I walked to
work, each step a beat, it’s just lunch, it’s just lunch. By the time I got to the bank, the top of the bag was falling apart, shriveled with my sweat.
I checked the clock every ten minutes that morning. At 11:56, I sprang toward the door, certain I could feel everyone’s stares against my back.
When I saw Thomas leaning against his car in the parking lot, my heart was a living thing, a rabbit scrabbling in my throat. It sank and died again when I remembered the last time I felt that way: waiting for Sam in the student union and watching him walk toward me in his cluster of friends.
“This was a mistake,” I started to say when I reached Thomas, but he cut in with, “Thanks for agreeing to this. I’m still getting my bearings around here, and eating lunch by myself was getting old.” And what else could I do when he opened the car door?
He drove us to his favorite café in the next town over, asking questions on the way about my job that I tried to answer as an ordinary person would, level as the plains. When the hostess showed us to our table, he touched his hand briefly to my shoulder.
He waited until we’d gotten our sandwiches to motion toward my ring finger and say, “You’re married. What’s your husband like?”
Relief spilled down my back. Yes, Sam. Here was something safe to talk about, a conversation between friends. I told him about the class where we met, weekend nights with him and Maggie. I told him about when he proposed our senior year, over shrimp scampi at a restaurant he couldn’t afford, running his finger under the necktie drawn too tight against his throat. I told him about living with my mother-in-law, that, in truth, I didn’t know who would be doing our laundry and cooking our meals if not for her.
And then I asked him about his family, just to be polite. His face lit up like a window on a cold day as he talked about his sister, his nieces and nephews. He could recite each of the kids’ favorite foods, what they wanted to be when they grew up. At least one of them, I suspected, wanted to be like their adoring, adored uncle.
