by Erica Boyce
“Yeah, I’m pretty tired, too,” Daniel says.
He squeezes my shoulder on his way past, and I can feel Charlie staring at me. I refuse to look at him.
He raises his glass, lacy with dregs of beer foam. “Well, I’m going to get another one of these.”
“Me, too, please.” I push my glass into his other hand.
He pauses. “Are you sure?”
Now I meet his eyes, feel my chin rise and jaw set. “I’ve only had one.”
He closes his fingers around the glass and takes them into the kitchen. I move to the couch and perch on the arm, its blocky IKEA corners digging into my tailbone.
“Zach’s all moved in, then?” I say, shuffling through the stack of magazines on the coffee table.
“Yeah,” he says. He hands me a full glass and sits down on the cushions. “It only took a couple weeks.” He starts to tell a story about the group of friends banded together by takeout and beer who helped carry boxes.
I’m having trouble focusing over the pressure in my head. Tell him. You have to tell him.
When he pauses, I say, “Hey.” He stops and looks up at me, eyes wide and waiting. The words are stuck. I stare down at the glass, growing warm in my hands. The liquid sloshes back and forth, and I place my hand over the lip of the glass, not wanting to stain his new couch. His new life.
“Is it Dad?” he says, and it’s not really a question. His words from my drive home still ring in my head, asking what exactly I was planning to do to help, why I was going home, practical and true but not quite right.
I take a swallow of the beer and let it swish down my throat. “Yes.”
He sets his glass on a coaster. I move down to the couch next to him, our legs barely touching. “Where is it now?” he says, staring out into the dimly lit room.
“Stomach,” I say.
Headlights from passing cars unfurl across the walls, distorting over his face. Somewhere below us, a woman is screaming happily, drunkenly, about the score of the Giants game.
He looks down at his lap. “They’ll probably put him on chemo again.” His words are clipped and clear, like he’s taking an oral examination. “The side effects won’t be great, but they’ll want to stick with what works for now. Maybe immunotherapy eventually, but—”
“Charlie.” I grit my teeth without meaning to. “Mom and Dad are having a really tough time.” He looks up. “You and I both know they would never ask you to come home, but I am.”
My hands are clenched around my glass. I don’t loosen my grip for fear of dropping it. I can picture where the floor would smack its edge, the explosion of sharp-edged, glittering shards, the dusting of tiny pieces that he would never really be able to clean up, not entirely, so every once in a while, he’d stand up from the couch and feel a bite in the soles of his feet, look down, and see the glass winking from a cut in his callus and wonder how that happened.
I set the glass down on the bare wood of the coffee table. Beer spills over the side, and I wipe it up with my hand, but it leaves a smear.
“You know I can’t do that,” he finally says.
I lick the beer remains off my fingers and turn to him. “I know you say that. And I know you think Dad is some horrible person who won’t be able to handle your—you and Zach.” His eyes glisten in the evening light, and he’s getting that old pink stain that used to spread from his neck to his ears to his cheekbones. I push on anyway. “What if this is—if this is it?” I swallow hard around the catch in my breath. “Wouldn’t you regret it, not coming home?”
“He doesn’t want to see me,” he says. “Trust me. And anyway, this is my home.” He motions toward their closed bedroom door, at the finger of light poking through the crack in the bottom.
“Okay.” I set my palms firmly on my thighs, for lack of a better place to put them. “You have this whole story you tell yourself where Dad was just looking for an excuse to get rid of you after you came out. I so don’t think that’s true.” My voice is swelling and filling the room. The light in their bedroom clicks off. “That farm is the only thing he thinks he can leave us. And when you decided it wasn’t enough for you, it was like—”
“Christ.” He says it softly, but he pushes himself off the couch and walks toward the kitchen. Though his feet are bare, I can feel every footstep through the floorboards beneath me. He throws the refrigerator door open, and it hums. He stands there for a couple of minutes, his face hidden and his hand tensed, motionless, over the top of the door.
When he walks back to the couch, his hair is standing on end the way it does when he’s been pulling on it, curls silhouetted. He sits next to me, and his weight makes a dip in the cushions I have to fight not to roll into.
“Do you know what he said when I left?” he says. I shake my head. “It was a couple of weeks after I’d come out to them. The night after I told them about med school. You were off at Shawn’s house or something. I’d just finished packing up all my stuff, and I was starting to feel a little guilty, looking at all those family photos on my bureau, all that. So I went downstairs to say sorry—not for leaving, but for how we’d fought about it.”
He pauses. The morning after his birthday concert, when he dropped me off at school, he’d apologized to me. “Sorry for ruining it all. I know you guys just wanted me to have a good time.” I stared at him from the passenger’s seat of his sedan. His eyes were puffy, as if he hadn’t slept at all, and he stared stiffly out the windshield. I wasn’t sure how to tell him not to apologize.
“I heard Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen,” he says. “It sounded serious, so I stopped halfway down the stairs. She was telling him it would be okay. Farming is hard, and it wouldn’t do anyone any good to force me to do it.” He smiles faintly. “And anyway, she said, they’d always have you, Nessa, to take care of things.” His smile pinches in at the corners. I wonder how often he’s heard us weighed against each other, our relative weaknesses held squintingly up to the light. I wonder how often he’s done it himself.
“Dad said, ‘I know, you’re right, like always.’” He rotates the coaster a few degrees, fingertips white with the pressure. “And then Dad said, he said, ‘Besides, I’m not sure this is the right place for his type anyway.’” His mouth is screwed up all the way to one side now. “My ‘type,’” he repeats, looking at me this time.
I put my hand on his shoulder. The world of this room moves loopy around me. I close my eyes against it. I try to picture anything cruel coming out of my dad’s mouth, the same one that sings songs with made-up lyrics. I think of the other things he could have meant, how Charlie could have misinterpreted. He just knew Charlie wasn’t meant for farming and was trying to make himself feel better about it, that must be it. The dirt and dust would have dulled Charlie, beaten him down until he was just an imitation, a fragment of himself.
I know that’s not what he meant, though. And even if I could convince myself, I could never say so to Charlie. This is what he hears every time he thinks of home. He will never go back. Not even for Mom’s sake.
I reach for his hand. It feels wrong, out of place in our language of nudges and elbowings. His fingers lace with mine and pull tight.
“You’re pretty great, you know,” I say for the first time.
“You, too,” he says. He pecks the side of my head, a quick pressure near my temple, and then it’s gone. He picks up our glasses and carries them to the kitchen. The sink gurgles as he pours the beer down the drain.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Daniel
Nessa swears sharply under her breath when the guest room door creaks on its hinges and as she fumbles through her suitcase in the dark. When she accidentally walks into the bed on her way to her mattress, I give up.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, and she stifles a shriek.
“Shit! Sorry,” she whispers.
When the air mattress�
��s plasticky shifting has stopped, I say, “Did you tell him?”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice flat. “He’s not coming home.”
In the light through the curtains, I can see her staring at the ceiling. I should probably just let her be. “Did you tell him it was stomach?” I ask stupidly.
“Yes.” She swallows hard enough that I can hear it. “Apparently…” She pauses. “I guess my dad said some pretty bad things about him before he left for med school. Not to his face,” she says, though she sounds unconvinced that the detail matters. “Charlie overheard him. But it—well, it makes it pretty hard for him to go back.”
I turn onto my back and close my eyes, like I’ll find the right thing to say inside my eyelids.
“We should leave in the morning,” she says.
I think of Zach, the way his voice picked up speed while he and Nessa made our Sunday plans. We would go to Golden Gate Park, they said, since I’d never been. Walk through secondhand bookstores and eat a late garlicky brunch. Charlie pulled out his phone while they talked, checking his emails, but he smiled in all the right places.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Sounds good.”
She turns away, toward the wall. “Good night,” she says.
“Good night.” And we settle in for a long night of listening to each other breathe in the dark.
* * *
When I wake up the next morning, the air mattress is already folded away and tucked under the bed. Nessa sits against the wall, staring blankly at a book. It’s Anne of Green Gables, the same one she was reading back on her parents’ porch.
“I didn’t know you brought that with you,” I say after I’ve cleared the sleep from my throat.
She stuffs the book into her bag and reaches for her phone. “I found this story on an extraterrestrial forum this morning. I don’t think you have to worry about that Ray guy anymore.” She tosses the phone to me. It lands facedown on the bed.
I flip the phone over and am about to tease her for finding those forums when I see the headline: “Local Eccentric Responsible for Rash of Crop Circles.”
I scan the article. Lionel did a good job—the list of circles includes all the ones from the past year where the town held some fragment of doubt. The one near Des Moines, where the local newspaper decided it must’ve been some big senior prank from the graduating high school class. The one in Montana, where everyone in town rolled their eyes and assumed the farm owner was just trying to draw attention to his new hemp field. (It didn’t help that he managed to mention the evils of cotton in every post-reveal interview.) And, of course, the circle in Maryland. Poor Becca and Jim. They’ll have to wait for their next project to really see the wonder they can give to a town.
Lionel clearly found the right reporter, too. You can almost hear the writer chuckling as she describes Ray’s attempts to shrug off his responsibility by inventing a group of people who supposedly work with him. Of course, she included the quotes from farm owners describing sketchy encounters with Ray. There’s also a quote from Ray himself, who’s changed his tune and now insists that he never stepped foot on those farms, that he’s never even made a circle, he just sat in on a few circler meetings. The article closes with a few quotes from a prominent psychiatrist who says Ray might be a schizophrenic suffering from delusions and should be approached with caution, because people like that can be dangerous.
I expect Nessa to look as relieved as I feel when I hand the phone back to her. But her eyes slide down across the floor. She still isn’t getting what she needed out of this trip. Charlie’s still staying behind. No circle can fix that.
“So he’s just another crazy person now,” she says. “I’m all packed and ready to go.”
“Yep.” I push my way out of the covers.
When we leave the room with our bags over our shoulders, I’m prepared to apologize to Zach and promise to visit later—soon, maybe. But he’s screwing the lids onto two travel mugs, Charlie rummaging in the cupboard behind him for protein bars. Of course. Charlie would’ve told him. Maybe even last night, while I was grilling Nessa.
Charlie pushes a couple of bars in through the zipper on Nessa’s bag.
“We’d better get back,” she says.
He tucks his hands in his back pockets. She dumps her bag on the ground, throws her arms around his neck. After a second, he spreads his palms across her back, then pulls her in close. Zach and I smile tightly at each other. When Nessa pulls away, there are wet spots on the shoulder of Charlie’s T-shirt.
“It was great to meet you, Daniel,” Charlie says as Zach nods along.
“Yeah, you, too,” I say, but he’s already turned back to Nessa.
“Tell Mom and Dad I… Well, tell them hi for me.”
“I will.” She reaches for his hand, squeezes, and it’s weirdly intimate.
Charlie coughs and pulls away, and we’re out the door, coffee forgotten.
* * *
When we get to the car, I move toward the driver’s side, but Nessa shakes her head. She doesn’t check the rearview mirror as she pulls away down the road, crests the hill we walked last night. She doesn’t say a single word until we’re back in Nevada, pulling over to change places.
Her eyes are bright when we pass each other. “Let’s go to Vegas,” she says.
On the way to California, we refused to drive through Las Vegas, agreeing on a looping route that avoided its crowds and noise. But her hands are clasped in front of her like a little kid, so I say, “Okay.”
* * *
My muscles clench as soon as the flashing lights and overpasses appear on the horizon.
“I can’t believe neither of us has been here before,” Nessa says, drumming her hands on the dashboard. “It’s an entire city built around fun.”
Exactly, I think but don’t say.
Soon enough, I pull into the entrance of the hotel Nessa’d looked up, insisting on paying for the room herself this time instead of splitting it. A small man in a bright-red vest with gold plastic buttons takes the car keys and hands me a valet ticket, and another man whisks our bags out of the trunk before I can even ask if I can park the car myself.
“Casino first?” she says, already walking away.
“Uh, sure.” My hand touches my wallet, stuffed safely in my back pocket.
The doors slide shut behind us, and we’re sealed off in a glass and metal box of stale air-conditioning. There are no windows—I read about this once, the casinos shutting out all hints of the outside world. The room is filled with rows of clinking slot machines, each one with a white-haired woman or tie-loosened guy sitting in front of it, staring dully at their results. The air is crowded with the screech and whoop of sugary booze-filled conversations. Panic rises in my throat.
“Oops, sorry!” A high voice in my ear as a group of girls in shiny dresses stumble past, pushing me into Nessa. She hasn’t moved, either. Her eyes are wide and darting. She’s chewing her lip so hard, I check for blood.
She startles as I move closer, refocusing on my face. And she laughs, her head back, and a few slot machiners turn and stare at us. I grin and wave at them.
“Okay, so this was a huge mistake,” she says after she’s recovered. “Come on. Let’s see if we can find their restaurant. I’m starving.” She pulls me back out into the hot, dry air by my elbow.
* * *
Neither of us speaks as we dig into our steaks, but it’s a calmer silence than before. It’s 5:30 when we sit down, early still, and we’re the only people under fifty in the restaurant. She raises her eyebrows at me when the woman at the next table over asks how much salt they use in their hamburger meat.
Halfway through the meal, Nessa puts down her fork and knife, lines them up under the rim of her plate. She bends the straw in her electric blue rum punch back and forth.
“I can do this,” she says.
“Do what?” I say when she doesn’t continue.
“Help my dad and my mom by myself, without Charlie. He was right. It probably would’ve just stressed my parents out, him being there.”
I put my own fork down and wipe my hands on my napkin, but she doesn’t look up from her drink. She smiles firmly.
“I called my parents last night.” I’m not sure why I say this, except to surprise her out of this.
“Really?” Her smile is real this time. She’s picturing a warm family conversation, maybe wishing for one herself. That’s not something I can give her.
“It didn’t go too well.”
“What? Why?”
I push at the edge of my plate, turning it a couple of degrees. “It wasn’t my usual call time, so I caught them off guard. We hung up after four minutes. I think they’re afraid of taking up too much space in my life.” I don’t realize it’s true until the words fall out.
She taps on the tines of her fork three times, pauses, then three more. “Well, I’m sure they were still happy. They love you.”
“You’re right,” I say, and I smile at her. “They do.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Molly
This morning, after Sam has eaten his breakfast, I unwrap a dose of fentanyl. They’re little white torpedo pills on a stick, and Dr. Cooper’s steady voice on the phone explained that Sam has to suck on them like candy until they’ve dissolved completely. They help with the breakthrough pain, the sharp reminders that will poke through the extended-release fentanyl patch he has to wear every day now, just under the hem of his shirtsleeve.
“How’s that lollipop?” I say brightly as I stand over him and wait for him to pop the bare stick out of his mouth and into my hand.
He still spends his morning out in the field, and I spend it hovering near windows, holding my breath until he passes into view. At one point, I move out to sit in the truck with a cigarette, hoping he doesn’t notice the threads of smoke rising out of the window, my breath vanishing cleanly into the air. There’s a hypocrisy in it, I suppose, inhaling something that could give me the very disease my husband is dying of. I just can’t bring myself to care. I can’t very well quit now, when everything else is falling apart. I need these moments alone, with nothing else before me.
