by Erica Boyce
“What—what are you doing here?” I say, my hand still on the doorknob.
“You didn’t really think I was going to let you alone, did you? I booked the next flight out I could get.”
“Hey, Maggie,” Sam calls from the living room.
“See? He’s not surprised to see me. He knows better.” She walks over to the living room, and as she reaches the doorway and Sam comes into view, I hold my breath. She smiles and says, “There he is. Hi, Sam.”
It was Sam and Maggie before it was Sam and me. The two of them went to every party and mixer together our freshman year, where they held court on the couch or the lawn chairs, men and women alike flocking to them. I was there, too, sipping punch in a corner and trying to look politely uninterested as one sophomore or another droned on at me about classes and football games.
Then, one night, when Maggie was deep in conversation with one of her admirers, Sam walked me home. I didn’t want him to, and I swore that I could find my own way back to our dorm. He insisted, though. I caught Maggie’s eye to make sure she’d be all right, and she cocked her head to the side a little, looking between me and Sam like she was making some sort of calculation.
After that, it wasn’t Sam and Maggie anymore. It was Sam and me, or Sam and me and Maggie. I resisted at first—it was wrong, I knew, stealing your best friend’s boyfriend, or whatever he was to her. It was unfeminist at the very least, cruel at the worst. “It’s not stealing,” she insisted, waving me out the door. To my surprise, I didn’t particularly want to argue with her about this one.
She walks into the living room and sits on the arm of Sam’s chair, tossing her arm over his back. “Let me guess,” she says. “This was where you sat when you interviewed Nessa’s boyfriends.”
He shakes his head vigorously, but his eyes are fool’s gold, luring in the unwary. “Only the ones who deserved it.”
She cackles at that, wiping a tear from her eye when they’ve stopped laughing. “It’s good to see you, Sammy.”
“You too, Mags.” He pats her on the knee. “Well, I’ll let you two ladies catch up.” He smiles at me. “It’s time for my nap.”
“I’ll help you,” she says, springing to her feet and brushing aside his protests just like she once did with mine. She circles his waist with her arm as if she’s leaning in to tell him a secret, but he’s the one who leans, and I have to look away.
While they shuffle and murmur in our bedroom, I carry her suitcase up to Charlie’s. It’s heavy, although she always overpacks, so that’s not an indication of how long she’s planning to stay. I heave it onto the bed, the bones and muscles in my back popping and groaning, and smooth my hand over the blanket.
When everything’s settled, Maggie’s standing outside our bedroom, her arms crossed as she chews her lip. She sees me before I have a chance to back into Charlie’s room. “Molly,” she says, and her voice is not whole.
I step over to her and link with her elbow, tugging her gently back into Charlie’s room. I don’t want Sam to hear.
She does not fall into my arms or cry on my shoulder. She runs her hands over her face and presses on her eyes. She is wearing a string of colorful beads beneath her scarf, little wooden planets, and she twists the strand between her fingertips. They clack together, one by one.
“What will you do about him?” she says.
“Keep him here as long as we can, I suppose. The doctor says the fentanyl should do for another week or two, and then he’ll need more care than I can give him. He said insurance almost certainly wouldn’t cover in-home care.” It’s a speech I’ve prepared in case anyone asked.
“Let me cover it,” she says, and I know from how quickly she does that this is the first time she’s thought of it.
“It’s sweet of you to offer, but you know we can’t accept that.”
She’s already shaking her head. “You listen to me. You gave me the greatest gift I could dream of—kids that I only have to visit when I want to. I fly out every once in a while, and they treat me like God’s gift while you do all the cooking and cleaning. And in return,” she continues over my laughter, “I’m going to give Sammy the best damn death he could ask for.”
This time, I don’t bother saying no.
* * *
“So, how’s Charlie?” she asks as I sit down on the creaking rocking chair next to hers on the porch. A cigarette dangles from her lips, and she holds the carton out to me, her face flat. I hesitate for only a moment before taking it and tapping one out for myself. Without missing a beat, she leans toward me with the same silver lighter we used in college. As far as I know, she hasn’t smoked since then. As far as she knows, I haven’t, either.
“He’s the same, you know. Out in San Francisco.” We exhale in unison, and the cloud hides my face.
She’s still staring at me when the smoke clears. “When was the last time you spoke to him?”
I sigh and kick out my legs, swinging my feet back and forth a little. They’re still in my house sandals, cheap plastic things that once had drawings of the Eiffel Tower printed on the foot beds. Charlie brought them back for me after his semester abroad. “See? We’ll always have Paris,” he said, kissing me swiftly on the cheek as I took them out of their crisp plastic wrapper.
“It’s been six months since my last trip.” She’s well aware of this, since she sends Sam bland, cheerful text updates when I go, furthering the story that I’m visiting her instead. “I was supposed to go out again this month, but I can’t leave Sam now.”
“Does he know about—” She flicks her eyes upward.
I consider saying I’m not sure if Charlie knows about God, no, but I know she wouldn’t laugh.
“I expect Nessa told him. She went out there a couple weeks ago to get him to come back.” I don’t have to look at her to know what she’s thinking, so I add, “He doesn’t want to hear it from us, anyway.”
Maggie’s eyes are wet again as she takes another drag—not that Charlie’s ever shown his walls to her, not really. When he was small and Maggie came to visit, he would climb all over her, as if he could live in her limbs like a tree house.
She opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, there are two men in front of the porch. I hadn’t even heard them drive up. It’s Allison’s husband and his former farmhand, their combined shoulders as broad as the porch steps. Their eyes are fixed low on the ground. I shove my cigarette toward Maggie, who takes it, bewildered, before they look up.
“Ben and Eli! What can I help you with?” I hope it sounds airy and gracious.
A car horn beeps twice behind them, an encouraging toot-toot. Craning my neck to peer past them, I see Allison in the driver’s seat of their old pickup. She wiggles her fingers at me and backs the truck up the driveway, and now they’re stranded here.
Ben clears his throat and lifts his eyes to somewhere in the general vicinity of my neck. “Allie mentioned you guys could use some help with the fields.”
I am ready to shoo them off and tell them not to be silly, that we can manage fine on our own, but in all honesty, I’m not sure I can. More importantly, they have no way of getting home until Allison decides we’ve been given our due and comes back to pick them up.
I open the front door for them. Their heavy canvas jackets whisk against each other as they climb the stairs. “That’s so thoughtful of you two.” Maggie throws both cigarettes over the porch railing, where I’ll have to retrieve them later, and follows us in. “I’ll admit we’re a bit at loose ends at the moment, as Allison—Allie—probably told you. Luckily, Sam takes very careful notes, so it should be easy enough to figure out what his plans were. I really have no memory for these things. Let me see.” I should stop talking, I know, but the three sets of eyes on me are too much. I shuffle through the stack of clipped coupons and delivery menus on the counter by the phone until I find Sam’s notebook and wave it over my hea
d like a flag.
Ben and Eli bend their heads over the book, their nail-bitten fingers traveling over his handwriting. I’ve hardly ever heard Ben speak, but now the words flow smooth as water between the two of them. The loss of their farm, their laundry flapping like wings on lines outside their trailer, is a fist in my gut once again.
“This all looks straightforward enough,” Ben says, his eyes moving toward the door. “Shouldn’t take us too long.”
“Well, go on ahead. Don’t let me keep you. I’ll have some coffee ready for you when you want to take a break.”
Eli smiles gratefully at me, whether for the dismissal or the coffee, I can’t say. They shuffle on out the door.
There’s a lumpy smile on my face when I turn back to Maggie, and I’m scrambling for something to say, maybe something that recalls our days in high school giggling at the big 4-H boys in our class.
Her head is tilted, studying me, and she says, “That was really kind of them.”
“Yes,” I say, easing into a chair at the table. “It was. This town would do anything for Sam.”
“I guess so,” she says, still staring at me as she sits down next to me.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Nessa
That night, I lay in bed feeling something like relief. It was as if I’d let the air out of a balloon, and now the tautness was gone, only slack rubber left. I tumbled easily into sleep on my Ambien wave.
When I wake, the sun mottled red behind my eyelids pulls me back into myself. My hands pulse with pain in all the old places. My insides feel more raw than empty.
I open my eyes, and Daniel is still there, his back turned to me, his side rising and falling. I should have told him to leave, to get as far away as he can, but then how would he get back to his car and his life? We’re stuck here together, in this place where the earth beneath our feet is riddled with caves.
* * *
Growing up, it was always my mom who bore the brunt of me. It was a slow, steady slide from kissing my skinned knees and checking under my bed to fielding my daily what-ifs: What if I have cancer? What if you get bitten by a bat? What if Dad falls off his tractor and hits his head?
The pebbles changed depending on what I’d seen on the news or heard at school that day. Eventually, my parents started turning off the TV and radio when I came home, though I hardly noticed at the time. It was only in high school, when Charlie started yelling at my parents about needing to watch the nightly news for his civics class, that I saw what had happened. “Can’t you see she’s crazy?” he hissed. “We can’t all live in her world, by her rules.”
And still, every morning, while my dad made coffee downstairs and before I went down to join him, I crept into bed with my mom. I would catalog what was wrong, what had been rubbing up blisters the day before and all through the night. When I grew older, the fears grew harder to grasp. It was less about death and decay, more about the dark, mysterious folds of my brain.
Every time, she would smooth her cupped hand over my head and kiss my temple, her breath warm and stale. She would promise me that everything would be all right, that I would be just fine. She would wrap her arms around me tight and squeeze. And no matter how old I was or how much I knew better, that was when I could finally loosen. It was like her words plucked the pebbles out of my shoes and threw them far, far away.
There were always more pebbles, though. Every day, new pebbles.
It took me a long time to figure out what it was doing to her. I was nineteen and home from college. I opened my eyes that morning to my dad’s wandering whistle and wiggled my toes under the blanket, back in this place where the pebbles went away.
I padded down the hall to my parents’ room. Their door creaked open. Mom was asleep still, her mouth softly open, pushing dust motes in and out with her breath.
“Mom,” I whispered. I shook her shoulder. My list that morning was long and backlogged. I wasn’t being friendly enough to my quiet roommate. I was starting to think the boy I was dating wanted true love, when all I wanted was to skitter away. I might be failing my American lit class, and every time I reached for Frederick Douglass, my throat closed up with the thought of all I was throwing away. And did she remember if the toaster oven she’d bought me had an auto-off feature? Because I was pretty sure I’d forgotten to unplug it before I left, so our dorm might be burning down as we speak.
My mom finally opened her eyes, and it took a moment for her to see me. In those seconds, I saw, for the first time, how tired she was: purply shadows under her eyes, smile weak and brave. And I wondered where exactly she’d been putting those pebbles. Maybe, instead of throwing them away, she’d been tucking them in her own shoes to keep them from rolling back to me.
“There’s my girl,” she said, drawing her covers back to make room for me. I crawled into the pocket she’d made and curled into her side. Her hand smoothed her usual rhythm over my hair. “Tell me everything,” she said.
I wanted to; I did. Every single morning, I want to. Instead, I swallowed, clenched my hands together, and said, “There’s not much to tell. How are you and Dad doing with your empty nest?”
Her hand stilled. “We’re fine,” she said faintly. “We’re just fine.”
* * *
I found myself at the college counseling center for lack of a better place to go. I’d tried to manage the pebbles myself, reciting them quietly to myself at night, but it only kept me awake, the sound of them rattling around in my skull, and my roommate had started to give me weird looks in the morning. I wasn’t expecting anything to work, but at least I hoped I wouldn’t be the craziest person the counselors had ever seen.
I repeated this over and over in my head as I sat in the waiting room, peeling the soles of my shoes back from something sticky on the floor and flipping through a parenting magazine someone had left behind. I was just getting into an article about how many hours of TV a child should watch when somebody called my name.
I’m not sure who I was expecting to be standing there—some combination of Freud and Mr. Rogers, maybe—but it wasn’t Ricky. Ricky, with her pleasant plumpness, her jewel-toned chenille sweaters, and her glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.
“Hi,” she said, shaking my hand. “My name’s Dr. Marsh, but you can call me Ricky.”
She led me back to her office, which was just another office like all the other ones I’d seen at the school. A computer hummed through its screen saver, a bulletin board was papered over with old Christmas cards, and stacks of unlabeled binders covered the desk. There was an extra box of tissues next to the chair she motioned toward, but that was about the only difference.
She settled into her own chair, scooting it away from the desk and toward mine. She peered down at her clipboard. “So, Vanessa, what can I help you with today?”
“It’s Nessa, actually. And yeah, it’s stupid really, no big deal.” I stopped just short of saying I’m a waste of time. I could picture her marking me down on her worksheet. Self-esteem: low. Her eyes moved to my hands in my lap. I unlaced them and flexed my fingers.
“It’s just,” I tried again. “I get these worries, these ridiculous worries. About diseases, or about what people think of me, or about, I don’t know, fires. I used to tell my mom about them all the time, and I’d feel better for a little bit, but I think she’s getting tired of it, so I thought maybe I could come in and talk to you instead.”
It sounded profoundly unappealing when I said it out loud, even for someone who’s paid to listen to college kids complain all day. Ricky had uncrossed her legs and leaned closer, placing her elbows on her knees with her fingers steepled near her lips.
“Tell me, Nessa, how long have you been talking to your mom like that?”
Though her face was blank and empty, it felt like she was asking how long I’d been sleeping with that security blanket. I coughed. “I don’t know. Ten years? Twe
lve?”
She nodded but didn’t write anything down. “And have you ever been fixated on cleanliness—washing your hands, wiping the counters? Or have you ever needed to count things, to calm your mind down?”
I winced. “Yeah, a little. I was an odd kid.” I looked down at her green suede clogs. She asked a few more questions like this, ferreting out all the habits that made me cringe.
Finally, she cleared her throat. “Well, we have a couple of options here. You’re welcome to come in any time you’d like and chat about what’s on your mind. But I suspect you may have an underlying disorder, and if we work on targeting that, it may serve you better in the long run.” She turned back to her desk, and I heard the word disorder over and over as a drawer squealed open.
“I have a diagnostic test in here that you can take, just to be sure,” she was saying. She pulled out a packet and held it out to me. “If you’re willing, of course.”
The words on the page jumped one at a time: worry, excessive, unwanted, urges, impulses. And the title: “Diagnostic Criteria for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.”
* * *
I called my mom as soon as I left the counseling center, cold air biting my nose. In the end, it had been no different than a vocabulary quiz. Quick with your pencil, yes/no/maybe, sometimes/always/never. Don’t think too hard about what your answers say about you—although they say a lot; they say almost everything. Then Ricky took the packet back and compared it to an actual, literal score sheet, her gray head moving back and forth between the two stacks on her desk. And finally, she looked up at me, smiled encouragingly, and said, “Let’s discuss your treatment plan.”
“Hi, Mom,” I said when she picked up. “I don’t have much time. I’m on my way to class”—a lie, I wasn’t sure why—“but I wanted to tell you, I went to the counseling center today, and they told me I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, so…” So you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I’ll let you sleep in from now on. You are finally free.
