by Erica Boyce
She clasps her hands and says, “It seems like Allison isn’t just sending her husband over for Sam’s sake.” She studies me, and I rock back and forth on my chair a little, knowing what she means: she’d sent him over for my sake, too. I don’t know how that could be true. “These people really care about you. You know that, right?”
I hitch my shoulders up a touch, not quite a shrug, but not quite assent.
“Have you looked into those loans for your bakery yet?”
“No,” I say, turning away.
She sighs. “Are you going to stay here when Sam is gone?”
The question pinches. “I don’t really know where else I would go. I never thought I’d have to start all over.”
This is where the Maggie I know would tell me to buck up. She would start imagining a future for me so vivid that I’d find myself dreaming along: that bakery, its pine floors, the warm scent of bread. She would almost make me forget the weight of Sam’s absence that I would carry with me, forever at my center.
Instead, she presses her lips together and stares down at her hands. I prod her under the table with my toe. She says, “I’m getting a divorce.”
At first, I want to say no.
By the time Maggie met her husband, she had given up on marriage entirely. “I just can’t find anyone who can keep up with me,” she would say, and I let her, even though her smile faded further at every friend’s wedding. Then she met him—a journalist, a traveler—and I knew they were happy. I knew, at last, that it didn’t matter that I was the one who ended up with Sam.
“What happened?” I say, not much louder than breathing.
She traces her fingertip along the lip of the mug. “I can’t remember the last time we just sat on the couch together, reading the newspaper, and it didn’t end in an argument.” She smiles ruefully, then her chin starts to wobble.
I hesitate only for a moment before coming around the table and gathering her up. She clings to my arms.
“I wasn’t going to tell you. I really wasn’t.”
“It’s okay,” I say into her vanilla-scented hair. Of course it is, of course, though a small part of me wonders how on earth I can help her while my life fades. Everything happens all at once, in one big snarled mess, and sometimes it’s beautiful, and sometimes it’s not.
That damn doorbell rings again. I let her go and walk to the door, still rubbing at my face as I open it.
Ben is standing there, his eyes moving every which way, a snapped-off cornstalk top lying like a small body in his hands.
“Eli and I noticed out there that some of the cornstalks looked like they were spray-painted or something.”
With a creeping horror, I realize that the stalk is, in fact, striped with a slightly unnatural shade of green. Somehow, I had completely forgotten about Daniel.
“We saw them yesterday and didn’t want to bug you about it,” Ben continues, “but we don’t want to mess with one of Sam’s systems if that’s what this is, is all. So we were wondering if you knew what it meant?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Daniel
“I know we need to get back to Vermont as soon as possible and everything,” I say, glancing at Nessa in the passenger’s seat, “but maybe we could make a quick stop at my parents’ in New Jersey?” I’m not sure how much the sink incident had to do with the unexpected cave detour, but I’m not taking any chances with another surprise stop. Through the corner of my eye, I see her turn to face me, the seat belt straining.
“Are you kidding? Now? When my dad’s…”
I rush to fill the gap. “They’re five minutes off the highway, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen them. Plus, I’d need one more stopover before we make it up to Vermont anyway. My legs are about to fall off. Not that I’d make you sleep there or anything. We could leave after dinner and then find a place to stay farther north or something.”
When I finally look at Nessa again, she’s frowning a little. “You said your mom was a therapist, right?” she says.
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t have time to be psychoanalyzed right now. Come on.”
I reach over and pat her shoulder a little, fumbling with my eyes on the road. “Please? It might help, and it’ll only take a few minutes. You need to take care of yourself before you can take care of your dad, right?”
She freezes until I take my hand away again. She turns back toward the window, but then says, “Okay.”
A few minutes pass, and my muscles loosen a bit before she says, “Tell me a little about this place where you grew up.” She looks at me sideways. “Since you’re feeling so talkative today.”
The place I grew up. College town, run by the professors, in theory. But really, it’s run by the students, swarms of teenagers who changed every year and always looked the same. When I was younger, they all seemed so wise. My parents always hired my dad’s students to babysit for me. One of them had long, shiny hair and would sit next to me on the couch, flipping through the channels and listing off all the things I should and shouldn’t do when I was old enough to date. I stared at her and nodded when I thought I was supposed to. I couldn’t really imagine her in my dad’s class, labelling thoraxes and antennae.
Nessa rolls her eyes. “Yeah, okay. Older woman on your couch, what a thrill. What about, like, friends, pets?” She lifts one foot onto the dashboard, picks at her shoelace. “Girlfriends?”
“I had a grand total of one girlfriend, mostly because I thought I should. Jess. We kind of fell out of touch.”
Nessa drops her foot back down, leaving a dusty print behind, like she’d been climbing up walls. Maybe she was expecting another Claire, thinks all the women I’m attracted to are screwed up. And maybe they are.
I shift lanes to pass a truck that’s weaving lazily back and forth. “I had a group of friends, you know, same as anyone else. Really only one close one, Ken, but we don’t have anything in common anymore, so. And one cat named Mocha. My parents got her when I was a baby because one of their professor friends told them it would keep me from developing allergies. But turns out, my dad was allergic, so my mom chased her around every night so she could shut her away in the basement while we slept.”
I laugh at the memory, my mom reaching warily under the family room couch where Mocha had lodged herself, the cat’s green eyes flashing.
Nessa smiles dimly, watching the cars as we pass. “That sounds nice,” she says.
* * *
Nessa is asleep when we get to New Jersey, so I’m alone as I pull down the street to my parents’ house. Everything is neat and squared, the houses straight-shouldered, white, gray, brick. Students walking along the sidewalk, running their hands over the hedges. They look so young, I’m surprised they can stay upright under the weight of their backpacks.
There’s one coming down the front walkway when I park. My parents added two entrances to the house after we moved in: one that leads directly into my dad’s study, so he can host office hours from home, and one that goes to my mom’s office. The third door, the front one, is for the rest of us. This setup is supposed to make people feel safe, cocooned from the rest of my parents’ lives.
But the truth was, no matter where I was in the house, I could always hear the crying or the arguing, over grades or something larger. After those appointments, my parents would come find me. If it was my mom, she would place one hand on my head, saying nothing, like she was drawing something from me through my scalp. If it was my dad, he would collapse next to me on the couch, rub his face, ask what was on TV.
This time, it’s a student, a freshman, looks like. He sticks a pair of headphones in his ears and bobs his head silently at me as I pass, like a bull lowing. Maybe he thinks I’m a classmate.
I pause in front of the door and rock back on my heels. I’m deciding whether to knock first or try the doorknob when it swings open, a
nd there’s my dad. He sweeps me into a hug, clapping me on the back the way guys do at football games. The skin between my shoulder blades stings a little. My mom stands behind him, touching my arm before he even lets go.
“Wow, have we missed you,” my dad says as he steps back. His smile is uneven.
“You guys repainted in here,” I say. The walls are stark and white. The height marks that once inched up the frame of the front hall closet are gone.
“Where’s your friend?” my mom asks.
I touch the edge of the door, still open. “She’s asleep in the car. I thought I’d come in and say hi before waking her up.”
My dad shoots her a look, a warning.
“Well, go ahead and invite her in,” she says.
I do as I’m told. But when I rap on the car window, Nessa isn’t asleep after all. Her bandages sit in a white pile at her feet, and she’s just finished stretching another flesh-colored Band-Aid across her palm. She looks up at me. For a second, we stare right into each other’s nervousness.
She opens the door and stands, and the moment is gone. My hand hovers above her back, her shoulder, as we walk up to the door, never quite gaining purchase.
“Welcome, welcome,” my dad says, ushering her through the door while my mom watches. “I’m Nick, and this is my wife, Theresa.”
He holds his hand out, and Nessa raises both hers in the air apologetically. “I would shake your hand, but mine are kind of a mess,” she says. “I’m sure Daniel told you about my accident.”
I hadn’t. My dad glances over her head at me as we walk into the living room and says nothing.
“Well, the roast’s still in the oven, but Nick made his famous guacamole recipe to nibble on while we wait,” my mom says, motioning toward the small bowl of green mush sitting on the coffee table.
“The secret is, we buy it by the tub at the grocery store,” my dad says out of the side of his mouth, leaning toward Nessa. It’s an old joke, one I used to roll my eyes at, but my mom grins at him, and Nessa laughs as we settle in, Nessa and I on the couch, my parents across from us in their armchairs.
The next twenty minutes are a blur. My parents ask Nessa question after question about Vermont, her family, the farm. She grows more and more animated with each one, more colored-in. My parents murmur in all the right places, coo sympathetically, but my mom won’t stop looking between the two of us, like she’s trying to puzzle us out. I’m glad we left a half cushion of space between us.
And then, Nessa leans back and says, “So, Theresa. I think Daniel wants you to fix me.”
My dad coughs. My mom’s eyes widen. Nessa smiles, but she crosses her arms over her chest. The silence is taut.
Chapter Forty
Molly
Ben shifts his feet, left to right, and I find my voice, somewhere down in my abdomen. “It’s—” I say, and I turn back to Maggie, who’s leaning over her chair to see. “It’s—” The clock’s still ticking, whispering. It’s what? It’s what?
They would never believe the story Sam fed to Lisa Zinke. They would laugh at the notion of finding every cutworm-damaged stalk and tending to it before it goes too far. Such a strategy would be another piece of evidence in the mounting case against Sam Barts’s sanity. So, then, it’s an art project of Nessa’s—everyone thinks she’s a sunflower, tall and otherworldly and beautiful, so they might believe this strangeness.
I glance up at the ceiling, toward our bedroom. Sam won’t be getting up for another couple of hours, closer to lunchtime. He’s no help to me right now.
I need to buy some more time, just a few more minutes to polish up a story.
Ben is looking sorrier and sorrier to have asked me. He twirls the cornstalk between his palms, back and forth until it blurs.
“Come on. I’ll drive you two home. You’ve done enough for the day. I’ll tell you more when we get there.” I edge past him toward our truck.
Maggie follows, uninvited, saying, “This I’ve got to see.” She’s smiling again, so I don’t protest.
Ben mutters something to Eli as I pass them at the base of the front steps.
Ben and Maggie insist on taking the back seat, leaving the front for Eli, who looks almost put-upon by the assignment. They move the bags of birdseed and heavy tarps from the back bench to the bed of the truck. Then, they sit there like shamefaced teenagers at the back of the class.
I bend and flex my fingers around the clutch and can’t imagine what I’m going to say. My mind is empty, drained by panic. I have to come up with something. Sam will be crushed if they find out. I picture Daniel’s face, what it might look like rumpled with anger or disappointment at me. And Nessa will surely be unhappy, too, attached as she now seems to be to that boy.
I don’t know whether I’m relieved or not when I see Allison’s truck in front of their house. It’s a brand-new double-wide they have, and it looks almost the same as any other house in town, low-slung, with vinyl siding. The wooden frame it sits on is still greenish, with numbers from the lumber yard scribbled along the edges.
When I knock on the door, Allison opens it. She stands there with her legs spread wide and her hands in fists on her hips. It occurs to me that I should have called her before we came over.
“Benjamin Remy, I told you to call me when you were ready. You’re supposed to be helping Molly, not making her drive you all over town,” she says.
He touches her elbow, the gentlest thing. Her eyes drop to his other hand, which is still holding that stalk, pinched between his fingertips.
“It’s all right,” I say. “There’s actually something I needed to speak with you all about. I hope it’s okay we just stopped by unannounced like this.”
She pauses, just for a moment. “Of course,” she says and steps aside.
“This is my friend from childhood, Maggie. I’m sure you’ve met before.” The apology in Maggie’s eyes is quick but impossible to miss, and suddenly, I’m sure they haven’t met. I feel myself shrink by a couple of inches. Not only have I invited myself over to her new house, but I’ve brought a stranger as well.
Allison smiles wide and opens the door even wider. “Absolutely.”
The door leads right into their kitchen. It’s smaller than the one in their old house, to be sure, but the cabinets gleam, and a small pot of mums is the only clutter on the laminate countertops. One of their daughters, Nadia, is spreading peanut butter on a piece of toast, and when she hears the door close behind us, she nods before ambling back to her room with her plate.
“We tell her she should stay on campus and enjoy herself on the weekends, but she keeps wanting to come home,” Allison says. I can tell she’s trying to make it sound like a complaint. “She’s a shy one, just like her dad.
“Go on. Have a seat. We don’t have a living room set anymore”—she looks away and combs her fingers through her ponytail—“but there’s plenty of room at the kitchen table.”
Ben and Eli straddle the bench running down one wall of the kitchen. Maggie picks a stool that sits a little bit too high, and the two wooden chairs are left for Allison and me. She pulls a container of store-bought muffins out of a cabinet and places it on the table, twittering about how she wishes she had more to offer.
Then they’re all waiting for me—Maggie and Allison staring at my face, Ben staring at the table, and Eli staring over my shoulder. I tap my fingers lightly on my lap, and I know exactly what to say. They’ll keep it a secret, even from Sam. If I don’t tell them the truth, they’ll put it together themselves once the circle is revealed, and then all hell would break loose, hurt feelings and rumors flying. I know now that I can’t pretend it’s a project of Nessa’s. It’s my husband’s, and his alone.
“As you all know, Sam is sick. For good this time.” I can’t see their faces as I speak. “He got this idea in his head during his last remission, and for the life of me, I couldn’t ge
t him to let it go. When we came home from his last scan, the one where they found the tumor”—I waver just a little—“he decided he had to act on it.”
I look around at them all. Maggie is smiling with her lips closed, no doubt remembering all his far-fetched college plans: to hitchhike across the country, and to marry me. Allison and Ben wear matching expectant expressions, and for a moment, I feel like one of their daughters, about to tell them something they won’t like. If I didn’t know any better, I would say something dawns on Eli’s face.
“You see, there’s this community. All over the U.S., apparently. These people, they make crop circles.”
Allison laughs, one big bark. “Well, that’s the strangest thing!”
I flinch a little. When nobody joins her, she falls silent.
“I thought so, too. You know Sam, once he’s got one of his ideas…” I trail off, and she sets her elbows on her table, her fingers kneading the flesh of her upper arms. Of course she knows. There’s not a person in this town who doesn’t know.
They all stay silent, so I swim on. “He contacted this boy. Daniel.”
Allison gasps. Ben grunts. Eli and Maggie watch my face.
“He’s still helping the Shannons with their harvest,” I say hurriedly. “That much is true. On certain nights, though, he comes out to our field. He’s marking the corn off before he bends it over to make the crop circle.” I nod toward the stalk laid across the table next to the muffins, a sprinkling of dusty dirt collecting under its tassel that Allison will sweep away as soon as we leave. “Or he was, anyway, before he and Nessa left.”
I stop just short of telling them the truth about where Daniel and Nessa went. Somehow, between crop circles and my son, Charlie seems to be the bigger secret, the one I need to protect.
Maggie bows her head the way she does when she’s smothering a laugh. Ben runs his finger along the stalk and says, “Is it just some big joke?”
“He wanted to make a message and try to get more young people to come start farms here.” The words feel clumsy in my mouth. Allison tenses up next to me. I keep talking in spite of myself. “At first, he wanted Daniel to literally write words in the corn, but I believe Daniel convinced him to do something a little simpler.”
