by Erica Boyce
I’m here because of Sam. I’ve never left a project unfinished, not once. I tell myself it’s Claire’s face I see when the shame creeps up on me. Nessa probably won’t be outside anyway.
I walk down the driveway, the gravel shifting under my feet. I keep my eyes on the field and turn my back to the house, so I jump a little when I hear her voice.
“Took you long enough.”
She is sitting on the porch in that same rocking chair, her finger in her book.
Of all the words in my head, all that comes out is, “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
She lays her book on the chair, stands up. “And miss out on the fun?”
As she comes down the stairs toward me, the curtains flick open and closed in a window on the second floor. My face burns when I imagine what she’s told them, what they think of me now, and I’m glad I’m standing outside the circle of the porch light.
“So,” she says, stopping a few paces away from me and shoving her hands in her pockets, “what are we doing tonight?”
I clear my throat and try to be professional. “We should be able to finish up the marking. Then we can do all the bending on the next night and be done with this whole thing.” I motion outward so it’s clear I’m talking about the field. Luckily, the paint held on while we were gone, so there’s not much left to mark now.
For a while, I can almost pretend nothing has changed. We work in silence, taking turns spraying and walking up to the road. But then, on my second trip down the hill, instead of handing me the paint can, Nessa touches the side of my arm, so slight, I can hardly feel it.
“I feel like I need to tell you something,” she says, her eyes fixed on my face. “I think you might’ve thought I wanted something serious out of this. And I don’t. This was just something fun for me. After we’re done with this”—she jerks her head toward the middle of the field—“I’ll go back to California, and you can go back to wherever. I know what Claire meant to you.”
The moonlight shines on her face, and I can’t look away. I don’t want to believe her.
There’s a rustling behind us. Barely hushed giggles loud as gunfire. My chest tightens, and so does Nessa’s grip on my arm.
“Drop,” I mouth to her. We crouch together. The dirt creaks under my feet. The whispers come closer and closer.
They will find us eventually. My mind churns, searching for explanations for what they’ll see: the farmer’s daughter and the stranger, huddled on the ground, surrounded by corn glowing crazy like fireflies. She is teaching me how to find the best ears for feed. We are secretly seeing each other, just like everyone thought. I blush again at this one and turn my head away, toward the street.
A woman’s voice rises harsh above the others, whisper-yelling, “Nessa? Are you there?”
Nessa spins toward the group. I reach for her, but she’s on her feet, and all I grab is her ankle.
“Maggie?”
A breathy cheer goes up, and the patch of shaking cornstalks comes nearer and nearer. I stand up, blood rushing to my head, vision fading out. I think about leaving, snaking through the field away from them all. But then someone pushes through the last layer of corn and stands in front of us, shorts and a T-shirt, hair flying loose, face full of excitement like she didn’t think she’d find us.
Nessa takes one step toward her, then stops. “What are you doing here?” she says.
And then I see the rest of them, easing out through the rows of corn like something from a horror movie. The red-headed woman I’ve seen a couple of times at the grocery store, squinting at the prices in the canned soup aisle. The man I’d walked past outside the bank one morning, muttering into his phone about a job listing. And another man, so tall, it feels like I’m peering up his nose instead of in his face.
“We want to help,” the first woman says.
My entire body burns. This is not right—no. Word has gotten out after all, spread around town. They are talking about it in their living rooms, and they will miss the point. There will be no magic, no bright, clean smile on Claire’s face, not this time. I will lose, miss it all. It’ll be ruined.
Nessa turns to me, and I realize I haven’t said anything yet. “I—no. You can’t,” I sputter. Though it’s too dark to see, I can picture their disappointment, know it from the way their shoulders fall all at once.
“Come on,” Nessa says, reaching for my arm.
“I just—give me a minute,” I say, not quite an apology, and I walk back up to the road, stumbling over ruts in the dirt. I can feel my fingers tingling again, that panic attack. I slow my breathing so no one will see it happening.
I don’t hear her following me until my feet reach the cracked pavement. The shuffling of the stalks trails behind me, and then she stands there, panting.
“You told them,” I say, and I can’t turn around.
“No,” she says loudly, then softer, “Absolutely not. I told Charlie, but there’s no way he would’ve told anyone else.”
I turn then and say, “But how?” Even though I know it doesn’t really matter, there’s no undoing now. I’ll have to leave. That’s the only way to protect the circlers and me both at once. If there’s never any circle, then it was always just a rumor. I was just an odd smudge of nothing passing through. I’ll cut ties with the group entirely, never talk to Lionel again. Nothing can get traced back to them. And he can’t find out what I’ve done, pin it all on me.
She looks back over the field. “I don’t know. Maggie’s my mom’s best friend, so she must’ve cracked and told her, but the others—I don’t know.”
I don’t say anything, start walking away, back toward the Shannons’. She makes a strangled little sound, and her sneakers thump against the asphalt as she runs past, then in front of me.
She stops with both hands up. “I know you’re mad,” she says, “and I know this probably breaks every rule in the crop circle code. Please, please don’t leave. I—” She pulls her bottom lip through her teeth, and I can picture exactly how it reddens a shade.
“My dad needs you to finish this,” she continues. “And maybe this is a good thing. All these people, they love my family, and they won’t tell anyone else. Maybe it’ll help us move faster, help us make sure we can finish this before—while he can still see it.”
It’s not true. It’s not a good thing, no. She moves closer, her face pale, and my heart stops hammering in my chest. All of a sudden, I realize her eyes on me are everything I need in that moment.
Chapter Fifty
Nessa
His hands twitch by his sides, and he looks over my shoulder, but he’s loosened, and I know he’ll stay for now. I want so badly to ease up into him, bury my face in the hollow of his clavicle, and hold on.
I stay where I am. While I sat on the porch for the second night in a row, staring up at the road, I lectured myself in my head. He was an idiot, obviously, and I was not to touch him under almost any circumstance. When his shadow appeared on the horizon, my hands began to wobble.
“Okay,” he says.
I keep my smile to a reasonable width. “Let’s get to it,” I say. I reach for his hand but then think better of it. There’s a tiny breath of silence before his footsteps follow mine.
The four of them stand together behind the first row of corn, far enough so they can pretend to be discreet. Maggie stares at me, but I shake my head. Allison’s husband stands a few paces away, staring at the ground with his hands in his pockets. I motion him over, and when Daniel comes crashing through after me, we are all in a line and at attention.
He stumbles for a moment and gapes at us like he’d forgotten.
“We’re ready,” I say.
He closes his mouth. “Right. So. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
He puts Maggie and me on watch up at the road and assigns Allison and Ben to be runners between us and Daniel an
d Eli, who take turns spray-painting. When he pulls out the plans to show everyone, his face clears in an instant, and he smiles. “Now that there’s more of us,” he says, “we can make this a little more complex.”
He pulls a pencil out of his pocket and bends over double, pressing the paper to his thigh and scribbling on it. The pencil pokes and snags the paper in a few places, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He finishes and holds the picture out for us to see. We lean in close like it’s a fire.
It’s beautiful, really—even more so than before—a spiraling maze of interlocking circles. I feel the warmth of his arm against mine and lean back before I ignite.
Up on the road, Maggie’s fixed in place, staring at the flecks of paint schooling together into something like art. The circle is too far from the house to see anything from the windows, so this is all new for her. It’s strange, but I can barely remember the first time I saw it.
“Pretty amazing, right?” I say to burst the silence.
“The circle or Daniel?” she says, her elbow jabbing my side. “No, you’re right. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
I relax. We stand in silence for a few minutes, watching the paint wink when the wind sifts through the stalks.
“How’s it looking?” Allison says, laboring up the hill.
“It’s amazing,” Maggie says. She grins at me.
Allison reaches the road, one hand on her belly. At Maggie’s nod, she turns toward the field. It takes her a few seconds to see it. “Oh.” She touches her mouth. “Oh wow.”
“Yeah,” Maggie says. She lays a hand on Allison’s shoulder.
“Well.” Allison brushes her hands against each other, businesslike. “That’s good, then. I’ll tell the boys they’re doing a good job.” A river of pebbles loosens in her wake and clatters down after her, down the hill.
The breeze smooths over the back of my neck, picking up and twirling the hairs that lie there. Maggie makes a sound like a horse, blowing her bangs out of her face.
It’s been a long time since we were alone together. When I was younger, she would sweep into our house a couple times a year. The three of them would be up well past midnight, leaning into each other and laughing. Charlie and I would sit cross-legged on the floor next to them, hardly daring to move, amazed that we hadn’t been sent to bed yet. Since she slept on my floor, it was always my job to wake her up the next morning after the rest of us had eaten breakfast. Her face would be crammed into her pillow, which made me giggle, and she groaned when I poked her in the side. After a few moments, she would sit up in her nest of blankets and ask me what I’d dreamed about the night before. For weeks afterward, I would beg my mom to let me sleep on the floor, just like Aunt Maggie.
There’s an odd texture to the space between us now, a stiff and formal kind of nostalgia.
“Thank you for coming and staying with my parents,” I say. “I know it really means a lot to my mom.”
“Nowhere else I’d rather be,” she says, easy and rehearsed. She glances at me and sighs. “The truth is, I feel kind of bad for dumping all my shit on your mom at a time like this.”
“Oh yeah, I’m so sorry again about your husband—ex-husband, I guess.” I should have started with this. My insides twist with embarrassment.
She just shrugs. “Marriages fall apart every day.”
The cornstalks part, and Ben steps out. He stands silently with his arms folded and whistles low through his teeth at the sight. “Damn,” he murmurs.
“We doing good so far?” Daniel climbs up toward us, and my heart stops beating for a second, suspended. He stands next to me and studies the field.
I inch away from him. Somewhere in the distance, an owl calls, too loud in the night.
“Not bad,” he says, nodding. “I think we’re almost done. Finally.”
Even I can tell my smile is weak. He motions to Ben, and the two of them teeter back down the hill and into the field.
Maggie pivots at her waist to face me, her arms crossed.
I glance at her sideways. “What?” I say, though I’m not sure I want to know.
She looks away, over the fields, toward the black and toothy mountains in the distance. “Don’t be too much like me, kiddo.”
Now I do look at her, honest, loyal Maggie, who never shies away from a fight but always leaves you laughing. One of her visits fell right after Charlie’s disastrous birthday, and I woke before sunrise to see her mattress empty. I crept down the stairs to the kitchen, and there she was, sitting at the table with Charlie, coffee mugs pushed aside. Charlie’s back was to me, and his voice was low, but I saw his pain in her face, bent forward and close to his.
“What do you mean?” I say.
She keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon, and I wonder if she’s heard me, but then she says, “Don’t give up on the person you love because you think it’s the right thing to do.”
I want to ask what she means again, to pretend I don’t understand and to shrink away from acknowledging this particular truth. Her words settle on me, and I wonder why she’s really leaving her husband. Who has she given up? Who does she think of when she can’t fall asleep?
An image rises in front of me, the three of them sitting on the couch together, my dad and my mom and then Maggie. Dad is telling a story about someone in town, with Mom making gentle course corrections. Maggie leans forward, elbows on knees, her eyes bright on his face, waiting for the punch line.
And just like that, I don’t know if Maggie is here for my mom or for him.
“Okay” is all I think to say.
Chapter Fifty-One
Molly
I wake up to the smell of burned toast and the sound of bacon hissing on the stove, groggy from a night of tossing and turning. After I’d called Allison, I couldn’t sleep for hours, wondering if Daniel would turn tail and run when he found out the others knew, if we’d be blacklisted on some forum somewhere, if Sam’s dream would never be realized. A consequence I hadn’t considered: Daniel’s fear outweighing his pride.
Sam has kicked free of the covers, a sheet of sweat glistening on his forehead. I tuck one blanket back up around his shoulders and touch my lips to his cheek.
In the kitchen, Maggie is muttering a steady stream of swears and grabbing at the blackened slices of bread in the toaster with two fingers. Charlie sits at the table with one ankle resting on the other knee. He raises his hands, innocent, and says, “I offered to help, but she wouldn’t let me.”
She spins around at the sound of his voice, the ties to her robe flapping. “Oh, hi. I think I’ve managed to ruin your bread.” She glares at the plate and the charred remains that lie there.
“There’s plenty more where that came from,” I say as I step around her to slide the now-smoking skillet of bacon off the burner. “You’re up early.”
“I thought I’d make you guys some breakfast, but I can’t even get bacon and toast right.” She slumps into a chair.
Charlie grins over her head at me, and the glow spreads down my shoulders, all the way to my fingertips.
I hide my face in the fridge, letting the cool, dry air mist over me. I surface with a clutch of eggs clacking softly in my hands.
“How did it go last night?” I say, keeping my voice casual and cracking the eggs swiftly into a bowl.
“It was fantastic, so much fun,” she says. “Nessa and I stood up on the road to make sure they were getting the markings right, and it was just like the most beautiful painting you’ve ever seen, with the moon and the stars and the patterns and the field.” She drops back into her chair and cranes her neck to face me. “You really should come out and see it with us.”
“I expect I’ll see it when all that’s done,” I say, whipping a glug of milk into the eggs. Every time I’ve driven past the field, I’ve turned away. I know it’s glow-in-the-dark paint that looks like nothing
in the sun. Still, somehow, I don’t want to see.
“You and Nessa are helping with the crop circle?” Charlie sounds casual, but beneath it, I can hear a snip of hurt.
“Oh yeah,” she says, “and a couple people from town, too. Allison and Ben and their farmhand, I think.” She rushes to add, “No one else knows, though.”
Charlie plants one finger on his place mat and spins it around in a pirouette. “I think I’d like to join you guys next time,” he says. He looks up at Maggie. “If that’s okay.”
Maggie leans over to shimmy his shoulder back and forth. “Of course it’s fine,” she says, though I’m not sure she knows that it is. “We’d love your help.”
He takes his hands off the place mat and relaxes. “Great, and I’ll bet Zach will want to help, too.”
“Help with what?” Zach comes down the stairs, bending below the edge of the ceiling to smile at Maggie. “What are you two signing me up for?”
“Hey, Mom?” The cry comes through Nessa’s door. “Can you come here for a minute?”
Sam is still in our bed, so it can’t be about him. I look at Charlie, who peers up the stairwell, his brow knit. Zach eases the bowl of eggs out of my grip, and I run up the stairs, shouting, “Coming!”
My mind races over what I might find, tears on her face or new burns on her hands or—
When I whip the door open, she’s sitting on the edge of her bed, eyes slightly widened at the urgent thunder of my feet. She touches the space next to her.
I close the door behind me, step over the tangled mess of Maggie’s makeshift bed, and sit down. She folds in closer, her head on my shoulder, and my hand makes its path over her hair, the curls.
