“About how when they brought out the tree you could see her getting really excited.”
“Like a kid,” said Steve.
Jeremy felt pressure in his temples, psychic strain, the sort of stuff he’d once been adept at evading. The moment was tugging at him like it had a hook in the roof of his mouth: they could all stay there, they could see what else might come out. But he picked up a green sponge and turned the water on in the sink.
“Dad, could you put the rest of the potatoes in the Tupperware?” he said.
“I’ve got it,” said Shauna.
* * *
At sixty-five miles an hour, the cornfields flicker against the window like stock footage; shadows in between the rows pulse steadily in shades of yellow and green and early brown. There are as many bean fields now as corn, but nobody remembers those, their rows green and spiky and nearer to the ground. Corn, though: it hoists itself skyward all by itself, determinate, until the long green leaves on the stalks grow heavy and begin to droop in autumn. From the road it’s like a painting, a huge mural, endless, ongoing.
You see cars pulled over and people who’ve gotten out to take pictures sometimes, around midday—families or couples who’re driving cross-country. There’s plenty of corn west in Nebraska, of course, and more of it east in Illinois, but there’s something about these gently rolling fields that makes people want to get a closer look. Near sunset, long, wheeling shadows suggest a different sort of picture, one with maybe a quiet hint of menace to it. But by then most of the people taking pictures have moved on.
The highway abutting the fields is miraculously uniform for miles on end; this is true on both the east-west and the north-south routes. Are they separate fields on either side of the highway, or does the road mark an artificial division through a single, uniform field? It’s a stupid question, because it only matters to whoever owns the land, but you get all kinds of thoughts when the sun’s strobe-lighting through the driver’s side window all day; and if you let yourself start thinking about the field without the highway, something happens to the way you take in the land. Your inner vision shifts. You think about fields with no one to see them, all that quiet life continuing on with no purpose beyond self-propagation. Tassels rotting in October. It gets to you, if you let it.
But instead of just driving the whole way from border to border, let’s say you get out into the rows, where the growth is thick and tall enough to dampen sound. You notice this effect even before you begin to speak; your ears register how the air’s a little different. “Hello!” people yell, making sure it’s not just some vague feeling they have, or “Is this Heaven?” They don’t mean that; they’re quoting from a movie about a man who builds a baseball field to coax the ghosts of old baseball players into emerging from the corn. There are other times when people go into the fields and yell different things: “Help!” for example, often repeatedly with increasing volume, or “Where are you taking me?” But nobody usually hears them. A few rows of corn will muffle the human voice so effectively that, even a few insignificant rows away, all is silence, what to speak of out at the highway’s shoulder: all the way back there, already fading into memory now. To make yourself heard, you’d need something substantial: the roar of the combine harvester in autumn, mowing all of this to the ground, and then rolling back over the stubble like a ruthless conqueror from an alien planet. Or something greater, bigger, louder. An airplane. But nobody’s going to land any airplanes out here.
* * *
“Farmer?” Jeremy was saying, with an air that made him sound older than he was; it made his father feel proud. “He’s got one tractor, no help except one son, and he’s a farmer?” They had adjourned to the living room and were watching Blue Chips, which was a movie about basketball; Nick Nolte was trying to recruit a high school player from rural Louisiana. It was one of the most popular tapes in the store; they had to stock four copies just to keep up with demand. Even then, one went missing.
Shauna smiled. “‘Family farms,’ right?”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Weird they wouldn’t make him a shrimp fisherman or something.”
“Rice, though,” said Jeremy. “Rice for export.”
Steve pointed at the screen. “Awful dry for growing rice.”
“There’s no way that’s actually Louisiana,” said Shauna.
“Tractor but no truck,” Steve said. He tried not to let his face show how much he was enjoying himself, from the dinner table through coffee afterward down to the present moment, gathered together on the sofa and chairs in front of the TV in the living room. “Just the one tractor.”
“These movies aren’t really for people who’ve been around farms,” said Jeremy, a little apologetically, and then the screen rippled.
It was a static shot: the frame held, impartial and austere, in marked contrast to the hand-held scenes in the shed. She was running. There was no need for anyone to give chase; it was the middle of the night on a long gravel driveway abutting a corn field, and the woman, fleeing, had only rough moonlight to guide her … where? Across the highway? Into the road? She ran, canvas hood in hand, growing smaller as she made progress, the sound of her footfalls fading into silence.
Steve Heldt leaned toward the screen, a helpless look on his face.
“That—that’s your mother,” he said.
“No, Dad,” said Jeremy.
“You think I don’t recognize my own wife,” said Steve.
“It’s not her, Dad.”
“What?” said Shauna.
“It’s her,” he said. He was rising involuntarily to his feet, his body drawn to the vanishing figure in the dark.
“No,” said Jeremy. He was reaching for the remote. “There’s a bunch of tapes like this. A couple, anyway. I’ve seen her before. It’s not Mom.” The screen popped white for a half second before the darkness became general. Steve kept his eyes trained on the screen, an unwilling cartographer of lost locales, invisible ink on a wrinkled map turning brown in the heat—look, there. Those landmasses out there in the middle of the water. These are new.
Shauna was at the wall switch. “Probably some kids with a camcorder,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s a different world now. Should I make some decaf?”
Jeremy’s thoughts were swimming in several directions. I like you and I hope you take care of my dad. He didn’t say it out loud, of course. But he felt it, raw and uncomfortable, as Shauna Kinzer restored order to a room that had, only minutes earlier, been under attack.
12
They had shredded wheat the next morning, at the same kitchen table where, nine hours earlier, they’d watched Shauna work, as if the damage that needed undoing had been hers to atone for. She’d stood, sometimes pacing, while the two men sat and listened; she’d spoken, not excitedly but patiently, gathering up the few available threads and spinning them together into a working theory about the strange scenes on the tapes.
She was magnificent. In the dark, she’d seen Steve in his half-crouch before the screen, desperate; in the kitchen, where they’d gathered, she buried that moment, using small talk and idle guesses for shovels. Jeremy broke in from time to time with rough descriptions of the other scenes he’d watched; she drew them all together.
“It could even be something to get people excited about a movie that hasn’t come out yet,” she said at one point. “I don’t know if either of you saw that Blair Witch Project but they had something like this on the Internet.” Both nodded back. She worked easily, gently, until the still-developing evening’s earlier act began to feel remote and distant. By 10:30 she had constructed a pretty sturdy comfort zone out of available materials.
“Sorry about last night,” Steve said to Jeremy now, not looking up from his cereal.
“First one of those scenes I ever saw, I’ll tell you what,” Jeremy said. “I couldn’t even sleep. Stayed awake all night. Nothing to be sorry about.”
Steve gave an almost wordless nod; there’s a noise some men make with their mout
hs closed when they’re ready to place a ridge-marker in a conversation but don’t know how. Most mornings the TV was on—news, weather. It was quiet today. The sky came through the kitchen window blue and grand and full of possibilities, which happens everywhere, but not every day: just some days.
“So I got offered that job with Bill Veatch,” Jeremy said. “I was going to mention it last night, but—”
“Well, congratulations,” Steve broke in. “Proud of you. They give you a start date? You need work clothes?”
“Slow down a little,” said Jeremy. “I told him I have to talk to Sarah Jane.”
“To put in notice, you mean.”
“Well, to talk first, but sure.” Jeremy couldn’t put into words what he meant when he said he had to talk to Sarah Jane: it was something about holding patterns and the itching persistence of loose ends, the relative ease of knowing where they’re located. The nearness of everything in his life to the house where they’d all once been a family. Fixed points in space and time.
“Well, all right,” said Steve, and then: “I think your mom would be proud, too.”
It always sat a little funny with Jeremy: Dad speaking on Mom’s behalf in her absence. These past few years of sitting around waiting for something to solidify: wouldn’t Mom have also understood that? You wait for signs, but there aren’t any signs; you wait a while longer, just in case.
“You think so?” said Jeremy.
“I do think so,” his father said. “You’ll be making a life for yourself. That’s what any mother wants for her children.”
Jeremy did not have a name for the feeling in his chest when he heard his father say this; it registered as a physical sensation, hard and solid, like a stone lodged in his sternum underneath the skin, something that had been there long enough for him to stop thinking about it most of the time but whose weight registered now, coolly radiating through his chest. He nodded, grunted, made sure to look his father in the eyes. Soon all of this will be gone.
* * *
He stopped past Sarah Jane’s place first, on his way in to work. He wanted to tell her in person he was sorry to leave, and that he was grateful for the chance she’d taken on him back when he was just a junior at Nevada High. Of course anybody could work the counter at Video Hut, but that wasn’t the point. In his dream of the person he hoped to become, you always thanked the people who’d helped you along. It was important.
But of course there was no car in the driveway, nobody home. Stopping by was only paying courtesy to a shared fiction, a head-nod to the silence around Sarah Jane’s increasingly long absences from the store. The place felt abandoned. Somebody’d been keeping up appearances—mowing the lawn, sweeping the porch, emptying the mailbox—but it wasn’t enough. The windows looked lifeless.
For a while he let the engine idle at the curb, watching the door of the house and measuring his options. She still made occasional appearances at the store; at least once a week she’d turn up, usually around closing time on weeknights. He could just wait until their paths crossed, but he didn’t want to. The momentum he felt was real. It was time.
So he kept in mind what mothers want for their sons as he dialed Sarah Jane from the work phone. He felt guilty; leaving Video Hut now felt a little like jumping ship. He and Ezra held down the fort these days, but the whole operation was in disrepair. There was no action, no forward motion. In February, they’d come in one morning to find a new sheet taped to the counter next to the A.M. OPEN page: it said EMERGENCY CONTACTS, but there was only one number on it, SARAH JANE (cell), with a redundant only contact in case of extreme emergency! underneath. When did she get a cell phone? He didn’t want to call it.
You’ve reached the voice mail of Sarah Jane Shepherd. I’m unable to take your call at this time, ran the message. This was followed by a man’s voice, distorted, too cheerful, announcing: The mailbox belonging to—and here Sarah Jane jumped back in: Sarah Jane Shepherd, blunt, declamatory—is full. Please try again later.
He set the phone back in its cradle. After a while the door jingled; it was Joan from Mary Greeley. “Late night?” she said.
Jeremy realized he’d been staring off into space. “Not lately,” he said, finding the surface quickly, glad of it.
They talked awhile about how many nice days might be left in the year before it got too humid. He kept pace, but it took some effort. The whole conversation felt like it belonged to another era, a time of reliable coefficients, and his mind was on Collins now: on trying, before he moved on, to get some glimpse of what had disturbed Video Hut’s once-inviolate stillness, its perennial motionless static present, a thing already passing into legend.
* * *
“You sleeping all right up there? Gets pretty hot, if I remember.”
“I’m fine. It’s not humid enough yet to stay hot all night.”
“Well, if you want one of the other rooms—”
“I’ve always wanted an attic room, is the thing, so it’s nice to spend a few nights in one,” Sarah Jane said. “When I was a little girl—”
“We had a basement,” Lisa interrupted. “Nobody else on our street had one. It stayed cool in summer.”
“Right. My grandfather had one, too. He kept the freezer down there, had whole sides of beef in it. We weren’t allowed to play around in the basement.”
“Well,” Lisa said, “if it gets too hot, these old farmhouses are huge. Two of the other rooms I’m just using for storage, I could clear them out.”
The breakfast table was in the kitchen; it was a two-seater with a Formica top in turquoise riddled with looping white squiggles all over. It looked like it had enjoyed a quiet life at a diner; it was an antique, but not a showpiece. People pay a lot of money now for reproductions of tables like these, but plenty of them are gathering dust at auction houses if you know where to look. Raise up the two leaves that hang down on either side of it and it’ll seat four.
Centered on the wall above it was an old black-and-white photograph in an oval frame: a carhop at a drive-in, somewhere in the Midwest in a bygone era, her uniform crisp, square hat set neatly atop her hair worn in a bun. The picture had been personalized in gloriously legible cursive script: You’re always welcome back at Henry’s! Love, Irene.
“I don’t really know why I put the guest room in the attic,” she said after a moment. “The view, maybe.”
“That view in the morning is really something,” Sarah Jane offered.
“It’s nice at night, too. The window faces the moon as it rises.”
“I’ll watch for it.”
She cleared their plates and stood at the sink, rinsing. The air smelled like sausage.
“Are you going back in today?”
Sarah Jane blinked. “Of course.”
“Are you going to get your things?”
Another blink, and a breath. “Am I moving in?”
“I have a lot of work to do around here,” Lisa said. “You already know a little about the business.” The kitchen window faced the east; the whole room was flooded with sunlight, clean and summery.
“I’ll bring some things,” said Sarah Jane.
* * *
The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It’s the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago, it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can’t usually see it in paintings, but it’s an important part of the scenery.
Every spring it’s like a puppy: always more energy than you remembered, leaping to life from an afternoon nap. You can feel it battering the windshield if you’re driving into it, and at night it might make you worry, but in the daytime it’s bracing. It felt, today, in Jeremy’s body as he drove down Highway 65, like a validation of his c
ourse, like the world responding to his choices with a palpable yes. Yes, it was time to launch out into the world, to set a course for the future. Yes, it was all right that he’d called Stephanie Parsons to tell her he’d been wrong, that he did actually want to know the address of the house; it was all right, when she teased him a little about it, to enjoy it. Was it all right to go try to find Sarah Jane instead of just waiting for her to show up at work? Yes, even if it wasn’t really in his character to just get in the car and head south. But yes decisively to all of this, driving out to Collins.
He turned the radio up when the signal from Des Moines shrugged off the last of the static, and he let the window down a little. The air rushed in. He was leaning his head into the wind when he saw the blue Chevrolet in the ditch to the side of the road, clumps of long grass out on the blacktop ahead of it.
There was broken glass arcing out in a half-moon from its front end, and a big greenish pool from where the radiator’d burst or been punctured. All four wheels were still. It looked like a great dead insect on its back. It was Ezra’s car, and it was upside down.
In later years he could find nothing in the gap between seeing the wreck and finding himself outside the car, on his knees, lifting Ezra’s body by the shoulders even though he’d been told in Health and Safety class just a few years ago not to touch anything at the scene of an accident unless you meant to begin CPR. On the asphalt were dozens of VHS tapes without their cases, some crushed, either by impact with the road when they’d been thrown from the car or by the car rolling over them. Loose tape rippled in the wind.
Jeremy wasn’t yelling; he wasn’t the kind of person to just start yelling. But he could hear his voice rising in pitch. “What are you doing all the way out here?” The sound of it in his own ears unnerved him: that loss of control, the first tentative steps toward panic. “Are you lost, are you lost?” he kept asking, repeating himself each time he got no answer. Ezra’s house was clear over on the other side of Ames toward Boone. It was as if he’d meant to head out toward where he lived but gone in the wrong direction.
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