by Amy Reed
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For all my best friends—past, present, and future
καλλίστῃ
kallistéi
“to the fairest”
—The Iliad, Homer
Part I
Chaos came first.
Before you and me and everything that has been and everything that will be. Before the gods or even the idea of the gods. Just the promise of matter, just disorganized potential.
Every story starts with the Big Bang:
Once upon a time.
Sadie, this story is yours.
I am the storyteller and you are the story.
When you want to remember something, you always say “Tell me about that one time we—” then I fill in the blank, and I recount your memory.
I am the history keeper of us.
We’ve been sitting on our bags in the middle of nowhere for almost an hour.
“No one’s coming,” you say, always the pessimist. You sigh and pull at a sweaty clump of hair that’s stuck between your temple and the giant sunglasses you always wear, the ones that cover nearly half your face and make you look like a movie star. “I thought Nebraska was supposed to be cold.” Where you got that idea, I don’t know. You have a lot of ideas. Maybe you’re just confused—it must be hard keeping track when every time you see your mom she lives in a different place. It must be like getting stuck in some weird kind of feedback loop where you’re being shuttled around millions of light-years through wormholes, lost in time and space, and every time you land it’s somewhere and sometime new, and you have to get your bearings quick, even though you’re dizzy and disoriented and nauseous and probably a little bit scared. Now we’ve landed on this planet where it’s June and humid and a million degrees, and the wormhole looks more like a bus that dropped us off on the side of a dirt road in the middle of a never-ending expanse of fields, not even at a bus stop, just a spot that looks exactly like every other spot for miles and miles and miles.
We don’t have cell reception, and I’m starting to wonder if your mom even knows we’re coming to stay with her for the summer. Maybe we went back in time, to before my dad supposedly talked to her on the phone, before your dad got so desperate to get rid of you, before anyone made any arrangements. Or maybe she just forgot.
You look so small against the sky, even with your shit-kicking boots and pink hair and fluorescent sundress-of-the-day, all of these things that usually make you seem so much bigger than everyone around you. But now it’s just you against the sky, and even you can’t beat that. The sky’s big here in a way it never gets in Seattle, where we’re always so snug with all the mountains crowding from every direction. There are some sad hills in the distance here, but they seem like a backdrop, like something two-dimensional and only half real. The rest is dusty flat infinity and big blue sky that goes up and up and up. This is the kind of sky little kids draw. And it sounds like the inside of my head when I’m wearing earplugs. Everything is so still, except for the creepy shivering of the corn, like the part in a horror movie before everything gets crazy. Corn everywhere. Corn for miles. So many places for things to hide.
Something about this reminds me of an old Greek myth. I don’t tell you this because I know you’d just roll your eyes and say Everything reminds you of an old Greek myth, which is probably a little bit true. But it really does feel like we’re at the beginning of an epic journey—lost in the desert, exposed to the gods and the elements, trudging through the punishing heat toward vague promises of paradise. This is the beginning of our Odyssey, our search. But which of us is the hero? There can only ever be one.
But you’re not concerned with that. At the airport, you announced that we’d be traveling as young socialites. You lifted your chin to the air and shifted onto one hip, put two fingers to your lips and smoked an invisible cigarette. You strutted through the Sea-Tac terminal as if it were your runway. I followed, the socialite’s assistant. It felt like an important job. But now we’re here, with no one but me to see you. I know you’re depressed, but you still look beautiful.
I could just close my eyes and listen to the almost-silence. But I know you’re not so easily charmed. You’re the one we have to worry about. And I am, as usual. Worrying.
What were you expecting, Sadie? How many ways are there to interpret your mom telling you she lives on a farm?
“Don’t you know where the farm is?” I ask.
“How would I know where the farm is?”
“No one gave you directions?”
“My mom said Doff would pick us up at the bus stop.”
I want to say How does anyone even know this is a bus stop? but I don’t.
You start pacing back and forth, holding your cell phone in front of you like a divining rod.
“Dammit.”
“Still no bars?”
You lift the phone above your head, spin around, hold it out in front of you, crouch, and hold the phone near the ground, as if one of these many configurations could trick the cell towers into thinking we’re not in the middle of nowhere.
“Dammit!” You throw the phone at a row of corn.
“We should hitchhike,” I say.
“In what car?”
Good point. We haven’t seen a car in the hour we’ve been sitting here. You jump across a wide, dry ditch to retrieve your phone. You’re on your hands and knees, sifting through the dust and dry grass. I don’t have the heart to tell you you’re now wearing a spiderweb as a hairnet.
You sit up with the phone in your hand, your tangled pink bob covered by its ghostly new accessory. You sigh, take one last heartbroken look at your phone, then leap back across the ditch and shove the cell into your backpack, your eyes slanted in fury as if betrayed.
“Let’s walk,” you say.
“But we don’t know where to go.”
“If we walk, we’ll end up somewhere.”
You assume I will follow. And I do.
You’ve been talking about your mom since we were little. I’ve seen pictures of her at the Great Wall of China, scuba diving in Belize, riding elephants in Thailand, and I have listened to your fairytale stories. Her greatest magic is the fact that she’s not your father. Remember that time I asked you why you didn’t live with her? You closed up tight, became a brick wall, turned to stone. You mumbled something about money, it was because of money, everything is always about money. It is the thing your mom doesn’t have, the thing your dad has too much of. I didn’t ask how you became their currency. I didn’t ask how he came to own you. I didn’t ask how she could afford to go to all the places in the pictures but not house a daughter more than a couple weeks per year. I didn’t ask why she makes herself so hard to find, why she never stays more than a couple of years in one place, why she often forgets to give you her new phone number. This summer will be the longest you have been with your mother since you were a baby, since the brief few years your parents were still married.
You’re tired and sweaty, and even you can’t make this glamorous. I’m pretty sure you’ve given up on pretending we’re socialites. That lost its fun shortly after our layover in Denver, but now you’re making a decent go with this displaced-city-girl act. It’s always something, even when the only audience is me and corn and some crickets. There’s always a game of pretend to play; there’s always someone else you want to be. Once I kidded you about how you should go into acting, a
nd you lectured me about how all actors are “narcissists” and “egomaniacs with inferiority complexes” and how acting is the “most banal of the arts.” I don’t know how you insert words like “banal” into your vocabulary and make them sound like they belong there, or how you manage to cultivate all these opinions that you assert so passionately. All I know is you make a lot of proclamations, and whether or not you actually believe them, I usually do.
One of your favorite proclamations is that your dad is a douchebag. Supposedly, he didn’t used to be a douchebag, of which you are the proof. At one time, long, long ago, he was someone your mother could love. We don’t quite believe this, even though he will occasionally roll his eyes at one of your colorful outfits or pseudo-revolutionary statements and say something cryptic like If you only knew me when I first met your mom, like you’re too late, you missed your chance to have a parent who actually understands you, and now you’re stuck with this prematurely balding man who works seventy hours a week at a bank and drives a gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive Suburban, even though he never hauls anything around except his new brat kid and way-too-young and obnoxiously boring trophy wife and the occasional large electronics purchase. Sometimes we pass him in the kitchen on our way out the door, and these things just pop out of your mouth, things like Dad, you’re such a cliché, and he does his har har har chuckle, and trophy wife Trish has no idea what anyone’s talking about and just giggles like a drunk foreign exchange student.
And now we’re here. A man can only har har har for so long. Someone was probably going to get murdered if you stayed in that house one more minute, and everyone worried it would be your four-year-old half brother, Eli, and I guess no one could think of anything better to do than to ship you off to the middle of the country. With me, of course. Everyone knows I come along with the package. Your dad’s always saying how he holds me responsible for making sure that you’re not dead or haven’t been sold into white slavery.
“I’m tired,” you announce. We’ve been walking ten minutes. You’d be a terrible slave.
Which does not bode well for our summer plans. Because even though I know you’ve been fantasizing about a different kind of mother from the one you’ve always known, we both know we’re not here for quality family time. We’re here to work, plain and simple. We’re seasonal employees. It’s the only way your mom would agree to take us—if she was sure we’d be out of her hair.
“This sucks.” You throw your backpack on the ground, take a seat, pull out your water bottle, and drink the last of it. “We’re going to die.” You stare into the empty bottle.
I could tell you to stop being such a drama queen, but I know you need these little outbursts to keep yourself even, like how tiny earthquakes are supposed to be good for relieving pressure at fault lines. This is what you have to do to avoid The Big One. I hand you my water bottle. You drink, hand it back to me, sigh. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’ll wander the cornfields for days until we die of dehydration, and the crows will feast upon our dried flesh, and when your mom finally remembers to pick us up, she’ll find nothing but sun-bleached bones piled beside your fancy backpack and my beat-up suitcase.
“Ack!” You leap into the air and begin jumping like a crazy person.
“What?”
You point to something behind me. I spin around, follow your finger to a cloud of moving dust in the distance and what appears to be a truck in the middle of it. You jump and wave and try to make yourself as big as possible, as if you’re afraid the driver won’t see two brightly colored girls on the side of the empty road. I just stand there and watch the truck as it approaches. It’s a beat-up old thing, and so is the man driving it. The truck slows to a stop, but you don’t move toward it. For once you want me to do the talking. I approach the passenger’s-side window. The wrinkled man is wearing a cowboy hat and denim overalls over a faded plaid button-up shirt, just like a movie farmer. He leans over and unrolls the window.
“Hello,” I say, taking off my sunglasses.
“Are you girls lost?”
“No, sir,” I say. “The bus from Omaha dropped us off out here and our ride didn’t show up.”
“Let me guess,” he says. “You’re one of them Oasis people.”
“Oasis Farm! Yes, that’s where we’re going. Do you know how to get there?”
“Oh, sure,” he says. He sighs, leans over again, and opens the door. “Get in. I’ll give you girls a ride.”
I run over and pull on your arm. “Come on,” I say.
“Are you sure we should get in a car with him?” you whisper.
“He’s just some old farmer,” I say. “He’s harmless.”
“Max, he has a gun rack on his truck.”
“It’s for hunting, not for murdering people,” I say. And I know it’s a bad idea even before my mouth opens to form the words, but I say it anyway: “It’s not like you’ve had a problem getting into cars with strange men before.”
The sting washes across your face. Most things we can joke about with little snarky jabs. But some things still hurt too much. I should know that. I’m immediately sorry. I don’t know why I said it. Maybe because you drank the last of my water. Maybe because I’m tired of sitting in the sun. The guilt wrenches through my guts.
You don’t say anything, just pick up your backpack and walk toward the truck. “I’m sorry,” I say, but you ignore me.
The man says “Throw your bags in the back.” You get in first and I slide in next to you. The truck smells like menthol and vinyl.
“Hello,” you say, again in your place as the one who handles things. “I’m Sadie.”
“Mm-hmm,” the man says, looking ahead as he starts driving.
“Do you know my mom, Lark Summerland? She lives at the Oasis Farm.”
Something in his face twitches. “Can’t say I know too many of them by name.”
“Oh.”
Still looking straight ahead, he says, “Young lady, you aware there’s a spider crawling ’cross your forehead?”
You are all flailing arms and girl squeals. I think I see the slightest grin on the man’s leathery face. “Get it off! Get it off!” you scream. You are slapping yourself in the face. I don’t know why, but I pause before stopping you.
I catch your wrists, look into your wide eyes. “It’s gone,” I say.
“Where is it? Is it in my hair?” You break free from my grasp. “Oh, God! Is it in my hair?”
“Sit still,” I command, and you obey, and I take a guilty pleasure in this rare moment when I can tell you what to do. I finger through your hair like the elementary school nurse used to do looking for lice. “You’re good,” I say, and you collapse onto my shoulder, take my hand in yours.
“Thank you,” you sigh. “My savior.” I feel a sparkle of pride and relief.
The man chuckles. “You girls are in for a treat,” he says. The truck slows down and passes a faded wooden sign on the side of the road that reads Oasis Organic Farm. We turn down a narrow, potholed road lined with pink and purple bougainvillea, the first real color besides yellow, green, and blue it seems we’ve seen all day. A couple of mutts run alongside the truck, barking welcome. After a half mile or so, we pull into a large dirt circle flanked by old oak trees, some trucks, a house, a couple trailers, and what look like a few large tents, with more buildings and vehicles behind them. A larger Oasis Organic Farm sign greets us above a long raised bed of flowers and other plants. A few chickens wander the area, pecking at the dirt. This is the first real shade we’ve seen in hours, the first trees and buildings besides a couple of abandoned-looking tool sheds in the middle of vast lonely fields, and it does in fact feel like an oasis. The dogs circle the car, announcing us to whoever is here.
“Well, here you are,” the man says.
“Thank you so much for the ride,” you say.
“Mm-hmm.”
I open the door, and we slide out, pull our bags from the back of the truck. You wave goodbye and yell “Thank you!” again, bu
t there’s no way he hears you over the sound of his truck rumbling away. We are left in a cloud of dust. The dogs approach, wagging their tails. One licks my hand.
“I hope these aren’t supposed to be watchdogs,” you say.
“Where is everyone?”
It is eerily quiet; the only sound is the slight rustling of leaves in the wind, the throaty clucking of the chickens, the friendly panting of the dogs. Then the sound of a screen door opening and springing closed. Booted footsteps on dirt. “Hello?” you say.
“Hello?” a man’s voice responds. The dogs go running toward the voice, their tails wagging.
Your mom’s boyfriend emerges from the side of the house. I recognize him from pictures you’ve shown me the last two years. You’ve never had much to say about him. He’s a small man with a graying ponytail and the look of someone who’s always slightly confused.
“Hi, Doff,” you say.
He blinks, then smiles, then blinks again, says, “Shit, what time is it?”
Apparently the farm has one clock. A single clock. For the entire farm and all thirty-three, now thirty-five, people who live here. And it ran out of batteries. Nobody realized this until we showed up. Maybe they don’t need clocks. Maybe they’re those kind of people who are so attuned to nature they can tell what time it is by just looking at the sun.
“Your mom was supposed to pick you up,” Doff says as we follow him into the house with our bags. “Everyone’s still out in the field.” We stop in the middle of a giant living room crowded with mismatched couches, chairs, and rugs, the walls covered with bookshelves and eclectic art. It is surprisingly cool inside, a rusty ceiling fan pushing the hot afternoon out the screen windows, a faint smell of earthy incense in the air. A computer that looks older than me sits on a small desk in the corner. The house is cozy in the way that basements or attics or tree houses are sometimes cozy, like the fact that most people would not choose to live there makes it that much more special.