The Fifteen Wonders of Daniel Green

by Erica Boyce

  “Oh yeah?” I said. I pushed myself up on one elbow to stare down at her face. She brushed her hand over my cheek. I leaned into it to make it real.

  “Yeah.” She dropped her hand back to the bedspread. “You saw things, right from the beginning—things no one else had the patience to see. You sat there quietly and looked, when no one else would.”

  My skin warmed. It was a first, someone making my shyness sound like it was a good thing. The best thing.

  “Like what?” I whispered.

  “Oh, you know. Like how much I wanted a coffee.” She pecked me on the nose and tried to laugh it off. But all that night, while she lay sleeping beside me, I ran her words through my head, over and over. When no one else would.

  * * *

  On my way in the door, Sam catches me by the elbow. “Hey, Danny. It’s real nice of you to drive Nessa down to her old farm like that. You know I’d do it myself if I could. But the circle. Are you sure…” Worry slips back and forth over his face. He doesn’t know how much I know, about why he counts his days so carefully.

  “It’s not a problem, Sam. I’ll be back soon, and the circle will still be finished by the end of the month.”

  He grins. “Excellent. Well, don’t let me keep you from your planning. Nessa’s over in the living room.” He steps outside, raising one hand over his head as he walks down the porch steps.

  Instantly, Nessa’s at my side. “I thought he’d never leave. Come on. We’ve got a lot left to do.” She leads me into the living room and pushes me toward the same armchair I sat in when I first met Sam and Molly. She perches on the arm of the nearby couch, and I can tell she’s almost succeeded in forgetting the real reason behind this trip, about the cancer.

  “So, did Connie buy it?” She tips toward me.

  “Yep. She sure did.”

  Nessa claps her hands once. “Perfect. Now she’ll tell the whole town I’ve gone to help the farm in Georgia. I’ve been thinking about what route we should take.” She hauls an old laptop out of the tote bag at her feet, steadying it on her knees as it whirs to life. “Usually, I take the back roads, but I think it’s better to be efficient this time and just do the interstates.” Her hair puffs out from behind her ears as she bends over the keyboard, and she shoves it back with one hand.

  I edge closer to her so I can see the screen. “You know, for not much more driving time, we could take a more scenic route if we cut down south a little,” I say.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours later, I’m walking back toward the Bartses’ with my duffel bag pounding against my back. Nessa is waiting for me, a suitcase held together with bungee cords lying at her feet. Molly walks over with a grocery bag bulging with what looks like about twenty loaves of bread, and Sam stands on the porch, holding the railing.

  “You ready to go?” Nessa asks, tugging the bag from my shoulder. She tosses our luggage in the back of her car. Once Molly’s nestled her bread between our bags, Nessa slams the trunk shut. Several paint flakes drift off when she does, and it’s clear her car is pretty much rust and air.

  “I figured I could take the first shift, if that’s okay with you,” she says.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say.

  She turns to hug Molly goodbye, her eyes squeezed tight. She whispers something in her mom’s ear, and Molly smiles at her, lips closed. As Nessa vaults up the stairs to Sam, Molly steps in close.

  “Be careful with her, okay?” she murmurs.

  It’s an odd way to ask me to look out for her daughter, but before I can figure out a response, Nessa is jogging past me to the car, saying, “Come on. We have to get moving if we’re going to make it to Connecticut by dinnertime.”

  While Nessa turns her head to back the car up the driveway, I watch her parents through her filmy windshield. Molly goes up the stairs to Sam, who pulls her close. She buries her face in his neck.

  * * *

  Road trips sound exotic, but the reality is that one highway looks pretty much the same as every other, no matter where you are in the country: rusty, dented guardrails, big strips of burned-out tire rubber, generic pine trees, a video clip on repeat. This particular trip is just the same except for Nessa’s presence. She keeps rambling on about farming techniques, only stopping when she gets out of the car at the run-down gas station in Massachusetts. When she slips into the passenger’s seat, she reaches behind her for a pillow, rests her head against the window, and falls asleep almost immediately.

  And I can relax again.

  Mom used to always tell this story about me to her friends over glasses of wine. I was eight, and she’d invited a bunch of my classmates over for my birthday party. At some point in the middle of the chaos, she took a step back to watch the kids clambering all over everything—and noticed I wasn’t one of them. In fact, I wasn’t anywhere in the basement, dubbed Party Central by my parents and scattered with bowls of popcorn and empty pizza boxes. She leaped up the stairs two at a time. Barked at my dad to see if he’d seen me. He put down his newspaper and glasses, dazed, and told her I’d probably just gone to the bathroom. But the bathroom door was wide open. He followed her up the stairs to my bedroom, where they threw open the door.

  And found me, huddled under the covers with a flashlight and a book.

  My mom, imagining me snatched away from their quiet house on a quiet street, said, “Daniel! What are you doing here, you little rascal?” And then, thinking of the nights she’d spent after work turning the basement into a jungle, complete with dinosaurs, fit for a bunch of second graders, “Don’t you know your guests are down there waiting for you?”

  At which point, I put my book down and calmly said, “They’re having more fun without me. And I’m having more fun without them.”

  “And that was the last time we ever threw a party for Daniel,” my mom would say. Her friends, most of whom had already heard this story before, would break into loud, tipsy laughter. If I happened to be nearby, she would run her fingers over my shoulder, like she was thanking me for the punch line, for the happy, normal story from a happy, suburban life. But I cringed every time I heard it. Part of me always knew I would ruin her plans for my life one day.

  * * *

  A few miles past the rest stop, I call Lionel. As the phone rings, I come up with a story to explain why the circle’s on hiatus: it’s a bad season for my host family, and I haven’t had time to make it back to the circle.

  “How’s the Barts circle coming?” he asks right away.

  “Well, actually,” I begin, but then I glance at Nessa, and something about the wrinkle in her sleeping forehead stops me. “It’s coming fine,” I say. Lionel’s sigh sounds relieved. My teeth grind at the lie. “What’s going on with everyone else’s projects? Becca and Jim?”

  He pauses for a second, long enough for me to know that something’s not quite right. “Becca and Jim just finished theirs up in the wee hours this morning,” he finally says. “Henry and Will are starting to scope out a new lead, too.”

  I wait for more. Nothing comes. “And?”

  “And…nothing.” He’s trying to sound firm, but he doesn’t quite make it. “Becca and Jim have alerted me to a couple of concerns, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Par for the course, really.”

  I’m about to say something about there not being much of a “par” in our world, much less a “course,” when he clears his throat. “I’m glad to hear everything’s going well in Vermont.” My fingers clench the steering wheel like I could choke off the guilt. “We’ll speak again soon, I’m sure.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Molly

  With Nessa gone, Sam stops his humming and tabletop drumming, in mourning for her. It’s always been this way, ever since she first left home. She leaves a wake.

  At dinner that night, I watch Sam pick through his broccoli ratatouille. It was a complicated recipe, and I’d filled
the dusky hours with the snap of my knife against the cutting board, holding my breath to get the measurements just right.

  “Come on now, honey,” I say. “You need to eat something.”

  “Don’t push me, for God’s sake,” he snaps.

  I ball my napkin up in my lap and run through the responses in my head. Your sadness does not give you license to snap at me. I wish you’d listened when I asked you to wear sunscreen. I think of that envelope, already ground into the floor of the truck, pulpy and brown from the mud forever caking my shoes.

  Instead, I spin my wedding ring around on my finger, the plain gold snagging at my skin.

  “Do you remember,” Sam says as he puts down his fork, “how long it used to take Charlie to get a meal down?”

  Of course I do. I picture Charlie’s worried face, biting his lip as he studied his mashed potatoes. It was as if he feared his small appetite was a personal failure. He used to watch Nessa plow through her plate, his chin resting in his little chubby hand. “We told him he couldn’t have dessert until he’d finished dinner,” I say.

  “And he would perk right up, say ‘Okay,’ and get up and leave the table,” Sam finishes. He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it. This is a marriage: telling stories worn so thin with use, the other can see straight through to the end.

  “All right, now. Quit sulking and eat up. We’ve got to build up your strength,” I say.

  He grimaces, then starts shoveling broccoli in his mouth.

  * * *

  Late that night, I roll out of bed, slipping a kiss into the palm of Sam’s hand as he swats a goodbye. I settle myself into the living room couch before dialing.

  “Just like clockwork, Molls.” Maggie’s voice on the phone is a sweet memory of swing sets and sleepovers.

  “Yes, as promised. Have you finished dinner already?”

  “Nah, don’t worry about it. I have to finish this deposition by tomorrow, so I’m just grabbing a dumpling from the nearest takeout container whenever I look up.”

  “This is the injunction you’re working on?” I do my best to sound interested.

  “Yup. The logging case. So many legal doctrines to throw, so little time,” she says through slurpy chewing.

  “Good thing they’ve got you to handle it.”

  “Anyway, enough of that,” she says, and I can almost picture her pushing back from her paper-strewn kitchen table and pacing around their apartment. “How’s Sam?”

  “Well.” I consider lying and pulling out the euphemisms we use around town, but I think better of it. “He’s terrible.” I hear her suck in her breath. “The doctors found another tumor.”

  “No. Oh no. Shit. Where?” Anyone else would’ve scolded me for not telling her sooner, as if my husband’s pain were something that belonged to the world.

  “Stomach.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  “Yeah. I know. And we thought…” My voice hitches. I roll the edge of my nightshirt tightly between my fingers.

  “Cancer’s a real motherfucker.”

  I smile in spite of everything. Maggie was raised by her father after her mother died. He always smelled of pot, the only adult I knew who talked to us like equals. He taught Maggie to swear.

  “Sam’s trying to stay positive. You know him.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m…” I watch as drops speckle my lap, like they’re surfacing from some deep place. “I’m a wreck. I can’t keep doing this. I just keep thinking I should’ve been a better wife to him. I should’ve loved him, all of this, more.”

  “Shut up,” Maggie cuts in with the stern voice I imagine she uses on her defendants. “There’s no better wife than you. Sam knows it, I know it—hell, I bet everyone in your town knows it. Your mistakes don’t define your marriage.”

  This time, I do lie. “I suppose you’re right.”

  * * *

  It was early in our marriage. We were living above Sam’s mother’s garage in Nebraska while we saved for a piece of land wherever we could find it.

  Sam was helping out on a neighbor’s farm, and I was working as a teller at the local bank. Every morning, we would sit down at the kitchen table, and his mother would cook us poached eggs with wheat toast cut into even triangles. And every night, Sam would pull me close to his chest and recite our future while his fingers moved across my bare shoulders.

  I would stare at the ceiling as he snored, wondering when my life had become so perfectly boxed in. Maggie was campaigning for women’s rights and would call me from pay phones, tripping over words, and when we met for coffee, her eyes shifted everywhere. Many of our girlfriends were secretaries or teachers; some were in medical or law school. My mother, who had worked as a checkout girl in almost every shop in town after my father left, placed her hands on my cheeks before walking me down the aisle and said, “Are you sure?”

  I had shaken her off, annoyed. Sam was meant to be a farmer, and I was meant to be with Sam. This was our great adventure, just us two. I would figure everything else out later.

  Lately, though, I had begun wondering if this was well and truly it. The world had seemed so fresh and open, leading us anywhere and everywhere at once. Everywhere was, apparently, right here. I clutched a silent dream in my belly to start a small business of my own, to be in charge—of what, I wasn’t quite sure. When Sam spoke at night of our one-day children, he rested his hand absently on my abdomen, his palm just above the spot where my dream was lodged. The walls were narrowing further and further.

  I wish I could say that time has blurred Thomas’s face and he has melted into the parade of people who have marched through my life. If I were an artist, I could still paint him, his sharp chin, his dark bangs, and his sad eyes. All the women I worked with were in love with him, of course, and you could always tell when he was making his weekly deposit from all the nervous giggling.

  Not me. My marriage was a cage, I thought, and if it kept me from campaigns and careers, it also exempted me from ever needing to flirt with anyone else. So when Thomas came to my window one crisp fall day and slid me his deposit slip, saying, “Thomas Grossman,” I looked him in the eye and said evenly, “I know.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “My reputation precedes me?”

  I snorted. “Please. You’re the most eligible bachelor to walk through those doors. I’ve heard your name so many times, my husband’s starting to ask why I say it in my sleep.”

  A dimple surfaced on one of his cheeks, and I realized my carefree not-flirting was skirting dangerously close to inappropriate. I clasped my hands behind my waist and asked, “Will the deposit be all, Mr. Grossman?”

  “Yes, Molly,” he said soberly, peering at my name tag. “That’ll do it.”

  * * *

  The next few times he came into the bank, he marched straight to my booth, a wisp of a smile curling across his face. We never exchanged more than the necessary words, with an occasional sentence or two about the weather, but the other girls hated me nonetheless. Their whispers shivered up my neck every time Thomas came in the door. On our lunch breaks, I sat alone on a cold stone bench, picking at the tuna salad sandwiches my mother-in-law packed for me.

  And so, one day, as he approached, I blurted, “I wish you’d go to one of the others. Can’t you see they hate me for this?”

  His mouth dropped open. He slipped something back into his pocket, then spun on his heel and walked right back out the door. He was well on his way to his car by the time I realized he’d never made his deposit. Our manager would surely pin the loss on me.

  “Wait!” I cried as I slammed through the door. Thomas turned slowly. “Aren’t you going to give us your check?” I said.

  He laughed, wiping his hair back from his face. Only then did I notice the rain, a bit of drizzle misting his glasses. “Sure,” he said, “but first—” He placed his hand
on my forearm. His hands were large and fine-boned, like a pianist’s.

  “I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble with your coworkers.” He sighed. “I guess it was just nice to have someone who hadn’t singled me out as prey.”

  I pulled my arm away without meaning to. “Modest, aren’t we?”

  He grinned. “My sister says I come across as moody and enlightened, when really I’m just depressed.”

  “Your sister sounds like someone I’d like to meet.” To my horror, I heard my coworkers’ giggles coming out of my mouth.

  “Let me make it up to you,” he said. “I’ll buy you coffee on your lunch break—tomorrow, maybe? Just as a thank you,” he added when my eyes widened.

  I thought about the pigeon that stared at me on my solitary lunch breaks. I thought about Sam, working in the rain, mud creeping up his pant legs. I thought about the other girls, pretending to count out cash while they silently seethed.

  I wish I had said no.

  Chapter Twelve

  Daniel

  The sky is dimming as we pull into a diner in Connecticut. The headlights sweep across the puddles, cigarette butts, fast food wrappers scattered over the parking lot. Just as I turn to Nessa and wonder if I should shake her awake, she opens her eyes and smiles at me. “We here already?”

  A waitress with an unnaturally high and perky voice leads us to our table. I glance at Nessa, who hides her mouth behind her hand. When we sit down and the waitress trots away, Nessa says, “Man. I wonder what she’s taking.”

  I stifle my laughter, but it doesn’t really work, and the old couple sitting next to us scowl while I open the menu. Must be ruining their quiet night out. The waitress comes back with cups of water, and I can’t even look at Nessa as she takes our order and squeaks, “Okay! Those will be right out!”

  Nessa rolls her eyes and says, “She’s giving me a headache,” digs through her purse. I snicker, but then something rattles in her hand, and over the lip of her purse, I can see a prescription bottle, familiar and orange. She pokes one finger into the bottle, pinches out a beige pill, slips it carefully into her mouth, sip of water. A practiced motion, routine.