by Erica Boyce
“Hello?” His voice is light with laughter. I picture him feeding his daughter, wiping mashed peas from his cheek where she’d flung them. Or sitting in his living room with friends, a glass of wine resting in his fingertips.
Sam sinks his head into his arms, folded on the table.
I clear my throat. “Dr. Cooper? It’s Molly Barts. Sorry to interrupt. Sam just came in from the field and, well, he’s having trouble staying upright.”
He sighs, breath pushing roundly through the receiver. I bite my lip, ready for him to scold me for letting Sam work, but his voice is warm. “All right. I’m sorry, Molly. Here’s what we’re going to do.” His words are so like Maggie’s in that years-ago dim motel room that I could cry.
* * *
When I come back from the drugstore, Sam is still stretched out on the sofa where I left him, his legs dangling over one arm and his head propped up on the other. He’s taken off his boots and placed them neatly on the braided rug, side by side.
“Dr. Cooper got you the good stuff,” I say. I rattle the paper bag over my head with one hand while I lay the other on his forehead. “He said this’ll knock you right out.”
He smiles thinly. “Wait,” he says, pulling himself up by the back of the sofa. He winces, and I reach for him as he shuffles toward the bathroom. I stand in the doorway, and he grips the edge of the medicine cabinet and eases it open.
He paws the medicine bottles down from the shelves into the sink, orange, rattling. Xeloda for the colon and stomach. Toposar for the prostate. Prednisone for the rash that came with Xeloda. Codeine for the pain. On and on, until the sink is full.
Then he gasps for air, his shoulders rising with it. He fumbles with a bottle until it’s open. I do not move to help him. He upends it over the toilet, a great shower of pills plopping into the bowl like white noise. At first, I raise one hand to stop him, the waterfall of hundreds of dollars we’ve spent that he’s about to pour down the drain and the strict disposal instructions he’s ignoring. His face, though, is almost gleeful, and then I understand. He will never have to take these pills again. Save for his new pain medication, he can stop the rattling of the medicine cabinet. He can pretend, at least for a little while, that he is healthy again.
Finally, the sink is empty, the pills all dumped. He gestures to me, and I pick my way through the bottles now rolling on the floor, my feet catching a couple and sending them spinning out, ricocheting against the baseboards.
I half expect the toilet to be full to the brim, but it’s just a sad little heap of pills slowly dissolving. A litany of side effects runs through my head—nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss—the way Sam tried to chuckle as he pulled out fistfuls of his beautiful hair on the Toposar. Schedules, eat with a meal, take with fluids. Sam reaches for my hand. It’s hard to tell who is holding on more tightly. The toilet flushes with one heaving gulp. And they’re gone, all of them.
In the silence afterward, I squeeze Sam’s hand. “Dr. Cooper wants you to stop working and go on bed rest as soon as possible.”
“Yeah,” he says, “I know. I’ve got to keep going until I can’t bend over and tie my shoes anymore.” He’s still staring at the toilet, at the water rippling and hissing in there.
“Yes,” I whisper, an echo. “I know.” He looks up at me and smiles—a shadow of his usual grin, but a smile nonetheless. I think, perhaps, we can do this together.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Daniel
“These two, huh?” Zach mutters as he pours me another beer, then grins at Nessa and Charlie. Their heads are bent together over Nessa’s phone, and Charlie’s got his arm across the back of her chair. She’s showing him the pictures she took of their old school photos, blown up on canvas in the hallways of Sam and Molly’s house. A breeze eases through the open window behind them and lifts bits of her hair from her face as she laughs.
Charlie takes the phone from her hand, turns it so Zach can see his striped turtleneck, thick glasses, gap-filled smile. “It’s a good thing we can’t have biological kids,” he says. “Can you imagine the unfortunateness that would result if you crossed my awkward years with yours?”
Nessa’s eyes meet mine from across the table. Zach stands up and walks behind Charlie, placing his hand on his shoulder as he leans in closer to the phone. Charlie reaches up and touches his fingers before continuing to swipe.
My chair screeches against the floor when I stand to gather plates and pots. Zach starts to join me, but I shake my head and wave him back to his seat, like my mom used to do. I carry the stack to their kitchen and start scrubbing. A film of bubbles collects in the bottom of the sink. Even over the hiss of their water pipes, I can hear the three of them laughing.
When I’ve finished the Tetris game of carefully fitting everything into the drying rack, Nessa and Charlie are tilting their chairs back, balancing them on two legs while she tells a story that apparently ended with a split chin and several stitches. I waggle my phone in the air.
“I’m going to go make a phone call,” I say.
Nessa nods, her hands pausing mid-gesture before I walk out the door.
Out in the street, I dial Lionel’s number. It’s long past time.
“So, about Becca and Jim’s news report,” I say after reassuring him that everything’s still on track in Vermont.
“Ray. I still have no idea what he was doing there, and I don’t like it. Becca and Jim are pretty shaken up about it.”
I pause, hoping he’ll say he’s heard the radio clip and I don’t have to break the news. No such luck. “There’s more,” I say.
“Oh?”
“I, um. I heard him give an interview on the radio. He claimed he’d made the circle. And that there’s a secret society of people just like him. He threatened to name names.”
“Damn it.” It’s the first time I’ve heard him swear, and it’s sharp, acid.
“The host laughed him off before he could get very far. And it was a little local station in the middle of nowhere, no syndication or anything.”
“Still,” he says, “he’s endangering all of us. He’s become a threat, and it’s time to take appropriate measures.”
Appropriate measures. I know what he’s talking about, although it’s only been discussed at a couple of meetings, never acted on. In most cases, if someone gets caught or seems a little too chatty, they’ll get cut out of the group, plain and simple. But if they’re intentional about it—if it looks like we’re all about to be exposed—the group will fight back. They’ll leak a story to the press claiming that the misbehaving member, acting on his own, was responsible for several recent circles across the country. The story will include quotes from the owners of those farms saying they recognize the circler as someone they caught trespassing on their land in the weeks before a circle appeared in their field. All farmers have to sign an agreement to tell and change any cover story we give them, at any time, so it’ll be easy enough for Lionel to feed them quotes to give to the reporter when she calls. And she will call, eager for the crazy kind of human interest story that’ll help her go viral.
And then, instead of an interviewee who might blow the cover on all of us, the ex-circler becomes a trespasser. Who is now trying to defuse his liability for property damages by making up a story about an army of circlers—one the American public won’t be fooled into believing, no matter how many times he tells it, now that they’ve seen the farmers he’s harmed. And while the mystery and life will get sucked out of those farmers’ circles, pinned to a run-of-the-mill prankster, it’s all for the greater good. Because the next time a circle appears, it will be in the middle of that prankster’s very public grappling with small claims courts. Leaving the town to wonder: if he’s not responsible for this one, then who—or what—is?
“This means I’ve got a good deal of work to do tonight,” Lionel says. “I’d better sign off. Thank you for alerting
me, Daniel.”
After he hangs up, at first, I’m weightless. Lionel will take care of it. Of course he will. But then, the now-familiar fear comes back. Sam’s markings can no longer be traced back to the group, it’s true, now that Ray’s claims will be discounted. Still, they’re clear proof that his circle was man-made, and I left them out there. Just swaying in the breeze for anyone to see. If they’re discovered, I could live with the excommunication. I could eventually get over losing Claire’s chance at London.
But what if Lionel decides that’s not enough? What if he leaks my name, too, as punishment for being so careless? What if my face ends up plastered all over the Live at Five news report?
My steps are picking up speed with my thoughts, practically jogging now. I slow to a stop at the edge of a dingy puddle and take a deep breath before dialing again.
“Hello?” My mom’s voice is gravelly. She must’ve fallen asleep on the couch under a blanket of psychology journals.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Daniel? What day is it?” I hear her get up to check the calendar on their fridge. I can picture it hanging there, my mom’s scribble all over the pages.
“No, it’s not our usual day,” I say as her fingers flip through the months. “I just thought I’d check in.”
“Oh,” she says. Then, with a buried smile, “Well. Let me go get your dad.” She muffles the phone against her chest, but I can tell when she’s climbing the stairs. There’s confusion in my dad’s voice when she wakes him from his place in front of the baseball game. I’m feeling pretty stupid by the time they’ve fumbled the speakerphone on.
“Daniel?”
“Yeah, hi.”
“It’s not the fifth yet, is it?”
“He just called to check in,” my mom says.
I imagine her eyes conveying the italics to him. I stifle a sigh.
“Cool! Great!” His voice is suddenly alert. “Did Mom tell you about her new client?”
She gets in a few minutes of details just vague enough to still be ethical, some college kid with an anxiety disorder and her parents, before my dad’s curiosity gets the better of him. “So, where are you now?” he asks.
“California, actually. I’m helping out a friend.”
“A friend?” my mom asks.
“Yup.”
“Oh. But won’t you miss the har—” She cuts herself off, biting back her internal alignment to frost dates.
“We’ll be back in time to harvest the corn, I’m sure. It’s just a quick trip,” I reassure her.
Silence. Then my dad says, “Oh! Keep an eye out for the valley elderberry longhorn beetle. They only live in the Central Valley, and they’re beautiful, like little strawberries.”
“Okay.”
“And be careful.” Against my will, I hear the hurt in my mom’s voice, all the layers of things she wants to say but thinks she can’t. The ways she wishes I could still be a kid, kept safe by the sheer power of her will.
“Yeah.”
“Send me a photo of that beetle if you find one!”
“I will, Dad.”
Silence fills the phone line for a moment before my mom says, “Well, we won’t keep you any longer. We love you, Daniel. Be good.” And she clicks the phone off.
* * *
She hasn’t really forgiven me. We were chopping onions for dinner one Friday night. Every few minutes, she would reach over and pull my fingers from the path of my blade. I’m not sure what she was more afraid of: that I would never learn to cook for myself, or that I’d cut myself in the process of her teaching me.
“So, sweetie,” she said, “how was your day?”
I thought about droning teachers, the guys playing finger football with a Cheeto at lunch, track practice. I shrugged. “All right. You?”
“I ran into Sally at the Compost Collective booth at the farmers market, and their members list is coming along, so that’s great. And all my patients are dealing with the holidays just fine, which is a little miracle.”
“Mmm.” I squinted through my onion tears. Dad once told me all about the chemical compound in the onion that makes you cry. He drew pictures and everything, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember any of it.
“How’s Jess? Has she started applying to colleges yet?” Jess was my halfhearted girlfriend and automatic prom date, who thought it was her civic duty to drag me to football games every Saturday.
“Uh, I think so.”
“You guys think you’re going to wind up at the same school?” She kept her eyes on the pile of vegetables on her side of the board, but she smiled to herself.
“Umm. I dunno.” I laid my knife on the board. “Actually, Mom, I was thinking I might want to work on a farm again.” I had to keep the real work, the crop circles, a secret even from her. That was the rule.
“Okay.” She chewed her lip. “Didn’t you get enough of that at camp? You want to go back?”
“No, Mom, I mean…” I sighed. “I mean I want to do that instead of college. There’s this website I found last night that lists all these farms across the country that are looking for help, and I thought it would be great to just go from one to the next for a while.”
“For a while.” She put down her knife and pressed one finger on its handle to stop the rattling of the blade. “For a while? Daniel, you’ve worked so hard in school, and now you’re giving up on it? Don’t you realize how important a college degree is nowadays? Don’t you want—”
I shook my head. “No, Mom. I don’t.”
She stared at me for a beat, then said quietly, “I forbid it.” She planted one fist on her hip and turned away.
The front door flung open. “Hi, folks,” my dad said cheerfully. Then he saw her face. “Honey? Honey, what’s wrong?”
That night, I drove circles through the town, music blaring. I stopped at a drive-through for dinner, but the french fries grew cold in the bag. It was well past my curfew when I finally pulled back into our driveway.
My dad sat at the dinner table, biting a pencil and staring at the day’s Sudoku. I tried to walk past him without a word, but he pulled out the chair next to him and said, “Sit.”
He pushed the newspaper away from him, then turned to look at me. “There’s something you need to understand about your mother,” he started.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, frustration burning in my cheeks. “She hated growing up on a farm and wants me to do something else.”
“No. Your mother loved her childhood.” He studied me for a moment. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but you remember what your grandpa was like after he came to live with us, right?”
I shrugged. When Grandpa broke his hip and couldn’t farm anymore, there was no one left to help him. His wife had been gone since my mom was little, and my mom sure as hell wasn’t going to take over a dairy farm. So he had to sell it and move in with us.
He was always my favorite grandparent. When I was a kid, he used to slip me candies and a wink when he thought no one was looking. My mom would roll her eyes, saying nothing, and I was giddy over the unexpected sugar. But after he sold the farm, he spent most of his days holed up in the guest bedroom. At dinner, he would scowl at me and poke my skinny arm, telling my parents I was turning into a pansy-ass. The first few times, my parents made me leave the room so they could scold him, tell him not to talk about their son that way. Eventually, I started catching their eye and shaking my head a little, begging them not to bother. When he died, there was a little relief in my mom’s face behind her tears.
“He missed farming,” I said. “It was his whole life. I can’t blame him if he was miserable without it.”
He sighed. “That’s not the whole truth. Your grandpa didn’t sell the farm just because he was injured and couldn’t work anymore. For years, he’d barely been getting by.” He folded his hands and stared
down at them. “We sent him checks, but he would return every single one. That farm was mortgaged to the hilt, and he had to drain his savings to pay for his hip surgery. When he came home from the hospital, the bank decided to foreclose.”
I pictured my grandpa then, the way he used to fling me over his shoulder with one strong arm while I squealed. Even after he moved in with us, he woke up before sunrise every morning, grumbling over his weather radio while he drank his coffee. My mom would watch him from the kitchen doorway.
“We need you to understand this, Daniel. He gave everything to that farm, it’s true. But in return, that place destroyed him. All his life, he struggled to make the margins work, to support your mom with what little they were willing to pay for his milk. And in the end, it fell apart.”
I ran my toe over the grout between the floor tiles.
My dad placed one hand on my shoulder. “Your mother doesn’t want that to happen to you. She worked hard to get you away from it.”
“Don’t you think I’m old enough to make that decision for myself?”
He smiled sadly. “Yes. I guess you are.”
* * *
The whole call took less than five minutes, just long enough for me to circle the block once. I shove the phone back in my pocket. Nessa’s laughter falls out the window above me. I can see Zach crossing behind her and gathering her into a hug. I climb back up the front steps.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nessa
“I’m heading to bed,” Zach says, stretching his arms over his head like it’s a luxury as he stands up from the table.
“I’ll be in soon,” Charlie says after Zach leans in to kiss him good night.
“Nah, take your time.” Zach smiles at me. I guess that’s my cue to talk to Charlie. My stomach is already turning.