The Fifteen Wonders of Daniel Green

by Erica Boyce

  “And you’ll call me. We’ll determine if it’s best for you to stay.”

  Somehow, by the time I hang up, Nessa’s fallen asleep, a tight ball wedged up against the car door. Which is the only reason I’m able to pull off the highway onto the Mammoth Cave exit.

  When I’ve parked, I reach over and shake her awake. Gently at first, but then more urgent.

  Her eyes finally spring open. “Where are we?”

  “We’re back at the caves,” I say. She looks confused, and I start to feel like an idiot. “I know when you said this place makes all your problems seem smaller, this wasn’t what you meant. It’s not like I think they’re going to fix anything about your dad or with Charlie. But I thought maybe you could use a break, and reality shows don’t really seem to be cutting it, so.” I motion toward the windshield, voilà, like I was somehow responsible for this.

  She stares out the window, not smiling. She doesn’t look angry, either. “We don’t really have time for this,” she says as I jump out of the car and open her door for her.

  I hold my breath until she steps out. I have this weird sense that she’d just stop in the middle of the parking lot if she could, so I keep one hand under her elbow and guide her to the visitor’s center.

  Something catches my eye as we pass the benches. It’s my bracelet—Claire’s bracelet. Not so green anymore. More dull and brown, half buried in the mud. I haven’t even reached for it since we last left the caves. It feels kind of like betrayal, leaving it there in the dirt.

  But it’s just a bracelet. So I keep walking.

  Inside, I turn to Nessa. “I’m going to buy us some tickets. We’ll be back on the road in an hour. I promise.”

  She nods, not meeting my eyes. “I’ve gotta go to the bathroom.” I watch her walk across the room, and the door to the women’s room swings shut behind her.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Nessa

  After ten minutes or so, I come out of the bathroom stall. The pit in my stomach is all that I am now, a black hole that’s pulling me deeper and deeper into myself. There’s no way out, not really.

  The bathroom is empty. I slide the lock on the outer door, solid.

  He’s dying. He’ll be gone soon. It’s all your fault.

  I look up in the mirror, but I don’t see anything. I turn the faucet on, as hot as it will go. Let the water flow clean through my hands.

  onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Daniel

  As I finish paying for the tickets, I think back to what Ray said about Claire. Even now that she’s gone, I’m still defending her. Anger and grief still flare up at the mention of her name. I still want to save her.

  When the man behind the counter hands me our tickets, there’s no sign of Nessa. She must need some time alone to gather herself up. Being on the road can be tough like that, your only spare minutes spent in motel room beds, staring at nothing.

  But I can’t stop picturing her glazed green eyes. Or Claire, her silences growing thicker after each meeting. Those damn orange bottles. I should’ve pulled one from Nessa’s purse, read the label.

  Maybe she slipped out of the bathroom while I was paying. I hurry to the building’s exhibit hall, trying not to run. There’s a series of posters about bats and some disease that’s threatening to kill them. Blown up to more than life size, their faces are gruesome, their eyes black and gleaming, nostrils gaping. There are two girls standing in front of one, maybe ten years old, pointing at the photos. No Nessa.

  I pull back the heavy red curtain along one wall. Behind it, there’s a small room with a big screen showing a movie about the caves. A woman is breastfeeding alone on one of the benches. She looks up at me, annoyed. I duck my head, sorry, sorry. Back out into the room.

  The two girls are staring at me now, their mouths open slightly. I walk slowly, so slowly, over to the bathroom. There’s no one in sight except for the man behind the ticket counter. He’s watching a soccer game on his phone, the cheers rising tinny from the speakers. I lean in toward the bathroom door. All I can hear is a faucet running.

  “Nessa?” I tap on the door three times. Then, louder, “Nessa, are you in there?”

  No response. The man at the counter looks up from his game, dares me with a bored glance to do anything weird. I step back from the door.

  I’ll check outside. She probably decided this was a bad idea and went back to the car. She’s not sitting on the bench. The bracelet tugs weakly at the corner of my eye, but I walk by, breaking into a jog as I reach the parking lot.

  The car is empty. Just a scattering of crumbs and Nessa’s mashed-up pillow in the passenger’s seat.

  I run back to the building. A metallic taste spreads through my mouth. I turn my back to the ticket counter and knock on the bathroom door until my knuckles sting. “Nessa, are you okay?”

  Just the faucet, running and running.

  “I’m coming in, all right?” I call and lean on the door before she can respond.

  It goes nowhere. Locked.

  My heartbeat rattles. I run to the ticket counter.

  “Excuse me. Hello? Hi.” The man finally puts his phone down. “I think my friend locked herself in the bathroom. Can you unlock the door?”

  “I’m not authorized to let you into the ladies’ room, sir,” he drawls, slow as taffy stretching.

  “Look, I know it’s a little weird, but”—I lean in, lower my voice—“she found out the other day her dad’s dying, and she’s in a real bad place. I just want to make sure she’s okay, you know?”

  He sighs, long and heavy. Glances at his phone one last time. Opens a drawer and pulls out a ring the size of a bracelet, bristling with keys. I smile gratefully at him as he ambles over to the bathroom door and unlocks it, steps back with his hands raised like he wants no part of this.

  Nessa is standing at the sink. The air rushes back into my lungs.

  “Jesus, you scared me half to death. Did you know that door was locked? Didn’t you hear me calling?” It sounds like I’m scolding her.

  But when she turns to me, her face is wet, her eyes red and empty. And then I see the steam rising and billowing from the sink.

  “What are you doing?”

  I step closer, turn the faucet off. Her hands are shaking. The skin is red. Blisters rise angrily between her fingers, across her palms.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Nessa

  It’s like this:

  Everyone has bad thoughts once in a while.

  Did I remember to turn the oven off, or is the house going to burn down?

  Was that a rock my car just ran over or an animal?

  Has my husband’s plane landed yet, or is it going to crash?

  For most people, those thoughts are just pebbles in their shoe. They pause, shake them out, and keep walking—yes, it’s off, I always turn it off; it was probably just a rock; no, it’s just running a little late.

  With obsessive-compulsive disorder, though, no matter how hard you dig, you can’t take the pebble out. You keep walking anyway, because you have to. And the whole time, the pebble is there, digging into your flesh. Sometimes, the pebble is sharp, and it makes you bleed. You limp through the gash, or you fall. Sometimes, it leaves a blister, red and raw and beating with your pulse, and it’s all you can think about.

  But the worst part is that the whole time, you know it’s just a pebble. You know you should be able to slip your shoe off and toss it back to the side of the road it came from. You see other people doing it all the time. And you can’t.

  And then the pebble starts to talk to you, and you feel even more miserable, even crazier. Pebbles do not talk. They don’t.

  These ones do. They whisper, sending hissing messages up your spine. Count every stair you walk up, and the house will not burn down. Turn the car
around, and check that it was a rock, then check again to be sure your eyes were right the first time. Keep your hands clean, and your husband will stay safe.

  There’s no connection. You know there isn’t. There’s no cosmic balance that will safely bubble your house, your car, your family. But the more you follow the pebble’s whispers, the louder and louder they become, until they are screaming, and the pain is almost worse than that in your foot. Because while they’re getting stronger, their voices are learning to say other things, too.

  You really are crazy, aren’t you?

  You are a bad person, for letting us pebbles in in the first place.

  What is wrong with you?

  OCD is not eating the brown M&Ms first because, you shrug, you just like it better that way. It is not preferring your books organized by color, even if it makes it harder to find what you’re looking for. It is not neat handwriting, it is not a particular brand of notebook, it is not foods that don’t touch, it is not counting the stairs as you walk up and down.

  It is any and all of those things, if the pebbles tell you to. It is blisters on your feet and on your hands.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Daniel

  I grasp Nessa by her wrist, avoiding the skin on her hand, and pull her out of the bathroom. The man is still standing outside the door, leaning against the wall and swinging his keys from one finger. His eyes widen when he sees the burns.

  “Whoa.”

  She stares at her feet. Her hair falls across her face.

  “She’ll be fine,” I say, like I have any clue. “And thanks,” I add over my shoulder as we leave.

  I wait until she’s buckled into the car to take out my phone.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  “Trying to find the nearest hospital,” I say while I scroll. “At the very least, we need to get those burns checked out.” I chuck my chin toward her hands, limp in her lap. “And I also think you should talk—”

  “No.” She turns to face me. Whatever had been clouding her eyes is gone now, hardness in its place. “We don’t have time, not now. They’ll want to keep me overnight for observation, and—no. Find a drugstore, I’ll tell you what to buy. I’ll pay you back, whatever.”

  I want to refuse. I should, I know, already be driving. But somehow, it feels like I’m the one drowning, grasping at nothing, clawing at cold, dark water. Nessa has clearly been here before. So I find a pharmacy and go.

  * * *

  We spend the night at the Kentucky border, at a motel the same as all the rest. We sit side by side on one of the beds, rolls of gauze and tubes of ointment laid out between us. I start to wrap her hands into thick white clubs. She doesn’t even wince.

  “I was diagnosed with OCD when I was in college,” she says.

  I can feel her watching me. I keep my face blank, focus on weaving a strip of bandage between her fingers.

  She fidgets, and the movement shifts her hands in my grip a little. “The hot water thing didn’t come until later. Same with my fear of planes. But I’ve had OCD for as long as I can remember. Once, when I was in fifth grade, my parents went away for the weekend and left us with our neighbor.” She blows out, and her breath shuffles across my face. “I was convinced something terrible was going to happen to them, that I’d never see them again. I spent an hour in the bathroom that Saturday, flossing my teeth. I know,” she laughs, though my eyes are still trained on her hands, “it sounds so dumb. I told myself that if I did all the right things, all the things my parents wanted me to do, they’d come back, safe and sound.”

  I finish wrapping her hands, and she holds them up, stares at them. The fuzz rimming the bandages glows against the bedside lamps.

  “Eventually, my gums started to bleed a lot,” she says, matter-of-fact. “It dripped down into the neighbor’s nice white sink. She finally heard me crying and opened the door. And the look on her face.” Her head droops. “I knew I was crazy.”

  “I’m sure she was worried,” I say, but I’m not sure, not really. After the rush of relief I felt when she wasn’t on the floor with a bottle in her hand. When I realized what was actually happening, that I had no idea what was happening. Did I fall back? Did I wish, for a second, that this was something I recognized? Did I wonder all over again who exactly this person was?

  She lies back on the bed, her wrapped hands suspended above her chest. “She was scared. And you know what? I don’t blame her. Or you.” She glances at me, and I make myself meet her eyes. “People have a hard enough time understanding all the weird things that go on inside their own, normal brains. Throw in a mental illness, and they really freak.”

  I shift away. My eyes travel the room, looking for something else, anything solid. They land on the pill bottles she’s lined up on the nightstand. There are three of them. “These are your medications, then.”

  “Yep. These are how I manage to stay charming.” She rolls to her side, her legs brushing up against mine, and taps the bottles one by one. “Luvox for daily maintenance. Xanax if the panic’s getting really bad. Ambien if I’m having trouble sleeping. Unfortunately,” she says as she rolls back to the center of the bed, “I have to pay for them out of pocket. That’s, like, three bucks a day, a lot more if I need the Ambien.

  “The drugs are so helpful. Not for everyone,” she adds quickly, and I know she’s thinking of Claire. Everybody does. “I was a mess while we were trying to find the right dose. Totally out of it, gaining weight, the works. Now, though.” She draws her hands across her face, pulling the corners of her mouth into a clown-like smile.

  In the silence that follows, I realize how much I’d missed this, her voice, over the past few days. The way it sweeps you under and along, brushing across your skin.

  So I keep going.

  “Do you have a therapist?”

  She sighs up toward the ceiling. “Not really. It’s just hard, moving so much. I have one in Vermont I still see once a year or so. He writes me my prescriptions, and that’s that.”

  “Must’ve been hard, going in to get diagnosed.” All those new patients of my mom’s in her home office, standing in our bathroom a little too long.

  Her eyes move toward the sunset collecting between the curtains. “I had to, for my mom.”

  I wait, but she doesn’t say anything else.

  “I know it’s scary to find out something like that.” I picture Claire, beside me in the car, twisting and retwisting her hair into a tight bun, slamming the door behind her, arms across her chest as she walked up to the community center.

  “Maybe at first,” she says. “But no. Somebody took what I thought was the worst part of me, the ugliest part. And they held it up to the light, and they shrugged and said, ‘Eh, we’ve seen worse.’”

  “It’s brave of you,” I say, because I can’t help it. She glances up at me, and I clear my throat. “I mean, to go out and live in the world, have all those crazy adventures, not stay tied down to one place with a—an illness like that.”

  She rolls her eyes. “I carry this thing with me wherever I go. Doesn’t matter if I’m in Vermont or Timbuktu. I’ll always have to deal with the same shit.” She pats her hands against her stomach and sits up. “When I was in Georgia, one of the farmhands fell off a ladder and broke his leg. It was a bad break, a compound fracture. I’d used the ladder the night before, just to change a lightbulb in the barn. He fell because he hadn’t opened the ladder properly. It had nothing to do with the fact that I’d been the last to use it. Still.” Her voice grows quiet. “I was convinced his fall was my fault. Every time I saw him in his cast, the guilt was overwhelming. It was all I could think about. So I packed up and moved as far away as I could. But it’s not any better when I’m at home or when I was in college. Half the time, when I’m in Vermont, I’m certain the drinking water is contaminated with chemicals, and I can barely make myself drink it.”


  One of her curls springs free of her ponytail, and she reaches up to tug it, but her bandaged fingers can’t bend. She winces a little as her burned skin flexes. She turns to me and crosses one ankle over her knee. “This disorder, it’s part of me. It’s a thing about me. It’s not the only thing.”

  Before I realize what I’m doing, my hands are framing her face, cupped against either cheek. Her eyes widen, but she doesn’t pull away. “I believe you,” I say. She’s so close, I can breathe her breath. So close, I remember how desperate I was when I couldn’t find her. I was afraid of losing her.

  She smiles small, lips closed. “I know you do.”

  Embarrassed by the memory, I take my hands away. Why would I be so worried about losing someone I barely know?

  * * *

  She takes an Ambien that night, throwing her head back to drink her water. And then it’s just me, lying in the dark once again, my hands laced across my chest. Wondering what the hell we’re going to do next.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Molly

  The doorbell rings, a long, elaborate nursery rhyme that Sam installed as a joke years ago and then never got around to taking down. We stare at each other from across the living room, our eyes wide with panic. Having given it a couple of days in the fridge for show, I’d just finished scraping Allison’s chicken into the kitchen trash, and there was no disguising the sharp scent of hot sauce and blue cheese dressing.

  “That can’t be the next car on the meal train already,” Sam says, pulling off his reading glasses and folding his newspaper.

  I shoot him a look as I stand up, because of course it is. Who else would it be? I hurry a story together on the way to the door explaining why we threw away all that time and effort—something to do with fentanyl, Sam’s stomach, and spicy foods.

  When I finally open the door, the woman standing there is tall and willowy, with thin hips and a silk watercolor scarf tied sideways across her throat. “You really do need to change that doorbell, love,” she says, wheeling her suitcase into the house.