by Erica Boyce
“Oh.” She paused. “Well. Are you going to seek treatment?”
“I made a weekly appointment, and we’re going to try something called cognitive behavioral therapy. And we might try some medication, too, depending on how that goes.” I stopped.
“That’s good. That’s great.”
If I didn’t know any better, I could swear there was disappointment in the spaces between her words.
“I’m glad you’re okay, honey. Good luck in your class.”
“Thanks,” I said. I stood there with the phone pressed against my ear and my fingers going numb, my feet balanced on the edge of a sidewalk. Students moved around me, a stream of puffy jackets and ducked heads.
* * *
When Daniel wakes up, the pit has already opened again, sucking me down and down and in. It’s almost like the walls are whispering, though I know it’s not the walls; it’s just the pebbles. He’s dying, he’s dying. You’re losing him, and it’s all your fault. For a second, I’m not even sure who they’re talking about.
He turns to me, smiling sweet. “Let’s change those bandages, hmm?” he says.
I hold my hands out, wrists together like he’s handcuffing me. The fabric has stiffened with greasy stains from the ointment. He leans in close to unwind them. I study his scalp beneath his hair, pink and fresh, and steady my hands so he won’t notice.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Daniel
I thought for a second that the old Nessa was back, talking and talking. But I can tell before I even look up from the new bandages that she’s gone again. She basically drew me a map to herself last night, and I still don’t know how to get there. So she spends the day staring out the passenger’s window and picking at the edges of the medical tape.
We make it to the northern border of West Virginia by late afternoon and stop at a sketchy pay-by-the-hour motel to take a quick nap. She says she wants to call her mom for updates. I step into the bathroom and turn the fan on so I don’t have to pretend I’m not listening.
When I come back out, she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands dangling between her knees. Her face is pale. She stares at me.
“What is it?” I say. I stumble over to her. “Is it your dad? Is he worse?”
“No, it’s not that.” She turns her face to the floor. “Did you leave your circle plans behind at the Shannons’?”
“No way. They’re right here in my pocket.” I reach for them reflexively. The crinkle is reassuring, but only for a second. “Oh shit.” I drop down onto the second bed. “The draft plans. I stashed them away so I could find a dumpster somewhere safe. They found them, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. My mom explained them away. Don’t worry.”
I gulp for air. This is it. I’ve blown it. Word will get out. Not only will Sam not get his magic, but Lionel will find out, and I’ll be the local eccentric, too. Everything I’ve made, nothing but a punch line. Something black appears at the edge of my vision. I want to grab at the edge of the bed. My fingertips are too numb.
Nessa is trying to talk to me, but I can’t understand. It’s like she’s calling at me from miles away. She holds a paper bag to my mouth and nose, the one that held our sandwiches from lunch. “Breathe,” she commands, and this one word, I get. So I do. It smells like pickles and bread. “And again.”
She does it over and over, ten or twelve times until my heartbeat slows. She lowers the bag. “Panic attacks,” she says. “Yet another fun side effect of OCD.” She tells me about when she started getting them. She was thirteen. She was too embarrassed to tell her doctor about these things that felt like heart attacks but weren’t really. So Sam made an appointment for himself and listed off the symptoms as his own. He came home with a package of brown paper bags for her to try.
Thirty minutes later, the fog’s gone, and I can actually respond, talk back.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks quietly.
“No.” I’ll have to trust Molly’s excuse. Try not to picture Connie showing the plans around town. She wouldn’t do that, I don’t think. The draft plans are different enough from my final version that she shouldn’t be able to make the connection once the circle’s done. I hope.
“In that case, I need to shower.” She stands and holds out her hands. “Wrap these up for me?”
I use the plastic grocery bags and roll of duct tape we salvaged from the back seat of her car. I smile up at her, but she looks away. I need to find some way to help her. Anything.
When I hear the water running, I rummage through her duffel bag, my heart pounding. The phone’s wallpaper is a picture of their barn, the sky so blue, it could be a stock photo. I push aside my second thoughts and I dial.
“Has he deteriorated already?”
I was expecting his voicemail, maybe hoping for it.
“Hi, Charlie. It’s Daniel, actually. I didn’t have your number, so I had to use Nessa’s phone.”
“What’s wrong? Where is she?” His voice is harsh.
“She’s…um. She’s okay, I guess. She had an…incident. With her OCD? Her hands are burned pretty bad. I’m not sure what to do.”
He sighs. “Where are you now?”
“On our way out of West Virginia. We should be back in Vermont in a couple of days.”
There’s a rustling on the other end of the line. “Okay. I’ll be there. Thanks.” He hangs up.
I drop the phone back in her bag and sit for a minute, watching a spider march its way across the ceiling. I need to make the next call from my own phone.
“Daniel! Twice in one week? We must’ve won the lottery. Let me go get your mother so we can put you on speaker.”
“Actually, Dad,” I say, “I was hoping to talk to her alone for a minute. I need her professional opinion on something.”
“Oh.” I hope he’s not as let down as he sounds. “Of course. Just a minute.”
The spider makes it all the way to the corner of the room, where it has stretched its web. Its legs move together, up and down. It must have caught something.
“Dad says you need some advice?” my mom says, a little breathless.
“Um, right. So this friend I’m traveling with. She has OCD. And her dad’s really sick, and I think it’s messing with her. I’m just not sure what to do.”
A little pause of surprise passes down the line. “Is she medicated?”
“Yeah.” I lean over to where Nessa has lined up her bottles on the bed and recite their names, carefully turning each one so it’s exactly as she left it. “We could probably be in New Jersey by tonight.” I feel like a kid again, pointing out a shiny new toy we just happened to pass in the store, not daring to ask for it.
“Well. She’s not my patient, Daniel. It would be highly unethical for me to treat her, and anyway, there’s not much I can do in one visit. OCD is not my specialty. You know that,” she says primly.
“Yeah, okay, fine,” I say, half angry and half embarrassed. I should have known. “Thanks anyway.”
“If you can drop by this evening, I don’t have any patients scheduled. I can have a quick conversation with her and see if I can’t get her back on track with her therapist.”
The air rushes back into my lungs. “Great!”
Nessa steps out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. I hadn’t heard the shower turn off.
I clear my throat, lower my voice. “That would be great. Talk soon, then.” I hang up before my mom can reply, close my eyes so Nessa can fumble on her clothes. She doesn’t ask who I was talking to.
* * *
After I finally freed myself from Lionel at Claire’s funeral service, I stumbled over to my car. Though I could barely see the door handle in front of me, I managed to climb into the front seat. I rested my head on the steering wheel, refusing to watch as people in black filed out of the church. I remembered my dad�
��s hand on my shoulder that night before I left home, steadying and calm.
The phone was ringing in my ear before I knew what I was doing. My dad’s voice hit me like a bus. “What’s wrong?” he said, and it all came out, all the things I didn’t want to tell them on our monthly phone calls.
“My girlfriend, Claire, you remember her. She was an addict. Alcohol and I don’t know what else. I thought she was doing fine. I was helping her. She was doing great. But then one day, she disappeared, and now—I’m at her funeral.” I picked at my thumbnail and watched through the windshield as Lionel and Leslie scurried to the parking lot.
I’m not sure what I expected my dad to say. I wanted to be crouched beside him in the woods, the sun warm on my back as he pointed at a beetle. Maybe he would tell me something about their life cycle that sounded vaguely profound and then point at their tiny beetle genitalia.
Instead, he just swore softly. “Shit. I don’t really know what to say.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I closed my eyes.
“Do you want me to go get your mother?”
“No.” I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see it. “Please don’t tell her.”
“Oh. Okay.” He sounded uncertain. It was hard to tell how long he’d be able to keep the secret. I wasn’t sure why I bothered. They worked in tandem, the two of them.
There was a rapping on my window. I opened my eyes, annoyed, but instead of Lionel, Claire’s parents were standing there. Their faces were broken. Her mom clutched something in her hands. I didn’t have to look twice to know what it was—a picture of me, printed on cheap paper. Claire kept it tucked in her wallet, between her credit cards.
“I’ve got to go.”
* * *
He only made it a couple of days. The phone’s buzzing was like a drill to my head when I saw her number come up.
“Oh, honey.” Her voice made me wince. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well.” I traced my finger along the edge of the motel room’s side table before muting the talk show playing on the TV.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m working. At a farm in Omaha,” I lied without thinking.
“I wish you would come home. You were always—”
Always so quiet, wanted to save people, such a sweet boy.
My fist curled up, and I couldn’t undo it.
“—was very sick,” she was saying. “You need to know that it wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, whatever.” I knew even as I said it how annoying it was, teenaged.
She fell silent.
A few beats passed before she said, “Well. You call us if there’s anything we can do.”
After we hung up, I hurled the phone against the wall. It chipped the cheap drywall, and a rain of plaster fell down around it. I turned the talk show volume back up.
* * *
She wants what’s best for me. She wants me to be happy. I know that. Of course I do. But I’ll be damned if her voice didn’t uptick with excitement when I told her I needed her.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Molly
I knew we’d made a terrible mistake as soon as we drove up to the land, the truck bucking beneath us. We’d bought the acreage sight unseen, using up all our savings. And now we would suffer the consequences.
Sam stepped up to the edge of the weeds. Mosquitoes nipped at my arms as I joined him. He kicked at a particularly large rock and rolled it over with one boot.
“Well, this is…” he began.
“A disaster,” I said. A slate shingle slid off the roof, shattering into nothing when it hit the rotting porch.
He hugged me to his side. “Our disaster,” he said.
* * *
Sweat equity would only go so far until we had to buy things, so many things. Lumber, nails, seed, pesticide—on and on it went. That’s what I told Sam the morning I gathered up my pocketbook and asked him to drive me into town to find a job. In reality, I found that Thomas had followed me east, staring mournfully over my shoulder while I scrubbed grime out of the tub and painted over chipped doorjambs. I feared if I didn’t get out of the house, I would scream.
There was no bank in town, not back then, but I’d seen a Now Hiring sign scrawled in the window of the general store. I asked Sam to wait outside for me, and he kept the engine running, listening to the weather report with the window down. As if we had anything in the ground to worry about.
The bell over the door tinkled when I opened it, and I winced. Nobody looked up, though—not even the girl behind the single cash register.
She looked like she was sixteen, maybe seventeen, with her bleached hair piled up into a ponytail. She wore heavy eyeliner and a denim jacket even though the air in the store was soupy. A small fan sat on the counter, wheezing on her face.
“I don’t know, Becky,” she sighed into the phone, leaning into the counter as she ran a long, pink file over her long, pink nails. “I just can’t wait to get out of this dumb town, you know?”
As I drew closer, I read the name tag pinned to her jacket: Allison. I cleared my throat, and she rolled her eyes, nice and slow. “Anyway, I’ve gotta go,” she said into the phone. “Customers.” The word was like a slur somehow. She giggled at Becky’s response before hanging up.
“Can I help you?” she said, her eyes traveling from my last clean blouse to my discount-store slacks.
“I’d like to fill out a job application, please,” I said, keeping my chin up high.
She smirked. “You’re a little older than what we normally hire.”
I planted one hand on my hip. “I’ve got news for you. I’m probably only about seven years older than you. It goes by faster than you could ever imagine.”
To this day, I’m not sure where the words came from. Allison stopped chewing her gum and stared at me for a moment. Then she tossed her ponytail over one shoulder and laughed and laughed.
“Fair enough,” she said. She blew a small peach bubble and drew it whole into her mouth while she pulled an application out from behind the counter.
Allison’s parents still owned the general store then, and somehow, they trusted her with all the hiring decisions, so we’d only been back home an hour before she called to offer me the job.
“So, like, can you start tomorrow? I’ve got homework and stuff,” she said. I could hear her gum cracking.
“Of course,” I said, twisting the phone cord around my finger.
Sam looked up from the living room floor, where he was tearing up carpet, and flashed me a thumbs-up.
“Rad. I mean, good. See you then!”
* * *
My shift started at nine. Every day, I would have Sam drop me off at the store fifteen minutes early. I spent most of the day selling cigarette packs to men who wouldn’t quite meet my eye and canisters of baby formula to women who looked like they were pleading for something. After school, clusters of children would come in, crowing over comic books and magazines they would never buy. At lunch, one or two older women would come in for a cellophane-wrapped sandwich. They laid their hands on my arm, their eyes sympathetic, when I told them where we lived. I would move my arm out from under them to get them their change, saying we were making progress, little by little, defending Sam while he bent and knelt and hammered.
Sometimes, Allison would stand behind the counter with me and whisper loudly about boys. And sometimes, her father would come out from the back office, staring off at something while he stood in front of the soda fridge.
One morning, early on, I slipped around the counter and walked up to him. “Thank you so much for the opportunity, Mr. Peabody,” I said, voice and eyes both lowered. At the bank, my boss had smiled smugly when I’d done this, stopping just short of patting me on the head.
Mr. Peabody looked almost alarmed, glanc
ing around the store to be sure no one had heard. “That’s all right, Molly,” he said. “Don’t mention it. Just keep on working hard, and you’ll do fine, like the rest of us.”
So that’s what I did, for two whole years, until I found I couldn’t open the cash register around Charlie, growing in my belly. By that time, Sam had cleared out the fields and was bringing in his first harvest, so we didn’t need the money quite so much anymore. Though Thomas’s face still watched me in the middle of certain nights, I mostly found myself picturing Charlie’s features instead, his fingers and toes, his eyes shut tight against the world.
Allison started dating Ben just before I left the store. He was from the next town over, and I could tell from the hush in her voice that she felt this was her ticket out. She stopped bleaching her hair and let the red creep back. When Ben came by the store, she would tilt her chin up to him and stare and stare.
The Peabodys sold the store shortly after I left. The next time I saw Mr. Peabody was at Allison and Ben’s wedding. He was standing in the corner of the church basement, smiling a little with those same distant eyes.
These are the things I didn’t tell Maggie at the time. When she called, I brushed over updates on the kitchen, the house, and Sam. She had bundled me off into this new life, and I was too ashamed to complain about what I found there. I asked instead about her law school applications and who she was dating out west.
Last night, as I lay awake in bed, all I could think of was how foolish I’d been not to tell her. She would’ve understood, no matter how different our lives turned out to be. And so, today, after Allison drops Ben and Eli off for their second day of work, I tell Maggie all of it, bracing my hands on the edge of the kitchen table. I spill these truths, hoping she will understand the tangled weave of this town and how I’d found myself caught in it, held by old acquaintances who believed themselves to be friends. By those who love Sam. She watches me, her eyes not quite narrowed, her chin in her palm. When I’ve finished, the ticking of the old clock on the wall is the only sound.