by Erica Boyce
After she called me with her diagnosis, I sat on the couch with the phone in my hand, staring out the window. It had been named, the monster in her closet, the one none of us could see that poked its scaly claw into her skin while we weren’t looking. It had been named, and maybe she could fight it.
It didn’t occur to me what that meant until her next visit home. Sam rolled out of bed that first morning, and I stayed put. I couldn’t fall back asleep, and the minutes ticked by as I studied the frost rimming the windowpanes, then turned toward the door. I heard her feet coming down the hallway, and I drew back the corner of the covers and readied my smile. Her steps paused for the briefest moment outside our room. And then they faded away, down the stairs, and Sam stopped his aimless singing in surprise.
I knew then that someone else would be holding her secrets, some doctor in an office far away who I would never meet. Nessa’s words would tumble out only for this doctor now, twirling her hair around her finger like she’d done since kindergarten. He’d nod solemnly, writing one or two of her words down on his clipboard, but probably not the important ones. When she left the room, he would slip her words into a drawer in his desk with all the others, filed and done.
“What’s wrong, sweets?” I whisper now.
She shakes her head a little. “Are you okay?” she says in a small voice.
My hand stills, cupped over her ear. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Her hands fidget in her lap, knotting together. “What will you do?” she whispers.
I look away, at her bedside table, crowded with tubes of lip balm and thick legal thrillers—Maggie’s. I have not allowed myself to imagine the future, not really, when the fields are spent and mowed to brittle stumps, the corn trucked away to feed the neighbor’s cows, their hides standing stark against the slushy snow. Perhaps I will call Thomas and ask him about interest rates and about that scar on his back, make a new friend again. Perhaps I won’t. Perhaps I’ll stay here, alone in this town, learn to settle into Allison’s hugs and see if the general store is hiring, if I can make the cashier laugh when I ask for an application. Perhaps I’ll move out west with Maggie to a less “saturated marketplace,” scandalize the neighbors, two almost-elderly women living together for no apparent reason. Perhaps her neighbors won’t find that scandalous at all.
Nessa is still waiting, winding herself tighter.
I sigh. “I can’t say for sure, but I’ll find something.” I hesitate. “Mostly, I expect, I will miss your father.”
It’s not a comfort, not really. In another time, I would have worried for hours, days, wondering what my words would grow into in Nessa’s mind. Her hands come apart, slowly, controlled, and she puts her arm around me and hugs me close.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Nessa
Dad can’t come down for lunch today. We all heard him shooing Charlie away from his room, his voice hacked to bits by coughs. Charlie’s face was drawn when he came down the stairs, and he didn’t speak a word to any of us.
The four of us sit crammed around the table, dragging our spoons through bowls of soup while my mom scurries around the kitchen. Zach and Maggie make a couple of attempts at conversation, but their words drift, unanswered, to the floor.
A sharp knock comes. “I’ll get it,” I say, jumping to my feet, even though my seat is tucked into the corner farthest from the door. I squeeze past Charlie’s chair, stumble over its back legs, and bang my shin. I am wincing when I open the door, balancing on one leg, and Shawn bursts out laughing when he sees me.
“You all right?” he says. He reaches out to support me with one arm. In his other, he holds a huge foil pan wrapped in plastic wrap.
“I’ll make a quick recovery, I think,” I say, pulling a frown for effect.
Zach chuckles, and Charlie shakes his head, smiling.
I point at the pan. “Is that for us?”
“Yup. Melissa made you guys some baked ziti.” He hoists the pan a little higher.
“How nice of her,” my mom says, taking the food and slotting it neatly into the fridge, angling the door so he can’t see the stacks of disposable dishes and glass casseroles marked with masking tape.
“Yeah. She always thinks of these things,” he says, his smile warm and shyly proud.
“Come sit with us,” Maggie says, motioning toward my seat. “Nessa can pull up another chair from somewhere.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” he says, swinging his arms back and forth. “I should get back to my kid and all.” He looks down at his feet, probably feeling out of place.
I feel a sudden urge to cling to his arm and beg him not to leave me in here, alone in this snow globe of grief. “Let’s go for a quick drive first,” I say. I hustle him out the door, waving to everyone over my shoulder without turning back.
I slam his truck door behind me and lean my head back against the passenger’s seat. I inhale the plastic scent of his air freshener deep into my lungs. He turns his key in the ignition and waits.
“How about the lake?” I say, though we haven’t gone in daylight in years and its shores are always crammed with families on days like this.
“You got it” is all he says.
Sure enough, the parking lot we pass is full of cars, and I can see people lounging on plastic chairs, their kids shrieking and splashing in brightly colored bathing suits and their dogs swimming after sticks like their lives depend on it. Shawn pulls down the dirt road we found years ago, tree branches scraping and thwacking against the sides of the truck. He parks in the small clearing at its end. From here, the others’ yelling and conversations are distant and muffled sound effects.
I half expected the lake to be changed somehow, a shade darker or lighter in the face of everything from the past few weeks. It’s just the same, though, framed by trees and wide as the sky. Over the ticking of the engine, I can hear a squirrel tittering in the trees above us. An osprey dives down into the water, its legs stretched out like landing gear. “My dad always thought they were the most amazing animals,” I say, pointing at the bird, which rises from the surface with a fish glinting in its talons. “Still does, I mean. Think that.”
Shawn says nothing, studies my face.
“He hired this guy to make a crop circle in their field,” I admit.
He laughs and settles back in his seat, dropping his hands from the steering wheel to his lap. “That doesn’t surprise me at all.” He rocks his head back and forth, stretching out his neck. “He loves those big, weird gestures. Remember when we graduated high school?”
He built a billboard out of plywood and painted it with letters three feet high that read, “Congrats, Nessa and Shawn, class of 2009!” He had a poster printed at Staples that he carried to the ceremony. It had my face on it in glossy full-color. I begged my mom to limit his signage for my college graduation.
“You got Charlie back,” he says.
“Sort of, I guess. I don’t know how much of it was really thanks to me.” And it all comes out, the whole story, the whole trip, or most of it anyway. I don’t tell him how Daniel’s hands felt against my back or how smooth his skin was. Shawn watches the dashboard as I talk, occasionally reaching over to pick off a crumb of lint.
When I finish, I exhale, one deep breath that shivers over the ends of his hair.
“Let me see your hands,” he says, holding out his own.
I cover them with mine, and he bends close to them, rotating them gently back and forth. The afternoon sun cuts harsh shadows across them, dark lines and patches like bruises, but the skin is healing now. It’s not the first time he’s seen them like this. Not by a long shot. Sometimes, I wonder if that awful date would’ve gone differently had I known that what I had was not a defect, not some unchangeable flaw, but an illness. Maybe I would’ve been able to accept a partner who knew everything, who knew it all.
Not that it matters now.
He has Melissa, and I—well, I’m not sure what or who I have.
Shawn places my hands in my lap, snugly between my knees. He looks up at me, his eyes so close, and says, “You’re going to be all right.”
“Yeah,” I say, though I know the relief is short-lived, I know he can only toss the pebble so far.
* * *
In my parents’ driveway, I reach for the door handle to get out of the truck, then change my mind. “Daniel said he thinks we can finish the circle tomorrow night. Would you maybe want to come and help?”
He hesitates, the engine grumbling in the pause. He turns his head toward the house, and there’s my dad in the upstairs window, leaning one hand against the pane. Through the glass, his palm is white and fleshy, like the belly of a fish. I can almost see the stick from his painkillers poking out of his mouth. He raises his other hand in a motionless wave.
Shawn lifts one hand from the steering wheel in reply. “Sure. I’ll be there.”
* * *
He needs help walking to the bathroom. This morning, after I talked to Mom, I heard Charlie checking on him in bed. “How are you feeling?” he said. “How’s your pain?”
“Same old, same old,” my dad said. And then he lowered his voice so much, I had to strain to hear it. “Son, I’m sorry. I was so—” His voice broke.
Charlie sighed. “I know.”
There was a pause. I hoped they were hugging, but I knew they probably weren’t.
“Come on,” Charlie finally said. “Let’s get you up and at ’em.”
After breakfast, when Dad was back in bed, Charlie said he shouldn’t be going anywhere unattended anymore, even three feet down the hall. He’s too weak; he could fall. His words slit right into my stomach, a paring knife, and my mom looked slapped.
Charlie and I worked out a system of shifts that he and I would take, guiding him down the hall to the bathroom and back a few times a day. My mom clamped her hands together in protest and kept saying there was no need until Maggie said, “You do not need to be there for him every time he takes a leak.” My mom dropped her hands to her sides, took out her big metal bowl, and started dumping bread dough ingredients into it. A loaf already sat on the counter, burnished and freshly browned.
This afternoon is Charlie’s shift, not mine, but the guilt from leaving them all at lunch is creeping its long fingers through my abdomen and hooking into my gut. When Charlie lays his medical journal flat across the arm of the couch and checks his watch, I stand. “I’ll do it,” I say, my book tumbling out of my lap.
“But it’s—” he says, but I’m already halfway up the stairs, too far away to hear about the protocol.
My dad’s awake on his back with his head sunk into a crater in his pillows, staring at my mom. She’s pulled the old rocking chair over from the corner of their room so it butts right up against the bed. She’s fallen asleep in it, her head lolling back and her mouth open. Her knitting is draped across her lap, the needles loose in her hands; she is making something small and brown that looks vaguely like a hat.
Dad starts when he sees me.
“Ready for your pee break?” I whisper.
He rolls his eyes. “You kids are so paranoid. I’m a grown man. I don’t need an escort.” He pushes himself up and swings his legs out of bed, tapping one foot against the chair as he goes.
Mom bolts awake and clutches her knitting needles. When she sees my dad, she lays her needles on the bed and wedges herself under his armpit in one motion, lifting him to his feet.
She checks her watch as I take his other arm. “Oh dear, it’s getting late,” she says. “I should start dinner.”
“Maggie’s got it covered.” Her eyes widen in alarm, and I stifle a laugh. “Zach is supervising. Heavily.”
“Well. Okay.” She sits back down with a thump and reaches absently for her knitting, looking for all the world like she’s lost.
I want to tell her to relax and go back to sleep, but Dad’s already pulling me forward, shuffling toward the door.
His breathing gets louder the farther we walk, and he’s almost gasping by the time we reach the bathroom. I reach for the door and turn to him warily.
He laughs, a wheeze, and says, “You can wait out here. Nobody wants to see this part, I know.”
I close the door after him, then start humming tunelessly to myself so I don’t have to listen to my father using the toilet. I stop when I hear the flush, but he’s grinning when he opens the door, and I know he heard me anyway.
Mom is gone from the room when we get back, the rocking chair still moving back and forth a little. I can hear the ringing of pots and pans against each other, chatter and laughter as I ease Dad back into the bed, but before I can join them, he motions for me to sit down in the chair. I eye the bundle of yarn nested there and perch on the edge of the bed instead, one leg folded under me.
His hand on my arm is fragile and cool. “Did I ever tell you”—he pauses for air—“how proud I am of you?”
I think again of the billboard and the poster, and I smile. “Yes. Repeatedly.” I lay my hand over his. “Don’t worry, Dad. We’re good.”
“No, no,” he says, waving me away. “I mean—” He sighs and turns his head toward the window, like he’s talking to the sky or the trees or the wind. “This is hard work, what we do. I always thought it would be Charlie. He’s the boy, you know. But it turns out it was you all along.”
I’ve lost the thread of him. I’m not ready for him to slip away like this, far away. “What do you mean?” I say, a tremor.
His eyes are clear when he turns back to me. “I’m giving you the farm.”
It’s like he’s taken my head by the ears and shaken, scrambling my thoughts. “I—what?” trickles out.
He nods, serene.
“What about Mom?” I say, remembering his eyes on her when I walked in, soaking her in.
“She can stay here as long as she likes, of course. But listen,” he says, both his hands on my arm now. “Don’t let her wallow here forever.”
I can’t even imagine what wallowing would look like on her. “This is her home,” I say meekly.
“It’s her home because I made it one. Once I’m gone, there’s nothing for her here.”
I flinch. How easy it is for him to imagine being gone.
“She’s got dreams somewhere else she’d never tell you about,” he says.
My stomach lurches, remembering what Charlie told me. The affair.
“She and Charlie both, they were never made for this. She’s just a little better at grinning and bearing it,” he says. He smiles wistfully, and for a second, I wonder what would’ve happened if he’d said this to himself before Charlie left for good. “You and me, though. This is who we are.”
I turn away and stare at the floor. This morning, I’d watched Ben and Eli move through the fields, and my muscles almost ached to join them.
His eyes are still on me, and I know he sees it all. He squeezes my arm once and lets his hands fall back to his sides. “Think it over,” he says, then yawns. “That long voyage over to the john really has me beat.” His eyelids drift close, and he settles back into his pillow. When I draw the blankets up over him, he doesn’t move.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Daniel
I call Lionel from my car, parked in the Shannons’ driveway.
“So you’ve seen it?” he says as soon as he picks up.
“Um, seen what?” I asked.
“Ray. He went ahead and posted everyone’s names on an alien conspiracy forum.”
The calls from the other circlers. That’s what they must’ve been about. “Shit.”
He sighs. “Yes.”
A pause blooms. “How’s the response been?” I say. “On the forum, I mean?”
“Luckily, it seems most aren’t taking it seriously. There’s a lot
of teasing, and some are outright furious with him for implying the circles aren’t real. I highly doubt it’ll make it out to the general public, but we’ve contacted the forum administrator to ask that the post be removed. We’ll threaten a lawsuit, if we must.”
“That’s a relief.” In the silence that follows, I brush dust off my dashboard. It sucks, what’s happening to them, I find myself thinking. To them, not me. My hand pauses, midbrush, as the thought sinks in. A few weeks ago, maybe even yesterday, this news would have been devastating. But now, I realize, I feel like I’m not a part of this.
“Have you finished your fifteenth?” Lionel says.
“Well, no.”
“So you’ll be wanting another assignment, then,” he decides.
“Actually, I’m leaving the circlers.” It comes to me all at once, and I say it without thinking.
The right thing to do, the safe thing, would be to quit Sam’s circle. Too many people in Munsen know about it now. There’s too much risk of it getting out, especially now that there’s Ray’s post. Lionel would be furious with me, continuing on with that many townspeople involved.
But I can’t protect the circlers anymore. They don’t need me to protect them. This is no longer my life, shifting around from place to place. This isn’t what I want, and the circlers aren’t my family, not now. With Nessa’s eyes on me last night, I realized this particular place—and the people in it—have come to matter more to me than the circlers did. It’s too important now to give it up, even with Ray’s leak.
Quitting will cut Lionel off at the chase. There’s nothing he can do to me once I’m out. Maybe he’ll pin some circles on me, but I don’t think so. Ray was right—he probably respects me too much. The other circlers can fend for themselves now. Lionel will handle it.
I have to finish this circle. This town needs this circle. They need it for Sam.
“I see,” he says. There’s a dragonfly carcass wedged under one windshield wiper. It’s probably been there for weeks. “You understand what this means.”