After we bump along the farm’s dirt driveway, keeping our heads well away from the metal sides and the window, and help unload the empty boxes, we’re quickly directed to a field with an extralarge collard green harvest. We get a crash course in proper harvesting technique as Trudy squats and snaps the large green leaves close to the main stalk. Leaves will regrow off that main stalk and yield more harvests. After watching us snap the first few, Trudy hurries off to attend to the other chores on her list. Everyone spreads out, staking out a row. It’s fun at first as I fill my basket, but after a while it stops being fun and starts being work. The sun is so low that it seems to shine straight into my eyes, giving me a headache. The mosquitoes come out as dusk falls, and I stop more and more often to slap at whining sounds and bites.
Trudy comes by to check on my progress and hums approvingly at my three-quarters-full basket.
“We’ll make a farmer out of you yet,” she says. She hands me a water bottle and I gratefully drink from it.
“Harder than it looks,” I say sheepishly after I come up for air.
“Now, isn’t that the truth.” Trudy digs her fists against her lower back and moans. “Farming is for the young,” she says. “Too bad y’all are too young to see that. No offense.”
My hands are caked in dirt, my hair is hanging in sweaty, lanky clumps around my sunburned face and my young back is throbbing from crouching down at collard level.
“None taken,” I say. I’m rather in awe that she subjects herself to this day after day, year after year.
Trudy wanders off to check on the other pickers, and I look around for Emmett. I find him hard at work two rows away. In quick, efficient movements he snaps the wide green leaves and stacks them in his basket. After we finish harvesting, we’ll take our baskets back to the house and bundle the leaves in bunches with rubber bands. I can’t resist spending time with Emmett, so I heft my basket and make my way over. As soon as I draw near, he straightens from his crouch and wipes a heavy, colorful arm across his forehead.
“Wicked hard work,” he says. Sweat is running down the side of his face, and his shirt is drenched with dark stains under his arms, down his chest and across his back.
“Are you getting sunburned?”
“Nah, just dehydrated.”
“Here, finish it.” I hand him the half-empty water bottle and he drains it.
“My grandparents used to have a huge garden,” he says. “My sister and I hated it. It seemed like there was always something that needed to be done there.” We both survey the field.
“It’s more work than I ever thought,” I admit. “You don’t think when you go to the grocery store for veggies that people put in so much time and labor to get them there for you.”
“Yeah, it’s true,” he says. “And I hated all the work when I was a kid. But man, tomato soup from roasted garden tomatoes? There is nothing better on earth.” There’s no place to toss trash, so he tucks the empty bottle into a deep side pocket of his cargo pants.
“My mom has a beautiful garden at her house, but it’s mostly flowers,” I say. “She grows herbs, but that’s about it for edible plants. And she does it mainly for their scent.”
“My grandparents were way too practical for flowers,” Emmett says. I can hear the fondness and exasperation in his voice. “My grandmother would sneak in a hibiscus or gardenia every once in a while, but most of the garden was for sustenance. Cabbage, potatoes, pole beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash. You name it, we grew it. Except for in the hottest part of summer, we’d have vegetables from our garden, and in the summer, we’d eat what Gran had canned. I grew up in Florida,” he adds. “So our growing season was ass-backwards. Winter was the fertile time; summer was fallow.”
I’m eating up his words, picturing how different his childhood was from mine.
“But even in the summer, we’d have mangoes, lychees and watermelons; they don’t mind the heat. Which sounds great, until you realize that picking fruit in the summer means mosquitoes swarming over you and crows fighting for the fruit.” He wipes his face again, using the bottom of his shirt. I try not to ogle his abs. “It’s easy to look back and see it as idyllic, but I remember how much my sister and I fought over garden chores.”
“You probably would have found something to fight over even without a garden,” I say. “Mo and I fought a lot as kids. It’s just something brothers and sister do.”
“You’re probably right.”
We’ve been standing here for a while, and the interns have started heading back to the farmhouse with their yields. I slap at a mosquito that whines by my ear, but I don’t want to leave.
“Where’s your sister now?” I ask.
“She’s stationed in San Diego right now—I told you she’s a naval officer, right?”
I nod. I can hear the pride in his voice.
“After I enlisted in the army, she decided she wanted to try military life. She joined ROTC at her school and picked the navy, probably just to spite me.”
Seeing my blank look, he clarifies. “They’re big football rivals.”
“Come on, beautiful,” Trudy calls out from the edge of the field. “Let’s break. Time for grub.”
We take our baskets to a large table under an overhang near the interns’ quarters by the fields where a couple of them are bundling the greens. They wave off our offers to help. Empty harvest boxes are stacked in towers on the porch. The bundled collard greens will join portions of lettuce, peas, squash, bok choy and cabbage that’ll be handed out at the Saturday market for the CSA members. Anything left over after the boxes are filled will be sold.
“We’re good,” says one with long hair and a shell-and-hemp necklace. She looks approvingly at Emmett’s inked arms, and I feel a ridiculous stab of jealousy. “We’re almost done.”
“Finished,” I correct her under my breath. Emmett, who hears me, stifles a laugh.
He takes my hand, which is hot and grimy despite the gardening gloves I borrowed. I try to hide my surprise and act like holding hands with him is normal. Like my jealousy is warranted. Maybe he didn’t like her appraising look either. The thought pleases me no end.
We head off to the outdoor sink and scrub our hands. I splash cold water on my face, sighing with pleasure, and feel the drops slide down my neck, disappearing under my tank. When I open my eyes, eyelashes clumped with water, I catch an odd, hungry look in Emmett’s eyes. But as soon as he realizes I see him, he settles his features into their usual calm, impassive lines and I wonder what I saw there.
“Come on, beautiful,” he says, using Trudy’s nickname for me and making me blush. “Let’s eat. I’m starving.”
The vegetarian dinner, served outside under Japanese lanterns lit with flickering candles, is the perfect ending to what has so unexpectedly turned into a lovely evening.
The interns, quirky and idealistic, with their sunburned noses and callused hands, are easy to talk to. The food, much of it picked that day at the farm, is light and delicious, and for once my stomach doesn’t shriek in protest as it fills. There’s roasted corn on the cob, tomato-and-green-bean salad, berries with sweet cream and, since one of the interns used to work at a bakery, fresh-baked bread and oatmeal raisin cookies for dessert.
Even though I’m the one who called Trudy in the first place, even though her invitation may have sprung from pity or the ulterior motive of involving another picker in the harvest, being here at dinner with Emmett by my side and this group of kind, gentle souls feels like a gift.
The farm is far away from the city’s lights, and as night descends, the surrounding land turns from its familiar darkness to a pitch black I’m not used to. The lanterns invest the picnic with an otherworldly glow. For the duration of the evening, I feel removed from all my problems. My fears, my diagnosis and the troubles waiting for me fade, and I feel so light and free I could fly.
I’m learning to notice these gifts when I receive them, and I send a little thank-you up to the sky, heavily freckled with
stars.
XVIII.
WHEN IT COMES TIME for my weekly phone calls to my parents, I again fight the urge to tell them about my diagnosis. I want to, since it’s what both of them would want me to do and because they’re my parents. They’re the ones I’m supposed to go to when bad things happen in life. I want them to make my illness go away, or at least to make me feel better about it. But there’s nothing they can do, and out of misplaced worry, they might insist I come back home. That would be disastrous. Instead of telling them anything important, I promise to mail them copies of the article on Trudy and Hank. I’m proud of my piece, although once it was published, I noticed some wording I wished I could change.
After the night at the farm, it feels like maybe God is paying attention … like maybe He is trying to help me. I wonder again if I’m right about being punished. Maybe Crohn’s really has nothing to do with Tabitha or Jason. Regardless, I can’t stop my mission now. So during my phone calls, I continue to lie.
When my dad asks if I’m okay, I tell him I’m fine, just tired from working hard (which he approves of). I tell my mother I’ve been feeling a little sick with a nasty stomach bug, and promise to drink plenty of tea and eat only dry toast and applesauce.
They both believe me, which is a relief but which saddens me as well. It shouldn’t be that easy to lie, to be so convincing.
I guess I have a bit of Mo in me after all.
As the days go by, I try to crack through Jason’s defenses. He is a surly and reluctant assistant, rolling his eyes when I ask him to make copies, grunting when I ask him for his opinion. And even though he occasionally volunteers an unprompted sentence or two—even though his face is no longer actively hostile, just sort of neutral and blank—I can tell I’m not winning. I insist he come with me on assignments, I try to schedule interviews so he can attend. I have him write headlines, which he doesn’t enjoy, and let him take photos, which he seems to like.
Whatever or whoever it is I’m fighting Jason for, whatever it is I’m supposed to save him from, I’m not really any closer than before.
I debate telling all this to Mo. I still can’t get over how well he and Jason hit it off that one afternoon at the coffee shop. If anyone had the key to unlock Jason, it would be my brother. But I don’t. Mo never did find a job in town, and yet he’s always gone. Always busy, always out late. And never short of money.
That’s the part I can’t figure out. Mo could make friends with a tree, so it doesn’t surprise me he found people to hang out with. But where did he get the money for Chinese takeout, for the stacks of pizza boxes I find crammed into the trash can, for a double latte and muffin at the coffee shop every morning? He has weird new clothes that look ridiculous on him—long, baggy shorts he wears sagging below the waistband of his boxers. He reeks of cigarette smoke even though he’s never smoked before. He should be broke. He should be on a strict diet of ramen noodles and mooching free coffee at the office, which was what I fully expected when he first came to visit.
Perhaps I was stupid to think he had come to me of his own volition. Naïve to have any doubt about what was really going on or to imagine that giving him space would get him to open up. In hindsight, I should have known. The signs were there, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to see.
I don’t know how much longer I would have continued with my self-deception. In retrospect, I have to wonder if what finally and irrevocably ripped the blinders from my eyes wasn’t another sort of divine intervention.
If it was, it was a cruel bit of kindness.
XIX.
I NEVER INTENDED to snoop through any of Jason’s things. I believed we would grow to trust each other—I didn’t kid myself that we’d be friends—and for him to trust me, I needed to trust him.
But after Jason’s transfer (or demotion, depending how you look at it) to becoming my assistant, he uses my desk. My computer. My drawers.
So I never actually decide to snoop, but while cleaning out some clutter, I find Jason’s journal under a pile of loose notes and flyers at the bottom of my drawer. Feeling my heart quicken, I carefully pull it out and glance around to see if anyone noticed. No one’s paying the slightest attention to me, and so, with the notebook carefully balanced on my lap, I open it and take a peek at Jason’s private work.
As I flip through the pencil-smudged pages, I quickly realize this is not a random sketch pad, it’s a graphic novel. The drawings are not bad, and I begin to think maybe Jason has some talent after all. Maybe he’s not some hopeless, mediocre bag of crappy attitude and inferiority.
This makes me ridiculously happy. Of course I can’t let him know I ever saw his drawings, but just knowing Jason has a talent, even a secret one, makes me like him better. I can’t figure out why he doesn’t let anyone see his sketches, but as I page through them, I marvel at certain expressions he’s captured with just a few strokes of his pencil.
But then, as I read the thought bubbles—dialogue and narration written in oddly familiar block letters—my happiness drains away.
The drawings might be great, but the story … the story is horrifying. I turn the pages faster and faster as the plot evolves. It’s about a boy who sneaks guns into an elite private school. With malicious glee, he executes the football team, then maims and taunts the cheerleaders as they beg for their lives. The drawings here are darker, as if Jason leaned heavier on his pencil, reveling in the spurting blood, the exploding eyeballs and the oozing brain matter of the once perfect and beautiful students.
I feel sick and dirty, but that’s not the worst. I might have been able to convince myself this was only fantasy, a harmless escape for a miserable boy. But the handwriting—that familiar print—is not Jason’s writing. It isn’t Jason’s plotline.
It’s Mo’s.
XX.
“WE NEED TO TALK.”
“Not tonight,” Mo says as he steps into the apartment, sounding like a weary husband confronted by a nagging wife.
I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for five hours, waiting, waiting for him to come home, scared to leave and miss him, with my anger, terror and frustration simmering under pressure as the clock on the wall ticks. Betrayed, I keep thinking. I’ve been betrayed. It’s one, and the early morning hour lends this meeting an eerie sense of unreality.
“No,” I say, my voice shaking with rage. “Tonight. Now.”
I’m so angry that I’m not tired. But I should have remembered that any show of temper always sparks Mo’s.
“Back off, Miriam,” he snaps.
I rise from my seat, my back sore from sitting for so long, my stomach sour and cramping, and pound my fist down on the table. Harder than I mean to—the blow sounds like a gunshot and causes my glass of water to wobble, then topple and roll off the table. It explodes as it hits the tile, sending shards of glass skittering across the floor.
We stand there for a moment, frozen by the sudden violence.
“Well done,” Mo finally says. But, stepping carefully between the pieces, he heads to where I keep the broom—something I’m surprised he knows.
I’m in my bare feet, so I stay put and watch as he carefully sweeps the glittering pieces into a small pile.
“I’ll need to mop the floor now,” I say, a bit petulantly. As if he’s the one who broke the glass, not me. “The broom’ll never get all the little pieces up.” I sit and pull my bare feet up to the chair, hugging my legs to keep out of the way.
Mo doesn’t answer, just keeps sweeping methodically, getting into corners, and eventually his pile is as much dust and crumbs as it is broken glass. I’m not much of a housekeeper.
He scoops it all up in a dustpan and pours it into the trash can. It tinkles as it drops.
“Now,” he sighs, like the parent of an unruly teenager. “What was so fucking important?”
I’m momentarily struck dumb. The combination of his unusual thoughtfulness with the broom and the profanity throws me. For a moment, I feel like I’m the one who’s done something wrong.
But the feeling doesn’t last.
I pull the notebook out of the bag I’ve slung on the back of the chair and place it on the table. We both stare at it as if I’ve produced a live snake, which in a way I have.
Mo’s eyes shift from the notebook to me to the door.
“Don’t even think about it,” I say, my voice low and tight. “We’re talking about this now.”
I see him thinking, eyes flicking around, looking for the right way to spin this, but I shake my head to let him know there’s no point in denying his part in this. His shoulders relax a bit, and I know he’s chosen what to say. I’m pretty sure it isn’t the truth.
“Isn’t it a trip,” he says. “Don’t tell me you didn’t laugh.”
“Don’t do this,” I say.
“What? You didn’t take all this seriously, did you?” He fakes incredulity. “Miriam,” he says. “Come on, don’t be a moron. We were just playing around. We have another notebook going where we’re fighting space aliens who take over all the politicians in the country. Is that real too? Are you going to call NASA? The National Enquirer?”
“You’re lying.”
He puffs up with mock indignation. “I’m not.”
Hugging my legs tighter, feeling cold and sick, I keep pushing.
“The only thing I’m wondering about is whether this was all your idea or if Jason contributed anything besides drawing the pictures.”
His expression hardens into hostility.
“You think he likes going to that school? Let me guess. ‘It’s a great opportunity for someone like him,’ right?” His tone mocks every adult sentiment we’ve ever been subjected to.
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