Belinda's Rings

  And Prim left. It wasn’t the reaction Belinda was expecting. She turned around and walked away without saying a word, as though she had been anticipating Belinda’s rejection. She retrieved her small handbag lying in the field and took it with her, back down the curving arm of the formation and out of sight. Belinda, fists clenched at her sides, had watched her trudge away, holding her white hat by the brim as the wind lifted it like the lid of a kettle. Belinda’s body felt rigid, as if all her muscles had swelled and stiffened, leaving her a statue.

  Dr. Longfellow was first to leave the group and approach her.

  Did you know that woman? he asked.

  No, Belinda blurted. I don’t know anything about her.

  He offered her a bottle of water and she took it, dazedly. As she drank, her hands, her mouth, the cold water running down her throat, felt separate from her. Dr. Longfellow peered in the direction in which Prim had gone. I’m sorry, he said. Everyone goes through something like this.

  Excuse me? Belinda said. A bead of water trickled from the corner of her lips and ran down her chin.

  Well, it was bound to happen, he said. Unfortunately, our line of work often attracts — unstable people. I hope she didn’t upset you too much?

  No, Belinda said, no. She looked at Dr. Longfellow for a moment, shaking her head mechanically. No, she repeated.

  I was speaking with the owner of the farm, he said, pointing over to a man standing among the strangers. Apparently that woman showed up this morning asking if she could join the tour. He said there was something off about her from the start.

  Off? Belinda said. She felt the bead of water hanging from her chin, poised to drop.

  Well, Mr. Beaton told me it didn’t seem like she was here for the crop circle.

  I — I see, Belinda said.

  She was with someone, too, he said. Her son, presumably. Very strange fellow, so says Mr. Beaton.

  A man? Belinda said, wiping her chin. Where? Where is he? She scanned over the strangers in the distance, all of whom looked middle-aged.

  Didn’t come, Dr. Longfellow said. He was with her this morning, but she was alone when she returned for the tour.

  Belinda gave the water bottle back to Dr. Longfellow. Her hand touched his and she held it there, her fingers pressing into his knuckles.

  It was her son, my — she said, her breath swallowing her words. Dr. Longfellow looked at her queerly.

  Don’t be alarmed, he said. We’ll find out how she got your name. I’m sure she’s harmless.

  I think — Belinda began, then nodded. I have to go, she said, and began to run.

  When she reached the edge of the field, her pulse thumping in her ears, Prim was nowhere to be seen. Belinda followed the path out to the road. A line of vacant cars sat parked on the sloping shoulder. No one in either direction. She was about to turn around when she saw a shape moving through a grassy field beside a farmhouse, a few hundred yards down the road. Belinda ran as if the wind were chasing her, sandals slapping on asphalt. She had no idea what she was doing. She was following a blind hope, a sudden urge to understand what she was feeling, the hulking chasm in her gut — as if she’d been deceived. Cheated by her own fantasies.

  Nothing had changed on the street leading up to her mother’s house. She could picture it now, and herself running along it. Stick fences, slumping with age, standing at lazy angles to the square houses. The cobblestone streets collecting rivers of water in their cracks, covered with hairy patches of moss like a checkerboard. The pristine old bicycle propped against the front steps of the house on the corner, tangled in wild grasses. The patchy bit of stucco on the front of their house that her mother had tried in vain to repair, and rose stems climbing towards it on a rickety trellis. And her mother, alone, barely alive, sitting inside hunched over the embroidery on her knees. Up until now, her aloneness had seemed selfish. But there was something too familiar about that way Prim had turned her eyes, the way her mouth had begun to pucker at the edges. Prim was not married, not happy. Belinda knew without having to ask.

  Prim saw her coming. She met Belinda on the drive leading up to the house, but her smile had faded. She held her hands in a tight heart against her chest.

  Belinda, winded from the run, clutched her knees and let the sweat river down her face. She took a moment to catch her breath. Prim watched her, expectantly. Belinda wasn’t sure what she wanted to say.

  Where’s Sebastian? she finally said.

  At home, Prim said. He can’t be around strangers for too long.

  Belinda felt her eyebrows twitch.

  He’s autistic, Prim explained, a sudden sharpness to her voice. Belinda recognized it as bitterness.

  Oh, Belinda said. She resisted her impulse to apologize. Sebastian was well over thirty years old by now, Belinda figured.

  Prim looked down at her feet, nudged a small stone with her toe. Belinda stared at the gravel on which they stood, breathing heavily, searching for words. She examined the gravel’s rocky texture, imagined zooming in on a patch of ground and seeing the same texture repeated. Zoom further, same texture. The same pattern, again and again, into infinity. A formula — fixed, unyielding.

  I named my son Sebastian, Belinda said, more to herself than to Prim.

  I know, Prim said.

  Why? Why did I do that? Her mind was spinning, the words flinging out like splashes of mud.

  Prim stared at her blankly. I’m not sure what you’re asking, she said.

  I haven’t seen you in thirty-six years, Belinda said. I want to know why I’m so — afraid of you. I’ve always been afraid of knowing you, knowing anything about you.

  Prim bit her lip. I don’t know, she said, squeezing her eyes shut against her tears. I don’t know. She wiped her palm over her eyes. Perhaps . . . perhaps you didn’t want to turn out like me.

  Belinda turned her gaze to the fields, stretching out in long waves behind the house. She focused on the thin lines of wheat stalks, trembling together in the wind. The crop circle was just visible in the distance, a shadowy inkblot, like a spill on the landscape.

  And when she looked back at Prim, she saw nothing but a woman. She was just an ordinary woman, like anyone else. Nothing special, as her mother had always said. All these years Prim had remained stagnant — a woman, a mother, reduced.

  But I did, Belinda said. I turned out just like you.

  16 Camouflage

  I USED TO BELIEVE that people couldn’t change. Now I realize that if other people are anything like me, they hold on to certain memories like pieces of themselves, and take them along wherever they go. We’re made of the things that happen to us, so that no matter how much things change around us, we will always be who we are. I try to think about that when I get stressed about change. I try to remember that I’ll always be me, no matter what is going on around me.

  But even so, sometimes it really gets to me when I find out that a place I remember so clearly has changed. When Rose got back from Disney World last summer, the first question I asked her was if she liked the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ride.

  Huh? she said.

  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I said, slowly. You know — the submarines?

  She blinked. I don’t know what that is, she said.

  It’s only the best ride in the whole park, I said. You’ve seriously never heard of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? Jules Verne? Captain Nemo?

  How long ago was it that you went to Disney World again? she said. Weren’t you like, twelve?

  Yeah, I said. Four years isn’t that long, ya know.

  Well I didn’t see anything like Under the Sea or whatever, Rose said. They must’ve taken it out.

  How could they take it out? I said. There’s this ginormous pool for all the submarines. It’s huge.

  How should I know? Rose said. Maybe it was busted. Or maybe no one knows what that is anymore so they shut it down. Who cares, anyway.

  After that I just kept my mouth shut ’cause i
t was obvious that Rose was in one of her moods where everything I say is lame. And anyway, part of me really didn’t want to know that the submarine ride was gone forever. I wanted to remember it in my own way, and I wanted that memory to stay true forever.

  When I went to Disney World with Da, the submarine ride was the best part of the whole trip. We’d only had the one day to do all the rides ’cause Da’s conference was in Miami and it was his only day off. Up until then I’d been hanging around the hotel swimming pool by myself during the day, bored as all hell. The pool had waterfalls and a floating bar in the middle. But when you’re twelve there’s only so much wading and suntanning and pineapple juice-drinking and magazine-reading you can do before you start wishing you had someone you could splash or play Marco Polo with. Jess hadn’t wanted to come ’cause she’d already signed up for Horseback-riding camp with her best friend for that week. I’d told her she was nuts to turn down a trip to Florida, but she said it probably wouldn’t be fun with Da anyway. Turns out she was kinda right.

  I don’t remember much about Miami. I remember going down to the beach outside the hotel and seeing a lady doing cornrows in girls’ hair for money. Da had given me ten bucks and that got me two cornrows, one on either side of my head. Da was pissed when he found out how much I’d paid. How could you be so stupid? he’d said. I thought he was being super mean at the time, but looking back I have to admit it was pretty stupid. And the trip wasn’t all bad. Once Da was done with working and we drove to Disney World in Orlando, he let me drag him around wherever I wanted. It was a pretty fun day, all things considered. Da really wanted to go on It’s a Small World so we did, but when it was over I made sure he knew how dumb it was, how freaky all those little robot children looked, and he had to agree. When we came out of Space Mountain a bird landed on Da’s head and I laughed hysterically watching him swat at his hair and run around in circles, Get it off, Jesus Christ! But when we left the park that evening we both agreed, hands-down, that Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was the best part of the day.

  We knew it was going to be good ’cause the lineup was the longest of any ride. When we finally boarded we got seats next to one of the little round windows at the back of the sub, where it was darkest. It was a nice break from the hot sun of the day and all the screaming and flashing lights and stomach-wrenching drops. Everyone was quiet in the sub, little kids included. We watched the blue water bubble and rush past, listened to Captain Nemo’s voice telling us scientific facts about the creatures peering at us with shiny glass eyes.

  And when we came up on the giant squid near the end, even Da gasped. It was really the only sea creature along the whole ride that you could almost believe, so it made the fake-looking fibreglass fish and the mermaids with cartoon faces and stick-straight arms forgivable. In the dark, murky water, the squid was bloated and pink like a muscle. Its tentacles coiled tight around the belly of another submarine. A single glowing eye, big as a Frisbee, glared in our direction.

  Full repellent charge! Captain Nemo ordered. Lightning flashes flickered in the water and our sub zoomed ahead. The eye, bright and unblinking, followed us like a waning moon.

  A couple of weeks after we got back from Florida, Da surprised me with a book called SEA MONSTERS: GIANT SQUID. It had a black-and-white drawing of a squid attacking a submarine on the cover.

  Just like the one we saw, remember? he said, grinning.

  It was a nice thing for Da to do, but I remember thinking it was kinda dumb at first. It looked like a kid’s book, and at that time I was trying to get into sophisticated adult books like Animal Farm and Great Expectations. The book sat uncracked on my bookshelf for months until one day, just out of curiosity, I decided to flip through. It turned out that the book actually had some cool facts inside. For instance, that all squid have camouflage capabilities. And not camouflage like the way some moths have wings textured like bark so they look like part of the tree. Squid have chromatophores in their skin that can actually shift and morph the pigment in the cells to change colour. If they want to, squid can blend right into their surroundings no matter what they are — coral, rock, or even sand — and they can do it so well that they practically turn invisible. One minute you see a squid and the next there’s only a tangled bunch of seaweed. They have the power to change into whatever they want to be. That means that wherever a squid goes, it’ll never be somewhere it can’t fit in.

  That’s when I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist. I read that book cover to cover. Then I took out a whole bunch of other sea-life books from the public library. I dug up the boxes of Wiley’s old National Geographics in the basement and went through every single one looking for underwater photographs in coral reefs and deep-sea trenches.

  I dreamt of squid. I kept having the same dream where I was swimming in the hotel pool in Miami and I felt something brush up against my legs, but when I looked down into the water there was nothing there. I tried to swim away but something was holding me by the ankle. Somehow I knew it was a giant squid, in camouflage with the clear blue water. Invisible. I kept kicking my legs but the squid held on, and then it began to swell up like a sponge, larger and larger, until the whole pool filled up with slimy squid flesh. I was trying to climb out but I kept slipping and sliding on the squid and falling on my face and getting squid juice in my mouth. The swelling flesh rose up around me like a thundercloud — and then I’d wake up.

  I made the mistake of telling Jess about the dream and of course she looked it up in her dream dictionary, even though I’ve told her over and over that I don’t believe in that psychoanalysis crap.

  Let’s see, she said, finding the page and running her finger down the list. Here it is — Squid. If you see a squid in your dream, you may be feeling unconsciously threatened.

  ’Kay, I said. Big whoop.

  Wait, Jess said, there’s more. Your judgment might also be clouded.

  This stuff’s so bogus, I said. It’s like horoscopes. Everything they say is so wishy-washy that it’d be easy for anyone to convince themselves, Oh yeah, that’s totally me.

  Jess just ignored me. Alternatively, she said, a squid can also symbolize greed. You may be thinking about yourself while disregarding the needs of others. Oh wait — there’s also something here about eating squid . . .

  I wasn’t eating it, I said.

  Didn’t you say you got some in your mouth? It says here that — Ugh, just forget it, I said. I don’t believe in this stuff anyway.

  Eating squid indicates that you are feeling self-conscious, and you worry about how others perceive you.

  Oh my God, I said. Can we stop now?

  Fine, Jess said. She tossed the book on her bed. She had a little smile on her face, as if she’d just learned some dirty secret about me. That look always makes me steam like a hot sausage. I threw a hissy-fit and stormed out of her room, which probably made her think she was even more right. It’s not like I cared, anyway. I mean, who isn’t self-conscious? Certainly not Jess, Miss I-talk-to-myself-in-the-mirror.

  I had the squid dream a few more times after that. I wouldn’t call it a nightmare because by then I’d decided that squid were pretty much the coolest creatures on earth. And probably the neatest thing about them is that no matter how hard scientists and oceanographers try, they still don’t know much about them. There was one oceanographer who tried attaching cameras to the backs of sperm whales on the slim chance that they might come into contact with a squid. Surprise surprise, it didn’t work. And as much as I like learning new things about deep-sea creatures, I’m glad the squid is still so mysterious. It makes the things we do know seem like treasures.

  My absolute favourite thing to tell people about squid is that they have not one, but THREE hearts. Nobody believes me at first when I tell them that. They think I’m making it up. I admit, it does seem kind of excessive. Why would a squid need three separate hearts when most other sea creatures get by just fine with one? Well, the reason is that squid need to circulate lots of b
lood in order to breathe at such low depths. They have one main heart that takes care of most of the body, and two smaller hearts, like mirrors of each other, that feed the gills on either side. Now, most people ask me why they don’t just have one big heart that pumps more efficiently instead. I don’t really know the answer to that. I’ve never been able to find it. But sometimes, just ’cause it’s more fun than saying I don’t know, I’ll say, Because three is my lucky number. That’s what I said to Rose, but she just clucked her tongue the way her mom does when her dad makes a corny pun.

  Right, she said. ’Cause that makes a whole lotta sense. I guess that’s also supposed to explain why you’re wearing three rings?

  I shrugged. They’re my Mum’s, I said. I can’t decide which one I like best.

  Well, she said, you could at least wear them on different fingers.

  Yeah, I said, maybe. But I didn’t want to. I’d been wearing them for long enough that there was a slight indent in my finger, as if the rings were starting to fuse with my skin. When I took them off it looked like some of my finger was missing. The skin that the rings usually covered was smooth and shiny, like the scar left by a bad burn.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Many books and articles were instrumental in helping me to understand the culture and controversies surrounding crop circles. Particularly useful were: Crop Circles: Exploring the Designs and Mysteries by Werner Anderhub and Hans-Peter Roth; “Anatomical anomalies in crop formation plants,” published in Physiologia Plantarium (92) by W.C. Levengood; Secrets in the Fields: The Science and Mysticism of Crop Circles by Freddy Silva; and Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern Times by Lucy Pringle. The crop circle illustrations in this book were inspired by the drawings of Leora Franco, featured in Pringle’s book.