V

THE GRAIN WAS WOVEN with riddles. Canola, wheat, maize, barley, linseed, and rye. Their brittle stalks would snap if you tried to bend them by hand. Before Belinda knew anything about crop circles, she assumed that the shapes were mown out of the fields, the stalks razored off. She’d seen the front-page stories in the tabloids speculating that UFOs had been landing in the fields, stamping the ground beneath with their spinning discs. The increasingly intricate designs quickly debunked that theory, but another convincing explanation had yet to take its place. Unorthodox wind vortices couldn’t explain how the grains of one stem bed had been bent at different heights to create defined layers like trifle, or how these layers could be swept in opposite directions. But crop circle theories fell by the wayside as soon as those two opportunists from Southampton insisted they had masterminded the phenomenon. They claimed to have dragged a plank attached to a rope to flatten the grains. Belinda was certain this was just a ploy to gain attention and notoriety. The manmade crop circles could be picked out on first glance by even the least discerning eye; they were crooked and lopsided, the lines wavered, and the flattened grains were smattered about the ground like road kill. They were a joke compared to the true circles, in which the stalks were bent at near ninety-degree angles and brushed like hair into perfectly symmetrical forms. The stalks were not flattened, but hovered inches above the ground. Their seeded heads had been swept into neat parcels of cresting waves. No evidence of footpaths leading into or out of the field. And besides, there were simply too many occurrences — more than one hundred each year in England alone, and dozens more across the globe — to be attributed solely to the work of two silly pranksters.

For Belinda, the most fascinating evidence came from Marshall V. Longfellow’s article on the anatomical anomalies found in grains taken from crop circles. She was finally sitting on the train, nearly on her way to meet the man himself. She had a copy of Dr. Longfellow’s seminal article with her, which she’d already decorated with highlights and penciled notes. She’d practically memorized it, but she took it out of her purse and looked over her notes again, as a distraction. She’d been chewing her nails incessantly as she waited for the train to start on its way. For a moment, she wondered what Wiley and her children might be doing, if they were sitting at the breakfast table, eating the toaster strudels she’d bought on Sebastian’s request. But then she realized it was two in the morning where they were. Everyone would be in bed. She quickly turned her eyes back to her article, back to Dr. Longfellow’s inspiring words.

He was an American biophysicist, and a legend in crop-circle research. He had been the first researcher to take samples and analyze their molecular structure, and he found that the plant cells had in fact been altered at the site of bending. The results of his tests suggested that the grains had been manipulated by microwaves, heated at the nodes and flexed into shape in the same way a piece of glass can be rendered malleable under flame. Some of the stalks even showed evidence of singeing. When the bent nodes were dissected and examined under microscope, they appeared to have burst from the inside out. A series of concentric circles radiated from the centre of each ruptured node, branded into the plant cells like minuscule tree rings.

Belinda couldn’t fathom why the skeptics had largely dismissed Longfellow’s findings. She guessed fear. It was evident, at any rate, that the grains had suffered some sort of trauma, and yet Belinda preferred not to think of it this way. She’d seen photos of one crop circle in a field of flowering canola, where each delicate yellow petal remained intact and untouched. The formation looked like a giant Easter wreath dotted with thousands of flowers, all nesting gently among the combed stems as if tucked into place by an invisible hand. If the incident had been traumatic, surely the canola flowers would have died. Surely the grains wouldn’t have continued to grow in their horizontal positions without making any attempt to regain their vertical posture. But they accepted their alteration willingly, continued to live, and even to ripen. Belinda saw it as a testament to the beauty of adaptation.

When Belinda was a child and still living in her mother’s house, they had a lopsided houseplant. Her mother kept it banished to a dark corner of the living room and it grew sideways, sprouting long, gangly arms that reached out in search of scant sunbeams. Her mother insisted it stay there because she bought it specifically to decorate that corner. To move it would defeat its purpose. The plant grew teardrops for leaves, and they gathered on the ends of the pale, limp stems. Every week when the time came for Belinda to water it, she thought of her sister.

Prim had left when she was fifteen years old and never returned. Belinda was only a baby at the time. In her mother’s embittered way, she made the subject of Prim taboo. She isn’t anything special, her mother insisted. Only a bad girl.

Of course, this only made Belinda more enamoured with her. She knew that Prim looked like her, with the same green eyes and dense blondish-brown hair. Their neighbour, Mrs. Fields, had given that away when she patted her on the head and remarked that Belinda was a spitting image of her sister, but that she hoped she was better behaved. Belinda had also deduced that Prim had the same wide ankles and square, boyish feet. Her mother had once told her, when none of the boots in the local store would fit her feet, that stocky ankles and feet were the Harris family inheritance, and not one of the ladies on the Harris side had escaped them.

But as a teenager, when Belinda thought of her sister, her stockiness was not a burden but a symbol of strength. Prim’s green eyes were luminous, not mossy, and her hair thick and luxuriant rather than unruly. She smoked cigarettes, the long curl of smoke wisping from her lips like a question mark. She dated boys, which, Belinda had intuited, was part of the reason for her fallout with their mother. Belinda had imagined Prim as a more confident, more beautiful, and seductively mysterious version of herself. Perhaps even a future self. Prim was the Snow White that Belinda aspired to be, banished from the house by her evil mother and noble in her bold independence. In Belinda’s mind, wherever Prim had gone she had undoubtedly married the man of her dreams, and this was all she needed to be sublimely happy. Belinda was content to believe this, and didn’t want any evidence that proved otherwise. It was naïve, but it allowed her to believe that you didn’t need a good mother to turn out all right.

The lopsided plant had been Belinda’s bridge. It had been there all along, since before Belinda’s birth, a living witness to Prim’s existence. Years later, when she moved out of her mother’s house, Belinda took the plant with her. She placed it on the kitchen windowsill in her apartment and watched the stems rise up from the soil after only a few days. She kept the soil moist and rotated the pot every so often, allowing the sun to pour over each leaf with equal attention. Within two months, a tiny flower bud had pushed its way out of the soil. And eventually, the bud unfurled into a lush, fuchsia-pink bloom. An azalea. Her mother had never known, had always assumed it was just a plain green plant. She had never given it the chance to be an azalea.

Belinda liked to believe that the plant had disguised itself for all that time. It became what it needed to be according to the circumstance. When she married Dazhong and moved to Canada, she’d had to leave the azalea with her neighbours. She had often wondered what forms it had taken since then, how many transformations it had undergone. In the twenty-one years that had passed, she had never once allowed herself to believe that perhaps the azalea had died.