HEAT DEVILS SHIMMERED over the cornfield. It was late July, the midday sun so hot that it raised blisters on Lara’s arms. It turned the leaves into green mirrors that reflected back a blinding light. Lara shut her eyes against the glare and held out her hands, trying to reach the edge of the cornfield by feel, but she tripped on the rough ground and fell, grazing her knees on the hard soil. She’d had plenty worse falls, but this one so humiliated her that she started to cry.
“Don’t be such a baby,” she whispered fiercely.
She sat up to inspect the damage. Her dress had a long streak of dirt up the front, and her knees were bleeding. She’d made the dress as part of a summer 4-H project for the county fair. It was pink lawn, with a placket up the left side edged in rose scalloping, and she’d won first prize for it. She got up, her knees stinging when she straightened them, and hobbled the last few yards into the cornfield.
The corn was so tall that walking into the field was like walking into a forest. After a few dozen steps, she couldn’t see the house or any of the outbuildings. The rows looked the same in all directions, neat hills about two feet apart. If she turned around in circles a few times, she wouldn’t know what direction she’d come from. She’d be fifty yards from home but would be so lost she could die in here. Probably she’d die of thirst within a day, it was so hot. Blitz and Curly would find her bones in October, picked clean by prairie hawks, when they came to harvest the corn.
She lay down between the rows and stared at the sky through the weaving of leaves and tassels. The corn was as tall as young trees, but it didn’t provide much shade: the leaves were too thin to make a bower overhead the way bur oak would. She scooted close to the stalks so that leaves covered her face and blocked out the worst of the punishing sun. It was a close, windless day, but when she lay completely motionless she could hear a rustling in the leaves, a sort of whooshing, as if they created their own little wind within the field.
Grasshoppers whirred around her. A few birds sang through the rows, pecking at the corn. The ears were just taking shape, the kernels at blister stage. The smell was sweet, not like the icky, fake-flavored corn syrup you got with your pancakes at the diner, but a clean, light sweetness, before anyone took the corn and started manufacturing things from it.
She lay so still that a meadowlark perched on the stalk right above her. It cocked a bright eye at her, as if wanting her opinion on the world.
“They’ll make the corn dirty,” Lara told it. “Here in the field, it’s clean. But then they’ll take it to their stupid factories and turn it into gasoline or plastic or some other nasty thing.”
The bird chirped in agreement and turned to peck at one of the ears of corn, trying to get through the thick husk. When Lara reached up an arm to strip the husk back, to help out, the bird took off in fright.
In the distance, she heard her father calling her name. She squinched her eyes shut again, as if that would shut out sound and sight both, but in a few minutes she heard the louder crackling of his arms brushing back leaves.
“Lulu! Lulu!” and then louder, closer, more exasperated, “Lara! Lara Grellier! I know you’re in here. Blitz saw you go into the field. Come on, we have to get going.”
With her eyes shut, she felt his shadow overhead, heard his sudden intake of surprised breath. “Lulu, what are you doing down there? Did you faint? Are you okay?” And he was bending over her, smelling of shaving cream—so strange, Dad shaving in the middle of the day.
It didn’t occur to her to lie, to say yes, the sun got to her, she fainted, she was too ill and weak to go. She sat up and stared at him, imagining how she must look covered with dirt and blood.
“I just fell, Dad. I’m okay, but I wrecked my dress. I can’t go like this, I wrecked my dress.” She burst into tears again, as if the loss of a stupid dress mattered. What was wrong with her, to cry over her dress at a time like this? But she sobbed louder and clung to her father.
He stroked her hair. “Yeah, baby, you look like you decided today was mud-pie day. It’s okay, the dress’ll clean up fine, you’ll see. You run in the house and wash up and put on something else.”
He pulled her to her feet. “No wonder you fell, wearing those crazy flip-flops in the field. I keep telling you to put on shoes. You could step on a nail, get tetanus or ringworm. Aphids could lay eggs under your skin.”
It was a familiar litany, and it eased the worst of her sobs. When they got to the house, he hesitated a moment before letting go of her arm. “See if your mom needs any help getting dressed, okay, Lulu? And don’t forget your trumpet.”
LATER, WHEN SHE’D been away from Kansas for years and finally came home again to run the farm, with children of her own who couldn’t tell the difference between a stalk of corn and a sheaf of wheat, the colors were what Lara remembered from that day. Most of the other details she’d forgotten, or they’d merged in her mind with all the other shocks and horrors that made up one long year of grief.
What her aunt Mimi and uncle Doug said when she shoved past them in the kitchen or Curly’s sour remark to Blitz, just loud enough for her to hear, “Are we supposed to drop everything and clap, now that Lulu’s turned into a drama queen?” let alone Blitz’s rumbling warning to Curly to get off Lara’s back, “She’s been through too much for a kid her age,” none of that stayed with her.
All she remembered was the heat, green leaves against blue sky, the red-brown blood on her pink dress. Oh, yes, and her mother, sitting on the edge of her bed in a bra and panty hose, staring blankly at the pictures of Chip and Lara on the wall in front of her.
The sight terrified Lara. Her mother was the active presence on the farm. Jim was cautious, uneasy with change, but Susan was a gambler, an experimenter. After he took physics, Chip labeled her a perpetual motion machine, “p-double-m” in teenspeak, because she never sat still, not even in church or at the dinner table—there was always someone who needed a helping hand up the aisle or “Just one more shake of salt will make this dish perfect.”
That hot July day, Lara shook Susan until her mother finally blinked at her. “You’re hurting me, Lara. I’m not a pump. You can’t draw water out of me by yanking my arm up and down.”
But she got up, and let Lara choose an outfit for her, a gold linen dress that Lara loved for the way her mother’s auburn hair looked against the fabric. Susan sat while Lara pulled up the zipper and tied a dark scarf around her throat, Susan smoothing Lara’s own brown curls away from her daughter’s face with a wind-roughened hand. She seemed so very nearly like herself, even on this day of all days, that some of the tightness went out of Lara’s chest. Nothing would ever be right again, but it wouldn’t be so horribly wrong if her mother started moving.
IF THE DETAILS of the year blurred into a long memory of grief for Lara, her father thought of them as a string of tornadoes roaring down on him. Jim saw himself as small, bewildered, holding out his hands in a futile effort to push back the funnels of wind.
For a long time, he played that most useless of all games: if only. If only I had paid more attention to Chip, seen how unhappy he was. If only I hadn’t argued so much with Susan about the bonfires or the war. If only I’d told John Fremantle no one could live in his parents’ old home because it was too rundown.
For some reason, that last one gnawed at him most, maybe because it was the one thing he thought he could have controlled: letting Gina Haring come to live in the valley. Not that it had been his decision, but he and Susan had been keeping an eye on the Fremantle house ever since Liz Fremantle died. Her three children had come back for her funeral, had looked at the old house and agreed with Susan that it would take a lot of work to restore it to the splendor of its early days, and had fled again, to New York and London and Singapore.
And then right before Thanksgiving last fall, John Fremantle called out of the blue to say he was renting the house to Gina Haring. Gina was his wife’s niece. She’d been through a difficult divorce and needed a cheap place to live while she figured out how to pull her life back together. And all Jim thought was, one less burden. Not, what will a stranger do to the subtle balance of relationships in the valley? Well, no one does think about that, do they?