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Once a year, a person starts to swell up. It’s a slow process, so most folks don’t notice the changes. Even their clothes swell with them. Clouds roll in from nowhere and the person steps outside and begins to find that their toes can no longer touch the ground.
A quiet takes over them. No words reach them. No words come out. No rope tied around them will hold. They start to pass through anything that touches them that wasn’t already on them. One year we tried tying everybody in town down at the first sign of clouds. Didn’t bother Bo Smith at all. Once his feet were a couple inches above the ground, his eyes became fixated on the floor, his breathing slowed down, and he drifted out of his binding and through the ceiling. He reacted not at all to the screams of his wife.
At some point, we can’t see them anymore. Doug Clemens had the idea to use binoculars once, but that year it was Nancy Engles, and she was a wisp of a woman, before she vanished into a cloud. Doug swore that she looked more and more like a ghost with every moment until he couldn’t see her anymore.
A handful of people still cleave to the idea that this is the rapture, but people who went to church or people who stayed home were both taken. Lots of folks put their faith in a cupboard and let it grow cobwebs. For them and for my family, the next part makes ascension to heaven so improbable or at least unnecessarily cruel. For a week, it pours rain, flooding town to the point where a person can’t leave or safely get around. School stays open just because this is a known issue and the bus driver is used to it, but besides that the town stays silent.
Worse still, the rain is full of salt. Tastes terrible. We’re a long ways from the ocean, and I’ve never been, but I always heard it’s salty like that too. This town is the only one in the county that can grow no crops because the soil is screwed up by all the salt. Lucky someone found extra reserves of oil out here about twenty years ago that brought some new people and businesses here, otherwise our town would have died off and people would have starved.
That’s why I call it a curse. The worst thing is we can’t talk about it. Our voices stammer when we try to talk about people we’ve lost or what happened to them. I tried to do a report on this in 3rd grade and was surprised that the page was blank when I tried to turn it in. Mrs. Haffert didn’t laugh at me, though. She started staring at the floor.
People can leave, but they’re guaranteed to come back. Maybe that’s the curse too, or maybe that’s just what it’s like to come from a place this small, this far from anybody else, where everyone knows everybody’s business.
How are you reading this? Probably means the curse is broken.
*****
When I pulled up in my truck after four years on the other side of the state, my mother first lifted her hand to her mouth, and her eyes grew wide. The creases around her eyes and in her brow became deep and dark, a face I used to see once a year. Maybe that was just her real face coming out because she quickly scrunched her expression into stern disapproval.
“You should not have come back here, Ellie.”
“I missed you. I missed my sister.”
“That sounds like a lie, because you never call.”
“It was hard to call because…”
“Because of…”
“Right. I’m sorry.”
“Tell me why you’re back here.”
“I know I should have reached out more,” I said, trying to swallow a brick in my throat. “I’ve been working on something and have an idea that I can’t really talk about.”
We can’t even talk about him, I thought to myself. This is terrible. I left whole voice messages that she was never able to listen to because they were scrubbed from existence.
I was already planning to leave after high school and stay away at any cost. “I got my degree in plant science.”
Her arms were crossed, and her face was stern. “Congratulations.”
I took off my backpack and unzipped it, pulling out bags of seeds. I lifted them up and walked towards her.
“These are coastal plants. They’re resistant to salt water. They might not work because this is such a different climate, but I’ve got a lot of different types to try out. Sea kale, sea spinach, glassworts, more.”
“I know the Gilroys have been trying to plant different things for years. You haven’t grown anything before.”
“Brett Gilroy couldn’t grow a healthy toenail, much less a coherent thought or a plant. And I have been growing stuff in my dorm. I’m loving plants mostly because we hardly see any unless we go to another town.”
“Where are you gonna grow anything?”
I gulped. “I was hoping you’d let me try the backyard.”
“Lot of stuff to clear out. Same with your old room. I’m assuming you’ll be staying with us for awhile? We were using your room for storage.”
Not surprised, I nodded. “If that’s OK. I can help move stuff around if that’s OK.”
She didn’t budge, but took out a cigarette and lit it. I was a kid the last time I saw her smoke.
“Alright. Come on in. I don’t have food or money for food right now, so I hope you do if you want to eat.”
The rooms of the house I remembered looked tinged in yellowish brown dust and were stacked with unopened credit card offer envelopes, collections notices, ragged grocery ads bookended by services people sell their jewelry and commemorative coins to, and very rarely a picture of him pulled out of an album and never put back.
The day he floated away, taking away with him a mountain of his own stacked up struggles, my Mom met his gaze on the floor and never really started looking up again.
“I can cook for y’all if you want. I do have a little money and don’t want to be a burden.”
“I don’t even know what you eat now. When my brother went away, he came back eating only green shit.”
I barked a short laugh. “I promise I eat pretty much what I did before. Though I’m hoping I can grow some green shit that other people will eat.”
One or two of those deep creases softened.
*****
Five days later, after multiple trips to the nearest town with a garden section, after I’d put my back into tilling up the dirt in the yard and setting down fertilizer, after I planted the seeds in nice rows, after I shared quiet meals with my mother where I would be looking at my phone and then look up her for a moment to find her sneaking a glance at me, after I laid down to sleep, I heard a knock at my bedroom door.
My mother’s face greeted me in the dark. Her brown eyes glistened in the dark. I have never seen her cry, but I could hear the strain in her throat as she grabbed my shoulders with her hands.
“Listen to me, Ellie. You have got to get the fuck out of here.”
“Mom I can’t go yet, I-”
“You’ve got to get the fuck out of here. I am asking you for this one thing. Get out of here.”
“Why, Mom?”
“I can’t! I can’t!” she hissed. “I can’t watch you! Leave me directions or call me or leave a voice mail or send me a letter about how to take care of your plants. I promise I will! I can do that! But I can’t watch you!”
I pulled away and slammed the door in her face. I tried to cry about it, but even now I’m still not able to cry in this house. Maybe Calculus is the only thing that makes me cry, or chocolate chip cookies from the grocery store in my college town because they remind me of the ones my Dad gave me whenever he took me shopping as a little kid, or Big Fish when the dad sort of turns into a big fish.
So instead I did what I do best and ran away again. I packed up my stuff and got out of there. I stopped at my sister’s room, kissed her on the head while she was sleeping, and tried to sneak out. She blitzed me from behind and hugged me so hard that my tension almost left right away.
“Rena, I have to go,” I said, prying her off of me. “I love you.”
“I love you too, but I know you have to go. Please be safe, please message me,” she said.
I crept out, but I noticed as I pulled away from the house that my mother was sitting on the porch, smoking a cigarette and watching me. At least her face finally seemed to relax.
Glad I could provide some relief, I thought.
When I drove about halfway across the state, just about as the sun was starting to come out, I parked at a rest stop to sleep for a while, and I checked my messages.
“Ellie, I’ve never been good with words and never been good to you, and I’ve been worse to you in recent years, and you have every reason to not call. I don’t know how to say anything that I really need to, but I can tell you that you have become a very cool young woman. I liked watching you work on the backyard, and if you tell me how, I will make sure I take care of it all exactly the way you say. That’s the one thing I feel like I can do.”
This almost broke me, because I felt like I found solid ground at the bottom of an abyss. But then she said:
“You cannot come back. I’m sorry, I hope you will understand, but you can’t.”
*****
When my sister was graduating, I came back anyway. I’d gotten married and invited them to come to it a year before, but they weren’t able to, and that was no surprise. Out of spite, I decided to go to them. I even brought my husband with me to introduce him. And to show him my home growing up, my school, and the weird switch it does from nearby green farmland to absolute dried earth once you’re within a mile of town, though I wasn’t able to use my words to describe exactly why it was that way.
Imagine my own switcheroo of dismay then disbelief then joy when I found patches of green amidst the dirt. My plants. I recognized them right away. They weren’t everywhere, but they had very clearly expanded beyond the yard. We decided to drive past the house first, knowing that we could peek into the backyard while they were at the assembly.
The house was nearly unrecognizable, it was surrounded by so much vibrant color. Plants you’d never see here, not even if you drove hundreds of miles in any direction. It wasn’t even overgrown! Mom must have followed my directions, because rows were still well kept and although the plants had gotten tall, someone was definitely taking leaves from the edible ones. Neighboring houses also had their own gardens, and a very nice garden store had opened in town, advertising some of the same seeds I had used.
My hometown had an Arby’s and a Burger King now, and they were separated by a median that had real plants growing in it. My school was now split into a combined elementary and middle school, and a small high school with a few portable units had popped up nearby and had a packed parking lot.
We caught them just as they were starting, but we had to sit apart from my mother. She clocked me from across the room and looked at me hard, but she didn’t cover her mouth with her hand this time.
I watched my baby sister walk in her gown. When she saw me, she looked concerned for a moment and then beamed with pride. I couldn’t stop grinning for her. Although I hugged her afterward, I didn’t stick around. Just like I told my husband we would, we split without a word to my mother.
But she was there at the exit to the parking lot. “You look good,” she said, after she basically put her body in the way of us leaving until I rolled my window down.
“I know you need to go. Hi Steven. Sorry we couldn’t make it to your wedding. We’ve been busy and it was right after. Right after. Right after. A rain.”
My jaw must have dropped. “I saw the plants at the house and around town,” I stammered. “Thank you. Thank you for raising Rena. I know it’s been tough.”
“Tough for all of us. I quit smoking. I’m hoping you and I can talk some time, but…”
“I know, I need to stay away. Bye Mom.” And I rolled up the window.
Later, hours down the road, I checked my messages and there was nothing. Good, I thought, I hope they’re celebrating Rena’s graduation.
“Hey baby, are you alright?” my husband asked.
“I’m fine. Just, you know, family feelings,” I replied.
“No, seriously,” he said, “you look ill.” He asked me to pull over.
“Your face! Your arms! Are you having an allergic reaction?”
Something was shifting in my home town, but we still weren’t able to talk to each other about it while there. This man I loved wasn’t from my home and was still seeing me everyday as if I was brand new, and at last he was able to see and say what I and my mother and sister could not.
I’d been swelling up every time I went home.
I’d been swelling with the memory of my Dad.
I’d been swelling with the silence and coldness of my mother.
I’d been swelling with every one of Rena’s birthdays that I missed, every phone call not sent, every neighbor’s lost loved one, every dust devil, every dead crop.
I had to cross the state to cry, clutching the steering wheel while my husband held me, until I started to let go of the salt water drowning my veins.
