Chapter Text
This is not just surprise and pleasure.
This is not just beauty sometimes
too hot to touch.
This is not a blessing with a beginning
and an end.
This is not just a wild summer.
This is not conditional.
- Mary Oliver , What This is Not
Prologue
After the funeral, Adam went to the cornfields.
It was his favorite time of day, when the sun was invasive and overpowering. Adam stopped at the fence and put both arms through holes in the wiring. He reached out and shook a husk of corn violently; a stream of dusty confetti, lit up orange, floated around. The blood-red sun was settling down, tucking itself in among the dirt on the horizon. It was a beautiful day. Too beautiful a day, he thought, for a funeral. But then again, sometimes his whole life just felt like a collection of days that shouldn’t really exist.
He didn’t want to go back to town. Back in town, there were apologies and pitying looks and sandwiches cut too perfectly in half. It was all too much. He wished the sun would just set already. Some proof of something moving. He wished it would just be night.
He hopped the fence.
In the field, the mosquitoes enclosed him like water. He didn’t swat them – he found that made them worse. He let them bite. He hardly felt it, anyway. Good luck finding any blood in there, he thought, and even the bugs thought he was kind of a downer, so they let him be. The corn was harsh, tugging and yanking at his skin like fingernails.
Adam trudged on.
When he got to what he deemed the middle of the field – a bald spot where the corn was sparse – he stopped. He looked around and then up, breathing deeply. The rustling and commotion he had caused behind him calmed. Adam let his head fall all the way back on his neck. He had read once that a human head weighs ten pounds. He thought about that a lot: how impossible it seemed that you could carry ten pounds of head every single day. If he concentrated hard enough, he swore he could feel each pound, begging, demanding release, to be let down, down, down. How long it takes for a baby to support its own head. How this thin neck of his could possibly bear all that. Today, his head felt impossibly heavy. Not any bigger, just so, so heavy. Ten pounds. Ten pounds.
In his mind, he heard his father’s voice: Jesus, Adam. Give it a fucking rest.
So he let it fall.
First his head, then his whole body. He didn’t realize he had collapsed completely until all he could see was half pale dirt, half corn. He closed his eyes. He pressed all ten pounds of his head into the ground, dug his nails into the dry dirt as his hands began to shake. And in that moment, he hoped to God that he would never have to lift those ten pounds up again.
June. Five years later.
Gansey lifted his head from against the car window.
He had fallen asleep, though he told himself he wouldn’t. He had never slept in the Pig before; he didn’t know that was possible. He pulled over when his eyes started to water and the map on his phone started to blur. The rest was blank. He shook his head, looking around. His phone was on the ground and then was a red mark on his nose from where his glasses had been pressed into his skin the whole night. There was a small amount of drool on his cheek, which he wiped with his palm as he threw open the Pig door. The road was as empty as it had been the night before. Gansey took off his glasses and pinched his nose, sighing deeply.
Everyone (meaning his mother and Helen) had told Gansey not to make the laborious drive to Floribel, West Virginia with the Pig – there was a train that went straight from the city to the town’s station. But to Gansey, bringing the Pig was a necessity: proof of his seriousness about this trip. He had told his family that the fresh air, the openness, the solitude of his grandmother’s town would do him some good – help me reorient myself and my priorities, he believed his words had been. Help him study. Gansey was quite taken with the idea of a wooden desk, poised in front of a window, notebook and B pencil positioned just so, summer breeze brushing his concentrated face. Gansey loved this fantasy. Very Emily Dickinson. Gansey lived in this fantasy his whole year at college, fled to it, trying to convince himself that a change of scenery is what would bring his passion back. His excitement back. His… well, himself back. At least the parts of himself he actually liked.
Gansey shook his head and turned the keys in the ignition. The Camaro started instantly, like she was just waiting for Gansey to wake up so that they could just go already.
“There we go,” Gansey praised as he pulled back onto the empty road. He opened his window and let the cool air pummel him. He glanced over at his phone and saw he had two texts from Helen. He turned his ringer to silent.
He didn’t need more of Helen’s badgering. More of Helen’s making sure he was nice to Gloria, gentle with Gloria, arrive on time because Gloria was oddly picky about her schedule and you’d know that about old people if you hung around them more, Gansey. Gansey didn’t need that. Gansey still didn’t feel right about this trip yet. He still felt like an imposition, even though Helen had insisted that Gloria did wanted him to visit, desperately.
“This is so typical of the male child,” Helen had said when Gansey first told her of his plans. “Don’t visit our grandmother for years, don’t talk to her, don’t send her gifts —”
Gansey tried to reason. “I send her—”
“—and she still adores you, still wants you to come, still asks about you all the time when I’m there, which is three times as much as you, by the way, even though I have a real life and a real career, which is excuse enough not to visit her in the middle of ass-fuck nowhere.”
“It’s actually quite a charming little town.”
“ Don’t tell me it’s charming Gansey, I know it’s charming, I’ve been there.”
Gansey had apologized to Helen many times, though he didn’t see how it was his fault. It’s not like he wanted to be his grandmother’s favourite. Now he felt as though he needed to live up to some expectation, some image of a boy who Gansey had not been since he was fourteen. Now Gansey felt he was on a mission to deliver something, some essential Ganseyness that he wasn’t even sure he possessed anymore.
He stopped suddenly at a comically unnecessary stop sign; it was empty everywhere around him. Gansey sighed and fell back in his seat. He turned his head to the open window and suddenly smelled something that zipped him right back to youth: fresh-cut grass and manure. It was fairly disgusting, but it reminded him of how much he loved Floribel when he was younger — running around in fields with Helen, eating little red-waxed cheeses and Hersey’s kisses and fresh green beans. He remembered all at once why he wanted to return to Floribel: the simplicity of it, the way time didn’t seem to exist here. Gansey desperately wanted to return to that simplicity — or, if he couldn't find that particular simplicity, he just wanted to find a new one. One that reset him, plopped him right back on his feet again. That was all he wanted. He suddenly felt better, a childlike joy bolting through him at the idea of seeing his grandmother. See? Gansey smirked at himself. He could do this. He could do simple.
As he sped past the stop sign, he saw a cow, a singular cow, in a field. It struck Gansey as ridiculous, for there to be just a single cow there. But it made him glow. He knew he was going the right way. He felt an old feeling, the feeling he got the minute after they were let out of school for summer vacation. The abundance of time. The possibility. The very openness of it all. It made him expand from the inside out, and suddenly he was a child – reckless and without consequence. Without thinking, he stretched his head out the window and screamed happily, “HELLO, YOU ANIMAL!”
The cow, chewing grass, turned his head lazily towards him, unimpressed.
Gansey laughed, turned back to the road, and sped on.
“Adammm!”
Adam lifted his head from the garden and held up one gloved hand to shield his eyes from the sun. He watched as Petunia ran towards him, her long hair tangling in the bead necklace she wore.
“Hey, P.U. What’s up?”
The little girl held up one chubby finger, breathing hard, and he nodded, grinning at her as she caught her breath. She swallowed and said in a rush, “Miss G let me do twinkle twinkle today, and she said if I get good I can do it for the recital. It’s a duet.”
“That’s really cool,” Adam said, trying to match her enthusiasm.
“It is. So will you do it with me?”
Adam gulped a shocked laugh. “As a duet?”
She nodded, noticing a bug bite on her shoulder and picking at it.
“I would,” said Adam, “but I can’t play piano.”
“Miss G will teach you like she teaches me.”
Adam threw down one glove. Petunia bent to pick it up because it was patterned with cartoon ladybugs with huge eyes.
Adam said, “I don’t think Mrs. G likes teaching me. She’s tried before. I’m terrible. Don’t touch that and then touch the piano,” he added, noticing her toying with the dirt-crusted part of the glove. “Gigi will kill me.”
Petunia studied the glove before throwing it down the same way Adam had. He hid his grin as he took a sip of water. Petunia said, “I guess she did say she’d play the duet with me if I really wanted to do it, so…”
“There you go.” Adam stood up and started walking towards the house. Petunia flocked to his side and grabbed on his hand, swinging it. He gave her fingers a little shake, then looked around. “Your dad here yet?”
“I dunno.” She seemed unconcerned. After her piano lessons, she always ran to Adam, at first to ask him incredible amounts of pointless questions, and also probably to stall. But eventually, she started trying to help him — dragging the hose messily behind her as Adam watered the plants, digging little holes in the incorrect spot so that Adam could pour some seeds in there, tell her what and when they would grow. For some reason she really enjoyed him, and Adam liked her, too. He always seemed to forget he liked kids until he met another one.
They rounded the corner and saw her father’s van in the driveway. Petunia ran to her father, arms outstretched. Her dad got out of the car and picked her up, then waved to Adam. Adam lifted a hand but turned away. He was a nice enough guy — he had managed to half-raise Petunia – but he was racist in a very boring, very typical-of-the-south kind of way. He hoped too much of it didn’t rub off on Petunia. But he didn’t worry that much. She was a smart kid.
Adam watched the truck disappear from sight.
The street by Gigi’s house was always empty: it was a dead-end, short, unpaved gravel road leading to a green and pale-yellow field beyond. No one ever came by, except Chester and the parents of children who took piano lessons from Gigi. And Adam. His old red pickup truck sat where it always did, in front of a small garage that was falling apart. Gigi always left that spot open for him. The grass was wilted underneath from all the use. Adam liked the sight of it. A place for him to always come back to.
He entered the old farmhouse.
Done with her lesson, Gigi was in the living room, painting. The living room used to have regular living room things — a couch, a TV, a huge sculpture of a horse made out of recycled metal — but all those things were now in the fallen red shed. Gigi had had Adam put plastic tarps all over the wood floors. Now it was her studio. She said the light was best in here, and she was kind of right. Two huge windows looked out into the field, and the high ceilings and open space was inspiring even to Adam. Gigi had put nothing in there but a huge armchair and an easel. Paint tubes scattered the floor like dominos. In the evenings Adam would usually collect them and put them neatly in a little bowl on the mantel, because he worried about Gigi’s dog, Sheryl, getting into them like she did last year. There had been a blue tinge around her little white furry mouth for weeks, and it took two trips to the vet to assure them she was fine. Adam thought Sheryl probably knew better now, but Adam was still careful.
Gigi sat in her chair, oblivious to Adam’s entrance because after her piano lessons were done she took out her hearing aids. She hated the things.
“Did the girls, Miss G,” Adam said, loud enough so she’d hear, but not so loud that she’d be startled. She turned to him, placing her brush down. He showed her the basket full of eggs he had collected from the chickens outside.
“Did they behave themselves?” she asked.
“More or less,” Adam replied. The chickens, no matter how many times he went in to collect eggs from them, never seemed to like Adam, and clucked and scattered at his very presence. One of Petunia’s favorite activities in the world was to watch Adam chase one particularly bad chicken around the yard, which was something Adam periodically did for her amusement.
“ Naughties, ” Gigi laughed. She loved the chicken’s shenanigans.
She turned back to her work – a sporadic blue color against lines of orange. She clucked to herself. “Adam? Adam. Would you come look at this? I simply can’t tell if it’s what I want it to be.”
Adam, wiping his hands on a towel she kept hanging for him on a doorknob, walked over. “I like it, ma’am,” he said honestly.
“But do you want it ? Do you need it?”
“I– I don’t think I could afford it.”
“Oh! Adam!” She gave a shrill laugh and gripped tightly onto his arm with one veiny hand. “Not money. Never that. I mean do you want something else from it, something it’s just not giving you?”
Right now, Adam kind of wanted the painting to let go of his arm. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m not that artistic.”
“Hmmm.” She hummed in a nerve-racking way. “Yes, yes I suppose you’re absolutely right. Only the artist can know that, right? Right?” She looked at him with piercing eyes until he nodded hurriedly. “Right. Exactly. Okay. Well, just have Chester bring over some swatches when he’s finished. Some violets, perhaps.” She liked sometimes for Chester to take paint swatches from the hardware store so she could look through them for inspiration.
“Sure. Do you want Chinese tonight? Should I tell him to get stuff at Ling’s?”
“No thank you, dear. Chester’s cooking tonight,” She put both hands on her knees, turned herself in the chair to look at Adam fully. “Now, I trust you’ll be joining us for dinner?”
“Thank you, but I can’t tonight.”
“Are you absolutely positive?” She looked painfully at his stomach. “You need to eat well, Adam. You’re far too skinny.”
This was a discussion they had had many times, and Adam didn’t care to repeat it. He walked to the sink she had installed and began washing the dried paint out of some brushes.
“Just the runt of the litter,” he reminded her over his shoulder.
“Ha!” She threw her head back so forcefully Adam was worried she’d fall. “Adam!” She was thrilled by him.
She went back to painting. They existed in content silence together for some time, until she said, “Oh, shame you can’t join us, too. Dicky gets in tonight.”
Adam thought he’d misheard her. “Dicky?”
“Richard. You’ve met him, haven’t you?”
Richard. Her grandson. She had told him Richard would be visiting months ago. Adam had completely forgotten. Adam had in fact never met him, and didn’t care to.
“In that case, I’ll be out of your way,” Adam said.
“No! No, no, I wanted you two to meet. I think you’ll get along.”
Richard was… not just someone you seemed to just meet. It seemed to Adam like Richard was the one to meet you, or you hadn’t really met at all. Richard was the embodiment of all Adam disliked about the Gansey family: their huge amount of money, the casualness with which they spent it, and the ability to somehow subtly undermine its importance every chance they got.
Richard, though he was related to Gloria, couldn’t be much like her, consider how much time he spent in her presence: none. And Adam had already picked Helen as his favorite Gansey grandchild — she came far more often and seemed a lot more interesting. He had heard Helen talk about Richard – his trips to Iceland for seemingly no reason, his weird business startups that somehow got televised. Adam couldn’t believe someone could be so frivolous.
Adam did not think he and Richard would get along. Adam did not want to be the type of person who got along with Richard. But he smiled at Gigi all the same.
“Sure,” he said. “You’ll call me if you need anything?”
“I’ll shout it from the rooftops.” She gave him one of her classic, big teeth, movie-star smiles. That was all he needed. He grinned back at her.
“Bye, dear!” She called out as he walked through the house. Adam left through the back-screen door like he always did, cradling it until it shut all the way, so it wouldn’t slam.