The night my big sister disappeared was full of fireflies and a harvest moon—two kinds of light you almost never see together and that we watched from our blanket between the corn stalks. Corn is tall. Taller than you, when you’re a seven-year-old kid. Tall enough to hide the things you want to keep secret or forget. And I have forgotten a lot from that time, but I remember why we moved there. We were homeless, not in a position to turn down the inheritance of a failing farm.
Mom begged for the bus fare from Omaha to somewhere near Wayne, Nebraska from people at church, and then we were there, in front of a probably-once-white house of two stories with a wraparound porch and 80-year-old maples standing guard at each end, so red-orange in the dusky light, they looked like they were on fire.
The farm didn’t work. Maybe Great Aunt Erna had just been too old to farm anymore, but when we arrived at the too-large house on the too-small plot of land, the only plants we could see were trees and weeds. “How did she live off this?” Rebecca asked, running her twelve-year-old fingers through the tall grass, but what she was really asking was how were we—who knew nothing about farming—going to live off it?
At least in the city, we could get water from the neighbor’s garden hose when ours was shut off and buy 25-cent brownies from the gas station. Here, there was nothing. “She sold the land, piece by piece. This used to be 70 acres,” Mom said, looking around tiredly. She seemed shrunken, brittle somehow. The anger that had fueled her for the months since she was fired was gone. Now, like the farm, there was nothing.
“Is this where you were the beauty lady?” I asked.
The two of them walked from the front of the house to the road for a minute, maybe looking for some corn hiding in the weeds, like big and little spoons peeking over waving seed-heads, identical except for size. “Queen, Victoria. But yeah,” Mom said.
Rebecca and I were in no rush to go inside, but Mom sighed and said, “Grab your stuff. I want to get set up before dark in case there’s no electricity.”
There wasn’t. Through the dimming light, we could see what there was: a forest of stuffed, dead creatures from deer to birds to foxes, dust, cobwebs, furniture covered in roses and daisies and some poppies, none of it matching except for its floral proclivities. The room smelled like mold and decaying leaves. Just leaves; not a person. Though Great Aunt Erna did die somewhere in there, between the animals, and must have waited weeks for someone to notice she hadn’t left her house. There appeared to be three bedrooms, but we slept in the living room on the floor that night, with the lifeless forest creatures keeping watch. It just seemed safer.
A neighbor kid, Tom, showed up the next day, knocking on the door with a case of water, sandwiches, and fruit. He was somewhere between a boy and man with black hair and dirty shoes. “Thought you might need this,” he said, handing the water over to Mom.
“You from the reservation?” Mom asked.
But Rebecca pushed past her. “Thank you,” she said to Tom, taking her blonde hair down from its ponytail.
“Used to be. We live here now,” he said to Mom, pointing behind the house. “Do you know about corn?”
Mom sighed. “No. But there isn’t any, anyway.”
Tom walked past us through the house, sidestepping broken and sharp-edged tile without looking down. He opened the back door, and there it was—planted around cattails and a pond whose depth we couldn’t gauge. “But there’s no equipment,” Mom said, looking around. “How did she harvest it?”
“It’s bloody butcher,” Tom said. “For the whiskey.”
“What? What are you talking about? I asked how she harvested it.” Mom’s voice was getting higher.
“Mom, I think that’s the kind of corn,” Rebecca said, putting her hand on Mom’s arm.
Tom nodded. “Bloody butcher corn. The Millers cut it for her, and she sold them the whiskey.”
I picked up an ear from the ground and peeled the husk back. “Red. It’s red!”
Mom took it from me, examining the kernels, already starting to rot from their time on the ground. “They say if a girl finds blood-red corn, she’s going to marry that year,” Mom said, mostly to the ear in her hand. Then, she looked up at Tom. “Sometimes boys your age would plant them for girls to find,” she said, dropping it. “To trick them into staying.”
He didn’t say anything, and she lit a cigarette she’d had stashed somewhere and sat down on the stoop behind the house so that the corn towered over her. How strange it wasn’t visible from the front of the house, at all, I thought, mesmerized by its height. “So, you live on our land?” Mom asked, using her free hand to push her thinning pale hair out of her eyes.
“Mom! Jesus.” Rebecca stomped inside, letting the wooden screen door slam behind her.
“Miss Erna sold all the land,” Tom said, and he didn’t seem upset at Mom, the way most people were. “Except this,” he added.
***
That night, I woke up to an empty space next to me, but Mom’s spot between us was still warm. She was out back with the corn, crouched and digging. “Mom?” I said, too quietly for her to hear over whatever she was muttering. “Mama!” I said.
She looked up, her tired, dirt-smeared face lit up by fireflies so that the shadows danced around her eyes. “Go to bed, Victoria. What are you doing up?”
“What are you doing?” I sat down next to her in the dirt. She did things like this sometimes. Things I’d learned not to tell other adults.
“Magic,” she said. “Be quiet so I can finish.”
She buried something and then grabbed my arm with her muddy hand and dragged me back to our pile of blankets on the floor, under the silent watch of the animals. When she was asleep, I went back out and dug it up. It was a sheath from an ear of corn.
In the morning, I set it on the table, dirt sprinkling the cracked Formica. “Why did you bury this?”
“Victoria! God, just leave my shit alone!” Mom said, snatching the sheaf and stomping outside to return it to the earth.
Rebecca held my hand as we sat down on the stoop, watching her. “Mom, what are you doing?”
Mom sighed. “It’s a Danish thing my grandma taught me. Look, don’t do it or anything, but it’s a curse.”
Rebecca put her arm around me. “For a person? Who?”
Mom sat there staring into the corn for a minute. “John,” she said, starting to cry.
Rebecca nodded wisely, though looking back I’m not sure how much she could have known at twelve about Mom’s affair with her boss that cost her job. “What does the curse do?”
“He will rot from the inside as the corn decays in the earth,” she said, sitting up. She dried her eyes, leaving dirt streaks on her cheeks. “I think I know where Aunt Erna kept the whiskey. Come on.”
***
We didn’t have any food or water, despite the fully grown corn not twelve feet out our back door and the seemingly deep pond it surrounded. Tom started coming by every day, dropping off both, checking on the distilling, fixing things he could fix, keeping us alive. Rebecca followed him around like a puppy, so much like Mom. Like rewinding Mom’s life and watching it play out again.
After a few days and Mom’s reminding the power company we couldn’t use the well without it—which meant a sweet, beautiful mother and her two innocent, little girls would die alone on that farm—Tom called Mr. Miller to help us harvest the corn and sell the whiskey.
We came outside to meet his truck where he parked it on the dirt driveway. He was tall and white and had a gold tooth on top somewhere you couldn’t see unless he smiled. Where Tom was silent for the most part, Mr. Miller talked. “I’d heard some pretty girls moved out here, but the rumors didn’t do you justice,” he said mostly to Rebecca, crouching down to look her in the eyes.
Tom was silent. Mom was all smiles. “Yep, my beauties. This is Rebecca and little Victoria.”
“Different daddies, huh?” he said, still smiling.
Even I could see Mom crumple and harden and change tactics, in that order, and I knew it was because I wasn’t golden like Rebecca.
“You girls know there’s a harvest moon tonight? An orange moon. You oughta camp out and see it. Best view in the world, right here.” Mr. Miller stood up. “Corn’s more than ready. Let’s see the bourbon.”
Mom took him to the cellar, and Tom, Rebecca, and I sat on the back stoop before the towering corn and cursed corn sheath. Silent, watching a frog or two jump out from between the ears. Tom picked up an ear from the ground and said, “Want me to make you a corn doll, Victoria?”
Rebecca hugged me into him so that we were one hug. “Yes, please,” I said into her shoulder where my face was pressed. “I don’t really like him.”
Tom took the husk off the ear, piece by piece. “No,” he said, glancing toward the cellar. “Grab a couple more ears.”
While I collected corn, Tom grabbed an old pot from under the steps and dumped out the dirt and bugs. “I’ll go with you,” Rebecca said, gesturing toward the pond, through the stalks.
Tom nodded and looked back to the cellar. “Come, too,” he said to me. “We have to soak the sheaths first.”
The water was hidden behind so many tall things that you couldn’t see over, could only peek around. Cattails becoming soft fluff between your little fingers, hiding muddy banks and lily pads and frogs. Rebecca filled up the pot, and we stayed there to strip off husks and push them under the chilly water. “It takes ten minutes,” Tom said, catching a frog and handing it to me.
When the husks were soaked and flexible, Tom showed us how to form them into little people. He ripped pieces of a sheath into strips and used them to tie the dolls together. “This is us,” Rebecca said, handing two dolls to Tom, and she did the smile Mom used for men.
Tom smiled at the faceless couple kind of sadly. “Let’s go back,” he said.
Mom and Mr. Miller came out of the cellar a little bit later. “He’s going to take me to grab some groceries,” she said, as they got into his white truck. “Tom, why don’t you go home now?”
Rebecca grabbed Tom’s arm, and I grabbed hers. “Don’t leave us here alone,” I said to anyone listening.
Once the truck pulled away, Tom said, “Okay. I’ll stay.”
I jumped up and down. “Let’s explore the house!”
Tom nodded, seemingly unsurprised that we hadn’t left the main floor, that we still slept in a nest under the animals’ gaze instead of in the three bedrooms upstairs. “I’ll show you.”
I scooped up my corn dolls and followed them inside. “If we find a marker, let’s put faces on them,” I said, imagining their missing features.
Tom glanced back at me as we walked, single-file, up the narrow staircase to the second floor. “You can’t,” he said. “They aren’t supposed to have faces.”
“Why?” I asked, but Rebecca called: “Guys, come here!” from the first room off the landing.
It smelled like death and decay and mothballs. Rebecca didn’t seem to notice as she dragged a photo album to the bed I was sure Aunt Erna died in and laid it out for us to see. “Look at these!”
“Can we go downstairs?” I asked, but they didn’t respond.
“Is this mom?” Rebecca asked, pointing to a blonde girl in the album.
Tom looked closely and flipped the page to more pictures of her. “I think this is Miss Erna’s daughter. The one that drowned.”
“She had a daughter?” Rebecca asked, turning the page.
“Look! There she is with Mom!” I pointed to a photo of the two of them when they were teenagers, sitting on one of the floral sofas in the living room with the animals like they were at a watering hole.
“They look like sisters,” Rebecca said, inspecting the picture closely.
They did. More than Rebecca and me. “Hey, isn’t that Mom’s pageant sash?” I said a page or so later.
Rebecca snatched the book and turned the pages slowly, examining the photos of this mom-like girl in all of the pageant stuff mom used to have before we were homeless. Rebecca’s hands were shaking. “She lied.”
“Maybe there were two queens?” I suggested.
“No,” Rebecca said quietly, after reaching the last page and closing the book. “She stole that stuff and lied to us.”
Tom seemed confused about the significance of this to Rebecca, but I understood; Rebecca thought her face would be her ticket out of this life, like it would have been for Mom if she hadn’t had us. But apparently that path led to death, and Mom never had a ticket anywhere. I took her hand. “She lies about not smoking, too, but she probably really will quit one day,” I said.
“I want to see this girl’s room,” Rebecca said, walking out.
It was the room next to Great Aunt Erna’s, the room of a teenager frozen in the past. Her bed was made with a quilt of flowered squares and an old stuffed rabbit. Romance novels sat dusty on the shelves. On her vanity, her own corn dolls were in various stages of decomposition. “She drowned, right? How old was she?” Rebecca asked.
Tom shrugged. “We didn’t live here then,” he said. “And Miss Erna never talked about her, but I heard it happened in the pond out back when she was 18 or 19.”
“In that pond?” Rebecca looked out of the girl’s window which faced the back, and from the second floor we could see it clearly. The corn couldn’t hide it from up there. “How deep is it?”
He shrugged again. “Deep enough to never dry out and feed all the thirsty corn. I thought that was why she planted it around the water. In town, they said it was to block the view.”
But Great Aunt Erna’s own bedroom window faced the pond, too. By the time we left her daughter’s room, tired and sad, it was dark. I took the girl’s quilt to camp with so that Mom would still have a blanket on the floor when she got home. When we were outside, Tom said, “I have to get going.” He looked over our heads for the truck that wasn’t there.
“It’s okay. We’re going to sleep out here, so we’ll see them come back,” Rebecca said, taking my hand.
Tom hesitated, then nodded and turned to go. “Wait!” I said. “Why can’t I give my dolls faces? You never said. I think they’d be happier if they could see.”
He took one of the dolls from me and stroked its missing face. “Because a long time ago the Corn Spirit made a doll with a beautiful face for little girls like you to play with. The doll went from village to village playing with the kids, but after a while she’d get distracted by her reflection in the ponds between the villages,” Tom said, looking up at the pond behind the corn. “She loved herself too much and forgot that she was made to make the children happy. The next time she stopped to stare at herself, there was nothing to see. The Great Spirit had taken back her face.”
Rebecca held my hand very tightly, and once Tom was out of sight she started crying, sinking into the ground between the stoop and Mom’s reburied curse-husk. I wrapped my arms around her, and she said, “I can’t stay here.”
I stroked her hair. “Please don’t leave me. It’ll be okay.”
After a few minutes, my sister wiped her face, and we wove our way through the corn and fireflies, spread the flowered quilt out, took off our shoes, cuddled up, and waited for the moon. She kissed my head. “I won’t leave you, Vic.”
***
In the morning, the blanket was there, and I was there, but she was gone. I ran through the house, looking for her in every room, calling and calling, until I reached a room I’d never been in.
It was a bedroom past the dead girl’s, and I slowed down, catching my breath. The door stuck when I tried to open it, and inside, it smelled like dust and looked like a museum. The faded, flower-covered walls were lined with shelves of porcelain dolls with nearly identical white faces and glass eyes and painted mouths in a sun-bleached rainbow of dresses.
I felt the air being sucked out of me under the gaze of this army of petrified children in their dying garden. Some had fallen face-first onto the wooden floor, so that delicate milky shards of their cheeks and smiles booby-trapped the landscape. I lifted a doll from the floor and pushed her yellow yarn-hair from her face, revealing a jagged hole. It was too hard to breathe in there, without air. These little girls took every breath for themselves. I dropped the doll and ran from the room, a porcelain sliver puncturing my foot, shooting physical pain into my brain to accompany all the rest.
I sat on the stairs and pulled it out, breathing hard, tears making it tough to see it clearly. Then, I left the bloody thing on the landing, like a pulled tooth, and ran out the back to the cornfield, leaving a trail of blood smears and tears, calling and calling.
I ran to the pond and then through row after row of corn, calling and calling. There was nothing. Nothing. It was like she’d never existed. “What are you doing?” Mom yelled. “What’s wrong? Shit!” I saw her hopping from where she’d stubbed her toe.
“She’s gone!” I yelled. “Gone!”
“Jesus. Calm the fuck down, Victoria,” Mom said, lighting a cigarette and sitting down. “What are you talking about? Rebecca? She’s probably in the house somewhere.”
“She is gone,” I said. “Call the police!”
Mom rubbed her face. “With what phone, Vic?”
“I’m going to Tom’s,” I said, already running, still barefoot. “I know which house it is. I’ll call the cops.” I heard her yell something after me, but I knew it wouldn’t be worth hearing.
The house that Tom shared with his mother was even more dilapidated than ours. Smaller, less reminiscent of something that was once-white, more slanted, so that it seemed to lean on a pine tree near the Western side. No driveway, like ours. Just dirt. I pounded on the door.
“What is it?” Tom asked. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t let me in, but the smell of something rotten slipped out around him. “Who’s there?” I heard someone call—someone old or sick or wounded.
“Um,” I said, trying to peer past him. “Can I—we can’t find Rebecca. Have you seen her?”
He shook his head. The voice was kind of moaning now. He didn’t look behind him or acknowledge it. He stood there.
“Well, uh, can you call the police, please? We don’t have a phone that works,” I said, turning to run back home.
He didn’t say anything.
“Please?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ll call them, Victoria. Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll find her.”
***
The sheriffs—a pair of them, like twins—arrived in a tan truck that spewed the driver’s clipboard and Burger King wrapper when he opened the door. He picked up the clipboard and left the wrapper. The two of them walked the farm and some of the land surrounding it, jotting things down on the clipboard, but they didn’t find her. They decided she’d most likely run away because of what she’d said to me, but Mom kept screaming at them to “Drain the pond! Drain the fucking pond!”
“We just don’t have the resources to do that for a runaway,” the clipboard man said with serious, skeptical eyes looking—not at Mom; more like past or through her. It made sense to me at the time. When you’re poor, you kind of exist in the background, in the space of obligation. I was already used to it. Rebecca could transcend that sometimes because she was so beautiful, but it never helped her. “I think it’s best to blend in sometimes, you know?” she’d said once.
Now, when her life may have been on the line, she was not there to inspire men to become their most gallant selves. I guess her shadow wasn’t enough. The only thing I knew for sure was that Rebecca did not run away. She told me she wouldn’t leave me, and she did not lie.
“Why do you want them to empty the pond?” I asked Mom on the back stoop where she sat smoking with shaking fingers. “Because of your cousin?”
Mom looked up at me standing over her. “Hazel,” she said softly, turning back to stare out through the corn.
After a minute or so, I sat down. “She died in there?”
Mom nodded and said in a faraway voice, “It was her birthday party. No harvest moon. No moon at all that night.”
I waited, quietly making a circle with my finger in the dirt for my corn doll to sit in.
“Someone dragged her into the water and held her in,” she said. Then a rough, brutal inhale and sobbing. “He hit her on the back of the head.”
Mom grabbed me in a desperate, clinging way, pulling me into her. The hug smelled like smoke and felt foreign and sad, but good, too. “Her blood was on the rock, on her dress—” her voice cracked. “She bought that dress for her party—I just want my Rebecca,” she sobbed.
***
For the next month, we tried to drain the pond ourselves with siphons we made—long, black rubber hoses that we thought would empty far enough into the corn to keep from running back in. Like a huge snake that you underestimate because it’s so skinny. Mom told me that when you started siphons, they would keep sucking on their own until the water was gone. “I saw it with fish tanks,” she said while we unspooled the length of hose from the pond to as far as it would reach.
“Where did you see a fish tank?” I asked. My arms burned and ached, but I was happy. We were doing something to find Rebecca. We had a purpose.
Mom looked down at me, her blonde hair matted to the sides of her face. “Vic, Jesus, keep it all coiled up, okay?”
It was hard to keep up with her. I remember that. “Did they have fish in them?”
“Oh, the tanks? Yeah. A couple houses I worked at had them. One lady wanted me to clean hers, so I learned about siphons.”
We stopped once the hose was unraveled completely, and I flung myself down on the grass.
“Her fish was dead,” Mom went on. “She didn’t want to suck up dead fish parts, so I did it.”
“Wait, what? You sucked the water out? Like a straw?” I followed the hose down to the pond as far as my eyes could see through the corn.
“You just start it that way, Vic.”
But the hose was too long for what little suction we could provide to work. At the end of that day, we sat covered in dirt, with mouths smeared black from the hose and taste buds saturated with rubber. Mom sobbed into the grass, and I threw up from the taste. I remember thinking we were lucky all we sucked up was rubber and a few bugs. Maybe Mom could suck up dead fish parts, but I don’t know if she could have handled dead Rebecca parts.
When we accepted that we couldn’t drain the pond, we tried to sift through it ourselves, dragging our one blue bucket and every pot and bowl we had to the edge. I filled, and Mom dumped. Then we traded, which was a bit harder because I was smaller.
When Tom found us there, he set down the apples and sandwiches he brought and started helping. None of us spoke, passing each other on our trips to dump the cold water.
“Come eat,” he said eventually.
“Does your mom make these for us?” I asked. “That was your mom I heard, right? At your house?” The sandwiches were bologna and mayonnaise on white. No crusts, like we were all children.
Tom nodded.
“Should we go over and thank her, you think?” I asked either of them.
Mom stared at the pond, but Tom shook his head. “She doesn’t like visitors,” he said.
“Oh.” I tried to wipe the dirt smears off the bread and asked, “Should we make a card then?” Even Mr. Miller and his wife—he never came alone now—stopped bringing us food. “We should say thanks.”
“I wanted to be a vet, you know,” Mom said suddenly.
Tom and I stared at her, but she just watched the pond. “A veterinarian. I was smart,” she said. “I could have done it—college, I mean.”
Tom and I glanced at each other. I wasn’t embarrassed of her in front of him. He never appeared to judge too much. It seemed like a lot of grownups thought there was a social obligation to show observers where they stood on a matter. Maybe he wasn’t old enough to act that way yet.
“My little brother, Bobby, and I wanted to save animals when we were kids,” Mom went on. “Feed baby squirrels, try to fix a bird’s wing, that sort of thing.”
I scooted closer to her.
She didn’t move away, and I slowly leaned into her. “I liked making them whole, you know? Making things—just putting them back the way they were supposed to be. Making them perfect.”
I looked over at Tom who was chewing and watching us. “What do you want to be?” I asked him.
He took a bite, and then he looked at Mom. “I want to be a vet, too,” he said.
If he said it for Mom’s benefit, it didn’t work. “Let’s get back to work,” she said, the spell broken. But the pond was much deeper than we realized, and our pots and bowls and one bucket were no match for it. Before Tom left for the night, Mom turned to look at him, acknowledging him for what I realized was the first time that day. “Why?” she asked.
He looked startled. Mom could be that way—startling, abrupt. “Why—oh, why do I want to be a veterinarian?”
She just stood there, waiting.
Tom kind of blushed a bit and tucked a piece of hair behind his ear and said, “I like seeing how things work. Taking them apart, seeing how they fit back together.” Then, he walked home.
***
After a while, no one from town or neighboring farms like the Millers came by anymore, and even Tom didn’t come around as much to help us dump pond water on the corn. Without discussing it, we slowly gave up. On one of the last days that we tried to find her, Mom said, “You know, Rebecca lied all the time. She really was just like me.”
It wasn’t true, of course, but I nodded. “You think she ran away without me? Even though she said she wouldn’t?” Agreeing with Mom felt like the right thing to do. My sister ran away. She is alive somewhere, sleeping in parks with stars overhead. We’ve done it before. It is possible.
“It’s the only answer,” she said.
I knew we were giving up on her. I wiped my tears off with my shirt, but soon there were too many, and I just took my shirt off and wiped my whole face. I sat there shirtless with dirty, puffy eyes. “Then, I want to say goodbye,” I said.
The cattails and corn swayed around us with the wind, hiding us from the world. I kissed my corn doll on its head and held it out to Mom, whose now sunken eyes considered it, suspiciously. She raised fingers with bitten-down nails covered in dirt and took the doll. “I’m so sorry, Bunny,” she said, her voice cracking around the words tumbling out. “I know I didn’t deserve you,” she whispered, holding it to her face and soaking it in tears. “I love you, you know. Always did.”
I had turned toward the pond to give them privacy, but then she said urgently, thrusting the doll in my face, “Victoria! I think I cried her face off. Her face is gone. Look!”
“Mom, it’s okay. They don’t have faces. It never had one.”
“What?” She looked at it closely. “Are you sure?”
I put my little arm around her. “Yeah. I’m sure, Mama.”
“Oh,” she said, examining its missing face beside the pond. She looked down at the water that Hazel drowned in, that the corn drank, that we drank, that may have been concealing Rebecca at that very moment, her face twisting with emotion. “It’s like mine,” she said, pointing at her reflection. “Look in the water. There’s nothing there. See?”
I looked, but the water rippled from the wind, agitating it too much to see anything reflected. I gently took the doll back and held it up for Mom to see. “It doesn’t need a face. Look, it’s beautiful,” I said.
She took my hand and held it for a long time. Then, she carefully laid the doll on a leaf and pushed it out from the bank. A beautiful girl on her tiny boat. I watched its wake, and when the wind stopped and the water was calm, the outline of my mother’s eyes came into focus—full of grief, but visible.
