The Seventeen-Year Summer

Part One · The Green Notebook

Bea Okafor had disliked insects for as long as she could remember, which was a considerable inconvenience in a family that otherwise adored the outdoors. She disliked moths for their dusty infatuation with lamps, beetles for their unpredictable trajectories, and anything with more than six legs on principle. So when her parents announced that she would be spending June with her grandfather in Corley's Bend, while they finished transporting the family's belongings into the new apartment, she accepted the arrangement calmly, right up until her mother mentioned, casually, over dinner, that it happened to be a cicada year. Bea inquired what that meant. Her mother explained that underneath her grandfather's lawn, at that very moment, there were probably several thousand insects that had been waiting in the darkness for seventeen years, and that they were about to emerge, every one of them, practically simultaneously. Bea set down her fork and asked, in an extremely level voice, whether it was too late to enroll in summer camp instead.

Her grandfather, whom everybody called Amos, including people who were not remotely related to him, lived in a narrow yellow house at the bottom of a hill, with a white oak in the back garden so colossal that its roots heaved up the patio flagstones like a sleeper turning over beneath a blanket. He met her at the bus station leaning on a cane, because his knee had been replaced in April and he was not yet permitted to kneel, climb, or, as he put it, do anything interesting. That evening he retrieved a battered green notebook from the kitchen drawer and laid it on the table between them. Seventeen years earlier, he explained, a university had recruited volunteers to count the periodical cicadas emerging in their own gardens, and he had done it under this oak with his daughter, who had been twelve years old at the time. Now the university was asking the original volunteers to repeat the census, in precisely the same locations, so that the scientists could compare the two generations.

The notebook was crammed with her mother's handwriting at twelve, which was rounder than it was now and embellished with unnecessary circles above the letters. There were measurements, dates, and meticulous diagrams of the oak, and a square marked out beneath it with pegs and string, exactly one meter on each side, which was apparently called a quadrat. Taped inside the back cover was a small brown object that Bea initially mistook for a withered leaf, and then recognized, with a shudder, as the vacant husk of an insect, split neatly down its back. On the last page somebody had written the words Next count, followed by a date seventeen years later and a blank line for a name. Amos said that he could manage the notebook and the arithmetic from a lawn chair, but the actual counting had to be performed on hands and knees, which was out of the question for a man with a new knee. He did not ask her directly, however; he simply left the notebook open on the table, retired to bed early, and allowed the blank line to do the asking.

Bea contemplated the blank line for a long time, and her mother's twelve-year-old circles, and in the morning she announced, without enthusiasm, that she would do it, on the condition that nothing touched her. Amos said that seemed entirely reasonable, and spent breakfast describing what was happening beneath the lawn. The cicadas had hatched among the twigs of the oak seventeen summers ago, smaller than grains of rice, and tumbled to the ground and burrowed down to the roots, where they had been sipping the tree's sap ever since, gradually growing, in perpetual darkness, for longer than Bea had been alive. They did not emerge according to the calendar, as she had assumed. They emerged when the soil a few inches down warmed to approximately sixty-four degrees, and then they surfaced together, by the thousand, in the evening. He presented her with a long steel thermometer, the identical one, he said, that her mother had used, and demonstrated how to insert it into the ground beside the patio.

Part Two · Sixty-Four Degrees

For a week the thermometer registered fifty-eight, then sixty, then fifty-nine, and Bea consulted it each evening as hurriedly as possible, from the farthest conceivable distance, as though the numbers themselves might bite. She was supposed to stake out the quadrat during those first few days, but the earth beneath the oak was soft and damp and riddled with small round holes, each about the width of a finger. She kept inventing reasons to postpone it until tomorrow. On Thursday the afternoon was warm and muggy, and at dusk she finally ventured out with Amos and his flashlight to string the square. She had positioned two pegs when something brown, armored, and stiff-legged clambered out of the grass and onto the toe of her sneaker, and then began, with tremendous determination, to ascend her ankle as though it were a tree trunk and she were merely the most convenient one available.

Bea shrieked loudly enough to set a dog barking three gardens away. She kicked, and the insect sailed off into the dusk, and she stumbled backward through the half-finished quadrat, dragging the string and pegs along with her, and toppled the jar of spare pegs off the patio wall, where it shattered on the flagstones. Then she fled indoors, abandoning the quadrat and most of her dignity on the lawn, and stood in the kitchen with her arms clamped around herself, trembling, while Amos laboriously climbed the steps behind her with his cane and the flashlight. He did not mention the jar, and she helped him sweep up the splinters of glass, which took a long time, and neither of them spoke, and she felt more miserable than she had felt about anything all year. When they had finished, standing at the sink with the dustpan, she told him she was sorry, that she could not do the count after all, and that he should telephone the university and explain. Amos said that he would consider it, and went to bed.

She could not sleep, so she carried the green notebook upstairs and read it properly for the first time, from the opening page to the last. Her mother's early entries were brief and furious: Hate them, declared one, underlined twice, and another said simply, Disgusting, beside a sketch that was more enthusiastic than accurate. But the entries changed somewhere around the middle of the notebook, in a single week of late May, and Bea reread the page where they changed three times, slowly, with the lamp pulled close. Her mother had stopped recording how she felt and started recording numbers instead: the soil temperature every evening, the minute the first nymph appeared, how long each one required to climb the trunk. Bea realized that the numbers had not been solely for the university; they had been her mother's method of knowing what was approaching, so that nothing could ambush her. Bea did not expect to stop being afraid all at once, but she wanted to stop being startled, and that, she decided, was something she could arrange herself.

In the morning she staked out the quadrat again by herself, in broad daylight, with twine from the kitchen drawer and pegs whittled from a splintered garden stake, measuring each side with Amos's yardstick until it was precisely one meter. She took the soil temperature at breakfast and again at supper, at exactly the same depth, and plotted every reading on graph paper taped to the refrigerator, so that the line crept across the page like something on a hospital chart. It went sixty-one, then sixty-two, then sixty-one again after a drizzly afternoon, which was infuriating. Then came sixty-three, on a muggy evening when the whole garden smelled of cut grass and warm stone. She also asked Amos, directly, the question she had been too apprehensive to ask, which was whether they bit. He said that cicadas had no means of biting a person and no sting whatsoever, and that the worst a cicada could do was mistake her for a tree, which was arguably a compliment. On the ninth evening the thermometer registered sixty-four, and Bea carried two kitchen chairs onto the patio, facing the oak.

Part Three · The Count

They began at dusk, exactly as the notebook had predicted. First one hole and then another opened in the soft earth beneath the oak, and brown nymphs hauled themselves out, shook off the crumbs of soil, and trudged, steadily and without the slightest hurry, toward the nearest thing that pointed upward. Within an hour the trunk of the oak was swarming with them, and so were the legs of the patio chairs, the cane, the birdbath, and the clothesline post. Bea sat with her knees drawn up and her hands squeezed between them, breathing carefully through her nose, but she remained in the chair. She had selected one particular nymph, level with her eyes on the trunk, and she kept the flashlight trained on it the way her mother's notes recommended, low and slightly to one side, so that it would not be disturbed. It stopped climbing, anchored its front claws in the bark, and went utterly motionless, and for a long time nothing whatsoever happened.

Then its back split open along a straight seam, like a jacket unzipped from the inside. Something pale and soft eased out of the opening and dangled there backward for several minutes, so white it was almost blue in the flashlight beam, with two eyes like droplets of red ink. It extracted its legs one at a time, curled upward, gripped the empty shell, and pulled out the remainder of its body, and then its wings began to unfurl, crumpled at first and then gradually smoothing, translucent, veined with green and gold. Bea forgot to be disgusted; she forgot, for nearly an hour, to be anything except fascinated. When she finally glanced away, Amos was observing her instead of the cicada, and the oak was encrusted with pale new insects slowly darkening, and the abandoned shells clung to the bark by the hundred, each one split down its back exactly like the one taped inside her mother's notebook.

In the morning she knelt in the dirt inside her own quadrat, with Amos in a lawn chair beside it cradling the notebook, and counted every exit hole, inserting a toothpick into each one so that nothing was tallied twice. The total came to two hundred and twelve, whereas seventeen years earlier, in her mother's round handwriting, the figure had been one hundred and ninety-eight. Amos inscribed the new number beneath the old one, and then he passed her the notebook and the pen, and she turned to the last page and wrote her name on the blank line. By the end of the week the males had begun singing from the treetops, a relentless, swelling, electrical roar that drowned out the radio, the lawnmowers, and occasionally conversation. Amos explained that only the males sang, by flexing small drumlike plates on their sides, and that the females replied with a flick of their wings. By the following Saturday Bea discovered that she could distinguish the two from the porch with her eyes closed.

When her mother telephoned that Sunday, Bea held the receiver out of the kitchen window for nearly a minute so that she could hear the chorus, and her mother laughed and said that she had forgotten how deafening it was. Bea described the graph on the refrigerator, the sixty-four degrees, and the two hundred and twelve, and then, after some hesitation, the shattered jar of pegs. Her mother was silent for a moment, and then she confessed that she had once shrieked so piercingly at her first cicada that the neighbors had hurried over to discover who was injured. That evening Bea selected an empty shell from the oak, an immaculate one, split cleanly along the back, and taped it inside the cover of the notebook beside her mother's. Then she did the arithmetic, counting forward on her fingers, and realized that at the next count she would be twenty-nine. She discovered, somewhat to her own astonishment, that she was already looking forward to it.