A History of Wild Places(102)

My mother lets out a long, labored exhale, as if she’s been holding it in for seven years, and I let her pull me into a hug. She holds me like that, not letting go, like she could make up for all the times she didn’t draw me to her and tell me everything would be okay.

I thought my life inside Pastoral was an illusion, a shell formed over the person I used to be, but maybe my life out here is just as scarred and scabbed over.

Just as broken.

No matter where you go, there are cracks in the plaster, nails coming loose, you just have to decide where you want to piece yourself back together. Where the ground feels sturdiest beneath your feet.

I forgive her for the secrets she’s kept: for not coming to look for me when I disappeared.

But maybe I also understand why she didn’t. Pastoral was never a place she feared; it was where she ran away to; it was an escape. And maybe she thought I wanted to stay lost, stay gone—she was only protecting me.

After all, Pastoral is where I was born—I was never an outsider in that secluded stretch of forest.

I was an original. Born within the boundary.





THEO


I sit up in bed, sweat pricking my forehead, eyes struggling to make sense of the room—I search for the bedside table, the old dresser, the tall window and the curtains letting in the moonlight. But I’m not in the farmhouse, I’m in a hotel room in a town I’ve never heard of.

Calla touches my shoulder. “Nightmare?”

“A memory.”

“Of what?”

I dig my hands along my scalp to the back of my neck. “My sister.”

Calla sits up beside me, placing her hands gently against my arm. “You have a sister?”

“I used to.”

I close my eyes and I can see her: Ruth. She’d blow bubbles from her bedroom out into the narrow hall that separated our two rooms, then she’d squeal, Did you see it, Travis? And if I didn’t answer right away, she’d stomp her small, eight-year-old feet on the floor to get my attention. Bubble wishes, Travis! If you catch one, you get to make a wish. But this memory of her is quickly replaced by a worse one: finding her in that shitty motel room. Arriving a few minutes too late.

But more painful than the memory is realizing that I had forgotten about her. For the last two years, I forgot that my sister had ever existed, ever lived and then died. It feels like a gut punch.

“She died,” I say to Calla. “Suicide.”

“Theo.” She squeezes her hand against my arm. “I didn’t know.”

“Neither did I. I couldn’t remember her until now.”

“I’m so sorry.” Calla’s eyes look glassy, the faint light from the streetlamps outside reflecting across her dark skin. “It was cruel, taking our memories from us. But even crueler now that we remember them.”

My old life is only scraps. Everyone I cared about, my parents, my sister, are all long gone. I didn’t have much more than what I do right now: a hotel room and an old truck. I dropped off the map long ago, before I ever found Pastoral. Even my talent has slipped away from me, a thing I’m afraid to let come rushing back: afraid of what it will show me, what it will mean.

“My sister is still out there,” Calla says now.

I know she’s been thinking of Bee; I can see the worry tunneling through her, making her hollow. But it’s not only Bee we left behind. The others are still trapped inside the border that Levi created, frightened of an illness that isn’t real.

I touch my wife’s hand, winding my fingers through hers. Palm to palm. Even here, in this hotel room, she seems grown from the forest, a wild creature not meant for cityscapes. She rests her head against my shoulder. I’m sorry, I want to tell her. For the time we lost, for the people we really are. But this thought is cut through by another: Maybe those two years spent in the woods together were the only time that mattered.

Maybe we only believed Levi’s lies so completely because we wanted to, because we needed to forget the pains of our past. We all have something we’d like to forget, some broken piece of ourselves we’d like to bury in the grave of our minds, and living in Pastoral allowed us this small gesture. A part of me healed while inside that farmhouse—the awful wrenching pain of losing my sister fell away. The hurt and anger shed from my bones, and now, thinking of her, I feel a sadness that doesn’t suffocate quite so bad. I can think of her and still take a breath. I can think of her and remember more than just the last time I found her.

The forgetting healed old wounds.

The forgetting wasn’t all bad.

“We can’t stay here,” Calla says, releasing my hand.

“I know.” I turn to face her. “In the morning, we’ll leave. We can go with your parents, if that’s what you want; we’ll figure things out from there.”

“No.” She touches her fingertips to my forehead, then winds them through my hair, following the motion with her eyes. “These aren’t our lives, Theo.” She smiles. “We have to go back.”

“Where?” I ask dumbly, like I’m afraid to hear her say it, admit what I’ve already been thinking.

“You know where.”

I trace the line of my wife’s shoulder to where her hair falls down her back. I try to imagine her sitting in a coffee shop, talking on a cell phone. I try to imagine her in rush-hour traffic. But I don’t know who that woman is, the person she was before.