A History of Wild Places(103)

“I can’t live here, can you?” she asks.

“I was barely living here before.”

“Neither was I,” she says.

I shake my head, certain that’s not true.

“We left the others behind,” she adds, her eyelashes flicking, reminding me of feathers falling from a sad winter sky.

We fought so hard to get out of those woods, I can’t believe we’re talking about returning to the place that held us captive. Going back into the dark of that forest.

“Theo,” she says, pulling my focus back to her. “Maybe we only get a few chances to choose our own lives.” Her eyes skip to the door, wavering, before finding me again. “And this is one of them. This is ours.”

She lowers her palm to place it against my chest; my heart beats wildly, my head feeling suddenly loose and alive, a fever threading through me. “I’ll go wherever you want,” I tell her. “I’ll go back to Pastoral.”

Calla’s eyes are like full moons, and she leans forward, kissing me on the lips, running her hand up my chest to my neck. “I love you still,” she whispers against my mouth.

She slips from bed and walks to the small chair beside the window, pulling a sweater over her head.

“Now?” I ask.

She nods back at me, grinning. “I need to go home.”

“What about your parents?”

“I’ll leave them a note—they’ll understand or they won’t. I don’t really care.”

We have nothing to pack, only the few supplies given to us by the hospital, so we leave our room without a suitcase, without things to weigh us down.

All we have now are our memories.

And we will go back to the place where we first forgot, to pick up the pieces. To make the wrongs right.





EPILOGUE





CALLA


Bee has her baby in the spring.

It rains against the farmhouse, a deep welcoming rain, coaxing the baby into the world. Faye stands at the foot of the bed, murmuring to Bee softly, calming her. “We’re close,” she says.

I heat water on the woodstove and bring up clean washcloths, anything to keep my hands busy, to feel useful while nerves clack up and down my spine.

“Open a window,” Bee says to me.

“But it’s raining.”

“I know.” Her lips curl up into a gentle smile. She’s always loved the rain—even when we feared it, she longed to stand out in the meadow and catch the drops on her tongue. It rained the day she was born, she tells me. A good omen.

I slide the window up into the frame, drops of water pelting the bedroom floor. Bee stretches her hand away from the bed, toward the open window, palm wide. She smiles when she feels the drops on her skin. “Thank you,” she says, closing her eyes.

Another contraction drives through her and she clamps her teeth shut, moaning against the pain, seizing my hand in hers. My sister. We might have been born to different parents, but we were both born in these woods, in Pastoral. And she is my sister—a truth that cannot be undone.

Downstairs I hear Theo pacing across the living room floor, Henry is there too, speaking in low, anxious tones. The community has been awaiting this birth—a child born to the woman who has become our new leader.

Bee has taken the place of the man who lied to us.

She told the others the truth: about the border, about the pox, and how she killed Levi to save her own life. All decisions are now made together, for the common good—governed by all—the same principles that Cooper believed in when he founded Pastoral.

The road is open now too, our fear subsiding.

Members come and go as they like, but mostly they stay—the outside world not how they remember it. Or how they want to remember it.

Outsiders come too, visiting those they thought were lost. Even my parents have come—my mother finally admitting to my father the truth—and she walks through the garden, recalling a time long ago when she lived in these woods, when she gave birth to a little girl who found her way back.

Parker and Theo still guard the gate, they keep the outside from spilling in too quickly—they keep reporters and TV crews from converging on our quiet life.

We’re building something new.

The kind of place the founders had set out to make. A slower life, a return to something lost. And sometimes, I wonder if Levi wasn’t entirely to blame for what happened to us—perhaps we allowed ourselves to be fooled, because we wanted to be someone else.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs echo down the hall, and the bedroom door swings open. It’s Netta, carrying a glass bottle. “It’s all Roona had,” she says, handing the bottle to Faye.

“It’ll be enough,” Faye answers, taking the bottle of neroli oil and pouring some into her palms. “The baby is ready,” she says, touching Bee’s stomach with her hands. “It’s time to push.”

I brush Bee’s hair back from her face, last summer’s freckles dotting her cheeks and forehead. I will tell the story of Bee in my book—if there are still stories inside me—I will tell how she lost her eyesight then gained it back; I will tell how a man named Travis came in search of me, how if we had met before, in the outside, we might never have fallen in love. But here, in Pastoral, we became who we were always meant to be.