A History of Wild Places(15)

Whatever we have is all there will ever be.

Calla looks out the window at the fields beyond the farmhouse, the chores to be done, fruit trees to be harvested, laundry on the line to be brought inside. She places her hands on her hips then turns, crossing the room back to the bed—her movements slight and easy. She is comfortable in this house, inside these walls. I peer up at my wife and at first her expression is flat, giving nothing away, but then a little smile curls across her upper lip, as if she’s forgiven me for my silence. Forgiven me for whatever wandering thoughts were flitting around inside my head. She kisses me full on the lips, tracing her finger up my temple, coiling it in my dark hair. “I love you still,” she says, a reminder.

At times, in the long hours of late afternoon, it feels as if we are living a life we have agreed to share but we can’t remember why. A sentiment I suspect many married couples feel after the years have worn thin. But now, in these early dawn moments, my wife feels familiar in a way that makes my heart ache just a little. A soft pain that’s hard to describe. “I love you still,” I answer in return.

“I’m meeting Bee in the orchard,” she says, lowering her hand from my face and walking to the bedroom door.

I nod.

Perhaps we are like two old people who have lived together too long, a lifetime, a hundred years or more. The cobwebs of tiny mistruths, little papercut deceptions, rooted in our joints and slung between rib bones. We’ve built ourselves on these microscopic lies, so small we can’t recall what they were. But they’re there all the same, binding us to one another. But also ripping us apart.

I hear Calla move down the stairs and pull on her mud boots before she leaves through the back door, the screen slapping back into place behind her. The scent of her leaves too, lilacs and basil, soil and devotion. I would do anything for her. She is more than I deserve. Yet, there is something in her movements, in the way she looks at me from across the room. Something that lives inside her: a thought, a clattering idea that she won’t let me see.

Much like my own.

She loves me, I know. But she’s also keeping something from me—secrets under her fingernails. Deceit in the creases of her eyelids.

My wife is a liar.





CALLA


My sister is a nocturnal creature.

She has always preferred the night, even as a child, hiding in dark closet corners and beneath the creaking boards of the stairwell, cobwebs gathering in her uncombed hair the color of maple syrup, slightly burnt. She preferred the weight of shadows over the bright warmth of the sun.

But now she cannot escape the dark.

“He doesn’t seem like himself,” I tell Bee. My sister and I kneel beneath the hazelnut trees that line the creek, the air softened by the sound of water spilling over rocks and tugging at the shore. Methodically, Bee and I gather the hazelnuts that have fallen to the ground in the night, and I watch her with a fascination I’ve always felt for my younger sister. Even now, all grown up, she is still a marvel to me—the ease with which her strong, sun-stained hands sweep the ground, deftly picking out the round nuts from the leaves and twigs and underbrush. A tactile skill, feeling for what she cannot see.

She was only nineteen when she lost her sight. I barely remember it now, but she still talks about it sometimes: how it happened strangely, how at first she saw liminal waves of sunlight and then bright bursts of color and odd, shifting shadows, before complete blindness took hold and it all went black. A sweeping darkness that never receded.

Perhaps, if we had lived out there, beyond the border, she could have gone to a doctor. A specialist who would have peered into her cloud-gray eyes and declared some medicine or surgery that might have saved her vision. But I try not to think about it: how things might have been different.

Because in the end, there was nothing to be done.

My sister has adapted, made use of her limitations, and maybe it’s even made her someone she might not have been otherwise.

“The seasons are changing,” Bee answers. “He always gets moody this time of year.” She rubs at her neck with the back of her hand, beads of sweat rising against her summer-browned skin. The three of us—my husband, my sister, and I—have lived together in the old farmhouse since Theo and I married. The same house where Bee and I grew up. And although Bee likes to tease Theo—making jabs at him during breakfast about how he’s too tall to fit through doorways, and his only real use to us is retrieving things from the top kitchen cupboards—he’s been like a big brother to her.

“This is different,” I say. There is a gnawing at the back of my teeth, an ache when he looks at me, like he’s thinking of things far away from here. There has always existed a strange sort of alchemy between us, two people who cannot live without the other—an earnest, unmistakable kind of love. And sometimes this well-deep feeling frightens me. The fragile devotion nested in my solar plexus, the desperation I feel for my husband, and the unconscious fear that I might lose him someday.

I place my palm flat against the soil. “At night sometimes,” I continue, “I wake and he’s standing at the window, looking out at the trees.”

Bee lifts her head, pale eyelids fluttering. “We all look to the trees.”

“But he doesn’t seem afraid. It’s like he’s looking for something.”

She lowers her hands again to the ground and finds another round nut, the shell still a pale brown, uncracked. A good one. She drops it into the basket. “It’s not dangerous if he stays on this side. And he’s probably just looking for signs of the rot in the trees.” Her voice is measured, unemotional. And I want to believe her.