A History of Wild Places(16)

I touch the thin copper ring on my finger: the wedding band Theo gave me two years ago when he asked me to marry him. I’ve known him my whole life, we both grew up inside the boundary of Pastoral, and yet I had never truly noticed him—not in the way I should have—until the afternoon I was foraging for wild morels near the creek, and he appeared on the path. “You found my secret spot,” he said, giving me a weighing look.

His dark hair slid across his eyelashes, in need of a haircut, and we sat on the shore, side by side, until the sun had set, telling made-up stories about the land and its history, and I wondered why we had never talked like that before. How it was that we knew so little about each other? It was as if we had slipped by one another unnoticed for our entire lives, until that day beside the creek.

It was only a few months later when he asked me to marry him in that same spot, the sun hovering beyond the trees and the sky a burnt autumn shade. I nodded and he kissed me and I was sure I would never be as happy as I was right then.

“Theo’s not dumb,” Bee says, drops of sweat gathering on her upper lip. She seems always overheated lately, like the mothers in Pastoral when they’re carrying a child, the little thrumming heart inside their bellies like a fire. “He won’t go over the boundary.”

I nod weakly, and we spend the next few minutes working in silence, filling the basket near to the brim, until Bee’s palm stalls against the ground, eyelids closed, as if she could feel the tree roots beneath us winding through the soil in desperate woven patterns—in search of water far below. “The trees sound sick this year,” she says, breathy and low.

I peer up through the branches. Soon the tree will be a galaxy of ripe hazelnuts, but for now we gather what we can from the earth. “It’s still early in the season,” I say. “There will be more to harvest later.”

She rocks back on her heels, feeling for the edge of the round basket with her fingertips, then dropping a handful of nuts inside. She smiles softly, like she thinks no one’s watching, and reveals the slightly crooked tooth on the upper right side, in an otherwise perfect row of teeth.

I wish I could hear what she hears: the far-off hum of honeybee wings across the meadow, the subtle shift when the summer air changes directions, a rainstorm in the distance. Once she told me she could smell a hint of salt from the Pacific Ocean, blowing in from the west a hundred miles away. She feels what I cannot—my eyesight an impediment to truly absorbing the world whirling and clicking around me.

Bee pushes herself to standing, reaching out a hand for the trunk of the hazelnut tree to orient herself. “Do you think he wants to leave?”

The question cuts through me, unexpected, and I shake my head. “No,” I answer quickly, before the idea can embed itself into my skin. But I look out at the border trees to the west, surveying the landscape, the pond with its calm surface, the slow-moving creek, the farmhouse at the low end of the meadow, and I wonder if my husband has considered leaving this all behind. A wooden fence runs along the road in front of the farmhouse, and if you turn south, the road will lead you to the gate where Theo stands guard most nights. But if you turn north, the road takes you into the heart of Pastoral, dead-ending at a small parking area where two dozen cars sit rusted and pillaged, weeds growing up around their flattened tires, some with hoods propped up, their parts stripped clean, others are missing doors. Even an old school bus sits on its rims: the same bus that the founders drove into these woods and never drove back out. It’s a cemetery of bent metal and steering wheels and spark plugs long corroded. Mementoes of old lives. Useless machines now.

I brush my hair back from my forehead, the wind pulling it loose from my braid, while my sister’s golden-red hair swirls about her like a firestorm, long and unruly—easily tangled and set into knots. She is a rare, wild creature—as lovely as the blooms beside the pond, as gentle as the trees that sigh in the evening breeze. But she is also reckless: often venturing too close to the border, where the pox threatens to sink into her flesh and rot her from the inside out.

The wind unsettles the leaves above us like a million scraps of paper under the blue summer sky, and I know she can hear it: the changing seasons, the buoyancy in the air, the fragile quality.

“A storm,” she says, turning her sightless gaze to the west. “Lightning. I can feel it.”

In the distance, a bulkhead of clouds is drawing close.

I lift the basket into my arms and stand up. A spire of electricity snaps across the dark clouds and a second later, thunder shakes the ground beneath us. “We should get inside,” I say. But she hesitates, tilting her chin upward, as if she could already feel the rain against her forehead. “Bee,” I say more sharply.

It isn’t safe out here, in the open, with the rain drawing close. We need to get indoors.

Finally, she nods, and we hurry back toward the farmhouse, cutting through the far field where the tall grass shivers like a golden sea, waves heaving beneath a bruise-black sky. Bee’s summer dress flaps around her knees as we run, the little white flowers stitched into the hem shivering as if they sense the storm. Thunder shakes the air and our bare feet leave footprints in the dark earth.

We reach the garden, edged by a low fence, the green tomatoes and ripe strawberries shivering in the sudden hard gust of wind. The chickens who live within the protected plot scramble back to their henhouse at the back corner, clucking nervously. Just to the south of the farmhouse, the windmill churns quickly, metal blades spinning, drawing water up from the well deep within the earth.