A History of Wild Places(18)

After an hour, I leave my bedroom and walk out into the hall, unable to sleep.

My footsteps are the only sound; even the wind outside has softened, the rain reduced to only a few scattered drops. The room my sister shares with Theo is two doors down on the right, past the white-tiled bathroom with the cracked clawfoot tub we rarely use. In summer, we bathe in the pond or in the metal basin beside the back door, and after, we let the sun bake dry our skin.

I walk to the stairs and down into the living room. A hallway stretches back from the kitchen to the mudroom, where a crooked, unwieldy door opens up into overgrown grasses, mangy shrubs, and several honey locust trees that press their thorny barbs against the siding of the house, scratching away the old paint.

We rarely use this back end of the house; it feels dark and closed off, from another time.

But a small room juts off the hall, down a series of low steps.

It was once a sunroom, where tall windows let in the southern light, and herbs and root vegetables were grown late into the season. But half the windows have been boarded up, the others draped with heavy linen curtains.

I touch the cold door handle, feeling the stale draft coming out from beneath the door. When I was little, the converted sunroom was used for outsiders, a place where new arrivals who had found their way through the woods to Pastoral would stay, awaiting the ceremony to initiate them into the community. I remember the wearied faces of strangers when they shuffled up our front porch steps, tired and hungry, their eyes wide with a different kind of thirst.

Sometimes they stayed in the sunroom for only a couple days, sometimes weeks, while it was decided whether they could remain—if they were a good fit for Pastoral. But rarely was anyone ever turned away.

It’s hard to imagine now: strangers in the house. It’s been over ten years since anyone new has wandered up the road to Pastoral. And just as long since anyone left.

I open the door and step inside the darkened sunroom—the rich scent of soil filling my nostrils, left over from the room’s previous life. Moss and stubby shards of grass poke at the bottoms of my bare feet from where they grow up through the floorboards, the wood planks set down directly onto the earth. The room feels like stepping outside, with its thin shell of glass walls. Some years ago, after a storm, we found one of the windows broken—a limb from a honey locust tree must have forced its way through the glass—and we nailed wood planks across the opening. But it was a hasty job, and now I can feel the breeze hissing through the wood boards, a wisteria vine weaving its way through the gap, reaching up for the ceiling.

I find the metal bed frame pushed up against one wall, the mattress bare, and I run my hand across the dusty footboard. A white dresser stands at the opposite wall, although I imagine its color has faded, turned dull and layered with several years of dirt. I walk to the windows overlooking the meadow and orchard trees, and I press my fingers to the glass, imagining the scenery before me: the dark, starlit sky, the moon pouring down over the tall summer grass that moves in waves with the wind from the southeast.

A memory slips over me.

Of this stale room. Of a stranger standing at this same window.

He smelled of pine.

But the memory feels wrong and far too recent. Hearing his heart inside his chest, beating beating beating. He sounded like a fox, quick and panicked, a heartbeat that wanted to find a safe place to hide. To run.

I turn and rub my palms up my arms, chilled suddenly.

I can’t remember his face, his name, but he was here. Only a season or two ago. A man.

A stranger.





THEO


By evening, the rainstorm has passed, and the moon makes long, angular shapes through the trees as I walk up the road to the guard hut.

Through the dusty window, I can see Parker seated inside: narrow shoulders and close-set eyes, like a young deer, watchful of anything twitching around him. He nods at me when I step through the doorway of the small hut, picking up his coffee mug—handmade by someone in the community with a handle like a tree trunk. On the desk, the pitcher of coffee looks like it’s still warm, steam rising from the top, and there’s enough left to get me through the night.

Parker sidles past me in the doorway, tossing whatever’s left in his mug out into the grass beside the road. His mom makes the coffee fresh every morning and afternoon, then brings it out to Parker, and he leaves whatever he doesn’t drink for me. It’s ashy, gritty stuff, but it’s drinkable. And most of the others in the community would trade just about anything for a cup of it. Tea leaves are grown in abundance, while the few coffee plants produce far less—so I drink it gratefully.

“Fucking exhausted,” Parker comments, scraping his hand through his dirty-blond hair.

“You see anything tonight?” I ask.

“Sure did.” He pivots to lean against the doorway while I take a seat in the only chair inside the guard hut, looking out through the smudged window at the road. “Three UFOs and a bigfoot. That sucker could run though, I chased him for ten miles before he dove into a river and sunk to the bottom. It might have been a girl bigfoot though, hard to tell in the dark.” He winks at me and smiles so wide I can see all of his mangled teeth. Parker can be a little shit sometimes, and he taps a finger against the revolver strapped at his waist. Tap tap tap. As if it gives him more authority than anyone else within the compound—more authority than me. And maybe it does. I don’t know why Levi allows Parker to keep it. He’s more likely to shoot himself than anything out on that road.