A History of Wild Places(22)

“No.” The floorboards above us creak softly—Bee has risen from bed, and she walks across the hall to the bathroom. A moment later, the sound of water rattles up through the pipes in the walls, taking a moment to reach the upstairs sink. “Where did you find it?”

There are only a few photographs within the community, brought to Pastoral by the founders who wanted to remember those they left behind in the outside. Grandparents, old friends, Roona even has a photo of her dog, Popeye, who died before she moved to Pastoral.

“In a truck,” he answers.

“What truck?”

He won’t look at me; his eyes are all wrong. “Out on the road.”

“What do you mean?” I take a step back, away from him.

“I went past the boundary,” he admits, his mouth slack, his fingers running across the photograph.

The air leaves my lungs, little sparks flaring across my vision. “Theo,” I hiss, and glance to the door, as if someone might be there, someone who might hear. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I just wanted to see what was out there.”

My hands begin to shake, and I take another step away from him—my heart a club against my eardrums. “Death is out there,” I answer, my eyes tracing the features of his face now, looking for cracks, for any hint that he’s changed.

That he’s brought something back with him.

My husband has done the very thing he should not do: He went over the border. Over the border. Where dark things live. Where no one comes back alive—at least not for long.

“I feel fine,” he says quickly, eyebrows sloping downward, mouth mirroring the same shape.

But I take another step back from him and my heels hit one of the dining room chairs. It scrapes across the wood floor and stops at the edge of the table. Knots form inside my chest, and my fingers reach out for the table to brace myself. “It takes a day or two for the symptoms to show,” I answer.

I shouldn’t be here in the house with him. I should run, call to Bee, warn the others.

“I’m not sick,” he insists, and he raises his palms to me, as if I could see some proof in the work-worn surface of his hands. “I don’t have it.”

“You can’t know that.” I inch around the end of the table, my eyes locked on his. The back door is only a few steps away, I could dart out through the screen door and be in the meadow in less than a minute. I could run up the path to Pastoral and leave my husband behind. My husband who might be infected. Sickness coiling itself along his tissues, his marrow, a ticking clock he won’t survive.

But I don’t, because I’m afraid what it’ll mean if I do. I’m afraid of what will come next. So I stay rooted to the floor, a roaring, clacking dread thumping at my temples.

He moves closer to me, but not enough to touch me, not close enough to pass whatever might be inside him onto me: he senses the fear screaming down my veins, pumping blood to my limbs, ready to bolt. “I promise I’m not sick,” he says again. He clears his throat and drops his hands to his sides. “It wasn’t the first time I went down the road.”

My eyebrows screw together, my heart pumps faster.

“I’ve done it before,” he says, a cool, calm slant to each word. As if they hardly mean anything at all.

I release my hold on the table. “You went down the road before last night?”

His eyes slip to the floor, his hands worrying against the photograph he still holds. “Every night.” His gaze lifts back to mine and there is a burden in them, a heavy kind of remorse that he’s been carrying for much too long. “I’ve been going down the road every night for the last year, a little farther each time. But I’ve never gotten sick, Calla. I’ve gone past the boundary hundreds of times, and I’ve never caught it.”

This is the thing he’s been keeping from me, hidden from view, but always there just the same. A lie I sensed, felt in his palms every time he touched me, masked behind half-closed eyes, where he thought I wouldn’t see.

“Maybe I’m immune,” he continues. “Maybe I can’t get it.” He seems alight suddenly, eyes widened, like he’s been holding this in all this time, and now he can’t wait to get it out. “I’ve never seen anything out on the road, not until last night. It was just sitting there—a truck—and I don’t think it’s been there long. A few years at most. There were only a couple seasons worth of dead leaves on the hood.”

The roar in my ears grows louder, fear mixed with hurt: Theo has lied, and worse than that, he has risked his own life.

“Someone just left it there,” he adds, eyebrows drawn upward. “Someone named Travis Wren.”

“I don’t care about the truck.”

“He didn’t just vanish,” he goes on, ignoring the hurt rising in my voice. “He either went back down the road, or he came to Pastoral.”

I look to the door, biting my bottom lip, terror ebbing in my mind, making it difficult to think clearly. “There’s no one named Travis in the community,” I say. We shouldn’t even be talking about this. He shouldn’t have gone over the boundary, shouldn’t have risked everything, only to find some worthless old truck and a photograph.

He scratches at the back of his head. “I know.” More footsteps creak upstairs, Bee moving down the hall to the stairs. I should shout up to her to stay put, to not come any closer, because Theo might be infected, but her footsteps stop. Maybe she’s retreated back into her room.