A History of Wild Places(39)

“Please get out,” she whispers through trembling lips.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Theo—” She shakes her head, rubbing water up her arms. “Please, just leave me alone.”

My legs push me up and I move into the doorway. I open my mouth to apologize, to tell her how sorry I am, but the tight line of her jaw, the cold cast of her gaze, tells me there’s nothing more I can say.

I leave the bathroom and walk back down the stairs. But I don’t stop in the living room, I exit the house and step out into the rain—the very thing Calla fears—and slog through the downpour to the path, back to the center of Pastoral.



* * *




The community is quiet—the rain has forced everyone inside.

I slink past the gathering circle and kitchen building, down the row of homes lit by candlelight, curtains drawn. The night is somber, hushed, and I think: We have agreed to let a child die. To do nothing.

I walk to Levi’s home and up to the porch, turning the doorknob and letting myself inside, out of the downpour. The house is mildly warm, candles throwing soft, palliative light against the wood walls.

“Whiskey?” Levi asks from the shadowed dark to my right. I jerk toward his voice, and realize he’s standing not far from me—in the doorway that leads into his office—and he must have seen me entering his home uninvited.

But he doesn’t say anything about my intrusion, or that I’m soaked from the rain, instead he walks across the living room to a narrow table just below the stairs.

There are only a handful of real bottles of booze left within the compound—bottles from the outside, brought here by new arrivals. Mostly we drink a harsh, white alcohol that Agnes makes from a still in the back corner of his shed. Moonshine, he calls it. We also use it to clean wounds and polish silverware. But Levi pulls out a half-full bottle of whiskey from a cupboard inside the table—the label a shimmering gold with black lettering. It’s a bottle he keeps hidden, all to himself. “It was Cooper’s,” he tells me.

He pours the dark liquid into two glasses, measuring them carefully, not a drop to be wasted. If this bottle really did belong to Cooper, then it’s at least ten years old, a remnant from when our founder was still alive.

He hands me a glass, and takes a quick swig from his own. “You walked here through the rain?” He nods down at my clothes, one eyebrow lifted.

“It’s starting to let up,” I say, which we both know is a lie. The rain is thrumming loudly against the roof.

But Levi’s expression falls strangely flat, neither worried nor fearful nor angry at my recklessness. “You need to be more careful,” he answers simply, raising his glass to his lips and taking another drink.

I stare down at my glass, at the dark amber liquid, the words I need to say lodged like bricks in my throat. Levi and I have become friends in recent years, a genial friendship that requires little of the other. In the evenings, we often play a slow game of chess on his front porch, rarely finishing a match, and sometimes we sit and drink Agnes’s moonshine well into the night, talking of the coming seasons, of crops to be planted. He’s always seemed relaxed with me in a way that he’s not with the others. And yet, I’ve also known there are things he won’t share, a burden he carries as the leader of our community, a responsibility that is mightier than anyone else could understand. These things, I suspect, he shares only with Bee.

“You don’t agree with my decision about Colette’s baby?” he asks, pinpointing the reason I’ve come. Why I’m really here.

“I wanted to offer—” I catch myself, searching my mind for the right way to explain. “I could go down the road into town. I could bring back a doctor.”

Levi takes another hard swig of the whiskey, eyes closing, savoring the taste. And when his eyes blink open again, they are glassy and unfocused. “It isn’t safe,” he answers, each vowel gone slack from the booze. This is a conversation he doesn’t want to be having right now, but one he also knows is necessary.

“But perhaps if I move quickly,” I say. “I can make it through the trees without—” My voice breaks off. Without getting sick. Without bringing back the thing we fear. “No one has to know,” I amend. “I could go tonight, while everyone sleeps.”

I consider saying aloud the thing I’ve done: admitting that I have already been over the perimeter countless times. That I’ve not gotten sick. That perhaps I am the only one who can do it safely.

But I keep my mouth shut. Because there are other things I would have to explain: the abandoned truck, the photograph I still keep in my pocket.

Levi lowers the glass of whiskey, holding it loosely at his side, and his expression pulls tight. Maybe he sees something in my face—the thing I’m trying to hide. “And when you don’t return, what should I tell the others?” he asks. “What should I tell your wife? Or worse, if you do return, what then?”

I know what he means.

If I leave and come back, they will think I have brought the illness back with me. They will assume I am sick. And they will fear I might infect others.

“You can separate me from the community,” I say. “And watch for symptoms.” I don’t offer the other thing: the way to rid rot from the body. The old way, the cruelest way. “Someone should at least try.”