A History of Wild Places(41)

I nod at him, a wave of guilt sliding along my spine for all the times I went down the road.

“And the truth is—” he continues. “We don’t know how far the illness has spread, if it’s gone beyond our forest.”

I swallow tightly. “What?”

“There might not be anything left, Theo.” His eyes cut slantwise to the front window. “There might not be anything out there.”

I feel myself wanting to step closer to him, as if I’ve misheard.

“Even if you made it through the trees,” he goes on before I can ask what he means, “even if you made it out to the main road, there might not be any help to be found. No medicine. No doctors. Nothing.”

“You think the disease—” I catch myself, swallowing the words, choking on them.

The few who remember the outside, who’ve been there, have often talked of what they left behind: cities and wide oceans and electricity so abundant you never run out. I’ve always assumed it was still there, all of it, just waiting for us—for the day when it might be safe to move beyond our walls back into the world. I had always believed that if I made it through the forest, to the world beyond, there would be nothing out there to fear.

Maybe I was wrong.

“We can’t know for sure,” he continues, mouth pulled flat. “And I don’t want to frighten the others, but we have to protect what we have built here, just in case.”

I feel the room tilt slightly, the candlelight flickering in spasmodic patterns. I reach out and grip the edge of a chair.

“If you see anyone try to sneak past the gate,” Levi says now, his tone lowered, like he doesn’t want anyone beyond the walls of his house to hear. “I want you to stop them.”

I swallow, and release my hold on the chair.

“If anyone tries to leave, I want you to do whatever you have to.” His eyes settle on mine. “Do you understand?”

If Levi is right, and there’s nothing beyond our valley after all, then even if I’m immune, even if I made it through the trees, there might be no help to bring back. “I understand,” I say, a nagging ache tugging just above my left ear, like a scab not yet healed.

He steps forward and claps me weakly on the shoulder, and in his eyes I see the weariness of a man who hasn’t slept. Whose hair is beginning to gray at the temples. A man worn down by the strain of too many burdens within a community he’s trying to protect.

I feel sorry for him suddenly, and also like I don’t really know him at all.

He releases his grip on me and turns back to the cabinet and the waiting bottle of booze.

I walk unsteadily to the door, and when I glance back, he’s reaching for the bottle—he’s going to have a glass or two before he sinks into sleep, maybe he’ll finish it, pass out with the bottle tipped over beside him on the couch. He has the look of someone who’s venturing too close to madness.

I yank open the door and let myself out, breathing in the damp night air.

I thought I was hiding things.

But Levi has kept secrets too—a deep ravine of them.





BEE


It’s raining.

I hide under the eaves of the garden shed, waiting for it to let up.

The others have fled into their homes, tiny lives folded into fortress walls, as if nothing could hurt them while they slept in their beds, candles illuminating only the shallowest places, never revealing what hides in dark corners and within the raindrops spilling down their roofs and windowpanes.

The sky becomes a mournful gray, and I cross my arms, huddled against the cold, listening as others sink into their mattresses and pillows, the heavy breathing of deep sleep, the twitch of fingers and toes as they drift off.

But I also hear something else.

A figure is moving through the downpour, feet slapping against the muddy earth, his breathing an unsteady metronome.

It’s Theo.

My brother-in-law is unafraid of the rain—he makes his way up the center of Pastoral, wet droplets beating over him, soaking into his hair, until he clomps up the steps of Levi’s porch and enters without knocking.

I strain to hear their voices inside, their conversation, but it’s too far away and the rain is a steady thrum in my ears. So I stay tucked under the garden shed eave, and I wait.

Trees moan along the boundary, rain beats against the earth, and I listen for the sound of oak and elm and aspen trunks cracking open, the rot breaking them apart. And in that silence, in the waiting, an old feeling begins to prick at me: that thorny, too-tight sensation of being caged, stuck inside Pastoral, a gnawing beneath my shoulder blades that has only worsened over the years. Some mornings, when the air is calm and milky, I think I can hear the ocean a hundred or so miles away to the west, and I feel the pressing urge to reach a hand through the border trees and touch the foaming sea with my flattened palms. To stretch my fingertips as far as they will go through the dense woods, until I feel something other than the prick of pine needles and moss. I long to sleepwalk through the trees and let my legs carry me somewhere in the distance—a needle-sharp desire that has rested inside me my whole life.

I want to leave this place.

But this feeling vanishes with the sound of a door thudding closed, followed by the quick descent of footsteps down Levi’s porch. Theo has emerged, and he’s moving quicker now, out through the rain toward the farmhouse. He’s heading home.