A History of Wild Places(50)

My fingers tremble, drawing back the mass of pages, and I open it somewhere in the middle. The paper is stiff, hardened by rain and wet soil, and many of the pages are stuck together. But inside, my eyes absorb not just words and sentences, but illustrations as well. The smudged charcoal drawings fill nearly every page, broken and gritty, the ink bled into the margins in places; they depict trees and bony limbs, a girl in a pinafore wandering through the dark, and sometimes there are eyes peering out from the black line of trees, slanted and low. Something watching her.

I slap the book closed and press my palms to the cover.

It’s a children’s book. A fairy tale maybe. But a dark one—meant to be read late at night when the wind howls against doorways. Meant to frighten.

I breathe for a moment, letting my heart rate settle, then I open it again and read the words written there. To prove to myself there’s nothing to fear.





FOXES AND MUSEUMS


Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series The fox had lied to Eloise before.

Leading her to plain, ordinary places within the forest.

But this time she knew it would lead her somewhere else, somewhere new—it would take her to the underground museum, the place where all forgotten artifacts were kept. She followed it to a stone well in a high meadow near the sea. And when it leapt over the edge and down into the deep, hollow well, Eloise did the same.

She climbed atop the stone well and took a step into the dark, into the nothing. Without fear, she fell into the well that seemed to have no end. For hours, days, she plummeted, the fox only a few feet below, falling falling falling. Until at last, she splashed into a pool of water that was not water at all. It was a syrupy mud, black and slick like oil. And when Eloise pushed herself up and looked around, she was in the museum of forgotten artifacts.

But she wasn’t alone. Eyes peered at her from all sides.

Eyes that watered with thirst in them, eyes that would not let her leave alive.





CALLA


I close the book and dig my fingernails into the edge of the chair.

I do not like this story. I do not like the eyes or the well or the underground museum. It feels too familiar, too much like the forest surrounding the farmhouse.

But I do not toss the book aside, I press it to my chest and close my eyes. And when I open it again, this time to the title page at the front—the place where publishers list their legal notations about copyrights and publication dates—I find the author’s name for the first time: Maggie St. James.

Maggie. The name of the woman in the photograph that my husband found in the abandoned truck. The photograph I know he still keeps in his back pocket—a woman my husband is holding on to, who he can’t seem to let go of.

But my eyes are drawn to something else on the title page. At the bottom, handwritten hastily with pencil, are the words: Remember Maggie.

A shiver clanks and rips down my spine, splitting me in half.





THEO


I find my wife on the torn, plum-colored chair in the living room, knees drawn up, a book in her lap. A cool, easterly breeze slips through the open windows, the sun only just risen, but Calla looks like she hasn’t slept—eyes bloodshot and saggy. “What are you reading?” I ask cautiously.

She closes the book and holds it up for me to see, her mouth flat. The pages of the book are warped, rigid, like it had been dropped into the pond then left to dry. Even the cover is misshapen, curved near the top, and against the matte-black surface, I can just make out silvery gray letters: Eloise and the Foxtail, Book One.

And there’s something else, something along the corners—it’s even scattered across my wife’s lap, collected in the seams of the chair, and on the floor at her feet: dirt.

“Where did you get it?”

“The garden,” she answers, her own gaze unable to pull away from the book.

“You found it in the garden?”

“Beneath the wild roses. It was in the soil, planted there.” Calla’s words sound foreign, not really hers, a daydream imagined while she slept. Because books aren’t found in gardens.

“Was it on the shelf?” I ask, certain she’s confused, and I flick my gaze to the shelves that line either side of the fireplace: books about wild-harvesting and water collection and wind turbines (books that the founders thought they would need when they came to Pastoral), books about the history of the west, poetry volumes of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, a massive hardback copy of East of Eden and several books from Jack Kerouac, Fredrick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. But there are newer titles too, mystery novels and romance and a few children’s books meant to distract the mind during the long cold winters. The farmhouse has always served as a community library, books borrowed and returned. Some lost along the way. Some left out in the rain or dropped too near a bonfire. Slowly, we lose books. And there are never any new ones to replace them. But on the shelves, I see no empty rectangle, no gap where the book could have been retrieved.

“No,” she says, her voice edged in irritation. “I found it where I found the silver book.”

I want to touch her, feel the temperature of her forehead to see if she might be running a fever, because something isn’t right. “Calla,” I begin softly. “What are you talking about?”

She stands up quickly, with a jerk of her knees pushing her upright, and she presses the book to her chest—a thing she doesn’t want to part with. Her beloved book, covered in dirt—like it really did come from the garden. Now, with her free hand, she reaches into the pocket of her stained jean shorts and draws something out. It’s small, balanced in the palm of her hand.