A History of Wild Places(52)

“It’s just a children’s book,” she answers, simple enough, but I can hear the shiver in her voice. Something inside the book frightens her, too.

I want to touch it suddenly, draw the book to me and turn through the pages, but I resist. I know she doesn’t want me too. “The images inside seem dark, for a kid’s book.”

Calla nods, eyes still focused on the black cover. “I don’t like it.”

A bird thumps against one of the kitchen windows, wings flapping manically—confused by the reflection of blue sky in the glass—and the window rattles in its casing. But my wife doesn’t turn toward the sound.

“Is there an image of Maggie?” I ask, “an author image, in the back of the book?” If there is a clear photo of Maggie St. James, better than the one I found in the truck, we might finally see who she is, recognize her in the community.

But Calla shakes her head. “The dust jacket is gone. The author photo was probably on the back flap.”

My heart sinks.

“You think she was here?” Calla asks now, eyes anchoring themselves to mine. “You think that man, Travis, found her here?”

A knocking begins against my ribs, and it feels as if we’re speaking to each other with stones in our throats. “Yes. I think she was here; I think he found her. And then something happened… to both of them.”

“Maybe they left,” Calla surmises. “Maybe he found her and then they went back down the road through the trees. Maybe they…”

She was going to say, Maybe they got sick and died out there in the forest.

“Maybe,” I answer. And maybe they did. Their bodies curled together, illness leeching through their pores, turning everything black: fingernails and corneas and lips. While panic seized their minds. But if they were here and then fled, why did we never see them, never know they were here? And why have these clues been left behind?

“Or maybe something else happened to them,” my wife dares to say, the very thing I’ve been worrying over since the night I found the truck.

Maybe Maggie and Travis never left Pastoral.

Calla scoops up the book into her arms and stands, looking unsteady on her feet. Off-balance. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you before,” she says now.

I touch her hand and she doesn’t flinch away.

“They were here—” Her eyes are watering at the corners, little dewy drops. “They were in our house and—” Again her voice breaks then reforms. “We have to find them.”





BEE


I sleep outside, among earthworms that make shallow tunnels through the loam beneath me, and under a swarm of dying stars so vast and abstract that sometimes I feel an ache in my solar plexus when I peer at them for too long.

Blades of grass press against the nape of my neck, braiding into my hair, knots that twist and bind. I bury my fingers down into the dirt and press myself flat against the earth. I want to remain here, in the dark, and let the ground absorb the life growing inside me.

I want to disappear.

But instead, I lie awake and listen for the cracking of trees, disease spilling out, infecting the air. The hours pass and the scent of smoke fills my nostrils, remnants of the smoldering sage.

We are insipid, ignorant, foolish in our attempts to protect the community.

I rise up from the ground and my legs carry me through the meadow to the creek, to the edge of the boundary. With bare feet, I cross the creek at a place where the banks widen and the cold mountain water is shallow, but it still numbs my toes, and I move quickly, stumbling over the smooth stones I can’t see. At the other side, I pause on the muddy bank, not wanting to make a sound.

A foot ahead of me are the boundary trees.

I think of Theo, who crossed down the road and returned unharmed, without sickness inside him.

I step forward, reaching out a hand for the nearest tree. I don’t know the boundary as well as other parts of Pastoral. I rarely come this close to the edge—I do not know these trees, their spacing, their broadness, the sound of their leaves against the midnight air.

My fingertips find a smooth trunk, soft like the surface of young skin. It’s an aspen tree, narrow around but tall, its tiny leaves chattering high above me.

I move to the right, touching the next tree, and then the next, running my hand high over my head and then down again, feeling the bark. I’m searching for something.

Something.

On the fifth tree, I find it.

A laceration in the wood.

The soft bark has been peeled away, cleaved down its center. I hurry to the next tree in the line, and each has been split open, flesh bared to the night air, sap bleeding to the surface. It’s sticky and sweet on my fingertips, collecting beneath my nails—as if the trees were crying, bemoaning their wounds.

This is the sickness. This is what we fear.

I drop my hand from the tree and take a step back.

My lungs are suddenly too tight, and my feet stumble back into the creek, slipping over the stones beneath the water, scraping my ankle bone across a rock and feeling the warmth of blood rising to the surface. I scramble up the far bank, away from the border, away from the rot. My hands fan out ahead of me, searching for something familiar. I find a tree: a broad elm, branches sagging low near the edge of the meadow. I slump down against the trunk, my motions stiff, shivering from the cold of the creek, and draw my knees up close.