A History of Wild Places(54)

I take a step back from her, my eyes flinching to her hands, smeared with dirt. “You touched the trees?”

Her eyes flutter a moment, the back of her jaw clamping down. This is why she didn’t want me to touch her, to help her back to the house, she knows she might be infected.

“You went past the border?” I try. But a web of knowing braids itself tightly together inside me, like spiders scrambling down my joints. “Did you touch the opening in the trees, the sap?” I ask, even though I know, just by crossing over the boundary, she’s probably been exposed.

Bee stares at me, but her gaze is slightly off, looking just past my shoulder, and I move slightly to the left into alignment with her eyes. More for myself than for her. Her nostrils swell. “Yes,” she admits, swift and certain.

A half-beat of silence hangs in the air between us, between the wind hissing through the lemon trees, and goose bumps rise on my forearms while a furnace boils inside me. I have a choice: I could run up the trail to Pastoral, I could tell the others that my sister has placed her hands along the bark of a sick tree. Or I could not.

I stare at her, looking for signs of the illness, for blood to blossom like wildflowers around the whites of her eyes. “You’re sure?” I ask. She might have thought she crossed over the boundary but been confused about her place within Pastoral. Maybe she only thinks she touched a pox-infected tree, but really it was just one of the old elms near the pond, the bark always rough and cracked. Easily mistaken, especially when your eyes only see darkness.

But she doesn’t answer, she turns away from me and climbs the steps, her feet dragging. She touches the screen door, about to step inside, but then her other hand strays across her stomach for a half-second. As if she is guarding something growing inside her. As if she is…

Then she opens the door and steps into the house.

I wait a moment, terrified, uncertain, before I follow her inside. The kitchen is warm, suffused with the sound of wind against the eaves and possibly the threat of rain.

Bee reaches the stairs, moving slowly.

“Has something else happened?” I ask. She stops at the bottom step, and in her eyes is a coldness—a biting back of all the things she won’t say. An anchor of regret drops into my gut: If my sister and I were closer, if she trusted me, she would tell me what was wrong. She would sink onto the couch and tell me why she’s stayed away and hasn’t slept in her bed. But instead, she stands as rigid as an oak, hands braced against the stair railing. “I need to know that you’re okay,” I say, my eyes flicking to her stomach.

A hard line forms from her temples to her chin. “I will be,” she answers, and she turns, making bloody footprints up the stairs—a trail passed from the back door up to her bedroom.

She shuffles straight into her room, without stopping at the bathroom to clean the blood from her skin, and limps to her bed. I hear the slump and compression of metal springs as she sinks onto her mattress.

She might be pregnant; she might be carrying Levi’s child inside her.

But something in the way she spoke, the way the words cut through the air, I can’t help but think there is a plan swimming around in her head—an idea she won’t share. My younger sister is plotting something.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the small silver book with the number three stamped into the metal. I squeeze my fingers around it, like I could press the truth from it, force it to give up its secrets. Just a drop maybe, a tiny spore of truth. But it reveals nothing.

Like my sister, I might be infected, from the night Theo pulled me through the rain.

We all might have it: Theo, Bee, and me. Death like a ticking clock inside us.

I walk to the front window, where the sky is turning dark with rain, but there’s still time—if I leave now, I can make it before the first drops begin to fall.

I pull open the front door and leave the house.



* * *




The road is dark.

Humidity hangs in the air.

Remember Maggie. The words repeat in my mind, stuck there, glue against the hard walls of my skull. Remember remember remember. But who wanted to remember her? Who wrote those words in the Foxtail book? Who didn’t want her to be forgotten?

Ahead, I can just make out the gate through the darkening sky. I rarely come to the southern edge of Pastoral, where the gate blocks the road, where my husband sits at his post every night, counting the hours, the silence like a long, drawn-out hum. When I approach the guard hut, Theo sees me through the window and stands up quickly, meeting me in the doorway.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, pulling me inside, his eyes flashing to the sky where the stars have been smeared out by the clouds.

“Bee went over the border.”

“What?”

“She went across the stream, and she touched the bark of an infected tree. I found her bleeding, covered in dirt, and her hands had sap on them. She touched them, Theo.”

I don’t even feel the tears against my cheeks, but Theo wipes his fingers below my eyes, gathering away the wetness.

“Where is she now?” he asks.

“At home, in her room.”

“Did you touch her?”

I shake my head then stop. “I—” I remember finding her, slumped beside the path; her legs were wet from the creek and her shin was bleeding. I reached out for her, but did I touch her? Yes. I helped her to stand up and then she pushed me away—I had thought it was because she wanted to prove she could walk on her own, but she knew what she had done, that she might be sick, and she wanted me as far away from her as possible. “Yeah, I touched her.”