A History of Wild Places(58)

Theo closes the front door behind him. “Calla,” he begins, walking past me into the kitchen. “They went over the border. They might be sick.”

“So did you. And Bee.” My voice is too high; a thin, awful pitch. “She might have the pox, but I wouldn’t put her in the ground to find out. I wouldn’t do it to you, either.”

My husband stares past me at the wall, at nothing. “Even if we got them out of the barn, Turk wouldn’t be able to make it down the road.”

“Then we’ll hide them.”

“Where?”

“In our cellar.”

I think of Bee, the way she’s touched her stomach in recent days, her skin flushed and swollen. She might be pregnant. And if she is, if her child needed medicine, I would hope someone would brave the dark line of trees to bring back help. I would want someone to risk their lives for her, like Ash and Turk tried to do for Colette. But it’s not just this. It’s the Foxtail book, the white-cotton pages dusted with soil, the story of a girl who is unafraid, who marches into the woods beyond her house in search of a place that most would fear.

I have stood at the edge of the forest and felt my skin tingle and my ears thrum with the foreboding itch of what lies inside the shadowed trees. But the book has spurred something awake in me, and now I mistrust my own fear. Perhaps it has betrayed me, made me coil into myself when I should have stared down the road like my husband and wondered what lies at the end. I want to do what’s right, not what my fear has made me feel.

The living room feels suddenly cold, a musty dark in that way it does during a rainstorm—the walls fully sated with moisture. “If Levi found out you went over the boundary, he’d lock you up too,” I say, tears catching in my eyes.

Theo crosses the room, swift and sure, and draws me into his arms. I press my face against his shoulder, eyes pinched closed. “You know we can’t hide Ash and Turk here,” he says at last, his breath against my hair. “I want to help them, but there’s nothing we can do.”

My temples begin to pulse, the feeling I get when I haven’t had enough sleep. I think of Travis Wren, a stranger in our house, tiptoeing into the sunroom while we slept. Our very own ghost.

“Everything feels so wrong,” I say weakly, pressing my palms to my eyes. Two people came to Pastoral and vanished, now two people have tried to leave and been locked up. My heart roars in my chest, my mind a riot of too many disproportionate thoughts, each crowding out the others, making it impossible to think clearly.





THEO


My wife is upstairs, and I know I should return to the guard hut for the remainder of my shift, but my legs carry me down the back hall and I push open the old, crooked door into the sunroom.

I stand surveying it, looking for something out of place. A strange hum vibrates at the back of my throat, the murmur of a song rising up as if from some memory—a nursery rhyme maybe, something whispered to children before sleep—but when I step down into the sunroom, the memory fades.

I slide my hand along the bed frame, the mattress, looking for something I might have missed. But there is nothing else tucked under the mattress. I pull away the curtains and let in the watery, rain-soaked moonlight. I feel along the window frames for a crack, a place where something might be stashed away. I check the drawer of the small bedside table, but it’s empty except for a small bundle of twigs gathered in the corner—signs of a mouse. I glance around the room but there is no other furniture, no place to hide something you might want to be found later, once you had gone missing.

A tiny pulse throbs above my left ear. An unknown nagging. My gaze lifts—to the headboard, the wallpaper—and I notice a wrinkle in the smudged daffodil print, the paper coming away from the wall. Likely water and sun damage from too many years of neglect. I slide my hand along the puckered folds, the glue that once held the paper flat has begun to buckle and melt. My fingers find a seam and I follow it down where it meets with the headboard, and to a strange bulge, a place where the wallpaper is thicker than it should be. I feel into the seam, carefully—afraid I might find a displeased spider or rodent—but instead my fingers discover a folded scrap of paper.

Gently, I pull it free, then sink onto the edge of the bed. The paper is crinkled from the dampness of the wall, but I manage to open it, flattening the creases in my palm.

It’s one of Travis’s notebook pages.

Torn free from the book then placed in the wall above the headboard. My eyes vibrate, struggling to settle on the words.

I can hear them upstairs, their footsteps loosen the dust from the ceiling, sending it down to the bed where I’m trying to sleep. There are ghosts in this house too, each room crowded with their afterimages—all the lives lived in this farmhouse. My head throbs with them.

I didn’t think it would be like this—all these people living way out here in the woods. It’s like they’re trapped in time, cut off from the outside, disconnected. I need to get out of here, and I’m regretting not calling Ben before I lost service. It hasn’t snowed in a couple days, maybe I’ll be able to get my truck unstuck. I have to try.

Also: I’ve been having bad dreams the last four nights, and sometimes I think I hear things in the woods, over their border—like the trees really are breaking apart.

I’ve found Maggie, I just need to convince her to leave with me.