A History of Wild Places(59)

Travis was in this room.

He was here. He heard us at night, moving around the house. And he knew about the rot in the trees—how? Someone told him, someone knew he was here. Someone must remember him.

But why did he tear out this page, why did he hide it separately? Unless he knew something was going to happen to him.

Unless he was worried they’d be found by the wrong person.





CALLA


I don’t bother knocking, I turn the knob and enter Bee’s room silently, closing the door behind me. My sister is curled on her side, facing the window, a sheet pulled up to her throat.

Remnants of a childhood are preserved inside this room: on the dresser sit two handmade dolls slumped against a small mirror, one is in the shape of a rabbit wearing a sunflower yellow pinafore, the other is a human girl with cat ears wearing a lavender-stained cotton dress and a ribbon made from twine tied in her strawberry-red hair. Bee grew up in this room, humming songs to herself, eyes gazing across the meadow while she counted the different shades of tulips—back when she could still see. Before it was all taken away.

I tiptoe across the worn wood floor and sit on the edge of her bed. Maybe I shouldn’t be this close—my sister might have the pox roiling inside her, seeping from her pores, carried on her breath with each exhale. But I’ve already touched the wound on her shin, already breathed the same air.

But worse than that: I’ve felt the summer rain against my own skin, felt it soaking into my flesh. The sickness is already in our house.

Bee’s hand stirs on her pillow. She’s awake. Her gray-blue eyes flutter open, fixed on the far wall she can’t actually see. “I heard you and Theo talking downstairs,” she says. But she doesn’t roll over to face me; she keeps looking away.

“Ash and Turk went over the border.”

“Levi plans to do the ritual?” she asks.

“Yes.” I touch the hem of a pillowcase where it’s been restitched several times. Blue thread overtop white. “You could talk to Levi,” I say. “You could convince him not to do it.”

Her eyes shiver closed a moment, her breathing changes. “I can’t convince him of anything anymore.”

“I know something happened between you two,” I say. “But you’re the only one he listens to.”

“No, not anymore.” She pushes herself up, the sheet falling away from her shoulders, and I can see that her feet are still caked in dirt, the blood now dried against her leg. Her bed linens will need to be scrubbed several times to get them clean. “And if they’re sick, the ritual might heal them.”

“Or it might not,” I say.

“In which case, it’s too late anyway.” My sister looks at me with a vacantness I’ve never seen in her before, tears staining her cheekbones. Instinctively, my eyes settle on her stomach, but there is still no definition beneath the thin cotton of her dress. “We can’t save them,” Bee says, reaching out and taking my hand. Her skin is soft and uncalloused. Fingernails closely trimmed.

“What about you?” I say. “What if we need to save you?”

She smiles, a tiny curve at the corner of her mouth. “I’ll save myself.”

I lie down beside her, forming myself into a shell, our knees touching. If my sister is sick, if the rot is working its way through her, then I am sick too. Made of the same flesh. Born of the same blood. We haven’t always been close, we haven’t always understood one another, but if she dies, perhaps I want to die as well. Perhaps there is no life that makes sense without her: my little sister who has always reminded me of the night sky, endless and beautiful and chaotic. My sister the universe. My sister the anomaly. My sister who is blind, yet now, looking at her, her pupils seem to focus, to dilate, as if some part of her can see the form I make in the bed beside her.

“What if I am not who I thought I was?” she says after a long, sleepy silence, listening to the rain stream down the windows, pouring over the roof as if it’s looking for a way in, a way to infect those who hide inside.

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes flutter closed again. Her mouth goes slack. “I’m just tired,” she says softly, her fingers burrowing beneath the blankets, drawing them up to her chest. “Will you put on a record?”

I slide from the bed and pull a record from the top of the stack, slipping it free from its sleeve, then place it on the player, turning the small hand-crank until the record begins to spin. I keep the volume low then climb back into bed.

Bee falls asleep, and I brush her hair away from her cheekbone. My little sister the universe. I feel her forehead for fever, for any sign of the pox, but she is cool to the touch.

We sleep side by side, just like when we were little, listening to the scratch of slow, sad songs. We are two tiny figures in a big-girl bed, and her breathing comforts me, the low, sputtering exhale. Her eyelids flutter for a time before they fall still, and I’m afraid of tomorrow, afraid for Ash and Turk.

What we’ve built here suddenly terrifies me.





THEO


The gathering begins just after sunrise.

Two holes have already been dug beneath the Mabon tree at the center of the circle. They aren’t trenches, long and wide to fit a coffin. Instead, they are only three feet wide and about five feet deep. They are actual holes. As if we mean to plant a tree in them.