A History of Wild Places(69)

Calla shakes her head and sinks back, looking away from Henry and Lily Mae. She doesn’t want to talk about Bee—her sister who has become a ghost.

I take another sip of the wine in my hand. It’s dull, barely alcoholic, but there is enough warmth to coat my insides and make me feel loosened along my edges.

“Haven’t seen that sister of yours around much,” Lily Mae says, swallowing a slow drink of her wine. “Used to see her sneaking out of Levi’s house nearly every morning. But not lately. Then Levi up and marries Alice Weaver. A little odd, I’d say.”

My gaze swivels to Calla, and I can feel the heat from her skin, the fury boiling up inside her.

“It’s none of my business what my sister does,” Calla answers, flashing Lily Mae a hard look.

“Everything that happens in Pastoral is the business of us all,” Lily Mae replies with a little upturn of her chin.

I know my wife should just let it go; it’s not worth the argument. But she swivels beside me so she’s at a better angle to meet Lily Mae’s eyes dead-on.

But Henry pats a hand against his knee before Calla can speak, before she can spit some insult back at Lily Mae. “Isn’t that the price for living this way,” he says with a grin, attempting to lighten the thin band of tension stretching from his wife to mine. “No way to avoid knowing your neighbors’ comings and goings. For better or worse, I suppose.” He raises his glass of wine in the air as if the four of us might toast to this, but no one else lifts their glass to his. So he takes a drink alone, closing his eyes and savoring the sharp twinge as it slides down his throat.

Calla looks away and the music begins again, an upbeat melody, and more members gather in the candlelight, swaying with the thrum of wine now pumping through their veins. They want to forget what’s happened, they want to drink and dull the pain inside them. And I don’t blame them for it—I’d like to forget too. But I also know forgetting won’t undo what’s already been done.

I need something else: reparation maybe. I need to peel away the lies and reveal the beating heart of what’s really happened here—to Ash and Turk, to Maggie and Travis. Bloody and awful as it might be.

Calla leaves my side suddenly, crossing through the candlelight to get another mug of wine. Or maybe just to escape Lily Mae.

Henry makes a joke about Agnes not fermenting his apple wine long enough because he gets impatient, but I’m hardly listening. My gaze follows Levi as he stands from his chair and wanders to the edge of the trees, just back in the shadows.

Henry says something else, asks a question about our canned fruit storage, but I offer him a quick smile and my apologies. There’s something else I need to do.

I weave through the group, into the shadow of the trees, moving toward Levi.





BEE


My head feels clear. Crisp, like a cold December morning.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but a gray, whirling cloud had settled inside my skull. How long had it been there? Years? And now it’s begun to lift, evaporating from behind my eyes.

It’s been days since I’ve seen Levi, and maybe the time away has cleared my thoughts. Not just in the way that love blinds, but in a real, tactile way. As if I had been tangled in reeds before, legs trapped in mud, hands clawing for a surface that wasn’t there. And now my body has begun to shed its old skin, slithering free of the binds he held around my wrists—tendrils of him braided into every strand of my being.

But now he’s gone.

Nights spent outside, sleeping under the stars, have peeled away something inside me. And sometimes when I wake—the sky still dark—I swear I can see up through the trees, tiny dots of light coming into focus. A fabric of stars winking back at me.

It feels as if I’m waking up, the blackness dissolving.

And something else is forming in its place.





THEO


Levi is swaying when I reach him, eyes glassed over, yet there is an edginess to the way his shoulders tilt heavily to one side, his mouth drawn too tight against his teeth.

“I did it for them,” he says when I reach him, as if I’ve walked up and interrupted him midsentence, even though he’s standing alone.

“Did what?”

His upper lip snarls, watching those who are swaying beneath the rows of lights. “They don’t know what’s out there, but I do—” His voice breaks off and he hiccups, tipping slightly onto his left foot before righting himself.

I feel sorry for him, seeing him like this—he’s not the man he was a week ago—before Colette had her baby and Ash and Turk snuck over the border. Some part of him has rattled loose.

His chin tips back and he peers up through the trees, like he’s trying to see the stars. But I suspect everything is a blur to him right now. The world blotted out. “They’re all sheep,” he mutters, his half-closed eyes snapping back to me. “But not you.” He takes another drink. “You’re smarter than them.” I think he’s going to say that I’m the only one he trusts, the only one he can confide in, but his mouth pinches closed and he breathes, steadying himself. Or he’s thinking some other thought he refuses to share.

I pull out the photograph from my pocket, keeping it curled slightly against the shape of my palm, and I hold it out for him to see.

His chin lowers, eyes flickering across the image. “What is it?” he asks, like he can’t tell what he’s looking at. He sways forward, spilling some of his wine onto the grass, then blinks down at the photo but doesn’t touch it, doesn’t try to take it from me. For a tiny half-second, I think I see something in his eyes, maybe it’s recognition, a twitch of his eyelashes, a puckering of his mouth. Or maybe it’s just the booze causing odd little convulsions in his face muscles.