A History of Wild Places(77)

Maggie St. James.

Maggie.

She reaches the pond, the lemon trees shivering as she approaches, and a man is waiting for her. She isn’t alone. He pulls her to him and they kiss, embracing beneath the half-domed moonlight, before they begin shedding their thin summer clothes and wade out into the pond, arms tangled around one another.

Travis Wren came to Pastoral and he found Maggie St. James.

He found her, and he also fell in love.

My hands shake at my sides and I drop the book onto the porch at my feet. My eyes blur over and I bend to retrieve the book, my head pounding suddenly, a feeling like I might be sick. When I stand back up, the visage of Maggie and Travis in the pond, are gone. Not even a ripple remains across the surface of the water.

My left temple begins to ache just above my ear—an old, distant pain. The memory of it just out of reach—like so many things.

I struggle to take a breath. Something happened here. Maggie and Travis lived within the walls of this old house. Not ghosts. Not phantoms passing through the hall.

Maggie and Travis are still alive.

Maggie and Travis never left.





CALLA


The house is hauntingly quiet.

My husband is gone from the bed and the Foxtail book is gone from beneath my pillow.

It’s late—middle of the night late—saturated with the kind of stillness that comes when even the midnight creatures stop their scurrying beneath floorboards and night owls have eaten their share of field mice and have returned to their roosts to await the dawn.

I walk to the mirror over the dresser. In my hand is the necklace, all five charms suspended from the end. I know I shouldn’t, but I unclasp the hook and place the delicate chain around my neck, securing it there. My reflection in the mirror feels instantly like someone else: dead eyes staring back, a woman who isn’t in the right skin. My fingers trail across the chain, observing the way it lays over my collarbone, a comfortable weight.

I am wearing a necklace that belonged to a woman who has vanished.

I leave the room and my feet carry me down the stairs—feeling as if the necklace is mine now, right where it belongs.

Nothing stirs in the house—not even the walls creak, the timbers holding their breath—but I move down the back hall to the sunroom, feeling the same curiosity that buzzed through me the last time I entered the room. But this time, I find the door ajar, and my husband sitting at the end of the bare mattress.

He’s holding the Foxtail book, and his eyes lift.

“Calla?” he says, like he is trying to shake away a bad dream, like he wants to be sure of my name. Of who I am.

“Yes,” I say, flat and strange.





THEO


“Why are you in here?” Calla asks, touching the doorframe, the entryway into a room she’s rarely stepped foot into.

I stare at her long dark hair, ribbons of auburn that sometimes reflect hues of cinnamon in the midday sun. She has always been a puzzle to me, pieces scattered that don’t quite fit. I didn’t understand it until now.

The pieces were never hers to begin with—they belonged to someone else.

When I don’t answer her, she drops her hand from the door. “You shouldn’t have taken that,” she says, nodding to the Foxtail book in my hands. Her book.

Hers.

How do I explain what I now understand—what I remember—to this woman I also love, who I don’t want to hurt?

Calla walks across the room and plucks the book from my hand. She holds it to her chest, as if it contains all her secrets—and maybe it does. Her gaze passes over me, surveying me, disappointment rimming her blue, sapphire eyes.

What does she remember?

But she swivels around and crosses to the door, disappearing out into the hall.

My mind is a storm—flickers of light and then great swathes of dark. It takes me a moment to react, to go after her, and when I find her again she’s in the kitchen, the book sitting harmlessly on the kitchen counter. She stands at the sink, the faucet turned on, water rushing through her hands, then she rubs her palms over the back of her neck to cool her skin.

The house is warm, but it’s always this way in summer—left to the mercy of the seasons—and we can only hope for a breeze to pass through the open windows to sedate our overheated flesh. I watch Calla and wonder: How many times has she stood at the sink, hands working the bar of lavender soap, rinsing dishes and sturdy glasses, eyes cast out the window to the meadow, longing for something she’s never spoken aloud, not even to herself? Perhaps not as many times as she thinks. As many as I once thought.

I fight the words in my throat, the ache expanding in my chest, becoming a fist-tight pain.

She needs to know the truth: a truth that will capsize everything she thought she knew, turn it wrong side out.

The man I am, standing in our kitchen, is not real. And neither is she.

“Calla?” I say, but she won’t look at me. She pivots to a drawer and retrieves two spoons. “What are you doing?”

“We’re awake now, might as well make breakfast.” She stands on tiptoes and pulls down the jar of dry oats from the upper cupboard. She begins to hum a tune—softly at first under her breath—while she pours the oats into a bowl. It’s a melody I now recognize, the lullaby I heard Maggie humming last night when she left the house and went to the pond. It’s the one Calla said she didn’t know when I asked her about it on our walk to the gathering. She lied.