A History of Wild Places(81)

When she gets closer, I can tell something’s wrong; a cold, awful knot of hate and fury turning her features in on themselves.

I say her name. “Bee?” And just the word against my lips sends a sharp, uncertain pain down into my gut. My sister is not my sister at all. She stops at the bottom of the porch steps, mute, and she’s hiding something in her hand. “What happened?” I ask.

The rims of her eyes are bloodshot; her nostrils swell like she might be sick—a wave of discomfort blazing across her face. She shakes her head, mouth unmoving, and I see that her bare feet are thick with mud, and when her head lifts, it’s as if she can see me—her pupils expanding.

I swear she’s looking right at me.

“It was me,” she says, finally turning her hand and revealing a knife clutched tightly in her palm, the blade dulled, smudged with dirt.

“What was you?”

“I carved the border trees.”

I shake my head at her. “What are you talking about?”

“I woke up in the woods… and I had this knife. I don’t know where it came from, but I—” Her voice warbles, a bird losing its pitch. “I don’t remember doing it. But I can feel the memory in my hands, cutting into the wood.”

“I don’t understand.” My own voice cracks. “The trees are sick; it’s the illness that splits them open.”

“No,” Bee says, lowering her arm to her side but still clutching the knife, fingers trembling. “It’s me. It’s always been me.”

“You’re tired,” I tell her, because there is fear in her eyes, and I try reaching out for her, but she senses the movement and flinches back, stepping away from me, farther from the porch.

“I’m not tired,” she snaps, her voice a thin wire pulled taut, vowels that want to break against the tongue. “I’ve been asleep for years.” She presses a palm to her right eye and winces. “Something’s wrong with me. My head feels muddy.”

I take another step closer to her, and I wonder… just like Theo and me, have her memories been smudged out? A kaleidoscope of images crushed together, now splintering like old wood.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I tell her, watching as tears pool against her eyelids. “Give me the knife, Bee.” My own head throbs, too many parallels crushing together at once: Bee is not my sister. None of this is what it should be.

Her chin tilts to one side, like she’s considering the request, but then she says, “I can’t. I need it.”

“Please.” I move softly toward her, trying not to make a sound. “You’re right, our memories aren’t what we thought they were.”

There is a vagueness in her eyes, a grinding of her jaw. “I can’t stay here,” she mutters, turning her head toward the meadow and the forest beyond, as if it were awaiting her return, silently calling her back. She takes another step away from me, into the grass.

“I know,” I say, mirroring her movements. I could tell her the truth: that I am not her sister, and she is not mine. But the wildness in her gaze makes me think I shouldn’t, not like this. Instead, I reach forward quickly and grab for her arm, trying to snatch the knife away from her.

But she shrieks, jerking away from my touch, and when she tries to spin around, twisting out from beneath my grip, the knife in her hand swings forward and the blade slides delicately across my forearm. Warm blood beads instantly to the surface.

I release her arm and press my other hand to the wound—the cut is deep, a swift peeling open of flesh, like butter, easily separated—and the bright red soaks between my fingers, dripping onto the dirt at my feet.

Bee staggers backward, her mouth agape. She must know what she’s done because she touches the end of the blade then presses her fingers together, feeling the sticky blood.

The shock tears across her face. Eyes wide.

“It’s okay,” I mutter to her. “You didn’t mean to.”

She shakes her head, repetitive and quick, staring through the darkness of her unseeing eyes—her pupils resuming their blankness, their voided focus. This single violent act has unmoored her.

“Bee,” I say, reaching out for her with my good arm, and this time she doesn’t flinch away; her body has gone slack. But she keeps the knife held tightly at her side, refusing to give it up. “I have to tell you something,” I say. “I have to tell you the truth.”





THEO


We had thought a man was living in the decaying sunroom, a stranger sneaking in and out of the house at night, unseen.

But that stranger was me.

And I wasn’t there in secret.

Broken bursts of memory surface inside me: driving into these mountains, sleeping in the drafty sunroom while snow blew down from the sky. But when I discovered that Calla was Maggie St. James, I knew we had to leave. A storm thrashed against the walls of the farmhouse, and Levi was there, in the sunroom, telling me I couldn’t go. I remember the air leaving my lungs as we fought, the single-pane window shattering, and the glass slicing open the flesh above my left ear. I can still see the shock in Levi’s eyes—he hadn’t intended for it to go that far.

I touch it now, feeling the tender spot just above my ear that has nagged at me, ached late at night, but I couldn’t seem to recall the injury that caused it.