A History of Wild Places(87)

But now I see: These were the imaginings of a teenage girl, a girl who fell in love with Levi in a meadow buzzing with fattened honeybees, wildflower fluff drifting lazily through the warm breeze, cool blades of grass poking up between my toes. I fell in love with him easily, and now I have allowed him to break me.

I am a stupid woman. Believing in stupid, impossible things.

I press my palms over my eyes and squeeze, making everything even darker. A black so black it feels like I’m tumbling forward through the floor of the closet. I dig my fingers through my long hair, catching on the knots, pulling them free. My mind feels like a bruise that will never heal.

The blood at my shins and temple has started to set, no longer rushing, but clotting over—becoming scabs. The body heals quickly, an efficient machine, but the heart is worthless at such things. It burns long after the hurt has worn away.

I drop my hands and blink up at the pitch-black closet, but the darkness has melted slightly. Bled into the background. Shadows take shape, as though I am waking from a dream and trying to orient the familiar objects in a room.

The wool jacket hanging above me.

The pair of blue overalls, stained muddy at the knees.

The wood shelf at the back.

These things come into focus as if looking through pond water.

I blink several times, trying to settle my gaze on the pair of overalls above me, but my vision turns grainy whenever I focus on any part of it for too long: the hem of the legs, the two silver buttons on the chest, the metal hanger it’s draped from.

And yet, I can see overalls.

Not clearly, but they’re there.

With aching legs and a throbbing head, I push myself up from the floor and touch the heavy jean fabric, pressing it between my thumb and forefinger, to be sure it’s real. Not just a cruel trick of the dark.

I release the leg of the overalls and scan the small, square room.

The more I blink, the more things become clear. As if whatever clouded my eyes is being washed away from my retinas. I reach my hands out to the shelf where I hit my head when Levi pushed me in, I feel the sharp corner, and my forehead throbs with the memory, the impact.

My body is bruised and bloodied and sore, but my eyes are beginning to see, so I push away the pain.

On the shelf are rows of books.

My fingertips slide across the spines, some thin and hardly measurable, others are thick with indented lettering. I haven’t read a book since I was a teenager, since before I lost my sight.

I bring my face closer to the books, making out the letters: letters that form words that form titles. My brain is slow to recall the formation of these symbols, how they become sentences that tell an entire story—a narrative. For so long, I’ve absorbed information through the sounds of the trees and the direction of the wind and the unique exhale from someone’s lungs.

Now, my mind is trying to sort through these stamped letters and deduce their meaning.

Their titles:

How to Govern a People by E. S. Warren

A Return to Simple Living and Native Farming by Allison Carmichael

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Mastery of Magic and Ancient Card Tricks by Bert Ferny



This last title sits stagnant in my mind. It rolls around inside my skull, pinging against memories that have gone dormant but are now waking. I slide the book out and peer at the cover: a deck of cards fanned out on a stone surface, the joker is the only card facing up. A scattering of stars adorns the top third of the cover against a black background. I remember this book, remember seeing it in Levi’s lap when we were kids.

I’d lie on my back in the meadow beyond the farmhouse, the sun warming my face, while Levi practiced his card tricks. He’d let me choose a card from the deck then he’d shuffle it back in, a moment later magically plucking my card from the stack, and show it to me with a wide, gaping grin. I’d nod and we’d start again. He was always good at it, and he liked to practice his tricks with me before showing them to anyone else in the community. He wanted to get them just right, and I’d smile watching him concentrate so deeply that the freckles on his nose pulled together.

We were young then, thirteen, fourteen, and we’d weave our hands together under the hazelnut trees—shy and wary, giggling softly—before we’d run up the path to Pastoral to beg Roona for scraps of dough from the sweet lavender bread she was baking.

I slide the book back onto the shelf, not wanting the memory to tear me open any further.

If these are the books he’s kept hidden all this time, the things he’s kept locked away and safe inside the closet, then maybe he doesn’t have any secrets after all. Maybe he’s more transparent than I realized. A man who is afraid of losing his power, his control over his people, but nothing more sinister than that.

I rub at my eyes, my vision clouding briefly then re-forming.

My eyes settle on another row of titles, lower on the shelf:

Ways to Outthink the Brain by Helga Boar

The Structure of the Mind after Birth by Reginald Cartersmith



And then my gaze falters, skips to a book I remember like a spark across my synapses: the book Levi started reading once he abandoned simple card tricks and the magic of making dandelions and hair ribbons disappear. The book he would read with furious intensity. He would even recite passages to me, as if he were devouring each word and he wanted me to devour them too. He wanted to see if he could do it, if he could really make someone see, hear, smell things that weren’t truly there. If he could make them forget.