A History of Wild Places(92)

“You have to get as far past the boundary as you can,” Faye says, touching my back between my shoulder blades. “I’ll try to stall them.”

“Thank you,” Theo says.

There is a pause, an exchange of looks—a goodbye between Faye and Theo. We might never see her again.

Theo moves into the trees, and the pain finds me, it drives up my rib bones, up my spine, clawing its way into my mind, screaming at me: I am here! I am a fire burning a hole through your flesh. I am cutting you open, making you bleed.

I press my face harder to Theo’s chest, I bite down, clenching my teeth, my jaw aching.

You can’t carry me all the way to the truck, I think.

Or maybe I say it aloud.

“We don’t have a choice,” Theo answers.

We move down the path, Colette leading the way, clutching the baby to her chest. I try to open my eyes again, to peer back over Theo’s shoulder for signs of anyone coming after us, but I can’t seem to raise my eyelids now.

We’re leaving Pastoral. We’re leaving my sister behind.

Yet, I know why she went after him.

Him.

In the river of my mind, I’m starting to remember: He might be to blame for everything that’s happened. Everything we can’t remember. The man that Bee once loved.

And now she’s gone to set things right.





BEE


He’s a monster.

He set the fire and watched it burn, knowing Faye and Colette and the baby were inside. He knew that if they were dead, no one else would try to leave to go get help for the child. And he watched Parker point his gun at Theo, probably hoping he’d shoot us all to keep us from leaving. We are traitors, after all. A problem to be dealt with.

Better dead than alive to tell all his secrets.

But with my eyes peering through the dark, seeing for the first time in too long, I trail Levi through the trees. His footsteps are an echo across the hard summer ground, his shadow scattering among the tall pines.

Drops begin to fall from the sky, a storm sinking over the valley—but I no longer fear the rain.

Levi ducks around the backside of Pastoral, and the community gardens come into view—rain catching on the neat, tidy rows of cornstalks and vegetables, on bright green leaves, and my eyes stall briefly, marveling at the sight. I had forgotten the shimmery quality of raindrops, and it sends a spark of emotion through me, a feeling like I might cry.

But Levi has stopped at the corner of the garden, only a few yards away, his shadow stretched long and lean in the moonlight, watching me.

Maybe he knew I was following him all along, and now he’s led me here, to the garden, away from the eyes of others. Where he can end it.

“You escaped the closet,” he says softly, with tenderness in his voice, a sound that now makes me cringe. He moves closer but I don’t back away. “You’ve always been strong-willed.”

I feel my jaw tighten, my eyes blink then refocus, afraid my vision will slip away at any moment—only a temporary reprieve from the dark. “You were just going to let them burn?” I ask.

“Sometimes there must be sacrifices to make the community stronger.”

“Is that what you planned to do with me—sacrifice me?”

“I hadn’t decided yet.” The hard ridge of his jaw shifts side to side. “You can see,” he says, but he doesn’t sound surprised. “You’re looking directly at me.”

“It wore off, whatever you did to me.”

“I wondered if it would, if I stopped reminding you that you were blind.” My temples pulse, fury seething up inside me. “I knew you would leave me someday, if I didn’t make it hard for you. If I didn’t make it impossible. You were always so fearless; you would have risked everything when we were younger to leave Pastoral, so I had to stop you, make you believe you were weak.” His head tilts to the side, like he’s trying to see me more clearly, raindrops cascading over us.

“You made me think I was blind.”

His expression sinks a little. “I did it because I loved you,” he clarifies.

I wince at his words and I can feel the hardened blood at my temples, along my cheekbone. “That’s not love.” All those summer days in the meadow, listening to Levi read from his books while I wove blades of grass together at my feet. We were teenagers when he started reciting words to me, asking me to slow my breathing—he was practicing something from one of his books: hypnosis, he told me. It felt like a game. A silly thing we laughed about. He would tell me it was snowing, even when the sky was clear and warm and blue. I would shiver and draw my knees close. He’d tell me to sneak from my room in the middle of the night and meet him at the pond. He got better at it, at fooling my mind into doing whatever he said. And that summer, I talked of leaving Pastoral, of running away together, but he wanted to stay, he always had. He knew he would lead our community once Cooper died; it had already been decided. Cooper had raised him as his own son, taught him how to govern, how to lead. Levi would move into Cooper’s house and take over his position within the community.

But still, I wanted to get far away from these woods; I wanted to see what was beyond.

One mild summer day, the season shifting into autumn, Levi began practicing a new trick. He placed his fingertips against my closed eyelids—soft and delicate—and told me to imagine a darkness so complete that it spread over my whole body, spilling across my eyes, until all I could see were shadows. Until the sky became a smear of gray, and everything around me bled of its color.