A History of Wild Places(96)

The police arrive in a noisy swirl of bright lights, and Calla is hoisted into an ambulance and taken away. Colette and her baby are whisked off too. The minutes move fast now, everything a blur of voices and movements—they ask questions about the bullet in Calla’s ribs; they ask where we’ve been; they want to know our names.

“You all just appeared out of the forest?” a young officer with a doughy face asks, as if he too has sidestepped into a not yet fully formed dream, and he’s unsure if this is all some prank. “After all this time?”

I tell a story, but not the right one. Not the real one. Because there is a strange ache inside me—the need to protect the place that was our home. To keep it secret, even now.

“Are there others out there?” they ask.

My stomach turns. Others. Maybe they want to be found, or maybe they want to remain hidden, solitary in the forest that is their home. Maybe it’s not my decision to make.

The sun is sinking to the west when they finally take me to a hotel an hour away—when they decide I have nothing more to tell. The hotel has an outdoor pool and continental breakfast and TVs with the volume turned up too high in the lobby. My ears buzz and thump, and I want to go to the hospital to see Calla, but they tell me I won’t be able to see her or Colette until the morning. Might as well rest, one of the officers says.

Might as well.

Might as well do nothing. Might as well sit inside a strange, stale room with not enough sunlight or air or space to move.

My head hurts, straining to make sense of this place where I once belonged.

I touch the TV remote, the ironing board in the narrow closet, the bar of soap beside the sink, but they threaten to reveal images of the people who have stayed in this room before me, of maids and crying children and one-night stands. My talent is returning to me in bursts, a jarring staccato of glimpses that I don’t want.

It’s sat dormant for so long that the creeping-back-in of memories that aren’t mine feels like a terrifying intrusion. We only just escaped Pastoral, and my mind is still a little cracked, bruised, and unsteady. I’m still not sure who I am.

So I lie awake, alone in a bed that smells like something I’ve forgotten how to describe: like metal, like bleach that doesn’t come from the earth, and I stare at the low ceiling thinking of Calla. Of strangers gathered around her, of needles poking her flesh, and the clicking of machines.

In the morning, there are no officers waiting for me in the lobby—even though they said they’d pick me up first thing and drive me to the hospital. I stand for a while beside the checker-patterned lobby chairs, staring out at the hotel pool. It’s still early, and only a single woman is reclined in one of the lounge chairs, reading a book beneath the shade of a large umbrella, the shivering blue rectangle in front of her winking up at the clear sky.

Several feet away, the lobby TVs are making my ears ring with an ad for a bathroom cleaning product, and then a women’s sanitary pad, and a storage unit facility that offers the first month free. Clean and organize. Clean and declutter. These slogans feel like insects nibbling at my eardrums.

I start to move toward the sliding lobby doors, needing an escape, when I hear a name bellowing from the TVs: Colette.

I pause and crane my head back, listening to the voice warble from the speakers, wishing I could turn the volume down two clicks. It’s a local news station, a man with silver hair and a woman with unnatural blue eyes, peering out through the TV screen. “… the woman and her baby were taken to the hospital yesterday after having fled a remote part of the forest about an hour south of here. But it wasn’t until early this morning when the identity of the unknown woman was discovered. Authorities have determined that she is indeed Ellen Ballister, the young actress who vanished eleven years earlier from her home in Malibu. And since then had been believed to be dead.”

I feel the ground beneath me sway just a little. A man walks through the sliding doors into the lobby behind me, glancing up at the TVs. He shakes his head and tilts his gaze to me. “Hell of a story, ain’t it? Her husband said she left a note eleven years ago, saying she was going up the coast, needed a weekend away, but she never came home. Somehow ended up in those woods. Has amnesia, they’re saying. Can’t recall what happened to her.” He shakes his head again, but there is a wink in his eyes, like he’s thrilled at the spectacle of such a story. “She even had a baby with another man in those woods. You can’t write this shit. Fucking crazy.”

The man stares at me a moment, waiting for me to respond, to nod in agreement, but I offer up not even a twitch of an eyelash. Somehow Ellen Ballister found herself in Pastoral—maybe she went in search of it, like Maggie did, or maybe she found it on accident (which seems unlikely) but either way, just like us, she forgot who she really was. She forgot she was someone else outside those walls.

But now she’s returned, with a newborn baby.

I turn away from the TVs and the man, and stride out through the doors. Word has gotten out, and I suspect it won’t be long until they come asking questions of Calla and me.



* * *




A young officer is standing beside his patrol car just outside the lobby doors, hands in his pockets, eyeing the hotel pool like he’d rather be floating faceup, smeared in sunblock, than waiting for me.

“Sir,” he says to me, not using the name I gave police yesterday: Theo. Maybe they suspected it was a lie, or at least not entirely truthful, so they’re waiting for the rest of the story to reveal itself. For me to fess up.