A History of Wild Places(98)
A Pastoral name—a good name.
Theo comes to pick me up just after noon. I climb into the old truck and roll down the window, resting my head back against the seat and feeling the wind against my face. But the drive is short, and too soon Theo is helping me through the lobby of the hotel to an elevator.
Inside our room, I walk to the window and stare out at an unfamiliar landscape. A world crusted over with concrete and blinking streetlights and car horns.
“Your parents called the hotel,” Theo says from behind me. “They know you’re here.”
I turn back to face him. “How?”
“Police notified them. Found you in the missing persons database, most likely.” Theo is standing only a few paces away, like he’s ready to reach out and grab me if I start to feel weak. If I collapse beside the window.
On shaking legs, I wobble the few steps to the bed, sinking onto the end with a hand against my ribs. “What will I tell them?”
“The truth,” Theo answers.
I shake my head. “I don’t even know what that is.”
* * *
I know I should call him Travis. And he should call me Maggie. But we can’t seem to shake the names of who we’ve become. Our Pastoral names.
We sit in the lobby of the hotel, my body thrumming with nervous energy. The TVs are droning from the far corner of the long, rectangular room. An older couple is watching the news, their heads inclined back, listening to the voices blare about stock prices and the worst flu on record and a shooting out east somewhere. Death toll unknown. This is the framework of a society we’ve left behind, the things I was once numb to. But now, each one is a papercut across my skin, little wounds that burn more than they ever did before.
“They’re here,” Theo says, standing up from his chair and nodding through the glass doors at the parking lot. He runs his hands down his pant legs, like he could wipe away the nerves.
My parents are walking across the pavement, hand in hand. They seem familiar, but in that distant, watery way. And I’m unsure how I’m going to feel once they’re only a few feet from me, arms outstretched—these two people who’ve spent seven years searching for their daughter. For me. I should feel bad for them, for the worry that’s carved hard lines into their faces, for the sleepless nights my disappearance has caused. But oddly, I feel nothing. Only a knocking against my ribs.
They move through the sliding glass doors, eyes scanning the lobby, and when they see me, tears break across both their faces. A moment later, I’m in their arms, my mom muttering my name—the wrong name. “Maggie,” she says. “Maggie, are you okay?”
But still, I don’t know what to feel. What to say. My stitches throb beneath my shirt, the pressure of their embrace too much, and my head is an anvil. I should know these two people, but my mind struggles to place them into the sequence of my life, a slideshow all mixed up and out of order.
I pull away from them and they look to Theo—to Travis.
“Thank you,” my mom says through the wash of her tears, hardly getting the words out before she pulls Theo into a hug, sobbing against his shoulder. After all this time, he’s brought me back to them—he did the job they hired him to do.
The racket in my chest rises up into my throat, and I sink back down into the lobby chair, trying to keep the room from spinning. To keep the nausea at bay.
My parents sit on the small sofa opposite me, hands wringing, staring at me as if they’re trying to superimpose their memory of me from seven years ago over the woman who sits before them now.
“Are you alright?” my mother asks, leaning forward, as close to me as she can get—a strange show of affection from a woman who rarely showed any when I was little. A piece of my past I feel more than I remember.
I nod but my body feels as if it’s convulsing. Theo sits down beside me, and I can feel him wanting to touch me. But he holds his hands stiffly in his lap, afraid for my parents to see, to know what we are.
“The police said you were found near where your car was abandoned,” my dad says. “That you’d been up in those woods all these years.”
My gaze flinches to my mom, but her expression looks suddenly tight, creases pulled together at her temples.
“I—” I begin, then catch myself, twirling the ring on my finger—my wedding band. I don’t know where to start, what to say. How do I explain the last seven years of my life? Tell them that who I am now is not who I once was. I prefer the dampness of soil beneath my toes and the hush of an autumn twilight over cappuccinos and crowds and noisy movie theaters. That I don’t think I can ever be that woman again; that I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. That seeing them again is both relief and strain inside my rib cage, pressing on the hole where the bullet was pulled free. That I feel like I can’t breathe. Like I might vomit right here in this hotel lobby with its screeching TVs and the whoosh of the sliding glass doors as hotel guests come and go, dragging rolling suitcases and yelling children and cell phones that ding and buzz and chirp.
Finally, Theo reaches out and takes my hand, squeezing tightly, anchoring me to him. And I hear the word pulsing against my temples: husband, husband. The memory surfaces now: of Levi saying this word to me over and over until it became true. He convinced me of its meaning, made it impossible to think of Theo as anything other than my husband. But he didn’t make me love Theo, didn’t make my heart twine into knots whenever he touched me—those thoughts are my own. Theo is my husband because my skin cannot bear to be without him, not because Levi made us marry.