My sister is a nocturnal creature.
She has always preferred the night, even as a child, hiding in dark closet corners and beneath the creaking boards of the stairwell, cobwebs gathering in her uncombed hair the color of maple syrup, slightly burnt. She preferred the weight of shadows over the bright warmth of the sun.
But now she cannot escape the dark.
“He doesn’t seem like himself,” I tell Bee. My sister and I kneel beneath the hazelnut trees that line the creek, the air softened by the sound of water spilling over rocks and tugging at the shore. Methodically, Bee and I gather the hazelnuts that have fallen to the ground in the night, and I watch her with a fascination I’ve always felt for my younger sister. Even now, all grown up, she is still a marvel to me—the ease with which her strong, sun-stained hands sweep the ground, deftly picking out the round nuts from the leaves and twigs and underbrush. A tactile skill, feeling for what she cannot see.
She was only nineteen when she lost her sight. I barely remember it now, but she still talks about it sometimes: how it happened strangely, how at first she saw liminal waves of sunlight and then bright bursts of color and odd, shifting shadows, before complete blindness took hold and it all went black. A sweeping darkness that never receded.
Perhaps, if we had lived out there, beyond the border, she could have gone to a doctor. A specialist who would have peered into her cloud-gray eyes and declared some medicine or surgery that might have saved her vision. But I try not to think about it: how things might have been different.
Because in the end, there was nothing to be done.
My sister has adapted, made use of her limitations, and maybe it’s even made her someone she might not have been otherwise.
“The seasons are changing,” Bee answers. “He always gets moody this time of year.” She rubs at her neck with the back of her hand, beads of sweat rising against her summer-browned skin. The three of us—my husband, my sister, and I—have lived together in the old farmhouse since Theo and I married. The same house where Bee and I grew up. And although Bee likes to tease Theo—making jabs at him during breakfast about how he’s too tall to fit through doorways, and his only real use to us is retrieving things from the top kitchen cupboards—he’s been like a big brother to her.
“This is different,” I say. There is a gnawing at the back of my teeth, an ache when he looks at me, like he’s thinking of things far away from here. There has always existed a strange sort of alchemy between us, two people who cannot live without the other—an earnest, unmistakable kind of love. And sometimes this well-deep feeling frightens me. The fragile devotion nested in my solar plexus, the desperation I feel for my husband, and the unconscious fear that I might lose him someday.
I place my palm flat against the soil. “At night sometimes,” I continue, “I wake and he’s standing at the window, looking out at the trees.”
Bee lifts her head, pale eyelids fluttering. “We all look to the trees.”
“But he doesn’t seem afraid. It’s like he’s looking for something.”
She lowers her hands again to the ground and finds another round nut, the shell still a pale brown, uncracked. A good one. She drops it into the basket. “It’s not dangerous if he stays on this side. And he’s probably just looking for signs of the rot in the trees.” Her voice is measured, unemotional. And I want to believe her.
I touch the thin copper ring on my finger: the wedding band Theo gave me two years ago when he asked me to marry him. I’ve known him my whole life, we both grew up inside the boundary of Pastoral, and yet I had never truly noticed him—not in the way I should have—until the afternoon I was foraging for wild morels near the creek, and he appeared on the path. “You found my secret spot,” he said, giving me a weighing look.
His dark hair slid across his eyelashes, in need of a haircut, and we sat on the shore, side by side, until the sun had set, telling made-up stories about the land and its history, and I wondered why we had never talked like that before. How it was that we knew so little about each other? It was as if we had slipped by one another unnoticed for our entire lives, until that day beside the creek.
It was only a few months later when he asked me to marry him in that same spot, the sun hovering beyond the trees and the sky a burnt autumn shade. I nodded and he kissed me and I was sure I would never be as happy as I was right then.
“Theo’s not dumb,” Bee says, drops of sweat gathering on her upper lip. She seems always overheated lately, like the mothers in Pastoral when they’re carrying a child, the little thrumming heart inside their bellies like a fire. “He won’t go over the boundary.”
I nod weakly, and we spend the next few minutes working in silence, filling the basket near to the brim, until Bee’s palm stalls against the ground, eyelids closed, as if she could feel the tree roots beneath us winding through the soil in desperate woven patterns—in search of water far below. “The trees sound sick this year,” she says, breathy and low.
I peer up through the branches. Soon the tree will be a galaxy of ripe hazelnuts, but for now we gather what we can from the earth. “It’s still early in the season,” I say. “There will be more to harvest later.”
She rocks back on her heels, feeling for the edge of the round basket with her fingertips, then dropping a handful of nuts inside. She smiles softly, like she thinks no one’s watching, and reveals the slightly crooked tooth on the upper right side, in an otherwise perfect row of teeth.