I wish I could hear what she hears: the far-off hum of honeybee wings across the meadow, the subtle shift when the summer air changes directions, a rainstorm in the distance. Once she told me she could smell a hint of salt from the Pacific Ocean, blowing in from the west a hundred miles away. She feels what I cannot—my eyesight an impediment to truly absorbing the world whirling and clicking around me.
Bee pushes herself to standing, reaching out a hand for the trunk of the hazelnut tree to orient herself. “Do you think he wants to leave?”
The question cuts through me, unexpected, and I shake my head. “No,” I answer quickly, before the idea can embed itself into my skin. But I look out at the border trees to the west, surveying the landscape, the pond with its calm surface, the slow-moving creek, the farmhouse at the low end of the meadow, and I wonder if my husband has considered leaving this all behind. A wooden fence runs along the road in front of the farmhouse, and if you turn south, the road will lead you to the gate where Theo stands guard most nights. But if you turn north, the road takes you into the heart of Pastoral, dead-ending at a small parking area where two dozen cars sit rusted and pillaged, weeds growing up around their flattened tires, some with hoods propped up, their parts stripped clean, others are missing doors. Even an old school bus sits on its rims: the same bus that the founders drove into these woods and never drove back out. It’s a cemetery of bent metal and steering wheels and spark plugs long corroded. Mementoes of old lives. Useless machines now.
I brush my hair back from my forehead, the wind pulling it loose from my braid, while my sister’s golden-red hair swirls about her like a firestorm, long and unruly—easily tangled and set into knots. She is a rare, wild creature—as lovely as the blooms beside the pond, as gentle as the trees that sigh in the evening breeze. But she is also reckless: often venturing too close to the border, where the pox threatens to sink into her flesh and rot her from the inside out.
The wind unsettles the leaves above us like a million scraps of paper under the blue summer sky, and I know she can hear it: the changing seasons, the buoyancy in the air, the fragile quality.
“A storm,” she says, turning her sightless gaze to the west. “Lightning. I can feel it.”
In the distance, a bulkhead of clouds is drawing close.
I lift the basket into my arms and stand up. A spire of electricity snaps across the dark clouds and a second later, thunder shakes the ground beneath us. “We should get inside,” I say. But she hesitates, tilting her chin upward, as if she could already feel the rain against her forehead. “Bee,” I say more sharply.
It isn’t safe out here, in the open, with the rain drawing close. We need to get indoors.
Finally, she nods, and we hurry back toward the farmhouse, cutting through the far field where the tall grass shivers like a golden sea, waves heaving beneath a bruise-black sky. Bee’s summer dress flaps around her knees as we run, the little white flowers stitched into the hem shivering as if they sense the storm. Thunder shakes the air and our bare feet leave footprints in the dark earth.
We reach the garden, edged by a low fence, the green tomatoes and ripe strawberries shivering in the sudden hard gust of wind. The chickens who live within the protected plot scramble back to their henhouse at the back corner, clucking nervously. Just to the south of the farmhouse, the windmill churns quickly, metal blades spinning, drawing water up from the well deep within the earth.
At the house, we scramble through the screen door just as the rain reaches the edge of the porch. I drop the basket of hazelnuts onto the dining room table—nuts that will later be ground down into a butter, to be spread on toast and eaten by the spoonful. A second later, the ping ping ping of raindrops on the metal roof echoes through the house. “We stayed too long in the field,” I say, out of breath.
Bee walks to the kitchen sink and turns on the tap, fresh well-water spilling over her dirt-crusted hands. “We got to the house in time.”
Some in the community don’t think we should fear the rain, that it couldn’t possibly bring the rot over our borders, but even a molecule of sickness carried in by a storm—a drop of infected rain against the skin—could be enough to force the lungs to stop breathing. Many years ago, Liam Garza was out repairing fence posts along the eastern edge of the crop fields, it was autumn—the harvest finished—when a late season rainstorm blew over the valley. But Liam didn’t gather his tools and hurry inside, he stayed out in the rain for another hour, finishing the last of his work. Two days later, he became sick, confined to his bed: a deep, awful cough and pale skin and eyes turning an acrid black. He was dead in a week.
After that, the community decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Maybe it was the rain that brought the illness over the border, maybe he was out in it for too long—allowing it to soak into his skin, drops catching on his tongue, breathing it into his lungs—or maybe Liam had slipped over the boundary into the trees but refused to admit it. Either way, we now move indoors when the rains come. Just to be sure.
Bee turns off the faucet and I can feel her stormy gray-blue eyes on me—even though she can’t truly see me. Another crack of lightning splinters the air and the walls tremor around us, the weathervane atop the house spinning wildly—the barometric pressure dropping. The magnolia trees beside the back door quiver, leaves opening wide as if in prayer, awaiting the rain, and I think how I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Unlike my sister and my husband, this place has always been enough.
“I think Theo’s keeping something from me,” I say at last, the words swallowed up by the darkening sky.
Bee turns her gaze to the window, thunder rolling across the horizon, a deep belly of fury and rainwater and electricity. “All men lie.”
BEE
My sister is afraid of the dark: of the trees at our border, the moon hanging too low in the sky, the stars pinwheeling down to crush us. She scurries indoors when it rains, while I stand in the open and beckon down the sky.