Pink spots dot Bee’s cheeks in the sunlight, but she doesn’t wake, doesn’t feel my gaze on her. The rain has let up outside, and the air in her room feels stagnant, in need of an open window.
But I don’t step into the room, I stay like the ghosts we used to fear, pressed to the doorframe, while a sinking feeling finds weight inside my chest. There is an ocean that swells and heaves between my sister and me, a vast sea that neither one of us will cross. She prefers to remember the past, pick apart the moments from our childhood, while I keep it stuffed down where it won’t hurt me.
And when I look into my sister’s eyes, there is something there I don’t understand—the woman she’s become is a stranger to me.
Downstairs, the front door slams shut, the vibration rattling the walls of the house, followed by the sound of footsteps across the living room floor. Theo is home.
I close Bee’s bedroom door, letting her sleep, and descend the stairs.
Theo is standing at the sink in the kitchen, looking down at something in his hands, and he’s still wearing his boots—a trail of dirt across the hardwood floor. I stop short at the bottom step. His posture is strange, shoulders rounded forward, back rigid. And a spider-crawling-across-flesh sort of unease rises up into my chest.
“Theo?” I ask.
He turns quickly, nearly dropping the thing in his hand. But he doesn’t try to hide it from me—to tuck it away behind his back—instead he holds it between his fingers, and his face sags with an odd trace of confusion. Like he’s unsure what he’s holding.
“What is it?” I ask.
“A photograph.”
I cross into the kitchen and my eyes flick to his, suddenly unsure if I want to look—want to see what has caused this unnatural discomfort in his eyes. “Of what?”
“A woman.”
My gaze skims the photo, catching a glimpse of blond hair and a sharp blue eye peering up from drawn, hard features. The rest of the image is damaged, waterlogged. “Who is she?”
“Her name is Maggie St. James.” Theo stares at me like he’s looking for clues, like I might know who she is. “Have you heard of her?”
“No.” The floorboards above us creak softly—Bee has risen from bed, and she walks across the hall to the bathroom. A moment later, the sound of water rattles up through the pipes in the walls, taking a moment to reach the upstairs sink. “Where did you find it?”
There are only a few photographs within the community, brought to Pastoral by the founders who wanted to remember those they left behind in the outside. Grandparents, old friends, Roona even has a photo of her dog, Popeye, who died before she moved to Pastoral.
“In a truck,” he answers.
“What truck?”
He won’t look at me; his eyes are all wrong. “Out on the road.”
“What do you mean?” I take a step back, away from him.
“I went past the boundary,” he admits, his mouth slack, his fingers running across the photograph.
The air leaves my lungs, little sparks flaring across my vision. “Theo,” I hiss, and glance to the door, as if someone might be there, someone who might hear. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I just wanted to see what was out there.”
My hands begin to shake, and I take another step away from him—my heart a club against my eardrums. “Death is out there,” I answer, my eyes tracing the features of his face now, looking for cracks, for any hint that he’s changed.
That he’s brought something back with him.
My husband has done the very thing he should not do: He went over the border. Over the border. Where dark things live. Where no one comes back alive—at least not for long.
“I feel fine,” he says quickly, eyebrows sloping downward, mouth mirroring the same shape.
But I take another step back from him and my heels hit one of the dining room chairs. It scrapes across the wood floor and stops at the edge of the table. Knots form inside my chest, and my fingers reach out for the table to brace myself. “It takes a day or two for the symptoms to show,” I answer.
I shouldn’t be here in the house with him. I should run, call to Bee, warn the others.
“I’m not sick,” he insists, and he raises his palms to me, as if I could see some proof in the work-worn surface of his hands. “I don’t have it.”
“You can’t know that.” I inch around the end of the table, my eyes locked on his. The back door is only a few steps away, I could dart out through the screen door and be in the meadow in less than a minute. I could run up the path to Pastoral and leave my husband behind. My husband who might be infected. Sickness coiling itself along his tissues, his marrow, a ticking clock he won’t survive.
But I don’t, because I’m afraid what it’ll mean if I do. I’m afraid of what will come next. So I stay rooted to the floor, a roaring, clacking dread thumping at my temples.
He moves closer to me, but not enough to touch me, not close enough to pass whatever might be inside him onto me: he senses the fear screaming down my veins, pumping blood to my limbs, ready to bolt. “I promise I’m not sick,” he says again. He clears his throat and drops his hands to his sides. “It wasn’t the first time I went down the road.”
My eyebrows screw together, my heart pumps faster.
“I’ve done it before,” he says, a cool, calm slant to each word. As if they hardly mean anything at all.
I release my hold on the table. “You went down the road before last night?”
His eyes slip to the floor, his hands worrying against the photograph he still holds. “Every night.” His gaze lifts back to mine and there is a burden in them, a heavy kind of remorse that he’s been carrying for much too long. “I’ve been going down the road every night for the last year, a little farther each time. But I’ve never gotten sick, Calla. I’ve gone past the boundary hundreds of times, and I’ve never caught it.”