I grab Calla’s hand, and I pull her toward the trees.
“No, Theo,” she shouts at me. “It’s too far to the house. We need to find shelter here, closer.” I ignore her and lead her on, to the path that winds along the stream, back to the farmhouse. “Theo!” she cries, tugging against my hand, her eyes flashing to the sky. “The rain is almost here.”
But still I don’t answer, my gaze is focused on the route through the dark, listening as the sky cracks and splinters—a summer storm upon us. I know my wife is afraid, but I feel an almost mechanical need to get back to the house, to flee the heart of Pastoral and the others. To get my wife safely inside.
We’re nearly to the back porch of the house when the first raindrops fall. And they’re not light, half-hearted droplets—it’s a full downpour. A deluge of water from the sky.
Rain explodes against our skin, absorbing into our scalps, our cheekbones, and our too-thin clothing. Calla lets out a small, terrified sound, and I yank her up the porch and through the back door. I only release her hand once we’re inside, and she stands in the doorway, arms hanging like wet sacks of corn flour, hair dripping over her face, a puddle collecting at her feet.
Her eyes lift to mine, the whites taking up too much space.
“Theo—” her voice trembles, “the rain. I’m—” She looks down at her arms, her hands, like she’s afraid to wipe away the water, to rub the sickness into her skin. Her jaw begins to tremble.
I move toward her. “We have to get you out of those clothes.”
She nods mutely and strips her shirt over her head, followed by her jean shorts. We leave them in a heap beside the back door and climb the stairs. Naked, she steps into the bathtub, and I turn on the tap, cupping my hands beneath the cold well-water and pouring it quickly over my wife’s shoulders, her hair, her pale, pale face. She wipes at her skin with her hands, the panic rising inside her—rubbing at her flesh, clawing at it, turning it red.
“Calla,” I say, when her skin is the color of a cardinal’s wings, and I grab her left hand, holding it in place. “You’re okay. There’s no rot on your skin. You don’t have it.”
“You can’t be sure. We shouldn’t have tried to outrun it.” She shakes her head and I can see the tears cresting her eyelids now, the panic in her breathing like she’s going into shock. “Why did you do that?” she asks now. “Why did you drag me through the rain?”
I release her hand. “It’s okay,” I assure her again, but I have no reason to believe this—it’s a certainty I feel without real merit, without proof. “You’re not sick.”
“You don’t know that,” she spits. “You’ve been over the border, you’ve been down the road, but I haven’t. You might not be able to catch it, but I could. We should have stayed in Pastoral.”
I rock back onto my heels, the rainwater on my own clothes dripping onto the aquamarine tiles of the bathroom floor.
“You pulled me through the rain,” she repeats, every part of her body shaking. “The rot might already be inside me.”
Her words land like a club against my skull.
“Calla.” I reach out to touch her, but she winces back so violently that I drop my hand.
“Please get out,” she whispers through trembling lips.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Theo—” She shakes her head, rubbing water up her arms. “Please, just leave me alone.”
My legs push me up and I move into the doorway. I open my mouth to apologize, to tell her how sorry I am, but the tight line of her jaw, the cold cast of her gaze, tells me there’s nothing more I can say.
I leave the bathroom and walk back down the stairs. But I don’t stop in the living room, I exit the house and step out into the rain—the very thing Calla fears—and slog through the downpour to the path, back to the center of Pastoral.
* * *
The community is quiet—the rain has forced everyone inside.
I slink past the gathering circle and kitchen building, down the row of homes lit by candlelight, curtains drawn. The night is somber, hushed, and I think: We have agreed to let a child die. To do nothing.
I walk to Levi’s home and up to the porch, turning the doorknob and letting myself inside, out of the downpour. The house is mildly warm, candles throwing soft, palliative light against the wood walls.
“Whiskey?” Levi asks from the shadowed dark to my right. I jerk toward his voice, and realize he’s standing not far from me—in the doorway that leads into his office—and he must have seen me entering his home uninvited.
But he doesn’t say anything about my intrusion, or that I’m soaked from the rain, instead he walks across the living room to a narrow table just below the stairs.
There are only a handful of real bottles of booze left within the compound—bottles from the outside, brought here by new arrivals. Mostly we drink a harsh, white alcohol that Agnes makes from a still in the back corner of his shed. Moonshine, he calls it. We also use it to clean wounds and polish silverware. But Levi pulls out a half-full bottle of whiskey from a cupboard inside the table—the label a shimmering gold with black lettering. It’s a bottle he keeps hidden, all to himself. “It was Cooper’s,” he tells me.
He pours the dark liquid into two glasses, measuring them carefully, not a drop to be wasted. If this bottle really did belong to Cooper, then it’s at least ten years old, a remnant from when our founder was still alive.
He hands me a glass, and takes a quick swig from his own. “You walked here through the rain?” He nods down at my clothes, one eyebrow lifted.
“It’s starting to let up,” I say, which we both know is a lie. The rain is thrumming loudly against the roof.