I hide under the eaves of the garden shed, waiting for it to let up.
The others have fled into their homes, tiny lives folded into fortress walls, as if nothing could hurt them while they slept in their beds, candles illuminating only the shallowest places, never revealing what hides in dark corners and within the raindrops spilling down their roofs and windowpanes.
The sky becomes a mournful gray, and I cross my arms, huddled against the cold, listening as others sink into their mattresses and pillows, the heavy breathing of deep sleep, the twitch of fingers and toes as they drift off.
But I also hear something else.
A figure is moving through the downpour, feet slapping against the muddy earth, his breathing an unsteady metronome.
It’s Theo.
My brother-in-law is unafraid of the rain—he makes his way up the center of Pastoral, wet droplets beating over him, soaking into his hair, until he clomps up the steps of Levi’s porch and enters without knocking.
I strain to hear their voices inside, their conversation, but it’s too far away and the rain is a steady thrum in my ears. So I stay tucked under the garden shed eave, and I wait.
Trees moan along the boundary, rain beats against the earth, and I listen for the sound of oak and elm and aspen trunks cracking open, the rot breaking them apart. And in that silence, in the waiting, an old feeling begins to prick at me: that thorny, too-tight sensation of being caged, stuck inside Pastoral, a gnawing beneath my shoulder blades that has only worsened over the years. Some mornings, when the air is calm and milky, I think I can hear the ocean a hundred or so miles away to the west, and I feel the pressing urge to reach a hand through the border trees and touch the foaming sea with my flattened palms. To stretch my fingertips as far as they will go through the dense woods, until I feel something other than the prick of pine needles and moss. I long to sleepwalk through the trees and let my legs carry me somewhere in the distance—a needle-sharp desire that has rested inside me my whole life.
I want to leave this place.
But this feeling vanishes with the sound of a door thudding closed, followed by the quick descent of footsteps down Levi’s porch. Theo has emerged, and he’s moving quicker now, out through the rain toward the farmhouse. He’s heading home.
I lift my hand, palm to the sky, and consider sliding it out beyond the eave of the roofline, until little explosions of rainwater speckle my skin. But I close my hand into a fist, too afraid. Theo might be immune, but that doesn’t mean I am.
I wait for the rain to recede, and after another few minutes the storm pushes east, moving out over the treetops, and soon the last of the rain sheds down from the roof above me and the air falls still—a silent, dark dripping over the valley.
I step out into the open and walk to Levi’s house.
Blood pulses between my ears—the words I need to say already clawing at my insides, wanting to sputter free.
When I reach his porch, I touch the frame of the front door, imagining tiny hands reaching out for the knob, tiny feet running across the hardwood floors, laughter like a bell always chiming. This house could be made into a home. A place where a family could live. Children always stirring, fingerprints on the windows, garden dirt on the rugs. Levi and I could make something in this house, a life sturdier than the ones we live separate from each other. We could be happy.
I imagine it so clearly that when I turn the knob and enter his home, I feel as if I belong here, a purpose greater than the sum of the words I’m about to say to Levi.
I hear his heart beating as soon as I enter—quickened in his chest, the blood hot in his veins.
“Bee?” he says, his voice thin. He sets something on the cabinet near the stairs, probably the bottle of booze he keeps hidden there.
“I need to talk to you,” I say. I know he’s surely upset with me for speaking against him at the gathering—for saying that the baby needed a doctor—but I need to tell him the thing that’s been roaring inside me for too long. The secret I can no longer keep.
He staggers toward me, and I know he’s been drinking. I can smell it on his skin: sickly sweet and salty skin. It’s been months since he’s been into the bottle of whiskey, since last winter, when a heavy snow sunk over the community and we all started to feel a little desperate. Levi feared winter was growing too long, that spring would come too late to plant crops, and the community might not have enough food to last through another year. But the snow thawed and spring came quick, almost overnight.
He drinks when he’s worried. When a thought begins to wear at him like a river against soft wood.
“You think Colette’s baby won’t survive?” he asks, his voice cold, grating against my ears.
“She needs a doctor,” I echo what I said at the gathering. “Her heartbeat is weak. I don’t think she’ll last much longer.”
He moves closer to me, then sinks onto the couch—I can hear the depression of the cushions—and he scrapes his hands through his hair, pulling tightly. “We should prepare a ceremony,” he says. “I’ll have one of the men construct a coffin, and we should mark a space in the cemetery. Let it be done quickly, so the community can mourn and then move on.”
A wall of air builds inside my throat. “She’s not even gone yet.”
“You know there’s nothing we can do.”
“We could try.”
He makes a sound through his exhale—a tired irritation. A weariness I don’t fully understand.
“We can’t just do nothing,” I press, easing onto the couch beside him.
He shifts, leaning forward, his breath bitter and hot. “This isn’t nothing,” he says, words like sharpened blades. “This is surviving. This is keeping our community alive.”