I turn the knob and step inside.
A metal bed sits against one wall, coated in dust. The floor bends away from my feet as I cross the room, grass poking up between the boards, cobwebs spanning much of the ceiling, a vine from a half-dead wisteria growing through the broken window, inching its way up the wall—dried purple flowers scattered beneath it from the last time it bloomed and shed its petals onto the floor.
One of the heavy curtains has been drawn back from a window, revealing a slant of moonlight. Perhaps it was Bee, the last time she was in here, her small footsteps visible in the layer of dust along the floorboards.
Years ago, when Cooper was still alive and outsiders arrived from time to time—appearing from the distant curve in the road—this room housed exhausted travelers. They slept here for weeks or months until it was decided if they could remain in Pastoral. And then they were given a job; a place to stay within the community. This was the halfway house. An in-between.
With slow, deliberate steps, I walk to the bed where a pillow and a blanket the color of oatmeal sit folded at the end, awaiting a new arrival who will never come. But I wonder: Did Travis Wren somehow sleep in this bed without us knowing? Did he shake the dust from the old blanket and rest beneath a canopy of cobwebs, a nightly breeze hissing through the broken window?
My hand trails across the metal bed frame to the mattress. He stayed here, Bee told me, eyes watering, lashes fluttering like small, frightened wings. But if he was here—a stranger asleep in our house—where is he now? What happened to him?
I slide my palm along the edge of the mattress—instinct buzzing at the ends of my fingertips—between the box springs, feeling for something. Something. Forgotten things, left-behind things. Something that could be hidden here by a man who once slept in this bed and then vanished.
There is nothing. Only a dead beetle; a clot of dried leaves.
But then… my fingers touch something else. I yank my hand out, startled by the solid nature of it. There’s something there. I inch my hand back between the mattresses, and feel the hard corner of a book. Of paper.
It takes some effort to dislodge it, as if it’s imprinted itself in the mattress, molded, been here too long. But finally, I yank it free and it comes out with a puff of fine dust.
My eyes blink in the dim light, holding a small book with a blank cover, no markings on the front. Carefully, I open it and see that it’s a journal, with someone’s blunt, crisp handwriting scribbled across the pages.
His.
I snap it closed. And my heart makes a sudden dip into my stomach.
I back away from the bed, holding the book clamped shut in my hand, feeling like a thief. Like the ghosts of this room might see what I’ve taken and start rattling the walls of the house, shrieking for me to put it back.
I slip out into the hall, closing the door behind me, and move quickly to the back door, escaping outside. Crickets sing in the far field, happy little chirps, a song to call out the night insects. And soon the frogs begin their bellow from the banks of the pond—a summer tune that folds over me, familiar, but also an echo in my ears that feels too close. Conspiring. Everything awake and alive and watching.
I hurry down the porch steps, past Calla’s garden that smells of green tomatoes and night jasmine, and continue through the grove of elms at the south side of the house, beyond the windmill turning slowly high above, until I can’t see anything but trees and stars. Until the house vanishes from sight behind me.
I stand in a shaft of pale gummy moonlight, looking down at the notebook.
This is another deceit. Another secret I will keep from my wife.
My fucking treacherous heart.
I turn through the pages quickly at first, as if I need to hurry, absorb as much as I can before Calla discovers me in the trees—catches me with a notebook written by the man whose truck I found days earlier.
But as I skim the pages, I find my gaze softening, slowing down, reading every word as if I were starving for them. A story unfolds within the pages, events and roadmaps and snowy mountain roads that led to the night—the moment—the notebook was stashed beneath the mattress. But there are also pages missing, torn free. Lost or discarded.
When I reach the end, I close the book and blink through the trees in the direction of the house. All this time, the house has concealed a secret, held it captive, hidden.
Bee was right: Travis Wren was in our home.
He came looking for a woman named Maggie St. James.
And now, both have disappeared.
BEE
There is a place beyond the pond, in the high meadow, where the ground feels oddly hollow, a cavity in the earth where sound travels easily—a place I often come. I lie down between the blades of grass and clover, and press my ear to the soil.
I listen to the tiny thump inside my stomach—the little burst of life, the delicate, wondrous growing of cells—that Levi doesn’t want.
Tears fall sideways across my cheeks, then spill to the ground and soak in. I am comforted by the earth beneath me—the mass so much larger than my own body, a great revolving orb that I cling to. And then I hear the back door of the farmhouse open, the quick, fettered pace of Theo’s heartbeat emerging into the night, his gate strange, unbalanced—rushed even. He moves away from the house into the grove of elms. He is quiet there, standing, and when I strain my ears I can almost hear the rasp of his breathing. Broken gulps of air. What is he doing?
But then my focus is drawn away, to another sound in the opposite direction.
The ground aches beneath me, twigs snap, leaves fall in slow measure—lazy and truant—followed by the faint preternatural hiss of trees cracking apart, limbs opening up, and disease spilling out.
I snap my head away from the ground.
THEO