I don’t feel sick.
I don’t feel the rot carving tunnels along my bones, intricate designs like snowflakes on glass. Each morning, I run my fingers down my forearms, searching for places where the delicate blue veins have begun to turn black. I peer at my eyes in the mirror over the bathroom sink, looking for tiny, needle-prick spots of blood, but so far, I show no symptoms. No sign of the rot.
Perhaps I got into the bath in time after Theo pulled me through the rain, scrubbed my skin raw before the illness could soak into my flesh. Maybe I’m okay.
But there is still an edginess inside me, a slippery, nearly-there-and-then-gone feeling. Something in my periphery I can’t quite see, a rustling disquiet that I have no word for.
I open the shallow drawer of the bedside table, pulling out the silver book I found in the garden. My fingers feel the impression of the number three stamped onto the front. Whether by accident or on purpose, it was buried in the garden beneath the wild roses. I would like to show it to Bee, let her hold it in her palm, and maybe she will have some memory of it. Of who it once belonged to in Pastoral.
But I haven’t seen her since the gathering.
Yesterday evening, I thought I spotted her kneeling down beside the pond, but when I stepped out onto the porch, a hand over my eyes to block the waves of setting sunlight, she slipped away into the grove of lemon trees. Thin as paper. She knows how to stay hidden, how not to be found—she can hear my footsteps from a mile or two off, the vibration against the ground.
I check her bed to see if she snuck in during the night to sleep, but the sheets are still tucked neatly under her mattress. Something’s wrong, and I worry she might be straying too close to the perimeter—where the sage smoke has hopefully pushed the rot farther back into the trees, but we can’t be sure.
I stand at the window and watch the morning sunlight whirl and leap across the meadow grass. I watch for my sister.
But she doesn’t appear.
Two days pass. Theo returns home late in the mornings after his shift, wandering in, heavy boots dragging across the floor as if he took the long way home—strolling along the creek, past the hazelnut grove—before finally shuffling through the front door and up the stairs to collapse in bed. Without a word. One afternoon, I found him standing at the end of the back hallway, staring at the door into the old decaying sunroom—a part of the house we have left to rot over the years.
When I look at my husband, I see a man who’s already half-gone, like he’s still out on that road, his steps moving quicker with each mile he puts between him and Pastoral. He is a man who has already left me behind.
Tonight, after he leaves for his shift at the gate, I don’t climb the stairs to our room; the bed will feel too empty, the house too hollow-boned and vacant.
Instead, I walk out to the garden, searching for something.
The chickens sleep restlessly in the small wood structure at the back corner of the garden—Theo built it some years ago, a slanted ramp leading up to their roost, safe from night predators. But they’ve never laid eggs inside their hen house—for reasons I don’t understand—instead they drop their small, oat-brown eggs throughout the garden, along the paths where they might be stepped on and flattened, they roll into divots and collect along the fence line. Lazy chickens, I’ve always thought. Careless.
A curiosity tickles at my fingertips, and I crouch down beside the wild rosebush, pressing my palm to the earth at the place where I found the small silver book. How did it get here? I brush the dirt away—remembering the glint of silver when it blinked up at me—and begin to dig a new hole beneath the rosebush. Drawn by a sourceless need. My fingernails pack with dirt, my back aches with the work, but I keep going—as if I might find meaning deeper in the soil. I pull dirt from the hole, uncovering sleeping earthworms, roots coiling outward from the rosebush, but find no more tiny silver books.
My eyes water in the cool night, but I keep scratching at the ground, desperate… when at last, I feel something.
A sharp, distinct corner.
There’s something else buried here.
I scoop away another layer of dirt, clawing now. The thing is larger than the small silver book I found in this same spot—much larger. It fills up most of the hole, substantial in size and heft.
My heartbeat clamors up into my temples, and finally, I wedge the thing free from the soil—from a tangle of rose roots that had started to tighten like knobby fists around it—and I slump it into my lap.
It’s a book.
A real book. Big and thickly bound and heavy. I sink back onto my heels and wipe the dirt from the cover. Its surface is no longer smooth, warped and distorted from rainwater, but I can still make out the silver lettering on the black cover: Eloise and the Foxtail, Book One.
Was the tiny silver book merely a marker for what really lay beneath—a hint to keep digging?
I hoist the larger book under my arm, and scramble up to the porch, into the house, sinking into the chair beside the unlit fireplace. I read the cover again, my index finger tracing each letter, each loop and line: Eloise and the Foxtail, Book One. But there is no author’s name on the front cover, no indication of who wrote it. The dust jacket is missing, only the hard cover remains.
A nagging creeps up the rungs of my ribs.