I slide my hand along the bed frame, the mattress, looking for something I might have missed. But there is nothing else tucked under the mattress. I pull away the curtains and let in the watery, rain-soaked moonlight. I feel along the window frames for a crack, a place where something might be stashed away. I check the drawer of the small bedside table, but it’s empty except for a small bundle of twigs gathered in the corner—signs of a mouse. I glance around the room but there is no other furniture, no place to hide something you might want to be found later, once you had gone missing.
A tiny pulse throbs above my left ear. An unknown nagging. My gaze lifts—to the headboard, the wallpaper—and I notice a wrinkle in the smudged daffodil print, the paper coming away from the wall. Likely water and sun damage from too many years of neglect. I slide my hand along the puckered folds, the glue that once held the paper flat has begun to buckle and melt. My fingers find a seam and I follow it down where it meets with the headboard, and to a strange bulge, a place where the wallpaper is thicker than it should be. I feel into the seam, carefully—afraid I might find a displeased spider or rodent—but instead my fingers discover a folded scrap of paper.
Gently, I pull it free, then sink onto the edge of the bed. The paper is crinkled from the dampness of the wall, but I manage to open it, flattening the creases in my palm.
It’s one of Travis’s notebook pages.
Torn free from the book then placed in the wall above the headboard. My eyes vibrate, struggling to settle on the words.
I can hear them upstairs, their footsteps loosen the dust from the ceiling, sending it down to the bed where I’m trying to sleep. There are ghosts in this house too, each room crowded with their afterimages—all the lives lived in this farmhouse. My head throbs with them.
I didn’t think it would be like this—all these people living way out here in the woods. It’s like they’re trapped in time, cut off from the outside, disconnected. I need to get out of here, and I’m regretting not calling Ben before I lost service. It hasn’t snowed in a couple days, maybe I’ll be able to get my truck unstuck. I have to try.
Also: I’ve been having bad dreams the last four nights, and sometimes I think I hear things in the woods, over their border—like the trees really are breaking apart.
I’ve found Maggie, I just need to convince her to leave with me.
Travis was in this room.
He was here. He heard us at night, moving around the house. And he knew about the rot in the trees—how? Someone told him, someone knew he was here. Someone must remember him.
But why did he tear out this page, why did he hide it separately? Unless he knew something was going to happen to him.
Unless he was worried they’d be found by the wrong person.
CALLA
I don’t bother knocking, I turn the knob and enter Bee’s room silently, closing the door behind me. My sister is curled on her side, facing the window, a sheet pulled up to her throat.
Remnants of a childhood are preserved inside this room: on the dresser sit two handmade dolls slumped against a small mirror, one is in the shape of a rabbit wearing a sunflower yellow pinafore, the other is a human girl with cat ears wearing a lavender-stained cotton dress and a ribbon made from twine tied in her strawberry-red hair. Bee grew up in this room, humming songs to herself, eyes gazing across the meadow while she counted the different shades of tulips—back when she could still see. Before it was all taken away.
I tiptoe across the worn wood floor and sit on the edge of her bed. Maybe I shouldn’t be this close—my sister might have the pox roiling inside her, seeping from her pores, carried on her breath with each exhale. But I’ve already touched the wound on her shin, already breathed the same air.
But worse than that: I’ve felt the summer rain against my own skin, felt it soaking into my flesh. The sickness is already in our house.
Bee’s hand stirs on her pillow. She’s awake. Her gray-blue eyes flutter open, fixed on the far wall she can’t actually see. “I heard you and Theo talking downstairs,” she says. But she doesn’t roll over to face me; she keeps looking away.
“Ash and Turk went over the border.”
“Levi plans to do the ritual?” she asks.
“Yes.” I touch the hem of a pillowcase where it’s been restitched several times. Blue thread overtop white. “You could talk to Levi,” I say. “You could convince him not to do it.”
Her eyes shiver closed a moment, her breathing changes. “I can’t convince him of anything anymore.”
“I know something happened between you two,” I say. “But you’re the only one he listens to.”
“No, not anymore.” She pushes herself up, the sheet falling away from her shoulders, and I can see that her feet are still caked in dirt, the blood now dried against her leg. Her bed linens will need to be scrubbed several times to get them clean. “And if they’re sick, the ritual might heal them.”
“Or it might not,” I say.
“In which case, it’s too late anyway.” My sister looks at me with a vacantness I’ve never seen in her before, tears staining her cheekbones. Instinctively, my eyes settle on her stomach, but there is still no definition beneath the thin cotton of her dress. “We can’t save them,” Bee says, reaching out and taking my hand. Her skin is soft and uncalloused. Fingernails closely trimmed.
“What about you?” I say. “What if we need to save you?”
She smiles, a tiny curve at the corner of her mouth. “I’ll save myself.”
I lie down beside her, forming myself into a shell, our knees touching. If my sister is sick, if the rot is working its way through her, then I am sick too. Made of the same flesh. Born of the same blood. We haven’t always been close, we haven’t always understood one another, but if she dies, perhaps I want to die as well. Perhaps there is no life that makes sense without her: my little sister who has always reminded me of the night sky, endless and beautiful and chaotic. My sister the universe. My sister the anomaly. My sister who is blind, yet now, looking at her, her pupils seem to focus, to dilate, as if some part of her can see the form I make in the bed beside her.
“What if I am not who I thought I was?” she says after a long, sleepy silence, listening to the rain stream down the windows, pouring over the roof as if it’s looking for a way in, a way to infect those who hide inside.