My mind is a storm—flickers of light and then great swathes of dark. It takes me a moment to react, to go after her, and when I find her again she’s in the kitchen, the book sitting harmlessly on the kitchen counter. She stands at the sink, the faucet turned on, water rushing through her hands, then she rubs her palms over the back of her neck to cool her skin.
The house is warm, but it’s always this way in summer—left to the mercy of the seasons—and we can only hope for a breeze to pass through the open windows to sedate our overheated flesh. I watch Calla and wonder: How many times has she stood at the sink, hands working the bar of lavender soap, rinsing dishes and sturdy glasses, eyes cast out the window to the meadow, longing for something she’s never spoken aloud, not even to herself? Perhaps not as many times as she thinks. As many as I once thought.
I fight the words in my throat, the ache expanding in my chest, becoming a fist-tight pain.
She needs to know the truth: a truth that will capsize everything she thought she knew, turn it wrong side out.
The man I am, standing in our kitchen, is not real. And neither is she.
“Calla?” I say, but she won’t look at me. She pivots to a drawer and retrieves two spoons. “What are you doing?”
“We’re awake now, might as well make breakfast.” She stands on tiptoes and pulls down the jar of dry oats from the upper cupboard. She begins to hum a tune—softly at first under her breath—while she pours the oats into a bowl. It’s a melody I now recognize, the lullaby I heard Maggie humming last night when she left the house and went to the pond. It’s the one Calla said she didn’t know when I asked her about it on our walk to the gathering. She lied.
“You do know the lullaby,” I say to her.
She stops humming but keeps her eyes on the two bowls on the counter in front of her. “It’s just something I remember from when I was a kid.”
I move closer to her. “That’s not true,” I say. She still won’t look at me, but her hands fall flat against the kitchen counter, pale white palms pressed into the wood, like she’s bracing herself. “It’s not from your childhood,” I tell her.
Her eyes are slow, shifting one millimeter at a time as they inch higher to click on mine. “What?” she asks. The word sounds mechanical, squeezed out through clenched teeth.
And then I see it. “You’re wearing the necklace?” I ask. It lays flat against her chest, the tiny books pressed together. Her hand reaches up to grasp it, but her mouth is still, no words falling out.
Slowly, I pick up the Foxtail book from the counter and Calla’s eyes watch me, shivering. I think she might cross the space between us and yank the book from my hands again, but she only stares—a marionette doll whose arms and legs have gone slack, but her glass eyes still blink in slow, eerily lidded motions.
“Here,” I say, flipping through the pages of the book. I’m searching for the nursery rhyme, and it takes me longer to find than I think it will—I haven’t looked at the book in years, another lifetime ago—and it takes a while for my memory to locate it. But when I do, I slap my palm to the page and walk to my wife’s side, turning the book for her to see. “You’ve been humming that lullaby because you wrote it.”
She peers forward at the page, her eyes no longer clicking open and closed—they have begun to water—and I don’t know if she’s crying or if she’s focused so closely on the book that she’s started to peer into the past.
I flip back through the pages again, all the way to the front, where the name of Maggie St. James, the author, is stamped onto the title page. “You know the lullaby,” I say again. “Because you wrote this book, Calla.”
She breathes, swallows, but her eyes refuse to blink.
I drop the book onto the counter and pull out the damaged photo of Maggie St. James from my back pocket. Even now, as I stare down at it, I’m having a hard time rectifying it: the distorted photo of the half-visible woman staring up toward the camera, with the woman standing before me in the kitchen. My mind still doesn’t want to believe, to push the two images together.
Calla runs her fingers over the photograph, moving slowly, as though she could feel the features of the woman’s face, and when her eyes lift, there is fear pooling in them. Her lips begin to tremor.
I’m about to reach forward and pull my wife to me, when her mouth dips open. “I know,” she says, eyes skipping back and forth between mine. “I remember it. I—I remembered the story of Eloise before I even read the book. I remembered every word of it.”
I don’t nod; I don’t move. I just stare at her, wanting to touch her, absorb each word into my skin so it won’t be true—take away the past that’s been buried inside each of us, scrub it away and make us forget. But I can’t; I don’t know how. The truth has found us, and now it stabs at the backs of our necks, refusing to be ignored.
“I’m not your wife,” she says, and the wetness at her eyelids spills down her cheeks. “Not really.” I can see it in her face—the memories clotting together, breaking across her skin, cutting her open. It hurts her to say it aloud. “I’m scared,” she says, tears falling in trails down her cheeks, suspended on her chin, and finally I pull her to me, bracing a hand against her tiny skull, fingers woven through her dark hair. Dark hair that used to be dyed a stark shade of blond.
She lifts her head, her heartbeat thundering wildly against my chest, and she winces before she speaks, like she’s afraid to hear herself say the words aloud.
“I’m Maggie St. James.”
CALLA
I twirl my fingers around the tiny books hanging from the necklace, counting them out of habit. Habit: a thing I’ve done before.
A thing Maggie St. James used to do, back before I came into these woods, before I forgot.