My fingers fall away from the necklace, and I hold a hand over my eyes, the morning sun creeping up over the evergreens, a semidarkness that reminds me of long winters when the sun never fully breaks through the clouds, and the sky remains stuck in a strange gray permanence.
“Maybe it’s the pox,” I say, glancing to Theo—my husband—a man who once had another name: Travis Wren. But something happened to us—our minds stripped clean and replaced with something else, memories that weren’t quite ours. We’re standing on the back porch, two drowsy outlines beneath the pale sky. I needed to free myself from the walls of the farmhouse, I needed cool air against my skin and the quiet rustle of early dawn in my ears. “Maybe it makes us forget,” I say. “Maybe we’re sick; maybe we’ve been sick this whole time. Years.”
Theo has been going down the road, beyond our valley, and isn’t it possible he brought the pox back with him? The rot seeping into our brains, turning it to muck, making us forget.
“I don’t think we’re sick, not after so long. We’d be dead by now.” Theo’s jaw slides back and forth, working over something, a slippery thought he can’t quite keep hold of.
“I think I buried the book in the garden,” I admit. “And the charm.” Again, I want to touch the necklace, coil my fingers around it, be soothed by the shape and structure of it. But I resist. It feels unnatural, the parallels of who I used to be and who I am now, the boundary lines too vague to sort through.
Theo shakes his head, eyes wavering against the approaching sun. “Why?” he asks. “Why would you bury them?”
“I was afraid, I think.” I scratch a finger along the inside of my wrist, anything to occupy my hands, to keep them from touching the necklace. “I hid them so no one else but me would find them.”
Remember Maggie, the inscription said. My mind skips back, like a stone across the pond, memories that feel mirrored, prism-like, and not quite solid. I wrote the note inside the Foxtail book—but it wasn’t a message meant for someone else, to remind them that Maggie had been here, the message was meant for me. I buried the book in the garden because I knew only I would find it. It was just deep enough, just shallow enough, that eventually, while pulling up a clot of weeds, I would easily unearth it.
I wanted the book and the charm to be found—by me. Remember Maggie, I wrote. I was telling myself not to forget: who I was, who I had been.
“Why did this happen to us?” I turn to face my husband, and his chin is tilted to the sky—the horizon becoming a murky dark hue, a purple bruise not yet bloomed. And in his eyes, I see the same uncertainty I feel in my own chest.
Memories of two different pasts: A childhood spent in Pastoral coils together with memories outside of this place. If I close my eyes and pinch them tight enough, I can feel the foamy sea around my ankles, my shins, and the brine of the salt air in my throat. I can taste the ocean, a thing I shouldn’t know, a memory I shouldn’t have.
A tree of anxiety grows inside me, stabbing me with its limbs. “You’re Travis Wren,” I say plainly, to hear myself say it aloud, the name knotting together in my stomach.
“Yes,” he answers, flat and cool.
“How much do you remember from before?”
“A little now.”
“You came to Pastoral to find me?” I ask.
He nods.
“Why?”
His face goes tight, trying to pluck a moment from his past—but the memories collide and break apart as soon we try to focus on them, just out of reach, like an insect that keeps skittering away.
“You were missing for five years,” he says, shaking his head, like he’s unsure of his own words.
Five years. Five years gone. I try to insert that number into my mind, a piece that should slide into place, clicking perfectly, but it only wobbles around in my skull, never settling, never finding its place among the other memories that don’t fit.
“Your parents hired me,” he adds.
“My parents?” I try to draw them forward in my mind, but there’s nothing there.
“I met them, in their home. Your childhood home.”
I turn now, my body facing his. “Where was it?”
The sunrise shivers through the trees; a bird begins to chirp. Theo frowns. “I’m not sure. I’m sorry, I wish I could remember.”
I nod, understanding, and try to think of a home beyond Pastoral, a bedroom where I grew up. A place different from this. I see a doll with perfect glass eyes placed beside a blue ballerina jewelry box that used to play a tune when you opened the lid, but had long ago sputtered and died. And then the flash is ripped away just as quickly, gone.
I scan my husband’s eyes, the cool river of them. “Why you?” I ask. “Why did they hire you? Were you a detective?”
A strange tension pulls along his forehead, and for a half-second I barely recognize him—he becomes the man he used to be. He is Travis Wren. “No,” he answers. “But I could find missing people.”
“How?”
The sky above us brightens, the sun inching above the trees, yet a mantle of rain clouds is already crowding out the blue, sinking down from the north. “I don’t know. I saw people… could see what happened to them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe that’s not right.” Even when he tries to draw the moment forward, it sputters away. “But I had your charm with me,” he says. “Number three. You dropped it beside the road.”
“What road?” I know I’m pushing him, forcing him to strain into the backwoods of his mind, but some part of me is afraid this won’t last, this glimpse of the truth, of memories we shouldn’t have. If we do have the pox—if we’re sick and the illness has stolen parts of our mind—this moment of clarity might not last. By midday, it might vanish all over again: I will be Calla and he will be Theo, and the necklace and the Foxtail book will only be clues to a mystery we’ll never unravel.
“A main road, a paved road. There was an old, collapsed barn there too. And a boy broke his arm jumping off the roof of a house, but it burned down a long time ago.”