It’s one of the last memories I have of before.
Now the man I used to be begins coming back into focus like a tide rising and falling against the shore of my mind. I stand in the kitchen, holding the photo of Maggie, trying to see my wife in the distorted image, in the soft blue eye staring up at me, when the screen door bangs open.
Calla pushes inside, her face pale, one hand pressed to her forearm. “She didn’t mean to,” she says, blood dripping steadily to the floor. Behind her, moving like a frightened animal, is Bee, a knife held at her side.
I make Calla sit at the dining table, and I peel back her hand, revealing a deep cut, while Bee crosses to the stairs and her footsteps can be heard climbing up to the second floor, and then the sound of the bathroom door shutting.
“It was an accident,” Calla says, pinching her eyes closed.
The knife has gone through several layers of flesh, and I grab one of the kitchen towels, pressing it to the wound. “I’ll go get Faye,” I say. “You’ll need stitches.”
But Calla shakes her head. “No.”
And I understand: She wants this to stay between us. If Faye knows, then so will others within the community, and they will want to know what happened, why Bee cut her own sister. There will be questions and whispers, and right now, we can’t have either.
So I blot away the blood, then using strips of fabric, I begin to wrap Calla’s wound. “Why does she have a knife?” I ask, keeping my voice low so Bee won’t hear.
Calla glances down at her forearm, where I tie the fabric tight at the ends. She cringes then looks away. “She says she’s been carving the trees—that she’s always done it. She says it’s not the pox splitting them open, it’s her.”
My eyes flash to the back door, the forest beyond. “Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
I think of the sickness waiting inside the trees at our border, until they finally peel open and breathe one last sigh—the pox turning the forest air stale with infection. But why would Bee carve the trees? What reason would she have?
My mind strays back to Levi, of the necklace and the notebook page he was trying to burn inside his fireplace. He wanted to make it vanish—just like Maggie. He was trying to make it all go away.
But guiltless people don’t burn things.
“Maybe we don’t belong here,” Calla says, clearing her throat. “We have whole lives we left behind out there.”
I try to remember the things waiting for me on the outside. But I only see the truck and an endless road. Surely there is more: family and friends I just can’t quite recall.
“I think we have to leave Pastoral,” she says finally. “Before we forget again.”
Doubt crisscrosses my thoughts, but I nod at her, because I know she’s right: These aren’t our lives. The real us is waiting somewhere beyond these forest walls, our memories and our past waiting for us.
“Okay,” I say.
BEE
I sink into the bathtub, and my skin pricks from the lukewarm water like little beestings.
I need to wash myself clean: The creases of my skin are caked with soil and prairie grass and tiny wildflowers pressed flat; they form a new landscape of my body. A restlessness is building inside me, a bewildering need I wish I could scrub away, but pain like this doesn’t wash off. I need something stronger. I need nails and wire. I need a knife—like the one resting on the bathroom counter beside the sink.
I hold my breath and sink below the waterline, remembering the feel of the cold creek when I bathed in its shallows, leaves floating past me, tickling my shoulders and elbows like delicate fingers. I bring my eyes, my mouth, my chin, back above the waterline, listening to the clicking and snapping of locusts through the open bathroom window, sawing between my thoughts, dividing me into sections.
Perhaps I am two people, one waking and one sleepwalking.
Perhaps I am capable of monstrous things.
I’ve been carving marks into the border trees—for how long? Years? But why do I do it?
I think of the cells growing inside me, duplicating themselves, amassing into something larger. A body formed of my body. A baby who wants to be born, stubborn, resilient—like her father—a baby who doesn’t know what I really am.
I touch my bare stomach, the flesh marred by goose bumps, when a soft tap comes at the bathroom door, and then Calla’s voice on the other side, “Bee, can I come in?”
I draw my knees to my chest, hair dripping, neck pressed to the back of the tub. “Okay,” I answer.
I hear the creak of the door opening, and then my sister’s careful steps as she slips just inside the room and closes the door behind her.
“I’m sorry I cut you,” I say. My voice sounds broken, nervous, like I haven’t used it in some time.
“It was an accident.” She clears her throat, and I imagine her gazing out through the narrow window, the soft white curtain churning gently in the wind. Or maybe she’s looking at the knife, resting beside the sink. There is a long pause, and I wonder if she’s forgotten what she wanted to say. I hear her hands press together. “I’m not who you think I am,” she says at last, and the words are not what I expected to leave her lips. “Theo and I, neither of us, are who you think we are.”
I lift my head from the edge of the tub and sit up straighter.