My heart clobbers against my chest bone, beating, beating, thudding so hard it hurts. I’ve always known his weakness: me. And even now, he underestimated how far I’d go, what I’d be willing to do to make things right.
He drops to his knees, a look of bewilderment pooling in his eyes, and he makes a sputtering sound, blood in his throat, suffocating him. I lower myself too, keeping my eyes on his, wanting my face to be the last thing he sees. The last thing he remembers.
I draw the knife out, smelling the metallic scent of blood on my hand, and I open my mouth. “I want you to feel it,” I say, each word bitten through clenched teeth. “I want you to know I’ve taken your life from you. I’ve taken everything.” Blood trickles from his mouth, an awful sight, but I don’t look away. “I was always stronger than you.” A smile forms on my lips, and Levi’s eyes flutter rhythmically, like he wants to speak but can’t. No more lies from his lips. No more cajoling words. “You’ve always been weak.” His eyelids convulse, struggling to keep themselves open, and I thrust the blade in again, harder this time, up to the hilt, but lower in his torso—searching for his kidneys. For the spot that will end his life. And I can see the change in his face; the color leaves him. His skin turns the shade of goat’s milk. “Fuck you,” I hiss, and I watch as he slumps to his side, arms like two sagging cornstalks, looking sad and awful and dripping in his own blood.
I yank the blade back out and stand up, my body trembling but suddenly warm, on fire.
I’ve killed him, the man I loved… and he deserved it.
Rain cascades down from above, streaming across his face, diluting the blood where it soaks into the wet ground.
A few yards away, the tidy rows of corn smell sweet and a little like dust, the husks peeling away in places, revealing the yellow teeth beneath. I think of the summer harvest, the taste of corn on the cob eaten at sunset while we all gather around a bonfire, telling old stories and laughing at old jokes.
I breathe, shaking from the cold—from what I’ve just done—and I touch my stomach, feeling the fish-flutter pulse of the baby inside. My child.
I have lived a partial life, half in darkness. But now I feel something else: a strange calm, an ease I haven’t known since childhood. A feeling I’ve missed.
The sky turns pewter, watery-gray, and a new certainty settles in my bones: I will raise my daughter within this forest, bright-eyed and wild-hearted. She will march unafraid beyond borders, and into dark feral lands. I will teach her how to swim in the pond beyond the farmhouse, just as I did, to harvest lemons and hazelnuts, and to sleep under the stars when the nights are warm and quiet.
And when I touch the bridge of her freckled nose, the shell-shape of her tiny ears, I won’t think of him. Because she will be all mine.
PART FIVE THE OUTSIDERS
THEO
I used to find missing people.
Until two winters ago, deep in the mountains of northern California, I became one of the missing.
I open the oil-stained door into the Timber Creek Gas & Grocery, the little bell chiming over the door, and a cold wave of memories crashes over me, as if stepping back into some far-off distant dream. The same gray-skinned woman sits behind the counter under the searing buzz of fluorescent lights, staring lazily out the window, her finger tapping the same brand of cigarettes.
“Do you have a phone?” I ask quickly from the door.
Her wiry eyebrows lift, giving me the same look of annoyance I remember from the last time I was here. “Yeah, but it’s not free to use. I’ll have to charge you.”
“I need you to call an ambulance.”
At this, the woman’s face draws back, like strings tugging her wrinkled features upward. “I remember you,” she remarks, nodding to herself. “You came through here a few years back, looking for that woman.” She releases her hand from the pack of cigarettes. “You ever find anything?”
“Yeah,” I answer hastily. “Now please, call an ambulance. She’s been shot.”
The yellow-whites of the woman’s eyes flick to my hands, where Calla’s blood stains my skin, dripping onto the linoleum floor, and the woman’s gaze stalls a moment, unblinking, before she turns and fumbles for her phone.
I don’t wait to hear what she says to the police; I hurry back outside to the truck and press my hands against the bullet wound in my wife’s stomach, while Colette and the baby sit quietly beside her on the front bench seat, all of us silent, all of us unsure what will happen next.
The rain lets up and the sky turns pale and waxen after the storm.
The police arrive in a noisy swirl of bright lights, and Calla is hoisted into an ambulance and taken away. Colette and her baby are whisked off too. The minutes move fast now, everything a blur of voices and movements—they ask questions about the bullet in Calla’s ribs; they ask where we’ve been; they want to know our names.
“You all just appeared out of the forest?” a young officer with a doughy face asks, as if he too has sidestepped into a not yet fully formed dream, and he’s unsure if this is all some prank. “After all this time?”
I tell a story, but not the right one. Not the real one. Because there is a strange ache inside me—the need to protect the place that was our home. To keep it secret, even now.
“Are there others out there?” they ask.
My stomach turns. Others. Maybe they want to be found, or maybe they want to remain hidden, solitary in the forest that is their home. Maybe it’s not my decision to make.
The sun is sinking to the west when they finally take me to a hotel an hour away—when they decide I have nothing more to tell. The hotel has an outdoor pool and continental breakfast and TVs with the volume turned up too high in the lobby. My ears buzz and thump, and I want to go to the hospital to see Calla, but they tell me I won’t be able to see her or Colette until the morning. Might as well rest, one of the officers says.
Might as well.
Might as well do nothing. Might as well sit inside a strange, stale room with not enough sunlight or air or space to move.