She told me how she had married too young, how she had had an affair with a man who had only been visiting friends on Whidbey Island, a few houses down from my parents’ home. How when she learned she was pregnant, the man told her she could come live in a community where they would care for her and the child after it was born. So she left her husband, packed her things, and went to Pastoral. But after I was born, she began to realize she couldn’t stay there—it wasn’t the kind of life she wanted for herself, or her child. She fled Pastoral and retreated back to her husband. She lied and told him that the baby was his, and he believed her—or at least pretended to. And I was raised by a man who I thought was my father.
My mother told me all this that day, waiting for the ferry, and I understood why she had always treated me like she did—kept me at arm’s length—I held her secrets inside my very existence. When she looked at me, she saw my real father, she saw the mistake she’d made, and she feared that someday her husband would look at me and see it too. I was a bomb waiting to go off—to break apart her entire world. I could ruin everything.
With the rain streaming over us, I asked her the name of my real father. I asked her about the place where I was born. His name was Cooper, she had said.
I need to see it, I told her. I pleaded with her. I need to go there.
She refused at first, but she also must have known that there was no turning back now. She had given up her secrets, and I deserved to see the place where I took my first breath, to know if my real father was still alive. So she told me how to get there: the route into the mountains and the old red barn and the path through the woods.
Now, facing my mother in this hotel room, a new betrayal begins to surface. “You knew where I was this whole time?”
Her head moves slowly, nodding.
“You could have told someone, said something.”
I think of my father who raised me, waking each morning for the last seven years, not knowing where I was. His only daughter.
“I couldn’t,” she answers.
I press a hand to my side where the incision has started to throb, the pain meds wearing off. I need to sit down, but I don’t—not yet. “You wanted to protect yourself, you mean,” I say. “You didn’t want my dad to know the lie you’ve kept from him after all these years.” She would rather let him suffer, than tell him the truth—than tell him how she had had an affair, how I wasn’t his real daughter.
I bite down on all the things I want to say to her, all the vile thoughts swirling inside me.
“Is he still alive?” she asks.
“Cooper’s dead,” I tell her bluntly. “He died before I arrived. I never got to meet my real father.”
“But you stayed there all these years. There must have been some reason you never left.”
“I didn’t have a choice.” Pastoral is not the same place it was when my mother lived there, when Cooper was still alive—when members came and went as they liked. The borders were open then, and there was nothing to fear.
“I told Travis how to find you,” she says, as if this makes it all okay.
“Theo,” I correct her.
“What?”
“His name is Theo.”
She wipes at her cheeks, the tears dried up now. “Theo,” she amends.
“And my name is Calla.”
Her eyes have stopped blinking, her mouth drooping at the corners. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry for all of it.”
I don’t know what to say, how to piece together seven years of being trapped in a place, forgetting who I used to be, when my mother knew exactly where I was. I feel angry and sorry for her, I want to blame her for it all—but I know that I can’t. I have my own festering regret, my own responsibility for the things that have happened.
She lowers her head, gathering more words together in her mind. “I loved it there, for a time. I thought maybe you stayed because you loved it too.”
I touch the necklace against my shirt, counting through each tiny silver book, trying to dig through the cluttered mess of my mind, pinpointing all the moments that felt real inside Pastoral. “It was my home,” I admit. The truth. Even if I never intended to stay in Pastoral, even if the lies Levi told us kept me there longer than I should have been, it did become my home. And in some ways, it was a balm for my broken soul, forgetting everything I left behind in this world: my mother, the boy who died while searching for a place that only existed in my mind, and even the reason I came to Pastoral in the first place—to find Cooper, a man who was already long dead when I arrived.
“When you were little, I used to tell you stories,” Mom says now. “They were fairy tales about a forest and a girl who vanished inside it. They were tales I remembered from Pastoral.” Her mouth quirks to the side, almost a smile. “I think it’s why you wrote your Foxtail books. They were based on the stories I told you as a child. You were writing about the forests of Pastoral, you just didn’t know it.”
“You told me those stories?” It feels like a riddle finally stitching itself back together, the thread made of my mother’s words. When I was young, she told me the tales of the wheat farmer’s daughter—the girl who lived in the woods when the town was first built. A story I would later grow up to write about in my books.
But Levi had used that same story to make his lies true, to convince us the forest was infected with an illness. When in truth, perhaps that young girl merely wandered into the woods and got lost, never to return.
It was a tale that grew and became something different each time—as stories tend to do.
I let my gaze settle on my mom, the warmth in her face, the distant look in her eyes like she too is recalling her time in those woods. “The Pastoral you remember is not what it is now,” I say. “The people who live there are afraid.”
Her expression drops, turns cold. “Afraid of what?”
“Disease. A sickness that we’ve feared for years—but it was never real.”
“I don’t understand.”