If I wasn’t so exhausted, so lost in a sea of my own thoughts, I might cry. I might scream. But instead I stand mute, staring at my mother in a hotel room that feels like a midway place between an old life and an unknown one I haven’t figured out yet. “I know you don’t understand,” I say. “You’ve never understood. But I am not the daughter you raised; I’m someone different. And I think, for the first time, I know who I am.”
“Maggie,” she says, and now she reaches out for me, touching my arm. Growing up, she rarely placed her arms around me unless I was sick, rarely brushed my hair away from my face. She kept her distance. And now I understand why: She saw in me the man, and the place, she was trying to forget. A past she was trying to rid from her mind.
I was an outsider in my own home.
I meet my mother’s ivory-blue eyes, unblinking, and I feel sad for her: this awful secret she’s kept, the thing she’s held on to all these years, only ever revealing small clues to me as a kid—stories that rooted themselves inside me. As if those woods, as if Pastoral had been calling to me all my life, urging me to come back.
“Come home with us,” she says at last. “You can start your life again.”
I smile at her, but it feels like a wince. “My life didn’t stop just because I was gone. I have another life now, and a husband.”
She lowers her hand from my arm. “You don’t believe that, do you? That he’s really your husband?”
White spots of anger burn against my eyes. “I forgive you, Mom,” I say, instead of the thing I want to say. “I forgive you for not knowing how to fit me into your life when I was younger, and for still not knowing how. But thank you for telling me the truth that day at the ferry, and thank you for sending Theo to find me. But I can’t go back home with you and Dad. I can’t go back to my life in Seattle, either.” Although I suspect my home in Seattle is long gone. After seven years, my parents have surely boxed up my things and sold off the old house where I once lived alone.
My mother lets out a long, labored exhale, as if she’s been holding it in for seven years, and I let her pull me into a hug. She holds me like that, not letting go, like she could make up for all the times she didn’t draw me to her and tell me everything would be okay.
I thought my life inside Pastoral was an illusion, a shell formed over the person I used to be, but maybe my life out here is just as scarred and scabbed over.
Just as broken.
No matter where you go, there are cracks in the plaster, nails coming loose, you just have to decide where you want to piece yourself back together. Where the ground feels sturdiest beneath your feet.
I forgive her for the secrets she’s kept: for not coming to look for me when I disappeared.
But maybe I also understand why she didn’t. Pastoral was never a place she feared; it was where she ran away to; it was an escape. And maybe she thought I wanted to stay lost, stay gone—she was only protecting me.
After all, Pastoral is where I was born—I was never an outsider in that secluded stretch of forest.
I was an original. Born within the boundary.
THEO
I sit up in bed, sweat pricking my forehead, eyes struggling to make sense of the room—I search for the bedside table, the old dresser, the tall window and the curtains letting in the moonlight. But I’m not in the farmhouse, I’m in a hotel room in a town I’ve never heard of.
Calla touches my shoulder. “Nightmare?”
“A memory.”
“Of what?”
I dig my hands along my scalp to the back of my neck. “My sister.”
Calla sits up beside me, placing her hands gently against my arm. “You have a sister?”
“I used to.”
I close my eyes and I can see her: Ruth. She’d blow bubbles from her bedroom out into the narrow hall that separated our two rooms, then she’d squeal, Did you see it, Travis? And if I didn’t answer right away, she’d stomp her small, eight-year-old feet on the floor to get my attention. Bubble wishes, Travis! If you catch one, you get to make a wish. But this memory of her is quickly replaced by a worse one: finding her in that shitty motel room. Arriving a few minutes too late.
But more painful than the memory is realizing that I had forgotten about her. For the last two years, I forgot that my sister had ever existed, ever lived and then died. It feels like a gut punch.
“She died,” I say to Calla. “Suicide.”
“Theo.” She squeezes her hand against my arm. “I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I. I couldn’t remember her until now.”
“I’m so sorry.” Calla’s eyes look glassy, the faint light from the streetlamps outside reflecting across her dark skin. “It was cruel, taking our memories from us. But even crueler now that we remember them.”
My old life is only scraps. Everyone I cared about, my parents, my sister, are all long gone. I didn’t have much more than what I do right now: a hotel room and an old truck. I dropped off the map long ago, before I ever found Pastoral. Even my talent has slipped away from me, a thing I’m afraid to let come rushing back: afraid of what it will show me, what it will mean.
“My sister is still out there,” Calla says now.
I know she’s been thinking of Bee; I can see the worry tunneling through her, making her hollow. But it’s not only Bee we left behind. The others are still trapped inside the border that Levi created, frightened of an illness that isn’t real.