“Is that what you planned to do with me—sacrifice me?”
“I hadn’t decided yet.” The hard ridge of his jaw shifts side to side. “You can see,” he says, but he doesn’t sound surprised. “You’re looking directly at me.”
“It wore off, whatever you did to me.”
“I wondered if it would, if I stopped reminding you that you were blind.” My temples pulse, fury seething up inside me. “I knew you would leave me someday, if I didn’t make it hard for you. If I didn’t make it impossible. You were always so fearless; you would have risked everything when we were younger to leave Pastoral, so I had to stop you, make you believe you were weak.” His head tilts to the side, like he’s trying to see me more clearly, raindrops cascading over us.
“You made me think I was blind.”
His expression sinks a little. “I did it because I loved you,” he clarifies.
I wince at his words and I can feel the hardened blood at my temples, along my cheekbone. “That’s not love.” All those summer days in the meadow, listening to Levi read from his books while I wove blades of grass together at my feet. We were teenagers when he started reciting words to me, asking me to slow my breathing—he was practicing something from one of his books: hypnosis, he told me. It felt like a game. A silly thing we laughed about. He would tell me it was snowing, even when the sky was clear and warm and blue. I would shiver and draw my knees close. He’d tell me to sneak from my room in the middle of the night and meet him at the pond. He got better at it, at fooling my mind into doing whatever he said. And that summer, I talked of leaving Pastoral, of running away together, but he wanted to stay, he always had. He knew he would lead our community once Cooper died; it had already been decided. Cooper had raised him as his own son, taught him how to govern, how to lead. Levi would move into Cooper’s house and take over his position within the community.
But still, I wanted to get far away from these woods; I wanted to see what was beyond.
One mild summer day, the season shifting into autumn, Levi began practicing a new trick. He placed his fingertips against my closed eyelids—soft and delicate—and told me to imagine a darkness so complete that it spread over my whole body, spilling across my eyes, until all I could see were shadows. Until the sky became a smear of gray, and everything around me bled of its color.
He was taking something from me.
If I had known what was happening, I might have refused, but instead I let myself tumble into the smooth cadence of his voice, the scent of his skin—pine and earth—filling my nostrils.
He whispered about darkness and shadows, until finally, one afternoon, the blackness crept across my vision and didn’t recede. Until the landscape was blotted out and he was the last thing I saw.
I forgot that he was to blame. I forgot that his words into my ears started it all.
He took that from me too: my memories. A swift pluck from my mind, you won’t be needing those, and they were gone.
And now I wonder: How long after that until a new idea entered his mind?
If he could convince me I was blind, he could convince the people of Pastoral of just about anything. A year later, Cooper died and Levi became our leader.
“You lied to me—to everyone,” I say.
“I kept you safe.”
“From what?” I ask, eyebrows raised, challenging him to tell the truth. No more lies. No more whispers against my neck to make me complaisant, to make me his. “The pox?”
“The real world is dangerous,” he answers. “It’s broken and diseased. People suffer out there from things you can’t even imagine.”
“You don’t know that,” I say. “You’ve never left Pastoral.”
“Cooper told me what it was like out there; he told me I needed to protect the community from the outside. Do whatever it takes.”
“He didn’t want this.” I close my eyes briefly then look back at Levi. “Is it real or not?” I demand. “Are the trees sick?”
“I created a story that you would all believe.” He breathes, and in his eyes I see the boy I remember from when we were kids. The gentle curve of his mouth, the softness that once lived in his bottle-green eyes that’s now gone—the boy I loved so deeply I would have believed anything he said to me. “Cooper told me the story about the early settlers who lived here, about the young girl who disappeared, how they saw her stalking through the woods looking wild and feral, diseased, as if she was sick. As if the trees themselves had infected her with something.”