Calla’s expression settles. “How are Colette and the baby?”
“Colette’s real name is Ellen. She was an actress before she came to Pastoral. It was on the news in the hotel.”
“You’re staying in a hotel?” Her eyes smile a little.
“Yeah.”
“How is it?”
“It smells like damp laundry.”
She laughs then immediately cringes, grabbing for her ribs again. Her eyes begin to droop closed; whatever drugs are in her IV are making her drowsy.
“You should rest,” I say.
She swallows and forces her eyelids open again. “Maybe you’re wrong,” she says, the sleepiness heavy in her voice. “Maybe Colette’s real name isn’t Ellen. Maybe her real name is the one she had in Pastoral.” She smiles gently, touching my hand. “Maybe that’s the only one that matters.”
“Maybe,” I answer. But she’s already asleep, snoring softly, her dark hair draped across the pillow.
CALLA
My name is not Calla. I am Maggie St. James.
Seven years ago, I went into the woods and forgot how to get back out.
But now, I wake in my hospital bed, the clean hygienic scent nauseating—I can’t think of a worse smell than a sterilized room. I prefer the scent of dirt and pollen, old books and old wood.
Three days I’ve been here, but they say I can go home now. Home? Where is that?
A nurse told me that Colette—Ellen Ballister—left the hospital. Her husband and family came to collect her through a sea of reporters and cameramen anxious to get an image of the starlet, returned after all these years with a baby in her arms—a baby fathered by a man who was not the husband she left behind. A baby who, the nurse also tells me, should survive.
She also finally gave the child a name: Clover Clementine Rose.
A Pastoral name—a good name.
Theo comes to pick me up just after noon. I climb into the old truck and roll down the window, resting my head back against the seat and feeling the wind against my face. But the drive is short, and too soon Theo is helping me through the lobby of the hotel to an elevator.
Inside our room, I walk to the window and stare out at an unfamiliar landscape. A world crusted over with concrete and blinking streetlights and car horns.
“Your parents called the hotel,” Theo says from behind me. “They know you’re here.”
I turn back to face him. “How?”
“Police notified them. Found you in the missing persons database, most likely.” Theo is standing only a few paces away, like he’s ready to reach out and grab me if I start to feel weak. If I collapse beside the window.
On shaking legs, I wobble the few steps to the bed, sinking onto the end with a hand against my ribs. “What will I tell them?”
“The truth,” Theo answers.
I shake my head. “I don’t even know what that is.”
* * *
I know I should call him Travis. And he should call me Maggie. But we can’t seem to shake the names of who we’ve become. Our Pastoral names.
We sit in the lobby of the hotel, my body thrumming with nervous energy. The TVs are droning from the far corner of the long, rectangular room. An older couple is watching the news, their heads inclined back, listening to the voices blare about stock prices and the worst flu on record and a shooting out east somewhere. Death toll unknown. This is the framework of a society we’ve left behind, the things I was once numb to. But now, each one is a papercut across my skin, little wounds that burn more than they ever did before.
“They’re here,” Theo says, standing up from his chair and nodding through the glass doors at the parking lot. He runs his hands down his pant legs, like he could wipe away the nerves.
My parents are walking across the pavement, hand in hand. They seem familiar, but in that distant, watery way. And I’m unsure how I’m going to feel once they’re only a few feet from me, arms outstretched—these two people who’ve spent seven years searching for their daughter. For me. I should feel bad for them, for the worry that’s carved hard lines into their faces, for the sleepless nights my disappearance has caused. But oddly, I feel nothing. Only a knocking against my ribs.
They move through the sliding glass doors, eyes scanning the lobby, and when they see me, tears break across both their faces. A moment later, I’m in their arms, my mom muttering my name—the wrong name. “Maggie,” she says. “Maggie, are you okay?”
But still, I don’t know what to feel. What to say. My stitches throb beneath my shirt, the pressure of their embrace too much, and my head is an anvil. I should know these two people, but my mind struggles to place them into the sequence of my life, a slideshow all mixed up and out of order.