“We can’t stay here,” Calla says, releasing my hand.
“I know.” I turn to face her. “In the morning, we’ll leave. We can go with your parents, if that’s what you want; we’ll figure things out from there.”
“No.” She touches her fingertips to my forehead, then winds them through my hair, following the motion with her eyes. “These aren’t our lives, Theo.” She smiles. “We have to go back.”
“Where?” I ask dumbly, like I’m afraid to hear her say it, admit what I’ve already been thinking.
“You know where.”
I trace the line of my wife’s shoulder to where her hair falls down her back. I try to imagine her sitting in a coffee shop, talking on a cell phone. I try to imagine her in rush-hour traffic. But I don’t know who that woman is, the person she was before.
“I can’t live here, can you?” she asks.
“I was barely living here before.”
“Neither was I,” she says.
I shake my head, certain that’s not true.
“We left the others behind,” she adds, her eyelashes flicking, reminding me of feathers falling from a sad winter sky.
We fought so hard to get out of those woods, I can’t believe we’re talking about returning to the place that held us captive. Going back into the dark of that forest.
“Theo,” she says, pulling my focus back to her. “Maybe we only get a few chances to choose our own lives.” Her eyes skip to the door, wavering, before finding me again. “And this is one of them. This is ours.”
She lowers her palm to place it against my chest; my heart beats wildly, my head feeling suddenly loose and alive, a fever threading through me. “I’ll go wherever you want,” I tell her. “I’ll go back to Pastoral.”
Calla’s eyes are like full moons, and she leans forward, kissing me on the lips, running her hand up my chest to my neck. “I love you still,” she whispers against my mouth.
She slips from bed and walks to the small chair beside the window, pulling a sweater over her head.
“Now?” I ask.
She nods back at me, grinning. “I need to go home.”
“What about your parents?”
“I’ll leave them a note—they’ll understand or they won’t. I don’t really care.”
We have nothing to pack, only the few supplies given to us by the hospital, so we leave our room without a suitcase, without things to weigh us down.
All we have now are our memories.
And we will go back to the place where we first forgot, to pick up the pieces. To make the wrongs right.
EPILOGUE
CALLA
Bee has her baby in the spring.
It rains against the farmhouse, a deep welcoming rain, coaxing the baby into the world. Faye stands at the foot of the bed, murmuring to Bee softly, calming her. “We’re close,” she says.
I heat water on the woodstove and bring up clean washcloths, anything to keep my hands busy, to feel useful while nerves clack up and down my spine.
“Open a window,” Bee says to me.
“But it’s raining.”
“I know.” Her lips curl up into a gentle smile. She’s always loved the rain—even when we feared it, she longed to stand out in the meadow and catch the drops on her tongue. It rained the day she was born, she tells me. A good omen.
I slide the window up into the frame, drops of water pelting the bedroom floor. Bee stretches her hand away from the bed, toward the open window, palm wide. She smiles when she feels the drops on her skin. “Thank you,” she says, closing her eyes.
Another contraction drives through her and she clamps her teeth shut, moaning against the pain, seizing my hand in hers. My sister. We might have been born to different parents, but we were both born in these woods, in Pastoral. And she is my sister—a truth that cannot be undone.
Downstairs I hear Theo pacing across the living room floor, Henry is there too, speaking in low, anxious tones. The community has been awaiting this birth—a child born to the woman who has become our new leader.
Bee has taken the place of the man who lied to us.
She told the others the truth: about the border, about the pox, and how she killed Levi to save her own life. All decisions are now made together, for the common good—governed by all—the same principles that Cooper believed in when he founded Pastoral.
The road is open now too, our fear subsiding.
Members come and go as they like, but mostly they stay—the outside world not how they remember it. Or how they want to remember it.