Theo swallows, and his voice dips low, like he too doesn’t want Calla to catch us talking. “How could he have been in the sunroom? We would have known.” His words trail away like he’s looking to the door.
I shake my head, my own sightless eyes flicking to the back door, knowing Calla is close. Quickly. Quickly. Her pace is almost a run. “I don’t know,” I answer.
A second passes. Calla is almost to the back porch, her footsteps loud against the earth. I think Theo must see her because I hear him stiffen, shifting something away that was in his hand—the photograph maybe. He’s tucked it into a pocket so Calla won’t see. “Why are you telling me this?” he asks. What he means is: why am I telling him and not my own sister.
“Because I knew you would believe me. And she wouldn’t.” I swallow down the guilt and take another step back, toward the living room. “She doesn’t want to know about anything out there.” I nod toward the front of the house, the road, the gate in the distance and the forest beyond that. “But you do.” I touch the stair railing, my heart climbing up my windpipe, scraping me open.
He might nod, but he doesn’t get a chance to speak, because the screen door swings open and the scent of my sister, of green-golden lemons and silty pondwater, enters the house in a burst of fragrance and wind. I turn and hurry up the stairs before my face can give anything away.
“What are you doing?” I hear my sister ask Theo, her voice a coil drawn tight.
The faucet turns on at the kitchen sink, the clank of old pipes, of water rising up from the well before it splashes into the basin. “Washing my hands,” Theo answers—the lie oddly believable.
“Where’s Bee?” Her voice is strained, a scratch at the back of the throat, unusual for her. She knows something’s wrong. Maybe she saw me talking to Theo, or she just senses it—when you live in a house with three people, secrets are rarely kept for long, everything is found out eventually.
“Upstairs, I think,” Theo answers, his tone perfectly dull, a man who is only half listening to her line of questions. A man who is used to lying.
Calla blows out a breath and moves across the house, across the living room rug that mutes her footsteps, until she reaches the stairwell. I sink back into my bedroom before she can see me. Another moment passes and then her voice echoes back across the house, directed at Theo, “Tonight’s the gathering.”
The water in the kitchen sink turns off. “I know,” he answers. Voice still flat, insipid. Maybe even a little annoyed.
The gathering. Tonight we will walk to the center of Pastoral.
Tonight, I will see Levi.
PART THREE THE GATHERING
CALLA
The weekly gathering begins at sunset.
Theo and I walk up the path to the center of Pastoral, the sky teeming with evening birds, the air smelling like lilac blossoms, bitter crab apple trees, and cooked corn on the cob from the bonfire near the gathering circle.
There are twenty-two dwellings within the confines of Pastoral: several homes like ours, a community lodge, a dormitory with a dozen smaller bunkrooms, a large kitchen and dining hall, a woodshop, and a birthing hut set back in the trees to the west. Cooper, our founder, purchased the land and all its structures from a bank some fifty years ago. He got it cheap, because no one wanted to buy a remote outpost in the woods that had sat abandoned for seventy years—the structures sinking into the earth, the forest taking back the land. And most people didn’t even know it was here.
Our farmhouse, where Bee and I grew up, sits at the southernmost border of the community, and closest to the guard hut. To the north of Pastoral are the wheat and cornfields, just visible in the waning light. The eastern boundary runs along a shallow ridgeline, where Henry and Lily Mae’s home sits nestled in the dense pines, their goats often foraging along the border trees. And the path that runs along the creek—where Theo and I walked tonight, from the farmhouse to the heart of Pastoral—is the western line.
Pastoral is ninety-some acres: ninety acres that provide us shelter and keep us safe.
Members have already begun to find their seats in the gathering circle—constructed in the open stretch of flat land behind the dining hall, and between the massive gardens—and they’re talking in small groups. This is where we gather each week, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the split-log benches that form a semicircle around a low wood stage, where we discuss harvests and weather and how to keep the community safe. It’s a place where we also celebrate birthdays and weddings and mourn those we’ve lost. Every December, we sing songs the elders remember from the outside, about mistletoe and gifts wrapped in colorful ribbons. We drink muddled apple wine and light candles around the Mabon tree. We have brought customs from the outside into the woods with us, but we have also created some of our own.