Finally, she stops and shouts after the fox, “Why do you show me pointless things?”
The fox stares back at her, tail swishing in the air.
“I want to see the darkness that lives in these woods,” Eloise demands. She knows the fox is keeping secrets, refusing to show her what truly resides in the trees. The hidden passageways, the holes in the ground that lead to other lands. “Please?” she begs.
But the fox looks back at her and snarls, as if she is the thing to fear. And it scampers away through a thicket of willows. Leaving her alone in the trees, leaving her to find her own way home.
THEO
I promised Calla I would let it go.
But I sit at the edge of the bed, hands worrying the fabric of the bedspread, and my mind keeps straying over the memory of the truck parked at the edge of the road. Tires sagging, doors unlocked. Travis Wren walked away from it and never went back.
Beside me, Calla sleeps with her face pressed into the pillow, soft, sun-browned skin and dandelion fluff eyelashes—I love her, I’d do anything not to lose her, and yet… my mind won’t stop coiling and uncoiling, stuttering over the things that don’t make sense. Let it go, I repeat to myself.
Calla reaches across the sheets as if she’s reaching for me in her dreams, lulled by the sound of the wind against the walls of the house. I should leave and head to the gate, relieve Parker of his shift, but from my coat pocket, I pull out the photograph: the distorted image of a woman I see even when I close my eyes, even when I try to force it from my thoughts. I trace her forehead with my index finger, her cropped hair, a summer-blond. Someone you’d notice if you passed her out in the real world, someone you’d remember, not because she’s pretty, but because there is a darkness about her, a sadness.
Maggie St. James.
It’s a deceit, holding the photograph while my wife sleeps a foot away. It’s a deceit to the entire community, slipping well past our borders to find it. This truth welled like a bruise in my chest when Levi spoke of trust and community and how we’re stronger together. I have defied the very framework of our way of life. And for what? Because of an itching curiosity, because of a boredom I can’t explain, but is always there. Scratch scratch scratch. Like little mice clawing at my bones.
A feeling that only disappears when I take those few cautious steps down the road.
I hold the photograph closer, squinting down at it. This belonged to an outsider.
He was here, Bee said to me in the kitchen. Travis Wren.
Could he have arrived in Pastoral without us knowing, snuck in through the back door of the farmhouse, then slept in the sunroom? Folded himself onto the old, dusty mattress while the dark fell through the windows onto the floor, then crept back out in the morning before any of us were awake?
The house comes alive at night, creaks and pops with the rising sun, walls breathing like wooden lungs, the roof finding its own weight more and more troublesome as the years wear on. A man could easily live within these walls, couldn’t he? Take up residence at the back of the house and not be known for some time, his footsteps blending in with the settling floorboards.
But why would he do it? Why would he sleep in our house and not just make himself known? This stranger.
It doesn’t make sense.
The creak of a door opening draws my attention to the hallway.
Bee is up.
Her bare feet are soft against each wood stair, and then I hear the click of the back door shutting into place. I stand from the bed and move to the window, watching her shadow scurry up through the meadow, past the pond, to the path that leads to the community.
BEE
The worn record wobbles around the player.
Joni Mitchell sings her sad, woeful songs about rivers and desperate love. The stack of old records, brought here by the originals when they came into these woods to build a different life, sits below my bedroom window. I found them in the attic long ago, and I prefer the slow, steady thrum of music at night when I’m trying to sleep over the creaky silence of the old house.
I find the small dictionary resting on the windowsill and thumb through the pages until I find the only one I care about: where the daffodil—dried and pressed flat—is resting inside. I run my fingers up the stem, remembering when it was first plucked from the ground, and the heady way its cool spring scent made me feel.
I think of him. Like a god unsettling the stars, reconfiguring the galaxies, his touch alters the arrangement of my cells. He destroys me then pieces me back together. But sloppily. I always feel a little more off-balance after I’m with him, seams tugging apart, my skin reddened in places. And still I keep going back.