I was sixteen when he pulled the daffodil from the meadow and placed it in my hand, then kissed me for the first time under the far-leaning magnolia tree near the pond, my back pressed against the smooth bark, my fingertips touching the arches of his collarbones. He told me I was the most starry-lit thing he’d ever seen, and I absorbed his words like rain against dry summer soil—thirsty for the sound of his voice.
My eyes started fading later that year, bursts of shadowy orbs flashing across my retinas, and slowly Levi became only a gray vestige. But I knew him even in the dark; he smelled like pine and freshly chopped wood meant for the fire. I could feel him approaching even when he tiptoed up behind me, his hands sliding carefully through mine, across my ribs, over the thin fabric of my summer dress. Our devotion grew into something neither of us truly understood at that age. We needed each other. Greedy hands and sweat beading along spines and blades of grass caught in muddy hair.
As my eyesight failed, he led me through the community, helping me to trace a path I could remember, feeling for doorways and fence posts and rocks I might tumble over, counting the steps from one building to another. He loved me. And I knew my dream of leaving Pastoral someday, to escape the closeness of all these trees, had faded with my vision.
Long ago, I would imagine myself walking the streets of New York City like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, renting a room atop a hotel high-rise in SoHo, ordering room service after midnight, and waiting for the knock at the door. How easily food could be summoned. It was a fanciful, indulgent daydream, but I craved things beyond these forest walls—things I’ve never known. The feel of carpet underfoot, sidewalks and sunrises against an ocean, or the chatter of strangers’ voices on a subway. It was a desire that Levi said was born from reading too many books and spending too many afternoons caught in my own mind instead of living directly in the present moment where I belonged.
But when my sight left me, these daydreams slipped away with it.
I would remain in Pastoral.
Right where Levi assured me that I belonged.
The record slows to a stop, the music growing quiet—the old mechanical player needing to be re-cranked. But the curtain over my bedroom window blows inward, a slow curling that sounds like waves against sand, followed by a slow, languid silence.
But there’s something else: a thing between the quiet.
I place the dried daffodil back inside the dictionary and remove the record from the player. Out in the hall, I let the railing guide me down the stairs—the old wood floor cold and grooved in places, marks left by the people who lived here once, long before us. My mind ebbs back to our mother: her bare feet striding across the floor into the kitchen in the early morning hours, making tea and oats before the rest of us had woken. In the darkness of my eyes, I can recall faint flashes of her long chestnut hair, the side of her face as she washed dishes in the sink, her voice calling to me from the screen door. She died not long after my vision failed. Pneumonia—the community thought. It took her quick.
But now, outside on the back porch, I can still hear it: low labored breathing, a heartbeat—tiny and small in the distance.
In my bare feet, I leave the safety of the porch and walk out into the field, listening.
I hear the cry of a woman.
* * *
I wash my hands in the white basin sink outside the birthing hut, a bar of homemade tea tree oil soap foaming between my fingers, dirt sloughing off down the drain. The scent of the soap reminds me of all the births I’ve witnessed over the years: counted fingers and toes, ten and ten, wailing cries and lungs sucking in their first breath, followed by exhausted sighs of relief from the mothers.
A baby is about to be born in Pastoral.
I enter the circular birthing room encased with windows, the morning sun just beginning to peek through the tree line, warming my face. The skylights overhead have been propped open and the sounds of the forest—birds beginning to chitter, leaves brushing together—filter in. The circular hut was constructed beyond the main row of homes and buildings of Pastoral, away from the commotion of community life. It rests beside the creek, tucked among the trees—a quiet, restful place where mothers can feel calmed by the sounds of the forest.
“She’s almost fully dilated,” Netta informs me quietly when I enter the room, then her footsteps move swiftly away from me, toward the far wall, her left heel dragging across the wood floor. I’ve never seen Netta—she came to the community later than most, after I lost my eyesight. But I know her by her walk, her odd labored steps, as if one leg is bent wrongly outward from the other. She is a short, narrow, wisp of a woman, and she always smells of basil and a little of something sweet, like wild bearberries.