He tries to touch me again, his fingers trailing over my palm, but the heat inside my chest boils, bubbles over. “Don’t fucking touch me,” I snap, turning away. I can’t be here, in the house where I believed someday I would live. With this man who… this man who I can no longer allow myself to love.
My legs carrying me to the door, hand cutting through the air in front of me so I don’t stumble over the wood chair that sits near the entryway.
“I didn’t want to tell you like this,” he says behind me, and his voice actually sounds weak, filled with regret. But I don’t need his regret. It doesn’t change what he’s done, what he’s doing.
I yank open the front door.
“Please,” he says. “Don’t go.”
I step out into the night, imagining the bright moonlight against my skin as it breaks over the trees. He moves through the doorway behind me, following me. But the heat of him is unbearable. I think of the tiny dried daffodil pressed between a dictionary in my room, kept after all these years—a stupid, childish thing. I thought it meant he loved me, that I was his and he was mine and nothing would ever change that.
But now I march down the steps before he can touch me again or say another word, and I break into a run. My legs need to feel it, the ground pounding beneath me, the wind against my cheeks, the darkness rushing past my ears: the blurring of all sound, all feeling. Not even the trees can wrestle me from silence.
I don’t want to hear a thing.
CALLA
We tie strings around bundles of dried sage, hang them from the lowest limbs of the boundary trees, then light them with golden-yellow beeswax candles, the flames catching quickly.
The sun has long set, and in the dark, the burning sage looks like floating orbs along the perimeter: an eerie midnight conjuring, spells cast into the woods. But these aren’t spells, this is survival.
Theo moves farther down the border, lighting the next bundle, but I stay, watching the smoke spiral up through the branches and drift away deep into the forest. The sage will rid the trees of their illness, clotting the sap that oozes down their trunks, deadening the rot and keeping it from spreading. It’s been several months since we’ve lit the sage, since we last saw signs of the illness moving closer into our valley.
He’s several paces away when his eyes lift, a cool darkness in them that for a moment I think might be the sickness, the rot spreading along the whites of his eyes, but then he tilts his gaze and the candlelight reveals his pupils are clear and undamaged. No blood pooling in them. We stare at one another for some time, the acidic blue moonlight making broken patterns across the ground, and I wonder if the things we keep from one another will break us apart. I wonder if the things we don’t say are worse than the lies we do. Like the illness, they will rot us from the inside out.
“I’m sorry,” he says across the open space between us, his left hand fidgeting at his side while his right holds a candle, wax dripping onto the ground at his feet, making a small syrupy puddle between blades of grass. “I shouldn’t have pulled you through the rain last night; I was stupid.”
The thick smoke stirs higher into the treetops, creating a veil of gray that begins to blur out the stars. “Ever since you found that truck—” A cold nip of fear tickles the hair on my arms—I hate being this close to the boundary, the shadows reaching long across the ground, the echoey stillness of the trees. This forest could kill us all, if we let it. “—you haven’t been yourself,” I confess. “You’re reckless.”
Theo rubs at the back of his neck. He traded shifts with Parker today so he could help me light the sage along the southern border—while the others are hanging bundles along the remainder of our boundary. I can even see spots of light farther up into Pastoral, waves of smoke and the scent of green and musk gathering over us.
“I know,” he agrees, but offers no explanation why, makes no promises that he’ll stop going down the road or peering at the photograph when he thinks I can’t see.
I move closer to him. “Where did you go last night?” I ask. “After you left the house?” It was still raining, and he should have waited for the storm to pass.
“Levi’s.”
A sourceless, indefinable prick of worry nudges at my thoughts. “What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.” Sparks from a nearby sage pinwheel down to the ground, smoldering a few feet from Theo. He steps forward and presses the toe of his boot into the embers, suffocating them so they won’t catch on the grass several feet behind us. “I offered to go get help for the baby.”