My stomach turns. “You would go over the border again?”
“Levi won’t allow it. I’m not going anywhere.”
“But if Levi had said yes, you would have left?” He looks at me but doesn’t answer, and I let out a breath, a furnace roaring inside me—but it isn’t anger, it’s fear. I’m terrified of what my husband might do, terrified of the thoughts strumming through him. “Remember Linden and Rose?” I ask. But I don’t need him to answer, I know he remembers. “They left. And it killed them.” Linden and Rose were founders, originals. Linden worked at the guard hut with Theo and Parker, and Rose did laundry for some of the members, including Levi. We often spent evenings on our back porch, the four of us, sharing stories and listening to them recount memories from the outside. I can still picture Rose’s warm, pinked face, wide toothy smile, and soft coiled hair that was beginning to gray at the roots. She used to talk of her brother, of family who lived out in Colorado who she hadn’t seen in years. They knew the dangers if they tried to leave, but they did it anyway—about a year ago. Rose didn’t say a word to me. They snuck from their home just before dawn, walked through the clot of swaying oak trees behind their house, and stepped past the boundary. They didn’t take the road, instead they followed the creek for a mile, right along the edge of the boundary—as if they might change their minds and step back over the threshold into the safety of Pastoral. But they kept going.
Yet, they never made it out of the woods.
Their bodies were found, spotted from the edge of the border, down a low gully near the creek. It was discussed for many days if we should venture past the boundary to retrieve their bodies so they could be properly buried in the community cemetery. But it was decided the risk couldn’t be taken.
It was only a couple days more when their bodies were no longer visible from the perimeter. They had been dragged away, deeper into the trees by some wild animal. Some said it was a mercy, that we didn’t have to watch their corpses slowly rot over the next few seasons.
We held a ceremony the following afternoon, placing stones in the graveyard without bodies to bury. “We should not speak their names after this day,” Levi said. “They risked all of our safety by trying to leave. They deserted us. And so we will desert their memory.”
And now they are the nameless. Those who chose the unknown over the community that sheltered and protected them. It hurts to speak their names aloud now, the silent grief, a wound left untended.
“They lost their lives going past the boundary,” I say, my voice wavering. “They knew the risks, but they did it anyway.” I want him to see, to understand: Death is all that waits for him out there. Even if he thinks he’s immune, we can’t be sure. It’s possible he’s just been lucky, evaded getting sick each time, until the next time when he returns with rot inside his lungs and eyes and fingernails. “I know what you’re thinking,” I say, pressing my teeth together at the back. “You want to go down the road anyway, even though Levi told you not to, you want to find a way to help Colette’s baby.”
His temples contract. “You don’t?”
“I don’t want to lose anyone else.” I feel the hot prick of tears behind my eyes. “I won’t lose you.” I’ll do whatever it takes to keep him here with me, on this side of darkness.
My husband’s shoulders draw back, and he breathes in the thick, gray air.
“Please,” I beg. “Forget about the road, the truck. Promise me you won’t leave. There’s nothing out there.”
He nods like he understands, but his eyes stare into the trees, over our border, and for a moment his expression is stark and pale in the moonlight, inhuman almost. A man with too many things secreted away inside him, things he won’t let me see. And for the first time, I think perhaps I don’t know him at all: this man I married, who lies beside me each night smelling of the forest, our breathing taking on the same sleepy rhythm, who sometimes looks at me as if he doesn’t know me either. As if I’m a moving puppet with disjointed arms and legs, words muttered from my wooden mouth.
A puppet wife.
His eyes lift, watery and bloodshot from the smoke, and he says, “I can’t.”
THEO
The white farmhouse with its mockingbird-gray shutters and tall, crumbling chimney, looks like a ghost ship set adrift among a sea of shadowed summer grass. A place where people wait out bad storms, protected from an illness they don’t quite understand.