We are those people.
But Calla doesn’t feel the gut-ache inside her like I do. The need that’s been etching ravines through my flesh. If I made it past the boundary once, and survived, could I do it again? Could I make it on my own?
The screen door creaks then thumps shut behind me, and I hear my wife upstairs, walking across our bedroom floor, from the doorway to the closet, bare feet, shedding her clothes and letting them fall to the floor. I stop at the bottom of the stairs, holding tightly to the wood railing. If I go to her now, if I whisper into her ear that I’m sorry: I’m sorry, little rabbit—a nickname I gave her shortly after we were married because she reminds me of a rabbit always in the garden, pulling up herbs and fresh carrots from the soil. Maybe if I climb the stairs and find her in our room, she will incline her head, enough space for me to kiss the soft, pale skin behind her ear. She will let my hands rove up her back, her spine, into her long dark hair, beginning to turn auburn from the summer sun. I will promise her anything, everything, just to hear her say that she forgives me.
I will prove to her that I will never leave.
And if I’m lucky, she’ll believe me this time.
But even as this thought skips across my mind, my legs carry me away from the stairs, past the kitchen, and down the far back hallway to where it ends. I stand facing the closed door on the left—the room that was a sunroom once, and then a guestroom for outsiders. But it has sat unused for years, for as long as I can remember.
I turn the knob and step inside.
A metal bed sits against one wall, coated in dust. The floor bends away from my feet as I cross the room, grass poking up between the boards, cobwebs spanning much of the ceiling, a vine from a half-dead wisteria growing through the broken window, inching its way up the wall—dried purple flowers scattered beneath it from the last time it bloomed and shed its petals onto the floor.
One of the heavy curtains has been drawn back from a window, revealing a slant of moonlight. Perhaps it was Bee, the last time she was in here, her small footsteps visible in the layer of dust along the floorboards.
Years ago, when Cooper was still alive and outsiders arrived from time to time—appearing from the distant curve in the road—this room housed exhausted travelers. They slept here for weeks or months until it was decided if they could remain in Pastoral. And then they were given a job; a place to stay within the community. This was the halfway house. An in-between.
With slow, deliberate steps, I walk to the bed where a pillow and a blanket the color of oatmeal sit folded at the end, awaiting a new arrival who will never come. But I wonder: Did Travis Wren somehow sleep in this bed without us knowing? Did he shake the dust from the old blanket and rest beneath a canopy of cobwebs, a nightly breeze hissing through the broken window?
My hand trails across the metal bed frame to the mattress. He stayed here, Bee told me, eyes watering, lashes fluttering like small, frightened wings. But if he was here—a stranger asleep in our house—where is he now? What happened to him?
I slide my palm along the edge of the mattress—instinct buzzing at the ends of my fingertips—between the box springs, feeling for something. Something. Forgotten things, left-behind things. Something that could be hidden here by a man who once slept in this bed and then vanished.
There is nothing. Only a dead beetle; a clot of dried leaves.
But then… my fingers touch something else. I yank my hand out, startled by the solid nature of it. There’s something there. I inch my hand back between the mattresses, and feel the hard corner of a book. Of paper.
It takes some effort to dislodge it, as if it’s imprinted itself in the mattress, molded, been here too long. But finally, I yank it free and it comes out with a puff of fine dust.
My eyes blink in the dim light, holding a small book with a blank cover, no markings on the front. Carefully, I open it and see that it’s a journal, with someone’s blunt, crisp handwriting scribbled across the pages.
His.
I snap it closed. And my heart makes a sudden dip into my stomach.
I back away from the bed, holding the book clamped shut in my hand, feeling like a thief. Like the ghosts of this room might see what I’ve taken and start rattling the walls of the house, shrieking for me to put it back.
I slip out into the hall, closing the door behind me, and move quickly to the back door, escaping outside. Crickets sing in the far field, happy little chirps, a song to call out the night insects. And soon the frogs begin their bellow from the banks of the pond—a summer tune that folds over me, familiar, but also an echo in my ears that feels too close. Conspiring. Everything awake and alive and watching.