And she would find it.
CALLA
The books I found in the garden, the journal Theo found stashed beneath the bed, were left on purpose—a way to ensure two people weren’t forgotten.
The sun dips to the west, while I stand on the porch watching Theo walk up the road for his shift at the guard hut, an uneasy feeling stirring in my stomach, like a scream that keeps growing louder. I wish he’d stay with me, but Parker will be waiting for him, and I know we need to pretend that nothing has changed—that we each haven’t found things left in our house like breadcrumbs in a gothic fairy tale.
Once he’s gone from view, I force my legs to carry me through the house and out the back door. I pull down laundry from the line that stretches between two elms, the fabric snapping in the wind. The night is warm, overheated, or maybe it’s only my thoughts that boil and cook inside me.
When I’m finished, I leave the basket in the grass and walk up past the pond, breathing, breathing. Gulping down the night sky, trying to calm my mind. I reach the trees and think of the Foxtail book, the chapters I’ve read out of order—the story unweaving itself strangely, without context: a girl chasing a fox, a girl who finds an underground museum. The book frightens me, the smudged illustrations, the dark, awful forest a place where the girl should not go.
Clouds begin to gather in the sky, blurring the stars, and I feel like Eloise from the story—searching for something, some underground place that might make sense of this ache in my rib cage. I move up the path along the creek, burnt sage still suspended from the boundary trees, hanging from string, waiting for a strong wind or curious birds to tug them down.
But something else catches my eye just off the path, a few feet from the gurgling creek.
Slumped against an elm tree, is a girl.
My sister.
Blood pooling around her legs.
I run to her and drop to my knees, searching for a wound. But when I touch her ankle—smeared in dried blood—she wakes with a start and yanks her legs back, swatting her hands in my direction. Her eyes flash upward, searching for the thing that has touched her.
“It’s just me,” I soothe.
Her mouth falls open, but no words free themselves from the tangle of her tongue. I wrap my arm around her waist and help her to stand, but once she’s upright, she shrugs away from my arms, and begins limping down the meadow, past the pond, toward home.
“Bee?” I call, walking after her. But she doesn’t look back at me, doesn’t answer.
We reach the porch, and I try again. “Bee, what happened to you?”
She turns around this time, touching the railing with her trembling hand. “The trees are still splitting open,” she says, her voice hoarse, as if she’s been crying or breathing too-cold air all night long. “We burned the sage, but the border trees are still sick.” She swallows, wincing as she shifts her weight away from the ankle that’s begun to bleed again. “I felt them.”
I take a step back from her, my eyes flinching to her hands, smeared with dirt. “You touched the trees?”
Her eyes flutter a moment, the back of her jaw clamping down. This is why she didn’t want me to touch her, to help her back to the house, she knows she might be infected.
“You went past the border?” I try. But a web of knowing braids itself tightly together inside me, like spiders scrambling down my joints. “Did you touch the opening in the trees, the sap?” I ask, even though I know, just by crossing over the boundary, she’s probably been exposed.
Bee stares at me, but her gaze is slightly off, looking just past my shoulder, and I move slightly to the left into alignment with her eyes. More for myself than for her. Her nostrils swell. “Yes,” she admits, swift and certain.
A half-beat of silence hangs in the air between us, between the wind hissing through the lemon trees, and goose bumps rise on my forearms while a furnace boils inside me. I have a choice: I could run up the trail to Pastoral, I could tell the others that my sister has placed her hands along the bark of a sick tree. Or I could not.
I stare at her, looking for signs of the illness, for blood to blossom like wildflowers around the whites of her eyes. “You’re sure?” I ask. She might have thought she crossed over the boundary but been confused about her place within Pastoral. Maybe she only thinks she touched a pox-infected tree, but really it was just one of the old elms near the pond, the bark always rough and cracked. Easily mistaken, especially when your eyes only see darkness.
But she doesn’t answer, she turns away from me and climbs the steps, her feet dragging. She touches the screen door, about to step inside, but then her other hand strays across her stomach for a half-second. As if she is guarding something growing inside her. As if she is…