It feels as if I’m waking up, the blackness dissolving.
And something else is forming in its place.
THEO
Levi is swaying when I reach him, eyes glassed over, yet there is an edginess to the way his shoulders tilt heavily to one side, his mouth drawn too tight against his teeth.
“I did it for them,” he says when I reach him, as if I’ve walked up and interrupted him midsentence, even though he’s standing alone.
“Did what?”
His upper lip snarls, watching those who are swaying beneath the rows of lights. “They don’t know what’s out there, but I do—” His voice breaks off and he hiccups, tipping slightly onto his left foot before righting himself.
I feel sorry for him, seeing him like this—he’s not the man he was a week ago—before Colette had her baby and Ash and Turk snuck over the border. Some part of him has rattled loose.
His chin tips back and he peers up through the trees, like he’s trying to see the stars. But I suspect everything is a blur to him right now. The world blotted out. “They’re all sheep,” he mutters, his half-closed eyes snapping back to me. “But not you.” He takes another drink. “You’re smarter than them.” I think he’s going to say that I’m the only one he trusts, the only one he can confide in, but his mouth pinches closed and he breathes, steadying himself. Or he’s thinking some other thought he refuses to share.
I pull out the photograph from my pocket, keeping it curled slightly against the shape of my palm, and I hold it out for him to see.
His chin lowers, eyes flickering across the image. “What is it?” he asks, like he can’t tell what he’s looking at. He sways forward, spilling some of his wine onto the grass, then blinks down at the photo but doesn’t touch it, doesn’t try to take it from me. For a tiny half-second, I think I see something in his eyes, maybe it’s recognition, a twitch of his eyelashes, a puckering of his mouth. Or maybe it’s just the booze causing odd little convulsions in his face muscles.
“Where did you get it?” His voice is flat and measured, giving nothing away.
I draw the photo back so only I can see it. “I found it.”
“Where?” This question comes as a punctuation in the air.
Beyond the border, I think. Down the road until I could no longer see Pastoral behind me. Much farther than Ash or Turk trekked. Deep, deep into the woods.
But Levi looks at me like he already knows, or he suspects. And we stare at one another, looking for the lies, looking for the cracks in the other person.
“Do you know who she is?” I ask.
Levi’s right eye squints nearly closed and he shifts his jaw back into place. “Should I?”
“Her name is Maggie St. James.”
He blows out a breath, almost as if he’s relieved. Or again, it might just be the alcohol making his gestures seem like they have meaning when they don’t.
“There’s no one in Pastoral with that name,” he answers, turning his attention away from me. “You know that.”
Across the way, at the Mabon tree, Alice and a small group of women have finished tying lengths of dyed fabric to the lowest limbs of the tree, and now they stand in a circle around the trunk, each holding the end of a fabric strip, singing softly as they begin to weave in and out through one another, wrapping the trunk of the Mabon tree in a crosshatch pattern. It’s a way to bind the marriage of Alice and Levi, to brand it into the tree. The same tree where only days ago, two men’s necks were snapped.
“Maybe she passed through here years ago,” I say.
“We haven’t had anyone new come to Pastoral in over ten years,” Levi reminds me. Not since Cooper died and the forest became unsafe.
I nod, looking down at the photograph in my hand, at the half-image of a woman who is screaming at me with her visible eye. Begging me for something—to find her. “But what if this woman did come here,” I press. “Maybe she snuck in and then something happened to her.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” I turn the photo over and read her name handwritten in black ink on the back. “I think a man came looking for her, too. A man named Travis Wren.”
Levi juts out his lower jaw then slides it back. “Why do you think that?”
“I found a notebook in our house, in the sunroom. It was written by a man named Travis Wren.” I hadn’t planned on telling Levi about the notebook, it felt like something I needed to keep secret, but now I find myself wanting to convince him, make him understand that two people are missing. And it’s better—less risky—to tell him about the notebook than about the truck I found down the road. Than to admit that I went over the perimeter.