The buzzing in my ears—behind my eyes—growing louder.
THEO
My wife has fallen asleep, her hand still clutching the necklace I found in Levi’s fireplace. But I sit awake at the edge of our bed, my mind ratcheting clumsily over thoughts that keep doubling back on themselves. A machine that repeats the same motion, stuck in a maddening loop.
How did Levi get Maggie’s necklace? And Travis’s last notebook page? Why was he trying to burn them, melt them down to nothing?
When I showed him the photo of Maggie, why did he lie? Why did he say he didn’t know her?
What did he do?
Calla exhales softly, her breath stirring a strand of her dark hair. And then I see it: something beneath her head, beneath the pillow—the sharp corner obvious against the soft edges of the white linen sheets. Quietly, gently, I pull the thing loose from beneath her pillow.
Calla stirs once, her foot kicking at the blankets, sending the green patchwork quilt to the floor. But she doesn’t wake.
It’s the book: the Foxtail book written by Maggie St. James. My wife has kept it hidden from me, as if she feared what I might read inside. This book belongs to her, while the notebook I found in the sunroom belongs to me. We each have our own secrets that we covet and keep close, so the other won’t see—but what do we fear they might reveal? What unknown words live inside?
I stand up from the bed, the Foxtail book in my hand.
It’s heavy, a book you don’t simply open and read before sleep—a chapter here or there. You must commit to it. A book like this demands something of its reader.
And holding it now, I wonder what Calla discovered inside.
I move toward the open door, nervous that Calla might wake and catch me with her precious book, when something passes by out in the hall. At first, I think it might be Bee—sneaking through the house, tiptoeing into her room to change her clothes, to get something to eat, before retreating back out into the woods where she’s been spending her nights. But when I walk to the doorway and step into the hall, I see the flash of hair—of a woman I don’t know—hurrying down the stairs.
It’s not Bee.
But the woman isn’t entirely unfamiliar either.
I don’t call out to her, instead I move quietly down the stairs and through the house after her, the Foxtail book tucked under my arm. She opens the screen door and ducks outside, dashing up through the meadow beneath a clear, night sky. I stop on the back porch and watch her, her blond hair sliding across her shoulder blades, her gait long and deliberate, pale arms moving with the ease of a deer knowing its path through the tall grass. She’s humming a tune, words slipping gently from her lips.
I blink and refocus, I hold the book tight against my side—she isn’t a ghost, a specter set loose from the old farmhouse. This is something else: an afterimage. A word that drips through my mind, unmistakable.
This is a moment from the past.
The soft-blond hue of her hair reflects the moonlight, but it’s not quite how it was in the photograph. Her hair has grown out several inches, and at the roots, I can see the dark brown shade of her natural color.
Maggie St. James.
Maggie.
She reaches the pond, the lemon trees shivering as she approaches, and a man is waiting for her. She isn’t alone. He pulls her to him and they kiss, embracing beneath the half-domed moonlight, before they begin shedding their thin summer clothes and wade out into the pond, arms tangled around one another.
Travis Wren came to Pastoral and he found Maggie St. James.
He found her, and he also fell in love.
My hands shake at my sides and I drop the book onto the porch at my feet. My eyes blur over and I bend to retrieve the book, my head pounding suddenly, a feeling like I might be sick. When I stand back up, the visage of Maggie and Travis in the pond, are gone. Not even a ripple remains across the surface of the water.
My left temple begins to ache just above my ear—an old, distant pain. The memory of it just out of reach—like so many things.
I struggle to take a breath. Something happened here. Maggie and Travis lived within the walls of this old house. Not ghosts. Not phantoms passing through the hall.
Maggie and Travis are still alive.
Maggie and Travis never left.
CALLA
The house is hauntingly quiet.
My husband is gone from the bed and the Foxtail book is gone from beneath my pillow.
It’s late—middle of the night late—saturated with the kind of stillness that comes when even the midnight creatures stop their scurrying beneath floorboards and night owls have eaten their share of field mice and have returned to their roosts to await the dawn.