“What road?” I know I’m pushing him, forcing him to strain into the backwoods of his mind, but some part of me is afraid this won’t last, this glimpse of the truth, of memories we shouldn’t have. If we do have the pox—if we’re sick and the illness has stolen parts of our mind—this moment of clarity might not last. By midday, it might vanish all over again: I will be Calla and he will be Theo, and the necklace and the Foxtail book will only be clues to a mystery we’ll never unravel.
“A main road, a paved road. There was an old, collapsed barn there too. And a boy broke his arm jumping off the roof of a house, but it burned down a long time ago.”
“How do you know that?” I ask, squinting at him. “About the boy breaking his arm?”
He looks at me but doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know—he doesn’t understand his own memories. And it makes me question if what he recalls is real, if we can even trust our own thoughts.
“I didn’t mean to get lost,” I say finally, fighting the tears that begin to press at my eyelids. I remember walking through the trees, sleeping in a bed in a farmhouse that wasn’t mine, but all too quickly felt familiar.
Why did I come here? Why did I leave my life and go in search of Pastoral? This is a black spot in my mind I still can’t pinpoint.
Theo looks south, in the direction of the gate and the guard hut. “We both forgot who we were.” His voice sounds clear now, like this is a truth he’s sure of: We both used to be someone else. But we left clues for ourselves—buried in the garden, tucked beneath the mattress in the sunroom—whatever we had left, whatever would help us remember.
I can feel the hard dirt under my hands when I dug a hole beneath the wild rosebush long ago, my eyes glancing to the meadow, panic in my throat. I placed the Foxtail book in first, touching the pages gently with my fingertips, worried the insects might begin to eat at the corners, or that the rain would soak into the soil and ruin the paper. But I didn’t want to bury it too deeply and risk never finding it again. I set the tiny charm on top, near the surface, like a gravestone: a hint that more things were buried beneath.
After tamping down the soil, I closed my eyes and whispered my name, my real name: Maggie St. James. I said it three more times, imprinting it onto the curved lobes of my skull, my bones—I knew I was starting to forget. I went inside and stood in the bathroom, water running in the sink, scraping my fingertips through my wet hair. It was still blonde then, but it was beginning to grow out, just past my shoulders, and I was fighting to remember something—searching my mind for the way back through the woods. I was struggling to keep hold of who I used to be. I muttered aloud, Don’t forget.
It’s one of the last things I recall from before.
Before the wall of black swept over my mind like a storm, and replaced my old memories with new ones. Memories of a childhood in Pastoral, of cool autumns wading in the stream, of Bee beside me as a little girl, laughing as she chucked stones from the creek up onto the soft, sandy bank. She was searching for skipping rocks, smooth flat stones that we could take to the pond and see who could skip them the farthest. But now, when I search for this moment in time, I only recall Bee telling me this story, of something she used to do—alone. I was never there beside her at the creek shore, I only imagined it: a childhood spent with Bee. And now, I can’t find any true memories of Pastoral when I was young. It was a childhood that never really existed.
My mind distorted truth with fiction, it created a messy, disjointed fairy tale that is hard to unravel.
“Do you think there are others?” I ask. “Do you think everyone in Pastoral has forgotten who they used to be?”
Theo is quiet for some time, then says, “No, not everyone.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m not. It’s just a feeling.”
I let myself touch the necklace at last, be soothed by the metal edges of each of the five books. I never intended to lose myself in Pastoral, I never intended to stay. “Then why us?” I ask.
Theo touches my hand, weaving his fingertips through mine. Still, he doesn’t answer.
“Say something,” I plead. “What do you think this is?”
His hand fidgets in mine, loosening his grip then tightening again. “I think we’ve been believing a lie for too long.” He pulls me into his arms, and I press my cheek into his shoulder, tears streaming down my chin, soaking into his cotton shirt. The sun lifts fully above the tree line, and I want to believe that he is really my husband, that we grew up in these woods. I want to believe that I really love him—that it’s not merely a trick of my mistaken, amnesic heart.