But he won’t tell me what he’s thinking, and maybe I don’t want to hear: I want to pretend a little longer that everything is just as it always was. Plain and featureless and good.
My husband is my husband.
My life is my own.
But the longer we stand here, a new working of fear wedges itself between us. And I know: He’s becoming someone else. He is not Theo at all; he’s Travis Wren. A man who came looking for me, who suffered the same fate as I did.
And now, with the thud of his heartbeat against my ear, I know he’s thinking the same thing: We can’t stay here.
This life is a lie.
FOXES AND MUSEUMS
Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series Eloise spent an uncounted number of days and nights within the woods.
Weeks passed and then years.
The trees wove themselves into her heart, and soon she became just as hard and rough as bark.
It wasn’t long before she began to forget her old life, her home at the edge of the woods, the soft feel of her paisley-printed sheets. Her mother’s kiss against her cheek before bed.
She was a forest thing now. And even her name faded in her mind, became a smudge she barely recalled.
But when you become familiar with the dark, with slithering, rotting things, you forget the feeling of sunlight. You forget what you should miss.
And then there’s no going back.
CALLA
Bee returns.
I’m standing on the back porch—trying to set right the patchwork of thoughts coming unstitched inside my head, trying to figure out how to leave Pastoral, but the ringing in my ears is too loud, my skin too tight against my bones—when I see her moving down the meadow. Her hair is unbraided, spilling over her shoulders, across her face, and she reminds me of a song, turning round and round on her record player.
When she gets closer, I can tell something’s wrong; a cold, awful knot of hate and fury turning her features in on themselves.
I say her name. “Bee?” And just the word against my lips sends a sharp, uncertain pain down into my gut. My sister is not my sister at all. She stops at the bottom of the porch steps, mute, and she’s hiding something in her hand. “What happened?” I ask.
The rims of her eyes are bloodshot; her nostrils swell like she might be sick—a wave of discomfort blazing across her face. She shakes her head, mouth unmoving, and I see that her bare feet are thick with mud, and when her head lifts, it’s as if she can see me—her pupils expanding.
I swear she’s looking right at me.
“It was me,” she says, finally turning her hand and revealing a knife clutched tightly in her palm, the blade dulled, smudged with dirt.
“What was you?”
“I carved the border trees.”
I shake my head at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I woke up in the woods… and I had this knife. I don’t know where it came from, but I—” Her voice warbles, a bird losing its pitch. “I don’t remember doing it. But I can feel the memory in my hands, cutting into the wood.”
“I don’t understand.” My own voice cracks. “The trees are sick; it’s the illness that splits them open.”
“No,” Bee says, lowering her arm to her side but still clutching the knife, fingers trembling. “It’s me. It’s always been me.”
“You’re tired,” I tell her, because there is fear in her eyes, and I try reaching out for her, but she senses the movement and flinches back, stepping away from me, farther from the porch.
“I’m not tired,” she snaps, her voice a thin wire pulled taut, vowels that want to break against the tongue. “I’ve been asleep for years.” She presses a palm to her right eye and winces. “Something’s wrong with me. My head feels muddy.”
I take another step closer to her, and I wonder… just like Theo and me, have her memories been smudged out? A kaleidoscope of images crushed together, now splintering like old wood.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I tell her, watching as tears pool against her eyelids. “Give me the knife, Bee.” My own head throbs, too many parallels crushing together at once: Bee is not my sister. None of this is what it should be.
Her chin tilts to one side, like she’s considering the request, but then she says, “I can’t. I need it.”
“Please.” I move softly toward her, trying not to make a sound. “You’re right, our memories aren’t what we thought they were.”
There is a vagueness in her eyes, a grinding of her jaw. “I can’t stay here,” she mutters, turning her head toward the meadow and the forest beyond, as if it were awaiting her return, silently calling her back. She takes another step away from me, into the grass.