I told myself I was off chasing some grand adventure, rewrote myself into someone brave, someone with grit. But those were just stories. I pulled my knees into my chest, blinked back tears. In truth, I was just running. There was a buzzing in the grasses, as if moments and memories of other lifetimes spoke. “Be quiet,” I yelled and flung my decanter. It clattered on a wayward rock, the sound shrill in the vast, echoing space.
I held my knees, my satin skirt stiff and abrasive, daydreams quavering on past. An image of the Native woman pressing into evergreen brambles. The homesteading woman bending down to pluck cabbage leaves. Lightning spurting from another’s mouth. Wolves howled across the expanse, from one end of darkness to the other.
Stot gripped the back of his neck, stood to grab my flask. He crouched beside me. “Whether you accept it or not, we’re in this together,” he said. “You might as well tell me what’s troubling you.”
I felt heavy, my forearms numb. My secrets suffocating. His engagement unbearable. Stot’s bearing was patient, waiting for what it was that I’d buried, what it was I held back. The voices groaned. They writhed, and they ached. They wanted out.
In wilderness, one slips toward oblivion.
Was that it, then? If I kept enduring, isolated in the wild distances, my breath might squeeze right on out. And so I told him—
“I slept with my sister’s husband.”
He stilled, his eyes darting between mine. Seeing me, recognizing the wide space between what I disclosed and what I buried. My fingernails dug into my arms, my flask cool against my blouse, the crisp scent of whiskey and apples creeping into the frozen-water scent of winter. A memory slapped against my chest, as if flung down from Kansas by the raging southern wind. It was the end of April, a week before Magnolia’s wedding, a winesap apple core sticky in my palms. She sat beside me in the clover, a spray of wild violets scattered alongside the creek, Lark leaning against a mossycup oak just beyond. We’d finished a picnic breakfast, and they’d told me they really, truly wouldn’t be coming along to homestead.
“So this is goodbye,” I’d said, unable to see my future anymore. The apple in my palm, the backs of my fingers on the moss, the groundcover damp with yesterday’s rain.
“There’s no need for dramatics.” Magnolia picked a fleck of oat grass from her skirt, her posture and carriage precise. “What’s altered, in truth? We’ll come calling all the time.”
She glanced over her shoulder at Lark. His hands shoved in his overall pockets, his attention elsewhere.
“Won’t we?” she asked him.
“Course we’ll visit,” he said, the white around his irises stark in the thicket. But I knew he meant nothing of the sort—as he saw it, our friendship was over.
Ever since he’d dissolved our romance, that day hunting beside the creek, he’d stepped further away, until I couldn’t even grasp a figmentof him. Magnolia pursed her lips, analyzed his stance. She recognized something was wrong but hadn’t discovered what it was.
Oak leaves crackled above, our farm indistinct in the valley below. Lark pushed off the mossycup trunk, swung his rifle over his shoulder. “Told my pa I’d help dry venison today.”
Another lie. Our fathers repaired the fences down in the holler today. But good riddance, I wanted him to go. Lark muttered some joke, cloaking the awkwardness between us, his ease frighteningly believable—but he wouldn’t look into my eyes. I’d had one portrait of Lark the stretch of our childhood—but I’d been wrong.
He walked over, leaned down, and kissed Magnolia.
Lark stood, and she smiled up at him, fiddling with the lilac ribbons of her sunbonnet. And then he was off down the path, his stride lanky, haphazard as the forest swallowed him whole. A white-tailed hawk squawked faroff, beyond the crackle of brittle oak leaves. “We’ll visit,” Magnolia said, her gauzy white overblouse opalescent in the sunglow. “You’re my sister, my dearest friend—I won’t have you living without me.”
I rested the mottled red apple in my lap, against the pleats of my skirt, the fabric sunny yellow daisies. But I didn’t believe platitudes anymore. I couldn’t envision how we could live alongside each other much longer. Magnolia bit her lip, ran a thumb across the tines of a fork, and I gathered the floral plates, slipped them back in our basket. “I’ve noted, since our engagement, you and Lark haven’t ventured off alone.” She hesitated, splotches of rose streaking up her throat. “I reason that’s an above-reproach notion.”
I folded a gingham napkin, and a cloud passed overhead, muting the glossy light. I felt vacant, all the way inside. She was the cleverest of us, but somehow she hadn’t put the pieces together about Lark and me. I couldn’t tell her, not with her this happy, not with him choosing her. The past didn’t matter, not even in the slightest. It was past. It’d stay there. I’d let her write her own version of our childhood.
“Sure.” I rubbed my clavicle, the ridge of my skin chapped. “No reason for us to go off alone anyhow.”
Magnolia held her embroidered ivory cape tight at her neck and studied me, apprehension rippling under her poise. A yellow jacket buzzed by, darting toward the stream. She sensed my evasion but chose to believe me, a smile budding across her face. My sister, the person who knew me best, didn’t see me. And I broke—she’d never even asked whether I loved him. Just one evening she’d come racing into our home, startling everyone clustered before the woodfire, and announced they were engaged. She’d vaulted into my arms, giddy and blissful, and I’d held her, shocked. I hadn’t been angry then, the disloyalty sharp and debilitating—but as the days sped past, I smoldered. She wasn’t that clueless, was she? I waffled between rage and sorrow, capsized by the carelessness of the betrayal. How could she not even ask?
Out in the grove, I plopped an enamelware plate into the basket, the clang unnatural in the wood. Magnolia glanced up, a furrow between her brows. I dropped another plate, the whimsical cornflowers and cobalt forget-me-nots shivering as the plate steadied. She opened her mouth, and I cut her off. “He’s lying, you know.”
Her lips pinched, a familiar expression of disappointment, the one when she thought my behavior was lacking decorum or moderation. She deliberately straightened the plates, morning luminescence like dew along her cheekbones. “I presumed we wouldn’t have to discuss this,” she said, her fingers resting on the sapphire rim of the plate. She looked up, her expression closer to pity than I thought necessary. “But we do, don’t we?”
I picked up the apple core, gestured for her to continue. She rested her clenched hands in her lap. “Can’t you just be happy for me? For once, let me step out from your shadow.”
I coughed a stunned laugh. “You cannot be serious,” I said. “How about:I apologize for stealing your beau.”
Magnolia dropped a trio of forks, her eyes wide. It seemed she truly hadn’t known Lark and I had been together. Varying emotions flickered over her face before something rigid settled, as if she were holding on to her shape. “He chose me.”
I stood, tossed the apple into the basket. “And you betrayed me.”
“Betrayed?” She wiped her hands along her waistband, stood. She shook her head, voice rising in pitch, lines fraught across her forehead. “Now just hold on a minute. Of all the things you could say to me—”
“And you’re not even homesteading!” I screamed, everything inside me overflowing, an eruption.
