Bea could hear the voices of the others in camp. They carried across the even, empty land and dropped at her feet. But she did not want to return to them and their questions or, possibly worse, their silence. She shifted away and scrambled up boulders toward the shallow cave where her family liked to spend time. Their secret perch. She saw her husband, Glen, and daughter, Agnes, above her, kneeling in the dirt, waiting for her.

Bea saw Glen’s brow furrowing in concentration as he spun a leaf by its stem, peering at it from every vantage, pointing to something on its green spine so Agnes could see, asking her to notice some remarkable detail in its common shape. They both leaned closer to the leaf, as though it were telling them its secret, their faces breaking into delight.

When Glen saw her approaching, he waved her toward them. Agnes did the same, a generous and awkward sweep of her arm, smiling with her newly jagged tooth, chipped against a boulder. Why couldn’t it have been a baby tooth? Bea had thought, her daughter’s head in her hands, inspecting the damage under her bright, bloody lip. Agnes had held still and quiet, one tear squeezing from her eye and trailing through the dirt on her face. It was the only way Bea knew the accident had fazed her. Like an animal, Agnes froze when fearful and bolted when endangered. Bea imagined that as Agnes grew up this would change. She might feel less like prey and more like a predator. It was something in her daughter’s smile, some unnameable knowledge. It was the smile of a girl biding her time.

“This one is alder,” Glen was saying when Bea reached them. He took her hand, kissed it gently, lingering until she pulled it back to her side. She saw him glance at her stomach and wince.

He had prepared hot water in the brutish wood bowl, but now it was the temperature of the air. She squatted next to them, lifted her tunic, spread her knees. She scooped water under her skirt and gently washed between her legs, her stretched, worn folds, her splattered thighs. She felt raw, but she could tell she had not torn.

Agnes assumed the same position, her slight and toady legs splayed, splashing imaginary water on herself, eyeing Bea carefully. She seemed intent on not looking at where the baby had been.

Agnes was in some kind of mimicry stage. Bea saw it in animals. She’d seen it in other children. But in Agnes something about it disarmed her. She’d understood Agnes up until recently. Around the time the leaves last turned color, Agnes had become strange to her. She didn’t know if this fissure was just something parents went through with their children, or mothers went through with daughters, or if it was just some special hardship she and Agnes would have to endure. Out here, it was hard for Bea to dismiss things as simply normal because every aspect of their lives here was anything but normal. Was Agnes behaving normally for her age, or was it possible she believed she was a wolf?

Agnes had just turned eight but didn’t know it. They no longer marked birthdays because they no longer marked days. But Bea had taken notice of certain blooms when they’d first arrived. Then, Agnes had just turned five years old. It was April on the calendar. Bea had noted a field of violets during their first several days of walking. When she saw violets again, it seemed likely a year had passed—they’d felt the heat of summer, they’d seen leaves turn color, and they’d shivered in the snowy mountains. The snow had gone. She’d seen violets four times. Four birthdays. She knew Agnes’s eighth birthday had happened sometime since the last full moon, when she had seen violets in a patch of grass near their last camp. When they’d first arrived, Agnes had been so gravely ill, Bea hadn’t been sure she would see violets again with her daughter. But there they were, Agnes bounding through them.

Bea crept toward the back of the shallow cave. From behind a boulder, in a divot she’d hollowed out on their first time making camp here, she pulled a throw pillow and a design and architecture magazine that had featured one of her decorating remodels. It was a national magazine and the spread had been a turning point in her career, though not long after it published, she left for the Wilderness. These were her secret treasures she’d smuggled in from the City, and rather than carry them place to place, facing scorn from the others and damage from the elements, she hid them, blatantly disregarding the rules laid out in the Manual. When they passed through the Valley, which they had a few times each year, she dug out her treasures so she could feel a little more like herself.

She sat next to Glen and hugged her pillow. Then she thumbed through the pages of her spread, remembering the choices she’d made and why. Remembering what it felt like to have a home.

“If the Rangers find those, we’ll get in trouble,” Glen said, as he always said when she dug out her treasures, always so concerned with the rules.

She scowled. “What are they going to do? Kick us out for a pillow?”

“Maybe.” Glen shrugged.

“Relax,” she said. “They’ll never find them. And I need them. I need to remember what pillows are like.”

“Aren’t I a good enough pillow?” He said this so sweetly.

Bea looked at him. He was all bones. They both were. Even her belly, which had barely jutted with the baby, seemed to have immediately sunken. When she looked up at him, he was offering a small broken smile. She nodded. He nodded back. Then he staged a long, loud, languid yawn, eyeing Agnes. Agnes’s yawn followed with a big, fisted stretch.

“Big day tomorrow,” he said. “We start our trip to Middle Post. And we get to cross your favorite river on the way.”

“Can we swim?” Agnes asked.

“We’ve got to get in it to cross it, so you bet.”

“When?”

“Probably be there in a few days.”

“How much is a few?”

Glen shrugged. “Five? Ten? Several?”

Agnes huffed. “That’s not an answer!”

Glen poked her and laughed. “We’ll get there when we get there.” Agnes’s scowl was just like Bea’s scowl.

“Is everything packed?” Bea asked.

“Mostly. You don’t have to worry.”

Bea gave the pillow in her lap a tight squeeze. It was moist and smelled bitter, but she didn’t care. She buried her face in it, imagining she could transfer love to her small baby. She sighed and looked up.

Agnes was watching her, hugging the air, pretending to have her own pillow, or perhaps her own baby, and smiling the same sad smile Bea had no doubt just displayed.

The bustling and hoot-filled evening quieted as they passed through it.

At camp, a few of the other Community members were still at the fire, but most were breathing lightly in the circle where everyone slept. Bea and Glen eased down under the elk pelt they used as bedding. Agnes arranged herself, as she always did, at their feet. Her hand curled around Bea’s ankle like a vine.

“Maybe there will be some good packages at Post,” Glen murmured. “Maybe some good chocolate or something like that.”

Bea hmmed, but really she couldn’t eat things like that anymore without becoming ill, her body overwhelmed by what it used to crave in their old life.

Instead of chocolate, she wished instead Glen would mention the child she’d just buried. Or she thought she wished for that. What would she say? What could she say that he didn’t already know? And did she really want to talk about it? No, she didn’t. And he knew that too.

She looked at Glen, and in the firelight saw a look of hope play on his face. He knew chocolate couldn’t soothe such bewilderment, but maybe the suggestion could do what the chocolate was supposed to. She fit herself into his arms. “Yes, some chocolate would be nice,” she lied.

All around them, Bea heard the sounds of the wild world bedding down. Ground owls cooed, and something else screeched; shadows of night fliers skimmed between the sky and the stars. As the campfire hissed itself to sleep, she heard the last of the Community walking cautious and blind from the fire to the beds and nestling down. Someone said, “Good night, everyone.”

Against her ankle, Bea could feel Agnes’s blood pulsing through her hot clutching hand. She breathed in and out to its rhythm, and it focused her. I have a daughter, she thought, and no time for brooding. She was needed here, and now, by someone. She vowed to move on quickly. She wanted to. She had to. It was how they lived now.

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