The ground is worn under the fence hole. I know others come here. Sometimes in the night, when we are exchanging calls with a bullfrog, I even hear a rustle that I know is human. I put my hand over Fern’s mouth because even through the Roundup she never fully learned to be afraid of what she couldn’t see. But I’ve learned. I know better. It’s not safe to make yourself known in a place you’re not supposed to be. We must always hide. But even though we’re hiding, I have a sense that the people who come here at night come for the same reasons we do. Escape from the world as we know it now. To know the world as it once was.

I bring my Fern here, cutting into her night’s sleep, because I want her to remember what she knew in the beginning of her life. What I knew my whole young life. The other night when I tried to rouse her, she rubbed her eyes sleepily, whined and kicked. She didn’t want to go. She threw the blanket up over her head. Eventually I cajoled her out of bed, but I’m afraid of the day when I can’t. When she becomes obstinate. When she becomes different from me. What will we share if we can’t share this? Will we be nothing but strangers? I want to grab her in these moments, squeeze her too hard, growl into her hair, never let her go. But she always wriggles free, unfazed, or maybe with a small eye roll. She knows she has everything I can give her. I think of my mother in these moments. She was someone who never did what I expected her to. When she looked at me, I didn’t understand what her look meant. She looked at me sharp-eyed, her mouth twisting and pained. As though looking at me hurt her sometimes. I didn’t understand it until I had the chance to care for this little Fern and I looked at her and saw all that came before and all that would come after and all its potential awfulness and certain beauty and it was too much for me to bear. I looked away, scared, disgusted, overcome with love, on the verge of crying and laughing, and finally, finally, finally I began to know my mother.

*

I tell Fern stories sometimes. Stories I grew up with. From our home in the Wilderness.

I tell a story I made up, and at the end she asks what I call it.

“What I call it?”

“Yes, you have to name the story. My mom always named her stories. The Tale of the Wolf and the Weasel, for example.”

“Got it.”

“So what is the name of your story?”

“It’s the Ballad of Fern.”

Fern blushes. “Oh, no,” she says bashfully. “That story’s not as good as the others.”

“It will be,” I say.

I’ll tell her this story and the others with all their complications and confusions because those complications and confusions are what make them true. It feels at times like the only instinct left in me. It’s the only way I know to raise a daughter. It’s how my mother raised me.

*

A few months after returning to the City, I walked into a hardware store. The clerk eyed me. I could not possibly be rich enough to buy anything, dressed in my Resettlement stripes. I went to the paint swatches and I picked out all the colors I remembered from my old life, my wilder life. I took those swatches, the generous rectangles of color, a code and a name in their corners. I took them all and slipped them into my bag and ran from the store well ahead of the clerk.

Back home I spent a sleepless night taping each square to the wall in a mosaic, placing patches and lines of color how I remembered them. Looking out from the height of land over a patch of verdant grasses toward the smudge of mountains on the horizon. Perhaps on a rainy day when all the colors would seem to have blurred their boundaries. It was a pretty and quiet and private place. A place you wouldn’t want to leave.

When Fern awoke, she rubbed her eyes twice and said, “I know that place,” a serene smile on her face, her voice thick with sleep and with wonder.