Ghosts and Other Lovers (15 page)

After eating, the warmth of the room made him drowsy; he began to yawn and it was obvious he was having a struggle to keep his eyes open. I gestured him toward the chaise longue, mimed sleep, then pointed to the door and made him understand I would leave him to it. This won from him a burst of speech, but as I hadn't a clue as to whether he was asking me about toilet facilities or simply thanking me, I could only shrug, smile, and wave bye-bye.

The door was there again last night. As soon as I came in Jack rushed to meet me, wide-eyed and talking a blue streak, desperately trying to explain something to me. All I could make out was that he'd nearly given up hope of ever seeing me again and had been about to leave.

I'd been gone only a day in my world, but that was so much longer in his. He drew me to the window and showed me that the snow was melting. He pointed to the remains of a deer carcass and I understood he'd been living off it -- and my tea, made with melted snow -- after exhausting the supplies in his rucksack. He'd waited as long as he could.

But why? I didn't understand why he had waited for me until, our eyes meeting, he reached out to touch my face.

He loved me.

We made love.

Just writing those words, I feel myself swept away again. I can't justify it. I'm happily married (and how suspicious I've always been of people who use that defensive phrase!) and he was a stranger.

My stranger. My fantasy. I guess that's the only explanation there is. Anything is possible, and everything permissible, in a dream, and the life I lead in that room is a dream.

We spent a whole long day making love. In some ways it was the most natural thing to do -- what is there, when you can't communicate in words? There are gestures, there is touch; looks and smiles, caresses, the language of the body.

He wanted me to go out the window and away with him. It was obvious my door did not exist for him, which is just as well, since I could hardly have taken him back here, into my real life! I know he won't be there when I return, which is

 

Eleven

 

I must not go back.

 

So much for my smug, self-serving belief that I could do what I wanted in my own private world without affecting anyone else.

David came upstairs last night, looking a little green around the gills, wanting to talk. Instant guilt attack. If I hadn't still been writing it, I would have imagined he'd just read in my journal about Jack.

So I went down with him and we talked. It was a talk about feelings, a vague but impassioned something's wrong/what's wrong discussion of a kind unusual in our relationship. We had one just before we got married, I remember, and a couple when I was pregnant and paranoid, but in general we've both had a practical, if uninquiring, attitude toward our relationship, as to life in general; a belief in not stirring up trouble. We don't argue very often but when we do it tends to be about something specific, not the "you don't talk to me/I feel we're drifting apart/what's happening to us" blather of last night.

And the pig of it was, I couldn't shrug off his vague fears any more than I could make them concrete with the truth.

"There isn't someone else, is there, Chris? You're not seeing someone else?"

His name is Jack, and he's not real -- I made him up. "When would I have time? No, there isn't anyone else."

"I didn't think so. But if it isn't someone, it's something."

I know he found it painfully difficult to express. He's always been supportive of my writing -- for all the good it's ever done him! -- and he doesn't want to start being obstructive now, even though he's started to feel that it is taking me away from him, away from him and the girls.

It's true; I had to admit his fears were well-founded. Between my job, his job, looking after the children, doing basic housework and other chores, my writing, and -- this is the part he still doesn't know about -- my secret fantasy world, there's nothing left over for him, for us -- nothing special, that is. We eat together, sleep together, go places as a family, and that's about it. I don't spend any more time away from him, physically, than I have in the past three years, but mentally I do. And mentally makes the difference. There aren't enough hours in the day and never have been, but back when we first got together (both of us with full-time jobs and ongoing, if unsatisfactory, relationships with significant others) we used to focus a lot of energy on making the few hours we did have together something special.

"There aren't enough hours in the day," David said last night. "I know that. We have to work, and Rachel and Phoebe need our time and attention, and there're always other things to be done, but we need time together, just the two of us. I'm not asking you to give up writing -- I'd never do that, I know how much it means to you -- but something has to change. Even when we are together I don't feel you're really with me. Your mind's somewhere else. It bothers me."

I hadn't meant for it to happen and I didn't want it to be true, but it was. I agreed that I would make an effort to change -- we both would. We'd get a sitter and go out together occasionally and, just as important, we would spend more evenings together the way we used to -- sharing a bottle of wine over dinner, listening to music, talking, making love.

I won't have to give up writing, but I'll lose my precious "extra hour."

I was a fool to think I could do whatever I wanted without consequences. Everything makes a difference; everything has its cost.

I must not go there again.

I feel as sad and despairing as if this meant giving up writing. Maybe it does. By luck or magic I found a way to make more time in which to write, and now I'll have to do without.

But if I carry on like this I'll destroy my marriage. If it was only my happiness at stake maybe I'd risk it, maybe I'd choose the unknown over present comfort. But there are the children to think of as well, their lives, their happiness. I'm not that selfish. I know, pace Charlotte Perkins Gilman and all the other feminist writer-heroines, that writing -- especially my writing -- is simply not that important. People's lives are what's important, my family's happiness, not my own selfish gratification.

Besides -- I have to keep reminding myself -- it's not writing I'm giving up, just the sneaky, supernatural way I've been doing it lately. I will finish my novel.

Only not tonight. My hour is up, and I haven't done a thing. I'll have to give up this journal, too. Cut back to the basics. We'll survive.

 

Twelve

 

Twice I heard the clock strike; twice I ignored it, as I'd promised myself I would, but the third time --

 

It was nearly four months since I'd heard it, and I'd thought I never would again. This might be my last chance.

Oh, David, I never meant to betray you, or leave you, and I still don't. Maybe, if you read these pages, and can bring yourself to believe them, you'll understand why, if not how, I have gone.

I got up when I heard the clock strike. It was a half-conscious impulse, a powerful desire, unreasoning, that drew me. I hesitated when I saw the door at the turn of the stair, hesitated and thought of you. What would happen if I called you? Would the door vanish, or would you be able to enter with me?

I wish now that I'd tried, had given you the chance to see, but I didn't, and it's too late for second-guessing. I did what I did.

As soon as I stepped into the room I was seized, attacked, by overwhelming pain. I staggered forward, doubled over, struggling to cope with whatever was happening to me, and then the pain passed. I could breathe again, but I was weak and covered in sweat. And there was something familiar about the pain. I looked down and realized I was pregnant.

The pain wracked me again. This time, the shock and terror were nearly as overwhelming as the physical labor. I was having a baby!

The contractions were very close together and horribly intense, with scarcely any space to rest in between. I didn't really have the time or energy to worry about the fact that I was all alone and wonder how I'd cope -- I just had to get on with it. It never occurred to me to try to leave the room; what I was going through so consumed everything that there was no chance of thinking coherently. All my energies were devoted to getting through the next surge of pain, and then the next, and then in pushing the baby out. I managed to get my clothes off, and located some towels. I suppose it was all over rather quickly, although it didn't feel like it.

Then everything happened much too fast, and there was a baby slipping between my legs as I struggled to grasp and lift the slippery, bloody little creature. We rested for a while on the floor and she -- yes, she; another girl, of course -- looked up at me with her dark blue eyes and gave a peeping, mewling cry more like a newborn kitten than a human child. She was so much smaller than Rachel had been, tinier even than Phoebe, but she was just as solid, just as real, and the protective, wondering love I felt welling up in me for her was just as strong as it had been for my other two.

Oh, my baby!

Those splotches are tears. Well, I'm postpartum, I can't be expected to -- I can't help it, I --

But looking at me now, looking at my breasts, you'd never guess that a few minutes ago they were swollen at least two bra-sizes bigger. You'd never know from looking at me that I just gave birth. There's no trace left of the sweat and blood or any of the other fluids -- I don't even smell of anything much, as if I'd done nothing more strenuous today than walk up and down the stairs.

We lay there together a while, first on the floor where she'd been born, then up onto the chaise longue. All of a sudden I felt hungry, but what I wanted even more than something to eat was to have a good wash, and to wash her, and get some fresh clothes for both of us. Also, I was worrying about the umbilicus, having nothing to cut it. I had a vague notion that something awful could happen if you left it too long, although I couldn't for the life of me remember what. We couldn't just stay there in post-natal coma like that forever. I guess I knew it was a risk: nothing and no one from that world could go out my door with me; I'd never even been able to take out a notebook. But I'd taken ideas, stories, out, and she was as much a part of me as my stories -- she was even still attached to me.

I thought it might work, but it didn't. As soon as I stepped through the door she was gone, and I was alone and intact in this world again.

That's why I screamed, and lied so unintelligibly when you called up to me.

Then I ran straight back here, to my desk, to my notebook, to try to write my way back inside to my baby.

She needs me; she can't live without me, and I can't let her die.

Newborns can go several days without food (I keep reminding myself of these comforting facts), but how quickly will several days pass in there while I'm out here? I won't leave my desk, I won't sleep, until I hear the clock strike to let me back in.

You do understand why, don't you, David?

It's not that I value her life more than your happiness, or Phoebe's, or Rachel's, only -- only it is her life we're talking about, her actual life weighed against mere comfort. She needs me in the way the rest of you don't. The three of you can survive without me -- she can't.

But maybe you can both have me; maybe we can all survive. Time works so differently there. It might be, as I hope, that I can go back there, climb out the window and scale the rough stone wall of my tower with my baby strapped to my front, and carry her across that beautiful, wild emptiness to another house or a village or a castle -- Jack came from somewhere, so there must be other people, and habitations, there -- find her a foster home and wet-nurse, and then come back. I just want to save her life; I don't have to raise her myself.

If I can do all that in the same sort of no-time in which she was conceived, then I'll be back here before bedtime. You'll never have to read this, never know what I've been through, and I'll pretend -- and eventually convince myself -- that it all took place inside my head.

But if you don't find me when you come upstairs looking for me, and you read this, I want you to know the truth.

The clock!

Remember, I love you all.

Where the Stones Grow

 

H
e saw the stone move. Smoothly as a door falling shut, it swung slightly around and settled back into the place where it had stood for centuries.

 

They'll kill anyone who sees them.

Terrified, Paul backed away, ready to run, when he saw something that didn't belong in that high, empty field which smelled of the sea. Lying half-in, half-out of the triangle formed by the three tall stones called the Sisters was Paul's father, his face bloody and his body permanently stilled.

 

 

When he was twenty-six, his company offered to send Paul Staunton to England for a special training course, the offer a token of better things to come. In a panic, Paul refused, much too vehemently. His only reason -- that his father had died violently in England eighteen years before -- was not considered a reason at all. Before the end of the year, Paul had been transferred away from the main office in Houston to the branch in San Antonio.

 

He knew he should be unhappy, but, oddly enough, the move suited him. He was still being paid well for work he enjoyed, and he found the climate and pace of life in San Antonio more congenial than that of Houston. He decided to buy a house and settle down.

The house he chose was about forty years old, built of native white limestone and set in a bucolic neighborhood on the west side of the city. It was a simple rectangle, long and low to the ground, like a railway car. The roof was flat and the gutters and window frames peeled green paint. The four rooms offered him no more space than the average mobile home, but it was enough for him.

A yard of impressive size surrounded the house with thick green grass shaded by mimosas, pecans, a magnolia, and two massive, spreading fig trees. A chain-link fence defined the boundaries of the property, although one section at the back was torn and sagging and would have to be repaired. There were neighboring houses on either side, also set in large yards, but beyond the fence at the back of the house was a wild mass of bushes and high weeds, ten or more undeveloped acres separating his house from a state highway.