Her Dear and Loving Husband (13 page)

CHAPTER 10

The next night James arrived at the library with a smile. Every night he was arriving with a smile. Sarah wanted to think she was the reason for his happiness, though she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t said so in words. But James said a lot without words. He could be so quiet at times, content merely being there. Sometimes, when Sarah was working, checking the databases or helping students or professors, James would sit nearby and watch her. He didn’t pretend to have a task at the computer. He didn’t pretend to correct papers. He watched her and he didn’t seem to mind if everyone saw him. 

A week later at closing time he found her near the librarians’s desk and presented her with a book, a well-kept older edition from days when bookbinding was an art. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the indentation of the title on the cover:
Several Poems Compiled With Great Variety of Wit and Learning
by Anne Bradstreet. Sarah was touched by his thoughtfulness. As much as she loved to read, no one had ever given her poetry before.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve never read Anne Bradstreet. It seems appropriate, reading her in Salem. She lived here during colonial times, didn’t she?”

“For a while, and not very well, I’m afraid. The Bradstreets lived with Anne’s family, the Dudleys, in a sparse house with barely the basic necessities. In winter they all lived in one room, the only one with heat. She was the first woman published in colonial America, and it’s rumored that King George III had a volume of her poetry in his collection.” James looked at the book, then at Sarah. He stared at her so hard it was as if she could feel his hands on her shoulders pushing her somewhere, toward something. But where?

He opened the book to the page he tabbed with a sticky note. “She wrote one of my favorite poems—‘To My Dear and Loving Husband.’ He closed the book and pressed it into her hands.

“I’m not familiar with it,” Sarah said. James cleared his throat before he began:    

        “
If ever two were one, then surely we.

        If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

        If ever wife was happy in a man,

        Compare with me, ye women, if you can…”

Sarah clutched the thin volume close to her chest, staring at the librarians’s desk, hard, as if the formica top were speaking to her, whispering the answer to a long-held question. She heard words, phrases, echoing from somewhere. She wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t like being haunted or chased or dragged away by chains. It was as if she suddenly remembered something she had forgotten. She said:

        “…
Thy love is such I can no way repay;

        The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

        Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

        That when we live no more, we may live ever.”

James bowed his head, looking first at the floor under his feet, then at Sarah. She had never seen such a strong-looking man seem so vulnerable, as if he held his heart out to her in his hands, as if his heart was hers for the taking.

“I thought you weren’t familiar with the poem, Sarah.” His voice was gentle, barely audible above the whispers in the library. 

Sarah shook her head. “I’m not.”

Neither Sarah nor James said much as he drove her home. They were parked in front of her house before she realized where they were. As the car clicked off, he turned to her with such need in his eyes that Sarah felt her heart stutter. She and James had shared something special in the library when she recited the lines from the seventeenth century love poem from a brilliant colonial woman to her dear and loving husband. How had she recited a poem she was sure she never read? Had she read it in college, in an early American literature class, and she had forgotten about it? Even if she did, college was so long ago, and she certainly hadn’t read it since. But somehow she knew the poem. It had been stored away in her somewhere. When she looked into James’s night-dark eyes she could feel that invisible, thread-thin line again, catching them up, pulling them close, not letting them go.

She had been so sure he felt the same way when their eyes locked. He smiled, as if he found something he had forgotten he needed, and the smile hadn’t left his face. Until now. Instead of kissing her, grabbing her, carrying her to her bed as she wanted him to, all he said was, “Let me walk you to your door. I don’t want anyone to steal you.”

In front of her house, he kissed the top of her head and turned to leave. But she did not want a kiss on top of her head. She wanted more. She followed him out to the street, and when they reached his car she walked close and pointed her face up the way she pointed her face up to the man in her dreams before he kissed her. She wanted James to kiss her. She wanted him to stay all night and make love to her.

She was ready to finally feel his lips against hers, but when all she felt was air she opened her eyes and realized, with a painful punch, that he didn’t feel the same way. She saw a stormy blankness in his nighttime eyes that told her he wasn’t interested. He stood there, frozen, a look of real pain in his eyes as he searched her face, looking for his wife perhaps, or looking as if he had been mortally wounded by her desire for him. Without saying a word, without looking back, he jumped into his car and drove away. 

Sarah walked into the house and stared, at the wall, at the blank screen of the television, at her cat, at the cream-colored wall. When the phone rang she was only half surprised to hear Olivia’s motherly voice at the other end of the line.

“How have you been, dear? I haven’t seen you since Halloween, and I hardly had a chance to say hello, I was so busy with the customers.”

Sarah tried to be brave. She tried to keep the tears away. What did she have to cry about? James had never made any promises, never even kissed her on the lips. Just the idea of kissing her sent him speeding away, his car brakes screeching on the pavement. Yet no matter how hard she squeezed her eyes, no matter how fast she waved her open hand in front of her nose, she couldn’t stop the internal thunderstorm from pouring like rain down her face. 

“What is it, dear? You can tell me.”

“It’s James.”

“James? Jennifer said you two left the library looking very happy.” 

Sarah wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I was hoping we had a chance, but it isn’t going to happen. I tried to kiss him, but he ran like he couldn’t get away fast enough. I don’t think he’s over his wife, and if he’s not over her then he’s not ready to move on. There’s no room in his heart for me.”

After an unsure pause, Sarah decided to share some interesting information she received via e-mail that morning. At the time, she sent a terse reply to her friend and deleted the message. Now, after James had run away, leaving her lonely and confused, she gave more importance to the news.

“I heard from my friend in L.A. She said my ex-husband misses me.”

Olivia sighed. “What do you mean?”

“She said he’s been asking about me. She said he’s been upset since she told him I was becoming friendly with a good-looking English professor. He told her he misses me and he’s thinking about coming to Salem to visit. He told her he wants me back.” 

“You can’t go back to him, Sarah. You remember how unhappy you were.”

“I know I can’t go back to him.”  

Sarah’s voice cracked as she said it, and she wondered if it were true. Could she go back to her ex-husband? Before that night she would have said there was no way she would leave Salem and James for a husband she wasn’t happy with. But now, in the aftermath of a bewildered James, the thought of returning to Los Angeles wasn’t as ridiculous as it might have seemed even an hour before. Sleeping had become all but impossible in Salem. Her dreams were more frequent and frightening since she moved there. In Los Angeles they had been a nuisance. In Salem they were relentless. Her hands continued shaking for hours after she was jolted awake by tremors, her anxieties fragile until morning though she turned on the lights and rationalized the fear away by telling herself that nothing she saw was real. She was awake now and everything was fine. They weren’t simply haphazard, fluid scenes, these dreams, detached from reality. They were tangible, linear. Clear. Somewhere, deep in the hidden maze of her soul, she knew there was some misunderstood truth there, and she wanted to make sense of what was happening to her. The more she read about the Salem Witch Trials, the more she recognized the imagery in her dreams. It made no sense that she should dream about a woman from that time. Was she dreaming about her ancestor? She didn’t know.

She was tempted to finally confide in Olivia. Maybe she had nothing to lose by bringing her clothbound notebook to the Witches Lair and letting her Wiccan friends take a look. Maybe between them they could make the disjointed pieces fit. And didn’t Olivia say her friend was good at dream interpretation? 

Olivia sighed. “Did you tell your ex-husband you won’t be getting back together?” she asked.

“I haven’t spoken to him since I left Los Angeles. I e-mailed my friend to tell her I couldn’t go back to him. She said she knew, but she wanted me to know I had options.” 

“Things don’t always happen when we want them to, but everything will come together when it’s time. Trust that, Sarah.”

“Thank you, Olivia.”

“Anytime, dear. Call me anytime.”

Sarah hung up the phone more confused than she was before.  

CHAPTER 11

It was a slow night in the library since classes had stopped for winter break. There were a few lingering students, some who needed an extension on their final papers or semester exams, others lounging in the chairs by the windows reading, an instructor or two researching information. Sarah had the night off. Jennifer was seated behind the librarians’s desk helping students. James was working at a computer terminal, keeping most of his attention on his work while Kenneth Hempel whispered to Jeremy, James’s student, a few tables away. James had some warning that Hempel would be there since he had seen the reporter get out of his green Buick in the parking lot off Loring Avenue. He even made note of the license plate number in case he needed to recognize the car again. That night in the library Hempel wasn’t hiding the fact that he was asking about James—he was doing it in front of James’s face. As Jeremy answered his questions, Hempel nodded and jotted notes onto his yellow legal pad. But James was too far for human ears to hear, and they were whispering close to each other, so he had to pretend he didn’t know what they were saying. It was better if he ignored them anyway. Besides, the young man sounded more annoyed by Hempel than intrigued.

“That’s right,” Jeremy said. “I only see Professor Wentworth at night, but that’s because he teaches night classes. Why would anyone be here when they didn’t have to be? I hate that I have to be here now. Asshole philosophy professor failed me and I have to retake the final exam.”

James smiled to himself as he realized that Hempel couldn’t have picked a less helpful source than Jeremy. Hempel spoke to three other students that night, as well as a librarian James didn’t know by name. She was the mathematics liaison, he thought. She couldn’t have much information to share, so he wasn’t concerned. Without looking, he sensed Hempel glancing at him, but he wouldn’t be deterred from his work. He left the computer terminal and wandered into the stacks, searching for the book he needed. He wouldn’t be run out of his own library by that daft little man. When he heard Hempel’s heavy, plodding footsteps, he braced himself.

“Good evening, Professor Wentworth.”

James slid the book back into its slot on the shelf. He didn’t turn around. 

“Hello, Mr. Hempel.”

He pulled another book, checked the index, turned to the page he needed. When Hempel didn’t leave, James continued to work, hoping the reporter would get the hint. Or perhaps Jennifer would snap her fingers and bring the stacks crashing down around them.

“Reading about Keats, I see. Have I told you I was an English major in college?”

“Not journalism?”

“Surprisingly, no. When I was a young man I had aspirations to write books. I wanted to be like Bram Stoker and bring the world’s attention to the vengeful, violent monsters lurking unseen in the dark. Stoker did that so well, didn’t he?”

“
Dracula
is a novel, Mr. Hempel.”

“Perhaps. But all fiction has some element of truth.”

James looked around, saw them alone in the stacks, it was close to closing, and he wondered if anyone would notice if he ripped into the reporter’s throat, sucked the man dry, and discarded his corpse in the bushes beside the parking lot. Perhaps the garbage bins would be better. The bay. Yes, the bay would be perfect. Hempel’s body would wash away into the Atlantic Ocean and no one would be the wiser. Would anyone notice if Kenneth Hempel was missing? He was such an innocuous little fellow. But then James remembered Hempel mentioning a family in the Witches Lair on Halloween, and he heard Jennifer speaking to a student by the librarians’s desk, so they weren’t alone. He knew he had to drop his idea, though he liked it very much.

“I’m actually not here to visit with you tonight, Professor, as much as I enjoy your company. I’m looking for one of the librarians. Dark hair, lovely smile. What is her name?”

James cleared his throat. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” He couldn’t control the gruffness in his voice.

“The students seem to think you know her very well. Miss Alexander, is it?”

“If you know her name, then why are you asking me?”

Hempel smiled at James’s curt response, as if that were exactly the reaction he wanted. “I just wanted to ask her a few questions. I didn’t see her around tonight, and I thought you might know where she was. When you’re a professional journalist you have to cover all angles of your story. I’m sure you understand.”