Her Dear and Loving Husband (22 page)

Her mind was muddled, and she was too angry to say what she was really thinking. She was afraid they were right. She was afraid that what they said made sense because she saw the connections between her dreams and James’s life, and yet the thought of it, of being possessed by a specter, of something separate from her living inside her body, mind, and soul terrified her. She wondered if she even had a soul, and if she did, whose was it, Elizabeth’s or hers? At that moment she was too afraid to wonder. Her terror bubbled its way up from agitation in her heart to fear in her throat. She had learned about specters she didn’t want to know could exist, and worse, that she might be one herself. She was out of her mind with an emotion somewhere between fury and panic, so she lashed out at them, trying to make her fear disappear by making them disappear. If she didn’t have to look at them then none of this would be real. 

Running home she watched the shadows, expecting to see the hideously disfigured Nosferatu jumping out at her, catching her with his quick arms and claw-like fingernails, strangling her with his wicked bite, drinking her blood until she became the corpse and he was healthy and fed. In the lights of the windows she saw green-faced witches casting evil spells, standing over bubbling cauldrons, watching her in haunted crystal balls the way the wicked witch watched Dorothy’s every move. When she escaped into her house she turned on the lights, looked inside the closets, and checked the door three times to be sure it was locked. Only then could she exhale, though she was still afraid there was something she couldn’t see lurking somewhere she didn’t look. She imagined she saw the binding chains slink like snakes toward her ankles.   

She woke up screaming that night, though screaming in the night had become normal for her. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to sleep through the darkness, to feel the stress of the day melt away, to drift and dream and awaken refreshed. She was tired of being tired. She had tried sleeping pills, more than one pill some nights, more than two pills other nights, but nothing helped. 

She didn’t try to go back to sleep, so she went into the living room and turned on the television. She knew from other sleepless nights that there was nothing worth watching after midnight, nothing but infomercials for exercise routines and kitchen gadgets. She flipped to the movie channel and began watching a familiar scene though she had never seen the movie before. The setting was familiar—wooden houses, horse-drawn carts, farmers, reverends, and magistrates wearing Pilgrim-looking clothes. Then she realized she was watching the film based on Arthur Miller’s play, set in Salem during the time of the witch trials. As she watched she kept her hand on her chest to remind herself to breathe. She was keeping the air trapped in her lungs. There was seventeenth century Salem in its gritty Hollywood recreation, the manic accusations from the girls, the possessed, horrible faces, the disgust of those who thought it was all nonsense, the terror of the accused, the arrogance of the magistrates. When she watched the arrested women as they were wheeled away to a dungeon and death unless they confessed to being witches, she cried.

When the movie was over she looked out the window at the moon, the stars, the void beyond. She wondered what else was out there she couldn’t see or understand, and she realized she needed to face her fear. She had to learn the truth about her dreams and understand why they were recklessly haunting her. 

She remembered the look on James’s face the first time he saw her. “Lizzie. My Lizzie,” he said, with such sweet gratitude, “you’ve come home to me.” 

She considered the possibilities. Maybe she was Elizabeth come home to him. Why did she choose to move to Salem? She could have gone anywhere. Why did she think James’s house looked familiar? She had never seen it before. Why did James’s silhouette, though ghost-skinned and dark-eyed, look familiar, like it was the man in her dreams? Learning that James’s wife died in jail during the witch trials was the final stroke of the panoramic painting. There was only one answer that made it all make sense. But what would that answer mean for her? Would Sarah Alexander cease to exist if Elizabeth Wentworth appeared from the past? 

She sat on the couch, looked out the window, and watched the stars dance and twirl in the distance. She meditated on the brightest star, mindful of her breath, struggling to still her mind. Soon the answer came. She had to see James. Right now. She needed to apologize, beg his forgiveness, hope that he loved her, not because she might be the reincarnation of his wife but because she was Sarah, plain Sarah. Everything needed to be all right between them. Whether she was Sarah or Elizabeth or someone else she didn’t know, whether he was a supernatural phenomenon or a gentle demon, he would always be her James. She knew that so clearly now she didn’t know how she couldn’t see it before.  

She looked at the clock and saw it was 3:20 a.m. Outside her window weighted darkness covered everything everywhere, not even a faint light peeking from beneath a cloud to say dawn would come soon. If she left then, she decided, she would still have some time with him before sunrise. She pulled her black hoodie sweater over her t-shirt and pajama bottoms, slid her feet into her slippers, grabbed her keys, and left at a sprint. She ran down one road, then another, and one more, until she stood across the street from the wooden gabled house. It was quiet in the neighborhood, all the houses dark, all but one, the one that creaked old-time tales with two gables pointing at the napping night sky. Standing across the street, she saw the soft glow of candlelight flickering through the diamond-paned window, and she thought she heard the house whispering her name. But was it Elizabeth or Sarah she heard? She wasn’t sure. She watched her steps as she walked across the street. It might not be a good idea to sneak up on someone like James no matter how friendly he seemed, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave.

Before she crossed the yard to knock on his door he was there, James, standing in the open doorway. She was startled when he appeared so suddenly. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I heard your footsteps and hoped you might want to come in.” He opened the door wider and stepped aside so she could walk past. He smiled when he saw her pajamas. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

Standing by the door, she hesitated when she realized she had never been inside his house before, at least not as Sarah, if she had ever really been anyone else. She walked in and stopped. She saw the high, gabled ceiling and the wood beams. She saw a large open great room lit only by candlelight, the kitchen to the left, and another smaller room to the right. The kitchen made her smile. It was old-fashioned, right out of the seventeenth century, with pots and pans and blue and white dishes lined up in shelves along the wall while a cauldron hung in the hearth. But there was also a modern sink, refrigerator, and a microwave oven. The eclectic coupling of the past and the present fit well in this house. Everything in the great room, the walls and most of the furniture, was simple and wood. The only modern furniture was a flat-screen television, a long reading chair, and a laptop computer on the seventeenth-century desk. Then she noticed the English professor’s book collection. There is nothing more lovely to a librarian than a roomful of books, and she marveled at the sight. She recited one of her favorite quotes: “I who always imagined Paradise to be a sort of library.” 

“Jorge Luis Borges,” James said.

She nodded, pleased that he knew the quote. As she stood there she wondered if the inside of the house was as familiar as the outside. She wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the addition of the modern amenities, or maybe the idea that she was the reincarnation of James’s wife was nonsense. James stood beside her, his arm brushing against hers.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It's more modern than I thought it would be.”  

He flipped the electric lights on and off overhead. “I had to keep up with the times. I have to admit, though, I still prefer candlelight. Electricity can be so jarring.” He reached into a drawer in the wood desk and pulled out a feather quill with a sharp tip. “Believe it or not, sometimes I still use this. It gives me time to think while I’m writing.”

Sarah walked to the bookshelves. “If anything ever happens to the library at Salem State College you can send your students here to do their research,” she said.  

“I’ve wanted to organize the books into a real library, you know, with categories and bar codes. I was going to ask Jennifer, but maybe you could help. If you want to.”

“I’d love to work with these books. How did you collect so many of them?”

“I’ve had a lot of time to read.” He laughed at the thought. “Some people collect postcards from their travels. I collect books. Look at this.” He pulled a Dickens novel from a shelf and handed it to her, watching her face while she flipped the pages and saw the date. 

“Is this a first edition
Oliver Twist
?” she asked. 

“It is. And here.”  

He gestured to a whole shelf of first edition Dickens. Sarah laughed as she pulled them off the shelf and turned the pages. This was even better than any librarian’s dream of Paradise.   

“How did you get so many first editions? These must be worth a fortune.”

“I was there.”

“You were where?”

“In London, on and off during the nineteenth century.” He paused to let her grasp what he was saying. “Dickens’s novels were serialized in magazines, and I got them hot off the press as soon as they were published into book form. But that one,” he gestured back to
Oliver Twist
, “is special because Dickens himself gave it to me.”

“You knew Charles Dickens?”

“I met him several times. I was a tutor at Cambridge then.” 

“What was he like?”

James considered her question. “He was still a young man, a dandy, already a successful author before
Oliver Twist
was published. He was very changeable, Dickens. One minute he’d be laughing and dancing a sailor’s jig, and the next he’d be so dark and gloomy you hardly knew what to say to bring him out of his mood. Manic-depressive I guess we’d call it today. Perhaps he was a bit obsessive-compulsive as well.”

“And you knew Jane Austen? It sounded like you knew her.”

“Yes, I did. But that was before Dickens.”

“Did you know Shakespeare?”

James laughed. “Believe it or not, there were things that happened before my time. I was born forty-six years after Shakespeare died.” He took her hands and held them to his chest. “That’s enough for now. I’m glad you’re here, and I don’t want to scare you away again with too much information. It’s a lot for you to adjust to.”

“I’m beginning to understand.”

He nodded as he pulled another book for her to see. “Look at this one.”

She flipped the book over in her hands and saw the title,
Persuasion
by Jane Austen. Without opening the book she guessed, “It’s a first edition, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He pressed it into her hands. “I want you to have it. Please accept it as a gift from me.”

She loved the gesture, but she tried to hand him back the book. “James, you know how much I love that story, but I can’t. It’s a first edition Jane Austen. It’s too much.”

“It is not too much, it is too little, and as you can see I have many books here. I want you to have it. I like the thought that every time you look at it you think about second chances. They can happen.”

Sarah clutched the book close to her heart. “I love it. And I will think about second chances whenever I look at it, Professor Wentworth. I promise.” 

He gestured to the sofa in the middle of the room. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked.

They sat close to each other, their shoulders touching, their eyes darting to and from each other. Then they spoke the same words at the same time: “There’s something I want to tell you…”

Sarah held up her hand. “Please, James, let me go first. I’ve been thinking about what I want to say to you.”

“Very well then.”        

She closed her eyes as she gathered her thoughts. She had rehearsed it so carefully on her way over.  

“I’m sorry for the way I acted earlier tonight.” James started to speak, but she pressed her fingers to his lips. “Let me finish. Before I moved here I was a divorced librarian who tried to get through her day like everyone else. I thought I understood about what was real and possible, what was fiction or nonfiction, but since I moved here all that has changed. I don’t know what’s true anymore, what’s legend, what’s folktale, what’s pretend. And the thought that I might be touched by the supernatural myself is more frightening than any nightmare I’ve ever had. But what if I am Elizabeth? It would explain a lot.”  

James took her hands in his, pulling her close to him, trying to soothe her fears away. She gripped his fingers and looked into his night-dark eyes.

“Yet as frightened as I am about knowing the truth, I know I have to. I’m afraid of falling asleep because of the terrible scenes I might see when I dream. So I’ve decided to go through with the past-life regression. I have to know.”

Sarah thought James looked more worried than she felt. She began rubbing his hand, stroking his fingers. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. Then she pulled herself away and walked to the diamond-paned window. When she looked outside she realized they didn’t have much more time. The sun would rise soon. The fact that James was different became more real the closer it came to dawn.  

“Does it matter to you? If I’m Elizabeth? You want me to be Elizabeth, don’t you? I don’t know which truth you want to hear. That worries me more than anything.”

“When we first met all I could think about was how spending time with you was like being with Lizzie again. But now that I know you, it doesn’t matter anymore. After all these years of wishing for Lizzie, I’m happy I found Sarah. If Lizzie is in you somewhere, then I’m glad she’s here. But more than anything, I’m glad you’re Sarah.”

Sarah was surprised she didn’t feel more joy at his words. It was exactly what she wanted to hear. But while almost all of her believed him, she felt that one fraction of self-doubt that still thought he only cared for her because she reminded him of his wife.