I’m not. I’m only afraid of one thing. That you don’t love me.”
“Oh, but I do,” she said. “And I always did. Always.”
His shoulders sagged for a minute, just a minute, and then he turned away from her. He was so hurt, but he would never again have the vulnerable look he had had before. He would never again have the pure gentleness.
There was a chair by the window to the porch, and he appeared to find it blindly and choose it indifferently as he sat down, still turned away from her.
And I’m about to hurt you again, she thought.
She wanted to go to him, to talk to him, to hold him again. To talk the way they had that first day after she’d come to herself, and buried her only daughter—the only daughter she’d ever have—beneath the oak. She wanted to open now with the kindling excitement she’d felt then, the utter love, thoughtless and rushed and without the slightest caution.
But it seemed as beyond reach now as words had been so soon after that.
She lifted her hands and ran them back hard through her hair. Then, rather mechanically, she reached for the taps in the shower.
With the water flooding down, she could think, perhaps clearly, for the first time. The noise was sweet and the hot water was luscious.
There seemed an impossible wealth of dresses to choose from. Absolutely confounding that there were so many in the closets. Finally she found a pair of soft wool pants, old pants she’d had eons ago in San Francisco, and she put those on, and on top a loose and deceptively heavy cotton sweater.
It was plenty cool enough now for the spring night. And it felt good to be dressed again in the clothes she herself had loved. Who, she wondered, could have bought all these pretty dresses?
She brushed her hair, and closed her eyes, and thought, “You are going to lose him, and with reason, if you do not talk to him now, if you do not once again explain, if you do not struggle against your own instinctive fear of words, and go to him.”
She laid down the brush. He was standing in the doorway. She’d never shut the door all this while, and when she looked up at him, the peaceful, accepting look on his face was a great relief to her. She almost cried. But that would have been ludicrously selfish.
“I love you, Michael,” she said. “I could shout it from the rooftops. I never stopped loving you. It was vanity and it was hubris; and the silence, the silence was the failure of a soul to heal and strengthen itself, or maybe just the necessary retreat that the soul sought as if it were some selfish organism.”
He listened intently, frowning slightly, face calm but never innocent the way it had been before. The eyes were huge and glistening but hard and shadowed with sadness.
“I don’t know how I could have hurt you just now, Rowan,” he said. “I really don’t. I just don’t.”
“Michael, no …”
“No, let me say it. I know what happened to you. I know what he did. I know. And I don’t know how I could have blamed you, been angry with you, hurt you like that, I don’t know!”
“Michael, I know,” she said. “Don’t. Don’t, or you’ll make me cry.”
“Rowan, I destroyed him,” he said. He had dropped his voice to a whisper the way so many people did when they spoke of death. “I destroyed him and it’s not enough! I … I …”
“No, don’t speak anymore. Forgive me, Michael, forgive me for your sake and my sake. Forgive me.” She leant forward and kissed him, took the breath out of him deliberately so it would remain wordless. And this time when he folded her into his arms, it was full of the old kindness, the old cherishing warmth, the great protective sweetness that made her feel safe, safe as it had when they’d first made love.
There must have been something more lovely than falling in his arms like this, more lovely than merely being close to him. But she couldn’t think what it was now—certainly not the violence of passion. That was there, obviously, to be enjoyed again and again, but this was the thing she’d never known with any other being on earth, this!
Finally he drew back, taking her two hands together and kissing them, and then flashing her that bright boyish smile again, precisely the one she thought