Standalone

The Salt Wife

Chapter One

Now

I wake to salt air and the sound of gulls fighting over something dead on the rocks below the window.

For a while that is all there is. The cries, ragged and greedy. The wet suck and drag of a sea I can hear but not yet see. A cold that has got into the sheets and into me, into the joints of me, the particular cold of a room where the fire went out in the night and nobody came to light it. My mouth tastes of copper and old wine. My tongue is thick. When I try to swallow, my throat clicks, dry as a shut door.

I don’t open my eyes.

I don’t decide not to. Something older than deciding keeps them shut a beat longer than a waking person’s would, and in that beat it takes an inventory I don’t remember requesting. Flat on my back. Weight of blankets, heavy, damp at the edge. Left arm across my stomach. Right arm out, palm up, the ache of a person who has not moved in a long time. A chair, to the left, close: the small give of wood taking someone’s weight, a breath that isn’t mine, held and let go, held and let go, the breathing of a person trying not to be heard.

Someone is in the room, sitting very still, watching me sleep.

The knowing arrives before the fear does, and the fear, when it comes, is oddly late and oddly quiet, a cold weight settling rather than a jolt. I keep my breathing long and even. I keep my face soft. I am, I understand without understanding why, already very good at being asleep while I am awake.

Then I open my eyes, because a person waking up opens her eyes, and to lie here counting a stranger’s breaths is a thing a person waking up would not know how to do.

A man is in the chair by the bed.

He is tall, folded into the seat with the loose economy of someone who has sat there a long time and forgotten to be uncomfortable. Dark hair going silver at the temples, a day of gray stubble, the fine lines of a face that is handsome in the particular way that makes people hand it their trust before it has asked for any. He looks like he hasn’t slept. There are violet smears under his eyes and a stillness to him that isn’t calm, a held stillness, the stillness of a man at a bedside in a hospital, waiting to be told a thing he can’t afford to hear.

When our eyes meet, something moves through him fast, too fast to name, and then he does the thing his face was built for and smiles.

“Good morning, love.” His voice is low, careful, roughened. “How do you feel?”

I look at him.

I want to say I feel nothing, because that is nearest the truth: there is a wide gray nothing where the answer should be, a swept room, a beach at low tide. But that isn’t it either, because a name is rising in me, coming up out of the nothing as a bubble comes up through deep water, slow and then all at once, and it breaks the surface of me without any effort at all, as breathing does.

“Julian,” I say.

His smile holds. But underneath it, quick, gone almost before it’s there, a thing I would have missed if I hadn’t been watching his eyes and not his mouth, something else crosses him. Not the relief I’d expect from a man whose sleeping wife has just proved she knows him. Not the warm flood of thank God, she’s back. Something narrower. Something braced.

Something, if I had to put a word to it, almost afraid.

Then it’s gone, folded away so smoothly that I could believe I invented it, and he leans forward and takes my hand in both of his. His palms are dry and warm. Mine is cold and damp, and I feel him feel that, feel the small adjustment he makes, gentling his grip as if my hand were something that might come apart.

“You remember my name.” He says it softly, like a prayer answered. “That’s good. That’s... God. That’s good.”

I pull my hand back. Not fast. Slow, and casual, tucking it under the blanket as though I’m only cold, and I watch him watch me do it, and I watch him decide not to mind.

“Where am I?” I say.

He sits back. Something in him settles into a shape he’s held before; I can see him find the shape, as you find a well-worn groove. “Thornmere,” he says. “Our home. The coast, north of Astoria. You’ve been unwell again, Mara. Three days, this time. The doctor came. He thinks it was another episode.”

Episode.

The word lands somewhere below my ribs and sits there, heavy, familiar in a way that has nothing to do with liking it. I don’t ask what kind of episode. Some animal caution I can’t account for tells me that the questions I most want to ask are the exact ones I must not, that to ask them is to show him something I haven’t decided yet whether to show. So I don’t ask. I file the word instead, set it down somewhere cold and out of the way, and I am halfway through the motion before it occurs to me to wonder why a frightened, forgetful woman would have a place inside her for filing things.

I push myself up against the headboard. The room swings, a long slow tilt like the deck of a boat, then steadies. And I see it for the first time: the room I woke in.

It is beautiful and it is cold and it is not mine.

Heavy drapes the color of wet sand, half-drawn. Dark furniture, old, good, older than the two of us and indifferent to us, the kind of furniture that has watched people be born and married and laid out on beds like this one and expects to go on watching. A washstand. A mirror I can’t yet see myself in. And one tall window, and through it: gray. A gray so total it takes me a moment to sort it into things: a sky with no sun in it, a sea the exact same shade so that no line divides them, black rocks below where the gulls are still quarreling over their small dead thing. Fog stands off the glass like something patient, waiting to be let in.

There is no horizon. Wherever this is, it has been arranged so that you cannot see the edge of it.

I look down at my own left hand where it lies on the blanket, and there is a ring on it. A thin gold band, plain, the kind of plain that costs money. I turn my hand and the weak light slides along it. It does not feel like mine. It feels like a ring I am wearing for a photograph, that will be collected from me afterward.

“Am I your wife?”

It comes out smaller than I mean it to. I hear the smallness and I don’t like it, and under the not-liking, colder, I note that the smallness was useful, that it did something to his face, softened it, that a woman who sounds like that is a woman a man like this leans toward.

“Yes.” He says it gently, and the fear is still back there behind the gentleness, banked but not out. “You’re my wife. Mara Thorne.”

Mara.

I try it on. Mara. Mara Thorne. It fits as the ring fits: close, tailored, and wrong, a coat cut for a woman I have never met. I wait for it to do what my own name would do, to light some warm window in the dark house of me. Nothing lights. There is only the gray, and the gulls, and this exhausted, watchful man handing me pieces of a life and searching my face to see whether I’ll take them.

He rises and crosses to the window and draws the drape wider, and cold white light comes into the room and finds every surface and warms none of it.

“The doctor left something new,” he says, to the glass, to the fog. “For the disorientation. It should help.” A pause I feel him choose. “You’ve had these gaps before, love. They frighten you when you’re in them. But they pass. They always pass, and you always...” He turns, and his mouth does something that is meant to be a smile and lands short of one. “You always come back to me.”

You always come back to me.

There’s a smoothness to it. A thing said many times, worn down by saying, the way the banister of a staircase gets worn by hands. He believes it. I can hear that he believes it. And I cannot tell, listening, whether that makes it more true or only more dangerous.

I swing my legs out from under the blankets. My bare feet find the floor and the cold of the boards goes straight up through me, clean and shocking, and it is the first honest thing that has happened since I woke: a cold with no gentleness in it, no rehearsal, a cold that isn’t managing me.

“How long,” I say. “You said three days. How long is it usually?”

He hesitates. It’s a small hesitation and he covers it well, but I’ve begun, without deciding to, to keep a tally of what he covers. “It varies,” he says. “You don’t remember the last time.”

It isn’t a question. But I shake my head anyway, and I watch him receive the shake, and I watch, there, again, that flicker of something that is not quite grief moving under the grief, and I think: he is not only sad that I’ve forgotten. Part of him is measuring how much.

“Come.” He crosses back and holds out a robe, thick, dove-gray, warmed I realize from where it’s been lying over the radiator, and that small kindness, that he thought to warm it, sits oddly against everything else, a tenderness so real it makes the room worse. “Breakfast first. Edith will have the range going. And if you’re steady enough, later, we’ll walk out on the cliffs. The air scrubs your head. You always said so.”

He helps me into the robe. His hands are careful at my shoulders, at the collar, almost too careful, the carefulness of a man handling a thing he has broken before. It smells of lavender, laundered soft. And under the lavender, faint, sharp, unmistakable once you have it, the smell of bleach.

I go still for half a breath. Then I let him settle the collar and I say nothing, because there is a place for this too, the bleach under the lavender, and I put it there without yet knowing what shelf it belongs on or why my hands already knew, folding it away, that some smells you note and do not mention.

At the door he pauses, one hand flat on the frame, and doesn’t go through.

“Mara.” Quiet. “Whatever you remember, in the next few days. Or think you remember. However strange it gets in there.” He touches his own temple, and for the length of that gesture the exhaustion in his face is so bare, so unguarded, that it stops my breath. “I love you. That part is real. That part has always been real. Hold on to that one, if you can’t hold on to anything else.”

He smiles, and this time it reaches his eyes, and the eyes are wet.

I smile back, because smiling seems like the safe thing, and it comes out of me flawless, warm, grateful, the smile he is waiting to be given, and the ease of it frightens me more than anything he has said. My face knows how to do this. My face is already, this morning, at the far end of a con I don’t remember starting.

He goes ahead of me through the door.

I stand a moment longer in the cold beautiful room, in the borrowed robe that smells of lavender and bleach, and I look at the ring that isn’t mine on the hand that is, and I make myself breathe, long and even, as I woke breathing, and I follow the man I remember the name of down into the house I don’t.