One night, when the thing inside her wouldn’t let her sleep, she pushed herself up from the bed, lit a candle and went downstairs to the kitchen, thinking to stoke the fire and put the kettle on. The house was quiet but for the little sounds, the creaking and groaning of the inanimate, the rush of the wind along the outside walls, the patter of mice. When the light of the candle swept over the kitchen in a glancing arc, she saw movement there, a hurried retreat, the creatures vanished in the time it took to recognize them for what they were. Mice. They were nothing to her, one more annoyance, and she’d given up on nagging Will to trap them — what was the use? They were infinite. They belonged here. And she didn’t.
She lit the lamp and blew out the candle. Stirred the coals and laid fresh lengths of driftwood in the firebox. The water jug was full, a small blessing, and she tipped it to the kettle, set the kettle atop the stove, then eased herself into a chair at the kitchen table. There was a stack of old magazines and newspapers on the corner of the table, artifacts themselves, long out of date, and though she’d read every page of them twice, twice at least, she picked up a newspaper and settled in to read of events that had transpired in the real world in a time that might as well have been a century ago for all they signified now.
The water came to a boil. She got up and poured out a cupful, flavored it with vanilla extract and a pinch of sugar so as to conserve the last of the tea, and was just about to sit back down at the table when she heard a noise from the hallway. Or no, not the hallway, but Ida’s room. It was a cloaked, furtive sound, starting, then stopping, then settling into a rhythmic give and take, slow friction, as if two things, two objects, two bodies, were being rubbed together. She froze in place, straining to hear. There it was, there it was again. And then she caught her breath to still the whistling of her lungs and the pain came at her in a sudden triumphant rush, all the air gone out of her, and though she didn’t want to give herself away, though she tried to suppress it, she began to cough. It started gently, almost as if she were learning a new kind of respiration, as if she were embracing it, but then it accelerated, harsher and harsher, until her face was aflame and her lungs throbbed and she had to brace herself against the table and spit in the cup and then see it there, her own issue, the only thing she’d ever given birth to, the hard yellow lump of sputum revolving in a wash of tinctured water.
The house had gone silent. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Even the wind died. This was a silence of another quality altogether — she could feel it — a deeper silence, a listening silence. Her heart was pounding. Her throat ached. It took her a moment to straighten up, to square her shoulders and catch her breath. Then she started down the hall, very slowly, one step at a time. The floorboards didn’t groan — they wouldn’t dare — and the ugly whitewashed walls stood mute. When she came to the door of Will’s room, the storeroom, the monk’s cell, she took an eternity just to lift the handle because she wouldn’t make a sound, she refused to, and when the door eased open inch by inch and the uncertain light spilling down the hall from the lamp in the kitchen began to spill here too, she saw the bed pushed up against the wall, Will’s bed, and saw that it was empty.
The Weight
After that, things seemed to move forward in a new kind of way, as if the elaborate machinery of the place had been stuck in gear all this time and now it was free to revolve unimpeded. Spring — the drying out — came in the second week of April, just as Will had said it would, fog giving way to a succession of sun-warmed days that seemed to set the island on fire, birds nesting everywhere, the pigs cavorting in their pen, a warm breeze riding up out of the south on a scent of citrus and jasmine. Insects hung over the flowers in the front yard, hummingbirds materialized out of the air and the sheep — mercifully — shifted farther afield, taking their ammoniac reek with them. Will finished the final section of his road and Charlie Curner came at long last to deliver supplies and letters — a whole carton of letters — and stow the sacks of wool in the hold of his schooner, and then the Evangeline, her sails gilded with sun and casting a long morning shadow over the waves, made for Santa Barbara, where the market was, where the money was, where Nichols was waiting to get the best possible price and then freight them to the mills all the way across the country. Better yet, Adolph went with him to oversee the transfer, and so they were spared his sourness, at least till the next boat brought him back.
The days lengthened. Sun shone on the porch in the afternoons. She had Edith throw open the windows and doors to let the fresh air scour the mold and carry off the accumulated odors of the place, the reek of ancient grease and cold ash, of dried mud and mouse droppings and people confined through a long wet winter in a house that was no house at all. If she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun, she could almost imagine she was in Italy.
Unfortunately, it all came too late, at least for her.
She wouldn’t blame Will, though it was the night she’d found his bed empty that the disease came back to claim her all over again, the microbes striking when she was weakest, when she was heartsick, devastated, when sleep was an impossibility and she sat in the chair by the stove and coughed till the house rang with the propulsive ascending notes of it. She wouldn’t blame him, not for the disease, but she would never forgive him that night. He’d crept out of Ida’s room at first light — she heard the soft click of the latch, the faintest wheeze of the hinges, felt his heavy tread radiating through the floorboards all the way down the hall and across the parlor to where she sat staring out into the ashen dawn. She waited till he opened his own door, shut it behind him and settled into his bed with a single fierce groan of the wooden supports. Then she got up from the chair, light-headed, her breathing harsh and ragged, each indraft roaring in her ears, and made her way across the room and down the hall to his door, but this time she didn’t hesitate.
In a single motion she flung back the door, slipped inside and pulled it shut. The room was gray, crepuscular, everything indistinct, and for a moment she thought she was dreaming, that nothing had happened, that she was asleep and well and that her husband loved her and she loved him in turn. But then he lifted his head from the blankets, his torso braced on the twin props of his elbows, his neck craning, his face a pale lump of meat with his features molded in the center of it, and she was living in the moment. “You pig,” she said, her voice low and calm, a flesh-cutting voice, cold as a surgeon’s knife. “Adulterer. Cheat. You thought I was Ida, didn’t you? Ida slinking across the hall for one last embrace?”
He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything, not a word.
“A servant, Will. A serving girl. How could you demean yourself? And with Edith in the house, Edith in the room above you while you—” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t name what they were doing, what they’d done, though she could feel it stirring inside her, deep in her own body, in the place where she’d opened her legs for him in the time when he wanted her and she wanted him.
The bed shifted beneath him. He let out a soft moaning curse and dropped his head back on the pillow. It came to her that he wasn’t going to defend himself, wasn’t going to plead or extenuate or attempt to comfort her — or lie, he wasn’t even going to bother to lie. The thought enraged her. What was he, anyway? A blustering hateful overgrown adventurer who didn’t care a fig about her or Edith either, the island king, William G. Waters, Rex et Imperator.