I wasn’t going to let her kill me. I wasn’t going to let them kill me. The whole crushing force of the women who had come before me, who had lived before my time with him. She sat like a matriarch on a throne wagging jeweled fingers on her dead hands while she attempted to orchestrate our future. My mother-in-law.
She’d already killed him. The man who was going to be my husband.
I had the evidence. My poor, poor Charles.
“Make us a cuppa, will you love?” She only pretended to be crooning.
I never could stand the way he jumped to attention when she issued a command. Even now she was still issuing them. From beyond the grave and he couldn’t let go of her. That year we first met he was making her tea every Sunday. She hated me. Because I was alive. Looking back I think she added something to her tinctures. Datura leaves. The poisonous flowers hung like fairy lanterns all around the garden next to her oleanders. I never could trust her.
“I was able to love,” she wrote, after seeing him on the screen. “Again.”
The moon hung like a tiny lantern surrounded by night clouds drifting in a rushing wind. Nothing was clear anymore, about the sky or the stars or the planes flying about and what they might be. She stood for a long time in the cold and brittle light of almost total darkness looking up into the heavens. The pages of her journal fluttered on the desk, before she tore them out completely and crumpled them in her fist.
“Come to bed, Sophia.”
Brace called her back from her depths, his voice stronger than her darkness, stronger than the cold of the clouds and the night sky filled with uncertain stars.
“I’m waiting.”
“It’s so cold out,” she said.
“I’m warm.”
Her hands were icy as she slid them across his chest. “Brrrrr,” he laughed. “You’re freezing.”
He smiled as he pulled her toward him, in the way that husbands smile, that’s different than the way a lover smiles.
“Am I?”
“Take off your clothes and come to bed. It’s late”
“You’re always right Brace, aren’t you?”
“Do you think so?”
“You’re always very sure of everything.”
“I am what I am.”
“I suppose we all are.”
“Come to bed.”
His arms were warm as they tucked themselves around her, pulling her in against him, but her mind had shifted elsewhere on some kind of different plane. Brace rolled his back to her. “Go to sleep.”
But Sophia couldn’t sleep. Not anymore, not after hearing that voice, and seeing the photograph. She and Brace never talked about the past or the other people they had been with. What would have been the point?
In the warmth of the bed, against Brace’s back, in the heat of the blankets—her mind kept drifting backwards.
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| Marc Chagall's "Lovers" 1956 |
