The Twilight Wife

by A. J. Banner

  “Uncle Theo, yes,” Jacob says.

  “There’s no chapel train on the dress.”

  “You didn’t want to trip.”

  “I wanted to dance.” An image comes to me, of Jacob sweeping me off my feet.

  “Do you want to dance again?” he says.

  “I’m not sure I remember how.”

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” He leaves the room and returns with the heavy gold earrings I wore in the wedding photos. And something else. A delicate gold necklace inlaid with emeralds.

  “Gorgeous,” I say, dazzled.

  “It belonged to my mother.”

  “Did your mother . . . come to our wedding?” I say.

  “She passed away before I met you. She had cancer. The one thing I couldn’t protect her from.”

  “You had to protect her?”

  “From my father. I told you before.”

  “Oh, Jacob. That’s awful.”

  A soft look falls into his eyes, fleeting vulnerability. “Sometimes I wish I could forget the past, like you.”

  “Your father was violent?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “But we’re shaped by our past. The past makes us who we are.”

  “It influences us, but it doesn’t make us. We can do anything, be anyone.”

  “You’ve overcome a lot to become who you are today.”

  “It was all worth it. I got to meet you. May I put the necklace on?”

  I nod, my heart in my throat, and as I look in the mirror, he puts on the necklace, his fingers brushing my skin, and a kaleidoscope of butterflies takes flight inside me. He attaches the clasp at the back of my neck, looks in the mirror to adjust the necklace.

  “There,” he says.

  I put on the earrings.

  He stares at me in the mirror, stoops with his head next to mine. “This is how it was. But your hair was different.”

  “I wore it down in the pictures.”

  “For the ceremony, it was up.” He twists my hair into a loose knot at the back of my head. Wavy wisps tumble down onto my cheeks. His eyes light up. “Just like that. Beautiful.” He holds my hair with one hand, traces the curve of my jaw with the other. His finger runs down my neck to my collarbone. His touch is charged, rippling across my skin. Now I remember. He broke the rules when he came to see me before the ceremony. He stood in my dressing room, arms folded over his chest, admiring me.

  “We could pretend it’s our wedding night,” he says. “You could put on the gown.”

  “What, now? It’ll be too loose.”

  “You’ll look beautiful in it, no matter what.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll wear my tuxedo.”

  “You brought it with you?”

  “I would never give up the clothes I wore when we recited our vows.” As he leaves the room, my headache returns, the cotton fuzziness in my brain. My reflection blurs in the mirror. The dress, Jacob, the wedding, the weight of the earrings. This has all happened before, in another life, in another place, but something was different. Maybe I wore different lipstick, or a diamond-studded clip in my hair. An indistinct face appears behind me. I turn around, but nobody is there.

  As I change into the wedding dress, images flit through my mind. A plethora of roses, the three-tiered, ocean-blue cake. Linny hugging me. Moments of laughter. Jacob guiding me onto the floor.

  The dress hangs a little loosely on my frame, but it still fits. The Swarovski crystals glint in the light. I find Jacob in the living room in a black wool tuxedo, expertly tailored. The jacket has a single button. He whistles and looks me up and down. “Wow. Just wow. You are the most beautiful woman this side of paradise.”

  “And you are . . . stunning.”

  He pulls me into his arms.

  I look down at my bare feet. “Do we still have the shoes?”

  “I don’t know what happened to them, but I don’t care.”

  I’m curiously light-headed. My blood runs hot. He’s kissing me again, his lips firm, insistent. He smells familiar, feels familiar. He pulls me close, whispers something against my mouth. My body responds from a primal place.

  “Damn,” he says, lifting me bodily, carrying me down the hall and across the threshold into my room, the bedroom we once shared. He sets me down gently, turns me around to unzip the gown. It falls to the floor, and I step free, unable to catch my breath. He unclasps my bra, takes it off, and throws it on the chair. I’m in only bikini panties now. I should wait. But my thoughts move in slow motion. The wine. I could never handle more than half a glass.

  In a moment, Jacob is undressed. How did this happen so quickly? I know his body. I remember what he looks like, his shape.

  “This could be our second wedding night,” he whispers to me.

  My body needs to be touched. It has been so long. How long?

  He pushes me back on the bed, bracing himself above me. He kisses my cheeks, my neck, and my collarbone with reverence. The mere touch of his lips sends me into a fever. “I’ve missed this so much,” he says.

  We’ve been here before, in this bed, in summer moonlight. In cool cotton sheets, not winter flannel. He holds my hands and I close my eyes, letting the pleasure seep into me. He always knew how to touch me, how to bring me to him, how to make me lose all reason. I stop thinking, stop worrying, and I give in to pure sensation. Every moment of our union becomes familiar in a way that only the body remembers.

  In my dream, I’m striding through a sunlit room to a large stained glass window. The ocean glints in the distance, barely visible through the trees. The room is empty, redolent of floor polish, the walls painted soft butter-yellow. On one wall, a painted tree grows a riot of emerald leaves. This house is perfect, old and quaint, quirky and bright. I move through the rooms, comfortable, as if this is already my home. I imagine a child’s laughter, dolls and building blocks strewn in a playroom. The smell of garlicky spaghetti on the stove. The heady scents of jasmine and Mexican orange plants in bloom. I’m in the blue dress, glowing in shiny cobalt silk, but when I look down, a dark stain spreads across the fabric, swallowing all the color, seeping out across the room, turning everything black.

  I awaken disoriented, unnerved. It takes me a minute to figure out where I am. In the dream, I was somewhere else. But where? And when? The water is running somewhere. A waterfall—no, the shower. I’m beneath the comforter. I’m not wearing any clothes. Jacob is whistling in the bathroom. A veil lifts from the sky as the sun rises.

  The night climbs back into me. The restaurant, our wedding attire. Jacob carrying me into the bedroom. What we did afterward. My head throbs. Is this a hangover? The last time I drank too much and woke up naked in bed, I was an undergraduate in my dorm room. I think.

  Jacob emerges from the bathroom, toweling his hair. “You’re up.” He looks even more handsome in the morning light, every muscle defined; the small mole where it has always been on his right shoulder.

  “Barely. I was having a dream. Not about the dive, though. It was a good dream this time—”

  “About us?” He sits on the bed and touches my cheek, leans forward to kiss me gently. He smells of toothpaste.

  “I was in a house all painted yellow. In the blue dress, but then the stain ruined everything.”

  “The tea stain.”

  “Must be. But the house was beautiful.”

  “So are you. Especially when you’ve just woken up.”

  “I look a mess.” I reach up to touch my tangled hair, rub my eyes.

  “A beautiful mess. A natural mess.”

  I pull the covers up to my chest. “Could you pass me my robe? It’s in the closet.” I’m suddenly self-conscious.

  He hands me the robe. “Breakfast?”

  “We need to talk about what happened last night.”

  His mouth tightens. “You regret what we did.”

  “It’s not that. We moved a little fast.”

  “We’re married,” he says sharp
ly. “We’ve made love a thousand times.”

  “I know it wasn’t the first time.”

  “Did it feel like it was?”

  “Not really.”

  He looks at his hands for a minute, then seems to force a smile. “It was a great night.”

  “It was,” I say. “I’m not saying anything was wrong. It was amazing.”

  “But fast,” he says. “We can go slower next time.”

  Next time. Something feels . . . off. As if there might have been a time when we thought, when I thought, there might not be a next time.

  “The house in my dream was so vivid, like we were there. Like we wanted to live there. Or like we did live there.”

  “Dreams can be like that,” he says gently. “Maybe you visited a house like that once.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  He kisses my forehead. “I should go into town. We’re almost out of coffee. Don’t wander off before I get back.”

  “If I do, I won’t go far.”

  “Good.” He goes into his room. He’s whistling while he gets dressed. I wonder if he will move back into my room now. Our room.

  While he’s gone, I slip into the bathroom to take a shower. Beneath the hot water, I work up a lather. The night with Jacob, the romantic dinner, what we did in the bedroom—did it all really happen? What about the house in my dream? The beauty, the comfort, and the hope I felt there—it seemed real, but then, so did recurring dreams I had as a child. I kept returning to the same treehouse made of blankets and pillows, as if that imaginary fort really existed. Could this yellow house be a figment of my imagination, appearing only in dreams? The dark stain spread across the scene almost as an afterthought, suggested by Jacob’s explanation of what happened to my blue dress.

  I rinse off, pull aside the shower curtain, and grab a towel. There’s a dent in the bathroom door—a deep impression that I didn’t notice before. Almost as if something hit the door with great force. Or maybe it’s simply a flaw in the wood.

  A headache pounds at my temples. I consider taking an aspirin, or an ibuprofen pill, but I discard the thought. I’d rather down a cup of strong coffee and take a long walk. First, I check through the photo albums in the living room again, but I discover no hint of the yellow house. Not that I expected to find one.

  In my office, I sign into my email. More ads, news, and a message from Linny.

  Dear Kyra,

  You didn’t tell me about an affair, but I warned you about getting too close to Aiden Finlay. I can’t imagine you ever having an affair with him. You’re in the perfect marriage to Jacob—the way things are supposed to be. Whatever mistakes you made before, they’re in the past. You got a second chance at life—start living in the present!

  Love you, gotta go,

  Linny

  I read her message twice. Her buoyant tone feels unfamiliar. She never valued marriage. When she was young, her parents yelled at each other nearly every day. They separated when she was twelve. Linny doesn’t believe in tying the knot. Or at least, she didn’t four years ago.

  What changed her mind? She’s always wanted the best for me, and even I could see that Jacob had more faith in me than I might have deserved. People change in four years. People change in one year. People can change in only one month. I sit back, the dizziness setting in again.

  I send a quick message. I’ll try, Linny. But first I need to clear up some things in my past. Did Jacob and I ever argue? Was I ever unsure of our relationship? Thank you, miss you, I’ll be in touch soon, and I sign off, wondering why I’ve asked her these questions. No, I know why. I go back to the bathroom, run my fingers along the indentation in the door, right beneath the chrome towel rack. I didn’t see the dent before, because the towels were in the way. Nothing comes back to me, no suggestion of how the dent was made.

  I head down to the beach, walking south this time on a new path, to shake off the headache. Maybe today, the Tompkins anemone will magically appear. But the creature has other plans. I’m beginning to wonder if it even exists. Red sea cucumbers, barnacles, mussels, and sponges cling to rocks. Occasionally, a spate of purple jellyfish washes up on the sand, their sails no match for the wind.

  A Dungeness crab watches me from a rock. It doesn’t move as I approach. I lift the crab and the shell of its back splits apart to reveal nothing inside—only a complex of empty chambers. The crab has been molting, shedding its shell. The real crab is long gone.

  The wind calms as I round a bend to a protected beach. This is the way to Windswept Bluff, where the old man might live—the man who thought he recognized me. Far ahead, a boat is anchored to a dock. Makeshift wooden steps lead up the cliff into the woods. Someone’s standing at the top of the steps, a dark silhouette of a man. He descends toward me, moving stiffly in a black, hooded raincoat. I wave at him, and he waves back. As he reaches the bottom step, I see that he is the man from town, the man who approached me at Mystic Thyme.

  “Hello!” I say. “Remember me?”

  “I’ve been watching you walk down this way,” he says.

  “You could see me from around the bend?”

  “I watched from up there.” He points up the steep, rickety wooden steps to the top of the cliff.

  “You do live close to us,” I say.

  “Windswept Bluff is up there, dirt driveway, only one house. Mine.” He marches toward me, bent forward as if his back hurts. “Who are you? Where do you live?”

  “A bit north of here.”

  He’s close now, giving off a strong scent of wood smoke. He peers closely at my face, a sudden spark of recognition returning to his eyes. “You left him, then?”

  “Left whom? My husband? No, I didn’t leave him.” The tide laps at my shoes. The earth tilts, then rights itself. I can’t get dizzy now, not when I have to walk all the way back along the beach.

  “You should leave him,” the man says. “Go, right now.”

  The wind ripples across the ocean, shivering through me. “You’re saying I should leave Jacob? I don’t understand.”

  His expression shifts to a startled frown. He blinks, rubs his eyes, and looks at me again. The wind roars in my ears. “Hell, I’m sorry. I . . . I must be dreaming. I need to go.” He starts to move past me toward the dock.

  I follow him. “Hey, don’t go. Not again. You said I should leave him. What did you mean?”

  “You look like someone else, that’s all. I get mixed up these days.”

  “Who? Tell me what you know about me.”

  He looks at me, and I can see he’s embarrassed, as if he was caught with his pants down. “I’m sorry, my memory is faulty sometimes.”

  “So is mine,” I say with urgency, feeling a strange affinity with this man. I point to the scar on my forehead. “I forget things. Sometimes I don’t remember what someone told me a week ago. I hit my head.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “I wish I’d hit my head, but I’m just old.” He strides out onto the swaying dock. I’m not sure I want to brave it.

  “I’m Kyra!” I call after him. “Could we talk?”

  “Doug. And sure, yeah, we can talk.” He looks at me again. His eyes are haunted. “You remind me of someone from a long time ago, that’s all. Years and years have gone by.”

  “The memory makes you sad.”

  “It does, I’m afraid.” Now I see he’s fighting tears. He doesn’t want me to see him cry. He unhooks his boat from the dock and jumps onto the deck.

  I venture out after him. The dock moves to and fro beneath me. “I look like someone you had feelings for. Who was she?”

  “Let’s talk when I get back. I gotta sell some fish.” He points down to a cooler on the deck, then toward the steep wooden steps. “I live up there, but don’t take the steps like I did. Those stairs are rotting. Take the driveway.”

  “When?” I say. “When should I visit you?”

  “When I get back,” he says.

  “When will that be?”

  “Couple
of days.”

  The engine roars to life as he steers away from the shore.

  “You’re always leaving!” I yell.

  The boat takes off into the distance, bobbing on the waves. Only when he has disappeared around the curve of the bluff do I realize I’ve been making fists, my fingernails digging into the palms of my hands.

  By the time I get back to the house, my feet are soaked, and my teeth are chattering. Jacob is reading on the couch, mug in hand.

  “Did they have coffee at the mercantile?” I say.

  “New shipment,” he says. “What took you so long?”

  I peel off my wet boots and socks and stand with my back to the woodstove, absorbing the warmth of the fire. “I met a man on the beach, a couple of miles down.”

  “What man?” He looks over his reading glasses at me.

  “He said his name was Doug.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “He was strange.”

  “The island attracts recluses. Don’t walk down that far without me.”

  “He mistook me for someone else.”

  Jacob looks at me intently now, suddenly interested. “Did he say who it was? Who is this guy?”

  “I have no idea. He took off in his boat. I saw him in town, too. Same deal.”

  Jacob puts on his reading glasses again, turns the page in his book. “He’s probably bonkers. Quite a few like him around here. Who knows what he could do?”

  I turn to warm my hands over the stove. The man’s words echo in my mind. You should leave him. Go, right now. But I don’t know him, and when he took a closer look, he claimed not to know me, either. Yet I can’t help but feel a connection to him, an echo as if we knew each other before. Perhaps we did, and neither of us remembers.

  “I’m going to ride into town,” I say. If I hurry, I might catch Doug’s boat coming around to dock in the harbor. I’m not exactly sure why I want to catch up with him—whether it’s more about his mysterious history, or to find out if he’s connected to mine.

  “I’ll drive you,” Jacob says.

  “No, no, enjoy your book. I’ll take my bike again.”