Then Eva awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom. Her heart had slowed to a languorous throb. She felt as if she was surfacing from a sleep that resembled, or perhaps preceded, death. She wanted to reach for the hand of her husband, but found herself too entranced, too abandoned, to do so. Though she could not lift her head, she became dimly aware of a reddish gleam at the foot of the bed, and wondered if, having dreamed this dream, she was destined to go up in flames, the bed a pyre, a shimmering blanket of fire enfolding her. But she was not. Through the lowered veil of her lashes, she made out embers burning in a grate; through the remnants of her dream, she smelled the ancient scent of woodsmoke, she heard the ticking of cinders falling into ash. Opening her eyes, she saw above her a low ceiling, black beams of wood, a small window hanging bright and faceted as a jewel. The room was not her own. Her husband was not beside her.
In the first days of the king’s return, there was a girl who wandered far into the forest. At dusk she would come home, with scratched face and torn skirts and brambles stuck like pins in her hair, to find her husband sitting before a hearth gone cold, a pot caked with old gruel. But how his eyes would shine when she appeared! He draws out her seat, he brings in water, he makes her a broth, which she plays with, with her spoon. She smiles at him shyly, saying, I think I lost my sense of time.
One evening, the dusk turns into darkness and still the girl has not come home. Her husband runs to the edge of the forest, a torch in his hand. All night he searches for her, the legions of trees looming around him, and by morning he stumbles out from the woods, bewildered and afraid, having found no sign of her. The other wives are washing clothes in the stream. They bend down farther over their work, as if by doing so they might make themselves invisible. The young husband approaches them, his face a wound, his voice hoarse when he asks them, Have you seen her? The women, up to their elbows in cold water, shake their heads. They are silent.
Eva imagined the silence into which her husband would awake. She imagined his voice in the empty room, saying her name. She heard, clearly, the variations he would use—Evita? Evuncular?—time’s elaborations, the joyful, thoughtless ornamenting of the word he most liked to say. The names would chime and shiver in the air. Evel Knievel? he would ask, and there would be no answer. She had been taken too far away.
In a strange bed, in a strange room, she felt the anguish of her husband as her own. It felt like knives, like rats gnawing, like broken glass, like poison bubbling—no, it felt like something else. Exactly. All it took was two slippery pills, swallowed at the clinic, and then a bus ride home and straight into bed. The pain began as a little pang in her gut, and then—whoosh!—she was possessed by it. Her husband (not yet her husband) knelt beside the bed with a cool washcloth in his hand as she writhed around like a snake, sweating through the sheets. And just as swiftly it was over. The pain disappeared and the bleeding began. The whole thing lasted only an afternoon. In the evening the two of them walked around the neighborhood, eating ice cream. To say they had made a decision would suggest that they had needed to have a conversation. Neither one had said, Given the smallness of our apartment, and the narrowness of the stairs. Considering where we are in our lives … She didn’t even have to mention her wedding dress, which was already paid for, already fitted, sitting hugely and steadfastly on her credit card. It was made of silk organza and floated up behind her when she moved. It was the color of champagne.
In this strange bed, in this close room, beneath the tiny jewel of a window, she thought of her husband and felt again the ache of that dreamlike afternoon. Or at least she did for a little while. A shockingly, shamefully little while. For how could she stay sad when the king himself was watching her, sitting alert by the fire? As she saw his dark eyes gleaming in the light, her sorrow for her husband dwindled into a low, melancholy note above which her false heart trilled. The king! The brave and ravaged and beautiful king. What might he say to her? What might he see? There was always the possibility he could love her, wasn’t there? There was always the possibility. If her young marriage had taught her anything, it was that. The surprise, the stark miracle of love, bent in her direction. So why not the king, watching silently from his chair?
She felt his eyes move over her, touching each part of her deliberately, like a hand.
The next time Eva awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom, her heart was brimming, beating lightly as a bird’s. The heaviness that had pulled on her was lifted.
