He brushed a strand of hair from my forehead and then his fingers, calloused from his work, dropped to my chin and he turned my head up toward him so that I felt his breath on my face.
“…And when I married you, I did it for selfish reasons, yes, but not for those you think. It’s true I wouldn’t have married you if I hadn’t had to. Still a boy, I was not fit to marry anyone. But if I had to marry, I was happy that it was you. I knew that given time, I would come to love you. I always wanted you—yes, wanted, Darcy. Don’t pull away from me. Wanted to feel myself inside you, to feel your warmth around me, to see your face change when you felt me for the first time…”
I could feel my face turning red like a fool but still I could not bring myself to turn away. The hand that held my chin was gentle but unyielding.
“…But it was more than that. I admired you and looked up to you as someone who had something to teach me. You seemed to have seen so much of life, and I was willing to learn from you. There was so much inside here.” He touched my breast over my heart. “Your courage, your strength, your loyalty, your ambition, not just for yourself, but even more for those you love. Even your brutality. Yes, even that I admired. And so I knew that you were meant for me, and that I would love you, almost from the beginning, because I wanted you and admired you, and when there is desire and respect, love is never far behind…”
Time passed or must have, and it seemed to have left us in its wake. I was enchanted as in a fairy story, kissed by fate and time, and in my trance, there was nothing but whispered words, and warm skin and gentle hands.
Then into the dream came a sensation both strange and familiar. The hands were no longer gentle but possessed of something I remembered vaguely from a long ago nightmare. They reached under the lace of Jewel’s nightgown, purposeful and rough. His mouth was against my throat and I couldn’t turn my head. I smelled whiskey on him. Pinned against the side of the porch, I strained against him and felt him rock hard against me, his whole body grown taut and driving. His breath came fast and shallow as he pressed into me, again and again, rhythmically, in a violent dance that demanded more than I could give just at that moment. I felt his teeth in my shoulder, and it hurt. Most hurtful of all was that he seemed so unaware of me, as if it might have been anyone or anything against him, and he would be pleased, so long as it was soft and warm. Like that day with Aaron. Not just like it, but like it enough to make me panic, to make me forget the porch and remember the barn, remember the feeling of heedless hands grabbing at my clothes. There’d been a sickle to grab then. There wasn’t one now. But ever resourceful, I was always my own best weapon.
My knee came up between his legs and at the same time I pushed him away from me hard.
“I hate you,” I said, as he doubled up against the wall. “You ruined my life and I hate you.” I tried to sound cold and dignified but my breath came too quickly.
As I moved around him, he straightened up and grabbed me, but not like before. This time, there was no passion in his grasp, and just enough force to prevent me from passing.
“You don’t hate me,” he said, “though you’d like to. You don’t want me to touch you and you don’t want me to touch anyone else. You’d like to keep me in a jar where you could look at me once in a while with the lid tightly closed.” And with that, he let me go.
Running upstairs, I caught Jewel’s nightgown on a nail and tore it. In the safety of my locked room, I took it off and got under the sheets naked. My teeth chattered, though the room was hot, and at the same time, I felt the sheets beneath me dampening with sweat as I took the pillow and covered my head with it. Sometime, near dawn, I fell asleep and when I woke, the only clear thing to me was that nothing was clear to me. The world and all its creatures were an abiding mystery, and nowhere dwelled a more mysterious creature than I to myself. It seemed to me that hate is a tortured kind of love, but that didn’t make sense at all.
Downstairs, Jewel sat alone at the breakfast table. “Luca didn’t come down to breakfast this morning,” she said. “He left a note that he’d put in for a double shift and not to wait up for him.”
I listened to her talk and realized that Luca had won after all. Last night, I had locked my door against him. This morning, he had locked his heart against me forever. And I might have grieved in my own way over this, were it not that soon, as in every life, new troubles came to take the place of the old.
5.
Like Snow Upon the Desert’s Dusty Face
I guess I have no medical aptitude. All along I’d thought Jewel had a bad heart because of the trouble she had breathing sometime and the sudden pains that made her wince. But it wasn’t her heart at all.
I could almost feel sorry for the young doctor who told us that Jewel’s lungs were being eaten away
