The day is lost to activity, but the night is still, and in the stillness, truth comes upon you quietly. And in the night, that yawning chasm of time between the early approaching darkness of winter and the first hint of morning light, I discovered theinn was haunted. Not with dead people. Jesse’s body was surely dust in the orchard by now. And not by Aaron. Rumor had it his mother had had him cremated. No, the inn was haunted with convictions long held and false, hopes long cherished and crushed, and plans, made with great enthusiasm that would never come to pass.
It had started with Jewel’s misconception of innkeeping, the idea that you could take vagrants into your home, feed them if they were hungry, give them a place to sleep when they couldn’t pay, and imagine they would not think you a fool, serviceable only to be taken advantage of. Jewel believed that if you were kind, kindness would come back to you, like a pigeon to roost. She had believed this with a conviction that rejected all evidence to the contrary. And she had died believing in all for which she had no logical reason to believe.
And Luca. Come to a new country and imagining the great things his father and he would accomplish there. Thinking, in spite of everything, that it would all turn out well, for no better reason than he wanted it to with all his heart.
And me and Kathmandu.
So the inn was haunted, as are all dwellings where great slaughters have occurred, the slaughter of people and the slaughter of dreams. And here I was, left with the carnage. And worst of all was not the dead dream but the living nightmare. The dreams about Aaron didn’t start until Luca was gone, as if Aaron had been waiting in the ether for him to leave before he felt free to come to me. In the dream, Aaron was not dead, not shot, not bloody. He looked hale and hearty and cheerful and when he spoke it was teasingly, like a mean older brother. “Did you keep that dress, Darcy?” he’d always ask. “The one I raped you in?” And I’d say, “No, I burned it, just like I’ll burn you if you ever come back.” And he’d laugh, and say, “You can’t burn me, Darcy. I’m already ashes. But I can burn you.” Even that wasn’t the worst of it because with the illogical logic of dreams, I knew he was dead and couldn’t come back. It was what he threatened to tell Luca that frightened me most. “I’m gonna bend over him at night while he’s asleep in prison,” he’d say in the dream, “and whisper in his ear that I put my seed in you. That baby’s mine, not his, and once he knows that, he’ll stop loving you, if he ever really did and you’ll disgust him, and your baby will disgust him too… Once I tell him.” And I’d wake up in a cold sweat, panting like an animal, and covering my mouth with my hand so as not to wake Rennie in the bed beside me. I knew it was Luca’s baby and couldn’t be Aaron’s. Yet I felt as if the life inside me had been defiled by the rape and that it would, against all laws of biology, somehow be Aaron’s baby too I was carrying.
Time was turning in upon itself again. Night after night, I would sit in front of the fire that never warmed me and think, if only Jewel were here. Jewel, needing me to calm her senseless fears, and in calming her fears, my own would ease. Before there’d been Luca, promising that everything would be all right, and disbelieving, I’d been comforted, nonetheless. Only Rennie now. So young. What could she know of haunting? And soon another child born into this haunted world to live in this haunted house, to a mother struggling to keep her wits and a father in prison. Unhaunted child, I thought, asleep in your silent world, so soon to be disturbed for the first time and for always. They should leave you in peace. Nothing should wake you.
There is a kind of delirium to despair, I know that now, and as I went to the sideboard and poured some brandy, an idea came to me, and drunk with despair more than with brandy, the idea seemed the only bit of reason in an unreasonable world. Later, I was to remember it with an agony of regret that no passing of years would ever dull. But at the time, it seemed the wisest and the kindest thing that I would ever do. I drank the brandy down and poured another. We needed it, my unborn child and me because we were so cold. Even our fingers were numb, had lost all feeling hours ago.
If we were never born… The word if had never had any place in my vocabulary before, and none in my thoughts. Things were or they were not. Things happened, and you were either destroyed by them or you managed to salvage something. But whatever happened, speculation was a waste of time.
And yet… if we were never born… The question presented itself again, and this time, I answered. We’d never know about haunting. It was too late for me. Too late for Luca. Too late even for Rennie. But the baby was still asleep. There was still time. One thing was clear or seemed so then. This child must never feel what its mother was feeling now, never this wretched. I would protect him as I had always done for Rennie. But I remembered that I hadn’t been able to protect her, not really, not when it was most important.
She had seen me that night, had seen Aaron. Had heard the gunshot. Had stood, looking through the spokes of the banister, and seen him bloody. Our eyes met so
