He shook his head slowly at first, then seeing her uncertainty, with more vehemence. “Not many, no.”
“You’ve been in love, though.” She stated it as fact.
“I suppose so, yes,” he replied evenly. “A long time ago.”
For a long moment she said nothing, only gazed into the distance, squinting against the harsh light that broke across the stratosphere. John leaned his shoulder against the tree beside her and buried his hands in his pockets as he stared down at the ridge’s pebbled surface.
“Did you ever think of asking her to marry you?”
He cleared this throat, nodded again. “Yes, I did.”
She looked at him then, realization dawning. “Wait - did you ask her to marry you?”
Returning her glance: “Yes.” His voice was soft, barely above a whisper. He could feel the beginnings of a knot, entrenched at the base of his throat. His concern was with her reaction to what was to come, though probably she assumed it was related more to some secreted longing for the woman he’d lost.
“And she said yes...didn’t she?”
He nodded, more or less resigned. “Yes, she did.”
Meg wrenched her gaze away from him. “How long were you married?” she asked. He could hear the faint warble in her voice, a wavering she attempted to mask by speaking louder.
He blew out a silent breath. “Two and a half years.”
“And you divorced?” she guessed.
“No.” He wanted to touch her but resisted. “She died.”
Her head snapped in his peripheral vision, her eyes zeroing back in on his face. He’d surprised her, just as he assumed he would.
“How? I mean...what happened to her?”
“Cancer. Cervical,” John said vaguely, his mouth twitching in a weak smile.
Meg’s hand found his and held it, curling in a tight show of solidarity. “I’m so sorry.”
John returned a faint squeeze. “Like I said, it was long ago - almost eight years.” He wanted to tell her it was all right, to take away some of her pain and prevent her from feeling sorry for him. Instead, he waited.
Her grip loosened then, and she took an intrepid step forward, away from the tree. John tried not to lose his nerve as he watched her edge closer to the rim. She stopped a foot short of falling, her body tense with coiled fear.
“How long were you together?” she asked quietly as she turned back around. “In total.”
“Not even three years. We were together only a short time before we married - just shy of three months.” He kneaded his forehead with rigid fingers. “God, we were so young.”
He shook his head, disentangling himself from the niggling barbs of remembrance. Meg’s eyes were full of a sympathy he didn’t want. “Let’s talk about something else,” he said, giving her an easy smile.
She clasped her hands behind her back and rocked forward on her toes. “What would you like to talk about?”
“Recite another poem for me.”
She cleared her throat, chuckling a little. “All right. What’s your fancy? Sonnet? Limerick? Free verse?”
“Doesn’t matter. Something light.”
She looked down and chewed on her lip while she contemplated his request. “How about some Ogden Nash?” she said. She turned her toes out and drew her spine up straight, then lifted her voice.
“There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.”
At the end she dipped her head in a curtsy. The way she did it reminded John of a humble, unknowingly brilliant street performer.
He chuckled rich and deep - it would’ve echoed for miles, had there been anything solid around them to return the sound. “Remarkably pleasant, indeed.” His eyes held the vestiges of his laughter even as the sound of it faded. “Although I’m not much for gin.”
Meg smiled, clearly pleased. She was calm as she looked away. Relaxed.
Oblivious to the inches long scorpion scuttling toward her.
John sucked in a breath when he noticed it, knowing he couldn’t afford to frighten her, close as she stood to the rim.
“Hold still, OK?” he said softly.
He took a step toward her. He could see the shift in her eyes the moment she grasped the reason for his cautious approach. She couldn’t see the scorpion, but she knew there was something. Every muscle tensed as she froze in place, like someone trapped in an excruciating spell of tetany.
The scorpion was large and colored like the earth. Its tail was lifted, curled in an ugly hook, and its pincers were curved like vises. John, recognizing its defensive posture, moved quickly now, determined to stop it before it came within striking distance of Meg’s bared ankle.
What happened next unfolded in a blur, multiple events occurring in quick succession within a span of seconds. John drew back his foot to kick the scorpion over the rock’s edge - Meg glanced down just in time to see the toe of his boot connect with its thorax - she opened her mouth in a soundless scream and took a juddering step backward - the rock ledge loosened, raining dust and gravel as it ground out from beneath her foot - John’s hand shot out and gripped her arm, securing her in place.
“You don’t want to go too far that way, either,” he said. The coolness in his voice belied the racing of his heart as he whipped her against him, reeling her in from the peril of the edge.
Meg clung to him, breathing heavily, her skin roughed with goose bumps. It took her several long moments to regain the power of speech.
“What. Was. That?” Her eyes flicked to the spot where she’d seen the scorpion. She kept her arms circled around John’s waist.
“Bark scorpion,” he replied, smoothing her hair away from her eyes.
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips. “Are they poisonous?”
He nodded, his eyes bouncing between Meg’s dilated pupils. He kissed her forehead, then pulled her head back into his chest.
“What would’ve happened?” she asked, tilting her chin to look back up at him a moment later. “If it’d stung me...”
“I can’t say for sure, because I’ve never been stung. I’ve heard, though, that their venom can cause racking pain - sometimes for days.” He cupped her cheek. “They’re rarely fatal, though.”
She gulped, then turned her face to look at the other spot: the place where she’d almost fallen. “Oh God,” she whispered. “And then I—”
She didn’t try to complete that thought. Her eyes moved back to John’s. “You just saved my life. Twice.”
He chuckled, shook his head. “It was nothing, Meg. Anyone would’ve done the same. That’s what happens when instinct kicks in. Adrenaline gives people super powers they never knew they had.”
She eyed him dubiously but didn’t argue. Instead: “I think I’m ready to go.”
John rubbed her cheek with his knuckles. He nodded. “OK.”
He bent to kiss her lips. When he pulled back, his mouth was tugged up on one side in a cockeyed grin. “We need to do that more often.”
Meg raised her eyebrows. “Which part? The tempting fate, or the flirting with death?”
“The kissing. That part.”
“Oh.” She returned his smile. “Yes.”
John sealed his mouth over hers again. Lightly sucked on her lower lip. Then suddenly he was scooping her up in his arms, curving his strong arms around her back and beneath her knees.
“Homeward bound?” he asked.
Meg laughed, then agreed. “Homeward bound.”
* * *
He’d been married.
He was a widower.
Now that Meg had had time to recover from her binate close call, she was able to fixate on other things
apart from the painful reminder of her own mortality.
She wished she’d thought to ask him her name. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to know - only that she’d pictured a million iterations of this bygone woman, and perhaps she wished for a name to attach to the face she’d imagined for her.
It was a lovely face, in Meg’s mind. It had a bow mouth and a high forehead, framed in smooth waves of honey hair; unmarred skin stretched over chiseled cheekbones; eyes the color of rain.
She’d imagined a whole set of character traits for her, as well. She would’ve been tender and kind, Meg decided. Soft-spoken with a generous laugh. Confident, but not conceited. Clearly she was a well-traveled woman, which would’ve lent her a cosmopolitan flair. Probably she was cognizant of global politics and could articulate the nuts and bolts of foreign policy with facility and intellect. Her social savvy and self-effacing wit would’ve set strangers at ease. Inevitably, she possessed the type of demure charm a woman of Meg’s ilk could only aspire to.
John seemed to have taken note of her preoccupation. Their return hike had been perceptibly quieter, with multiple attempts at banter on his part, and multiple laconic replies on Meg’s.
When they reached the Jeep, he surprised her by circling her waist with his hands and lifting her clear off the ground and into her seat. He looked at her for a long moment, his gaze searching and perhaps a bit wounded. Meg felt sure he would ask her then what was bothering her, but he kissed her instead. He pressed into her with a subtle desperation, held on to her like a cherished object he was on the verge of losing. After a moment of shocked reticence, her fingers wove through his hair, and she angled her face, pushing against him with analogous force. John groaned quietly into her mouth and tightened his hold on her waist, pulling her into his chest.
When they broke apart, his unrelenting grip bespoke his reluctance to let her go.
“I’m not going anywhere, John,” Meg said quietly.
He didn’t smile. “Promise?”
She used her teeth to pin down her bottom lip, preventing its upward curl as she bobbed her head.
The harsh noise from the engine precluded any conversation during their trip back toward the lodge. John drove straight to his cottage, without so much as a backward glance at Meg’s cabin.
A waxing gibbous moon gleamed like a freshly minted nickel, pulled aloft by the sinking sun. They sat a moment in the Jeep, the keys still dangling from the ignition. Meg watched the sun drowning in a puddle of diffuse purple light, but she could feel John’s eyes on her.
They shifted at the same time. Meg hopped down from the vehicle’s lifted frame as John did the same. She followed him to the door, though her feet dragged. Meanwhile, she worked on an excuse in her head - something she could offer up as a viable reason to part ways. She felt like a method actor who’d finally grown weary of her lengthy masquerade as someone other than herself.
When she sauntered past John into the dark cottage, the door shut with more force than she’d expected. She started, her heart pounding like a fist as she whirled around to face him.
He stood with his back pressed up against the door, staring at her with hooded disquiet. Meg watched curiously as he tipped his head back, resting it against the sturdy wood.
“You’re not still thinking about the scorpion, are you.” A statement, not a question.
She shook her head slowly.
“And you’re not thinking about falling either.”
Again she shook her head.
John let out the breath that had him pinned like a tense, squirming insect against the door. His shoulders slumped forward, and he closed his eyes with a subtle nod, as if she’d just validated his deepest fear.
“We fell out of love.”
His voice was so low, Meg wondered whether she had heard him correctly. Had he even spoken at all, or had she merely imagined it?
He took a cautious step toward her. The moonlight streaming through the window cut across his brow and illuminated his eyes as he lifted his chin. Meg felt the crumbling of his inscrutability like the insistent tremor of an earthquake. The determined set of his jaw confirmed what she already knew: that he found it difficult to reveal so much in such a short span of time. She wondered how many months or years it had been since he’d last shared of himself in this way - or indeed, whether he ever had. She felt a sudden, irrational need to protect him from his own discomfort.
I should stop him, she thought. Let him know it isn’t necessary for him to explain any further, that he doesn’t owe me an explanation. I’ve not yet earned his trust.
She feared what would become of them once he’d divulged whatever it was he felt the need to say. How would he be with her, once she had his secrets? Would this easy harmony, this natural synergy they shared be left intact or in tatters? Perhaps the sense of mystery enshrouding their respective pasts was the largest contributor to the electricity that hummed between them: always more to discover, puzzles to solve.
But about this she was deeply curious. We fell out of love.
By the time she opened her mouth, she was no longer sure of whether she intended to stop him, or prompt him to continue. In the end, his mind worked faster than hers.
“Her name was Catherine - my wife. We met at Dartmouth when we were even younger than you are now.” John’s mouth tilted in a weak smile. “She was never easy to love. Not like—” He swallowed his words, shook his head to clear the thought that had formed there.
“We fought passionately, and somehow I convinced myself it was part and parcel of loving someone so deeply. That we’d grow older and wiser, and we’d do it together, and then maybe we wouldn’t fight so much. I was only able to convince myself of this because, in between the fights, we were happy. Really happy - or at least I thought we were. And when we married and Catherine wanted a baby, I told myself this was part of the growing. That this was what came next in life’s natural order, and this was what I owed her as her husband, someone who had vowed to love her for the rest of our lives.
“For two and a half years we tried to get pregnant.” His face lined with sadness. “I was scared at first, and then, for those brief moments when we allowed ourselves to think it may have worked - that we were about to become parents - I was actually excited. And then it grew exhausting, this continuous cycle of hopefulness and frustration. It was even harder for her than it was for me, I’m sure. We became so singularly focused, and the disappointment became more and more devastating with each passing month.
“But she wouldn’t hear reason. She became fragile, so easily torn apart whenever one of her friends would happily announce her own pregnancy. Whenever I tried to suggest that we take a break from it all, she would get so upset.” His eyes blurred beneath a pall of unhappy memories.
A moment later he blinked it all away, and his gaze once again found Meg. “We weren’t happy, Meg - neither of us. Nothing proved that fact to me better than an incident that happened a few days after she returned from a trip to visit her mother. I overheard her on the phone with one of her friends. I’d come home early from work, and I heard her in the kitchen, telling her friend Helen she was going to leave me.”
He dropped his head into his hands, and his tall frame, normally held so nobly erect, sagged in remembered defeat. Meg’s hand twitched. She thought to touch him, comfort him in some small way, but she stilled once more when suddenly he barked a humorless laugh.
“The thing of it is, I’d have stuck by her. As miserable as we were, as unhappy as we made each other, I really don’t believe I ever would have left. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing that day. I was shocked and angry, but I was also relieved - and that fact broke my heart more than any of the rest of it.
“I planned to confront her about it. It was a few days later, and I left work early, because I could barely concentrate. I was surprised when I got home and found she wasn’t there. She had a car, but she didn’t work at the time, and she rarely went anywhere in the afternoons.
�
�So I waited. I thought of everything I wanted to say to her. I was going to ask her to stay, to work it out with me. This was the right thing to do, I decided. But I wouldn’t beg.
“Christ, I was so angry. I was indignant, and sad, and just...destroyed. I hated both of us, for letting this happen to our marriage.
“When she came home hours later, I could tell something was off. She’d been crying, I knew immediately. I thought, This is it. She’s going to tell me she wants a divorce.” His voice quieted several decibels. “And instead she told me she was sick.” He drew in a shaky breath as he plowed a hand back through his mussed hair. “Two months later she was gone.”
John glanced up just in time to catch the tear that detached from Meg’s lower eyelid, before she could wipe it away. He stepped forward as it rolled down her cheek, and wrapped his hands around her shoulders. He gave her a light squeeze, imploring her to meet his eyes.
“Do you know why I’m telling you this?”
Meg worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
John sighed. “I’m not completely certain either,” he whispered, perhaps to himself. “I guess I’m telling you in case you were tempted to compare yourself to her. Catherine was a wonderful woman in many ways, and I have no doubt she would have made an incredible wife to some man. I just...wasn’t that man. I know that now. She wasn’t ‘the one’ for me, and I couldn’t be that for her either.
“She should never have died so young, but she did, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. I’ve made my peace with it - that’s why I didn’t mention her before.” He bent his knees, crouching slightly to look into Meg’s watery eyes. “I think what I’m most afraid of is that, by admitting how weak I was, I’ll lose you, too. So please, don’t let this change anything between us. I may not have fought for Catherine the way I should have, but I swear to you: I learn from my mistakes.”
He left the rest unsaid.
* * *
They ate a late dinner of grilled cheese and tomato soup from the lodge. Meg watched while John created a number of rough sketches, scrawled the particulars of their hike across pages of grainy white paper with the same brooding contemplation she reserved for her journal entries. A tree branch, a cliff face, an animal carcass. Even the scorpion.
Seventh Wonder Page 9
