Her Dear & Loving Husband

by Meredith Allard

  Sarah handed her the journal. Olivia read aloud:

  I am looking lovingly into the eyes of a man, though I cannot see his face because it is featureless, like a blank slate…

  I am sitting at a table surrounded by people who look like they should be part of a Thanksgiving Feast tableau with their modest Pilgrim-style clothing, old-fashioned manners, and anti-quated way of speaking…

  I am at a wedding. It is a wedding from long ago, centuries past, a simple affair with family and a few close friends…

  I am in the kitchen cooking supper, stirring a pottage in the cauldron in the hearth…

  I am standing in front of a tree. The tree is scarred, hunched, ugly, not beautiful like other trees because this tree knows its sinister purpose…

  Though I am too weak to see clearly I know I am locked and chained in a dank, gloomy cage in a dungeon infested with rats…

  When Olivia stopped reading it was silent in the store, the only noise coming from the rain pellets striking the store with barely restrained fury. Sarah walked to the window and looked out at the wharf. She saw the murky black sky, the water crashing down, the bay cracking in harsh waves under the nor’easter’s strength. She stayed by the window, watching, finding comfort in the acerbic weather. The disturbance she felt locked inside was there as a winter storm for all of Salem to see. When she felt Olivia watching her, she turned and saw concern in her friend’s steel-gray eyes.

  “The one about her husband telling her that Rebecca had been arrested—that’s the story James told me last night. He had done the same thing, gone home to tell Elizabeth that Rebecca had been taken away. Elizabeth was cooking in the cauldron, and they talked about returning to England…”

  Olivia handed Sarah the clothbound notebook. “What do you think it means?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said.

  Olivia closed her eyes and nodded her head the way she did the night of Sarah's psychic reading, a rhythmic meditation. Suddenly she was still and she stayed that way a long moment. When she opened her eyes she smiled. She clutched Sarah’s hands so tightly Sarah flinched.

  “I think I know what to do. Will you meet me at Jennifer’s tonight, Sarah? And bring James. He should be there as well.”

  Sarah agreed. She would agree to anything that would help her make sense of her dreams.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jennifer’s house was silent, the nervous, impatient kind of silence you feel when something unwanted is about to happen. Along with Jennifer, Sarah and James were there, as well as Olivia and her friend Martha, a heavy-set woman with her black hair cut into a flapper’s bob. Martha lingered near the window on the fringe of the scene, silent, listening, watching. Sarah stood with her back to the wall, her arms crossed in front of her, her body a tight standing board, her muscles stiff, her joints heavy. She felt like she needed to shield herself from something, only she didn’t know what. Everyone darted their eyes around the room, looking at each other, away from each other, but no one was speaking. Somehow she knew she wasn’t going to like what they had to say.

  “James,” Jennifer said, “why don’t you tell Sarah how your wife died.”

  James didn’t look at Sarah. He spoke to the polished wood floor beneath his feet.

  “My wife died during the Salem Witch Trials. She was ac-cused of being a witch, arrested, and she died in jail before she was tried.”

  He looked at Sarah with the same searching stare he had since he first saw her outside his house. But all Sarah could think to say was, “I’m sorry. That must have been horrible.”

  “It was.”

  Olivia put her hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “You’ve been dreaming about the witch trials, haven’t you? Don’t you dream about watching some of the convicted witches die as they’re hung from a tree?”

  “Yes, I dream about that.”

  Sarah looked at everyone in the room, and she could tell by their drawn, worried faces that they were trying to tell her something she might not want to know.

  “Think about this,” Jennifer said. “The first time we drove by James’s house you thought it looked familiar. Then you went back to get a better look. What happened when he saw you?”

  “He was confused. He called me Elizabeth. He thought I was Elizabeth.” She closed her eyes as she remembered that night. Then she looked at James. “Elizabeth was your wife.” He nodded. “And she died during the witch trials? She died in jail?” He nod-ded again.

  “And didn’t you tell me once that you thought James seemed like the man in your dreams?” Jennifer asked. “You can’t see his face, but the silhouette is the same?”

  Sarah pressed her hand to her chest, pushing on her ribs because her heart felt ready to implode through her bones. She sat in the chair next to Olivia, darting her eyes around the blank canvas of the white wall, afraid to look at anyone.

  “Who you are is not yourself,” Sarah said, recalling Olivia’s cryptic words from her reading at the Witches Lair five months be-fore. “He will find you. He is here and he will find you. Who you are is not yourself.” Her hands went to her head. James rushed to her side.

  “Sarah? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing makes sense,” she said. The words felt scattered in her mind, like disconnected letters on a crossword puzzle. She shook her head, pushing the unnerving thoughts away. Olivia took Sarah’s hand, then gestured toward Martha, standing silently in the background.

  “Martha is here to help you, dear. If you learned the truth about what your dreams are telling you then it might make the nightmares go away. You could sleep again.”

  Sarah sighed with stilted breath. Her eyes brimmed with saltwater, the terror barely tucked beneath the edges of her mind. “What are you trying to tell me?” she asked. But she al-ready knew. The pained look on their faces verified what she already knew.

  “We think you might be the reincarnation of James’s wife,” Martha said. She spoke with a southern accent, her voice soft and easy. “We think Elizabeth’s spirit has been reborn in you, and I’d like to lead you through a past-life regression to see if it’s true.”

  Sarah jumped out of her chair. “How can you say that to me! How gullible do you think I am? What other metaphysical powers do you want me to believe in next? Now I have to believe in vampires because James is a vampire.” It was the first time she spit the word out with disgust, as if it left a bitter taste in her mouth. She stared at Jennifer, pointing an accusing finger. “Now you’re going to tell me you’re not just a Wiccan but a witch with real magic?”

  Jennifer held her hands out, palms up, a gesture of surren-der. “Yes, Sarah, I’m a witch with real magic.”

  Olivia squeezed Sarah’s hand. “Don’t worry, dear, we’re not wicked witches. It’s part of the Wiccan Rede that we can’t use our spells for evil, and the Covenant of the Goddess says we can’t in-terfere in people’s lives unless we have their permission. People need to acknowledge the power our magic contains before we can cast a spell for them. Harm none, Sarah, that’s our motto. We harm none.”

  “Black arts is a terrible term for what we do,” Jennifer said. “We’re good witches, Sarah. You have nothing to fear from us.”

  Sarah slumped in her chair. “Great,” she said, the sarcasm grating her voice. “Next you’re going to tell me werewolves are real and Frankenstein lives down the street.”

  The others shook their heads. Sarah was so visibly disturbed they seemed afraid to say anything that might upset her more. She looked at them, one at a time, but they stayed silent.

  “James?”

  He didn’t look at her. “There’s no such thing as Franken-stein,” he said.

  “There’s no such thing as Frankenstein,” Sarah repeated, a manic hysteria creeping into her voice. “There’s no such thing as Frankenstein! So there are vampires, witches, and werewolves in the world, walking around among us while most people think they’re make-believe. And now you’re trying to tell me that someone else’s spirit is living insi
de my body? What does that make me, a ghost? Doesn’t that make us one great big happy haunted family. We should join the Halloween festival next year.”

  She began pacing the kitchen, around and around the granite island. She couldn’t face the others, and she couldn’t hold back the despair she felt creeping inside her fragile, sleep-deprived mind.

  “Sarah,” James said, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. If you don’t want to do the past-life regression then don’t. It’s your decision.”

  Sarah dropped her head into her hands and wept. She was too overwhelmed. James walked to her, put his arms around her, pulled her close.

  “Everything is going to be all right,” he said.

  “Don’t you touch me!”

  Sarah tried to push him away, but he was too strong. She turned away from him instead.

  “This is all your idea,” she said, spitting the words like wooden stakes aimed at his heart. “All you ever cared about was finding your wife. You want me to be your wife so you won’t have to miss her anymore.”

  “Sarah, no,” James said. “That’s not true.”

  “You don’t care that I look like Elizabeth? That’s not why you want to spend time with me?”

  “It was at first, but not now.”

  Sarah didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. It didn’t matter. It was all nonsense. She pushed her way out the front door, weeping and unable to see in front of her, her vision blurred with salt and bitterness. She was determined to make it home where she could lock herself inside, safe from the superstitious madness she was sure they were trying to feed her. James reached the street first and frightened her.

  “Sarah, please, listen to me.”

  He grabbed her arm and turned her toward him. When he wouldn’t let go she tried to wriggle away.

  “Stop it! You’re hurting me!”

  He dropped her arm and stepped back. “I’m so sorry—I just want you to listen. Sarah!”

  But she was already running away.

  “Sarah!” he called. But she kept running away.

  She wanted to escape Salem and go back to Los Angeles, back to the husband she never loved but who wouldn’t let her give in weakly to the dreams, the man who wouldn’t expect her to believe such ludicrous superstitions. Back to a life where she could be like everyone else, going to work, coming home, reading books, watching television, listening to music, going out with friends. Normal things normal people do every day. Since she moved to Salem she had been asked to believe things no sane person should be expected to believe. She began to feel foolish for ever going along with any of it. Vampires, witches, and werewolves, oh my. Where was normal here?

  If the others hadn’t been so serious she would have laughed in their faces. She couldn’t believe what she heard, and worse, they seemed to expect her to believe them. There she goes again, she thought, silly Sarah too gullible to be rational, too out of touch with reality. She felt paranoid suddenly, as if they were trying to push her over the edge of sanity where she would stay, sitting forever in the corner of the mental hospital, a modern-day Ren-field waiting for the call of her demon master. She would spend the rest of her life babbling about vampires and witches and how she had known some once. Then she would tell the doctors that who she was was not herself because she was really someone who died over three hundred years before. The doctors would nod with grim faces as they scribbled notes onto their legal pads, upped the dosage of her medication, and ordered a straight jacket to bind her arms to stop her from rubbing away the horror movie of evil witches and bloodthirsty vampires playing on a continuous reel behind her eyes. The thought of being bound by the straight jacket terrified her as much as the tentacle-like chains that followed her everywhere in her nightmares.

  Her mind was muddled, and she was too angry to say what she was really thinking. She was afraid they were right. She was afraid that what they said made sense because she saw the con-nections between her dreams and James’s life, and yet the thought of it, of being possessed by a specter, of something separate from her living inside her body, mind, and soul terrified her. She wondered if she even had a soul, and if she did, whose was it, Elizabeth’s or hers? At that moment she was too afraid to wonder. Her terror bubbled its way up from agitation in her heart to fear in her throat. She had learned about specters she didn’t want to know could exist, and worse, that she might be one herself. She was out of her mind with an emotion somewhere between fury and panic, so she lashed out at them, trying to make her fear disappear by making them disappear. If she didn’t have to look at them then none of this would be real.

  Running home she watched the shadows, expecting to see the hideously disfigured Nosferatu jumping out at her, catching her with his quick arms and claw-like fingernails, strangling her with his wicked bite, drinking her blood until she became the corpse and he was healthy and fed. In the lights of the windows she saw green-faced witches casting evil spells, standing over bubbling cauldrons, watching her in haunted crystal balls the way the wicked witch watched Dorothy’s every move. When she es-caped into her house she turned on the lights, looked inside the closets, and checked the door three times to be sure it was locked. Only then could she exhale, though she was still afraid there was something she couldn’t see lurking somewhere she didn’t look. She imagined she saw the binding chains slink like snakes toward her ankles.

  She woke up screaming that night, though screaming in the night had become normal for her. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to sleep through the darkness, to feel the stress of the day melt away, to drift and dream and awaken refreshed. She was tired of being tired. She had tried sleeping pills, more than one pill some nights, more than two pills other nights, but nothing helped.

  She didn’t try to go back to sleep, so she went into the living room and turned on the television. She knew from other sleep-less nights that there was nothing worth watching after midnight, nothing but infomercials for exercise routines and kitchen gad-gets. She flipped to the movie channel and began watching a familiar scene though she had never seen the movie before. The setting was familiar—wooden houses, horse-drawn carts, farmers, reverends, and magistrates wearing Pilgrim-looking clothes. Then she realized she was watching the film based on Arthur Miller’s play, set in Salem during the time of the witch trials. As she watched she kept her hand on her chest to remind herself to breathe. She was keeping the air trapped in her lungs. There was seventeenth century Salem in its gritty Hollywood recreation, the manic accusations from the girls, the possessed, horrible faces, the disgust of those who thought it was all nonsense, the terror of the accused, the arrogance of the magistrates. When she watched the arrested women as they were wheeled away to a dungeon and death unless they confessed to being witches, she cried.

  When the movie was over she looked out the window at the moon, the stars, the void beyond. She wondered what else was out there she couldn’t see or understand, and she realized she needed to face her fear. She had to learn the truth about her dreams and understand why they were recklessly haunting her.

  She remembered the look on James’s face the first time he saw her. “Lizzie. My Lizzie,” he said, with such sweet gratitude, “you’ve come home to me.”

  She considered the possibilities. Maybe she was Elizabeth come home to him. Why did she choose to move to Salem? She could have gone anywhere. Why did she think James’s house looked familiar? She had never seen it before. Why did James’s silhouette, though ghost-skinned and dark-eyed, look familiar, like it was the man in her dreams? Learning that James’s wife died in jail during the witch trials was the final stroke of the panoramic painting. There was only one answer that made it all make sense. But what would that answer mean for her? Would Sarah Alex-ander cease to exist if Elizabeth Wentworth appeared from the past?

  She sat on the couch, looked out the window, and watched the stars dance and twirl in the distance. She meditated on the brightest star, mindful of her breath, struggling to still her mind.
Soon the answer came. She had to see James. Right now. She needed to apologize, beg his forgiveness, hope that he loved her, not because she might be the reincarnation of his wife but because she was Sarah, plain Sarah. Everything needed to be all right between them. Whether she was Sarah or Elizabeth or someone else she didn’t know, whether he was a supernatural phenomenon or a gentle demon, he would always be her James. She knew that so clearly now she didn’t know how she couldn’t see it before.

  She looked at the clock and saw it was 3:20 a.m. Outside her window weighted darkness covered everything everywhere, not even a faint light peeking from beneath a cloud to say dawn would come soon. If she left then, she decided, she would still have some time with him before sunrise. She pulled her black hoodie sweater over her t-shirt and pajama bottoms, slid her feet into her slippers, grabbed her keys, and left at a sprint. She ran down one road, then another, and one more, until she stood across the street from the wooden gabled house. It was quiet in the neighborhood, all the houses dark, all but one, the one that creaked old-time tales with two gables pointing at the napping night sky. Standing across the street, she saw the soft glow of candlelight flickering through the diamond-paned window, and she thought she heard the house whispering her name. But was it Elizabeth or Sarah she heard? She wasn’t sure. She watched her steps as she walked across the street. It might not be a good idea to sneak up on someone like James no matter how friendly he seemed, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave.

  Before she crossed the yard to knock on his door he was there, James, standing in the open doorway. She was startled when he appeared so suddenly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I heard your footsteps and hoped you might want to come in.” He opened the door wider and stepped aside so she could walk past. He smiled when he saw her pajamas.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  Standing by the door, she hesitated when she realized she had never been inside his house before, at least not as Sarah, if she had ever really been anyone else. She walked in and stop-ped. She saw the high, gabled ceiling and the wood beams. She saw a large open great room lit only by candlelight, the kitchen to the left, and another smaller room to the right. The kitchen made her smile. It was old-fashioned, right out of the seventeenth cen-tury, with pots and pans and blue and white dishes lined up in shelves along the wall while a cauldron hung in the hearth. But there was also a modern sink, refrigerator, and a microwave oven. The eclectic coupling of the past and the present fit well in this house. Everything in the great room, the walls and most of the furniture, was simple and wood. The only modern furniture was a flat-screen television, a long reading chair, and a laptop computer on the seventeenth-century desk. Then she noticed the English professor’s book collection. There is nothing more lovely to a librarian than a roomful of books, and she marveled at the sight. She recited one of her favorite quotes: “I who always imagined Paradise to be a sort of library.”