HASTONBURY HALL, ENGLAND, 1918
She wanted to know about Sophia, so
I told her. Not everything but many things. She listened with so
much intensity that it was almost as though she was remembering it
herself. That was what I fantasized, anyway, in the hours I had to
spend without her.
“So what did we do when we rode into the
desert?”
She was partly joking with me, still challenging me
to see when I would run out. And she was deigning to believe me a
little bit. She had begun, in spite of herself, to believe what I
told her about my past. I could tell. But when she asked about
herself, when I recollected her role in these adventures, she was
still just playing.
“At first we were in a hurry. As I said, I needed
to get you away from my beast of a brother as quickly as I possibly
could.”
“And then?” I loved it when she took off her shoes
and got on the bed with me.
“And then we slowed down. The desert was utterly
empty. We began to feel safe. You were hungry. You ate most of the
food.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, you did. Greedy girl.”
“Was I five hundred stone?”
I shook my head, seeing her as she was in my mind’s
eye. “Hardly. You were as slender and beautiful as you are
now.”
“So I was greedy and ate all the food. And then
what?”
“Then I made a fire and set up a very primitive
tent and put our blankets under it.”
She nodded.
“And then we both realized that the stars were
extraordinary, so we moved out from under the tent.”
“That sounds nice. And then what?”
“We made tender love with the open sky as our
witness.” I also loved to see the blush in her cheeks.
“No, we didn’t.”
I smiled at her. “You’re right, we didn’t.”
“We didn’t?” Now she looked disappointed, and I
laughed.
“No.” Boldly, I touched her cheek. “I wanted
to.”
“Maybe I did, too. Why didn’t we?” She brought her
knees up to her chest.
“Because you were married to my brother.”
“The one who tried to strangle me.”
“Yes. He was murderously jealous, because he
thought I was betraying him and taking advantage of you. I didn’t
want to prove him right.”
“He deserved it.”
“Yes, he did. But we deserved better.”
I could see the emotion in her face. “Do you think
so?”
“Yes. The regrets stay with you. They distort you
over time. Even if you can’t remember them.” I touched her feet
through her socks. I was hungry to touch every part of her. “And
anyway, we’ll have our chance.”
I DON’T KNOW what happened to Sophia that night,
but when she came in the next morning, she was different. She was
both solemn and urgent.
“Dr. Burke is wrong about you. You are going to be
fine.”
I couldn’t lie to her.
“You are,” she said combatively.
“Tell that to my lungs.”
“I think I will.” She put her arms around me and
pressed her cheek to my chest. She had always seemed concerned
about somebody else seeing us, but she didn’t seem to care
now.
She held me for a long time, and then she looked up
at me. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said. “I can’t
stand to think of the pain you’ve been in. You deserve
better.”
“It’s all right,” I said quickly. “I’ve been
through worse.” Her eyes were full of sorrow, and I didn’t want it
for either of us.
“But that doesn’t make it hurt any less, does
it?”
“Yes, it does,” I said forcefully. “Pain is fear,
and I’m not afraid. I know I’ll have a new body soon enough.”
“You say that like your body is a room you can go
in and out of.” She had her hands on my arms. “But this is
you.”
I felt frustrated all of a sudden. I pointed to my
chest. “This is not me. This body is breaking down, but I am not.”
I didn’t want her look of sympathy. I hated to be weak in front of
her. “I promise you. I will be healthy again, and I will find
you.”
Her expression was tender. She was quiet for a
while, and it occurred to me that she looked older than she did the
first day I woke up to her. “We deserve better,” she said
softly.
“We will have better.”
“Will we?”
“Yes, we will.” I looked at her with absolute
seriousness. “I don’t mind this. I can wait a little longer if I
have to, because I know I will be with you again, and I will be
strong again. I will take care of you and make love to you and make
you happy.”
“You make me happy,” she said. She put her arms
around me, and I realized I was crying into her shoulder and I
didn’t want her to see. My fever was riding so high it was hard not
to shiver in her arms.
“One thing, though,” she said after a while, and
her voice was lighter.
“What?”
“When you find me again, how will I know it’s
you?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“But what if I don’t believe you? I’m a stubborn
chit, you know.”
I held her hard. “Yes, you are. But you are not
hopeless.”
ON THE LAST sunny day of my life, Sophia brought
me her father’s coat and led me outside. I can remember the effort
it took to stay on my feet from one step to the next. We walked
just far enough from the house to forget it was a hospital. She
wore a bright blue wool hat and a fuzzy red dress that felt like
contentment itself between my fingers. She didn’t look like a nurse
but like a lovely girl without a care on a stroll with her beau in
the garden. That’s how we pretended it was.
We found a patch of grass in the sunshine and lay
down on it. I felt the warmth of the sun and the sweetness of her
head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her. I wished I could
crawl into that moment and stay inside it without letting another
one pass. In rapt silence we watched a yellow butterfly land on the
toe of her boot.
“This was a butterfly garden once,” she told me.
“The most magnificent thing you have ever seen.” She turned to me
and smiled. “Well, maybe not the most magnificent thing you
have ever seen.”
I laughed. I loved the sound of her voice. I wanted
her to keep talking, and she seemed to know it.
“There were thousands, tens of thousands, of them
in all colors. And you should have seen the flowers. I was very
small, but I would just lie here and let the butterflies land on
every part of me and try not to laugh when they tickled.”
“I wish I had seen it,” I said, watching the slow
flap of the butterfly’s wings on her boot.
“My mother made it. She was famous for the gardens
she made.”
“Was she?”
“Yes. And for being beautiful. And reckless.”
“Reckless?”
“She liked fast things. My father said she had
jumpy legs, because she couldn’t stand still even for a
second.”
We thought about that for a while. I wanted to be
careful.
“And what about the butterflies? What happened to
them?”
“They went after she died. My father didn’t try to
keep up the gardens after she was gone.”
My carefulness hadn’t helped me. I wished I hadn’t
asked that question. It cast us out of the shelter of that moment
and back into the wash of time. Time was loss, and Sophia had
suffered too much of it.
She didn’t lift her head, but I felt the sadness of
her body pressed against mine, and I was too weak to resist it. It
filled me, too.
“I love you,” I told her. “More than anything. I
always have.”
I heard the wetness in her breathing. I lifted my
hand to her face and felt her tears.
“I love you,” she said.
Those were words I had waited lifetimes to hear,
but they gave me a deep ache. I wished she didn’t. She had lost too
much already. I wished I had died in the muddy valley of the river
Somme and not made her lose one more thing.
FOR TWO DAYS I went in and out of feverish sleep.
Sophia was there. I saw her when I opened my eyes and felt her when
I couldn’t. I wondered if she had been fired from her nursely
duties, she was with me so constantly. I talked to her, and she
talked to me, but I have only the blurriest idea of what we
said.
And then I woke up. My body ached, I could barely
get air, but my head was clear. Sophia was initially ecstatic when
she saw me sitting up with my eyes open. The innocence of her
response was both a joy and an agony to me.
But on further examination, she must have known
that the color of my skin wasn’t right. My breathing wasn’t right.
Dr. Burke said something to her in a low voice outside my door, and
her manner changed when she came back in. Her eyes were full, and
her mouth was pressed into a cooperative shape.
“Back again, are you?” I asked her teasingly,
talking in a low voice to suppress an upheaval of fluid and
coughing. “Haven’t you gotten yourself tossed out yet for spending
too much time with patient D. Weston?”
“They can’t really toss me, can they? They can’t
spare an extra set of hands. And it’s touchy, being that it is my
house.”
“But tell me the nurses are giving you a
respectably hard time at least.”
“I think they understand how I feel about D.
Weston.” She touched my ear tenderly. “All the nurses say you are
the most handsome we’ve got.”
I smiled because I didn’t have the air to laugh
anymore. “Is that what you talk about?”
She sat on my bed quietly for a while. Her face had
turned solemn. “I want to go with you,” she said.
I put my hands on her waist. “What do you mean, my
darling?”
“I want to go where you’re going. I’m not scared of
dying. I want to stay together and come back together. You said
that souls cohere. I want to stay with you.”
“Oh, Sophia.” I kissed her ribs through her
sweater. I pressed my face into her abdomen. “You can’t take your
own life.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re young and beautiful and healthy,
and you can’t. Anyway, rebirth comes from wanting to live. Suicide
is rejection; it’s the end. If death is truly what you choose, you
might not come back after that.”
“But I don’t want to reject my life. I don’t want
to choose death—I want to live. I just want to live my life with
you.”
I took both her hands, and I looked in her eyes.
“You can’t possibly know how much I want to live my life with you.
For now you have to try to live as fully and happily as you can.
You’ll become a nurse. Maybe a doctor. You’ll fall in love.”
“I’ve fallen in love,” she said, and her eyes
spilled over.
I kissed her hands. “You’ll fall in love again. And
maybe you’ll have children and you’ll grow old and die when it’s
time. And maybe you’ll look back and remember me every so often.
And when you come back again, I will be waiting for you. I will
find you.”
She was shaking her head. “But how? You say that,
but how will you find me?”
“I just will. I always do.”
“But I won’t even know you, will I? I’ll treat you
like a stranger. My memory is only average. I’m not even as good as
Nestor the dog.” She started to cry, and I held her as close as I
could.
“You don’t need to know me. I’ll know you.”
I felt her wet sobs against my chest. “I won’t know
me,” she said.