“Hello, Noah.”
Silence abounded while they waited for a miracle to bring ease between them.
“I think we should talk. Could I come in?”
“Addie and Robert aren’t home. They’re gone to the Davises’.”
“Yes, I know, Robert told me. That’s why I came.”
She hid her surprise and said, “What good will talking do?”
“I don’t know...” He dropped his gaze to the threshold and shook his head forlornly. “I don’t know,” he repeated, quieter. “I only know we’ve got to because we can’t go on like this anymore.”
She stepped back and freed his way. “Come in then.”
He moved the way a farmer moves through his fields after they have been leveled by hail, entering the front room with its scent of pine and its total familiarity, even in the near dark. She left the door for him to close, placing herself a goodly distance away, waiting with her arms crossed, wrapped so tightly the weave of the crocheted shawl became distorted.
“I’ll light a lantern,” she said, heading toward a round parlor table between two chairs—three amorphous shapes in the dark.
“No, don’t. The kitchen is warmer anyway.” He moved toward it as if homing to some force beyond his control. In the doorway he paused, studying the room where he had shared meals and felicitations, laughter and games, and friendships whose absence had left a void in his life. Sarah had been writing: her things were scattered on the table. The room emanated a melancholy that struck him deep—the cat curled up on a rocking chair by the stove, the evidence of Sarah’s singular occupation on a Saturday night when the others were off to happier pursuits, the betrothal brooch he had given her resting among her writing materials like a sad, powerless talisman. He stepped near the edge of the table and looked down at her empty coffee cup, the brooch, her glasses, the open book with her effortless angular writing, so different from his own labored scratching that never seemed to follow the horizontal line of the page. He touched the book, read the last sentence she had written and felt a great pressure in his chest.
From the doorway she watched him and remarked quietly, “It’s not polite to read other people’s journals.”
He looked over his shoulder, studied her tightly crossed arms and smileless face. “You don’t have any secrets from me, Sarah. Everything you’re feeling, I’m feeling. I’d say we’re a couple of pretty miserable people.”
“Sit down.” She came into the room and closed the book, set the penholder atop it and left the brooch where it was. He hung his jacket on the back of a kitchen chair, took off his hat, scooped the cat off the rocker and dropped to it himself while Sarah resumed her place at the table.
Ruler stayed on Noah’s lap where she’d been put, giving their eyes a focal point while Noah scratched the creature’s neck and head. In time he lifted his gaze and asked wearily, “So what are we going to do, Sarah?”
She put her elbows on the table, wrapped one hand loosely around the other and rested her cheek on them. “I don’t know.”
Some time passed before he said, “I missed you.”
A smile touched her lips, then fled: her only reply.
“Say it,” he said.
“I think it’s better if I don’t.”
“Say it anyway.”
“I missed you, too.”
For a while they simply looked at each other, allowing the loneliness of the past months to show in their faces. Ruler began purring. Noah kept scratching.
“I’ve done some tough things in my life, but coming here tonight beats them all.”
“So why did you?”
“Because I’ve been going through hell and hell’s not my favorite place to be going through. How about you?”
“Yes. The same.”
“This town’s got some nice decent women now, but I’d as soon eat a dish of mud as take one of them out. Damn you for that, Sarah Merritt.”
Her smile glimmered again, as sad as before.
Noah drew a deep breath, let it out with a faint shudder and dropped his head against the back of the chair. His eyes closed. He set the rocker in slight motion and breathed, “I’m so damned tired.”
An urge flooded her as she studied him: to rise and cross the few feet that separated them, line his cheeks with both her. palms and kiss his closed eyes, then rest her jaw against his forehead.
She rose instead and refilled her coffee cup without offering him any. “I suppose you’ve heard Robert and Addie are expecting a baby.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“Ironic, isn’t it...” She stood facing the stove, a finger in the cup handle, without drinking. “... that I wish it were me.”
He opened his eyes and studied her long back with the latticework of ugly pumpkin-colored knit covering her brindle-brown blouse, and her hair streaming over both, in bad need of combing.
“Do you?”
“Yes, very much. I envy them.”
“That surprises me.”
“Me, too. I always thought my newspapering was enough to keep me happy.”
“And it’s not?”
She refused to answer.
He sighed.
A long time went by before he asked, “Could we talk about your father, Sarah?”
“My father is no longer mentioned in this house.”
“Your father’s been mentioned in every word that you and I have spoken since that night you found out about him.”
“I loved him more than any person on this earth and he betrayed that love in the most unforgivable way possible.”
“And now I pay for what he did to Addie. How much longer?”
“Why don’t you just go to one of those other women? It would be so much simpler for you.”
“Because you’re the one I’m stuck on. I told you that before. I stayed away from you for better than half a year hoping I could get over you but it didn’t work. I still love you.”
He watched her from behind, gauging her minute motions, the slight drop of her chin, the way she held the cup without drinking from it. She took it to the dry sink and set it down, untasted, then returned to her chair and her former pose with her cheek resting on her loosely joined hands.
“Marrying you would be sheer stupidity.”
“But you want to, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What if I came over there and kissed you and touched you in a less than brotherly way, what would happen?”
She laughed ruefully, put ten fingertips over her face and wobbled her head left and right twice.
“See?” he said. “That’s what I mean when I said coming here took some nerve. If you turned me away again it would be the last time. I could never come back again.”
“I’ve had the most preposterous thought these last few months,” she admitted, regarding him again over her joined hands. “It’s absurd, sinful even, but I’ve had it nonetheless, during my weaker moments when I’ve missed you so much I wondered if I might die of it. I’ve thought, why couldn’t I marry Noah and we would silently agree that he could continue going to Rose’s as he did when I first met him? There. Now you know what kind of woman I am.”
The corners of his mouth tipped up sadly. “Lonely, scared... just like me.”
They studied one another while the lantern hissed and the stove radiated warmth, finding their point-blank honesty at once disconcerting and relieving.
“Now I’ll tell you a deep, dark secret of my own, something I’ve imagined since we’ve been apart—coming here and hauling you upstairs and taking your dress off and kissing you in ten places and showing you that when you care about someone the way we care about each other, that’s a natural part of it. Do you want to try it?”
She laughed aloud, briefly. “Of course not.”
“No, of course not. If you’d said yes, you wouldn’t be Sarah and I wouldn’t love you and we wouldn’t be sitting here across the room from each other, hurting this way. So what should we do?”
&nb
sp; Her mouth got the tortured look that precedes tears. Her only answer was a shake of the head: “I don’t know, I’m so afraid.”
He put his feet flat on the floor and leaned forward, scaring the cat away. Resting both elbows on his knees, he fixed his eyes on Sarah’s. When he spoke his voice sounded constricted and unnatural.
“Did you really miss me so much you thought you might die of it?”
“Yes,” she whispered, feeling her chin grow hot where her joined hands touched it.
“Then meet me,” he said and pointed at the floor halfway between them. “There.”
She felt adhered to the chair, studying his earnest eyes, the slope of his shoulders leaning toward her, his squarish hands curved one around the other as he waited for her response. She had only to rise to be in his arms again and face the moment of proof. Her only other choice was to watch him walk out that door, never to return, to relive the purgatory she had suffered since they’d parted ways.
She had moved in a colorless, tasteless void these past seven months without him, but tonight he had merely to appear before her and she came back to life. He stepped into a room and her apathy vanished like frost from a lighted window-pane; she felt again.
To maintain this distance from him was agony. To watch his face reflect the torment on her own filled her with anguish. Was this passion? She so wanted passion, not for its own sake, but because without it she was doomed.
“Meet me,” he repeated.
She swallowed the tears that were on the verge of forming and pushed back her chair, fear and want crushing her like a great hand that would prevent her from rising. She pressed her palms to the tabletop and rose against it.
He got up from the rocker and waited.
“I wish I were Addie,” she whispered as she began to move toward him.
“No, you don’t,” he replied, moving, too, “because then there wouldn’t be you and me.”
They met at the corner of the table, pausing before one another before stepping into a tenuous embrace. They held each other loosely, acclimating to the tumult of feelings before he drew back and offered his eyes, then his mouth, softly. The great weight of loneliness lifted, and the kiss became a twining, the embrace a reclaiming of what each had given up. She put her arms about his neck and he drew her full-length against him. Heart to heart, they rested, their eyes closed, their fear of missteps dissolving in the grand rush of reunion. They kissed unbrokenly, testing each other, and themselves, letting the contact heat at will until their mouths opened and their tongues met. She made a small, pained sound in her throat and he replied with a tightening of his embrace. Suddenly their restraint vanished and their kiss became urgent, their bodies taken fire from the taste and touch of one another after the months of self-denial. He made a throaty sound, too, neither sob nor groan, but an agonized end of agony while their fists searched for a grip—his on the woolly weave of her shawl, hers on the smooth leather of his vest.
In time they halted to hold each other fast and let the torrent of feelings rush out.
“Oh Noah, I love you,” she said. “I missed you, I was bereft without you.”
“I love you, too. Tell me again.”
“I love you, Noah.”
He held her so tightly her heels left the floor. “I never thought I’d hear you say it again.”
“I was always so stubborn about saying it... I’m sorry, Noah, but I do love you, I do, only I never thought falling in love would be so terrible.”
“Or so wonderful.”
“Or so frightening.”
“Or so lonely. A hundred times a day I had to stop myself from walking past your newspaper office.”
“I kept looking out the window, hoping to see you pass.”
“And then we’d meet on the boardwalk and act like we didn’t know each other.”
“Nobody could live with me.”
“Me either. I was angry at the whole world.”
“I snapped at everybody and got so irritable and faultfinding. I scared off Patrick with my temper, and I miss him so much. And poor Josh—I’ve been awful to him, too. Nothing seemed right without you, nothing.”
They kissed again, incautiously and deep, searching for motions to reiterate all they felt. When it ended he had a two-handed grip on her hair, tipping her head back with the faintest tug on her scalp.
“I never want to go through that again,” he said fiercely.
“Neither do I.”
They let their eyes rove each other’s face, sharing a very small space on the kitchen floor, with her maroon carpet slippers planted between his scuffed brown cowboy boots. He released her hair and began stroking it back from her temples.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“As if I’ve been living underwater for a long long time and have just come up into the air.”
“How else do you feel?”
With her head thrown back and her throat arched, the words came out strained. “I want you.”
His hands stopped moving. “I’m going to do something. Don’t be scared.” He lifted her in his arms, threshold fashion, and ordered, “Turn off the lantern.”
She reached and adjusted the ribbed brass screw, bringing darkness descending over the room, then linked her arms around his neck. He carried her to the rocker and put her on his lap with her legs draped over a wooden arm of the chair.
“Say my name,” he whispered.
“Noah.”
“Say it again.”
“Noah.”
“Yes, Noah... and I still want to marry you.” He set the chair in motion, rocking gently, and resumed stroking her hair back from her left temple while his other hand curved up her back and closed lightly around her neck, toying with it beneath her hair. He kissed her mouth softly... softly... and went on rocking her, easing her, touching his lips to other fine places—her cheek, her eyebrow, her chin. He nuzzled her throat, felt her head hang back and the warmth of her hair leave his left hand. He touched her breast the way he had touched her hair, a finding in the dark, a mere grazing without demand. He heard her breath catch and went on caressing her with faint strokes of his thumb while his forearm rested along her stomach.
“I love you, Sarah,” he whispered.
He felt tremors begin deep within her. They shimmied up through his arm as he caressed her breast and felt it bead up. She murmured something—a wordless sound that needed no words, sliding from her throat as she covered his hand with both of her own and clamped it tightly against herself. She drew her head up with an effort and brought his open hand to her face and kissed it in three places, then replaced it on her breast. She closed her eyes and sat very still, letting his hand play over her. When he found her mouth again, her lips were open, the breath hurrying from them in wonderful, soft gusts.
As the kiss ended, she whispered in wonder, “Oh Noah...”
His hand departed her breast and settled her in the curve of his shoulder with her forehead on his jaw. The rocking chair resumed its faint, rhythmic ticks against the floor.
“Oh Noah,” she repeated, her breath warm against his neck.
In the darkness he smiled and continued rocking.
“So will you marry me, you stubborn woman?”
“Yes, I’ll marry you, you incorrigible man.”
“I won’t go to Rose’s.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to,” she replied.
He stopped rocking and kissed her—much less desperately than when they’d been on their feet, but leaning forward and coiling around her until his leather vest creaked. He kissed her in myriad soft ways, and, parting, let his lips linger.
“Did I see that betrothal brooch on your kitchen table?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Do we have to light the lantern to find it?”
“No, of course not, I can find it in the dark. I’ve done it many times.” She left his lap, retaining a fingerhold on one of his hands while reaching for the tabletop. Momentarily, she returned, and,
sitting upright on his lap, pinned the brooch to her blouse, directly over her heart.
“There,” she said, settling into the lee of his shoulder once more. “Everything’s where it should be.”
“Let’s see,” he whispered. He found the brooch, and if in finding it he touched her breast again, she objected no more than she had the first time.
Minutes later she whispered, “Noah?”
“Hm?”
They were rocking again, wishing Addie and Robert would never come home.
“That feels wonderful.”
He chuckled and kept on rocking.
They were married on Christmas Eve at five P.M. by Birtle Matheson in a brief, quiet ceremony with only Addie and Robert as witnesses. Sarah wore a simple dress of ivory satin—made by Addie—and carried a tiny ivory Bible festooned with matching ribbon. Her hair was upswept in a modified pompadour—again by Addie—trimmed by a tiny spray of seed pearls, and her lips were painted, for the first time in her life, with a touch of coral.
Noah wore the black suit he’d bought months ago for this occasion, with its double-breasted vest, a white shirt with a wing-tipped collar and a black four-in-hand tie.
After the ceremony the four of them had supper at Addie and Robert’s house, accompanied by champagne and a fancy ribbon cake baked for the occasion by Emma, who had gracefully accepted the news that the wedding was to be private and small, so small she herself would not be invited.
“You do it your way, Sarah,” she had said, “and blessed be the day.”
On her way home from Addie’s, Sarah was thinking,... and blessed be the night... please, oh please.
The house where she would live as Noah’s wife was as she remembered, plain and only partially furnished, awaiting her choices on what remained to be bought. Entering the kitchen, she exclaimed, “Why, it’s warm in here.”
“I hired Josh to come and stoke the fire.”
“Oh, how thoughtful, Noah... thank you.”
The lantern flared, then Noah came up behind her and took her coat from her shoulders. He hung it, along with his own, and his hat, then returned to her.
“I have another surprise for you. Come.” He took her hand, and the lantern, and led her straight up the stairs to their bedroom, where he stepped back to let her enter first. In one corner, in a pail of sand, trimmed with embossed cardboard cutouts and red wax candles in tin clips, was a fragrant spruce tree.