BITTERSWEET
BITTERSWEET
One Week Before She Disappeared
ABBY
“Have you told anyone else that you want to leave your husband?” Hearing the woman in black say those words out loud makes the concept more real. Which makes the idea more frightening. I shake my head. I haven’t said a word to anyone about it because it’s nobody else’s business. “Do you think he knows?” she asks.
That is a difficult question to answer.
“I think he knows I am unhappy. But I’ve been unhappy for such a long time, maybe he doesn’t notice anymore. Maybe, like me, he finds it hard to imagine us being apart when we’ve been together for so long. So it doesn’t occur to him that I might actually leave.”
“You sound as though you have already made up your mind.”
“I know.”
“But then why talk to me about it if you have already decided?”
It’s a good question and there are a lot of answers. I only give her one.
“Because I’m scared.”
When I spend too long thinking about how and why our marriage unraveled, my memory tends to wander to happier times. We weren’t always the us we are now. Which is probably why I am so afraid of walking away. What if I never meet someone who can make me that happy again? Because we were happy, before. Nobody has ever made me happier than he did. But nobody has ever made me feel this sad either. Is being with someone who used to love you better than being alone?
A few months ago, he said he had found the perfect property for sale. Fixer-upper was an understatement. The location was great—for him, not so much for me—but being a little farther out meant we got more for our money. Unlike where we were living, this place had a view, and he was excited about the idea of renovating something, making it our own. I think we both thought that fixing that broken old building would fix whatever was broken in our marriage. For a while, I think it did. But there were problems with the project—just as there always are with these things—and the builders kept asking for more money. Money we didn’t have. There comes a point with everything in life where there is no turning back. We had spent an extortionate amount on architect fees and jumped through seemingly endless hoops to get planning permission, the builders made constant noise, and dust, and complaints, and demands, and the months that followed were not happy ones. Renovating an old property only sounds romantic if you’ve never done it. When the builders discovered something unexpected I wished we never had.
“The builders found something today,” I said one night as soon as he walked in the door. He’d been away for a few days at a book festival, and I confess I had enjoyed myself while he was gone. Because he works from home he was always there, and I never got to spend any time alone, even on the rare occasions when I did have a day off. While he was away, I watched old movies, ate food he didn’t like, and danced around the house listening to Nina Simone while drinking white wine—he prefers red—and it was bliss. Until the builders knocked on the door.
“The builders finding something doesn’t sound good,” he said, hanging his coat on a hook. “What is it this time and how much will it cost to fix it?” he asked, pouring himself a glass of wine from the bottle that was already open. The project had cost more than double the original quote by then, and things were tight. He hadn’t sold a new book for a while—mainly due to the fact he hadn’t written one—and he always had a head-in-the-sand approach to finances. I often worried that he might lose everything—including the house—if I wasn’t around to keep on top of things.
“No dead bodies or bones or anything like that,” I said. “But they did find something when they were digging the new foundations...”
“Keeping people in suspense is my job.”
“You have to promise not to freak out.”
“I never freak out.”
He always freaked out.
“The builders found two sets of clothes, two pairs of very old shoes, jewelry, including two rings, some pots, glass bottles, and some coins.”
“Were the coins gold?” he asked.
“Sadly no. But the builders think they are about two hundred years old; they found similar-looking ones on a project not far from here last year. The clothes were laid out flat like two people were wearing them and holding hands. So I called the Heritage Committee and—”
“You did what? Do you want them to stop us from building? This project has already cost everything that we have, more than that—”
“I had a very interesting chat with them actually.”
“Great. How much did that cost?”
“The woman I spoke to said what we found was evidence of a two-hundred-year-old ritual. If a married couple thought they were going to be separated forever, perhaps because of illness or war, they would bury a set of their clothes together under the floor of their home. They would leave money, sentimental objects, and something to eat and drink. Then they would put linens over the top, like a protective blanket to sleep under, before covering the plot with earth and stones and replacing the flooring. Which was likely to have been wooden boards back then. The husband and wife thought it was a way to guarantee they would find each other in the afterlife. Apparently it’s an ancient custom called ‘the buried lovers.’ I think you should see it for yourself.”
We had to use a torch to see the site where the builders had been working. I aimed the light at the spot where the items had been found, illuminating two sets of old muddy clothes and shoes.
“Okaaay,” he said, looking as unimpressed as he sounded. “Now I’ve seen it, can we throw it all away?”
“No! That’s the important part. There is a superstition.”
“Oh good. A superstition. Love those—”
“The woman from the Heritage Committee said that if you discover a pair of buried lovers—remember that’s what she called them—you have to leave them exactly as they were or put them back as best you can. If you separate them on earth, you will separate them in the afterlife. And if you steal their true love from them for all eternity, they will come to steal yours and curse you with eternal loneliness.”
He stared at me as though waiting for the punch line.
“You aren’t seriously considering this, are you?” he said then. “The builders need to dig down much further for the foundations. We can’t leave some old clothes and pots in the dirt because of some silly superstition.”
“They said they could work around the items and then insert some extra steel beams and it would be okay.”
“And how much extra will that cost?”
“Not much. But it will take a little longer.” He closed his eyes. “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to disassociate from my body so I don’t have to listen to this anymore.”
“Surely you don’t want to risk eternal loneliness?”
As soon as I asked the question I remembered how much my husband enjoyed his own company. He’s only happy when he is writing and he does that best alone. I think loneliness is his preferred way of life. But then he opened his eyes again and put his arms around me.
“Darling, the ghosts of people who buried some clothes hundreds of years ago are not going to haunt us or make one of us disappear if we move their things. How about we just bury them nearby?” he said, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled his face closer to mine.
“Please, I don’t want anything bad to happen to us.”
“It won’t.”
“I missed you while you were away,” I told him and realized that it was true. I enjoyed some time on my own, but I did miss him. I didn’t like sleeping in our big old bed without him by my side. “Promise we don’t have to move the buried lovers and you can make love to me right here.”
“I promise,” he said, then he kissed me.
A week later I overheard the builders laughing about how he had told them to throw everything they found in the trash and not tell me. My husband didn’t believe in curses, but I did. I still do.
The woman in black speaks again, pulling me from my thoughts.
“A lot of people fantasize about what their life might be like if they hadn’t married their partner, or if they were to start a new life without them. It’s actually perfectly normal and nothing to feel guilty about,” she says, but I’m not sure that I believe her. “I’m curious to know whether that’s all this is. Just a fantasy because your marriage is going through a rough patch—again, perfectly normal—or whether a separation or a clean break is something that you are serious about. A lot of people don’t know the answer to the next question, and that’s fine too, but if you were to leave your husband, where would you go? What would you do?”
The answer was bittersweet.
“There is only one place I’ve ever thought of as home.”
“Where?” she asked.
“The Isle of Amberly.”