Chapter Six #5
It was curious, Hannah thought, how one forgot exactly what pain felt like until it came again.
Hunger, pleasure, and other emotions could be remembered with fairly good accuracy, but the precise dimension of pain was always a surprise when it returned.
Which was the only reason why, her mother always said, women continued to have children after they’d had a first one.
Only not her mother, of course, she was too wise for that.
And not herself, of course, because she wasn’t a real woman, actually.
But she’d not felt such pain in her throat and her breast in a very long while.
At least she’d the bitter comfort of knowing she’d been right— she’d never met a man like Gray Dylan before. And she hoped to never again.
“I think” she finally managed to say, because Peggy was awaiting her answer, and she’d a fair, if not an easy one to give, “that you might go, if you wish, in the daylight as you say. But that you’d better be very, very careful of where you go, and be sure you can get back from there alone if you have to. ”
“Just what I thought myself!” Peggy said on an exhaled sigh.
“And so what I said to himself, exactly, too! So he says I might take a friend as a chaperon, for if it made me easier, he’d prefer it.
He wants to take a carriage and drive out of town to show me the mountains in autumn, for he says there’s no lovelier sight in the land, and what have I seen of his home but cities and theaters and hotels?
And he’s right! So who shall I take. I’m thinking?
Who else? Ah, will you come, Hannah dear?
Please. It’s just for an hour or two together.
Oh, I know it’s a onetime thing, for what’s a gent like that to do with a girl like me?
Especially when he finds I’ve been telling the truth about myself.
But I think it’s a thing I’ll never forget.
And safe as houses if you’re there, too, for though he’s big and strong as an ox, I should think from the look of him for all his fine clothes, what can he do with the two of us? ”
No more than he’s already done to one of us: which is to kill hope, Hannah thought.
Then she was instantly shamed by it. For she was old and wise enough not to have been fooled by the softest words or the bluest eyes, wasn’t she?
And then she was bitterly glad that at least he’d done it early on.
Because she knew very well that no man ever seduced a woman as well as her own fantasies did.
And that was, after all, the only place she could be fully seduced.
So why not go? Why not be Peggy’s chaperon?
Since she could never be much to a man, at least she could be of use to another woman.
Her thoughts raced as her heart did: How could she tell Peggy that her handsome gentleman had repeatedly asked her out, too, without it sounding like spite or cruelty?
—which she supposed it would be if she divulged it now, when she was aching so badly.
But at least she should try to save poor Peggy from him.
For herself there’d be more than virtue as its own reward, there’d be the extra prize of that most exquisitely perverse of pleasures: the wrench of regret and rejection to be lived through once again.
It would give her the fuel for the silent battle of wits she’d need to wage in order to show Peggy with her own eyes what a deceitful, faithless fraud Gray Dylan was.
And most of all, what else could she say now, after all?
“Well, yes. Why not? I will,” Hannah said.
She was instantly rewarded for it by the sound of Peggy’s contented sigh, and then by a pang of pain that sliced through her temples and her heart.
“You’re a true friend. Thank you,” Peggy said in a choked little voice.
“Yes, well, and why not?” Hannah repeated to herself and Peggy, for there really wasn’t anything else to do or say yet.
Because there was no sense in tears, even if there’d been luxury of solitude for them, and no point in them really, she told herself, even if there’d been a realistic reason for them.
She was on the brink of sleep when she heard Peggy’s voice again.
“Do you want to know what I wished for?” Peggy asked sleepily.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to say, or it won’t come true,” Hannah said, thinking of the cold and beautiful moon, and how insignificant her impossible wish had been in the face of it.
Polly giggled. “Ah, but I can tell now. For it’s come true already…thanks to you, Hannah dear,” she said on another comfortable little sigh.
Peggy was long lost to sleep as Hannah lay awake, envying her.
Not for the wish come true, but for what she herself had lost so long ago: simple problems with simple solutions.
She discovered wishing to have been a painful luxury, too.
Because wishing itself holds hope, she realized wearily, and all she was left with now was the knowledge of her one omnipresent, simple, and simply impossible wish.