9. Juliette #2
I don’t mean to. I mean to lie down for a few minutes and then get up and unpack. But the bed is soft in the way expensive mattresses never are, and the quilt smells like lavender, and the moment my head hits the pillow I’m gone.
I dream about libraries.
The dream has the smell right - dust and binding glue and radiator heat - and it has him wrong, or maybe early: a man holding a book upside down, looking at me like a research question he intends to spend a life on.
About dark stacks and whispered promises and a man on his knees with a ring in his hand. I dream about the woman I was when I said yes - so certain, so hopeful, so convinced that love would be enough.
Then the dream stops being about the ring.
It’s the biography section now, or the stacks, or both at once - dream architecture, every library of my life filed under one call number - and his hand is flat between my shoulder blades, and his mouth is at my ear saying something I can’t hear but my body apparently remembers, because there’s a shelf against my back and dust in the light and I am arching up into a man who is not there.
I know he’s not there. Even asleep, some librarian in me keeps the record straight: this man is a reconstruction from surviving documents.
It doesn’t matter. The reconstruction knows things.
The reconstruction has his exact hands, his exact weight, the sound he makes low against my neck when I stop arguing mid-sentence - my body kept all of it on file without asking me, six years of shelved evidence, and now it’s pulling items from the archive and reading them to me in the dark.
In the dream I say his name.
In the dream he says mine back the old way. The before way. The way that assumed decades.
I wake up with the sun in my eyes, that woman’s ghost in my chest, and my body still humming, thoroughly unashamed of itself.
I lie there and hate everyone involved. The man in Boston. The woman in the dream. The body in this bed, which left him on principle and didn’t consult a single cell below the neck.
Grief and want. Same landlord. No wall between the units.
Morning.
I make coffee in my mother’s kitchen with her ancient percolator. The coffee is too strong and slightly bitter and absolutely perfect, and I take it out to the porch and sit in the chair where she used to sit.
The cottage sits at the end of a long dirt road, half a mile from town. You can see the whole approach from the porch. My mother used to say she liked that about it. No surprises. You always see them coming.
Fog off the water this morning, lying in the field like something that means to stay.
The porch boards are cold through my socks.
My mother’s wind chime - oyster shells and fishing line, ugly, immortal - ticks out its small weather report from the eave, and I drink her percolator coffee out of her second-best mug and let the quiet do what the quiet does.
No seating charts out here. No galas. Nothing to perform and no one grading it. The relief has a strange aftertaste, like all rooms feel too big after a hospital, but it’s relief all the same.
The delivery van appears around the bend at seven-fifteen.
It’s from the florist in town, the one my mother used for every occasion, and the driver looks apologetic as he climbs out with an arrangement so large he can barely see around it.
The delivery kid waits while I read the card - island manners, or island intelligence-gathering; the line is thin - rocking on his heels with the van door open and the whole arrangement’s worth of gossip already composing itself for the counter crowd at Helen’s.
“Juliette Holland?”
“That’s me.”
“These are for you. Had to put them on the first ferry.” He sets the arrangement on the porch railing, and it’s gorgeous - cream roses, pale pink peonies, something delicate and trailing.
Exactly like the arrangement that arrived on our anniversary.
Exactly like something Marcy would order. “There’s a card.”
He’s gone before I can think of anything to say.
Halfway down the steps he pauses, professional discretion losing to island curiosity.
“Nice arrangement,” he offers. “Somebody’s sorry.”
“Somebody’s something.”
“Usually is,” he agrees, and goes.
I stare at the flowers for a long moment. Then I reach for the card tucked into the arrangement at a perfect angle.
I understand you need space. But I need you to know I kept everything. Every note, every bookmark, every photograph. I have a box full of evidence that I loved you, and I should have shown it to you years ago. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to let me prove I can be different.
-Z
P.S. The flowers were my idea this time. Not Marcy’s. I know you like peonies.
I type a reply. I type they’re ranunculus, and the fact that you had to say it wasn’t Marcy is the entire biography of our marriage. I read it twice, thumb over the send arrow.
Then I delete it, letter by letter, because he doesn’t get my sentences anymore. That was the currency. The bank is closed.
I read the card twice. Three times. And then I do something that surprises me: I laugh.
It’s not a happy laugh. It’s the bitter, exhausted laugh of a woman who spent six years leaving notes her husband never mentioned, only to find out he was keeping them in a drawer like receipts.
He kept everything.
Every note, every bookmark, every photograph. He collected my love in a drawer and never once told me, never once acknowledged it, never once gave me any reason to believe it mattered to him at all.
And now he wants credit for it.
I set the card down on the porch railing, next to the flowers that are exactly right and arrived too late.
Then I pick up my coffee, and I watch the lane, and I wait to see what comes next.
The silver Mercedes appears around the bend at seven-forty.
It parks at the end of the lane, a hundred yards away. Close enough to see, too far to speak.
Zachary doesn’t get out. Doesn’t approach. Just sits there in his inappropriate car with the engine off, looking at the cottage where I grew up.
I wait for the rage to come. The how-dare-he of a woman whose husband has followed her to her dead mother’s house.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead is quieter: a weariness so profound I can feel it in my bones.
I finish my coffee.
I go inside.
I leave the flowers on the porch, and I don’t look back.