"So your husband isn't Haitian?" Avril asked. "Because that's much easier to swallow. I mean, you said he is dark, right? I didn't imagine you saying that?"
"No," I said, sipping the wine in my glass. It never tastes as sweet as when I have just arrived or, as now, when I am hours from returning to him. The only comparable taste with you is when our charges remember spring and realize it is now forever out of their reach. "Not imagined, but misinterpreted." I know how it is to swallow incredible stories in one gulp. Had you not offered one on a silver platter and bended knee, I would have lived a far different eternity. Or, just maybe, I would have done the asking if only to evade an eternity under my mother's thumb. We are a willful breed, and the apple does not fall far.
On cold nights--and these are many--the tartness of your proposal lingers still on my tongue when no words would suffice.
From my lips, she knew the skeleton of my story--I am elsewhere for half the year, important business that can be done no other way--and, through schooling and social osmosis, she had heard twisted retellings from strangers who no longer believed I was anything but a gullible victim, as though anyone could trick me. I am the one who reveals all, who births poetry and song. No lie, no matter how fancifully told, could ever suit me.
"What if you didn't go this year?" she asked, as so many have asked before and may after. Six months is usually as long as my friendships can last here. Then, like innumerable other strangers turned companions, Avril argued this as though she were the first to know guile. "What would happen then?"
This is never hypothetical to me. There was 1816, blamed on Mount Tambora, because I thought I might see what it was to stay with you for a while longer. Those who suffered my indulgence poured down and, seeing the toll it took on you, I vowed to be more judicious. I fidgeted our ring around my finger, rubbing each of the six ruby cabochons. The green of my dress, embellished with silk chamomile, made the red shine like fire. "What if you didn't sleep?" I returned with practiced quickness. "You think it would all be a party until the minute your head is thick and throbbing as you wished everyone away to let you be. I must return because that is what is done. Appreciate that I even loved you enough to divulge this much, though you will not recall tomorrow." This, too, is not the fullness of the reasons, the cause of why I am so eager to return.
The truth was that I felt I might shatter to spend another night without you. Our work is integral. I am honored to do it at your side. It was the first time I felt I deserved my rank. Yet, for those I will soothe through the darkness and in these next six months, I could not give a thought. I missed you to my core, and I would not break my word to be with you soon, even if the world shattered beneath me.
I believe we had said all the goodbyes she was due when she added in defense, "Didn't... I mean, he stole you, right? How could you want to be with him?"
My fingers flew to my temples. The power there and the pain of this falsehood I have heard for millennia. Men couldn't understand that women could make bold decisions, so we had to have been tricked or stolen. Never have I heard a story that I stole you, though I benefitted disproportionately from our union. How could one steal that which eagerly clings? How could anyone with my power and pedigree be stolen like a pomegranate from the tree?
The day was warmer than it had any right to be, and my anger did nothing to diffuse it. "My family is violent, deceitful, unfaithful. He is kind and does not stray. Why would I choose their control over the freedom of his love?"
She did not see my point. She thought of words like "Stockholm Syndrome" and "apologist." "I go tonight," I said with finality. "I return to the land I rule. I tend to kings and beggars, humbled and exalted in kind."
I turned to leave, but her hand held mine. "Will I ever see you again?" she asked.
I kissed her brow, my lips barely making contact. "Everyone does, one day."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.