Overseas (57 page)

“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I? I’m your lawfully married husband. At bloody last, I might add.”

I circled it with my fingers, watched the light gleam around the slim golden surface. “I’m just not used to it yet, that’s all.” I looked up at him and smiled. “It looks wonderful on you.”

“Feels a little odd, still. But I rather like it, all the same.”

“
Still?
How long has it been, anyway? What day is it?”

“Today? October tenth, I think. I had to spend a night or two in ruddy hospital…”

“Good
grief
, Julian…”

“… while Geoff sorted out poor Arthur’s affairs, and then it was down to Le Havre with Hollander before we finally found you.” He slipped out from under me and went to the pair of enormous windows along the side of the room, speaking as he walked. “We were focusing on the area where the gangway would have been, but without success. So we started moving outward in concentric circles…” He drew open the curtains, letting the bright Parisian morning tumble into the room. “There, that’s better. Bloody mausoleum. Of course we could only try in the dead of night, when we wouldn’t be much seen. We came all week. I would have kept trying forever if I had to.” He drew open the curtains on the other window and turned to face me with a broad grin on his face. “And at last, there you were, so alive and unutterably beautiful. And I have never felt more joy in my life, darling. Now come here. I want to show you something.”

I rose from the chair and went to stand before him. He reached out for
me with his left arm; the right one he held rather stiffly at his side. “Don’t you have a sling or something?” I asked suspiciously.

“Yes. I’ll put it back on later.”

“No.
Now
. I’m not taking any chances with that shoulder. I’ll bet you still have
stitches
in it, don’t you?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Bossy little minx.”

I turned and watched him move across the shadowed room to the bureau. His pajamas hung perfectly beneath his white T-shirt; shamelessly I ogled the lean curve of his bottom as it shifted under the loose cotton, and when he turned back in my direction, a sigh slipped out from my very bones.

“What is it?” he asked, returning to me with the pale blue sling in his hands.

“Just admiring you. Here, let me.” I reached for the straps, putting them around his neck and buckling them securely. A smile spread across my lips.

“You’re
smiling
at this contraption?”

“I was just thinking. You’re going to have to exercise your ingenuity for the next few weeks. Or else remain uncharacteristically submissive.”

“Ha.” He gathered me up. “Shows how much
you
know of my capabilities.”

“You’re capable of one-handed push-ups?”

“I’m capable of anything, given the proper incentives.”

“Serves you right,” I said smugly, closing my eyes against the lovely sensation of his warm cotton-clad chest against my face, “being such a freaking superhero. Arranging your own shooting, for God’s sake. Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me?”

I felt him toy with the hair at my back, felt the gentle tugs as he wrapped curls around his finger and unwound them again, just as he used to do. The commonplace gesture seemed now like the greatest luxury in the world.

“You asked me once,” he said, after a while, “if I’d wait with you, wake with you, instead of rising at dawn. And I told you all about stand to.”

“I enjoyed waking up in your arms just now. Just as heavenly as I’d dreamed.”

“What about Amiens?”

“I was awake the whole night. It wasn’t the same.”

“You didn’t sleep the entire night?”

“How could I sleep?” I shrugged. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

He didn’t say anything, only tightened his left arm around me so hard I could scarcely breathe. “There’s another reason,” he said at last. “Have you any idea how lovely you look, when you sleep?” His voice slipped into a lyric cadence, as if he were reciting poetry. “The flush of your skin. The long beautiful angle of your cheekbones, just so. The way your eyes tilt up, ever so slightly, at the corners. Your hair, tumbling madly over the pillows, or else spread across my chest, dark and soft. That wide mouth of yours, pink and round, the lips just parted. All last summer, I’d wake at dawn as I always did, every sense alert, and instead of the mud walls of an officer’s dugout I’d find
you
, heavenly vision, lying in my arms like an angel. I couldn’t bear it. If I’d woken you, I should have wept with it.”

“That’s all right. Tears are okay.”

“Mmm.” He turned me around and pulled me back against his chest, his left arm slung about my waist. “Look out the window, darling.”

“It’s beautiful.” The view cast southeastward, across the Place de la Concorde to the Tuileries, with the bright mass of the Louvre perched at the end. We were several stories above the ground: the grand mansard rooftops, luminous in the midday sun, spread around us in a wild irregular pattern of boulevards and squares and parks. Off to the right, the Seine glittered provocatively between the buildings, and a memory drifted past me, of trudging across the Pont Neuf three years ago with Michelle and Samantha, arguing about whether we should squander our money on a cup of coffee each at a sidewalk café that afternoon. The quintessential
Parisian experience, of course, but a budget buster for Let’s Go travelers like us.

“A much nicer view than the youth hostel I stayed at last time,” I said. “In the Marais somewhere, I think.”

His laugh rustled near my ear. “I should hope so. We’ll go out this afternoon, sweetheart, and do a little shopping for you. Find you something to wear.”

“A toothbrush might be nice.”

“And tonight I’ll take you to dinner. The finest table in Paris. Make you splendidly tipsy on champagne and Burgundy and, oh, perhaps a little Muscat with dessert. And then whatever you like. Dancing, theater. A boat along the river, all to ourselves. Paris is at your feet, darling. The world’s at your feet.” He bent his head and kissed my neck. “
I’m
at your feet.”

“The most important part.”

He laughed aloud. “Kate, don’t you see? We’re perfectly free now. We can do whatever you want, my love. Anything at all, anywhere. I’ll give you
such
a honeymoon. Just name the place.”

I leaned my head into the hollow beneath his chin and sighed. “I can’t think. Just somewhere we can be private. I’d like… let me see… a piano, so you can play for me in the evenings. I’ve missed that. And a beach, where we can lie together and watch the palm trees sway.”

We stood quietly for a moment, staring out the window.

“What is it?” I turned toward him and looked up to see his brow knit together in long worried lines. “Spit it out, Ashford.”

“Well,” he said carefully, “I expect we should find a doctor for you first. Make sure it’s all right.”

I lowered my head. “I should be okay in a few days, I guess. I was only seven weeks along. I’ll need… a new prescription, of course, and…”

“And the rest of it?” His hand began to drift against my back, long gentle strokes.

I couldn’t speak without sobbing, so I remained quiet for a moment longer, letting his warmth, his stroking hand, absorb the pain for me. “I
loved it so much,” I said at last. “I don’t know what happened, if it was the grief of seeing you go, or just exhaustion, or if… if going back in time… killed it. But I loved it so much. It was all I had left of you. Your son, your daughter maybe. Now I’ll never know… And I never even thought… I never thought about babies before…”

“Don’t blame yourself. It’s my fault, if anything.”

I stood there against him for the longest time, trying to understand how the joy and the grief could coexist together in my heart. He went silent, stroking my back with his uncanny patience, not crowding me with words. Waiting for me to speak first.

“You’d make an amazing father.” I kept my voice even with some effort. “I wanted so much to give you that.”

He let my words hang there for a moment. “Perhaps,” he said, “when you’re ready, we might try again.”

I put my arms around his waist.

“Maybe not just yet,” I said, “but sometime.”

Somewhere in the Cook Islands

Halloween 2008

Though the sun burned overhead, the white sand felt cool and powdery beneath my legs, protected since daybreak by the lazy fronds of the palm tree against which I was leaning.

Julian’s head rested in my lap; his body lay stretched out perpendicular to mine, long and lean, his navy blue swimming trunks topped by a white linen shirt against the sun. No sling today; I’d let him take it off at last.

We were talking about his father. “I so wish I could have met him,” I said, looping Julian’s hair around my fingers, the sun-lightened strands like corn silk on my skin. “I mean, he obviously did a great job of raising you.”

“He’d have loved you,” Julian said, his eyes closed with contentment. “You’re exactly his sort of woman. Funny, opinionated, natural. He despised affectation.”

“What did he think of Miss Hamilton?”

Julian opened one eye. “Didn’t like her. It was one of the few things my parents fought about.”

“I think I like him even more.”

Julian closed the eye again. “I picture the two of you, sometimes. How proud I should be, presenting you as my bride. You two getting on famously.”

“Stop. You’ll make me cry.”

He reached up and found my hand and caressed my thumb, saying nothing. I gazed down adoringly at his face. A relaxed face now, its great burden of care finally removed. I hadn’t realized how much it had affected him, this fear for me, this certain knowledge that some crisis was coming that he might be powerless to avert. And now that I’d survived it, that he’d rescued me from the fate he’d always feared for me, his soul had taken on the peace of the fully redeemed. It had made for an epic honeymoon.

“Recite me something,” I said, after a while.

“What would you like to hear?”

“Something romantic. One of those old story poems.”

He smiled, and without opening his eyes, began “The Highwayman.” He was no fool. He knew that by the time he got to the second
I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though Hell should bar the way,
he stood pretty good odds of getting laid.

Today was no exception.

So it was only some time later, brushing the sand from my skin, he remarked, “You know, there’s one poem you’ve never asked for.”

“Which one’s that?” I turned over onto his chest, being careful to stay on his left side, and pressed little kisses into his sunlit flesh, into the neat pink scar to the right of his collarbone. “Mmm. You taste delicious. That coconut massage oil.”

“Mine.”

I looked up at his chin. “Julian, it’s a wonderful poem. But I really don’t need to hear about your insatiable longing for another woman’s beauty. Particularly Florence Hamilton’s.”

“What’s Flora got to do with it?”

“Well, she was the one who had it published. Obviously you sent it to her,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Unless there’s someone else I don’t know about.” I picked up his hand from the sand and began licking the fingertips with great concentration.

“Kate Ashford,” he burst out, struggling to rise, “do you mean to say
that after all this time, you still think “Overseas” was an ode to Florence bloody Hamilton?”

I sat up and stared at him. “Wasn’t it?”

“Don’t you know when that poem was written?”

“Well, I just assumed…”

“Kate,” he said, “I scribbled “Overseas” into my notebook on the train, going up the line from Amiens, the morning after the most astonishing night of my life, having just fallen desperately and irrevocably in love. Haven’t you even listened to it?
Her beauty, glowing through the rain…
That was
you
, idiot love. Outside the cathedral.”

“Oh.”

“I did, after all,” he said, his voice gentling, “promise you rubbishy poetry. Even if Flora saw fit to snatch it for herself, when my kit was returned home.”

“So,” I said, “when I was sitting there in my AP Lit exam, writing that stupid essay, analyzing those lines…”

“You were writing about yourself, yes.”

I began to laugh. “Well, you might have
told
me, you know.” I grabbed his hands and put them around my naked waist and kissed him long and deep. “You adorable man. What am I going to do with you?”

“I daresay,” he murmured, returning the kiss, “if you simply continue on as you are, forever and ever, I should be very happy indeed.”

“Forever and ever? Never getting older? Never having, for example, birthdays?”

He dipped his head down and snorted into the skin of my shoulder. “As to that, darling… and, in passing, have I mentioned how much I adore this unspeakably alluring neck of yours?” He kissed around the base of it with tender little bites, taking his time. “But as I said, in the matter of birthdays, I’m shocked you have so little faith in me.”

“You did tell me, once, you needed reminding.”

“Not for the first one, I should hope.”

“Ohhh, I see. So that
was
my birthday present, this morning? I wondered.”

“Kate, my love,” he laughed, bearing me down in the sand with him, “you get
that
present all the time.”

“And always deeply appreciated.” I began kissing my way downward.

“Kate, you’re distracting me. I’m trying to work up to something here; I need my wits about me.”

I propped myself up. “Julian, seriously, I don’t need a present. I was only kidding, to see if you remembered. I mean, you’ve given me this entire magical honeymoon, to say nothing of buying up half the rue du Faubourg, waiting for your stitches to heal…”

“You enjoyed that, darling. Admit it.” He tweaked my nose affectionately.

I conceded. “Okay, a little. I sort of needed the clothes, after all. And it’s easier now. Knowing you’d met me before. That I was in your thoughts, all those years, while you were running Southfield. That I did help, in a way.”