“I think it should be.”
“It was all theoretical to you,” she said. “That you might share the gift with me, that I might die if you didn’t. It was theoretical to you that you had it. It all happened too quickly for you.”
“That’s the truth,” he said.
“Look, I don’t expect anything of you that you can’t give,” she said. “Only allow me this. Allow me to be part of all of you, even if you and I can’t be lovers anymore. Allow that, that I’ll be part of you and Felix and Thibault and …”
“Of course, yes. Do you think they would ever allow me to drive you away? Do you think for a minute I’d do that? Laura!”
“Reuben, there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t feel possessive of the woman he loves, who doesn’t want to control his access to her and her access to him and his world.”
“Laura, I know all that—.”
“Reuben, you have to be feeling something about the fact that they gave me the Chrism, whether you wanted them to do it or not, that they made their decision about me and with me essentially without seeing me as part of you. And I made my decision the same way.”
“As it should be, for the love of—.”
He stopped.
“I don’t like what I’m finding out about myself,” he said. “But this is life and death, and it’s your choice. And do you think I could endure it if they’d left it up to me, if they’d treated you as if you were my possession?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “But we can’t always reason with our feelings.”
“Well, I love you,” he said. “And I will accept this. I will. I will love you as much after as I love you now. My feelings might not listen to reason. But I’m giving them a direct order.”
She laughed. And he did in spite of himself.
“Now, tell me. Why are you here alone now, when the change might come at any time?”
“I’m not alone,” she said. “Thibault’s here. He’s been here since before dark. He’s out there, waiting for you to leave. He’ll be with me every night until it’s resolved.”
“Well, then why don’t you come home now?” he demanded.
She didn’t answer. She was looking off again as if listening to the sounds of the forest. “Come back with me now. Let’s pack up and get out of here.”
“You’re being very brave,” she said quietly. “But I want to see this through here. And you know that’s better for both of us.”
He couldn’t deny it. He couldn’t deny that he was terrified that the transformation might come on right now as they sat there. The mere thought of it was more than he could bear.
“You’re in safe hands with Thibault,” he said.
“Of course,” she said.
“If it was that Frank, I’d kill him with my bare claws.”
She smiled, but didn’t protest.
He was being ridiculous, wasn’t he? After all, hadn’t Thibault—whenever he’d received the gift—been invigorated by it? What was the practical difference between the two men? One looked like an elderly scholar and the other like a Don Juan. But they were both full-blooded Morphenkinder, weren’t they? Yet Thibault conveyed the grace of age, and Frank was forever in his prime. And it struck him suddenly with full force that she would look as beautiful as she was now forever; and he himself, he himself, would never grow older, or look older or seem older—never become the wise and venerable man that his father was, never ever age beyond this moment. He might as well have been the youth on Keats’s Grecian urn.
How could he have failed to realize these things, and what they must mean to her, and should mean to him? How had he not been transformed by that awareness, that secret knowledge? It was theoretical to him, she was right.
She knew. She’d always known what the full import of it all was. She’d tried to get him to realize it, and when he did let it penetrate now, he felt even more ashamed than ever of fearing the change in her.
He stood up and walked to the back bedroom. He felt dazed, almost sleepy. The rain was heavy now, pounding the old roof above. He felt an eagerness to get on the road, to be plowing north through the darkness.
“If Thibault weren’t here, I wouldn’t think of leaving,” he said. He pulled on his clothes, hastily buttoning his shirt, and slipping on his coat.
Then he turned to her and the tears rose in his eyes.
“You will come home just as soon as you can,” he said.
She put her arms around him and he held her as tightly as he dared, rubbing his face in her hair, kissing her over and over again on her soft cheek. “I love you, Laura,” he said. “I love you with all my heart, Laura. I love you with all my soul. I’m young and foolish and I don’t understand all of it, but I love you, and I want you to come home. I don’t know what I have to offer you that the others can’t offer, and they’re stronger, finer, infinitely more experienced—.”
“Stop.” She put her fingers against his lips. “You are my love,” she whispered. “My only love.”
He went out the back door and down the steps in the rain. The forest was an invisible wall of darkness; only the wet grass showed in the lights from the house. And the rain stung him and he hated it.
“Reuben,” she called out. She stood on the porch as she had that first night. The Old West–style kerosene lantern was there on the bench but it was not lighted, and he could not make out the features of her face.
“What is it?”
She came down the steps, into the rain.
He couldn’t resist taking her in his arms again.
“Reuben, that night. You have to understand. I didn’t care what happened to me. I didn’t care at all.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t care whether I lived or died. Not at all.” The rain was flooding down on her hair, on her upturned face.
“I know.”
“I don’t know that you can know,” she said. “Reuben, nothing paranormal, psychic, supernatural has ever happened to me. Nothing. Never have I had a presentiment, or a foreboding dream. Never has the spirit of my father or my sister, or my husband or my children come to me, Reuben. Never has there been a comforting moment when I felt their presence. Never did I have an inkling that they were alive somewhere. Never has there been the slightest breach of the rules of the natural world. That’s where I lived until you came, in the natural world.”