The Forgotten Room(93)
I smiled at the nurse. “It’s good to hear, even when I’m not so sure if I’ve made the right choices.”
She opened the door. “Well, that’s the thing about choices, isn’t it? There are always more to make. I’ve never seen a street where you couldn’t cross to the other side.”
She smiled again, then headed out into the corridor, her feet tapping briskly against the marble. I’d made it out the door and was shutting it behind me when Dr. Greeley and Cooper emerged from another office down the hall. It was too late to return to the office or run down the stairs. Instead, I held the sketches behind my back and stood where I was while I waited for them to approach, much as I imagined a small woodland animal waited in the middle of a road, staring at oncoming headlights.
I stared at the small cleft in Cooper’s chin, unable to meet his, eyes. “Good afternoon, Captain. I hope you’re well.”
“Very,” he said. “Thanks to you.”
I felt myself coloring and my gaze jerked up to meet his, and I immediately regretted it. Everything I was feeling—the euphoria, the loss, the regret—was mirrored in his eyes.
Dr. Greeley sounded almost gleeful. “The captain is doing so well that I’ve just completed his final exam and am pronouncing him fit enough for discharge.”
Cooper cleared his throat. “Caroline and I are taking a train to Charleston tomorrow afternoon.”
I almost said that it was too soon, that I needed to talk to him about the sketches, and the photo in Prunella’s scrapbook, and how I’d suddenly realized why I thought Harry Pratt looked so familiar. But I couldn’t, of course. It was too late. I needed to go, needed to get away as quickly as I could before I shattered into so many pieces that I could never put myself together again.
“That’s wonderful news,” I said to the cleft in his chin, still unable to meet his eyes. The color of winter grass. I remembered thinking that the first time I’d seen him, and how now it seemed that I had seen them before, had always known him.
“Good-bye, then,” I said, spinning on my heel and racing toward the steps before I made a fool of myself. I headed outside onto the pavement and into the hot sunshine, wanting to feel anything except the sharp sting of regret that filled the cavity in my chest where my heart had once been.
Twenty-six
NEW YEAR’S DAY 1893
Olive
All her life, Olive had wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve and experience the exact instant when the old year turned to the new. When the familiar date passed into history, never to be seen or known or smelled or touched again—like death, she supposed—and those bright exotic numbers that had once belonged to some impossibly distant future—1893, imagine that!—became your present reality.
But Olive was an early riser by habit and had never managed to keep her eyes open past eleven o’clock. Since the age of nineteen, when her parents had first let her stay up in the parlor, she had always woken on the settee at two or three o’clock, covered by a kindly blanket and a thick haze of bemused disappointment.
Until tonight. Like the rest of her life, New Year’s Eve had now irreparably altered, and Olive lay wide awake as the clock struck midnight and the entire house seemed to shudder with the celebration far below, in the magnificent second-floor drawing room, where everybody else in the world had gathered, except Olive and Harry.
Harry, who lay against her now, the long shanks of his body resting heavily alongside hers, his breath stirring her hair. She thought he was asleep. They had made love swiftly, zealously, reaching a roaring climax within minutes of tumbling through the attic door, and then he had gone mortally quiet, so that she had listened for the thump of his heart to make sure he was still alive.
“Happy New Year,” she whispered, into the air that seemed to shiver under the weight of the new numbers, the new future that inhabited the room with them. The skylight soared directly above, each pane reflecting a faint image of their entangled nakedness. A hundred Harrys, a hundred Olives, brought together under the starry new night.
But Harry didn’t answer. As she suspected, he had fallen asleep.
The minutes passed; the hours bled away. Harry slept abundantly, a deep and contented unconsciousness for which she envied him. Or did she? Maybe it was better not to sleep. Maybe it was better not to miss a single moment of this, of Harry’s warm body united with hers.
She wore nothing at all except the necklace. That was how Harry liked her best, without any clothes at all: not because he was lascivious—or maybe not only because he was lascivious—but because he hated to have anything come between his eyes and her skin, between his skin and her skin. Only the necklace, the central stone of which had slipped down the side of her neck and lay now on the cushion beneath, just touching the top of her collar. She imagined it glittering there, priceless and memorable, the token of Harry’s love.
Just like the earrings on her mother’s ears.
Olive’s father had loved her mother—of course he had—but Olive had always known that her father had a boundless capacity for love, a talent for it. His heart was so large and ambitious. And he had been paid a thousand dollars on the first of December, and he had gone to a jeweler and seen a splendid set of rubies—Olive could picture it all, could actually see her father glowing with delight at all the beauty laid out before him—and he bought that set on an impulse with those thousand dollars, in the full and infinite optimism of his love.