Her Dear and Loving Husband (16 page)

“I’ll bring these back to your office,” she said.

“Absolutely not. You had no business bringing them out here in the first place.”

He walked back to the instructor’s desk, grabbed his book bag, and turned out the lights. In the hallway, he took possession of the cart and wheeled it out the door.    

“Were you going to the game?” he asked. 

“I was thinking about it.” Actually, she had no such thought. She couldn’t care less about ice hockey, but if James was going then she wanted to go too.

“I’d be happy to escort you. If you’d like that.” He grimaced, a flash of concern in his night-dark eyes. “I understand if you don’t want to be anywhere near me, Sarah. I don’t think I would want to be anywhere near me if I were you. I know I should have told you sooner. I didn’t keep it from you because I didn’t trust you. I kept it from you because I knew you would be afraid. Who wouldn’t be?”

Sarah put her hand over his as he wheeled the cart across College Drive. He stopped at her touch, and she didn’t pull away from his lifeless skin. It didn’t feel odd. It felt…like James. “I don’t think anyone who talks about the Romantic poets the way you do could hurt anyone,” she said. “I’m glad Jennifer sent me tonight.”

As they walked they glanced shyly at each other, like teenagers with a crush. Then he stopped, stacked the books on the bottom shelf of the cart, and patted the top shelf. “Hop on,” he said.

Sarah shook her head. “I could barely push the cart with just the books.”

“I think I can handle it.”

He picked her up as if she weighed no more than a porcelain doll, then sat her on top of the cart. He pushed her forward, onto the green near the residence hall, past the annex to the main library building. He wasn’t running, but he moved quickly, and Sarah felt her heart race and her breath quicken. She felt like she did when she was a girl and she went on the roller coasters at Great Adventure, the adrenaline rushing, feeling alive. Students and professors waved and laughed as they rushed by, and they were at the library too soon. She hadn’t felt such child-like glee for years. James stopped the cart, lifted her from the shelf, and placed her gently on the ground. They took the elevator to the third floor where he put the books into his office, and they left the empty cart on the main floor.    

They walked hand in hand to the O’Keefe Center, to Rockett Arena where the game had already started. Sarah stopped short when she saw the “Sold Out” signs displayed in the box office windows, but James led her toward the turnstile.

“Levon gave me tickets,” he said.

“Hey, Doctor Wentworth,” the usher said. “Your seats are down front.”

They walked into an electric atmosphere of blue and orange, and shouts of “Vikings!” or “Defense!” bounced off the walls back at the spectators like yodels down a mountain range. As she looked around, Sarah saw nearly an equal number of Bowdoin supporters in their white hoodies with their school’s polar bear logo. The score was tied, 2-2, and Sarah saw Levon, the Viking goalie, set in concentration as the puck flew his way.

The game passed in a blur for Sarah. Every once in a while, if the crowd screamed loudly enough, she would check the score, but otherwise she was consumed by James. He cheered as loudly as anyone, cursed a bad call, shouted encouragement for Levon. When Levon blocked a potential Bowdoin winning goal, James stood up and shouted, “That’s my boy!” Sarah smiled whenever a student recognized him and gave him the hi sign or shouted “How ya doin’ Professor?” or “Hey Doctor Wentworth! Don’t usually see you at the games!”

The Vikings scored again in the fourth quarter, and they won 3-2. The cheers in the arena echoed so loudly Sarah had to cover her ears to stop the ringing. Levon skated past to the locker room, and he stopped when he saw them.

“Doctor Wentworth, you made it!” He pointed his chin in Sarah’s direction. “I saw you earlier. You were waiting for the professor in the hall.”

Sarah felt her cheeks blush hot. “I had some books for him.”

“That’s right. I remember tripping over the cart.” Levon grinned. “You’re the Humanities librarian.”

“That’s right.”

“She’s a nice lady, Doctor Wentworth.”

“Yes, she is,” James said.

Levon looked at Sarah, still grinning. “I’m glad you’re hanging out with the professor. I’ve been telling him he needs a friend…”

“Good night, Levon.”

Levon laughed at the professor’s terse dismissal as he skated away.

After the crowd cleared, James took Sarah’s hand and led her back to the library. It was dark, Jennifer had closed for the night, so Sarah used her keys to let them in. She flipped on the lights of the main floor, and suddenly they were alone inside. James sat in a chair by one of the computer terminals, and he logged into his account and typed something into the keyboard. Sarah walked over to him, as close as she dared. She wanted to brush his gold hair from his eyes. She wanted to kiss him, but she wouldn’t pressure him again. He took his glasses off and slid them into his shirt pocket, and she was glad he felt comfortable enough to put his disguise away, meager as it was.

“Look at this,” he said. He turned the monitor so Sarah could see what he had pulled up—information about the year 1662.

“1662?”

“The year I was born.”

She leaned over his shoulder so she could see the screen clearly. He leaned toward her, his hair touching her cheek.

“You’re three hundred and forty-nine years old,” she said. He nodded. “You look good for your age.”

He laughed, though the amusement became a sigh. He took Sarah’s hand and held onto it. She didn’t want him to let go. He brought her around the chair and she sat on his lap. She leaned into him, her back against his chest.

“Immortality sounds like a gift, doesn’t it?” He spoke softly, whispering in her ear. “Never growing old or feeble. Never ailing, never dying. But my nights became monotonous. I had to find a way to give meaning to my time, so I began teaching. It’s an odd job for me, I suppose, but then any job besides Grim Reaper might seem odd for one of my kind. I enjoy sharing the knowledge I’ve gained, and since so few people know what I am, no one questions me. I’m virtually undetectable in this world.”

“Where were you born?”

“London. I moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with my father, John, who made his fortune as a merchant. We both wanted a fresh start after my mother died, and we were intrigued by the untapped opportunities in the New World. We knew of the seaport here and the possibilities of making more money in the merchant trade, so we immigrated.”

“Did you meet your wife here or in London?”

James paused, and she turned her head so she could see his face. His brow was furrowed, his eyes closed as he rested his head against the chair. He seemed to wonder how to say what he needed to say.

“I met my wife here, through friends of the family, over supper one evening. She died too young. Many people died young in the seventeenth century, but she didn’t die from illness or childbirth as so many did then. She died for all the wrong reasons.”

Something James said made Sarah pause, something tugged at the edges of her memory, but she didn’t try to make sense of it then. She was just happy to be near him.

“You must have had a fascinating life,” she said.

He looked sad as he nodded. As Sarah sat on his lap, feeling his strength envelope her, part of her, her logical mind, began to balk against the supernatural hocus pocus. Though she had felt his unbeating chest, he was so human in every other way. How could this young-looking man have been born during colonial times? How could he be dead but alive, talking to her, stroking her hair? She touched her hand to his cheek, felt the lifelessness there, and she was reminded that the hocus pocus was true. Silently to herself, she tried to list all the changes that had happened over the last three hundred years.

“It must be jarring to you, the passage of time,” she said. “Like that old saying, the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“It can be quite a shock sometimes to remember it’s the twenty-first century and not the seventeenth, though human nature hasn’t changed much in all that time. Apart from the new-fangled technology, what people want from their lives has remained essentially the same. They want their basic needs met. They want security. They want to know they matter.”    

Again, Sarah thought of James’s wife. She remembered his reaction the first time he saw her the night she went to look at his house.

“When you saw me the first time, you thought I was your wife even though she died over three hundred years ago?”

“Yes.”  

“Do you still think I look like her?”

“Yes.”

He spoke quickly, as if he needed to change the subject. “I’m sure it’s hard for a human to accept the fact that my kind exists. There are probably around a million in all, more in Salem as well. Timothy, for example.”

Sarah had seen the pale-faced, dark-eyed, dark-haired boy following James around the library like a faithful puppy with his tongue out and his tail wagging. Whenever she saw the boy she thought he seemed too young to be in college.

“And Jocelyn. You met her on Halloween. She was dressed as Cher.”

“Jocelyn and Steve are vampires?”

“Not Steve. Just Jocelyn.”

“A vampire married to a human?”

James shrugged but he smiled. “It happens,” he said.

“It must be hard for a human to be married to a vampire.”

“Jocelyn and Steve seem to manage. They’re one of the happiest couples I know.”  

James paused and his face softened as he watched her. She wanted to love the way he was looking at her, but she couldn’t help wondering who it was he looked at with such tenderness, the memory of his wife Elizabeth or her. She wanted to believe he saw her since she was the one sitting on his lap, but then she remembered what happened the other night, the coldness between them when all she wanted was to be closer to him. She shuddered at the memory of the way he jumped into his car and sped away.

“I suppose it depends on how different the human is willing for her life to be,” he said, his voice trailing away with the thought.

“I didn’t know about you until last night. You don’t seem that different.”

“But I am. I’ve become better at hiding it over the years. For one thing, we’re on different schedules. Most of life happens during the day while I’m sleeping. And I drink blood, Sarah. I need blood to survive.”  

“That is different.”

“There’s also the fear factor. Some people might be too nervous about the fact that their significant other drinks blood. She might be afraid her vampire would suddenly decide he’s hungry one night and start feeding on the closest human he can find.”

“And you’re dead?”

“You remembered.”

He shook his head again. Of everything Sarah had learned about him, that fact amazed her the most. How can a body function without a heartbeat? Even a vampire body. Especially a vampire body. Looking at him as he held himself so still, she wanted to reach out, pull him even closer, run her fingers through his hair. He was the bigger, stronger one by far, yet something about him looked so vulnerable then. But instead of grabbing him, she reached out her hand and touched his chest where his heart should be. The nothing that had frightened her so much the night before, no rise and fall of air, no pounding life rhythm, now seemed merely an interesting fact about James. She looked into his night-dark eyes and saw a faint smile, maybe one he didn’t intend for her to see. With a little more courage brought on by his smile, she pressed her ear where her hand had been. She could have stayed that way all night. Then she felt his chin on top of her head. His head felt heavy, but the pressure felt right. She stayed there longer than it took to hear the hollow silence inside his chest.

“Still nothing,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How does the blood you drink flow through your body if your heart doesn’t pump?”

“I don’t know.”  

She raised her head from his chest and looked him in the eye.

“Tell me about Elizabeth.”

He shook his head. “Another time.”

“Tell me anything. Tell me about the day you met.”

James closed his eyes again. He stayed that way so long Sarah thought he fell asleep. When he opened his eyes to look at her, she thought he seemed far away, as if he had traveled back in time. When he spoke his voice sounded different, like an actor in a Shakespearean play. He smiled as he thought of that long-ago day.  

“I remember how my heart danced dizzying circles the first time I saw her over the supper table where my father and I were gathered with friends. Her family was new to the Massachusetts Bay Colony having just arrived from England.”

“What year was it?”

He thought a moment. “1691. From the moment I saw her I knew I had never seen anyone as beautiful. She was talking to her younger sister in a sweet, motherly way, and I might not have been there at all for all that she noticed me. When she finally looked around the table and saw me gazing at her, our eyes met and I knew instantly she was the one for me. It came as no surprise that other young men had noticed her. I didn’t think I had a chance to win her hand. Surely she could find someone better than me, I thought, but she was always on my mind. 

“My father, ever my friend and protector, noticed how distracted I was and how gammy, how clumsy, I had become. I was tripping all over myself, knocking everything over, unable to concentrate at my work. There was a particularly embarrassing incident one afternoon when I spilled hot coffee over a potential buyer. My father had found a new supplier for the beans and he was hoping this man, Mr. Smithers, would purchase most, if not all, of our product.

“‘James,’ my father called, ‘bring Mr. Smithers some of that coffee I brewed this morn. He should taste how warming and delicious the drink is for himself.’ Though I was standing but a foot away I hardly heard him.

“‘James?’

“‘Aye?’ I said.

“‘The coffee, Son.’

“‘Coffee?’ I answered.

“‘Aye, James. Coffee.’

“I rushed to the tea service, an expensive set my father had imported from somewhere exotic, and I clanged around until I fit the right top onto the right pot. My father and Mr. Smithers watched with amused grins. I tripped over I-didn’t-know-what as I brought the tea service to the table, and I knocked into a chair and the pot fell over, spilling hot liquid all over Mr. Smithers, down his white linen shirt and white stockings. Mr. Smithers, as if nothing strange had happened, touched his fingertips to the puddle on his breeches and put his hand to his mouth.