Ghost Wife : Part 3

Skylight Confessions
by Alice Hoffman

(Page 3 of 12)

As for Arlyn, if nothing ever happened to her again, this would be enough. The way he circled his arms around her, the way the dishes in the dish rack fell to the floor, the good white china in shards and neither one of them caring. She had never been kissed before; she'd been too busy with bedpans, morphine, the practical details of death.

"This is crazy," John Moody said, not that he intended to stop. Not that he could.

Would he hold this against her, years and years later, how waylaid he'd become? Would he say she tricked him with a rare beauty no one had noticed before? All Arlyn knew was that when she led him to her bedroom, he followed. It was a girl's bedroom with lace runners on the bureaus and milk-glass lamps; it didn't even seem to belong to her anymore. The way time was moving, so fast, so intense, made her shudder. She was about to make the leap from one world to the next, from the over and done to the what could be.

Arlyn went forward into time and space; she looped her arms around John Moody's neck. She felt his kiss on her throat, her shoulders, her breasts. He had been lost and she had found him. He had asked for directions and she had told him which way to go. He was whispering, Thank you, as though she had given him a great gift. Perhaps she had given him exactly that: her self, her future, her fate.

HE STAYED FOR THREE DAYS, THE ENTIRE TIME SPENT IN bed; he was crazy for her, hypnotized, not wanting food or water, only her. She tasted like pears. How odd that was, that sweet green flavor, and even odder that he should notice. John didn't usually pay attention to people, but he did now. Arlie's hands were small and beautiful and her teeth were small and perfect as well, but she had large feet, as he did. The sign of a walker, a doer, a person who completed tasks and never complained. She seemed neat and uncomplicated, everything he admired. He did not know her name until the first morning, didn't learn of her father's death until the second. And then on the third morning John Moody awoke suddenly from a dream, the first dream he could remember having in many years, perhaps since he was a child. He'd been in the house he'd grown up in, a renowned construction his architect father had built outside New Haven that people called the Glass Slipper, for it was made out of hundreds of windows woven together with thin bands of polished steel. In his dream, John Moody was carrying a basket of pears along the hallway. Outside there was an ice storm and the glass house had become opaque. It was difficult to see where he was going at first, and then impossible.

John was lost, though the floor plan was simple, one he had known his whole life. His father was a great believer in minimalism, known for it, lauded for his straight lines stacked one upon another, as though a building could be made purely from space and glass. John Moody looked down to see why the basket he carried had become so heavy. Everything was odd: the way his heart was pounding, the confusion he felt. Stranger still: the pears in the basket had become flat black stones. Before he could stop them the stones arose without being touched; they hurtled up through the air as though they'd been fired from a cannon, breaking the windows of the Glass Slipper, one after the other. Everything shattered and the sky came tumbling into the house. Cloud and bird and wind and snow.

John Moody awoke in Arlyn's arms, in a room he did not recognize. There was a white sheet over him, and his chest was constricted with fear. He had to get out. He was in the wrong place; that was all too clear to him now. Wrong time, wrong girl, wrong everything. Next to him, Arlie's red hair fell across the pillow. In this light, true morning light, it was the color of the human heart, of blood. It seemed unnatural, not a color that he, who preferred muted tones, would ever be drawn to.

Arlie raised herself onto one elbow. "What?" she said sleepily.

"Nothing. Go back to sleep."

John Moody already had his pants on and was searching for his shoes. He was supposed to be in class at that very moment. He was taking conversational Italian, planning to travel to Florence during the summer between graduation and his advanced-degree program in architecture. He would stand in great halls, see what the masters had accomplished, sleep dreamlessly through still, black nights in a small hotel room.

Arlyn tried to pull him close. But he was bending down, out of reach, retrieving his shoes from beneath the bed.

"Go back to sleep," John told her. All those freckles he hadn't noticed in the dark. Those thin, grasping arms.

"Will you come back to bed?" Arlie murmured. She was half-asleep. Love was stupefying, hypnotizing, a dream world.

"I'll watch you," John said.

Arlyn liked the sound of that; she may have smiled. John waited till she was asleep, then he left her. He hurried along the stairs Arlyn's father hadn't been able to get down, then went through the empty hall. There was dust in every corner, black mourning ribbons still tied on the backs of the chairs, bits of plaster trickling from the ceiling. He hadn't noticed any of that before; everything fell down and fell apart once you looked closely.

Once John got outside, the fresh air was a jolt. Blessed air; blessed escape. There was a field behind the house, overrun with black-eyed Susans, tall grass, and weeds. In daylight, the cottage had very little charm; it was horrible, really. Someone had added on a dormer and an unattractive side entrance. The paint was a flat steamship gray. Disgraceful what some people thought of as architecture.

John prayed his car would start. As soon as it did, he made a U-turn and headed back to the ferry, counting to a hundred over and over again, the way men who avoid close calls often do. One, get me out of here. Two, I beg of you. Three, I swear I will never stray again. And so on, until he was safely on board the ferry, miles and leagues away, a safe and comfortable distance from a future of love and ruin.

Copyright © 2007 by Alice Hoffman

About the Author

Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then was a Mirrellees Fellowship at the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing.