Ghost Wife : Part 11

Skylight Confessions
By Alice Hoffman

(Page 11 of 12)

In bed, watching John sleep, she became frightened of who she'd become. She had never been the sort of person who lied and cheated; she felt such actions were poisonous and wrong.

"What is it?" John said when he woke to see her sitting up in bed. Arlie looked a hundred years old.

"Did you ever wonder if we were really meant to be together?"

"God, Arlie." John laughed. "Is that what's keeping you awake?" He had stopped wondering about that. He'd made a wrong turn and here they were, years later, in bed. "Go to sleep. Forget things like that. That kind of thinking doesn't do you any good."

For once, Arlyn thought John was right. She closed her eyes. She would do what she had to do, no matter the price.

She stopped answering the phone when she knew George was the one calling. She looked out at the sky and after a while the phone stopped ringing. She kept busy. She took up knitting. She made Sam a sweater with a border of bluebirds. One day she came home from the market with Sam to see George's truck in the driveway. George wasn't behind the wheel. He was right up by the house, sitting beside the boxwoods. Arlie felt her heart go crazy, but she calmly said to Sam, "Can you take one of these packages?"

She handed Sam the lightest grocery bag, and grabbed the other two from the backseat.

"There's the window washer," Sam said. He waved at George and George waved back.

Arlie took the bag of groceries and told Sam to go play ball. George Snow got up. There was grass on his clothes; he'd been sitting there a long time, waiting.

She told him she couldn't see him anymore. If she had to make a choice she would always choose Sam. Sam was throwing a ball against the garage door. She thought that his presence would keep the conversation with George on an even keel, but when she told George it was over, he got on his knees.

"Get up! Get up!" Arlyn cried. "You can't do something like this!"

Although Sam rarely paid attention to adults, he was certainly watching now. A tall man was on his knees. The ball Sam had been playing with rolled down the drive, then disappeared beneath a rhododendron.

"We can just take off and go away," George Snow said. "We'll leave right now."

He made it sound so easy, but of course Arlyn was the one who had something to lose. What about the child in the driveway whom she loved above all others? What about the man she had foolishly promised her future to?

"George," she said. "I mean it. Get up!"

He stood to face her. His coat billowed out behind him. It was too late. He saw it in her face. He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeves.

"I can't believe you're going to do this to us," he said.

He kissed her before she could tell him no. Not that she would have wanted him to stop. He kissed her for a long time, then he went to his truck. Sam waved to him and George Snow waved back.

"What was wrong with that man's eyes?" Sam asked later, when his mother was putting him to bed.

"Soot fell into them," Arlie said. "Now go to sleep."

That night when John came home he called her name in a loud voice. Arlyn's first thought was, He knows! Someone has told him! Cynthia did it! Now I can run away! But that wasn't it at all. She went into the kitchen and John was holding out his closed hands. It was Arlyn's birthday. She'd completely forgotten. She was twenty-five years old.

"Is this for me?" Arlyn said.

"I can't imagine who else it would be for," John said. "Let's take a look."

He opened his hands to reveal a strand of creamy pearls the color of camellias. The first beautiful thing John ever bought for her. He'd waited until now. Until she didn't give a damn.

"I should have a birthday more often," Arlie said.

It wasn't until they were in bed that John told her he'd found the pearls.

"Oh, don't be mad," John said. "You know I can never remember dates. At least you have good luck on your birthday! It's not every woman's husband who finds a treasure. They were under the boxwood. Maybe they've been there for a hundred years."

It was as though the pearls had grown outside their house, seeds planted in the earth, to arise milky as onionskin. Arlie looped them around her neck. Let that fool John think they'd appeared like magic, springing out of the earth or dropped from the sky by a red-winged hawk. She let John fasten the clasp even though they were most certainly a gift from another man, the one she'd loved. Not that it mattered anymore. She'd made her choice and if she herself lived to be a hundred she would never regret it.

Her choice would always be Sam.

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.