Sylvie sat on the couch in the front room and listened to the house. It was still strange to her, being alone. Sole. Solitary. Sole, I sit. The boys, even Scott, were fast asleep, exhausted from a day of work. She was tired too, the baby making her hips ache and her brain fuzzy. But she wanted to feel what it was to be alone now. It was yellow and brown, she decided, the silence yellow, the space brown. It hummed around her in waves. It wasn’t all bad, but she was aware of Hugh’s absence and it felt strange, gaping, too big, white.
The evenings had been pleasant once, before he started drinking so much. They had read to each other or just chatted, about the boys and the farm, making plans and discussing things. He had told her about books she should read, describing the plots and the characters so that she felt she had read them. When he first brought her to Agony Hill and they unpacked all of his books into the bookcases he’d built in what had been the Hicksons’ parlor, Sylvie thought that she was luckiest girl in the entire world. To have all of these books, to be allowed to read them whenever she wanted. But there had always seemed to be so much to do. Once Scott came, she was always working and it was only in the evenings that Hugh let her sit and read the books. When she started writing poems, he sometimes asked her to read them aloud, and then he started writing his stories and letters and articles and reading those too, asking for her advice on how to make them better.
They had been happy for a while like that, alone in their little world up on Agony Hill, before things started to change. Before the gin. Before his letters. Before he’d gotten the rejection letters for his “book.”
Suddenly, she remembered the day they’d met. He’d come into the drugstore where she worked at the counter, and bought a packet of pills for his bad stomach. It had been a quiet day and she had taken a book from the rack, a Nevil Shute novel about a woman marching across Malaysia, and she was reading it, careful not to break the spine so that she could put it back when Gary came back from his lunch break.
She’d looked up to find a tall man watching her. “Why are you reading like that?” he asked. “Books should be read extravagantly, completely, not timidly, as though you’re afraid to live right down in them!” He had sounded stern and she’d been a bit afraid of him when she explained that the book wasn’t hers so she didn’t want to break it.
He smiled then. “Well,” he said, handing over some bills, too much for the pills alone. “I’ve bought it for you, so you can read it however you’d like now. Break it wide open!”
Taking him literally, she’d looked right at him and opened the book as wide as she could. It had made a satisfying sound as the paper opened and the spine broke. He’d laughed and really focused on her then and she knew, because men had started to look at her like that, that he thought she was pretty and that he liked her. She thanked him and sure enough he was back the next day and this time he asked if she might like to go for a walk. She said all right, but it would have to be after she finished working.
When he came to pick her up, he asked about her favorite books and they talked without stopping. She didn’t think he was very handsome. He was much older, for one thing, almost thirty-five, and for another he had a strange way of talking, as though he were teaching a class rather than having a conversation. She had liked the way he talked about the world, as though it were his and hers to explore. “When I take you to London,” he’d say, or, “You’ll love Rome.” He told her about how he’d come to Vermont with a man named Jeffrey, who had a farm and wanted to show that it was possible to live freely, without regard for things like marriage or taxes or capital. She gathered that he and this Jeffrey had had a fight, though, over money, and later Hugh had told her about how he lent Jeffrey five thousand dollars and Jeffrey had never paid him back.
When he said he wanted to take her to Bethany with him, where he was going to buy a farm and they could live the way people used to live, off the land, without having to capitulate to modernity, and would she go with him, even if they weren’t married, she’d told him she’d be happy to go but that her father wouldn’t let her unless she was married. He had sighed and said that well, they might as well get a license, but they could still live freely, without “strictures.” Did she understand what he was asking her, he said then, did she understand what it meant to live with someone and be his wife? And then he grabbed at her breasts and pulled her toward him and kissed her. She didn’t like it. He had bad breath and the kiss was very wet, but somewhere in there he said he had boxes of books and that they would be theirs now, both of theirs, and that she would have a house to keep as she pleased, and she said yes without really thinking about it.
“Well, Sylvie,” she said to herself now. “You made your bed.” It was a thing her mother had liked to say, to tell them that everything that happened was their fault. But Sylvie had always hated it. People made mistakes, especially children, and Sylvie had never said those words to her own boys. If something bad happened, the person who was responsible for it would spend enough time blaming himself or herself for the calamity. What they wanted to hear was that they would have company as they sought to solve it. “We’ll figure it out together,” Sylvie always told the boys when they had amends to make or messes to clean up.
She smiled to herself. She actually did need to make her bed. She’d washed the sheets that day and hung them out in the dry air, then folded them carefully. Bed. It was time to go to bed.
Still smiling, she shut off the lights and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. The air had a slight chill and once she’d put the sheets back on and undressed, she got beneath the quilt and found she missed Hugh’s warmth. Shivering, she put a hand on her belly, felt the baby move and shift beneath her skin. They would keep each other warm, this baby and Sylvie. Was it a girl, like Hugh thought? December. She’d know in December.
“I’ll see you soon,” she whispered, closing her eyes, burrowing under the covers, and smelling the warm smell of the laundered sheets. The baby kicked faintly once, then twice, as if in answer.