This Is How I'd Love You (24 page)

He has no idea how many days have passed when he awakens to see Rogerson sitting beside him, his shirtsleeves covered in mud. For a moment, he believes he has overslept, that it’s all been a terribly vivid dream and that he’s about to catch hell. He wonders if there is time for coffee.

But as he looks around the room and feels the ache in his chest, the dull throbbing in his head, he knows.

“Still raining?” Charles asks, closing his eyes again.

“I’m waiting for my hot bath.”

“A good novel.”

“I’ve got something for you,” Rogerson says. “A letter.”

Charles opens his eyes slightly, just to see the familiar slant of her handwriting. Everything is blurry, but the shape of the envelope is clear.

“Apparently you’ve been so sick that you couldn’t even be roused for this. Shall I?” Charles cannot speak. “Of course I shall,” Rogerson says, clearing his throat. The sound of the envelope torn between Rogerson’s fingers sends a chill across Charles’s body.

His voice begins, articulating her words carefully.

“Dear Mr. Reid, What a strange night I’ve just had. I hope to tell all about it someday. For now, though, I must address your recent letter about what you believe. It is a lovely letter and it’s made me want more of myself. For you, too.”
Here Rogerson stops, then adds in his own voice, “More, yes. We love more, Hensley. Right?” When Charles says nothing, he continues, “
Things I know
. It’s a list, Reid. Ready?”

Charles tries to nod his head. Rogerson continues. “
One. It is easier to lie than tell the truth
. Don’t we know it?
Two. Your words are the ones I would hold to my chest if I were dying. True or false, they are everything.
Sweet. God, she’s good.
Three. You will make it home and I will live out my days consoled by the fact that you are in the world.
She loves you, Reid. I mean, really. This is getting serious.
Four. I am . . .”
But Rogerson’s voice halts here.

Charles opens his eyes. “What?” he manages to say. “She is what?”

Rogerson folds the letter and replaces it in the envelope. Charles reaches his hand out, but it falls onto the bed, impotent.

“She is waiting for you, Reid. That’s all.” Rogerson’s hand is heavy and warm against Charles’s shoulder. “You’ve got to get the hell out of here, okay? Get out of here and go get her.”

Charles nods, weeping. The tears are warm, then cold, and he cannot hide them.

H
ensley changes trains once again in Chicago, painfully aware of her solitude this time around. For several hours she settles herself onto a wooden bench near the ticket booth. As trains arrive and prepare to depart there is a great surge in the size of the crowd, but then it diminishes. It is as though the terminal is a beach and the passengers are its rhythmic, if irregular, waves.

Luckily, Thomas Wright’s arrival was delayed by more than a week and Hensley was able to pack her things properly and conjure a traveling skirt that allows the slight swell in her waist to be accommodated by a soft, pleated waistband. She knows it is ridiculous, but she wants to step off the train and shame Lowell by her beauty. She’d like to arrive more desirable than when she left.

On the morning of her departure, Hensley stood in the kitchen where she last saw her father alive. She cooked herself an egg in the cast-iron pan that was there when they arrived and would stay on, serving the house’s next resident. It was a good pan, well seasoned, with a shape somewhere between a circle and an oval. Just the sight of it made her hungry. So many slices of ham and bacon had been fried in it that everything came out slightly smoky. She ate the egg right out of the pan, imagining the face her father would have made to express his disdain for her slovenly manners.

Her father’s desk, her own sewing machine, the silver tea service, and several boxes of personal items including her father’s chess set were bundled in the corner of the living room, to be sent to New York separately. Hensley just had a trunk and one valise to take on the train. Mr. Reid’s letters were tucked into her own satchel, which would not leave her side.

The truck sat in front of the house, idling. Teresa came in, her boots striking hard against the wood floor.

“Ready?” she called, her voice pitched low like her brother’s.

They had spoken little since their middle-of-the-night encounter a week before.

“Almost,” Hensley called from the kitchen.

Teresa poked her head in the doorway.

Hensley had her fork in the pan, scooping the eggs onto it. “You caught me. Want a fork?”

Teresa’s boots clomped across the floor. She took a clean fork from the dish rack. “I’m starving.”

They ate the buttery eggs in silence, like an old married couple. The truck idled outside, filling their thoughts with the imminent journey.

Finally, Teresa pulled the brim of her hat down hard and said, “We should probably go.”

“Okay. I’ll just clean this pan.”

Teresa turned away from her. “Good eggs. Thank you,” she said. Soon, Hensley saw her carry the impossibly heavy trunk and suitcase out and heave them into their place in the truck bed.

Hensley wiped the pan dry and then scooped up Isaac, who had been slinking between her legs all morning. Rubbing his little white face with her knuckles, she told him to be good. Newton was nowhere to be found, but she placed the last of the milk into a dish and left it by the back door.

Hensley stood once more in front of her bedroom wall, wishing she could take the whole thing with her, wondering how she would bear to awaken each morning without his words being the first thing she saw. Despite the trouble it might cause, Teresa had acquiesced to Hensley’s pleas to leave it until she’d gone. Hensley leaned her cheek against the wall, the morning sun already making it warm.

You are going to become another man’s bride,
she told herself.
This has to be the end
.

Hensley tried to conjure the way Lowell’s face looked to her when they first met. When it had appeared innocent, handsome, even. But instead she could only picture the words of his telegram.
I would be remiss if I did not extend the offer of a marriage.
She understood how loath he was to see her again. Could this be, in fact, their only commonality?

Hensley opened her eyes and her fingers traced the words just beside her. But she finally pushed herself away from the wall and closed the door behind her.

The two girls drove away from Hillsboro. Hensley kept her eyes on the dirt road that brought her here.

Dear Mr. Reid,
she began,
I wonder how it is that this desolate dirt road is somehow connected to the chaos of Times Square.
But then she stopped. She gripped the handkerchief in her hand, willing her mind to be quiet.

She had not written to him again since she’d confessed the truth. And there had been no reply. So, just as she’d suspected, it must be finished. Their short love story had ended with a blank page. Their effort at immortality, in the end, sabotaged not by death, but by life.

What would he do with her letters now that he knew the truth? Perhaps they would be thrown into a rubbish bin in the mess hall, piled on by clumps of that uneaten white mush. Or maybe he and Rogerson would take a match to them, throw them on top of a fire, eliciting some final heat from her words.

Still, she longed to know that he was safe. She’d left her forwarding address only with Teresa, not the postmaster. If a letter from him did arrive, Teresa would send it along, bundled in her own correspondence. Hensley knew she must not imagine that possibility, just as a hungry man must not imagine a roast.

As they drove, flies buzzed against the inside of the windshield. “I’m sorry you’ll have to explain about the wall.”

Teresa shrugged. “I don’t expect he’ll care. I’ll just have to fix it.”

Hensley reached out her hand and laid it on Teresa’s. “You’re a good man.”

They giggled as the heat of the day assaulted the truck.

“Yes. I am Berto Romero with hair on my chest and a cock between my legs and you’re a nice, refined, virginal girl sitting here beside me.”

“Two peas in a pod.”

Their smiles faded gradually. Hensley stuck her hand out into the hot air. Teresa wiped the sweat from her brow with her shirtsleeve.

“Will it be terrible? Marrying this man?” she asked.

Hensley let the question settle into her. She pictured the way he looked when she went to his apartment, his bare feet flimsy and awkward and slightly grotesque. When he acknowledged his deception without flinching, she’d known it was not the first or the last time he would lie to satisfy a desire.

“Perhaps people change.”

Teresa nodded. The journey was long and hot and hostile to cheerful thoughts. By the time they reached El Paso, Hensley didn’t care if she never saw another long-eared jackrabbit or the shadow of a red-tail hawk as it hovered, darkening the desert.

Teresa parked the truck beside the curb while Hensley flagged down a porter. Suddenly their good-bye was imminent and they were in public. There could not be an embrace between a lady and her driver.

Instead, Hensley handed Teresa an envelope. “I saved myself the cost of postage and already wrote you a letter.”

Teresa smiled. She glanced at it and read the sentence written in small script on the outside.
Parting advice:
If you have hair on your chest and a cock between your legs, you should not use the women’s restroom.
She smiled and folded it into her back pocket. She touched the brim of her hat. “Many thanks.”

Hensley watched her move into the crowd, a young hired man entering the station in search of Mr. Thomas Wright.

 • • • 

S
oon enough, another train disembarks and the station is full again with finely dressed men and women walking hurriedly across the marble floor. Into this chaos, a man enters from the street, rolling two large, upright cases. His face is familiar, but Hensley doesn’t know how that could be possible.

At the very moment that she is studying him for clues to his identity, he sees her and approaches.

“Well, hello,” he says in a surprisingly deep voice. “You don’t recognize me in my street clothes. But I never forget a face. Especially not one I might’ve killed.”

“Oh,” Hensley says, excitedly. “From the circus. Of course. Your mustache is not . . . curled.”

“Right you are. Remind me where I had the pleasure of holding you? Was it California?”

Hensley shakes her head. “No. New Mexico. A little mining town in the south.”

His eyebrows vault high up on his forehead. “A long way from home.”

“I was, yes. I’m going home now. Back to New York.”

He nods approvingly. “The whole troupe will be there next month. Will you come and see us again? Articus McDonald. Everyone calls me Arty.” He takes Hensley’s gloved hand and brings it to his lips.

“Oh, I’d love to. It was a wonderful show.”

“I will curl my mustache for you.”

Hensley smiles. “Then I will recognize you.”

“You don’t seem as happy as most people who are on their way home.”

“Don’t I?” Hensley puts a hand to her throat, trying to ease the lump of emotion that is lodged there.

Arty shrugs his wide shoulders. “The road is my home, so forgive me. I wouldn’t know anything about going home.”

The noise of travelers is receding all around them.

Quietly, Hensley says, “I’m to be married. In New York.”

He nods. “Well, that is a terrifying idea.”

Hensley smiles. “Like being lifted in a chair way up high by somebody you’ve never met before.”

Arty laughs. “Precisely. What did I tell you that night?”

“Um, you told me to hold on tight. That’s all I remember.”

“Well, it’s good advice for marriage, too, I guess.”

Hensley nods. “I suppose it is.”

“I was married once. The holding on is everything. When you get lazy, let go a little bit, that’s when she will find another strong man. Even if he’s a short lion tamer who needs red whips and sedatives to control his creatures. He will know something about captivating a creature who is feeling neglected.”

“That’s a sad story.”

Arty winks. “But it’s mine. And I use it all the time to my advantage.”

Hensley blushes. “Lemonade from lemons, as they say. Right?”

“Load on the sugar,” he says, pushing his carts slowly away from Hensley. “My last bit of advice. Lots and lots of sugar.”

Hensley watches him cross the empty station and wishes she could follow him. If she’d any courage at all, she might just join the circus and swing from the trapeze. Her baby would learn how to juggle and eat fire. They would live in train stations and on wagons, amid midgets and giants. She could write letters to Mr. Reid from every single town and city, hoping in each one that he might make himself known to her. That he would step into the spotlight, surrender his arm to her sweaty, chalky hand. Then they’d reinvent themselves and a whole new act could be developed: the three of them holding tightly to one another while they sailed through the heat of the tent, untethered from any earthly concern.