imagined the rest of him. When they sat to rest, Elfriede stared at their clasped palms in the grass, Wilfred’s large, white bones curled around hers, and a premonition of grief came upon her. But what will I do when you’ve gone? she whispered.
I have an idea, Wilfred said. Let’s not speak of that day until it comes.
NOW IT’S COME.
“What?” Elfriede says.
“After all, I’ve regained my health.”
“But they don’t ever make you leave, the doctors. You can stay as long as you like.”
“Only if you’ve got the dosh, my dear.”
“But I could—we could—I have plenty of money—”
“You mean your husband has plenty of money.”
Elfriede bows her head to this truth. Across the meadow, about thirty yards away, the grass stirs. A rodent of some kind, or a rabbit. Making preparation for winter, though the sun is still warm, no hint of evil yet cools the air.
“We have until Thursday,” Wilfred says. “Four more days.”
“And then what?”
“Nothing. I go about my life, pretending my heart’s not beating away somewhere else, beating inside your chest—”
“Oh, don’t. Don’t.”
He doesn’t. So they sit, as they always do, as they’ve done for the past few weeks, since Wilfred was first allowed out of the infirmary garden with strict instructions not to exert himself, not to expose his lungs to any hint of inclement weather. Lucky for them, the weather has been fine, an unprecedented succession of warm, dry, perfect days. Or maybe it’s not luck, after all. Maybe some more conscious force has arranged their affairs in this manner. Either way, the result’s the same. They sit side by side in the meadow grass, watching the sun make its eternal arc across the heavens. Sometimes he touches her, as he does now. His fingertips on the backs of her knuckles.
“I once met this fellow in the south of France, this painter. Do you know what he called this time of day? The hour before sunset?”
“No.”
“The golden hour.” Wilfred waves his hand at the sun, which now burns just above the jagged peaks that form their horizon. “He said that’s when everything looks the most beautiful, just before the sun sets. This luminous air turning everything to gold. He said it made him want to paint the whole world. And then it’s gone, just like that. The sun disappears. The night arrives.”
“The golden hour.” Elfriede stares at Wilfred’s hair, which has indeed transformed into a gold so pure as to make the alchemists weep, like the sun itself. She wants to touch it, to bury her face in it, to lick the gold from each strand before it’s gone. Before Wilfred’s gone, and the night arrives.
“What about you, Elfriede?” he asks. “That’s the important thing. What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Except I can’t stay here any longer if you’re gone.”
“Can’t you?”
“No, it’s impossible. It will hurt too much.”
“Not so much as it hurts me to leave.”
“No, more. Because you’ll have Vienna, you’ll have new sights and scenes, nothing to remind you of me. Whereas here, these buildings, this mountain, this meadow—everything is you now. And it will be empty.”
“Is that so intolerable?”
“You know it is.”
“Hmm.” The fingertips make another waltz on her knuckles. A Blue Danube of longing. “I thought you needed approval from this doctor to leave. Are you certain you want to cross him?”
“He can’t stop me. I’ll find a way out, like you.”
Find a way out. Once she says the words, once she releases them into the air, they become possible. The horror of the outside world loses all consequence compared to the horror of existing inside the sanatorium without Wilfred. Against that, she has no other fear: not the mountain roads or the trains or the stares of strangers, not the husband she has disappointed, not the baby who doesn’t know her, not Herr Doktor Hermann and all his degrees and authority. She can leave. She is the wife of a baron, after all. She can arrange for a carriage, she can simply walk out the door if she wants. Who will dare to stop her?
Elfriede straightens her back. Her eyes are dry now, her blood’s warm. “Yes. I can’t stay here without you. I’ll leave.”
“Good,” says Wilfred. “That’s settled. But where will you go, my heart?”
She curls her fingers inside her palm, so that her entire hand disappears in the grass beneath Wilfred’s hand. Sometimes, sitting in this patch of meadow under the sun, smelling the warm, dead flowers, she forgets that anything else exists except the two of them, disappearing into the grass and each other.
Where will she go? She belongs to only one other place. Only one other heart beats inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.
“Back to my son, maybe,” she says. “Maybe I’ll go back to my son and miss your freckles. All twenty-six of them.”
BUT NO SUCH AGONIZING DECISION needs to be made, after all. When Elfriede returns to the sanatorium—by a different path from Wilfred’s, of course—Herr Doktor Hermann waits for her in her room. He takes her hands.
“There is terrible news, Elfriede,” he tells her. “I’m afraid your husband is very sick. The family has summoned you home to his side.”
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