Remembrance

“What?!” I snapped, tired of trying to guess what she seemed to have found out about me.

“You didn’t like this Steve. He bored you. You wanted to get married because you are afraid time is running out. You don’t want to be alone any longer. You want a husband to grow old with.” Her voice lowered. “You would like to have a child or two.”

She did hit hard. When I went to therapists and talked for weeks about my parents and my parents, and well, uh, my parents, all I felt was that I was wasting money. But here this woman was telling me what even I didn’t allow myself to look at. Yes, I was becoming afraid of my age and my rapidly disappearing youth. Yes, I was afraid of being alone. For years it had been enough to write books and be a great success, but now it wasn’t enough. I was tired of validating myself. I wanted a great big, loud man hanging around and telling me I was the greatest.

And yes, I thought, Steve had bored me. Steve was perfect. That would have been great if I were perfect too, but I’m about as far from perfect as you can get. There were many days when I wanted to eat ice cream instead of going to the gym. There were days—

I didn’t want to think of Steven anymore. He was a great guy and I knew it and thinking anything else was lying to myself. I treated him badly but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t imagine that Nora’s medieval curses had much to do with it but something was wrong with me.

“I’m thirty-nine years old,” I said, barely audible even to myself. “It’s a little late to find a man and have kids. Men my age don’t want infants—unless they’re eighteen and wearing a bikini,” I said, trying, as usual, to make a joke.

The way Nora looked at me made me sure she didn’t foresee me as having kids. What was it she’d said? Your present is your future. I am as I’ll always be, I thought. Alone with only a bunch of paper heroes to love me.

“Isn’t there anything I can do? Sure you don’t have a non-red-haired cousin or two who’d like a nice romance writer for a wife?”

Nora didn’t smile. “I think he has cursed you to love no one but him.” She looked at me very sadly, as though she were glad no one had put this curse on her head.

This startled me. “You mean that…I mean, assuming there is such a thing as past lives, that I have never loved anyone since the sixteenth century? That life after life I’ve been alone?”

“You have married and—”

“Kids?”

“Not many. You are not a fertile woman.”

Gee, I thought. I think I’ll go back to the therapist who told me I wanted to sleep with my father. At least she gave me some hope for the future. Nora didn’t even give me hope for the past. “But I didn’t love these husbands of mine?”

“Not the way you loved the man who is the other half of you. His spirit will not allow you to truly love anyone but him.”

“And I’ve never seen him since the Elizabethan Age?”

“Oh yes,” she said as though I’d missed the point. “Your jewelry lady was married to him. She—”

“What? Do you mean Lady de Grey was married to this man I love?”

“Yes.”

“But as far as I can find out she and her husband hated each other.”

“Love. Hate. It’s the same thing.”

Not in my book, I thought. I hated a guy I used to work with who was always trying to put his hands inside my clothing. I haven’t yet ever hated anyone I loved.

“Real hatred,” Nora said, “is the other side of the coin from love. Hate lasts centuries, just as love does.”

“If we hated each other why did we get married?”

“Because you loved each other.”

“Do you have any gin?”

She smiled. “Don’t worry. Everything will work out soon.”

“Soon. As in three lifetimes from now?”

“Yes. You see, you are writing about him, about this man on paper…”

She trailed off to let me supply a name.