His Haunted Heart (7 page)

“I apologize for everything. It seems to keep me out of trouble.”

“Well, now you can practice
not
apologizing. I doubt you’ll ever do anything that warrants one, anyway.”

He squatted down and searched in earnest for a specific title, growing more and more tenacious when he didn’t find it. I brushed past him, forgoing the elicit titles for the more tame classics and stumbled upon Jane Eyre. It was one of my favorites. The teacher had snuck it into my bag one day at school. Though I was exhausted at night, I managed to sneak in a few pages every time I could. It took me nearly a year to read through the entire volume.

I cried over the death of Helen like it was my own friend.

“Rochester is an ass,” Porter called, still in his place, but peeking over his shoulder at my choice.

“He’s tormented. There’s a difference.”

“So he’s excused?”

“He’s not excused, just misunderstood. Broody is becoming on some people.”

He chuckled. The sound rumbled through the space, bouncing off the walls. The whole place filled with the boom.

“Maybe I should try to be broody.”

I snapped the book shut and spun on my heels. “Too late.”

This time we laughed together.

Chapter Six

Porter

We’d spent the whole day together. It hadn’t been my intention, but the surprise was pleasant. By the time dinner time came around, as we sat across from each other at the table, she’d blossomed like a flower, no longer holding her petals tight.

Though every time she smiled, her eyes looked downward.

And a funny-shaped dimple concaved on the left side of her mouth.

I tried, in vain, to ignore my mother looking back and forth between us.

“Delilah, dear,” she interrupted my unabashed stare. “Did you tell Porter about your little ghostly sighting?”

I dropped my fork and then tried to recover my folly by coughing. It was futile.

“I did not.”

“Well, maybe it’s something you can tell him about later on.”

“Sure.” Delilah answered.  The petals fell back into place around her.

The rest of the meal was taken in silence.

“Do you want to go for a walk with me tonight?” I offered, with a hidden agenda.

“Yes. Let me get my cloak.”

After she was up the stairs and out of sight, I retrieved my bags from the porch where I’d left them. While she’d slept the night before, I searched her boots and found the number eight worn down, almost unreadable.

“I’m ready now.”

“You cannot wear those boots outside. They won’t protect you from anything.” It was a chore to force my face to remain stern.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, knocking the toes of the boots together. “These are all I have.”

“Then it’s a good thing I bought these.” From behind my back, I pulled a brand new pair of boots. I’d bought four different pair in varying shades and skins. She would find that out later, tonight this pair would do.

“Porter, you didn’t. You’ve given me too much already.”

Her eyes betrayed her words, gazing at the boots.

“I have done no such thing. You’re offending me. Come, put them on.”

With a great deal of slowness, she reached me. As her lithe hands grabbed the boots, I held on, teasing her a bit for her protest. “Porter…” she said with a bit of groan.

“Hurry, I know a place where the lightning bugs roam.”

“I’m hurrying.”

One by one she clunked the decrepit boots to the side. “Let’s throw those to the trash.”

She smiled and for the second time that day, I saw her run her pointer finger down the length of her nose. I would have to pay more attention, but I already assumed it was an endearing quirk.

“That’s where I found them in the first place. It would be like returning them home.”

“You found them in the trash?”

She picked them up lovingly. “I did. They served me well. Some of the best things are those that others feel need to be discarded.”

Another run of her finger down her nose. The quick move was now so obviously her outward sign of embarrassment.

After setting the boots outside the front door, she laced her arm through mine after some coercion. We walked for hours, unfazed by the lack of light or the looming darkness. She didn’t seem to scare easily at the things most women, and namely Marie, used to shy away from.

“Where are you taking me?”

The moon threw streams of light down on her hair, making the blackness turn to blue. Her pale skin was luminescent and it took everything in me not to reach out and touch her face again. Throughout the day I’d felt that if I didn’t steal even the smallest touch, that I might crumble.

“It’s right up here.”

Within minutes we came upon the biggest cypress tree on the lands. I’d been drawn to it since I was a child and demanded that a platform be built upon it. Many hours I had spent on that throne of my own, away from the world below, with my dreams in the clouds above me, playing out fantasies of lore and books unwritten.

“Climb up,” I offered, remembering my manners.

“I’m in a skirt, Porter.”

“I won’t look, I swear.”

She looked up the length of the ladder and then back to me, quelling a smile. “Put your face on the trunk of this tree and don’t look until I tell you, okay?”

“Sounds like a game of hide and seek.”

Raising her nose to snub me, she replied, “That’s my offer, take it or leave it.”

A furious blush marked her cheeks when she got a little cheeky—probably the first time she’d been allowed to let her true colors shine.

I waited a breath to agree. Her premise was understood and it was too soon to ask for her trust.

“I’ll accept your terms. But you owe me. You do know the rules about owing me, don’t you?”

A hand on her hip and a cut of her eyes—she knew the rules for sure. I could call in her debt anytime I wanted.

With my forehead pressed against the rugged bark of the tree, I waited for her to ascend to the place I’d once called my second home, though it was little more than stray wood nailed into a tree.

“You can look now, Porter.”

Warmth radiated in my chest when she said my name. I made my way up the board nailed to the trunk, my makeshift ladder, until I reached the top. The stars shone brighter up here and the air was filtered, only allowing the purest of breaths and the clearest of dreams. The fog could be seen below, hovering, waving its hands over the surface of the pond, casting a cotton blanket over the land.

And my wife, she was almost brand new to me here. Well, she was still new, but getting to know her was a joy—not the hassle I’d imagined. She swayed back and forth while perched on the edge of the unkempt flat, staring at the lightning bugs in the distance. A finger drew lines in the air, moving from one to the other. She was either drawing an invisible picture or counting them.

By the light of the moon, she was no longer someone I tasked with saving my life or ridding me of my loneliness. She was beautiful, inside and out.

“How many?” I asked, guessing that she was, in fact, counting them.

Her shoulders sagged and a giggle escaped her mouth. “I lost count.”

“My fault?”

She shook her head. “No. I got distracted by their beauty. This place seems like a dream. The fog, the lights in the sky—like I stumbled into a fairy tale.”

After a length of overthinking, I put my arm around her back and barely touched her waist. Delilah stiffened beside me and I thought I’d made a dire mistake.

Until she scooted closer, resting her head on my shoulder.

“How often do you leave?” she asked in a whisper.

“Sometimes once or twice a week. Sometimes, I have to stay for longer trips.”

I valued my trips away from The Rogue when I was engaged to Marie. Her constant nagging to go with me to buy her clothes, more clothes, and baubles than anyone ever needed, made it a vacation from my life and the fiancé that was more like an anchor than a sail.

“Would you want to go with me sometime?”

The proposition was out of my mouth before I could rein it in.

She backed off enough to look me in the face but still remained in the circle of my arm. “Why?”

“Why not?” I countered. “You’re my wife. My mother used to travel with my father. It’s a bit of a shock to the system the first few times. You don’t have to—I just thought…”

She resumed her previous posture. It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either.

“Would I have to wear different clothes?”

I sighed. Most of the women of the outside weren’t kept to the older standards that women of The Rogue were. If the Constable or any male saw a woman dressed inappropriately, she would be reprimanded at once. Even the women who were known to work at The Plots dressed in a pious manner in comparison to those on the outside world.

I would be the first to admit that the outside had a magnetism. The underlying slither of sinful freedom became a pull. I drank alcohol in the outside world, which was forbidden here. I smoked cigars and watched movies that made my mother’s books seem like nursery rhymes.

Nausea rolled through my stomach at the thought of Delilah in that world. Her innocence and purity was something I’d expected, but over the course of the day I, had learned to cherish it. Delilah was how The Rogue began—she was this innocence that the founders had hidden away from the world to protect.

My arm tightened around her waist at the thought of someone taking that away—dimming that iridescence I saw in her that I hadn’t seen in someone for a long time. 

It was my charge to protect it—to protect her.

“Let’s forget about it for now. I’ve handled everything so that I could stay here for a week or so. There’s no rush for you to make a decision.”

“A week is a long time.”

“Is it? I bet it goes by like a flash. Today certainly did.”

Movement in the distance caught my eye and I knew what it was before bringing it into focus. Just like her lover, Marie lurked in the distance, under trees, below the cover of rain. She’d always been a coward, but it had become worse in death. She had always appeared to me as a small child in her ghost form. I chalked it up to her obsession with age and beauty. If she was young in her after-life, then her shallow fears of growing old and growing ugly would never come to fruition.

“You’re going to think me mad,” Delilah breathed next to me.

“What?”

“Do you see her too?”

She didn’t point, but her eyes told me where she looked.

“I see her every once in a while.” The fact that twice in one day Delilah had seen Marie scared me more than I had been the first time I’d seen the ghost for myself. She didn’t do much to me, simply floated around the grounds.

“She changes.” My wife intonated the fact like she still didn’t believe her eyes. And I couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t understand how Marie was appearing to Delilah or why.

“How?”

A shiver caused me to quake. I didn’t like that my former life and the one that I’d chosen were intersecting.

“I first saw her when you were at my door—at my parent’s house. She was not more than a year old, standing in the rain. The second time was in the foyer, right inside the door. That was yesterday. She was a little older, maybe three or so. I could see right through her.”

I leaned my face against her hair. She smelled like lilacs and lavender and I took the opportunity to breathe her in. “Why didn’t you tell me? Weren’t you frightened?”

“Eliza was there. She said it was an older property. I thought things like that may happen all the time. And it was hours after our wedding. I didn’t want you to think you’d married a mental case.”

“Look at me, Delilah.”

Her thin body turned, but her eyes remained downcast. I placed my finger under her chin and tipped it gently, wanting to see her eyes when I told her. Finally her gaze traveled the length of my face until landing right where I wanted it to be. Her eyelashes were killer—making the brilliance of the blue come to life.

“Delilah, I want you to know that you are safe with me. If this is going to work, we can have no lies or secrets. I’ve seen enough around here not to be surprised by anything you have to say. I know your life has been filled with strife, but I will protect you as best I can.”

My body begged me to hold on to her closer, to press her against my chest and feel her heartbeat next to mine.

“I’ve kept secrets all my life.”

I sighed and thought of a way to get someone who barely knew me to believe what I had to say. “But we give those things up when we enter a marriage. Nothing you can say will make me forsake you—nothing.”

I let the notion settle with both of us. She’d agreed with a nod of the head, but the proof would reveal itself in the coming days.

Delilah resembled a fairy, dangling her legs back and forth over the edge—the slight wind fueling the dance of several strands of hair around her face. Her tomorrow eyes never missed a thing, flitting back and forth across the sky, considering every object that I’d taken for granted.

A smile tipped at the corner of my mouth. She was exquisite beyond anything I’d ever known could be.

There was no scar in this light—only her.

“I almost forgot. I have something for you.”

“You’ve given me so much. Please, not another thing.”

“This one is more for me than you.” Her face canted, her doubt evident. “I’m serious. This one proves that we are married. It will relieve me of the guilt I carry for not bringing it to the church.”

I slipped two rings from my pocket. One was my father’s and one was my grandmother’s. The ring I intended to give my rose-faced bride was an antique. Its vintage styling was simple, yet elegant. A silver band met in a love knot underneath a sapphire. The color bowed in shame to the color of Delilah’s eyes. I presented it to her on an open hand, the only packaging I had.

If I could’ve, I would’ve opened up my heart and offered it to her as well.

Her gasp told me nothing. Marie had gasped as well, but hers was a gasp of repulsion. The ring wasn’t new or gold—expectations I hadn’t adhered to.