The Siren

“What is the purpose?” Zach asked, truly wanting to know.

Nora’s eyes returned to the two women in the foreground clinging to each other in sympathy and horror.

“For salvation, of course. For love.”

11

“You think I’m so damn obedient,” Caroline said as she pulled away from William. She stood at the window looking out on their backyard where just yesterday they had sat and talked until dusk. If only there were more yesterdays instead of so many todays.

“You’ve never given me cause for complaint.” She heard the confusion in his voice.

“It’s always ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ and ‘as you wish, sir.’ But it’s not out of obedience.”

“Then what is it, Caroline?”

She didn’t want to answer. But she knew she couldn’t keep lying to him with her every breath.

“Fear.”

“Of what?”

“Of this…game you make us play. It isn’t a game to you, though, is it?”

He came to stand behind her. She braced herself but he didn’t touch her.

“No, it isn’t. For me this is very real.”

“I want it to be a game…so much,” Caroline admitted. “Games can be won. You win the game and the game’s over. And I want it to end.”

“It can end,” William said, his voice soft with sadness. “If you stop playing.”

“But I can’t. If I quit playing…” She didn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t bring herself to finish it.

“Then neither of us will ever win.” William said what she’d been afraid to say.

“So what’s the consolation prize?” she asked, trying and failing to find a smile for him.

William bent and rested his chin on the top of her head. He wrapped his arms around her and she sank into him and closed her eyes. This game had an hourglass for a timer and she saw the sand running out.

“I don’t think there is one.”

* * *

God, it was wrenching. Zach minimized the document and pushed back from his computer. He stood and walked around his office. Stopping at the window, he stared out at the city and the sky. Today was a gray day, cold and windy. It had been windy the day he’d left England: a sea wind, warm and fierce, and Zach recalled waiting at the airport almost hoping his flight would be canceled or even just delayed long enough for Grace to realize he really was going. But the wind had failed him that day. It had carried him aloft instead of forcing him aground. Sailors’ wives once had little balconies on their roofs. What were they called? Widow’s walks. That was it. Yes, the widow’s walk, the place where they could go alone and stare out to sea and watch and wait. He envied them their macabre station. At least they could see the ship coming in. At least they had a place to hide their grief every day it didn’t.

Zach stared at the sky and wished he could see all the way across the gray ocean. Gray was Grace’s favorite color. She joked it was “like silver only sadder,” and he’d tease her about all the gray sweaters in her closet, the dozens of gray woolen socks. Grace would have loved a morning like this. She would have opened the curtains, opened the blinds and dragged him back to bed with her to make hasty love before the sun intruded and changed the color of the day.

Tearing his eyes from the sky, he looked down at the gray streets below. Supposedly from this height everyone was supposed to look like ants. But they didn’t look like ants to him at all. They still looked like people. He leaned his head against the glass and watched their progress. He was afraid for them and didn’t know why.

Nora…was she why? When he’d made her cut the more graphic scenes of sexual violence from her book she’d replaced them with emotional violence. Now everywhere he looked he saw people as fragile as paper.

Nora’s book had impressed him more than he wanted to admit. Most impressively she had turned the romance novel formula on its head. One of the cardinal rules of classic romance was that at no point, no matter how infuriating the heroine was and no matter how much the hero wanted to throttle her, he could never, would never raise his hand to her. But William was a sadist and used pain to prove his love. And where the romance novel began with the two characters trying to come together against forces both internal and external, Nora’s novel began with them together and then let the forces slowly, torturously tear them apart. She was writing the antiromance novel.

Zach let his eyes focus on one of the small figures below him on the street. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He or she bustled across the street in a great hurry. He wondered if this was why Nora was drawn to religion despite herself. The Pagan gods sat on high and played with their subjects like pieces on a chessboard. Nora’s god turned Himself into a pawn and let Himself be captured. He could see the attraction. Zach wanted to run down to the street below and follow whoever it was until he was certain he or she made it on time. He wanted to know everything turned out fine for at least one person in the gray city today.

Zach pulled away from the window and faced his desk again. As he returned to his computer he remembered Nora’s original first line from the first draft of her novel—“I don’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it.” He realized it wasn’t just William speaking to Caroline. It was Nora talking to him.

He sat down and opened Nora’s revisions again. He made himself keep reading. As much as it hurt, he had to know what happened next.