Alma Katsu - The Descent

He nodded at the endless horizon. “Don’t you think it’s lovely here?”

“Lovely in its way, I suppose . . . but so isolated, stuck out here in the middle of the ocean. Tell me you haven’t been here alone the entire time since I last saw you.”

He shrugged, a little bit embarrassed by my pity. “Yes, for the most part. After you left, I stayed at the castle at Garda with Pendleton, but I couldn’t stand living there. Your ghost was everywhere: in the mezzanine where we sat in the evenings and you told me about your life, in the bed we had shared. You must admit, when you left I had a lot to think about. I wasn’t going to continue living the way I had before. . . . So I sent Pendleton on his way and came here to be by myself, and every day I circle the stone path and stare at the ocean to clear my head.”

That meant he’d been on his own on the island for nearly four years, if the girls had joined him only recently. “Weren’t you lonely?”

“No, not really. I needed the solitude. I needed to understand myself better and I wouldn’t have been able to do that surrounded by others.” He turned back to the fortress and we started to wander inland again. “What about you?” he asked. “What did you do after you left Garda?”

The wind was at our backs now and blew my hair over my shoulders and into my face and I had to brush strands out of my eyes. “Do you remember, when you’d finally caught up with me, the man who came to my rescue?”

“The doctor. Of course I remember him. I almost killed him.”

“His name was Luke. You made me try to send him away so we would be together, you and I. But I’d already told him about you, and he didn’t believe that I’d stay with you freely and refused to go. So you made him forget me, took away all his memories of me.” Adair had made that part of my punishment for betraying him, for walling him up and leaving him entombed for two hundred years. He’d meant to strip me of everything, property, freedom—but especially love, the love of the man who had given up everything for me.

In the end, however, Adair couldn’t go through with it. When he saw that I’d never come to love him as his prisoner, he set me free and told me to go after Luke. To find him and tell him who I was and what we had meant to each other. “I knew he’d go back to be near his daughters,” I said, “and that’s where I found him. I begged him to remember me. And because it was meant to be—just as you said—he listened, and he forgave me.”

Adair flinched. “So, you have been with him the whole time we’ve been apart. And was it as you hoped? Were you happy together?”

I bowed my head. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he should know the truth. “We were happy, yes.”

He started to turn away from me. “So why have you come here—”

“Luke died a few months ago,” I said, cutting him off. “It happened very quickly. When he took me back, we ended up living near his former wife so he could spend time with his daughters. He was practicing medicine again, and we’d just gotten the house remodeled the way we wanted.” The words spilled out though I hadn’t planned to tell Adair these details. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. I suppose it was because I’d had no one else to tell. “The illness came on very suddenly. He went into the hospital and never came out. First there were tests, round after round, until they found the problem. A brain tumor.” I swallowed and stared at my feet. “His doctors argued whether it was operable or not, but by then it was too late. Everything started to fail: memory, speech, vision. He had seizures. It was hard to watch.” And hard to relive now in the retelling.

Adair stared at me intently. “I am sorry.”

“I stayed in the house for a while. I’d gotten close to his daughters and his ex-wife. They’ve been nice to me, but I think they were beginning to wonder why I was still hanging around. After all, Luke was my only connection to the area. Aside from the three of them, I had no one else, no friends. I’m sure it seemed odd to them, based on what they knew of my past life. They thought it was so glamorous, the home in Paris, all the travel, and after Luke died, I think they expected me to go back to it.” Adair knew, however, that my Paris house was gone: he’d burned it to the ground when he’d been trying to find me, to flush me out, to burn everything I owned as part of my punishment for what I’d done to him.

“So, your man is gone and you’ve come to see me,” Adair said. There was a tiny uptick in his tone, a hint of expectation.

“It’s not like that. I’m not ready to be with anyone yet,” I rushed to tell him, wanting to be honest with him. Believing that I was being honest. I was still raw from Luke’s passing. It had been only a few months.

Oh, but it was the wrong thing to say to Adair. His face crumpled a bit, and I felt his mood deflate, almost unperceivably. He took a moment to compose himself. “Then why are you here? Don’t play games with me, Lanore—why did you come looking for me?”

His questions set my heart pounding hard in my chest. The time had come to tell him, to throw myself on his mercy. It felt too soon; I’d expected that we would’ve spent more time catching up, that I’d have a better chance to see where I stood with him, to find out if he’d forgiven me for breaking his heart. I couldn’t risk that he’d refuse me. I needed him. He was the only one who would be able to help me get to the cause of the nightmares.

The goats chose that moment to come over, staring at us as though they’d never seen humans before. The one with the huge set of horns snorted under his breath as though making up his mind about something, but he didn’t run away when I petted his shaggy head.

“You’re right.” I dropped my gaze, cowardly. “I’ve come for a reason. There is something I need to ask you to do for me, Adair.”

Before I could utter another word, however, we were hit by a sudden gust of cold air. A huge dark cloud was sweeping toward us from the sea. It unfurled across the entire horizon, black thunderheads roiling like a cauldron at full boil, lightning bursts blinking deep within the gray swells. A heavy sheet of rain dropped from the sky and swept across the waves, heading in our direction. I’d never seen a storm break so swiftly, especially one that size.

“That looks dangerous,” I said, pointing to the sky. “We’ll have to go in.”

“It’s nothing to be worried about. We get weather like this all the time.” Adair tried to sound nonplussed, but I noticed that, for some unknown reason, he seemed to be looking at the dark clouds with suspicion. The first huge gust rolled in off the water, sending the goats running for the shelter of the pine trees. Adair placed a hand on my back to gently guide me to the house. As we approached the French doors off the dining room, I saw the two women silhouetted in the yellow light watching for our return, the brunette twitching with impatience. As we stepped through the door, the downpour started behind us in earnest.

I brushed my windblown hair back into place while Adair bolted the door. The women glared at him. “We wondered where you were. You’d been gone so long,” Robin said to Adair in a whiny child’s voice.

“Quite a storm out there, wouldn’t you say? And strange that it came on us so quickly,” Adair said under a furrowed brow. He seemed to be probing for something.

“That’s how it is here, on the water,” Terry replied breezily. Of the pair, she was the bold one, the one who would stand up to Adair. “Good thing you came in. Winds could blow someone as small as her right over a cliff,” she said, nodding coolly at me.

Robin took Adair’s hand and began to tug him toward the stairs. “C’mon, Adair, say good night to your guest. She must be tired after all that traveling,” she said, though plainly it wouldn’t matter to her if I keeled over from exhaustion at that very second. Adair opened his mouth to protest, but I shook my head.

“That sounds like a good idea,” I said. “Robin’s right. It’s been quite a day, what with the travel and all. We can finish catching up tomorrow.” I needed time, anyway, to make sense of the strange situation in which I’d found him.

Adair capitulated, tucking the blonde under his left arm and the brunette under his right. Thusly propped up, he turned away from me. “I guess this is good night, then. We’ll see you in the morning.” I watched them walk away, three abreast, the girls’ hips swaying as they climbed the stairs.

I waited a few minutes before heading to bed. I didn’t want to run into any of them again tonight. It seemed fitting that I be alone, for that had been my choice, to leave Adair for Luke. Still, I’d been jarred by the sight of Robin and Terry; I don’t know why I hadn’t thought Adair would be with someone else by now, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me, and I was left feeling unsettled. I climbed the massive staircase and padded by the closed door to their shared bedroom, their muffled voices rising and falling as I passed. I imagined they were talking about me. I started a fire in the tiny fireplace, changed quickly, and slipped into the chilly bed.

I was smothered by a sense of incredible melancholy. I should’ve known that talking about Luke would stir memories, bringing to the surface everything that I’d tucked away in the back of my mind. It was the first time I’d spoken about Luke’s death with someone who hadn’t been directly affected by it; namely: his children, Jolene and Winona; his ex-wife, Tricia, and her husband; and the doctors and nurses who’d worked with Luke at the clinic. Of all those people, I was the one who was least entitled to anyone’s condolences. Sure, Luke and I lived together as though we were husband and wife, but we’d been together for only a few years. I was practically a newcomer. Tricia had more of a claim on him than I, let alone his children. The sympathy belonged to them.

The first sign that something was wrong came when Luke collapsed at the clinic. He didn’t tell me until he got home that night. “I passed out today,” he said casually at the dinner table, not even looking up from his plate. “I woke up on the floor of my office. I don’t recall how I got there.” He tried to claim it was only light-headedness, because he hadn’t eaten lunch or because he was dehydrated, but after a few minutes of cross-examination he admitted that he’d been having headaches for days. I begged him to see a specialist, but being a man, and a doctor, he wouldn’t listen. I think it was because he had an idea of what was wrong and he didn’t want to have it confirmed.

I’ve been with a lot of people as they were dying and can attest: it’s not like it is in the movies. It’s not antiseptic or tidy. It is absolutely the lowest point in any person’s life. They’re either old and their body is starting to irrevocably fail, or they’re young but very sick or have had an accident. In either case, they’re afraid of what’s coming, afraid and confused. I’ve learned through experience that there’s nothing you can do for someone at the end except to try to keep them company so they don’t have to make that passage alone. No one wants to die alone; I’ve held the hand of many a dying man. That’s the price of immortality. It hasn’t meant that death is a stranger to me; if anything, we are reacquainted frequently at the deathbeds of others.

As a matter of fact, I’d been through the death of a close loved one so many times that, during those last weeks with Luke, I went into a kind of autopilot. I knew what was expected of me in those situations. The dying wanted unfailing support. Luke wanted me to be stoic in the face of his emotional ups and downs. He wanted me to be practical and logical, to be a rock at a time when his life was falling apart. He wanted me to be in the waiting room while he was undergoing tests. He didn’t want me to freak out when he suddenly couldn’t speak or use his right arm. He never had to ask for any of this; I just knew it was what he needed from me. He was too smart to worry that I would be unhinged by his passing; he knew I’d lost plenty of others before him.

It seemed that immortality—rather than make me more sensitive to the pain of losing a loved one—had robbed me of the ability to feel real emotion in the face of death. When my lovers and friends died, my feelings were always muted and distant. I’m not sure why this was. It might have been to protect me from being swamped by grief, so I wouldn’t relive the sadness I’d felt for each of the people I’d lost over the course of my life. Or maybe it was because I knew from experience that, soon enough, another person would come along and—if not take Luke’s place, not exactly—at least distract me from missing him. Because I had no choice but to live on and on.