Chapter 6

Chapter 6

J

ames heard Jennifer’s high-heeled footsteps tip-tap down the hall. Without knocking, she walked into his office, flipped on the lights, and closed the door behind her. He didn’t look up, his pen poised over his notebook, his eyes glued to his book.

“Good evening, Professor. Haven’t seen you in a few nights.”

“Been busy. Midterms coming up, you know.”

“You always have an excuse. You need to get out more.”

He leaned his head against his chair. “People have been saying that a lot to me lately.”

“It’s true. You wall yourself off like you’re a leper or something.”

“Leper?” He mused over the word. “I never thought of it like that, though I suppose it’s not far from the truth.”

“You’re not contagious.”

“I can be.”

Jennifer walked behind his chair and put her hands on his shoulders.

“Fishing for husband number three, I see.” He smiled, somewhere between amused and perturbed, as he shrugged out from under her touch.

“As a matter of fact I am. Are you biting?”

“I don’t bite, remember? Besides, I’m too old for you.”

“I’m thirty-four, so I’m older than you.”

“That’s a matter for debate.”

She watched as he pulled his wire-frame eyeglasses from his shirt pocket, and she laughed when he put them on.

“Still going for the Clark Kent/Superman look, I see. I like it. It’s sexy.”

“Actually, I was going for the Professor Henry Jones/Indiana Jones look. I thought it was more appropriate.”

James looked out the window at the heavy night sky, smelling the storm dropping from the east. The dark clouds matched his somber mood and he welcomed the rain. “Thanks for helping me find Amy,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do after Drew moved away. It’s been too long—I can’t go back to doing things the old-fashioned way.”

“You and my family have known each other too long and you have done too much for us. You know we’ll help you however we can.”

“Your family helped me first. You always leave out that part of the story.”

“We’re just glad you’re back in Salem. You’ve been away too long.”

James still stared outside, lost somewhere in his thoughts. “Are you sure we can trust her? Amy, I mean. I know you wouldn’t have asked her if you didn’t think so, but you can never be too careful.”

“You worry too much, James. I’ve known her family a long time and she’s kept a lot of secrets for me. Her mother is in my coven. Everything will be fine.”

Outside the raindrops splattered the window in a pattern of blots like a Rorschach test. He smiled when he realized the pattern he saw was long curls and full lips. Jennifer stood silently, leaning her hip against his desk, her arms crossed over her chest as she watched him.

James looked at the time on his cell phone and saw he had five minutes to get to class. He knew from his haphazard thoughts about Sarah that he would have trouble concentrating on the lecture that night. He stood from his desk and paced the ten short steps of his office, his eyes closed, his mind heavy. Since he walked Sarah home a few nights before he had been struggling to make sense of it all—what he had said, what she had said, what any of it meant, if anything. Yet no matter how hard he tried to understand, everything around him seemed confused. Even the familiar sights in his office, his desk, his computer, his books, looked foreign, like archaeological artifacts uncovered from some long-ago culture.

That beautiful dark-haired, sweet-eyed woman managed to undo all the careful forgetting he had done. It had taken him years to get to the point where he didn’t walk around feeling weighted down by the past. He had walled himself off from nearly everyone and everything, going from work to home and home to work, except for his occasional clandestine meetings with Amy, keeping busy so he wouldn’t be consumed by his history. Now, since he had seen Sarah, he found himself sorting through the memories because he couldn’t ignore them anymore. They were pinching him, pecking him, forcing him to pay attention. Now, he was flipping through them as though he were pasting them under their proper headings in a scrapbook—scenes he wanted to remember and others that were still too painful. If he were being honest he would admit that the memories were mostly good, only the bad were oh so very bad. He scolded himself for coming back when he should have stayed away. Forever. What was he looking for? His wife hadn’t been there for a long time and she wouldn’t ever be there again. He told himself he should sell the house to the Salem Historical Society and leave. Forever. But he could still feel her in the pots and pans lining the kitchen shelves, in the furnishings in the great room, in their bed. And though he knew he shouldn’t come back to Salem, he did. As long as he felt connected to her there he would return whenever he could. And now there was Sarah, and he didn’t know what to do about her.

He thought about the first moment he saw Sarah. He hadn’t expected anything out of the ordinary that night, but he awoke with a start, pinpointing her quick, light footsteps near his front door. Usually his neighbors stayed away since they thought his wooden gabled house was haunted. And in its way it was. He heard the dry crunch of autumn leaves, so he pulled aside the curtains, raised the blinds, and focused on the shadows outside. When he saw her he thought he was dreaming. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, expecting her specter to vanish, but she was still there. Only she was not a ghost or a phantom meant to haunt him. She was human, and she looked exactly as he remembered with her dark curls, her chocolate-brown eyes, her thoughtful expression, the full lips he wanted to kiss whenever he looked at her…

“She’s so like Elizabeth,” he said.

Jennifer sighed. “I know you miss her, but you need to accept the fact that she’s gone. It’s been a long time.”

James grabbed his keys and his book bag. He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “I know this sounds crazy, but it’s her voice, her face, her hair. Everything about her is the same. Even the way she looks at me. And she became so frightened after I told her about the Witch Dungeon Museum.”

“But that’s just it. You keep scaring her. The last thing any girl needs is to have a hungry old fart like you jumping out from the shadows of a creepy house. Or telling scary stories while walking her home in the dark. You need to play nice if you want to get to know her.”

“I’m not hungry, and my house isn’t creepy.”

“But you are old.”

Jennifer walked to the window. She stood there awhile, not speaking, watching the watery Rorschach blots hit and slide from the glass.

“Did Sarah tell you why she wanted to see your house?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“You should ask her.”

“But you know.” James put his hands on Jennifer’s shoulders and turned her to face him. The sound of the rain made a quick-time tapping, matching his impatience for the information he guessed she knew. “Tell me.”

“She said your house looks like the house she’s been dreaming about.”

“She dreams about my house?”

“And a man.”

“What man?” He felt the blood quicken under his skin. “What man, Jennifer?”

“She wouldn’t say.”

James grunted in frustration. He locked his office door, and Jennifer followed him into the hallway. He walked to the elevator, pressed the down button, and waited.

“You should tell her,” Jennifer said.

The elevator dinged, the door opened, and they stepped inside. He waited for the door to close before he spoke.

“I’m not telling her anything. She’s scared enough of me as it is. I don’t think I made a very good first impression. Or a good second impression, for that matter.”

“I’ll talk to her tomorrow,” Jennifer said. “I’ll tell her.”

“No!” He spoke with such force the steel elevator walls rattled. He dropped his voice to a firm whisper. “It’ll frighten her too much, especially after the way I treated her.”

“You should give her more credit than that. I told her I was a witch a few days after I met her and she didn’t mind.”

“You didn’t tell her everything.”

“I told her enough. She needs to know, especially if you want to get to know her.”

“She doesn’t need to know.”

When the doors opened onto the first floor, James brushed past Jennifer, out of the library, across Rainbow Terrace and College Drive to the North Campus where his classes were held in Meier Hall. Somehow, despite his internal turmoil over Sarah, he managed to talk coherently about William Wordsworth and his 1804 poem “Intimations of Immortality.” He was amused by the title, and the theme, that age causes man to lose touch with the divine. He didn’t tell his students how true that might really be.