13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [64]
The grass is green and lush everywhere, and quite overgrown. The new owners must not bother coming here much in the fall and winter months. The day is fresh and cloudless and seems to contain a harbinger of frost. Perhaps soon the unsheathed earth will be as hard as city asphalt.
The farmhouse, built of stone fitted together with packed earth, remains unchanged. She has always liked the red tile roof, despite the fact that some of the tiles are loose and have a tendency to get flung off during storms. As she walks to the door, she reaches in her coat pocket for the key she shouldn’t have kept. She is nervous that the new owners have changed the locks; certainly that would be a reasonable precaution. But the new owners must be trusting people: the key fits and turns and all is well.
“Yes,” she says softly to herself, “thank you.”
LOUISE HELPS HERSELF TO the house. For the night, she takes sheets from a cupboard and makes one of the beds—a small one in a guest room. She is reluctant to take over the master bedroom of Henri’s dead mother, though it has been settled since then by live people. Besides, sleeping in a small bed makes her feel like a child again, a child on an adventure. It suits her.
The sheets feel slightly humid and cold against her skin when she slips into them, but it doesn’t matter. She soon falls into a dreamless, obliterated sleep.
THE NEXT MORNING, she feels inexplicably powerful, as if the property she is trespassing on is hers by some divine right. She takes a walk around the grounds. Her favorite place is the pond, black and still. The stream that runs into it is completely clear, and resumes its clear flow back out of the other end. It seems strange that the same water, when it is still, can be so opaque, so able to shield something from view.
It is colder today than yesterday, and Louise has to tuck her hands into her coat pockets to keep them warm. At the pond’s edge, she flips a stone over with the tip of her shoe. The earth underneath is black and moist, and startled beetles skitter across it, suddenly exposed to the crisp air. Louise thinks of spring—of frogs leaping in the grass, moles burrowing in the ground, foxes sleeping in abandoned barns, insects swarming in every rotted tree trunk, sometimes even spiders in her bed. In the spring here, every spot bristles with delicate life. She thinks this would be a gorgeous thing to show a child: to catch a frog and cup it, to feel it palpitate in the palm of her hand, to touch its slick green skin and try to see its tiny amphibian soul through its globular gaze—to show her own child the simple wonder of live things.
What if this wish were granted to her? What if Xavier’s seed had taken in her? It would be the most terrible wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. And her husband would suspect something, after all these years of infertility.
She mustn’t make her stomach churn with foolish hopes and fears.
But what if he makes love to her again? It might happen then.
A new and dizzying future yawns open before her, as if the ground has cracked open at her feet. She has done a bad thing, but she cannot feel guilty: the possibilities are too exhilarating. She remembers Xavier’s groan when he came, and a shiver of pleasure runs through her at the mere recollection.
She does not understand the power of that man’s body over her. The image of his mouth especially flares up so vividly in her blood that she can’t stand still—she has to resume walking immediately. He is like a poison in her, all the more potent because she doesn’t want an antidote. She welcomes this disease of desire.
Surely this is a mark of her corruption, and surely she should feel ill over this, but she cannot. She feels wonderful and strong this morning. It occurs to