Free Stella Bain by Anita Shreve Page B

photograph, she faces another man in another room, a stolid Dutchman she will never love. But pity blossoms and ensnares her and causes her to make a grave mistake. She has failed to count the nights of her future. She has never known the anguish of an unhappy marriage bed. She has not imagined that a house can become a fortress, a prison.
    Her husband wants to possess her fully, but she holds something in reserve. Something indefinable, her own, that he can never touch.
     
    She has children, beautiful babies. They make a playhouse of the prison. Together, they wait for squirrels beneath the trees; together they shake the bushes, hoping for birds. They plant a garden, the crooked rows soon blistered with colorful blooms. They walk through leaves and snow. They play innocent games of castles and battles, of magic and buried treasure. Their gentle footsteps do not disturb the earth.
    She becomes a child with them at dusk, when bat loops make them dizzy. Her children hide with her in tree trunks. They fashion nests in her hair; she makes cakes with sticky frosting. She teaches them their lessons, then sends them off to school. She is happy in that house only when her children are safe within its walls.
     
    A room, a cottage, the plaster chipped in places. Her own, with floral studies on the walls. She is honest in that room, and she can think. She has a sink, a plate of yellow pears. She reads, she sews, she draws. A woven rug covers a scrubbed floor. Her windows are precious jewels that she polishes.
    Here she is replenished. The cottage is her secret and her haven.
    When it is taken away from her, she empties out to silence.
     
    A party, Champagne bubbles, a flute that slips from her fingers. The younger brother from years ago, her lover’s sibling in another room, now grown but unmistakable. Unwittingly, a rival for a post her academic husband believes is his. The man she married seethes, becomes a twisted creature with a selfish agenda. The younger brother—merely decent, merely kind—wins the post despite his desire to disappear. To her, he offers simple friendship, nothing more. He remembers her face as she stood in that family foyer so many years ago and tells her that it has always been the standard by which he has measured love.
     
    Another bed, and she is frightened. A man has her body laid out upon his own, a piece of cloth on his pattern. She faces outward, staring at the ceiling. The man, her husband, covers her mouth with his hand, the air so hot and wet she has trouble breathing. He tramples over every memory of their marriage, and yet the curtains at the window do not move; the electric lamps still burn. Her husband plays her body with fat fingers. He touches every part of her he thinks he owns. She has children in another room, a letter on a table. She will not wake the children. She will not send the letter.
    He tears the cotton of her blouse. Lust, that beautiful hunger, turns ugly in his hands. Love has never been in that house, and he is mad with rage—this violent act unique.
     
    Her husband uses his innocent daughter to destroy the reputation of his rival, that younger brother from years ago, and causes him to risk his life in France. The trenches are awash with a mixture of flesh and muck. Great bursts of shrapnel tear bodies into pieces. The soldiers, with their guns and boots, destroy every living thing. A face is gone, a spine. The limbs pile up in buckets. The man her husband sent to France drives an ambulance, a pacifist at war. She tries to find him to make amends.
    If she locates the man her husband sent to France, will he know her face, its features contorted by terror and by guilt?
    Wherever she is billeted, she inquires about the man from America. Records are imperfect; they are often lost in shelling. He might be one mile from her or sixty. Sentries stand guard outside the tents, alert to guns and gas. She is covered with blood and worse each morning. Her mind is injured. Whose is