The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story (4 page)

“His wife?” said Evelyn. She’d been leafing through the recommendation forms, but now she sat very still.

“Yeah, she fell off a horse or something. Do you think I have the right stamps?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to check with the post office.” Evelyn felt as though she’d been hit in the stomach. Brendan had never told her he’d been married.

“Well, I really appreciate it, Professor Morgan. I like Professor Thorne’s class, but yours is my favorite. Your exams aren’t as hard.”

“Um, thanks.” She couldn’t concentrate. Why hadn’t he told her? It must have happened here at Bartlett.

“Hey, Professor? Thanks a lot. I’ll see you on Friday!”

“What? Sure, Anne. I’ll see you in class.” After Anne left, Evelyn sat at her desk, staring at the stack of midterms. Thanksgiving was a week away. She’d been planning to ask Brendan to go to Boston with her to meet her parents. She hadn’t been sure how they would respond to him—another college professor? But she’d wanted him to see her family.

“Evelyn? Are you done for the day?” There he was, looking perfectly ordinary, smiling at her from the doorway. Brown hair swept back from his forehead, the hair she loved to run her fingers through, the shoulders she loved to lean against, listening to his heartbeat.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your wife?”

He stood silent. Then he said, “All right. Come on, let’s go.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Just come on, all right?” There was something wrong, something terribly wrong. She could see it in his face. He turned, and she followed him down the hallway and into the parking lot, almost running to keep up. They got into his car. And then they drove. And drove.

“Where are we going?” she asked once.

“To see my wife,” he said. She wanted to ask what he meant, but his face was so grim, so filled with pain, that she just sat there, miserable, wishing she hadn’t said anything.

They pulled up in front of the Henrico County Medical Center. At the front desk, the nurse said, “It’s past visiting hours, Dr. Thorne.”

“Please,” he said. “Can I go in just for a minute?”

“Oh, all right. Just for a minute.” She looked curiously at Evelyn, as though wondering who she was.

Evelyn followed him down a hallway painted what was probably supposed to be a calming shade of pink, with a sign that said
LONG-TERM CARE
and an arrow pointed in the direction they were heading.

He opened a door, entered a room with two patients in it, and walked up to one of the beds. “There she is,” he said. “There’s Isabel.”

Evelyn looked down at the bed. The woman lying on it must have been beautiful once. She had very pale skin and black hair that had been cut short. There were tubes going into her arms, a band around her head with a monitor attached. A machine helped her breathe.

“It happened about three years ago,” he said. “She was riding a horse, and it threw her. She’d grown up riding horses, but this was a stallion right off the racetrack. She was trying to tame him. The stable called an ambulance, but by the time it reached the hospital, she was in a coma. She’s been like this ever since. The doctors say there’s no hope, that she’ll never recover. But I can’t bring myself to disconnect her.”

He took her hand. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. I thought—I wanted to be with you so badly. I thought if you knew, you’d never give me a chance. Evelyn? Say something.”

She reached out, touched Isabel Thorne’s hand lying so still on the hospital blanket. What could she say? How could she blame him? He must have suffered terribly. She would tell him that it was all right, she understood.

The tubes turned into vines: thick canes of briar roses, thin green shoots of honeysuckle. They sprouted leaves, then flowers. Pink and white roses blossomed, honeysuckle dangled. She could smell them, thick and sweet. She was standing on moss, in the middle of a forest.
On a stone table before her lay a woman in a dress as red as flame, long black hair cascading down and pooling on the forest floor. Roses grew over her, swaying. Honeysuckle wrapped itself around her arms, her throat. Soon she would be completely covered.

“Evelyn,” said the man beside her. A knight in green armor, a man made of leaves. He was holding her hand: no, in her hand was a tree branch. She could smell loam, the humid forest air.

She breathed quickly and put a hand to her chest. It was happening again.

This isn’t real
, she told herself.
I need to make it go away
. The medication, that’s what she needed. It was in her bathroom cabinet. “Just in case,” Dr. Birnbaum had told her. “But I don’t think you’ll need it again, Evelyn.” Well, he’d been wrong.

She heard a movement. The woman on the table was almost entirely wrapped in vines. Only her head was still free, although tendrils were already reaching across her forehead. She turned her head toward Evelyn and opened her eyes. Black eyes, as deep and black as night.

Evelyn reached toward Brendan, opened her mouth, tried to speak.
I need to go
, she tried to say.
I can’t be here for you right now. I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise
. But nothing came out.

She turned and ran through the forest, down the pink hallway. A taxi was waiting in front of the hospital. It had just dropped off a woman in a wheelchair and was starting to pull away when Evelyn waved frantically. The taxi stopped.

For a moment she panicked. How could she ask the driver to take her where she needed to go? “Bartlett College,” she managed to say, although the man leaned toward her as though he could barely hear.

“Sure, lady, but it’s going to be expensive,” he said.

She opened the door and slid into the seat. She sat trembling as the taxi pulled away from the curb. She looked back at the hospital. Brendan Thorne was standing there, in front of the sign that said
EMERGENCY ROOM
, where the ambulances were parked. He was looking directly at her, doing nothing. Just standing.

She drove home from the college as quickly as she could, ran upstairs to the bathroom cabinet, and shook some pills out of the plastic bottle into her hand. With her clothes still on, she lay down on her bed, where they had first made love. She stared into the darkness. She remembered the forest, the man made of leaves, the stone table with the woman lying on it wrapped in vines. The woman’s eyes, open and staring into her own. Filled with such hatred, as though it had been there, waiting, for centuries.

She knew the pills would put her to sleep—they always did. Tomorrow she would call Brendan, explain everything. It would be all right.

But when she woke the next morning, it was not all right. She’d had problems with nausea before, but never like this. The room was spinning around her. She couldn’t stand. She had a vague thought that she should cancel her Friday classes but couldn’t remember where she’d left her cell phone. How could she get to it, anyway, when the floor kept moving? She wondered how many of the pills she’d taken. Too many, more than she was supposed to. She remembered shaking them out into her hand.

For three days, she mostly slept, although eventually she made it to the kitchen for some crackers and bottled water. When she woke, she wondered where Brendan was, why he wasn’t coming to check on her. Finally, she ventured downstairs to look through the
refrigerator and find something to eat other than crackers, holding on to the railing to avoid falling. She brought up
The Tale of the Green Knight
, the edition Brendan had translated. She opened it to a random page.

She read bits of the book whenever she wasn’t sleeping, letting the pages fall open at random, reading wherever it opened.

Poor Morva
, she thought.
It must be terrible to hate so deeply
. And then she fell asleep again, her face resting on the open book.

On Monday morning, she could stand, and her head felt clear for the first time.
I have to talk to Brendan
, she thought. She tried to call his cell phone, but no one answered.

When she got to the English department, Stephanie, the secretary, said, “Evelyn, I didn’t want to bother you over the weekend,
but could you take over Brendan’s Chaucer class for the rest of the semester?”

“Why?” she asked, suddenly feeling as though a fist had closed around her heart.

“His wife died on Friday, early in the morning. She’d been in a coma for the last three years. I don’t know if you knew; he didn’t talk about it much. He sounded awful on the phone, said he couldn’t finish the semester. He called Michael and quit, just like that. I feel sorry for him, I do, but do you know how hard it’s going to be to find coverage for his classes? Michael is taking the Intro to Medieval Lit course, but if you could take Chaucer, that would be incredibly helpful.”

“Sure,” Evelyn said, without thinking. “Do you know where he is?”

“I have no idea, but he left everything in his office. His laptop was sitting on his desk. Even his cartoons are still on the door.”

She drove to his house. It was the same there as well, everything as she remembered, except for his absence. The landlady was there, pounding a
FOR RENT
sign into the ground. “Oh, he was the nicest man,” she said. “Always paid his rent on time and fixed things himself. I have no idea where he’s gone, honey. He left a note under my door, that’s all I know. Some people can afford to forfeit their security deposit, I guess.”

She e-mailed him but received no reply. Maybe he didn’t have computer access, wherever he was. But he must still have his cell phone. She called him every day for a week. No answer. It was as though he’d disappeared off the face of the earth.

H
ere’s your tea, dearie.”

Evelyn looked up and smiled. “Scones, Mrs. Davies? You’re spoiling me, you know.”

“Well, everyone needs some spoiling. And we’re glad to see you again, Mr. Davies and me. How’s your book going?”

It was going better than she had expected. Fall semester had been difficult. Each time she’d taught Brendan’s Chaucer seminar, she’d gone home and cried, sitting on the bathroom floor or wrapped in a blanket on the front porch. Dr. Birnbaum had referred her to a psychiatrist in Richmond, a Dr. Singh, who had told her “Call me Indira” and who practiced holistic medicine. She’d said, “These hallucinations of yours—are they disrupting your life or is the disruption caused by your response to them? Lots of people claim to have seen spirits, Evelyn. It’s practically the national literature of Ireland. Some of them may be schizophrenic; we don’t know. But unless the hallucinations are disrupting how you function—unless you think the fairies want you to spy for the CIA—they’re not dangerous. You need to put them in perspective and go on with your life. If they are disruptive, we can put you back on the medication, as long as you promise to take no more than I prescribe. That last overdose could have caused serious problems. But maybe we should try management instead of medication for a while.”

Evelyn had to laugh. “No, no one’s asked me to be a magical CIA operative … yet.” Dr. Birnbaum would probably have a fit, but Dr. Singh—Indira—was right. The hallucinations themselves had never actually hurt her. So she was crazy. Maybe she just had to accept that about herself, learn to deal with it. Move on.

Spring semester had been better, but when the crocuses came up and the forsythia started blooming all over campus, she started
feeling restless. She went to see Michael Fitch and said, “What if I didn’t publish my dissertation? What if I published something else instead?”

“Like what?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and looking dubious.

“Like another book of poetry.”

“I don’t know, Evelyn. I’m not sure that’s what the tenure committee will be looking for.” She didn’t tell him what the tenure committee could do to itself, but she thought it, feeling exhilarated and frightened, knowing that for the first time since she’d gone to Oxford she was about to do not what anyone else expected of her, but what she, Evelyn Morgan, wanted.

She Googled “Giant’s Head” and discovered that the inn was still there, still run by Mr. and Mrs. Davies. She called to make a reservation, then bought the plane ticket. This time she was going to Clews for more than a week—for at least a month, perhaps longer, as long as it would take her to write a book. She’d told Brendan that she was trying to write, and then what had happened? Nothing. She’d been so wrapped up in him, and then in his disappearance, that the notebook with
The Lady of Shalott
on the cover was still blank. But if she was going to write anywhere, it was in Clews. She had known that instinctively. And she’d been right.

Evelyn drank her tea, spread marmalade on a scone, and looked down at the notebook. On the first day she had arrived in Clews, she’d sat down at the desk in her room and written
TEN LIVES
at the top of the first page. The notebook would eventually contain ten poems—she was working on the ninth. Each poem described one of Elowen’s lives: the first as queen of Cornwall, then each of the lives she had lived after that. In some she met Gawan again; in
others she did not. But in each one she learned something; each one allowed her to become a more complete person. During her ninth life, Elowen was a school teacher in the American South during the civil rights marches. Her tenth life—well, Evelyn wasn’t yet sure what Elowen’s tenth life was going to be. Perhaps she would make her a college professor, give her aspects of Evelyn’s own life. That would be nicely self-referential, wouldn’t it?