“She died?” I ventured.
“Yes, four months gone with our child.” His jaw tightened. “I tried to tell myself that these things sometimes occurred, but….”
“But you married again, and the same thing happened.”
“Not precisely the same thing, but yes, she did not survive six months of marriage to me.” During all this he had seemed remarkably calm, but for the first time I saw a flash of anger in his dark eyes as he looked at Nizhoni, cold and calm, listening but saying nothing. “I understood then that Nizhoni’s dying curse had contained all her power within it, and there was no escape from it.” He drew in a breath then, spreading his hands wide. “And that, Angela McAllister, is the truth of what happened.”
“Your truth,” Nizhoni said, and I shook my head wearily.
“Everyone’s truth is a little different,” I told her. “Are you going to fight for another hundred and forty years over whose truth is better?”
She didn’t answer, but looked away, her gaze apparently fixed on the unnaturally sparkling stream a few yards away.
“It seems to me,” I went on, thinking I really hadn’t signed up to be some sort of afterlife marriage counselor, but knowing I had to do something, “that you two were always misunderstanding one another. I suppose it’s not that strange, since you came from very different worlds.”
Not that it really excused either of their behavior. As much as I wanted to shake both of them for their stubbornness, for their refusal to reach out to one another and tell the other person the true nature of their feelings, I knew that really wasn’t going to help. What was done was done, as Aunt Rachel liked to say. All I could do was try to make sure the future didn’t carry with it these dark echoes from the past. And, whatever I might think of the way they’d been so horribly at cross-purposes, I hadn’t been there. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to live back in that place and time, when societal pressures on men and women were so very different from what they were today.
But love was love, whether it was experienced now or in 1876. Maybe getting them to admit that would be enough. I pulled in a breath, then spoke. “Jeremiah, I just want to ask you one simple question.”
He inclined his head slightly but remained silent, waiting to hear what I was going to say.
“Did you love Nizhoni? Do you love her?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “I did, and I do. It was wrong of me to say nothing, and ever since I lost her, I have berated myself for my silence, but — ”
“That’ll work for now,” I broke in. “And Nizhoni, did you love Jeremiah?”
Silence. The air was so still that I thought I could hear the thudding of the blood in my ears, the faint creak of Jeremiah’s boots as he shifted his weight. What if she wouldn’t admit it? I didn’t have much left in my bag of tricks.
Something in the proud set of her shoulders seemed to slump, and she whispered, “Yes. I did. I was weak. I should not have allowed myself to care for him. I — ”
Her next words were smothered, however, as Jeremiah strode forward, took her in his arms, and kissed her so thoroughly that I found myself staring, embarrassed, at the ground, although I could still catch a glimpse of what they were doing out of the corner of my eye. After a brief, muffled sound, she made no protest, her arms tightening around him, drawing him close.
As they kissed, the stream grew brighter and brighter, looking like a ribbon of molten silver in the dark landscape. At last they broke apart, but I noticed their fingers were still intertwined, as if, after spending so many years apart, they could not bear to be separated again.
“Will you come with me now, beloved?” Jeremiah asked softly.
“Yes, my husband.” She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it softly. Pale metal glinted on his finger as she did so, and I realized he was still wearing a wedding ring. The briefest glance over her shoulder at me, and she said, “Be happy, Angela. For you will be alive to see your children grow to adulthood.”
Then they were moving away from me, somehow stepping onto the gleaming surface of the water, walking along it as if it were simply a pathway, until the light surrounded them. It seemed to flow over their limbs, embracing them, and then they were gone, the stream now looking like just an ordinary stream, all trace of that extraordinary silver light disappearing as if it had never been.
I stood there in the dark starlit night, pulling in one deep, heaving breath after another. Nizhoni was gone, and she had taken her curse with her. The Wilcoxes were free.
I was free.