“Does he love you?”
“Yes.” Kacey fully believed her answer, but where did that answer come from? How, in fact, did she know that he loved her?
“Do you love him?”
Kacey placed her right palm so swiftly over the ring that it was as if she had slapped herself.As big as my eye.She had not been able to shake the impression that the ring watched her, and now she had the ridiculous feeling it couldhearher, too. “I could, maybe, one day. But this is so fast.”
Her mother nodded. Kacey wanted to sink into the uncomfortable couch, she was so exhaustedly grateful that her mother understood and didn’t think Kacey was crazy for hesitating. Then her mother’s gaze drifted to Sam—his white-blond hair, his soft cheeks.Mouse, Kacey wanted to call, but couldn’t make herself interrupt his game. He flew his plane, colored with all four of the crayons in the little crayon pack Rosanna let Kacey take home from the diner. Kacey tightened her hand over the diamond. It pressed into her flesh. Then she let her hand slide away. The diamond came out like the sun. Neither she nor her mother lookedaway from Sam when her mother said, softly, “I think you should follow your heart.”
The wedding was a blur. Her friends came back from college for it, and exclaimed over her Marchesa dress, the silk lustrous, as though pearls had been somehow spun into fabric. Her veil was delicate, hand-tatted lace, a gift from the groom. An heirloom, he had explained. Every bride in his family had worn this. Her friends loved this story. When Kacey asked about their classes, they said, “Shut up!” and “You’re still upset about that? Kace,look at you! You are living thedream.” They demanded to know if he was good in bed. Kacey blushed, explaining he had wanted to wait, and then they teased her about being a virgin, their voices retaining that quality of incredulous, affectionate jealousy. At college, the only thing boys wanted was to score. They concluded that Kacey was the luckiest girl in the world. She had found the perfect guy.
Her best friend, Sara-Lynn, during a moment when it was just them at the edge of the dance floor, watching the party surge and swirl like rough water, said, “Where’s his side of the family?”
“He’s an orphan.” Or was it that he was estranged from his family?
Sara-Lynn frowned. “And how old is he?”
“Thirty,” Kacey said, but then didn’t know how she knew this. “I think.”
An anonymous-looking server placed a glass of champagne in Sara-Lynn’s hand. Sara-Lynn took a sip and smiled, her worry gone. “Well, you’re eighteen, so it’s all legal, right?”
Kacey supposed that it was. Later, Kacey couldn’t remember much of this conversation, couldn’t remember the faces of the servers, weaving in and out of the party, or what her new husband said when he toasted her. She remembered only the fireworks, their light coloring her brother’s awed face, and how they made her veil look like it was on fire.
When the party was over and he led her to the mountain resort’s honeymoon suite, her heart thrummed, and she wished that someone was there to tell her that she felt excitement, when she knew, with startling clarity, as though she had been living in a fog and the powerful beam of a lighthouse had just cut into her, that what she felt was fear.
“There are two bedrooms,” he said, as if he sensed her thoughts. “Let’s wait until the time is right.” He kissed her cheek and closed his door behind him.
He brought her to his home, the working farm surrounded, as he had promised, by sheets of colored fields of flowers. “They are yours now,” he said, and a thrill went through her. “This, too.” A tennis court (though Kacey didn’t play), a paddock of horses (though Kacey didn’t ride), a greenhouse with plump tomatoes, a kiln (Didhedo pottery? He laughed at her question, shaking his head), the barns noisy with sheep, and the main house, which dated to the eighteenthcentury, when this country was a colony, with thick stone walls and mullioned glass, yet modern features like an enormous porcelain bathtub standing in the middle of one of the many giant bathrooms, and a cooking range in the kitchen that had been made in Italy and was the size of a small car. The attic was filled with mannequins wearing elaborate theater costumes—or maybe the suits and dresses were actually from the eras they evoked. There was the bare cage of a hoopskirt, and a shimmering silver roaring twenties dress, its beads falling like rain. An open trunk in the attic’s corner showed mounds of wigs. The library (“This is yours, too”) made her want to weep at the sight of all those beautifully bound books tooled with gold—classics, mostly, some of them clearly rare. There was even a folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, though ithadto be a reproduction. Only eighty-two original folios existed in the world. He pointed the book out to her, reminding her how she had mentioned lovingRomeo and Juliet, which she had read for class sophomore year.
Servants moved around them as he gave her the tour. They dusted and tidied, but Kacey somehow couldn’t look directly in their faces, and although they said their names when he introduced them to her, she couldn’t hold the names in her mind. She remembered only that their voices had a slight accent.
He showed her, about a mile up the road, a guesthouse, windows sparkling, with a heated pool in the lush backyard. “For your mother and brother,” he said. “Just make sureyou visit them here, okay? I don’t want to have them in the main house.” When Kacey frowned, he said, “My love, I need quiet for my work.” His work, he had explained, was making more money out of the money he already had, investing it in promising start-ups. This involved a lot of travel and hours working on his laptop in the studio that Kacey could see from the window of her bedroom, which adjoined his. “Everything I have is yours,” he said, “except the studio. That one space is mine. You understand, don’t you?”
“It’s your man cave?”
He laughed. “You could call it that.”
They walked the grounds, housekeepers and groomsmen and farmers discreetly doing work around them, their faces averted. Kacey found it difficult to look into their faces. She supposed that this was because she felt uncomfortable, knowing how close her life had been to theirs, and how it was different now. They all wore uniforms coded to the kind of work they did: blue for the house, brown for the stables, green for the farm.
“Sam wouldn’t make noise if he came here,” Kacey said. “He’s as quiet as a mouse.” Which wasn’t true, but she smiled, ready to explain the pet name.
Her husband’s face hardened. “I’m not trying to keep you from your family. All I ask is a little privacy. Is that so wrong, after everything I’ve done for you?Willdo for you?”
Having never seen him angry, never anything but blankly amiable, Kacey scrambled to apologize. Yes, of course, she would visit her family at the guesthouse. Yes, of course, shewould never enter his office. Yes, she understood.
He smiled and took her chilly hand in his. That night, like every night, he gave her a light kiss before retiring to his bedroom. “My patient flower,” he said, as if she were disappointed instead of relieved. “I still think we should wait.” She wondered what might be wrong with him that he so clearly wanted her yet not in this way, and what was wrong with her, that although here she was, married at eighteen after what everyone described as a storybook romance, she did not want him at all.
She visited the flower fields. It was like being in the center of a kaleidoscope. Although she stood still, she had the impression of being tumbled in color. The spring bulbs had just bloomed, and she was surrounded by swathes of golden daffodils, their perfume heady, a honeyed, powdery kind of sweetness, and tulips, whose fragrance was light and fresh, almost grassy. The red ones were enormous, each bloom as large as a doll’s head. There were many varieties of tulips, a rippling rainbow. Kacey lost track of time among them. She noticed dahlias, too, with their brilliant, spiky petals.
This brought her up short. Dahlias bloomed in fall, not spring. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe they weren’t dahlias. Maybe this was a different variety.
She felt a scratchy kind of discomfort, as though she had rubbed up against raw wool. The flowers, though beautiful,seemed suddenly menacing, a host of many-colored faces. The ring winked up at her in the sunlight. A claustrophobic panic overcame her. She had to leave.
When she emerged from the fields and started up the path to the farm, she was startled to see a girl standing on the path. She appeared to be Kacey’s age. Her clothes marked her as a farmworker. She was dressed in green, the cloth rough and muddy at the hems of her trousers. Kacey was surprised, she thought, to see another human being after being surrounded by flowers, but then she realized her surprise was due to something else.
It was the girl’s face.
“I canseeyou,” Kacey blurted before she realized how weird that was to say. And now that Kacey had said it, and was thinking about this girl’s curious face—her black eyes, her black hair, the crease in her full lips, the little scar on her left check, the single long braid that hung over her shoulder—Kacey remembered that what was actually weird was that shecouldn’tsee anyone else on this farm... including her husband. She knew that he was handsome and had blue eyes, but couldn’t hold the memory of what he looked like in her mind. “Who are you?”
