Luke’s parents had been childhood friends with my own, and when his parents died mine felt it only right to offer him a place in our home. He had not yet turned 18, and they pitied him.
That was not, of course, their only motivation. Luke’s parents had left him with a very large inheritance, and Luke himself was a well-known young man in Pennsylvania, even after his parents’ influence had ceased to exist. In short, they hoped we would marry. I knew this, but I was 14 and hardly concerned with such matters.
The morning he arrived dawned bright and shiny, the snow glinting off trees and winking at me through my bedroom window.
“Nina!” My father called me from downstairs.
I took one last look at myself in the mirror and stepped slowly down the enormous staircase. My parents were standing in the hall with him. The first thing I noticed was how tall he was… how I’d finally found a boy that was my height.
He wasn’t, of course, a boy. He was almost four years older than myself. But his age had never really bothered me much. That was the way it always was with Luke. He was so comfortable that I never questioned anything about his nature: How easily he touched me, teased me, how personal space seemed to be a nonissue for him. Parents aside, I don’t think I would’ve been comfortable with that kind of behavior had it been with anyone else. At the time, I assumed it was because I was in love with him. Nowadays I cringe at my naivety.
That first morning, as I walked towards him and smiled, his eyes were sad. They were deep and dark and full of emotions that I could not have begun to comprehend at that stage in my life. All I could think of was how handsome he was, with hair the color of chocolate and eyes like emeralds. When he saw me, those eyes began to brighten. They began to shine like the snow outside my window, and suddenly I felt strong enough to move mountains.
I remained silent and continued to smile, even after he told me “Good morning.” That’s how I always behaved around Luke. Silent, but all smiles.
My father leaned forward on the balls of his feet, grinning. “I must find my wife,” he told us. He winked at no one in particular and then glided out of the room.
I watched as Luke fingered the frayed edges on his coat. “We can get that fixed up for you,” I said hesitantly.
He looked up at me, smiling. “Thank you.”
I wanted to continue talking to him, wanted him to give me reason to think he might be attracted to me. But with two words, he had ended our conversation.
I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. I couldn’t leave until my parents returned. In that moment I hated my parents and I hated Luke and I hated myself for even thinking that something may have come of this boy coming to live in our home. I was ready to melt away into the floorboards when Luke said suddenly: “I’m not used to people offering me things.”
I looked up at him, surprised. It had sounded as though he was thinking out loud; I wasn’t sure whether or not I was supposed to respond.
He smiled at me. “I don’t know if you know what I mean. When you are unused to something, and someone offers that thing to you, you are not sure what to make of that offering. When you told me that my coat could be fixed I wasn’t sure whether you were being genuinely nice or simply making fun of the state I was in. It seems nowadays that I am unused to everything as though--” he paused, seeing the look on my face. “I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I don’t know what came over me. It’s just been so long since I have simply… talked to someone. And you are easy to talk to. Did you know that?”
I continued to stare at him, astonished. Who was this boy? Why did he feel it acceptable to poor his heart out to me, a near stranger? But I couldn’t resist that twinkle in his eyes. I smiled, in spite of myself.
~
Those few months were the best of my life. I spent every moment I could with Luke, taking long walks through our grounds, bundled up under layers and layers of scarves and coats and gloves. My parents, in their desperation to see us married, didn’t even protest at their young daughter spending so much time with a man.
I brought him hot chocolate every morning and sat on his bed as we watched the snow fall. We talked about everything. Books were our favorite subject. When he wasn’t with me, Luke spent all his time in the library, reading to his heart’s content.
Luke loved looking out the window. Sometimes I thought he was torn between looking into my eyes and watching the world outside. When I was sitting with him, I’d often notice him leaning towards the window, like a bird ready to take flight. But when he was really thinking hard about something, when he was faced with a question he wasn’t quite sure how to answer, he stayed close to me.
I thought he was terribly romantic: he was so quiet and sweet and gentle that I could swoon with just one word. He had a way of speaking that was so unassuming you could never fault him, even if he was saying something awful (which he never did).
“Nina,” he said to me one unbearably cold February morning.
I looked up at him, questioningly. When he didn’t respond I hit him playfully in the arm.
“Sorry,” he said, laughing. “I was just wondering…”
“Yes?” I prodded him.
“I don’t know. I just wonder about you sometimes.”
“What is it you wonder about?” I asked.
That’s just it,” he said. “I wonder, but I don’t know what about. You are so secretive.”
I laughed. “Perhaps I am not as mysterious as you think.”
“Nina, Nina. I think you may be the most mysterious person I know.”
I scoffed at this. Even at 14, I was well aware of the extent to which my emotions were written across my face. I could hide nothing. “Why would you say such a thing?” I asked him.
“Oh, Nina. I simply do not understand you.”
I shrugged, and reached over to his nightstand to pluck a fig from the bowl. “What is it you wish to understand?”
It was Luke’s turn to shrug. “Sometimes I wonder why you tolerate my company.”
I blushed in spite of myself. I could think of several reasons why I tolerated his company, none of which I was willing to share with him.
He shrugged again. Luke certainly did a lot of shrugging. “It’s probably just me. It’s usually me…”
He said this quietly, so quietly I barely heard him. I pretended not to have heard him because I wasn’t sure how to respond. I wasn’t even sure what he meant.
~
The year Luke came to our house was the year he left. He left right in the middle of April when the war began.
“Nina,” he’d said as he stood in front of the open door. I’d come down with some kind of cold and was wearing three shawls and shivering against the cold blasts of wind pouring into the house.
“Nina,” he said again, his voice breaking. He squeezed his eyes closed. I didn’t move. My mother and father had been standing some ways behind us, in the hall. I thought my toes were going to snap off if I stood there much longer.
I could still see him moving towards me, still feel his warm hands slide into mine, still hear his heartbeat as I rested my head on his chest. It felt like we stayed like that for ages, but in hindsight I knew it had only been about 10 seconds.
He came back a couple years later. I don’t know why or how, but he came home to visit and then left again. I should’ve realized then, should’ve known that something had switched. But he was still so sweet, so gentle, so kind. There was no way I could have predicted the cracks he would leave in my heart.
When he proposed to me during that visit, I sincerely thought that I was being wise about making my decision. I did not accept right away, I spent about two days deliberating. It felt like an eternity.
“Luke,” I approached him the day before he was supposed to leave. He brightened when he saw me.
“Good morning,” he’d said, kissing me on the cheek.
And then I’d looked him in the eye and told him yes, I would marry him. With all of my heart, I bound myself to him.
~
When he didn’t come back home again at the end of the war, I waited for months. When in June we still had no word of him, I assumed he was dead and cried for an equal number of months. Sometime in September a neighbor stopped my father on the street and asked “Why isn’t that nice young man living with you anymore?” When my father told him that we hadn’t seen him since the end of the war and that we’d assumed the worst, the neighbor had furrowed his brows and said “But I just saw him last week in Providence!”
Well my father, being the man he was, had crunched home on a ground covered in leaves and stormed into the house, his pride smoldering on his shoulders; a bonfire that could turn trees to ash. He told me what the neighbor had said and as I sank into a chair he stood over me, telling me that as far as he was concerned the engagement was dissolved and he didn’t care what feelings I may still have for the boy.
“The ungrateful bastard has the audacity to accept our hospitalities and then leave us in the dust simply because he feels like it. Well I don’t care how much money the boy has, I don’t want you going anywhere near him.”
As slighted as my father may have felt at having losing Luke’s money, it was nothing compared to the hole that was burning into my heart, the kind a cigar would make if you pressed it into silk.
~
The house seemed empty with Luke gone. I sat on my bed, casting sullenly around for something to wear, but nothing was really catching my eye. The thought of stuffing myself into one of the itchy dresses lying around my room sounded about as appealing as eating a brick.
I shook my head violently, trying to rid myself of the ringing that seemed to have found a permanent home in my ears despite the fact that the war had ended months ago. It was those damn cannons that had been blasting day and night for ages. I’d had a dream last night of an elephant stuffing Luke into a cannon, only when he shot out of the big, black monster it wasn’t Luke, it was a bird. The bird didn’t even come out squawking. It was a dove and it came soaring out like it was proud of its predicament, like it didn’t care one bit about the smoke that was charring its wings or anyone below it who might’ve been upset by the blast.
When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I wished I hadn’t. I looked around at the warm, cozy blankets and my toes curled sadly against the cold floor.
The house was bustling, naturally. I was always the last one up. Our house didn’t stop for anything. It kept going like perfectly oiled clockwork, even when Grandpa died and then even when we found Uncle James dangling on a rope hanging from a tree outside. No matter what had happened, the choreography of footsteps remained the same every morning.
I gravitated towards the foggy window, watching my breath mist the panes. Our estate sprawled lazily in every direction. It’d become barren and desolate with the coming winter. I could see a clothesline from which hung an assortment of dirty, ripped clothing.
These days I felt like an earthquake could come at any minute and tear the ground apart, swallowing us all whole. It didn’t seem so impossible, given the state the country was in. It was if there was nothing binding anyone together anymore. I felt disconnected from everyone around me, absorbed in myself, unable to feel any kind of empathy. The constant rain didn’t help. It came down in sheets, like blankets hanging from pillows in the forts I used to make with my friends, shielding us from the world around us.
The occasional news that reached us was never very interesting. Every day was the same: conflict in its various forms. So and so had passed such and such a law, so and so had taken money from such and such a business… destruction seemed to be the only thing we were capable of nowadays. But the worst part was the lack of attention anyone was paying to any of this. It seemed like I was the only one who was paying any attention to the coiling springs and suppressed electricity crackling through the trees. The Civil War was over but it seemed like no one could get rid of any of their leftover animosity.
~
I had been in love with Luke. Naïve as that love may have been, I was in love all the same. What affected me the most was how easily he had severed that bond. I couldn’t bring myself to think that maybe he’d never actually had the same feelings for me. That’s what I told myself when I began falling for someone new. That Luke had just been a mistake on my part. I married when I was 20 and even as my husband and I drifted apart after the early years of our marriage, I still believed in love. I still believed that it was just my fault, that I’d been choosing the wrong men. Sometimes I even blamed it on the world I lived in, the pressure I was under to get married.
Falling in love was something so pure, so beautiful, so perfect. Everyone eats chocolate after a good cry, I told myself. So why not fall in love all over again after a good heartache? After all, things were bound to get better. Things were bound to be different the second, third or 10th time around. They just had to be.
~
I posted a first draft version of this a couple weeks ago. This was for an assignment I had for school to write an allegory: a text with a thesis representing a greater meaning. I have already handed in the paper, but I just wanted to see what you all thought. Thanks!
