Verity

She’s got a broom in her hands and is sweeping dirt from the lowest stair when he walks past. Seeing him doesn’t surprise her anymore. 

When he first went by—years ago now—she felt the shock like lightning in her stomach and in her chest. It was his back that she saw, but she knew him at once by the color of his hair, the deep rust brown that hung past his shoulders, out of style her whole lifetime. The particular motion of his step, always favoring his right leg. An accident when he’d been a child, she assumed, although he never spoke of the past. He was dressed the way he had since the day they’d met, in exquisitely tailored pants and a crisp linen shirt, like the ones she would whiten in the sun, spread out in this very yard where she’d hidden herself away. 

He wore his hair up that day, a hot, sticky summer morning in late June, and strolled past where she was sweeping. In her other life—before they boarded the train and left the city—she might have called out to him. She might have sought a doctor. You didn’t see what was gone, which meant that he was an abomination or that she was an abomination. That’s what her parents said about these things, but he didn’t harm her. He didn’t approach her. He didn’t meet her eyes. He calmly walked the path in the same steady gait he had used in life when he walked toward her across the lobby of a hotel, beside her down the church aisle, as he carried her through the front door of this house. She stayed motionless, only her eyes tracking him until the specter disappeared among the trees. 

Her hands ached once she let go of the broom handle that had withstood her fear. For hours after he’d gone, she stretched them and would look toward that point, the last place she had seen him. How many years had it been? How many years alone and their wedding vows still fresh? (When they made them, how the decades ahead seemed an eternity!)

She expects him now, a guest that won’t come inside. She’s tried to invite him, beckon him onto the steps, but he has never once looked her way. Her parents’ beliefs are cast aside. He is no monster. The apparition is a comfort. Always the same time, always the same path. The same stride. Like a story being retold.  

---

The ocean was a restless strip of iron gray that thrashed, as they walked along, the curving stretch of beach between the last paved street and a lighthouse that stood at the end of the cape. The last of the visitors had gone weeks ago and they’d spent the time since readying the hotel for winter. It was too large to heat, and the visitors would not return until the spring. These past few weeks, walking through its empty halls and hearing only the echo of her own footsteps, Verity had liked the place, their livelihood. Sterling’s birthright, she’d supposed, although she was not certain, not anymore, that he had ever lived as she did. 

He was as easy here as anywhere else. The salt wind doubled the size of his hair, which he’d tied back with one of her own ribbons. They weren’t as funny about things like that in this town, or about her desire for quiet, her tendency to hide in the office when the lobby was full. “We here are all like debris, flung out by the sea,” the head chambermaid said the time she’d found her, after Verity had apologized—just as she, a spinster, had to Sterling at the party where they met—for a nature she did not control.

They had that in common. Sterling’s bare hand held hers, not warm but not so cold that it alarmed her anymore. Those hands were a relief in the summer heat and warmed the longer they touched her. She took a deep breath of the cool, clean air gusting off of the water. It stung her eyes, which watered and wet her cheeks. She dabbed at them with the sleeve of a suit jacket. They were more practical for day work.

“I’m more content with everyone gone,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

Sterling squeezed her hand and sidestepped a battered piece of wood the ocean had rejected. “I like the noise.” He didn’t elaborate, only bent down to retrieve a white ribbed shell in the shape of a fan, which he pressed into her hand. “For your collection.”

Verity swallowed a feeling of gratitude and nodded. She placed the shell in a pocket and stared down the beach at the lighthouse in the distance. It flared briefly, then went dark for a minute or so. From the top, the light flashed again and Verity said, “How long have you been alive?”

The hand on hers squeezed again, briefly, fondly, and let go. Sterling took off his shoes, leaving them behind on the dry sand, and walked into the surf. 

“I’m afraid the answer would only make you sad, my dear.”

“Have you married before?”

Sterling shook his head.

“But you’ve loved someone. There must have been someone before now, someone before me. Don’t say you’ve been alone all this time.”

He shrugged, a playful rise and fall of his shoulders. Not an answer exactly, but it gave her comfort. He would not tell her more—Sterling rarely spoke about the past—so she tried to imagine the kinds of people who might have accompanied him before she was alive. Were they others like him, cold and ageless, or had he kept them to feed on? Verity had offered. She’d understood he must eat, like any living thing, and if it wouldn’t kill her, she hadn’t seen a reason to refuse. She made a face thinking of him holding someone else that way, although she knew he must have—many, many times in his history—in order to be standing on this beach with her today.

Was he thinking of them too? The confirmation of his nature had come as a shock, even though she’d known the rumors. What she’d dismissed as cruel gossip was largely true, though he did not, as some claimed, keep a harem to sate him. But she was not frightened by him, not by his age or his species, by what he ate. By the knowledge that he desired her in a way different to the way other men had when she’d been younger. The act itself was private and quick, with none of the pomp of society she’d grown up with. He had not forced it, had seemed surprised, his dark eyes widening, when she had suggested it on a walk like this. After the first time, he’d given her a necklace that fell against the scar—a trinket she wore daily and with pride.

Her fingers danced over the pendant. An old-fashioned design. She could not be its first owner. But she would never know who had worn it before, and she would not see it on someone else’s neck. That was the vain thought she kept close: He would not die before her. When the women who’d mocked her as a spinster lost their husbands, hers would still be living, as youthful as he appeared today. And when she grew too feeble to give him blood, she’d ask him to take too much—!

The idea was horrid. She wouldn’t ask anything of the kind, and the fact she’d had the thought at all caused a frown to pinch her forehead. She could not kill him if he asked; why had she fantasized about asking him to cause his own solitude?

She went to his side, ignoring her boots and the length of her skirt that darkened with saltwater. Sterling glanced at her with a faint smile and motioned around them.

“There were houses here, about a century back. The ocean swept up and took them. A century from now, I wonder what will be left.”

With a hand on each of his cheeks, she raised on tiptoe and swiftly kissed him. “Don’t think about that,” she said. “Let’s think about breakfast, and then we can take an inventory of the linens for next season.”

“Verity.” Sterling clasped her hand again but was looking down as he spoke. “If you’re unhappy here, we can return to the city.”

“No.” She gave a vigorous shake of her head that loosened her hair more than the wind already had. A wave pushed against her legs but she didn’t lose her balance. “Build me a house.”

“Alright. Where?”

“A distance from the hotel. Near the lighthouse, perhaps.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather live further inland? The winter storms can be powerful.”

“We’ll go inland if there’s a storm.”

“Sometimes the trains stop.”

“Then we’ll stay in bed and hope the roof holds.”

She tugged his sleeve, drawing him back onto the dry sand, and turned her body toward the lighthouse.

---

One fall day, she waits for him on the porch. She has finished sweeping. A line of white shells decorates the top of the porch rail. The air is cool with approaching rain, a relief after the suffocating humidity of summer. At the expected time, she hears the first fall of his footsteps. The same path, the same step, but today there is someone beside him.

It’s a man, younger than Sterling appeared when they married—she’s never known his true age any more than she knows where he lived before Philadelphia and now here. In all of the time that Sterling has appeared before her, he has always come alone. She rubs her arms. Has someone passed, someone close to them? 

There’s a strange noise, the clang of a bell, but hollow. The sound lacks depth and the stranger pauses, pats his pocket. Takes from it something small and black that he holds to his ear. 

“Kirin here.” 

He lifts a hand, a finger. Steps away from Sterling, who nods. A distance away, the man—Kirin—is speaking into the object like one might a telephone. Sterling doesn’t appear surprised by it. He has his hands in his front pockets, both of them, and he is looking at the man the way he used to look at her.

The wind picks up in the forest and something stirs in her chest, circling. Kirin is not so far away that she cannot see details. His dark hair is cropped short, his clothing strange. The shirt has only a simple scoop neck, but it leaves his throat revealed, and on the side of it, like on the side of hers, are the scars left behind by Sterling’s teeth.

Kirin has stopped talking. The thing, whatever it is, he’s put back in his pocket and seems comfortable when Sterling puts a hand on his back, on his hip.

“I used to live here with my wife,” Sterling says. His voice is exactly as she remembers it: warm, resonant. “A long time ago. The house fell during a storm—thirty, forty years ago now. This forest grew up around it. The porch is all that’s left.”

She doesn’t understand what he’s saying. No storm ever felled this house. If that had happened, how is she still living in it? Dazed, she stands up from the rocking chair, tripping over her feet as she stumbles to the stairs, steadies herself with a hand against the post.

“What was her name?” Kirin asked.

“Verity.” When Sterling smiles, she catches the sharp points of his teeth. “Her parents were old-fashioned, but she still ran off with someone like me. She didn’t like living in the hotel, though. Too many people in the summer, too cold in the off season, so I had this built for her by the most noted architect of the age. I thought I would get to watch her grow old, but medicine back then wasn’t what it is today.”

“You could have turned her.”

“I loved her too much to subject her to this hell. You would have liked her. Such spirit, a remarkable woman. She was never afraid of me. In that way, you’re a lot like her.”

“Why not have the house reconstructed?”

Sterling shakes his head and takes something small and white from his pocket. He approaches the house and sets the thing on the railing with the other shells. Verity stares at it in confusion. She extends a hand toward his but cannot touch him, cannot pick up the shell that he’s brought, cannot remember being sick. Isn’t he the one who left?

She says his name then, just once. And like all of the other times, he doesn’t react, as though he can’t hear her, as though he’s never been able to hear her. But a minute goes by and something changes. He turns in her direction and raises his eyes. For one moment, like all of those moments so many years ago, they find hers. She believes they do. They drift across her face and behind her and drop back down. 

“I promised it would only be hers, you see. No matter what happens, this place is just ours. That’s what I told her the day we moved in. If I let somebody else live in it, I think she would haunt me.”

“Show me a picture later.”

Sterling nods. He doesn’t look back at her before they walk away. She catches the glint of his wedding band, now on his right hand, and that hand is on the back of someone else. Tears that cannot be cooled by the wind slip down her cheeks as she watches him go. She feels the same stillness as the day the house was finished, turns toward it and faces vines where the door should be. The porch drags around her in splinters. But as she reaches for the handle, the shape and coolness of the metal are what they should be. It turns in her hand, opening to another time.