The Long Night

She did not sleep. She sat in her husband's study and turned the words over, and the more she turned them, the darker they looked.

It's cold out. She took this first, because it was easy. The prefectural city was cold this time of year. Her husband had gone with warm clothes, but he was careless, and he would not wear them. She saw him shivering in a cold hostel, his hands numb over his papers, and the cold in the omen became the cold in his bones, and she did not know which one she was grieving for.

Why didn't you go in and lie down and rest? This was the part she could not make gentle. She had a father once, and a brother's friend, and she had heard women say this exact phrase in houses where a man had failed, or fallen ill, or not come home. It was the thing one says to a man who has worn himself out and lost, and has nothing left to stand up for.

She told herself she was being foolish. She told herself that the rite was a comfort, not a truth, and that she had never believed in it, and that she was a grown woman with a house and a husband and a life, and that a prophecy overheard by accident from two old friends over a last cup could not possibly mean what she was afraid it meant.

But the night was very long, and the house was very quiet, and a woman alone with a lamp is not a reasonable creature. She sat, and she grieved, and she made herself, in her mind, the wife of a man who had failed, and she began, even, to prepare the small kindnesses she would offer him when he came home ashamed.

She would not say I told you so. She would have his favorite soup hot. She would say that the river was beautiful in autumn, and that there would be another exam, and that a house by the river was not a bad place to wait for it.

She had begun, in the small hours, to arrange all of this in her mind, the way a woman arranges a room. She had already, in the dark, made herself a widow of hope, and the worst part of it was that she did not, in the depths of her, disbelieve it. She had heard the words, and the words had chosen her, and she could not, it seemed, unhear them.

Once she got up and looked at herself in the mirror on the dressing table. She looked like a woman who has been sitting up all night, which is to say she looked like herself, only paler. She set the mirror down again, because she did not want the mirror to see what she was thinking.

Dawn came very slowly. The roosters, who are the worst judges of a wife's heart, began their cries while the sky was still dark, and then went quiet, as if even they were ashamed. The lamps burned low. She had not slept at all, and she was, by the time the first grey light came to the window, exhausted past grief.

And then, because the world is kinder than the small hours allow, there came the sound she had been half-listening for all night: the sound of a horse on the road, and a man's voice, and the quick light knock on the door that she had thought she was never going to hear again.