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It would have been simpler – Tonia sometimes thought – if he had stopped loving her. It would have made it easy to hate them both, but it didn’t happen that way, and she couldn’t make up her mind as to whether she was grateful or resentful of it.
The truth of the matter was that her husband continued to love her beyond that which duty demanded of him, and that she didn’t turn him away, even when he came to her with the girl from the village’s perfume still in his hair. How could she?
The facts were that on these days – and the ones immediately after – she felt something almost like normalcy, as though they had returned to the days before the war, when they were more than just husband and wife. He had been her friend, and she his – at times, it seemed as if they were the only two people who truly saw one another, but everything had changed after the war, and there were days in which he seemed to exist somewhere else for hours – sometimes days – at a time, as if he were less a man and more a shade, recently escaped from the underworld and still barely corporeal.
She was loathe to admit it – even to herself – but the truth was that try as she might, she could never work out how to bring him back on her own. There was some vital piece of the puzzle that was just outside of her reach, and through it all, he looked through her as though it was her and not him who had emerged from the other side of the war as a ghost.
That first night, when he returned from the library in the village – she had urged him to go, insisted as though she had known how essential it was – she imagined that she felt the same thrill that Orpheus had when he thought he was seeing Eurydice step out of the underworld, only for Tonia, her ghostly love had regained substance and for a few precious days, it was as if he had undergone some sort of resurrection. They stayed up late by candlelight and discussed his newest writing, and when he looked at her, he was the same man she had always known.
As the days turned to weeks, turned to months, she quietly discovered the truth of the matter behind her husband’s revival. It was surprisingly easy to track down information on the librarian – after all, it was a small town and the wars meant there were even fewer residents than usual – and she wanted to know everything she could. Who was she? Why her? What made her able to pull him back from the edge of existence when Tonia could not?
Throughout it all, she kept sending him back into town – to the other woman, and throughout it all, he kept returning to her.
Until the day he disappeared.
It took Tonia longer than she cared to admit before she resolved herself to go down into the village and seek her out. It was hard not to know her immediately – she had never actually seen the girl, but the moment she saw her from a distance, she knew who she was as if through instinct, and when they spoke, when she pressed the book of her husband’s poetry into her hands, something between them felt as though they had always known one another.
She had wanted to hate her – everything she had ever known told her that she should hate her – but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She was the closest thing Tonia still had to her husband, this woman who had, time after time, raised him from the grave and sent him back to her, and now as they sat together in the back of the library, their fingers entwined, it felt as though he had never left them.