Her Loving Husband's Curse (2 page)

When they turned down Lafayette Street and walked onto the campus of Salem State University, James’s lips tightened and his shoulders closed together. Jennifer and Olivia waited for them inside the library. Jennifer, an auburn-haired beauty, and her mother, Olivia, ever the gypsy with her peasant skirts and coin earrings, were Sarah’s dearest friends, her Wiccan friends, and she was happy to see them.

“Bickering witches,” James said, but he smiled when he said it.

Olivia patted Sarah’s hand lightly, as if she were afraid of breaking her. “Are you all right, dear?” she asked.

“You need to stop tip-toeing around me,” Sarah said. “I put the exhibition together. I’ve been working on this for weeks. I’m fine.”

“James doesn’t look fine,” Jennifer said.

“I know,” said Sarah. She looked around expecting to see one more face, and she was surprised when it wasn’t there. “Where’s that new guy you’ve been gushing about, Jennifer? I thought he was coming.”

Jennifer shook her head. “Soon,” she said.

They walked in silence to the Winfisky Gallery at the Ellison Campus Center in the North Campus, passing students with their backpacks slung over one shoulder, most walking in pairs chatting, others riding their bikes or listening to music blasting through their earbuds. Sarah felt her heart cough in her chest when she saw the sign outside the museum: The Salem Witch Trials, 319 Years Later. James’s hand tightened over hers, and though it hurt, his grip was strong, she squeezed back, trying to comfort him. After watching the doom on Olivia’s face, and the gloom on Jennifer’s, Sarah had enough.

“Stop looking at me like I’m going to explode!” she said.

Olivia exhaled. Jennifer smiled. James looked away.

“I knew you’d be all right,” Jennifer said. She nudged James’s arm. “I told you she’d be all right.”

When they turned the corner near Winfisky Gallery Sarah saw the people waiting. Most were tourists with their walking shoes and cameras, ready for one more witch museum to visit, as though the Salem Witch Museum, the Witch Dungeon Museum, Witch House, and the tours weren’t enough. But there were others there too, locals as well as friends and families of the art and design students who created the exhibits.

Inside the gallery Sarah found the students making last minute adjustments, turning the statue of Rebecca Nurse to the right, straightening the painting of Gallows Hill, lighting the portrait of John Hathorne sitting center at a witch trial. James wandered from wall to wall, staring into the art as though he could reach through the paintings and the pencil drawings to the seventeenth century on the other side and wring a neck or two. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought him after all, Sarah thought.

“Should I open the doors, Mrs. Wentworth?” a student asked.

“Yes, Natalie. Go ahead.”

The people came in, oohing and aahing at the artistic interpretations of the Salem Witch Trials. Families and friends hugged each other, proud of their students. A few wiped away tears. Sarah nodded, pleased with the response.

Olivia stepped beside her, slid her arm around Sarah’s waist, and squeezed. “This took such strength for you, Sarah. Look how far you’ve come in just a year.”

“Thank you,” Sarah said.

Olivia leaned close and whispered. “Jennifer said there’s a recreation of the…the…” She shook her head, unable to continue.

“The dungeon? It’s in the next room.”

“Show me.”

Sarah led the way. It was dark inside, and she could barely make out Olivia’s short-cropped red hair and steel-gray eyes in the flickering light of the flameless candles. The recreation of the dungeon was 70 by 280 feet, made of oak timbers and siding, and inside were dirty, suffering-looking women mannequins in seventeenth century rags, chained by irons to the wall. Most of the women had no bedding, though one had a sad excuse of a straw mattress. One mannequin woman was on her knees praying. Another lay prostrate, her eyes open, staring at a God in heaven who could not or would not help her. She was dying, or already dead, it was hard to tell. Sarah watched the women, some with their witch-accused children clinging to their knees, and she was surprised to feel nothing. Maybe she had relived the scene so often in her dreams that seeing it played out with life-sized dolls didn’t affect her. She felt Olivia watching her, that detective seeking clues look only Olivia could do.

“You’re all right,” Olivia said.

“I told you I was fine.”

“I didn’t believe you.”

“I know.”

Olivia stepped closer to the exhibit. “Where are the bars?”

“They didn’t need bars. We were chained. If anyone tried to escape they were immediately executed whether they were tried or not, whether they confessed or not.”

Olivia’s hand went to her heart. “Why do only a few have bedding?”

“We had to pay for everything. We had to pay for the bedding, a flat straw mat, useless though it was, and we had to pay for food. The prisoners who couldn’t afford to pay went without. We had to pay the salaries of the sheriff, the magistrates, even the hangman who would take our lives away. The bit of light here is brighter than it was then. When it’s dark, that’s when your mind plays tricks on you. Everywhere was a shadow where monsters could hide.”

Suddenly, in the space of a thought, the numbness went away and Sarah was there again, in 1692. She saw herself in the dungeon alongside the mannequin women, only they were living now, all of them suffering. The pain of it all, the horror and the sadness, were real and she had to shake herself back into the present. Olivia placed a comforting hand on Sarah’s shoulder, and Sarah exhaled.

“We had to pay for the privilege of having our bodies searched for witch marks. We paid to have our heads shaved. Sometimes I could hear James arguing so loudly, begging them to treat me well. ‘Name your price,’ he’d say, the grief cracking his voice. ‘Name your price for some kindness for my wife and I will pay you that and tenfold more.’ But I suffered with everyone else. They barely gave us enough water to drink because they thought they could coerce a confession from us if we were thirsting to death. When it rained it flooded inside and we’d be up to our waist in rainwater, urine, and feces, and often that was the only water we had to drink. The rats would bite our legs and arms. Some prisoners went mad. The only thought that kept me sane was knowing that James was trying to set me free. After a while I was shipped to Boston with other prisoners because the jail here was full. But I was already too sick when I arrived.”

Sarah closed her eyes. Her hands reached for her stomach, then full with the baby that should have been born. Suddenly, the pain, so strong just moments before, dissipated into a dull tugging. When she opened her eyes she realized a few of the visitors had gathered around, listening as though she were a museum tour guide. When they moved onto the next scene, Olivia put her arm around Sarah’s shoulders.

“I am so very sorry, Sarah.”

Sarah leaned into the warmth of Olivia’s embrace. Olivia reached into her bag and pulled out a tissue, dabbing at her eyes, and she dabbed at Sarah’s too. Sarah kissed her friend’s cheek, grateful for this second mother in her life, wondering where she would be without her wise Olivia. Olivia gestured toward the end of the exhibit.

“I think there’s someone who needs more comfort than I do,” Olivia said.

Sarah saw him across the darkened room, James, his beautiful face twisted into a torment so powerful she thought he’d be permanently scarred. She saw the blood spots at the corner of his eyes, visible under his wire-rimmed eyeglasses. She took his hand and kissed it, but he was so caught up in the nightmare-like panic he didn’t feel her caress.

“James? Jamie? It’s all right.”

He stared at the exhibit, his black eyes wide, almost child-like, as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. As if the monsters of his imagination had come to life and he was mesmerized by them. As if he were afraid the exhibit would disappear before his eyes and he would never understand. Sarah looked at the scene that held him in stop-motion terror. He was staring at a woman mannequin, dirty, ragged, kneeling between two walls with barely the width of her body as space between them. She couldn’t sit. She couldn’t stand or lay down, caught in pain-filled limbo.

“Why is she trapped between the walls?” he asked.

“She hasn’t had her trial yet,” Sarah said. “Sometimes they kept the accused witches in these tiny spaces hoping they would be in such agony they’d confess. Everything in the dungeons was about forcing confessions.”

“But she’s trapped,” James said, hysteria creeping into his voice, the sound a nails-on-chalkboard contrast to his usual mellow tone. He dropped his head into his hands, his eyeglasses hanging down his nose. “No. No,” he said. “You hadn’t had your trial. You never had your trial.” He looked at Sarah, a trail of blood slipping down his cheek. “You weren’t here were you?”

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. You were not here. Sarah stroked his face, wiped the red away, his pale-blue cheek streaked pink.

“Were you here?” A question now.

“It was a very long time ago.”

“Were you trapped between the walls?”

Sarah nodded. James walked closer to the mannequin stuck in a perpetual half-up, half-down stance, the never-ending torture everywhere on her face.

“Oh my God,” James said. “You were trapped between two walls? And couldn’t lie down? Couldn’t sit? Couldn’t stand?” No matter how tight he shut his eyes he couldn’t stop the sobs. “Oh my God,” he said again. “Elizabeth…”

She took his face between her hands. “My name is Sarah.”

But James turned back to the mannequin, drawn to the horror the way lookie-loos gape at accidents on the road, not wanting to see the carnage yet unable to look away. Sarah stood between James and the mannequin so he had to see her.

“The reason they removed me from the walls was because of the money you paid them. You did help me, James. You did.”

“It was too little too late and you died. Oh Lizzie…”

Sarah took his hands in hers. She felt a shard of glass poking her heart from the inside out at the sight of her miserable husband. “I thought the exhibit would help us face the sadness from this time so we could be done with it. I hate feeling like there’s this whole part of our lives we have to tip-toe around.”

“Do you really feel that way?”

“We need to remember these times, James, the good and the bad. They’re a part of who we are, the good and the bad.”

“There is no bad of you, Mrs. Wentworth.”

“Or you.”

James shook his head. “I’m not so sure.”

She wiped his cheeks with the back of her hand, then stood on her toes, leaning up, kissing his lips.

“Let’s just say these times, as horrible as they were, are a part of us. And now that we’ve faced them head-on we’re ready to leave them behind and focus on the wonderful, perfect years ahead. The madness can’t touch us anymore.”

“There is always madness, Sarah.”

“But it’s our turn to be free of it. We’ve earned it.”

James smiled with a pensiveness that said he wasn’t so sure. Sarah took his hand.

“Come with me, Doctor Wentworth. A few of your students have spotted you and we need to wash your face before anyone wonders why you’re bleeding from your eyes.”

James went into the men’s room and washed his face. He was quiet as they left campus. On Lafayette Street, Sarah took his hand again, but she didn’t lead him toward home. She led him into Marblehead, where the fancy people lived. She walked, faster and faster in the nook of a neighborhood, past the trees, the colonial-style homes where doctors and lawyers had their offices inside, through the parks. It was, Sarah thought, a perfect place to raise a family.

James stopped. “Where are you taking me?” he asked.

Sarah smirked, caught like a naughty child. “I thought we could visit Jocelyn and Steve. Their new house is down the block.”

“Are we going to see Jocelyn and Steve or Billy?”

“We’re going to see the whole family.”

“Sarah…”

Sarah turned away. She looked at the red brick houses, the yellow houses, the colonial-style churches with the steeples on top. As they neared the green-covered coastline and the bay in the distance she strained to see Jocelyn’s house, certain that if she could get James there he would understand.

“Sarah…” He touched her cheek with his fingertips, his face still pulled from the wretched dungeon. “I know you want a child, but we can’t have one.”

“Jocelyn and Steve have Billy.”

“Billy’s adopted.”

“We could adopt too.”

James turned away. “Do you know what problems Billy will have with a mother like Jocelyn? How are they going to explain her differences away?”

“As long as children have a loving home who cares if their family is different? He’ll think his mom works at night and sleeps during the day. What’s wrong with that?”

“How are they going to explain to that little boy that his mother drinks blood?”

Sarah wanted to scream. She felt goosebumps in her gut and her head ached. Again, she remembered the baby from so long ago. Her hands nearly went to her stomach, but she stopped herself. Why was James so set against a child?