Fever by Sharon Butala Read Free Book Online Page A

dragging me down into them, it was rarely anymore that I came back to my life with Gary with a sense of shock. I felt as though a cure was possible after all, as though I really might live a life that was new in more than appearance.
    One day a letter came to me from Lucas. Gary handed it to me and waited while I nervously opened it. For years Lucas’s only communications had been waspish, complaining letters about the children. I had got so that I could barely bring myself to open them, and yet, in the name of our years together and our ineradicable, shared parenthood, could not prevent myself. But it had been a long time since his last letter and I didn’t even know where he was living when this one arrived.
    As I read it I had to sit down. Gary listened to my few stumbling phrases of explanation, then tactfully went into the other room. I couldn’t stay seated though, I rose, put on my coat, stuffed the letter into my pocket, and went out to walk in the park under the tall, old poplars, through the rustling yellow leaves that lay scattered across the curving asphalt paths. I thrust my hands into my pockets and held tightly to the letter.
    Lucas had written to ask my forgiveness. He had written to tell me that he was filled with remorse, tormented by it, for the way he had treated me and that while he didn’t blame me if I couldn’t forgive him, he wanted me to know how sorry he was.
    Justice at last, I thought, and I threw back my head and opened my arms to embrace the trees, the park, the wide, swift river, the endless, burning blue of the fall sky.
    In my initial wave of emotion I thought I had been released atlast, and all my old love for him came flowing over me, and tenderness for him, the one who was suffering now. This is too much, I thought,
this
I can’t bear, to be able to love him again when I had for so long allowed myself only hate.
    But I had not walked far before I came to see the hopelessness of loving him again. I was married to another man whom I also loved. I had no wish to hurt Gary by leaving him and anyway, (I found myself using a crisp, legal-sounding language even in my head), an apology from Lucas did not constitute a desire to renew our relationship.
    Eventually I went back home to Gary who had made a pot of coffee and was sitting at the kitchen table drinking it while he waited patiently for my return. I handed him the creased and wrinkled letter and waited while he read it. When he had finished, he stood and got the coffee pot and filled the cup he had already set in my place.
    “Well,” he said in his quiet way, unsmiling, “how about that.”
    That night I lay awake tossing in the darkness, one moment filled with tenderness for Lucas and the next angry that a few words scratched on a piece of paper could make me forget the anguish, the misery of those years. All the scenes of his cruelty came flooding over me: Lucas entering the house at breakfast after being out all night, the kids, Karen especially, rushing off to school as soon as he entered the kitchen; me walking into a friend’s house unannounced for coffee and finding him there; him disappearing from a party with a woman so that I had to catch a ride home with the next-door neighbours.
    Finally I got out of bed and went to sit in the living room. I didn’t turn on the lights, but sat in the big chair by the window and stared out across the blackness of the river at the myriad steady lights shining above the wide, soft shadow I knew to be trees. The night Lucas left me: coming into the house aftermidnight when I was alone reading in our bed, the kids asleep in their rooms, not speaking to me as he tossed his clothes into suitcases, his friend who was driving him (he was leaving me even the car), coughing gently as he waited in the hall, me sitting helpless in my nightgown, smelling the musky scent of the marijuana he had been smoking, not realizing for years that the marijuana wasn’t another insult aimed at me, but his way of