12. Rhett

There came a time in the summer when I began to feel fragile, unstable. For instance, I would trip over something inconsequential and I would run a few steps to avoid falling. What if I didn't? What if I fell? What would break? Who would see the blood streaming down my legs? Who would be with me?

I started leaving lights on throughout the night. If the house was too dark I could not get up to look for a book or make certain that we were safe, Scarlett, the children and I. Will and Suellen and their three girls were there too, but I never seemed to think to hard on them. If the house was too dark, I would lie there immobilized, entertaining visions of peril. My dreams provided no solace, no refuge from the agony of the past wielded into that of the future.

I thought about this later.

I realized that I was not presenting a coherent face to the world. I had to burn the past, had to, had to. Beginning with the dreams.

Scarlett used to tell me her dreams, not because she needed my help in understanding them, but because she wanted to rid herself of them, clear her mind for the day. "Don't tell me you're still running through the fog," I would say to her when she'd wake me up in the middle of the night, but in the end I would listen.

She told me that after Miss Melly died, she stopped having dreams.

In the late summer she began to dream again, for the first time since it happened. Since I can no longer pass them off on Ashley I find myself thinking about them. I remember telling her that I had dreams about dying and getting old…the obvious fact, that everyone knows except for me. Remote to the end, keeping secrets from myself. My body damn near mutinied this past winter, and I just barely managed to regain control of my vessel, ah, another sailing metaphor. I realized that that Scarlett's situation is my own. She too was faced with her own mortality, first when she fell, second with Bonnie, third with Miss Melly. And again with me, I am sure.

In one dream she was hanging Bonnie's blue velvet riding habit in her closet only to find that it was in shreds. She showed it to me. I say (or she says, who knows in dreams) that this was her favorite. She's determined to find her an identical blue velvet riding habit before she wakes up from her nap. In other words, she must fix what she broke, bring her back. The similarity of this dream to one of my own does not escape my attention. Nor does the fact that I am still thinking she's dead because of me, I did it, I am responsible.

In another dream of mine, she and I are sailing on the Ashley River. There are many other boats, and we have assembled as a group. Others are boarding their respective vessels but there is no sign of Scarlett. I decide that I should leave the boat to search for her. While I'm waiting on the shore, I realize that the other boats are leaving, one by one. Finally, there is no one left onshore but me. My first thought is anger: she has left me. As I left her. There is a sense, even outside of my dreams, however irrational, of being abandoned. Shouldn't that be her sentiment? Shouldn't she hold me responsible for her ordeal? Did she feel anger at me, for instance, for leaving her? The answer would have to do with the way in which anger creates guilt and vice versa.

I do not disbelieve this answer, but it remains less suggestive to me than the mystery of me being left alone on the Ashley River.

I know how it feels. The point is that Scarlett does not.

When the twilights were long at Tara, we would eat in the front parlor, where the light was. By the time September came I was in fact working, or trying to work, but I also wanted not to be out, exposed.

At a point in the summer it occurred to me that I had been sharing a bed with Scarlett for a little over a month and there had been no mention of Ashley, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart from him in our married life, so to be about five miles away from him and not to have heard his name was a truly remarkable feat. There had been the week or two or three here and there in the early days of our marriage, when I longed to please her, a new experience for her in a marriage. There had been a month while we were on our honeymoon in New Orleans. There had been a few weeks after Bonnie was born. On all such occasions we had spoken to one another with such tenderness, such, dare I say it, love.

I remember having had on that particular eve in Clayton County a sense of well-being so profound that I did not want to go to sleep. I found candles and lit them and kissed her and settled against her in the bed, used to the feel of her body against me by now. She had been reading some letters of her mothers and had fallen asleep. Wade and Ella had gone downstairs, I could hear their conspiring laughter. I could see Scarlett sleeping.

I sat on the balcony overlooking the sacred soil of Tara and finished a bottle of wine we had drunk with dinner and watched the trees sway in the wind.

I was going to climb back into bed without disturbing her, a complicated sequence.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Getting in bed." I reply.

"I have a present for you." Scarlett says, grabbing my hand, then moving it to her midsection and letting it rest there. "That's my birthday present to you."

I remember tears coming to my eyes. I feel them, even now.

The birthday present no one else could give me.