Spirit Lost by Nancy Thayer Page A

lives to be perfect. She had always known she would have to face problems. But she had not counted on something like this—a ghost. Who would plan for that?
    Willy had even gone so far in her mind as to admit to herself that perhaps there would come a time when John or she would feel drawn to another person. She could imagine it, oh, sometime far in the future, when John turned fifty, for example, or when she was overcome with the frantic practicalities of raising a family, for she had seen such things happen to friends. She had imagined that one or both of them at some time might become infatuated with someone else, and she had known she could endure this, too. Because she was so certain that she and John would never separate. They loved each other too much. She did not think either of them would actually be unfaithful to the other;they weren’t the type. But they might want to be unfaithful someday—that was what she had thought could happen—and had planned on dealing with that, too. Then they would go away, for a long vacation. They were lucky enough to have the money for such things. Or they would do something drastic—move, have a child, spend a year in Europe, build a house, take up judo together, something, she couldn’t know so far in advance just what—that would prevent any danger to their marriage, that would end the infatuation.
    But she would have staked her life—in a way, was staking her life—on the belief that she and John would always stay together. They had been so lucky to find each other. They needed each other so much. Their desires and likes and dislikes and needs and eccentricities all fit together so well, and at the foundation of it all was the irrational, furious, magical, sexual, endless electricity of love and lust that had drawn them together and continually surged through and around them, keeping them together, keeping them alive. They truly had found—or had been found by—that thing in the universe that was so rare and so huge, that made their sum more than the total of their parts.
    Some nights they lay in bed just kissing, kissing each other all over. Willy kissing John’s torso from his nipples down along the swirl of hair that led to his belly button, to his genitals, burying her face between his thighs, kissing him there, her long hair sliding over his chest and abdomen, while his back arched slightly in pleasure. Or John kissing Willy on her mouth, her face, her neck, her shoulders, her arms and hands and breasts, while she said his name, said wild things, wild nighttime words of desire and praise. It was more than sex; it was a communion of joy in their mutual existence, an amazed expression of their love.
    Willy loved John passionately, and sensibly. But the week after he saw the ghost was hard on her love in ways she’d never dreamed of. John kept seeing the ghost, and Willy never did. And the things John said the ghost did were so very strange.
    Every morning John claimed that he had been awakened in the night by the ghost, always the same ghost, the woman. The first three nights, it was only that he awakened from his sleep to find her bending over him, studying his face. He said she had been smiling when he awakened; he could see her smile by the dim light of the room, and when he opened his eyes, she waited until he focused on her, until their eyes met, and that connection was made when two people silently acknowledge the other’s presence. Then, she had vanished. Just vanished, into the air. Now you see her, now you don’t, just like that.
    The next two nights, John said, he had awakened from his sleep not only to see her, but to feel her. He felt her hand caressing his face, like a mother caressing a sleeping child, he said. The ghost, leaning over him, had softly drawn her small hands across his brow and down the side of his face. Like someone blind reading braille. She had also lightly, slowly, drawn her fingertips over his mouth. Lingered there. Then vanished.