“You are going to be a hundred before you finish that thing, Arthur.”
I said that to him at least once a week for the better part of three decades. He would just give me that slow, easy grin of his and keep on reading. He was a creature of habit, my Arthur. Every single night at eight o’clock, he would settle into his favorite recliner, click on the lamp, and pull that battered old novel from the nightstand.
He did that for thirty years. I suppose I should have been annoyed by it. Most wives might have been, I reckon. But Arthur was the quiet sort, and he liked his routine. It was a comfort to me, in a way, seeing him there in the soft yellow glow of the lamp. It meant everything was right in the world.
Anyway, he passed away last month. It was peaceful, thank the good Lord, just him fading away in his sleep like he was drifting off into one of his chapters. I spent the first week in a fog, just moving through the house and trying to find my footing again. The silence was the hardest part. It was so loud, if that makes any sense.
One Tuesday, I finally felt strong enough to tidy up his side of the room. I picked up his book from the nightstand, intending to put it on the bookshelf where it belonged.
It felt heavy in my hands. The cover was worn smooth at the corners, the spine held together by years of careful handling.
I teased him about it one last time, even though he wasn’t there to hear it. “You really were a slow reader, weren’t you, old man?” I whispered to the empty room.
I went to shut the book, but my thumb caught on a little piece of cardstock sticking out near the middle. I figured it was just an old receipt or a scrap of paper he’d used for a bookmark. I pulled it out. It was a plain white index card.
I turned it over, expecting to see a grocery list or maybe a phone number. Instead, there were pencil marks. Small, neat, precise little tallies. I counted them twice just to be sure. Forty-one.
My heart gave a funny little flutter. Forty-one what? He had read that book for thirty years. Maybe he was counting how many times he’d finished it? But why keep track like that?
I opened the book to the place where the card had been. Page 204. It was right in the middle of the chapter where the husband returns from the war. I had read this book myself back when we were first married, so I knew the story well enough. It was a classic, I suppose, but I never understood why Arthur loved it so much that he had to read it over and over.
I looked at the page. There was nothing out of the ordinary, just the dense block of text describing the soldier walking up the garden path. But then, my eyes caught a single, thin pencil line underneath one specific sentence. It was the only mark in the entire book.
I felt a chill go through me. Arthur never wrote in his books. He was very particular about that. “You don’t mar a good story,” he used to say. So, seeing that line made my hands shake. I leaned closer to the lamp, the light casting long shadows across the page.
The sentence read: “She stood on the porch and watched him come home, knowing that the man walking toward her was a stranger wearing her husband’s face.”
I stared at it. I read it once, then again, then a third time. My brain didn’t want to process the words. It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water down my back. I thought about the tally marks again. Forty-one.
Why would he underline that? And why would he read the same book, over and over, until he landed on that exact page, every single night?
“It’s just a book, Martha,” I told myself. My voice sounded thin and brittle in the quiet house. “It’s just a story.”
But the doubt was already there, a little seed growing in the dark. I thought about the year we moved to Georgia.
It was the year right after he had been gone for those three months on that “consulting job” up north. He came back, and he was different. Quiet. Distant. He started reading that book every night, and he never really stopped.
I kept staring at the sentence. It felt like a confession. I thought back to the way he would look at me sometimes from across the table. Not with love, exactly. More like he was studying a map of a place he didn’t quite recognize anymore.
I stood up and walked to the closet. I reached for his old wooden lockbox on the top shelf. I hadn’t opened it since the funeral. I felt like a thief in my own home, but I couldn’t stop. I found the small key he kept hidden in the back of his sock drawer.
Inside the box, there were letters. Not letters to me, though. They were letters addressed to someone named Sarah. They were dated from that same year he was away. My hands were trembling so hard I could barely unfold the paper.
“I can’t go back to her,” one of them said. “She looks at me like she knows, but she doesn’t. She just keeps living her life, and I feel like I’m playing a part in a play that never ends. I want to tell her the truth, but I’m a coward.”
I dropped the paper. It fluttered to the floor like a wounded bird. I sat down on the edge of the bed and covered my mouth with my hands.
The man who came home to me thirty years ago wasn’t the man I had married. I realized it then, with a terrifying, absolute clarity. That’s why he read the book. He wasn’t reading it for the story. He was reading it to remind himself how to act. He was studying the lines. He was trying to figure out how to be the husband I deserved, using a character in a book as his guide.
He had been living a lie for thirty years. He had spent his whole life trying to be the man I thought he was, but he never managed to reach the end of the story. He kept getting stuck on that one page. That one moment where the stranger realizes the mask is slipping.
I looked back at the book on the bed. Forty-one tallies. Forty-one times he had tried to reconcile who he was with the man I needed him to be. And every single night, he got to page 204 and he just… he couldn’t go any further.
He wasn’t keeping track of how many times he read the book. He was keeping track of how many times he failed to become the man who came home from the war.
I looked at his picture on the dresser, the one taken before he went away. He looked so kind, so familiar. But now, all I could see was the distance in his eyes. He had been a stranger for three decades, and I had loved him every second of it.
I feel a strange, cold hollowness in my chest now. I don’t know who I am supposed to be angry at. Him? For lying? Or myself? For never really looking closely enough to see that he was just acting?
I suppose it doesn’t matter now. The book is still sitting on the bed. I keep wanting to pick it up and burn it, but I find myself sitting here, staring at the cover instead. I keep wondering what it would have been like if he had just told me the truth that first night he came back.
Would I have stayed? Would I have understood?
I’ll never know. The secret is buried with him, and I am left here in this house, living with the ghost of a man I never actually knew. I just wish I hadn’t looked at page 204. I really, really wish I hadn’t looked.
