He knew it was going to happen as soon as he walked in the door and saw her there. She was standing by the table in her blue dress and she hadn't gotten Timba from school yet. In the space of a second he felt hot, then cold, then nauseous, and then that it was absolutely imperative to keep her from saying whatever it was she was about to say.
He opened his mouth and brought up a hand sharply, but she was already talking. "I had a vision," she said, her head tilted down but her eyes looking up, into his. She seemed to be speaking to his shoes but then she seemed to be speaking to his chest, then his face. "As soon as they brought us on the ship, I saw it. That if I gave in to them immediately, everyone would be spared, but if they had to go to any effort to get the information out of us, we'd end up being destroyed. I don't know how. I just saw it and trusted it." Then she stopped talking and finally, slowly, stood up straight and faced him square with her eyes on his. She was completely calm and waiting for him.
His body was cold and his ears were hot. His tongue was thick in his mouth. He saw her there by the table, the blue dress taut over the shapeless middle, the slack shoulders and the dark shadows under the eyes and the coarse hair, and the nausea in his stomach curdled with hatred. This old, ugly, foolish woman. He could not stop staring at her graceless face. His teeth ground together and his lip curled up and he was so hot that his vision began to tint red, and he wanted to do something terrible to her. Netra was there in her crib in the side room, quiet.
"I was accepted onto the council today," he said, his tongue so thick he could barely get the words out. He had a bitter disappointment that he couldn't say it with triumph.
She nodded.
He knew he wouldn't hit her, and he knew with a sicker and sicker sinking feeling that he wouldn't disbelieve her. He knew she had chosen this day to speak because this was the first day in twelve years that he wouldn't have disbelieved her. But how close it was! The hatred for her was complete and animal, a raging culmination of everything he'd ever felt for her over the past twelve years pressed into one day; more. For her weakness, her betrayal, her cowardice, her age, her reputation, her lack of beauty, her lack of desire for him. And it still couldn't obscure that thread of knowledge that was so thinly but solidly there for him now, that she was telling the truth. He saw it like he saw her eyes were blue.
His hand was still on the door latch. For a minute or longer he could manage to do nothing but hold onto the door latch. Finally the swooning hatred abated a little and he backed out of the room, swung the door behind him and slammed it shut, and soon he was in the small one-windowed room by the dock without having seen where he was going. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He was sick with disappointment. This was the worst thing that could have happened to him. This was the worst thing. Everything he'd been fighting for for the last decade and a half, all in pieces. The world was upside-down. He'd known as soon as he'd seen her standing by the table.
And yet she had waited for him all these years... waited for him to grow up, he knew, thinking of Netra in her crib. He could barely wrap his mind or his heart around the enormity of it. This woman. Calla. A liquid warmth trickled into his misery; he was cracking open like an egg. And he had thought he was one of God's faithful! How he'd resented every sacrifice; the waiting, the awful marriage, every night in that bed with her and the compromise to his principles that Timba had represented.
His heart was peeling open. Feeling it he knew that this was what he had wanted, more than anything. To be shown by God what true grace was, to be shown what truth itself was. The fact that it was being shown that he didn't have it and she did, he knew, was immaterial. His hatred had passed and he rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. The world was so much larger than he thought! He thought of Calla, in their quarters, her slouched and shapeless body now poignant to him. Why would he have been so sure she stooped from the weight of guilt and not from some other weight?
She had waited for him.
He went back to his quarters, again without having seen where he was going. He opened the door and she turned from Netra's crib.
"I'm unworthy to be your husband," he said.
Tears shone in her eyes and she shook her head and came forward to take his hand. "Do you think I'm some kind of saint?" she said. "Do you know how angry I've been at God, do you know how I've hated my life and hated you, despite how everything you've done has been for our people? I've been so inconstant."
"But you kept faith all this time."
She laughed, which gave her beauty instantly and which he had never seen. "I did not keep faith all this time. If you could've heard what was in my head some nights... the only thing I did was keep my silence all this time."
And he was silent too, for a moment.
"It's unbelievable," he said. "And yet I know it's true. Because you were silent all this time."
She gazed at him and nearly laughed again. "How I've hated you."
"I'm ashamed to say the things I've thought of you. God," he called, lifting his eyes, "forgive me for thinking I would never see a true miracle." And then he closed his eyes and was quiet again and the disappointment and weight of everything began to sink in, heavier than before.
"So you're on the council now," she said.
He was going to say something about the impossibility of his task now, to not only change the laws about children and save the People from extermination, but to right the years of injustice to his wife and the entire system, the entire way of thinking, that had allowed her to be so scorned and shunned and hated since the day her team was taken by the enemy. Seeing it all at once now he thought it was impossible that he should be able to accomplish this, that the most he could hope for was to start things and perhaps his children would be able to do the real work. Because he would not be a successful and an acclaimed councilman as he'd dreamed. He saw now that he would be hated too.
"Dear woman, I need your help," he said.
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