“I think so, yes.”
I wait a moment for this news to settle. She looks away from me, toward the desert and its desolate horizon beyond the patio stones. When she turns back to face me, her eyes are glistening.
“What happened to him?”
“Did you know he was living in San Francisco?”
“No.”
“Do you know what happened there? Do you know about the earthquake?”
“Y-yes. Is that where Kat was, too?” Fear injects itself into her voice.
“Yes. But she’s all right. We... we had a few rough days, she and I. Scary days. But she’s all right.”
This both comforts and alarms her. “And Martin?” she says a second later.
“We... were all in the house before the earthquake struck. He... he fell down a flight of stairs just before. And then came the awful fires. He... he likely didn’t get out of the house before it burned.”
“Why? Why didn’t he?” Candace says, horrified. Obviously Kat and I got out.
I hesitate. There are so many reasons Martin Hocking very likely perished inside that house.
“Why didn’t he get out?” Candace whispers.
I inhale deep and then let the breath out. “I have so much to tell you. So much. ’Twill be hard to hear, and I’m sorry for that. I truly am. I trust you will be able to bear it?”
She nods slowly, her wide-eyed gaze tight on me.
“I think I need to start at the beginning, well before the earthquake, or none of this will make sense.”
Candace says nothing for a moment. She looks past me to where Kat is sleeping atop sofa pillows. Then she turns back to me. “All right.”
“I was living in New York City until a bit more than a year ago,” I begin. “I had emigrated from Ireland but I... I wasn’t happy there. I was hungry and cold and living in a hovel of a tenement because I couldn’t afford anything else. I saw an advertisement in the paper. A man out west was looking for a new wife for himself and a new mother for his little girl. I answered thatadvertisement. Your husband placed it. Martin told me you were dead, and that he was a widower and that Kat didn’t have a mother. I didn’t know you were alive. I only just found out. I swear to you I didn’t know. He told Kat you were dead, too, and she thought it was her fault. Martin had found a way to blame her somehow; he made it seem that mothering her had made you weak and sick and that it was her fault you had gotten ill and died. She stopped talking when she thought you had been taken from her and that it was her fault.”
I stop for a moment to gauge Candace’s ability to hear more, because there is so much more to say. She swallows hard as more tears slide down her cheeks, but unlike before, these are tears of anger and profound regret.
“He told her I was dead?” she whispers.
I nod. She closes her eyes, breathes in and out with whatever strength is left to her to do such a thing, and I wait. When she opens her eyes, the sadness has been replaced with bafflement.
“But... but wait. Why would you do that? Why would you marry someone you don’t know?” Her tone is accusatory, and for a moment I think she is as angry with me as she must be with Martin. I tell her the answer I’ve been telling myself: I had to get out of New York. I didn’t care that I was marrying a man I didn’t love. I had made the mistake of giving my heart to someone before and had been crushed, and I was none too keen to do it again. I wanted a warm home and food to eat and a child to love. I wanted more than what I had. I wanted more than what I had been left with.
“I believed in time I would come to have affection for him, maybe even love,” I say. “But I never did. And I am quite sure he never had any affection for me.”
Candace sighs and closes her eyes tight again for a moment, as if to wish me and my horrible news away. I wait a few seconds for her to look at me again. When she does, I continue. “Martin told me he traveled about for an insurance company assessing risk, and that for appearance’s sake he needed to be seen as a successful married man with a family rather than an unlucky widower and father to a motherless child. That is why he married me, he said, and I believed him. At first.”
She swallows hard again and waits for me to go on.
“He told me his parents had died when he was six, in a carriage accident back east, and that he had been raised by an aunt and uncle who made his life difficult and that there was a cousin named Belinda who now lived south of San Francisco. He was helping her sell hair tonic that she made from herbs in her garden. He had the bottles in the boiler room of our house in San Francisco. But the bottles were not filled with hair tonic. And Belinda was not his cousin.”
Candace dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Who was she?” she says a moment later.
“She was someone who had inherited an abandoned gold mine. Martin had married her under another name to get to it. He had found out somehow that there was, in fact, gold inside it. Four months after marrying me, he married her. All while still married to you.”
Candace seems to dissolve for a moment into her pillows, and her face becomes a mask of the worst kind of sadness. She brings a hand up to her forehead, and many moments pass before she removes the hand to look back at me.
“How do you know all this?” she asks, misery etched into her face. “How do you know this is all true?”
