Page 6 of Wished

She’s close, and I fight the urge to kiss her. Instead I say with sardonic emphasis, “Mywife?”

We both know that isn’t true.

It’s an irrefutable fact.

We aren’t married.

But then something unbelievable happens.

I’m slammed with a sudden cracking, wallop-to-the-head, stunned, room-spinning, dizzy realization. And suddenly, I know—Iknow—the erotic, blood-pumping image I had of bending this woman over my desk and driving into her until I was out of my mind with need wasn’t my horny, fevered imagination. It wasn’t my imagination at all.

It was a memory.

Amemory.

I’m ... married.

And this woman?

She’s my wife.

1

Anna

“Now there’s a view I will never get tired of,” Dorene says in her scratchy early-morning, post-cigarette voice. Her words are laced with a suitable amount of appreciation and awe even though we have the same view every single week, at 6:30 a.m. sharp, Monday morning.

“I agree,” I say, not caring that I sound wistful and half-in-love. It’s early. I’m tired. I’m allowed to sound wistful and in love.

Besides, it’s true. I’ll never get tired of this view. There’s no place like the Barone Estate right before the sun peeks over the still waters of Lake Geneva. The sky is the pink of an iced raspberry, with golden clouds feathering over calm purple waters. A cool, insubstantial mist drifts off the water and curls over the soft, grassy shore, tangling around my ankles, wet and cold. Swifts swoop and swirl above in acrobatic glee and the breeze they ride on teases my cheeks.

The sweet morning scent of dew-covered grass and summer clover hangs in the air, waiting to be burned away by the sunrise. Far across the lake are the mounded blue hills of deep, cool evergreen forests. They promise pine and loam and quiet. Curving along the shoreline are the still-sleepy stone edifices of Geneva. The streetlights wink out in expectation of day. It’s a romantic, beautiful picture. But the best view of all is the chateau towering above us.

The first time I saw it, three years ago, I thought I’d been transported to another time. The chateau is starkly beautiful. Austere in its severity. It’s three stories of cold, gray stone, hewn from the surrounding mountains and cut to withstand centuries of bitter winds and unexpected twists of fate.

There are two conical towers with rooflines that sweep sharply like the edge of a dangerously angled mountain slope. The windows are narrow and lead paned. In the sunrise they’re limned with gold.

The chateau is notable because of its lack of decoration. No arches. No gables. No finials. No columns or spires. No whimsy or romance. In my mind its beauty is in its bareness.

What’s more beautiful? The loud, bright colors and heavy perfumes of the jungle, or the endless silent glide of an arctic glacier, towering and alone in the deep, dark sea?

The Barone Chateau is terrible in its beauty. Beautiful in its aloneness. Not even its proximity to Geneva, its perch at the edge of the jewel-like mountain lake, or the wild, untamed gardens that bloom and blossom around its base, can fool anyone into imagining this home is anything but what it is. A fortress.

A lonely, stark fortress that rejects romance, denies softness, and laughs at love.

All the same. It’s beautiful.

On Monday mornings, when we wend down the long, winding gravel driveway, I sometimes feel like the chateau is only waiting. Maybe it’s been waiting for years. It’s caught in that breath-held moment right before sunrise when the world is at its most magical. You only have to step outside right before the sun crests over the edge of the world to find it.

You can breathe in the pine-needle and wet-grass smell. You can listen for the quiet melody of the wood thrush carried on the gentle breeze. You can let the cold mist rise off the lake and bring a shiver over your skin. The world is whispering, “Just wait and see. This day is going to bring the most wondrous, magical things your way.”

It’s just like that moment between making a wish and blowing out your birthday candles. There is so much magic and expectation between dragging in that great gust of air and blowing out your wish.

That’s how I feel about the Barone Chateau.

It’s captured in that moment, waiting for the sun to rise and the wish to be made.

I arch my back and glance up at the sheer wall of the eastern tower. The stones emit a dull gray glow in the early-morning light. The late-spring air is cool, almost brisk, and I rub the goose bumps on my arms.

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