Twilight
"Heavenly shades of night are falling, it's twilight
time/
Out of the mist your voice is calling, it's twilight
time"
- The Platters "Twilight Time"
Ghost scents, barely perceptible, welcomed his return. Remembrances of a summer spent here with the Thymes floated in the air like mist, haunting him. Homer dropped the bags he was carrying on the floor and turned to help his wife with the rest of their summer luggage.
Kay handed him two duffel bags, their clothes which he hastily packed last night, and carried two weeks worth of grocery up herself. She found Homer standing quietly in the middle of the living room, looking contemplatively at the couch, a hideous relic from some far gone era.
"You should get a new couch," she said heading for the kitchen. He looked up just as she disappeared through the doorway and frowned. "I saw an antique store in town. It looked interesting," Kay added inspecting shelves and cupboards for their supplies. Homer followed her into the kitchen.
"That's ridiculous Kay," he said without much thought. She looked at him crossly, he missed it and continued, "Replacing an old couch with another old one. It's a waste of good money."
"And buying this property isn't?" she grumbled placing cans and boxes into the cleanest cupboard. Homer let her comment pass and headed out to the porch. The lake, calm, reflected the gray hues of summer dusk. In the horizon, the pale indentations of the mountain range struggled to make their last appearance before night fell.
"I want to live here forever," he told the phantoms of the past. He tasted the bitterness in his voice and heard the floorboards creak as Kay came up next to him.
"You might as well," she answered. He looked at her, his wife of thirty years, the mother of his children. "Two weeks here won't change anything, Homer."
She said this with a resolve and certainty that made his heart break. Kay looked out to the lake, the pine trees around it casting long shadows upon the waters, the horizon glowed with the faint redness of summer time twilight.
"You know I spent a summer here once, back when I was a kid. I lived with a family, the Thymes, they were well-off unlike my own. Fred Jr., he was my best friend back then. And his sister, I had the biggest crush on his sister, Sandra. When I first saw her I thought, 'She's the most beautiful girl in the world.' I wanted to live here forever and be with her. Then summer ended and I had to leave."
"Whatever happened to her?" Kay asked turning to see her husband smile faintly, sadly. A palpable air of mourning washed over his face. She remembered that once, she too had loved and lost a girl.
Jancy, her name was Jancy, she reminded herself though she didn't have to.
"She died," Homer managed to say without any hint of loss or regret. "She and her mother, they died in a traffic accident that winter." Then he turned to look at her, her face lined with years both bountiful and dry, her cheeks sullen by the medicine she had been taking for her cancer.
Looking at Kay reminded him somehow of Mrs. Thyme, maybe because when she was younger, Kay looked liked Sandra. But she didn't know this and she didn't need to know.
"I'm sorry to hear that," she said regretfully. Then added, "I want to go by the water."
"It's getting dark out. Why don't you wait tomorrow?"
"Let me go, Homer. I'm not going to die. At least not yet."
For a moment she looked like Sandra again. Homer relented but said, "Go." Kay walked past the screen door and down the dock. The night had fallen and now the water reflected the waking stars above. She looked up and saw constellations, ghost figures of gods whose religions were long forgotten.
"We have a canoe you know," Homer said as he walked slowly behind her.
"I loved a girl once too, Homer," she whispered when he stopped next to her. "Her name was Jancy. My mother thought she was bad business. Mothers know those kind of things, I guess. But I loved her, she didn't know how much I did."
Something stirred in the water and she saw the figure of a girl swimming in the black, silent lake. She knew there was no one there, just the ghosts of their lost loves. Homer looked at the canoe tied to the dock.
"Why are you telling me this? Is it because of Bill? Did he put you up to it?"
Kay laughed out loud. Yes and no, she thought. "No, you silly old man. I just thought it was the time to tell someone."
"So what? You trying to tell me that you're a..."
"I don't know, Homer. She was the only one." That's a lie, Katherine Atherton.You know that's a lie. "She was the only one I ever loved that way."
"So all these years have been a lie," Homer breathed sharply. "All these years you've been lying to me and to Tom and to Kate and to Marsha and to Bill."
"It's not a lie, Homer. I love you and the kids," she reached out and touched the back of his hand. "But sometimes I wonder. Like you with Sandra. What if."
"I should never have bought this place. I should have never brought you here."
"Sometimes we need to remember. Sometimes we need to forget."
"Tell me about her Kay, about Jancy," Homer said weakly, taking her hand in his."We were the same age. But she was already a woman when I was still a girl. We liked the same things, we liked to dance and pretend to sing. We danced a lot. We had songs, Homer. Songs that were ours, our secret language. When we slept over at each others houses, we'd sleep in the same bed. I liked cuddling next to her. We called each other 'Doll'. We kissed each other's mouths."
"Whatever happened to her?" Homer asked. He turned to look at Kay who smiled sadly, faintly. She was in a place now that he visited frequently, ever since she got sick.
"Daddy got transferred and we moved away. We wrote letters the following years. Last letter I got from her, she said that her father got stationed in Europe. That was more than forty years ago."
"I'm sorry to hear that," her husband said regretfully. She squeezed his hand as if to say thank you. They realized, for the first time in thirty years, they had more in common than being each other's spouse. They were both in love with ghosts. In the distance, the rising moon's reflection oscillated in the calm face of the water.