Mary knew her annoyance was only another of the irrational emotional swings she’d been experiencing lately. But she didn’t want to talk now. She simply wanted to sit here in the sun on this perfect day and watch the tide come in. With Luke. With Luke who was at his core kind and generous. With Luke whom she loved. She didn’t want to probe the philosophical chasm that she knew would always exist between them.
He said, “I was thinking about what Rachel said last night, about the Book of Revelation.”
Mary winced, stared fixedly at the breakers. So think about it. Fine. Just don’t talk about it.
“Remember,” Luke went on, inexorably, “what she said about the beast—the number of the beast—that maybe it was a code the first Christians used? I didn’t know that.”
There was so much he didn’t know, even about the one book he considered the fount of wisdom. Mary watched the erratic circling of the gulls, held on to her silence, tension knotting hard under her ribs.
“And what she said,” Luke added, “about prophesying the end of the world. Remember? She said to prophesy the end of a human world—the end of a civilization—was to prophesy the inevitable. But I still… I mean, it isn’t the same, what Saint John was prophesying.”
Mary had read the Book of Revelation last night out of curiosity, and above all she didn’t want to talk about John the Divine’s frenzied visions. She had sensed too much method in the saint’s madness.
But Luke wanted to talk about it, and her silence didn’t deter him.
“It wasn’t just the end of a civilization he was prophesying. It was… well, it was more than that. The battle of light and dark, good and evil. I think she’s right: Saint John was writing in codes. But he saw what was coming, way back then. The Lord showed him Armageddon.”
And Mary’s patience snapped at the end of its tether.
“Luke, he didn’t see anything! He wrote what he wished would happen, what he knew the faithful wanted to hear.”
Luke stared at her, aghast. “Don’t say that!”
“Why not? It was a piece of fiction—nothing more!”
“No!” And his open hand cracked against her cheek, knocked her off balance. She caught herself with her hands in the sand, her face stinging, and it was a moment before she could make sense of what had happened.
Stupid, she thought, and the appellation was directed at herself. Why can’t you learn patience?
And yet—
“Damn you, Luke!” Anger overwhelmed regret suddenly and forcibly, and she felt her lips draw back from her teeth, saw him kneeling in the sand before her, reaching out to her.
“Mary, I’m sorry! Lord help me, I didn’t mean—”
“Let me go!” She tried to pull free, but his grip on her arms only tightened with her struggles, and her frustration fed her anger, until finally she began crying, and then she knew that was what she wanted—tears to wash away the poisons of doubt and fear, and Luke to hold her in the comforting cage of his arms against his chest, where she might hear his heartbeat while he said softly, over and over, “Mary, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Mary, I love you… I love you….”
And what she wanted was his kiss; a kiss to taste her tears, one for each closed eye, a kiss on her lips.
There was the catalyst, and out of it would come all the answers. She opened her lips, her arms moving around the curve of his ribs, hands reaching down the long muscles of his back, and she reveled in the unleashed shivering of nerves in her own body.
Give me this covenant, this promise.
It didn’t matter that he was impatient and inept, that the voracity of his ardor, once catalyzed, left no room for sensibility. He kissed her throat as if seeking the pulse of life there, opened her shirt to find her breasts with his lips, fumbled at her clothes and his as if they were insurmountable barriers, and perhaps he realized that she expected more than consenting rape, but he knew no art in this. And it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter that he took her thoughtlessly, suddenly, that he left her nothing to savor but the sheer power of his body, that he forced himself into her against instinctive spasms of muscles and bludgeoned down that resistance by brute force. It didn’t matter, because she wanted him, at any price, here within her body; she wanted that wordless covenant more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.
Mary lay with her head in the crook of Luke’s arm, feeling the weight of his hand at rest on her breast, the cool wind playing a tactile fugue with the warmth of the sun on her naked skin. This she would want to remember, this warm, sated moment unshadowed by doubt.
At length, Luke stirred, propped himself on one elbow, leaned over her, kissed her, openmouthed, and when he drew away, she brushed at the sand caught in his sun-haloed beard, compared the color of his eyes to the blue of the sky behind him. He said, “Mary Hope, I love you,” and she closed her eyes, believing him.
Then he sat up, laughing as he combed through his hair with both hands. “We’ll never get rid of all this sand.”
“Yes, we will—come on!” Mary rose and ran toward the ocean, feeling young and joyous. Luke followed her, and hand in hand they plunged into the breakers, laughing at the shock of the icy water, dancing like children in the white foam. Finally, shivering and exhilarated, they returned to the log, let the sun and wind dry their bodies, then dressed themselves and sat together in a pendant silence. Mary turned her face up to the sun and tried to hold on to this fragment of time.
Finally Luke said soberly, “Mary, I didn’t leave the Ark just to find survivors. I went in search of… women who can bear children.”
She felt her smile slipping away like the moment, like a golden nugget in a mountain creek, swept out of her hand by the swift current.
“I know, Luke. And you found me.”
“The Lord led me to you. I didn’t expect to find a woman I could care for. I only hoped to find…”
A brood mother, no doubt. He couldn’t seem to finish that. She waited, and at length he said, “Mary, I want you to be my wife.”
She nodded. “I will be your wife, Luke.”
“But there are some… customs at the Ark you must understand.”
She studied his face, watched him frowning over his choice of words. He said, “You have to understand that there aren’t many of us who can… bear or father children.”
“But you’ve fathered children, haven’t you?”
“Yes. One. The Doctor keeps records of visitations, so he knows who fathers each child.”
“What’s a visitation? Intercourse?”
His fair skin reddened. “Yes.”
“Were you married to the mother of the child you fathered? Was it one of the children who lived?”
He smiled fondly. “Yes, he lived. Jeremiah is his name, and he was born a month before I left the Ark. But I wasn’t married to his mother. The child was fathered on a visitation. She’s a widow. She lives in her uncle’s household, and he serves as true father to the boy.”
Mary pushed the toe of her boot into the sand. “Is any widowed or unmarried woman subject to these… visitations?”
“Yes, except the ones the Doctor knows are Barrens.”
“What about married women?”
“If a woman’s husband can’t father children, yes.” He looked at her anxiously. “But you’ll never have visitations—not as my wife.”
“But you’ll be making visitations.”
“Yes.”