That Day

By Bernard Fancher

Sarah Mere dreams to escape and remember--to escape the present and reclaim the past. Dreaming, she begins by returning to the French estate in the country where her future once seemed so certain, before that day in September changed everything.

Even so, she believes friendship and love may yet offer the way to happiness, and possibly even salvation. Her good friend Gitangeli facilitates the transition, and despite residual suspicion, Mere resumes her life's journey, slowly entrusting the present and future to a man she would never have chosen to approach, much less love, before that day in September forced her to confront every bias and fear.

Though she becomes again vulnerable and open to life's possibilities, what does she really know; whom can she trust? The world remains a dangerous enigma, the future uncertain. Is love worth risking all?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bernard Fancher
• Release date: Mar 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458078339

Bernard Fancher

I live on a small and mostly defunct farm in western New York, where the events of a typical day include writing and walking my dogs--items not necessarily listed in order of priority. (At least not from the dogs' point of view.)

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That Day

by

Bernard Fancher

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by Bernard Fancher

All rights reserved

Smashwords License Statement:

This ebook is licensed and distributed by Smashwords, and may not otherwise be reproduced or disseminated without the author’s permission.

Disclaimer:

The story that follows is fiction. Except where clearly historical, the people, places, and events portrayed are works of the imagination.

***

That Day

Still more asleep than awake, Sarah Mere struggled to restore the last of her dream. The spray of the fountain called her to return, and so she lay perfectly calm until finding herself transported once more to the pool at the far end of the esplanade; once again she felt the falling mist as she bent at the waist, putting a hand down for support on the stone bench as she slipped off her heels, before continuing barefoot onto the cool grass.

They had brought a blanket with them the last evening of their stay, to spread on the ground underneath them. And though all the other evenings they had listened in bed, with the French doors open to the veranda, and fell asleep with the sound of false rain splatter coming in through the night, she dreamed so intensely of the one time they slipped out and made love on the grass that sometimes she could even smell it.

She learned on the second full day of their vacation that the fountain’s water originated not, as they had originally surmised, from an artesian well, but rather from a free-flowing spring situated somewhere higher in the hills; so profuse and profligate a flow as to be limitless, serving both the old estate and an adjacent vinery, it fell down through an ancient lead pipe, the energy of its descent at the last moment redirected, emerging through a constricting brass nozzle centrally situated in a shallow pool at the end of a bluestone-paved walkway. Suddenly released, yet still beholden to the combined influence of gravity and centrifugal forces, it fell again a last time, spreading outwards in a lazy lachrymose arc, becoming like the soft and barely perceptible rain she imagined it to be the very first night they stood quietly embracing on the veranda.

The concierge told them they should one day come back in wintertime to see the ice that formed in place of the fountain. Innocently, Mere asked: How is that possible? Wouldn’t the pipe freeze as well? The bemused but attentive attendant replied brightly, yet somewhat clandestinely, as if dispensing a secret she alone could pass on: Mais non, mademoiselle. The font, she is zeh one only may freeze.

Mere smiled again at the memory. Still half asleep, she reflexively searched with her thumbnail, catching it on the thin metal band at the base of her finger. Touching the ring recalled the moment David first slipped it on her, a moment she half-dreamily hoped still to return to. But the idyll had already begun to disperse—the illusion of freefalling spring-water yielding to something present and real, as tactile awareness pulled her out of sleep and abruptly forward through time. Instead of the fountain she dimly perceived the drumming of the downstairs shower—which accounted, she imagined, for the void in her bed. Sliding a hand into cool space, she sought the confirmation of a recently abandoned, still comfortably warm place; instead, her outstretched fingers encountered only the discomfiting crispness of undisturbed sheets.

The information registered dully, slowly on her mind. Tightening her eyelids against the gray daylight, she tried to reverse the course of awakening. As a young girl she had once succeeded in doing the opposite, forcing herself to waken from a pleasant and comforting dream, which she still all these years later vividly remembered. She stood on a stool at the kitchen counter while her mother measured out and combined flour water and fruit, and built an apple pie. Again she saw with her mind’s eye, watching those delicate yet supremely competent hands sliding pure-white crescents of apple off a plate with a knife, catching the dough up with a floured wood rolling pin to lay on a thin covering which, pinched along the perimeter with quickly twisting fingers and thumbs, sealed everything in. Lastly, as if signing the work with the sharp tip of a knife, her mother cut two long graceful ogee curves that would, as the crust baked, open to resemble the slits of a fiddle.

With extreme effort, wanting the dream to become real, she had forced her eyes open, but instead of waking to a brightly lit kitchen containing the reassuring presence of her mother opening the warmed oven to insert a newly made pie, she encountered only herself lying