In Search of Eden, page 5
There was a pause that seemed to last forever.
“No. But they won’t promise anything. His spinal cord is injured. They don’t know how badly.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them immediately and switched modes. He could feel the emotions, dangerously close to the surface, and he forced them to recede back down to safe levels. His heart slowed by sheer force of will. “How are you? How is Eden? Where are you?” he asked, remembering the unfamiliar area code. He was back in charge again, an officer taking stock of his troops after an attack.
“I’m at the airport in Minneapolis. Eden’s all right. She’s . . . she’s being taken care of.” She sounded disjointed and confused. “Where is David? Where did the accident happen?”
“Here. He was here doing one of his seminars. He was on his way to the airport.”
An irrelevant detail right now. He was annoyed with himself for asking. “Do you have the best doctors? Do you know who to ask about things like that?” He didn’t know, but he could find out.
“Yes, Joseph, all of that is under control. He’s at Hennepin County Medical Center. It’s the best trauma center in the area.”
“What can I do? Do you need me to come?” Even as he was asking, he knew what she would say.
“No. I don’t know. . . . If I thought the two of you could—” She broke, paused, tripping over the old familiar barrier. “He isn’t conscious,” she finally said. Her voice choked then.
His pain rose up. This had been the black outcome he had feared when he had let the silence rise between them like a great wall. What if the story ended before it was resolved? He had thought about that eventuality every now and then. And now it had happened, just as he had feared.
He brought himself back to fact taking. “How did it happen?”
“What?”
“The accident. How did it happen?”
“A drunk driver in an SUV crossed the median on the freeway. He hit David head on.”
Anger flushed Joseph’s face and raised his voice. “What exactly are his injuries?”
He noticed Henry was leaning forward, his knuckles white on the coffee cup.
A sigh, a tremulous breath from Sarah, then a litany he could hardly bear to hear. “Crushed pelvis, broken leg and arm, crushed vertebrae. He’s already been in surgery once to have something called an external fixator put on his pelvis. His leg needs more surgery, but they’re waiting on that. Right now they’re just trying to keep him alive.”
“I understand.” But he didn’t. How could he understand? His light, bright brother was lying near death a thousand miles away. His brother.
A pause. Another tremulous breath.
“What can I do?” he repeated again, hearing a note of demanding desperation in the echo of his voice on the poor connection.
“Could you tell Ruth? I didn’t want to tell her over the phone.”
“Of course. I’ll go right away.” He thought of his mother beginning her day, suspecting nothing, not knowing that evil had once again invaded her world.
“And, Joseph—”
He waited, poised for another direction, something, anything, to do.
“You could pray. You still do that, don’t you?” she said, wistfulness rather than criticism in her voice.
“Of course I do,” he lied. He heard pain in his echo.
“Pray for him, then, Joseph,” she repeated. “Pray for us all.” She disconnected.
He closed the phone and sat there for a second or two before he grabbed his hat and jacket and slid out of the booth.
Henry stood with him. “Is it David?” he asked.
Joseph nodded and gave him the brief facts.
“Oh, God,” Henry breathed, and Joseph knew it was a prayer.
“I’m going to tell Ma.”
Henry nodded. “I’ll let them know at your office. You do what you need to do.”
Joseph nodded, tossed a ten-dollar bill onto the table, and said an abrupt good-bye with one last glance at Henry’s worried face.
The wind was sharper and biting when he stepped outside, the sky darker and lower. His premonition had been right. The first flakes of snow began to fall. He looked up and saw them rushing down, hard, fast, and inexorable.
chapter 5
*
Ruth Williams padded into her quilting studio in her slippers and flannel robe, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. She had spent some time with her Bible but wasn’t quite ready to launch into the day yet. She stood before the window near the heat vent and looked at the sky with a practiced eye. It was dull gray and low and promised snow. In fact, as she looked closely, she could see that the first flakes had begun to fall.
She took a mental inventory of her readiness. All was well due to Joseph’s almost compulsive need to make sure she was prepared for any eventuality. There was firewood stacked nearly ten feet high just outside the back door, and the cast-iron Papa Bear stove in her basement was piped into her ductwork and full of kindling, newspaper, and wood, ready to be fired up. That had been her son’s contribution the last time he had visited.
The pantry was full of candles and cans of lamp oil, and her kerosene lamps were full with fresh wicks, neatly trimmed. Joseph had even checked her cupboard to make sure it was well stocked with canned goods and matches. What he saw had apparently satisfied him. She also knew that the rooms she customarily rented out to bed-and-breakfast guests were freshly dusted, with clean sheets on the beds. And her closets were packed with quilts and blankets in case some of her neighbors weren’t as well equipped as she. She glanced once again at the clouds and the more rapidly falling flakes and verified her prediction. The storm was here. But she was ready.
She looked out the frosted window onto the town. It had the idyllic Christmas-card look of a mountain village. The streets rose and gently fell, following the curves of the Blue Ridge Mountains they nestled against. The buildings were old red brick, the trim paint fresh, lights warm and welcoming. It was a Thomas Kinkade picture, a Norman Rockwell scene, and some, on seeing it, on being here amidst the peaceful faces and gentle accents of its people, might think it a place where no spiritual battles of consequence were won or lost.
They would be wrong.
She used to be involved in that battle. More so than now, she realized, fighting back a familiar feeling of uselessness, a well-worn lie that she was too old and irrelevant to be of use to God any longer. She was only sixty-seven, but she might as well be a hundred and seven for all the impact she made on anyone’s life.
She had closed the campground when the family fell apart, and once again she wondered if she had done the right thing. But John had died, and David and Joseph had their split, and it had seemed as if she were the only one, struggling alone. Not alone, for her two most faithful friends had helped her run the camp for the rest of that year, since churches had already booked and made deposits, but she hadn’t felt free to impose upon their good graces forever. Carol Jean had her quilt shop and Vi her artwork. So after struggling through the winter, she had finally closed down the camp. She had moved into town, into this place, her husband’s family home. The campground was to have been her retirement. “Sell it,” a few friends had urged. “You’d get a pretty penny for that land. Lakefront, mountain view. You’ll be a wealthy woman.” But how could she sell a piece of her life? The place she and her husband had poured their hearts into? The place she had raised her boys? But that part of her life was over now, she told herself. Which brought her back to her initial complaint. The truth was, she was bored.
Oh, she stayed plenty busy. She went to church three times a week and served on the Threads of Love group and the altar guild. She did hospital visitation, taught quilting classes at Carol Jean’s shop, took classes at the college, taught a women’s Bible study, rented out rooms to tourists, bought season tickets to the Barter Theatre. She had taken a trip to England one year with David and Sarah and Eden, but what wouldn’t she give to be once more ringing the gong for breakfast and seeing a hundred mismatched, gawky campers pour or straggle out of their cabins and gather around the long wooden tables. She remembered making vats of French fries, piles of hamburgers and hot dogs, and buckets of slaw.
But more than that, she had seen lives change at that camp. She knew that for a fact, and she impatiently brushed at her eyes as she recalled the cardboard box full of letters and pictures she had collected over the years. She sighed and looked out the window, the depressing thoughts taking on a life of their own, rewinding and preparing to replay.
“Wait just a minute,” she said out loud. “I’m not having this.” Somebody needed an attitude adjustment, and today it wasn’t one of a throng of children or one of her own boys. It was she, herself. “Forgive me, Father, for being so hopeless and negative. You are the God of all hope.”
She dropped the curtains, bowed her head, and started the day over again by putting on her armor, piece by piece. Beginning with her shoes. “Thank you, Jesus, that I stand forgiven and cherished, firm and secure in the peace I have with you,” she breathed softly. “Thank you that the belt of your truth holds me together. That the body armor of your perfect righteousness covers and protects me. Thank you that the filter that protects my mind is the truth of my salvation, of who I am in you. I pray your Word would come against every scheme of the enemy in my life and in those of my loved ones today, Jesus. And I thank you for the powerful shield of faith. I pray you would help me to stay under it. Strengthen my arms to lift it up. Put your angels around me, Lord. Help me to pray in the Spirit today, and lead others to pray for me.”
She took a deep breath and, remembering the tears and fractures in her own family, again brought that pain to the Lord. She closed her eyes once more, seeing at once the gentle shepherd and the captain of the heavenly armies. He would see to it all. She prayed for David and Sarah and Eden. She prayed for Joseph. She prayed that God would heal the rift.
“In the mighty name of Jesus,” she finished. “Amen.”
She turned from the window and finished her coffee in one long swallow. There were things needing to be done. She set down her cup and brushed her palms together, as if finishing off the self-pity and sorrow she’d been visiting. She checked her watch. Seven-twenty. Carol Jean and Vi would be here at nine to pray. She wondered if the snow would stop them and decided it probably would not. They both lived within spitting distance, and if anyone got stranded, they knew she would call on Joseph to drive them home in his truck. She went down to the kitchen to see what she could throw together for refreshments.
She rummaged through the fridge and dug out a few oranges, a sack of cranberries, an apple, and grapes. She took out flour and sugar and set to making orange-cranberry muffins. She was glad her late-season bed-and-breakfast guest had departed the day before. It was her policy to leave the two weeks before Christmas free for holiday preparations, and she had always done so except for the year that Homer Dawkins had asked to rent a room, even though he had a perfectly good house just over on Randolph Street. She shook her head at the foolishness of men. She had said yes because he hadn’t a soul in the world, his wife having died just months before, and Joseph had immediately pitched a fit. Not just because some silly old man was willing to pay a hundred dollars a night to make cow eyes at his ancient mother, but because he said it just wasn’t right.
Joseph was always concerned about the rightness of things, and she feared sometimes that it got in the way of his seeing the goodness of them. A fine distinction, but she felt it was important, somehow, and she worried about her son’s inability to see it. But, of course, in this matter, he’d been absolutely right. She couldn’t have the two of them staying in the house all alone together, what with Homer’s own place merely a stone’s throw away. There was the appearance of evil to think about, even at their age. The solution she’d come up with had satisfied her quite well, but Joseph still fumed whenever anyone referred to it. She had prevailed upon her son, and he had moved back into his old room, now done over in pink and green with lace curtains. He had spent two weeks glowering while Homer had a fine time helping her hang Christmas lights and wrap packages. The man hadn’t wanted to leave when the holidays were over, but she had sent him packing on January second, bright and early. Joseph had left the same day, and she smiled with a rueful sigh. Having her son sit at her supper table every night, even with the frowns and grunts that replaced polite conversation, had been a blessing. Her spirits sank when she thought about Joseph, but she took herself in hand. There was no time for melancholy today. There were preparations to make. Besides, the story wasn’t over yet.
She checked her watch again and switched on the radio. The local station was playing Christmas songs from Thanksgiving until New Year’s. She greased her muffin tins while Johnny Mathis crooned and was just softening her butter in the microwave when she heard a commotion on the porch. The front door opened and Joseph called out. She smiled in pleasure and walked out to meet him, her hands dusted with flour. She stopped cold when she saw his face, for it was gray, simply gray, as if all life and hope had been drained from it.
She felt a flutter in her chest and a dryness in her mouth. “Who is it?” she asked quietly, hands suddenly dangling by her sides.
He didn’t answer, just came toward her and reached his arms out, and that was when she knew.
“It’s David,” she said.
He nodded, and it was a good thing he had a hold on her, because her legs gave out and she had to sit down on the stairs.
chapter 6
*
Sarah looked at her hands lying helpless in her lap and thought how odd life was. Her hands had been busy just hours ago. She sat now amid the calm but urgent activity in the intensive care unit and felt a sense of bewilderment. There were four nurses in David’s room and one doctor, each doing things to her husband. At least they said it was her husband, but if she hadn’t seen the discolored thumbnail from a baseball accident when he was twelve, the tiny scar above his left eyebrow, hadn’t had his wallet and wedding ring handed to her in a brown manila envelope, she would not have believed it. She certainly would not have recognized him. She had expected to see him broken and bleeding, but she had not expected the hugely swollen state that distorted his features and made him seem like a stranger lying naked there on the bed. He was covered with just a sheet, and she was reminded of Jesus in the hour of His extremity. They had told her the swelling had something to do with his injuries, something about intra-or extra-cellular fluid, but all she knew was that he did not look like someone she knew, someone she loved, and irrationally, she held the wild hope that the man there on the bed was not her husband at all but someone else’s husband. That her own husband would come walking through the door any minute now. He would calm her fears and stroke her hair and hold her and comfort her. Because that’s what David did. He ministered to others. He helped others. But what happened to the sheep if the shepherd was cast down? It made no sense, and the bewilderment returned. She tried to pray again, opening her mouth but making no sound, gaping like a landed fish gasping for oxygen. Her need was too deep for speech, and she thought of the groanings of the spirit that were too deep for words.
His hair was the same, she told herself, and she focused on his hair. His beard was the same, as well, but if she looked at his beard, then she must look at his face, and she couldn’t bear to look at his face. Even his hand, when she held it, caused her pain, for it, too, was grossly swollen and unfamiliar. But it didn’t matter, for she couldn’t touch him at all just now. They were working on him and had sent her out again. They allowed her near only once an hour for a few minutes. The rest of the time she waited here in the hall or out in the waiting room. She had pulled a chair near the glass window, and no one had stopped her, so here she sat. She looked once more toward David, then down at her hands again.
It amazed her that everything could change so suddenly, that life was so fragile when it had seemed so fixed. Just yesterday evening she had been making soup and worrying about their daughter. It seemed so trivial now, but then she had been browning meat and slicing onions, watching the knife slice cleanly through the outer papery layers and peeling them away swiftly and wondering why everything couldn’t be as simple as cooking. Follow the directions and things would turn out as you expected. A cup of this, a pinch of that, cook at the prescribed temperature, and the end product was assured. She had been comforted in the rituals of measuring and chopping and stirring. In knowing that there were some realms in which actions had predictable results. If meat was put in a pan over high heat it would turn brown. If you added baking soda to a bowl of batter, it would rise. She had even enjoyed washing her dirty dishes, squirting in the soap and rubbing it around with the bubbly cloth, then seeing pots and bowls emerge from the steaming hot water clean and squeaking. Why couldn’t life be as straightforward as that? she had wondered. More particularly, why couldn’t raising children work the way it was supposed to? Why couldn’t you do the right things and say the right things and have them turn out right, like a pot of soup or a loaf of bread?
She had sighed as she worked, the day’s energy already spent in her never-ending mission to turn her daughter into something other than a wildcat.
Eden was not the child she had imagined.
She had imagined a little girl who would wear pink. Who would adore coloring and making scrapbook pages adorned with tinsel and glitter, who would want to play dolls and dress-up. Well, the dress-up part had come true, she thought wryly, thinking of Eden’s disguises. Once she had decided that the mean girls at school were plotting against her friend, and she had dressed up like a bag lady and lurked in the park, listening to their conversations and writing everything down in that spiral notebook she carried everywhere. Then there was the night disguise—a set of dark clothes and dark face paint she had put on so that she and the girl next door could spy on the neighbor’s older brother. And of course it had all begun with the cowgirl outfit she had worn at age five. It was still a treasured possession.
