It was quiet outside her motel room, and she got out of bed. This would be her last day on the road. She took a shower and dressed, then bought a newspaper in the motel's sundry shop before walking across the street to a restaurant. She ordered cereal and bananas, spreading the paper out on the table while she ate. She grimaced at the picture on the front page. Rwanda, again. The devastation in the refugee camps. Adults with empty eyes. Sick, starving children.
She had lived in Rwanda once, teaching in the Peace Corps in the early seventies. Even then the country had been in turmoil. She stared at the blank faces of the children. They could be the sons and daughters of children she had taught back then.
The cereal suddenly felt like rocks in her stomach, and she put away the front section of the paper in favor of the comics.
* * *
It was one o'clock when she pulled her car off the road at the crest of Winter Hill, and for the first time she felt certain she'd made the right decision in coming. She was not the superstitious type, but when she'd reached the Pennsylvania border a few hours earlier, the classical station she was listening to played Peter Huber's Patchwork. It was her favorite of her grandfather's compositions, and it felt almost as if he were talking to her, winking at her the way he used to do when she was small, saying, "Welcome to your home state, Rachel."
Everyone knew the story behind that particular piece of music. The idea had come to Grandpa one day when he was walking on Winter Hill and saw the patchwork of green-and-gold farmland spread out in front of him, as she was seeing it now, with the scrubbed little village of Reflection mirrored in the glassy waters of the pond.
Rachel doubted this view had been much different then. The barns and silos and farmhouses had been repaired and painted or in some cases replaced. But the three sky-touching churches had stood near the pond for a hundred years. The gray flagstone, the largest of the three, was the Lutheran church she had attended as a child. Across the street stood the Mennonite church, its white clapboard image perfectly re-created in the pond's mirror. She couldn’t recall the denomination of the third church, the diminutive brick chapel, but from this distance at least it was as charming as the others. Reflection had been an old and crumbling little town even when Rachel was small, but from up here it was lovely, the sight of it comforting.
She'd been right to come. This would be a good summer. A healing summer.
In the distance, several miles west of town, the boxy shape of Spader Hospital rose out of the trees. Rachel looked at her watch. She had an hour before she was supposed to pick up her grandmother. She got back into her car and drove slowly down the hill toward the town where she'd grown up.
Passing a farmyard, she noticed that the laundry line stretching between the house and barn was hung with blue shirts and black pants. An Amish family had lived in that house for as long as she could remember. Still no electrical cables or telephone wires in sight. What had she expected? The Amish had endured in this area for two centuries, their way of life virtually unchanged. Had she thought they would succumb to modern times in the two decades she'd been gone?
She began her tour on Water Street, the blue-collar neighborhood in the southern part of town. The street seemed narrower than Rachel remembered it, almost claustrophobic, yet she felt buoyed by the sight of it. The houses hugged the curb, and the steps of their wooden porches sagged, but for the most part they were well kept and freshly painted. Flowers and shrubs grew in every tiny exposed patch of earth between the buildings and the street. Many of the houses were duplexes. But there was one lone triplex, she knew, a few blocks closer to the center of town.
She almost missed it. Someone had painted it robin's-egg blue, and she found she couldn’t quite remember what color it had been when it was her home. Something neutral—beige or white or gray. The blue was outrageous, but she liked it. She parked her car across the street and studied the building. The two doors on the left were close together; the third was set apart. Fitting. She'd never thought of that before. The first door had belonged to her family, the second to Luke's. Her parents had moved into the building within days of Luke's parents, and pregnant Inge Huber and pregnant Charlotte Pierce had become fast friends. When their children were born—a girl to Inge, a boy to Charlotte—their mothers kidded that they would marry one day. Rachel and Luke's future was set at their birth.
What a beautiful boy he'd been. Dark-haired, blue-eyed. Rachel couldn’t remember a moment in her childhood that Luke had not been a part of, that she had not felt his nearness. They would bounce out their front doors and be pulled together as if they were magnetized. Even at ten, eleven, twelve, when most boys were avoiding girls as if they would suck the life from them if given the chance, Luke and Rachel had been inseparable.
Rachel hugged herself, grimacing against the nostalgia. After graduating from college, she and Luke had followed their mothers' plans and married. And Michael Stoltz had been their best man.
The Stoltz family had moved into the third apartment of the triplex when Luke and Rachel were seven years old. Michael had just gotten his first pair of glasses, and that about summed him up. He was a slender, gawky child, shorter than most of his classmates, annoyingly bright and adored by his teachers but not well accepted by his peers. Perhaps it was because Luke and Rachel lived so close to him that they saw something in him the other children missed. He was a valuable friend, and by the time Rachel was eight or nine years old, she and Luke could no longer imagine going off together without inviting Michael to come along. Still, although they were a threesome throughout elementary school, in high school no one ever doubted that the bond between Luke and Rachel was based on more than friendship. She and Luke would fix Michael up with a date from time to time, but nothing ever worked out for long. He was not bad-looking, but he was still skinny, and that combined with his bookishness made him invisible to the eyes of adolescent girls.
Where was Michael now? When she'd left Reflection, he'd still been in Rwanda with plans to teach in Philadelphia once he was out of the Peace Corps. And he was married to Katy Esterhaus, the one girl from their high school who could match him for brains.
With a shake of her head, Rachel turned the key in the ignition and started slowly up Water Street toward the center of town. She didn't dare think too long about Michael.
Ahead of her, the small, circular park that stood in the center of town came into view. The streets of the town fell away from the wooded circle like curved, misshapen spokes of a wheel. The park looked denser and greener than she remembered, and Rachel found herself averting her eyes from it as she drove past. Somewhere in that lovely little circle, scattered among the oaks and maples, stood ten weeping cherry trees, planted shortly after she'd left. Her parents had told her about the trees in a letter. She'd been living in Gail's apartment in San Antonio for a couple of months by that time, and she'd locked herself in the bathroom with the water running in the tub so that her cousin would not be able to hear her sobs. Her parents had also told her about the stone memorial erected in the park to make certain that no one, not her generation or the generations to come, would ever forget what had happened to their children.
Rachel drove through the center of town, past the old Starr and Lieber Bank building with its beautiful curved stone facade, past the huge Victorian house that served as the library. She came to the pond and immediately broke into a smile. Stopping the car close to the curb, she glanced at her watch again. It was too late. She would have loved to get out and walk around the narrow path circling the water. Huber Pond. Named after her grandfather, Reflection's major claim to fame.
The forest surrounding the eastern half of the pond had once been her playground, and it was as thick and dark as she'd ever seen it. She and Luke and Michael had loved those woods. They'd play for hours in them, building forts or pretending to be pioneers. Whatever game they played, it held an element of fear, because they knew that deep in the woods lurked the "bat woman," the odd, spooky woman who lived in a rundown, ove
rgrown old cottage there. She was like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, they thought, eager to shove little children into her gaping black oven. They dared one another to visit her, jumped out at one another from the woods yelling, "Bat woman!" They threatened one another with being dragged to see her. But none of them ever ventured into that part of the woods, and sitting in her car, Rachel wondered if the woman had been a figment of their collective imaginations.
Even though it was getting close to the time she was to pick up her grandmother, Rachel felt compelled to get out of her car to look at the statue of her grandfather, set close to the edge of the pond. She had forgotten what he looked like. His heavy brows and round, wire- rimmed glasses gave his face a serious look. His beard and mustache were neatly trimmed. She was moved by the handsome bronze image of him. Peter Huber, 1902-1984. He had died eleven years after she'd left home, but she had not seen him since she was fifteen, in 1965, when her parents had forbidden her to have any contact with either of her grandparents. She'd bump into them from time to time in the little town, occasionally exchanging furtive hugs or pained greetings, but that had been the extent of her contact with them. She remembered her grandfather as a kind man, quiet and gentle. Even as a child, she'd imagined his quietness was due to the fact that his brain was always working, always creating. When he'd sit down at the piano, his house would fill with the rich, smooth sound of his music. She wished she could have known him from an adult's perspective.
She doubted she would have the chance to get to know her grandmother in that way, either. The social worker at the hospital had described her as quite frail and very depressed. Rachel's role this summer would be to care for a woman who was fading away.
As Rachel walked back to her car, she suddenly turned and did a double take. The sign next to the pond, which had read HUBER POND all the years she'd lived in Reflection, now read SPRING WILLOW POND. She stared at the sign for a long time. It made no sense. Why would they change it? It would always be Huber Pond to her.
Decker Avenue was the most logical street for her to take to the hospital, but it was home to Spring Willow Elementary School, where she had taught for all of six days before fleeing town, and she opted to take Farmhouse Road instead. She drove for several miles through farmland, the hospital poking its head up in the distance occasionally as she rounded curves and slipped over hillsides.
The attendant in the hospital parking lot told Rachel to leave her car at the curb in the circular driveway, since she was only picking someone up. She parked carefully behind a horse and buggy, a little awestruck. She'd grown up thinking that those buggies were a natural part of the landscape, but now the sight of one touched her. There were still people in the world staunchly committed to their principles.
Her grandmother's room was on the second floor, and she found the older woman sitting up in a chair, dressed in a midcalf-length blue denim skirt, a white blouse, and blue canvas shoes. She knew by the ready smile that her grandmother had been watching the door for her arrival.
"Rachel." Her grandmother lifted one arm toward her, and Rachel bent down to kiss the soft, cool cheek. The older woman gripped her hand as though she might never let go. There were tears in her eyes.
"Hello, Gram," Rachel said. She would not have recognized her grandmother. Helen Huber was still a pretty woman, with expressive blue eyes and high cheekbones, but her dark hair was now white and short. It was smoothed back from her face, which was terribly thin. She needed to eat. Good. Rachel had been in a cooking mood ever since school let out for the year, feeding herself entirely too well.
Gram turned her head, and Rachel noticed the delicate, fernlike pattern tattooed onto her cheek, slipping beneath the collar of her blouse. A burn. The lightning. She shuddered.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
Her grandmother smiled. "My hearing's quite keen," she answered, and Rachel realized she had asked the question loudly. "And to be honest, I'm feeling achy and old and ready to go home. But I'm so, so happy to see you." Her lower lip trembled, moving Rachel to bend low for another embrace.
A nurse brought a wheelchair, and Gram shifted slowly into it. It was obvious that she was in a good deal of pain, and Rachel was immediately reminded of Phil's last few months.
"This is my little granddaughter," Gram said as the nurse pushed her through the hall to the elevator. Rachel walked at her grandmother's side, holding her hand.
"Nice to meet you." The nurse smiled.
Once down at the curb, Gram gingerly transferred from the chair to the passenger seat of Rachel's car. The nurse handed Rachel a couple of prescriptions and a list of instructions.
"You were so good to come," Gram said as they pulled out of the hospital driveway. "Though it wasn't necessary."
"I'm pleased I had the time off." She glanced over at her grandmother, at the feathery lines on her cheek. "Is the burn very painful?" she asked.
"What? Oh, this?" Gram touched her cheek. "No, not at all. They call it 'aborescent erythema.' It's not a real burn. It's from where the lightning followed the pattern of rain on my skin. They say it will fade away soon." She sighed. "The worst part is the dizziness. I've fainted a few times."
She talked a bit about what had happened—the work in the garden, the white light—and then she fell quiet. Talking seemed like an effort for her, and Rachel felt the strain of silence in the car. Chattering to fill the void, she told her grandmother about her earlier tour through town, past her old house, and the older woman listened, nodding her head occasionally.
"What is your husband doing this summer?" Gram asked finally.
"Phil died last October." Rachel kept her eyes on the road. "He had leukemia. He'd been sick for a while." She knew she hadn't mentioned Phil's death in her Christmas card. She hadn't seen the point.
"Oh, I'm very sorry," Gram said. She touched Rachel's arm. "How terrible for you."
Rachel acknowledged the sympathy with a nod. She missed Phil's strength and support. Their marriage had never been one of passion, but its foundation of friendship, caring, and tenderness could have sustained her forever. Eleven years her senior, Phil had been the principal in the school where she first taught after moving to San Antonio. She'd poured it all out to him during her interview, trying to keep a cool head, a professional demeanor, as she described what had happened in her classroom in Reflection. He checked her references, talked to professors she'd had in college, her supervisor in the Peace Corps. He believed in her, he said when he called to offer her the job, and she'd had a hard time not bursting into tears. She'd worked hard to prove him right in his assessment of her. She'd taken classes at night to get a master's degree in special education, and she had become a teacher other teachers turned to for guidance. For the last ten years she'd taught emotionally disturbed students and French on the high school level, and she'd won four awards in addition to being named teacher of the year in her school district two years ago. She owed Phil her self-confidence, her pride, and her ability to lay the past to rest and embrace the future.
A full three minutes passed before Gram spoke again. "I've been there, you know."
What was she talking about? "Do you mean San Antonio?"
Her grandmother actually laughed. "No, although I was in San Antonio once when Peter had to go there. Interesting city. But no. I meant I've gone through what you have. Taking care of a sick husband. Losing him."
"Oh, that's right. How did Grandpa die?"
"Kidney disease. It was slow, which gave us a long time to say good-bye but prolonged the suffering, too."
"Yes." Rachel had done most of her grieving for Phil while he was still alive, anticipating his loss. She had not cried once after his death, but felt his loss deeply, felt the unjustness of it. He'd had so many plans for the rest of his life. She'd withdrawn from her friends for several months, taking solace in food, parking herself night after night in front of the television. She was more than ready to change that pattern.
"Tell me about my great-grandso
n," Gram said.
"Well, his name is Chris, and he's twenty years old and a very talented, wonderful kid. He'll be a junior—a music major—at West Texas State this fall." She felt the little pocket of worry in her chest begin to mushroom again. Chris was a talented, wonderful kid, but this summer he'd hooked up with a group of neighborhood kids to form a rock band. He seemed obsessed with the band, his classical training forgotten. "Music is his first love," she said. "He's played piano and violin since he was small." Now, of course, he was playing keyboard, singing in a voice that scratched its way through songs possessing no discernible melody.
"You should have brought him with you," Gram said.
She had considered asking him, pulling him away from those new friends, but he never would have agreed to come. Besides, she would have been nervous about having him here. He knew very little about her past.
"Maybe he can visit for a few days later in the summer," she said.
"He's twenty, you say?" Gram asked.
"Uh-huh."
"He was Luke's boy, then, was he?"
Rachel jerked as though her grandmother had touched her with a live wire, and she could respond with little more than a nod. Yes, Chris was Luke's son, and he knew it, although he'd always called Phil "Dad." Still, it shocked her to hear Gram say Luke's name out loud, as if it were not a dirty word.
She'd told Chris that Luke had died in Vietnam. During his junior year of high school, though, Chris took a trip with the San Antonio Youth Orchestra to Washington, D.C., and he'd called her from the hotel one night, nearly in tears.
"They don't have Dad's name on the Vietnam Memorial," he said.
It was the first time she had heard him refer to Luke as "Dad." It was jarring, but it touched her all the same, and she thought she was being given a little window into Chris's soul.
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