Reflection

by Diane Chamberlain

  "I got the weeds out of the corn this morning," Rachel said suddenly, pointing toward the garden. "I hope I can finish the rest of them by tonight."

  "I could hire someone, Rachel. I hate for you—"

  Rachel leaned forward from her seat on the swing, resting one strong hand on Helen's arm. "I'm enjoying it, Gram. Really, I am. We've got a problem, though." She looked out to the yard. "You're not getting enough light back here."

  "Ah, yes." Helen had forgotten about that. She'd meant to have the trees pruned before she planted this year but had never gotten around to it. Suddenly, she felt the devil slip inside her skin. She could barely contain her smile as she turned to her granddaughter. "Maybe you could call Michael Stoltz for me," she said. "He does tree work and general handyman things in the summer."

  The color rose to Rachel's face more quickly than Helen had anticipated. "Michael Stoltz?" she asked.

  "Yes. You and he were friends when you were children, weren't you?" She knew how deep that friendship had gone. She and Michael had spoken about it more than once over the years.

  "Yes, we were." Rachel gazed at the garden, her cheeks a feverish red. "I had no idea that he still lived around here, though."

  "He came back after Katy—his wife—got her medical degree. She wanted to practice here. Do you remember, her father was a doctor in town when you were growing up? Doc Esterhaus?"

  Rachel nodded. She looked dazed.

  "So Katy took over the pediatric part of his practice when he retired, only right now she's on some kind of special voluntary service program with the Mennonites. She's in Russia, I think it is. And Michael's the minister at the Mennonite church."

  The cookbook slipped from Rachel's knees to the floor of the porch. "He's what?" She reached down for the book.

  "A minister."

  Rachel shook her head as though Helen must be mistaken.

  "He's very well thought of in town," Helen continued. "He's heading up the organization that's trying to block Marielle Hostetter from developing her land, though I don't hold out much hope for him. She won't talk to him. Won't talk to anyone except her nephews and her lawyer."

  Rachel didn't seem to hear her. "Michael's a minister," she repeated. "Do they have any children?"

  "A boy, eleven, or maybe twelve by now. I'm quite sure he's stayed with Michael instead of going with Katy. I don't recall his name. My memory's not what it once was, I'm afraid."

  "Michael wasn't Mennonite growing up. He was…I don't think he was raised in any faith. Does he wear plain clothes? Use a buggy?"

  "Oh, no." Helen laughed. "Only the Old Order Mennonites still use buggies. Some of them buy cars, but only black cars, and they paint the chrome on them black. But Michael's church is very liberal."

  Rachel looked down at the cookbook, running her fingers over the cover. "I'm having trouble remembering which denomination is which," she said slowly. "It's a peace church, isn't it?"

  "Well, they all are, all the plain sects. And they believe that a church should be made up of adults who belong out of choice rather than being baptized into the faith as infants. The Amish and some of the Old Order Mennonite groups still dress plain and shun electricity and higher education. But for the most part, the modern Mennonites go on to college, and they're very active in various relief programs."

  "It fits," Rachel said.

  Helen thought she saw tears in her granddaughter's eyes, but they only shimmered there for a moment.

  "Michael was a conscientious objector during Vietnam," Rachel said.

  "I know. I remember him speaking on the steps of Town Hall." Helen remembered that speech very well—almost verbatim—but if she told that to Rachel, it would open up questions she didn't feel like answering. "He's still good at speaking, I hear. Gives a good sermon."

  Rachel laughed. "I just can't picture it."

  "So, would you like to call him about the trees, or would you rather I did it?" Helen asked.

  "I'll call him," Rachel said. "Tomorrow." She returned her attention to the cookbook, flipping through it with a slow, even rhythm, but Helen was certain her granddaughter didn’t see a single word printed on those pages.

  * * *

  The attic stairs looked rickety, but they felt solid beneath Rachel's feet as she climbed them. Fumbling in the dark, she found the light switch. The small attic was crammed with stacks of boxes. The air was warm and stuffy. She fought her way through the field of cartons to reach the window, and it was several minutes before she got it open. She was perspiring from the effort, but the cool night breeze was worth it.

  Putting her hands on her hips, she looked around. Which side did Gram say her parents' boxes were on? North? Which way was north? She spotted the name John on the side of a box against the far wall. Picking up an old metal footstool, she walked over to the north wall and sat down.

  She'd been putting this off since her arrival at her grandmother's, but now that she knew Michael was here and that she might see him, she knew she could no longer avoid the memories. It had been so easy to do exactly that here in Gram's wonderful house—this refuge from reality. Miles from town and a thousand miles from San Antonio, she might as well have been on another planet. That first day when she'd seen her old triplex and thought about Luke and Michael seemed like months ago. But Michael was here, and that changed everything.

  She bent over to open the first box and felt the waistband of her jeans cutting into her stomach. She'd already lost a pound or two, but still, this extra weight was tenacious and repulsive. She was at least fifteen pounds heavier than she had been the last time she'd seen Michael, when she was twenty-three.

  So what? She growled at herself in disgust. He's married. And he's a minister. She was still having trouble getting used to that notion. What would he think of her being a Unitarian? She'd joined that church years ago so that Chris could have some sort of religious education. It had been the only denomination she could find that didn't require her to believe in a doctrine she couldn’t swallow.

  The box was full of leather-bound appointment books that must have belonged to her father. They looked thoroughly unfamiliar. Three cryptic journals, filled with dates and places written in strange handwriting, were tucked into the side of the box, along with two framed photographs of her grandparents. Helen and Peter Huber, looking handsome, the way she remembered them from her childhood. Digging further, she found a slightly blurry, unframed photograph of a young woman, fully clothed in a dress, shoes, and hat, jumping from a rock into swirling water. Rachel studied the picture closely. Was it Gram? She couldn't tell, but the image brought a smile to her lips.

  She pulled out a few loose pieces of paper and saw that they were sheets of music, handwritten. It suddenly dawned on her that she was not sorting through one of her parents' boxes. She turned the box this way and that, looking for her father's name to no avail. Carefully, she piled the appointment books and journals and photographs back into the carton, leaving out the picture of the leaping woman. She stopped to take one last look at the sheets of music. Even though she could make little sense of them, they fascinated her. The scribbled manuscripts were undoubtedly early versions of her grandfather's compositions.

  She folded down the flaps on the top of the carton and slid it across the floor to the south wall before turning to tackle the boxes marked with her father's name.

  The first two boxes held carefully wrapped Hummel figurines, her mother's treasures. Rachel had nearly forgotten how every spare inch of shelf or table space in their house had been covered by knick-knacks. The third box held a tarnished silver tea service.

  Had her parents saved anything of hers? Any memorabilia? She had left everything behind when she'd fled from Reflection, taking only some clothes. It had never occurred to her to take any other possessions. Least of all, memories of her husband.

  Her parents had left town shortly after she had, settling in another part of Lancaster County. They'd come out to San Antonio three times, once for her wedding to
Phil and twice to visit. They'd died together in an automobile accident a number of years ago. Rachel hadn't learned about their deaths until two weeks after the funeral, when someone managed to unearth her address from her parents' files. Only then did she realize that her mother and father had continued to feel the need to keep her whereabouts a secret.

  The fourth box was filled with her things, and she shivered as she pulled out the objects, one by one. High school yearbooks. A few ancient Beatles albums. Two shoe boxes marked "Rachel" on the top in her mother's handwriting. Inside were pictures Rachel had taken over the years. Plenty of her dog, Laredo, and plenty of Luke and Michael when they were kids. She pressed her hand to her mouth. So long since she'd seen an image of either of those boys. She glanced through the pictures quickly, intentionally refusing to study them.

  Beneath the second shoe box was her small white wedding album, wrapped in clear plastic. Rachel and Luke. Their names were embossed in large gold letters on the front of the book, and beneath it in smaller type, June 9, 1972. She rested her hand on the album, hesitating a moment before opening it.

  When she finally lifted the cover she was immediately plunged into that long-ago day, truly one of the happiest of her life. She looked at the pictures of her glowing face, of Luke in his uniform, his smile warm and full of love. No hint in their faces of what was to come. That day had been her last taste of innocence. How she'd trusted the world back then. How easily she'd made the decision to spend the time Luke would be in Vietnam in the Peace Corps. She'd had to fight to go. She had not been married when she'd applied, and the Peace Corps didn’t like to take just one member of a married couple. But they had invested enough in her training by then that she could persuade them to let her go. It had been the luck of the draw that she and Michael had ended up in the same village together. Katari needed two teachers, male and female and French-speaking, and she and Michael requested—and were fortunate enough to receive—the same assignment.

  People had chastised her for not staying home while Luke was serving in a dangerous war. She should be available to meet him if he could get leave, they'd said. But she'd never been the type to sit home. Growing up with two boys as her best friends had made her adventurous and independent. She'd been excited about going to Africa, and besides, it would make the time go faster.

  In a few of the wedding pictures she thought she could detect a hint of sadness in her face, evidence of the long separation she and Luke were about to endure. There was such love in Luke's eyes, and in hers. Love and certainty. There had never been any doubt, in her mind or his or in the minds of people who knew them, that this marriage was right. Yes, they were young, but they were meant to be together.

  She was stunned by Luke's resemblance to Chris. Luke had been twenty-one in these pictures; Chris was now twenty. So close in age, so obviously cut from the same exquisite cloth. After she'd left home, Rachel had possessed only one picture of her first husband, a wallet- sized snapshot of him in his uniform. Now, to suddenly see Luke from all these different angles—the easy, handsome smile, the expressive blue eyes—was overwhelming. She stared at his face, holding the pictures into the light, searching for a sign that the dark side lurked inside him even then. But she saw nothing of the kind. Whatever had turned Luke into a dangerous man had come from outside.

  Michael, their best man, was grinning in every picture, delighted by the happiness of his two closest friends. Sometime during college, Michael had completely shed his gawkiness. He was still slender, but there was beauty in the structure of his face, and he'd grown into one of those men who looked better with glasses than without. Katy Esterhaus had been his date, but she was in only one picture. She was staring into space, blond and squinty-eyed behind her own thick glasses. Rachel had always thought an undiscovered prettiness lurked behind that studious demeanor. She wondered what Katy looked like now.

  Two months after the wedding, Luke was in Vietnam and Rachel and Michael flew together to Zaire, then Rwanda, where they spent the next year working side by side in an impoverished, muddy village, teaching and learning and growing. She'd had some anger at Luke during that year for not attempting to become a conscientious objector, as Michael had done. She'd tried to understand Luke's feelings of patriotism. He'd clung to them despite the fact that by 1972 many people doubted the legitimacy of the war. His letters were few and slow in coming, though full of love for her and caring for Michael.

  Gradually, though, the tenor of those letters began to change. Three months after his arrival in Vietnam, he wrote of killing someone, and she knew he'd been crying as he'd written those words. But a few months later his letters offered no sense of sorrow or remorse—no feeling at all—when he described the bloody details of the war he was fighting. She felt him hardening with each letter she received. She'd read them to Michael, usually after they'd had dinner together in her small cinderblock house, which had more space and light than his.

  "'Yesterday we managed to ambush this group,'" she read from one particular letter." 'It was a challenge, but we got them. Some kids were in the way and got hurt. It was too bad, but one of those things that couldn't be helped.'"

  She raised her eyes to Michael's after reading the letter, and he said quietly, "What's happening to him?" She shook her head slowly, without speaking, afraid of the answer to that question. Luke was becoming a stranger to her.

  She was changing, too. Something happened when you existed side by side with another person for a year, in hellish conditions, doing the sort of work that made you cheer together over the smallest successes, that made you cry in pain together over life's injustices. Neither she nor Michael had ever experienced an existence in which death and suffering and unfathomable poverty were an accepted—and expected—part of daily life. Something happened when that person you'd known forever was suddenly your one link to your past, to your real life, to your sanity. When that person was so fine a human being, so life-embracing. When you watched him make children learn who had not been learning, or help a man dig a grave for his youngest son, or drive the frantic mother of a malaria-stricken baby fifty miles to the nearest hospital. Something happened. And one day she looked over at Michael and felt a slow, subtle twist of pain in her chest, and she knew she'd crossed a line between loving him as a friend and loving him as something more.

  And then, of course, the fear began. Fear that those feelings would grow inside her until she could no longer control them. Fear she would never be able to stop thinking about him when she lay in her bed at night. As bad as the fear was, though, the guilt was worse.

  They'd been working together for five or six months when she realized that Michael felt it too. It was during her second bout with malaria. Michael stayed with her through the night, bathing her with the coolest water he could find to bring the fever down. In the morning he made her strong tea she could barely touch, and he sat on the edge of her bed, stroking her face and arms and neck with a damp cloth. It was Sunday; neither of them were expected to teach that day, and so they talked. Oh, they always talked, but this time was different.

  "I was watching you with Mbasa yesterday," he said, referring to the mother of a three-year-old boy who had disappeared sometime during the night. Mbasa had been hysterical when Rachel found her down by the stream. "You sat with her all day," Michael said, "and you were so comforting to her. You knew just what to say. I was…in awe."

  He turned his face away from her then, and she knew. He didn't want her to see the raw emotion there, but she heard in his voice the same tenderness she felt for him. A tenderness pure in and of itself but touched with longing.

  "Michael," she said, reaching her hand up to his cheek. "Do you love me?"

  "Of course I do. I've loved you and Luke since I was a kid—" He stopped himself. "That's not what you mean, is it?"

  She shook her head.

  "Yes, I love you, and it scares the shit out of me."

  She wept then, too weak to hold in the feelings that had been churning inside
her during the past few months. She told him how much she loved him, how paper-thin her memory of Luke had become. Luke wrote her letters of death and killing and violence and anger, while Michael seemed the embodiment of serenity and compassion.

  "Listen to me." Michael wrapped his hand around her wrist. "What you and I are feeling is wrong, Rachel. I'm not saying we're bad for feeling it. I think it's normal after what we've been through together, but we can't give in to it. Luke is going through something terrible, something so bad that you and I cannot even imagine it. We know he's a good guy, right? He has a good heart. We have to remember that. Remember when he found those kittens behind the high school and practically cried when the vet said they had distemper and had to be put down?"

  Rachel furrowed her brow, the memory vague through her fever.

  "We're in this bizarre situation," Michael continued. "Luke's a million miles away, and his letters sound like someone else wrote them, and so it's almost like he doesn't exist anymore. And then you and I are working together every day, in this kind of…emotional setting, and we're horny as hell, right?"

  She smiled and nodded.

  "The whole mess is a recipe for disaster, and we're going to have to fight it."

  She was relieved. At least she would no longer be alone in the battle.

  From that day forward, they didn’t touch. Where they had been easy with their hugs and casual pecks on the cheek, they now behaved as though they were separated by an invisible wall.

  In March, Luke was among the last soldiers to leave Vietnam, and Rachel received permission to fly to San Francisco to spend a week with him before his transfer to Fort Myer in Virginia. The week with her husband did nothing to ease her fears. She had no sooner greeted him in the airport than a teenage boy with long hair and holes in his jeans walked up to Luke and spit on the front of his uniform. Within seconds Luke had flattened his assailant to the floor. Rachel stepped out of the way, alarmed by the hatred in her husband's eyes and by his focused and furious attack on the terrified boy.