Yes, she thought with a grin. She hadn't heard him play their own piano in far too long. "Of course," she said. "Good idea."
"Gram?" Chris leaned forward again, this time to talk to his great-grandmother.
"I was wondering something about Reflections."
Rachel knew what he was going to say, and she held her breath as Gram turned her head toward the backseat.
"I was wondering if I could, like, adapt a little of it for my band," Chris said. "Some of the themes. I know that might be asking too much."
"I'd like you to do that," Gram said. "Send me a tape so I can hear what you did with it."
"Cool," Chris sat back again, a broad smile on his face.
She and Gram said good-bye to Chris curbside at the airport. Rachel hugged him hard.
"I'm so glad we had this week together," she said. "I loved having you around."
"Me too, Mom." He glanced at Gram, then whispered in Rachel's ear. "Take care of yourself over there, okay?"
Rachel nodded, letting go of him, and Chris immediately drew his great-grandmother into a hug. "Bye, Gram," he said. "I love you."
"I love you, too," Gram said, and there was a small but beautiful smile on her lips.
"I won't tell anyone the truth about you," Chris said, "but I'm very proud to be your great-grandson."
Rachel couldn't stop her tears this time. She had a terrific son.
She waited until they were a few miles from the airport before telling Gram her plans.
"I'm seriously considering going with the Mennonites to Zaire to work in the refugee camps," she said, glancing at the older woman. "I would have to leave in a couple of weeks, though, and I'm concerned about leaving you alone right now."
Gram was quiet. After a minute, she said, "You're trying to get yourself away from Michael so he can make a decision without you being a factor in it."
"No," Rachel said, although she knew that was part of it. A small part, though. She wasn't running away from Reflection this time. "No, I want to do this for myself. It felt right the second I thought of it. Regardless of what decisions Michael makes, I'm still going. There were people I loved in Rwanda, and it tears me up to see what's happening over there. I speak the language. I'm a little rusty, but it'll come back to me."
"How long will you be gone?" Gram's voice sounded tight.
"A few months. But I won't go if you still need me, Gram."
"It's dangerous there."
"I'm not afraid. I only wish I could leave before Reflection Day." She smiled to herself. Reflection seemed more dangerous to her than Zaire.
She stole a look at her grandmother and saw the sheen of tears in the older woman's eyes. "Oh, Gram," she said, "will you be all right?"
"I'll be fine." Gram reached out to touch Rachel's hand on the steering wheel. "I'll just miss you terribly, that's all."
"I'll miss you, too." She sighed. "I love Reflection, Gram. It's my hometown. But I haven't brought it anything but pain by coming back. I need to do something that makes me feel good about myself again. I need to do something that helps somebody."
"I understand."
They drove the rest of the way home in silence, and Rachel knew that the hardest part of her decision was still ahead of her. Telling Chris and Gram had been easy. Telling Michael would be something else.
–42–
Michael felt a hand on his shoulder and he rolled over in the darkness, struggling to pull himself back from sleep.
Katy sat on the edge of the bed next to him, her blond hair lit up from the light in the hallway. She moved her hand from his shoulder to her lap, as though she didn't dare touch him any longer. He could see her cheeks were wet.
"Please forgive me," she said.
"I do." He touched his fingers to her cheek. "Did you take a cab from the airport?"
She nodded.
"Why didn't you call me to pick you up?"
"I didn't want to bother you."
She buried her face in her hands, and he felt sorry for her. He rested his hand on her knee while she cried.
"I felt like a part of me was missing," she said finally, raising her head again. "No excuse, I know. But I worked hard to become a doctor and to become a success in my career. I wanted a child, and I had a child. It all just didn't feel like enough to me anymore. That's trite, I suppose. I felt like a doctor and a mother and a wife. And I guess I still needed to feel like a woman. Like an attractive woman."
"I'm sorry if I didn't make you feel that way."
"I think we've been together so long that we've started taking each other for granted," she said.
"Probably, yes." He felt remarkably calm.
"Then all of sudden, Drew was there, paying me compliments, looking at me like he…wanted me. I was terribly weak. I thought I was a smart person—"
"You're a brilliant person."
"Then how could I do such a stupid thing?"
Michael sighed. "Affairs of the heart seem to defy intelligence and reason," he said. He was living proof of that.
"I want things to work out for us," she said. "They have to, Michael. We have too much to lose."
He sat up in the bed, leaning back against the headboard. "I don't think we can base staying together on our fear of what we have to lose," he said.
She sucked in her breath." Michael. What about your ministry? You can't seriously be telling me you would throw that away? And we'd be shunned if we split up. It'd be subtle, sure, but it would be there all the same. You know that."
"Yes, I know."
Katy tugged idly at the edge of the blanket. "It's Rachel, isn't it?" she asked.
He shook his head. "No. Not entirely."
"You've always loved her."
"I've always cared very deeply about her." He thought of the incident at the after-game party when he was thirteen, of Katy turning her back on him, of Rachel coming to his rescue. "Do you remember that time when we were kids and I scored the winning point for the opposing team in basketball?" he asked her.
She looked at him blankly and shook her head. "I don't want to see her," she said. "I just…I feel humiliated. And ashamed. I assume she knows about me and Drew? And I'm jealous."
"You may not see her at all," he said. "She's leaving for Zaire in a couple of weeks."
He'd seen Rachel briefly on Labor Day, when they'd slipped—unnoticed, he hoped—into the high school to use the darkroom. She'd told him there, in the darkness, as they watched images of the countryside emerge before their eyes. Celine had pulled some strings to allow her to go, she'd said. Her plans had stunned him into silence, but only for a moment. It made sense for her to go, and it was important to her. He had heard the resolve in her voice. The peace. He was glad that at least one of them had come to a decision of sorts.
"Zaire?" Katy asked. "She's not going with the church, is she?"
He nodded, and Katy looked out the window.
"She's moved right into my life, hasn't she? Into my town, my church. And my husband's bed, I assume?"
"Katy."
"Do you love her?"
"Yes."
"Do you love me?"
"I feel a strong commitment to you, Katy."
Katy closed her eyes and stood up. She ran the fingers of both hands through her hair. "Everyone hates her, Michael," she said. "Drew said the whole town despises her."
"Rachel is not the issue here."
She leaned against the wall. "I don't want to talk about this anymore," she said.
Typical Katy, he thought. Any real meat in a conversation, anything remotely difficult, and she tuned out.
"What's happening with the Hostetter project?" she asked.
"The vote was last night." He had watched the board sign, seal, and deliver permission to the Hostetters to destroy the land. "They start work Friday."
She let out an exasperated sigh. "Everything's falling apart." She turned to the window and toyed with the lock for a moment before looking over at him again. "Can we do something t
ogether tomorrow?" she asked. "The three of us? Take Jace to Hershey Park, maybe?"
"Yes," he said. He wanted to do that, to give tomorrow to his family.
"Good." She tried to smile, then added, almost shyly, "I'm really tired, Michael. Where do you want me to sleep?"
He couldn’t sleep with her, not when he'd been so recently with Rachel. Could he ever—would he ever want to—sleep with Katy again?
"You stay here." He got out of the bed, reaching for his robe. "I'll sleep in the guest room."
The bed in the guest room was not made up, but he didn't care. He lay down on the spread and covered himself with a blanket. It didn't matter where he tried to sleep tonight. Between the confusion in his mind and the turmoil in his heart, he knew he would not be able to sleep at all.
–43–
Rachel awakened with a sense of doom she couldn’t place. She stared at the ceiling, trying to determine the reason for the gray shroud hanging over her. Then suddenly, she had it: It was Friday, ground-breaking day for the Hostetter Project. By the end of the day, acres of trees would be felled, the earth around them would be torn and raw, and the vision of Reflection so many held dear would be gone forever. Soon the Amish and Mennonites would be sharing their cemetery with tract houses. A few hundred more cars would snake their way between the buggies and spook the horses. Glossy, glassy office buildings would block the reflection of Michael's church in the pond, and the forest that had been her playground as a child would be flattened and transformed into one hundred houses and four hundred people.
She got out of bed, wincing when her foot hit the floor. Her hip ached where she'd gotten a few of the shots for her trip. Her arm was even stiffer. She dressed quickly, then left a note for Gram. Running errands, she wrote. She was certain where she was going but not yet sure what she would do once she got there. She had an idea, though—a bizarre idea that she feared was the product of a hazy, not-quite-awake mind.
It was nearly eight o'clock by the time she reached the center of town, and she could see that a crowd had already formed in the street in front of the pond. Yellow plastic tape had been stretched along the sidewalk, separating the crowd from the Hostetter property. The bulldozers and trucks and backhoes were planted on the grass, lined up next to a slender dirt road someone had cut through the lawn, from street to forest, over the past couple of days. The blunt noses of the vehicles were pointed at the trees, ready to charge.
Rachel pulled her car to the side of the road across the street from the crowd. She could see Celine Humphrey and Becky Frank among the throng. She spotted Lily, sipping from a mug, and Marge eating what looked like a doughnut. Sixty or seventy people, she guessed, and more were arriving by the minute, talking among themselves, pointing toward the woods.
Michaels car cut through the crowd and turned into the narrow driveway next to the Mennonite church on the opposite side of the pond. In another minute he walked out front, joining the other bystanders. Rachel wished she could talk to him. Katy was back, that much she knew. He'd called her to let her know and to tell her he'd planned to spend yesterday with her and Jason. That was good, she'd told herself. He needed to experience fully what he had come so close to giving up.
She lost him in the thickening crowd, and she couldn’t see Lily anymore, either. Or Becky. How long should she wait? Her pulse thrummed in her hands where they rested in her lap.
It was eight-thirty when one of the workmen got into a bulldozer and turned the engine over, and that's when Rachel drew in a deep breath and got out of her car. She made her way resolutely through the crowd, aware of the flurry of whispers that followed her progress. Without a moment's hesitation, she stepped over the yellow tape and walked toward the dirt road.
"Hey, lady!" one of the men called out to her. "Ma'am! You can't go there."
She feigned deafness, only turning around in the road once she'd reached the bulldozer, which looked very large, very menacing, this close up. She glanced at the crush of people in the street. They had fallen utterly silent, and Rachel felt the color in her cheeks. She was making a spectacle of herself.
The crowd began to chatter again, and there was excitement in the sound. She folded her arms across her chest as one of the workmen approached her.
"You've got to move, lady," he said. "We're ready to start work here."
"Then you'll have to roll over me to start it," she said.
"Oh, come on, lady." He scowled. "We don't have time for the heroics. They're gonna cart you away, you know that? Either jail or the asylum. Come on now, let's go." He reached out to take hold of her arm.
"Don't touch me." She jerked away from him, giving him a look that had lawsuit written all over it, and he backed away.
"Hey! Huber!" A male voice hollered from behind the yellow ribbon. She spotted a man in a gray suit standing at the edge of the crowd, making a megaphone with his hands. She didn't recognize him. "You're an outsider, Huber," he called. "What the hell right do you have to interfere with what's going on here?"
A few people in the crowd cheered him, but others—by far the majority—booed and hissed.
"We're calling the police," one of the workmen shouted to her. The guy in the bulldozer had turned the engine off and was lighting a cigarette.
She saw movement in the center of the crowd, and in a moment Michael stepped over the yellow tape. Was he coming to talk her out of this? When he reached her, he merely winked at her, took her hand, and stood a short distance away from her. With their arms outstretched, their two-man blockade effectively bisected the road.
"Oh, shit," said the workman. "Look, you two, we're just here to do our job. I don't know what your problem is with the situation here, but we're getting paid to knock down these trees, and that's what we're going to do. It's legal. It's our right. So get the hell out of our way."
One of the other workmen added, "The cops have been called."
Michael leaned over to speak quietly to her. "What do you want to bet this will be the slowest police response in history? They all love this place as much as we do."
Rachel smiled at him. She hoped he was right.
Michael nodded toward the crowd. "Check it out," he said.
Rachel looked toward the gathering to see Lily stepping over the yellow tape. Lily set her mug down on the sidewalk and marched along the dirt road until she reached them. She was grinning as she took Michael's hand, leaning forward to talk to Rachel.
"Cool idea, Rache!" she said.
Then someone tore the tape. In an instant, at least half the crowd moved en masse down the hill, and Rachel couldn’t help laughing. Each person linked up with them on Michael and Lily's side, as if Rachel's hand might burn them. She stepped farther and farther to her left, until she was right up against one of the backhoes. It was Sarah Holland, the clerk from the bookstore whose face had been scarred in Rachel's classroom, who finally took her hand and gave her a smile.
"Let's make it a triple line," one of the men said, and people regrouped until a boisterous clot of humanity blocked entrance to the forest, and for the moment anyway, Reflection was safe.
* * *
Helen turned on the television to check the weather, a habit she'd gotten into ever since the storm that had changed her life. She realized quickly that some major news story had broken, and she struggled to make sense of the images on the screen. There were dozens of people and a couple of bulldozers. She spotted the Mennonite church and the forest behind it. A protest at Spring Willow Pond, a reporter said. The blockade had been started by Rachel Huber. Once Helen recovered from her shock, she watched the rest of the broadcast with tears in her eyes.
By afternoon, a Harrisburg station had picked up the story. The newscaster spoke about Rachel's past in Reflection. He showed horrible old pictures of the demolished wing of the Spring Willow Elementary School. He showed old high school photos of Rachel and Michael, and Luke. He talked about the nonresistance of a Mennonite, how potentially devastating the Hostetter development had to
be for it to move a Mennonite minister to action.
The police had been called hours earlier, a second reporter said from the scene, and were only now beginning to make arrests. It didn't matter. The workmen had already given up for the day. Too late to start, they said.
Helen smiled. Tomorrow was Saturday. Reflection would have a two-day reprieve.
She sat on the sofa, her eyes on the television, her mind on Peter. She gnawed her lip as she watched her granddaughter being led away from the pond by a police officer. Rachel and Michael had taken the risk, Helen thought. They'd put the past aside for the sake of the future. She could do at least as much.
At two o'clock she walked into( the library. She lifted the phone to her ear and dialed the information number for New York City.
"I'd like the number for a Speicer," she said, sitting down. "Karl Speicer."
–44–
Helen brewed a pot of peppermint tea and drank it slowly, cup after cup, trying to calm her nerves. Hans had said he would rent a car at the Harrisburg airport and arrive at her house sometime between two and three. It was nearly three now.
She'd had to leave a message on an answering machine for him the day before. His voice had surprised her with its strength, had brought tears to her eyes with its familiarity. It was different, yes—forty-three years had made a difference. But even though the speaker didn’t identify himself, she had known whose voice she was hearing.
She had first apologized for calling, telling him she wouldn't do it if it were not absolutely necessary. She told him only that he needed to come to Reflection, that it was urgent. She had something for him from Peter. "Please, Hans," she begged, "you must come." She hung up, kicking herself for sounding so desperate. What if Winona was the one to pick up the messages from the answering machine?
Hans called back late last night, so late that she feared the phone would awaken Rachel—or that he might not call at all. He didn’t sound at all distressed by her call, but rather pleased. Still, she felt edgy talking to him and didn’t allow him to draw her into conversation once she had his perplexed commitment to come.
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