When Sparrows Fall

by Meg Moseley

  The children! She had to call home. That’s what she had to do. Dial 532 … no, 352. No, it was.… The digits jumbled themselves in her head until she wanted to scream.

  “Excuse me, nurse?” Her voice was rusty, her throat dry. “I can’t remember my own phone number. Could you find it for me, please?”

  “That’s a concussion for you. Sure, I’ll track it down. Give me a few minutes.” The nurse left the room.

  Miranda lay still. Tears seeped onto her cheeks. She couldn’t use her right hand to dry the tears because her shoulder hurt so badly that she couldn’t lift her arm. Slowly, she raised her left arm. It trailed an IV line. An ID bracelet rasped against her wrist.

  A sob caught her in the ribs like a giant’s fist. She felt as if she’d been in a fight, pounded by some merciless bully. But what had happened?

  Think.

  That was it. She’d been trying to think. Day after day, she’d gone to the cliffs, alone. Praying. Planning. The days blurred, and she couldn’t remember much about her last walk. Just that the sun had burned through the fog as she’d stood by the cliffs. Maybe, dazzled by the cloudy white sunshine and lightheaded from fasting, she’d fainted.

  Who had the children? Nothing else mattered.

  Jack had them. Because she’d written that letter and she’d changed her will. Because Mason planned to move the entire church to North Carolina. That was almost as crazy as some of Carl’s ideas, but Mason had warned her not to stir up trouble. So she’d dragged Jack into it. By now, he must have decided she was the crazy one.

  She opened her eyes to convince herself that she was awake and in her right mind.

  She hadn’t dreamed it. Mason had threatened her.

  “Your visitor was a good-looking guy,” her roommate volunteered from the other side of the curtain. “Your husband?”

  “No. My husband passed away a couple of years ago. That was his brother.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry about your husband.” The woman paused. “His brother is cute.”

  The nurse breezed back into the room. “Here’s the number. It’s an ungodly hour though. You’d better wait.” She left a slip of paper on the bedside tray and hurried out.

  “But I have to check on my children!” A sob racked Miranda’s throat and shook her ribs into pain so intense that a wave of black rolled across her vision. She fought it off.

  “The nurse ain’t God,” her roommate said. “You can call right now, if you want to.”

  Miranda tried to shift her position and yelped. “I can’t reach the phone.”

  “I’ll get it for you.” A middle-aged woman swam into view. Wearing a blue and white hospital gown, she padded to the bedside. “Hi, I’m Sue.”

  “I’m Miranda.”

  She heard a rustle as the woman picked up the paper, and then the tap-tap-tap of fingers on buttons. The phone nestled in Miranda’s hand and was guided to her ear.

  She waited, anticipating Timothy’s voice. It was his job to pick up the phone when she wasn’t home.

  On the second ring, a man answered with a low, grumpy “Hello.”

  “Who is—oh.” Her scrambled brain had already forgotten Jack would be there. “Is this Jack?”

  “It is. Who’s calling?”

  “This is Miranda.”

  “Miranda. Is everything all right? Do you need me to run up to the hospital?”

  “No. The children. How are the children?”

  “They’re fine. Alive and kicking.”

  “Are they up yet?”

  “At five in the morning?” A short laugh. “No. I wasn’t either. I’m glad you called though. I have questions.”

  “It’s too early for that,” she said quickly. “I’ll call back later so I can talk to the children. About eight?”

  “Sure. Let me give you my cell number so you can reach me anytime.”

  “Wait. Sue? Can you write down a number for me?”

  Miranda repeated the numbers after Jack. On the other side of the curtain, Sue parroted them once more as she wrote them down.

  “I’ve got it.” Miranda’s nose itched as tears dried on it. “Has anyone else called? Or come by?”

  “No. Not a soul.”

  “This may sound strange, but I’d like to ask you not to rock the boat while I’m gone. Don’t, um, make waves.”

  He laughed. “You’re asking the impossible, darlin’. They call me Jack ‘Tsunami’ Hanford.”

  “They do?”

  He laughed again, making her feel like a fool. “No, I just made it up. I like the sound of it though.”

  She had to play along. “Yes, it has a ring to it. Well, I’ll … I’ll let you go.”

  “All right. And Miranda—you’re welcome.”

  “Oh! Thank you, Jack. Thank you so much. You’ll never know how much I appreciate—”

  Too late. She was speaking to a dead phone. She deserved his shortness with her, but it still stung.

  He’d better not be short with the children, or he’d hear about it.

  As she lowered the phone to the bed, a man walking down the hallway chuckled and said “Bottom of the ninth.” A woman laughed and made a soft reply.

  She sounded happy. Normal. She wasn’t worried about tangling with a pastor who wanted to drag his entire church out of state. She didn’t have to rely on a smart-mouthed professor who had no idea what kind of trouble he might cause.

  Miranda needed him though. The children needed him. Jack was the wall between them and Mason’s threat.

  Unwilling to disturb her roommate again, Miranda wept quietly, the agony escalating with every stifled sob. She ached to be with her children. This hospital stay was like an evil foretaste of a worse separation.

  At five minutes to eight, Jack rounded up the kids and told them their mom would be calling. “And everybody will have a chance to talk, all right? You can pass the phone around.”

  They gathered at the kitchen table and waited. Sometimes they were a tad too compliant, as if their behavior had been shaped by a rod on their backsides, though Jack had no problem with that. He had been raised that way, with moderate success.

  At two minutes past, the phone rang. He grabbed it. “Jack’s Diner. The best breakfast in town.”

  Gabriel busted loose with a belly laugh. Within seconds, everybody started laughing. Everybody but Timothy, who stared off into space, and Miranda.

  “I want to talk to my children,” she said after a frosty silence.

  “Certainly, madam. Here, start with Martha. She’s about to blow a gasket.”

  Martha nearly dropped the phone in her excitement. “Mama! Guess what? Uncle Jack gave me a book! And Frosted Flakes!”

  He slunk away, smiling. In Martha’s sheltered existence, maybe he was nearly a tsunami.

  “Hey, look.” Gabriel pointed toward the window. “Pastor Mason’s here.”

  It was mighty early for a pastoral visit. He must have heard about Miranda’s accident.

  Jack watched from a window as an old burgundy Buick rolled to a stop behind the van. A tall, solidly built man climbed out and frowned at the Audi. Probably pushing fifty, the visitor wore a dark suit and a white shirt but no tie. Lacking the full beard that Jack had imagined for him, Mason Chandler bore no visible resemblance to an Old Testament prophet. A televangelist, maybe, or a game show host.

  Jack pondered some of his experiences with ultraconservative churches. He’d found two schools of thought regarding facial hair for men. According to one view, it was sinful to shave. According to the other view, it was sinful not to. Chandler’s mug was as hairless as a baby’s bottom, and so was Carl’s in every photo.

  Jack ran a hand over his jaw and considered losing his razor for a while.

  The man moved his attention from the car to the house, studying it with narrowed eyes, and started walking.

  Jack stepped onto the porch. “Good morning.”

  The man broke stride but recovered quickly and jogged up the steps. “Good morning. And who are you?
”

  “Jack Hanford.” He offered his hand. “Carl’s brother.”

  Chandler shook hands but scrutinized Jack as if he might have been guilty of an overnight tryst with Miranda. “Mason Chandler. Miranda’s pastor. Is she home?”

  “She’s in the hospital. She fell from the cliffs.”

  Mason’s eyebrows rose. “How did she manage that?”

  That was entirely the wrong question. Jack’s needle drifted toward the orange zone.

  “She was taking pictures, apparently.”

  Mason shook his head. “Miranda and that camera.”

  “In case you’re interested, she’s going to be all right.”

  “Thank God. I’ll be praying for her. How did you get involved, Jack?”

  “On Miranda’s orders, Timothy asked me to help out.”

  “Why you, Jack?”

  Like a used car salesman, Mason used first names at every opportunity. The habit grated on Jack’s nerves.

  “I’m the children’s guardian,” he said.

  Mason’s face hardened. “When did that happen?”

  “Recently.”

  “How long do you plan to stay?”

  “For the duration.”

  “That’s not necessary. The church can take over.”

  Jack’s needle jumped to the red zone but he hung on to civility. “No, thank you. We’re doing fine.”

  “You must have more important things to do with your time, Jack.”

  “Not at all. I’m glad to help. Apparently I’m the only family she has.”

  “The church is her family now.”

  Then it was a dysfunctional family. The clues were adding up.

  The door creaked. Jack looked over his shoulder.

  Gabriel peered through a three-inch gap but didn’t speak. Even when Mason gave him a warm “Good morning,” Gabriel only nodded, closing the door with an unwelcoming click. The kid had good taste, if not good manners.

  Mason began his retreat. “Nice meeting you, Jack. I’ll stay in touch.”

  “You do that. I’ll be here.”

  After the Buick rolled away, Jack paced the porch until he’d put a lid on his temper. When he went inside, the kids were off the phone, and they’d scattered. All except Martha.

  Cute as a bug, she was curled up on the couch, her hair still in those messy braids. She’d pulled her long nightgown all the way over her feet, and she’d draped what she called the cuddle-quilt around her shoulders. Her lips moved as she sounded her way through the Seuss book. Sometimes, she spoke a word out loud, savoring her mastery of the symbols that stood for sounds that made words that built worlds. She owned those worlds, but her mother kept her locked up, safe from the big, scary, real world where bad things happened.

  Bad things could happen in a run-down log home on an isolated back road too. Like a very bad thing once happened in a small brick house in an ordinary town where a boy looked into his mother’s eyes and saw unthinkable darkness but did nothing.

  “Not this time,” Jack said quietly. “I’ll make a fool of myself first.”

  Martha looked up with a smile so happy that it broke his heart.

  six

  It was still dark out, and oddly quiet compared to the thrum of Chattanooga. Waiting for the coffee to brew, Jack drifted through the previous day.

  The family could have survived without him. Timothy acted as the man of the house, keeping the wood stove fueled and lecturing Jonah about staying away from its hot surfaces. Rebekah did a fine job of washing clothes and putting meals on the table, but her gratitude for Jack’s help made him realize what a load she was carrying.

  Ten. She was ten.

  The younger ones carried on as best they could, doing their junior-size chores, but they were getting a little ragged around the edges. They missed their mom.

  And Miranda? She’d called several times, perfectly lucid. Uptight, but lucid. No one else had called. Just that early-morning visit from her pastor. The memory was almost enough to put Jack in a foul mood.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, he eased into his day with a paper from a student who always took a highly original view and set out to prove her point with style if not with impeccable logic. T. S. Eliot himself might have enjoyed her thoughts about the psyche of J. Alfred Prufrock.

  Jack leaned over the paper, red pen poised. He would make her think harder and dig deeper. When parents entrusted their young people’s minds to R. Jackson Hanford, PhD, they got their money’s worth.

  His troubles retreated to a dull rumble in the back of his mind while he played with words, ideas, arguments. He loved teaching. Loved his students. Most of them, anyway. Most of the time.

  Halfway through the paper, he tripped on Eliot’s line about Prufrock’s thinning hair. It conjured up memories of a dad with a receding hairline and an existential crisis of his own.

  Jack ran a hand through his hair. It was still thick, a legacy from his mother’s genes. His temples were going gray, though, and he was barely past his fortieth birthday. At forty, his father already had two failed marriages behind him. Jack had one, and that was one too many.

  Struggling to focus on his student’s paper, he saw instead his father’s odd, blank expression. It had cropped up with increasing frequency after his not-quite-ex-wife’s memorial service. Roger Hanford had blamed himself, for good reason, but he wasn’t the only one at fault.

  Outside, the wind lifted its head. Rain began to fall, light but steady. Jack poured more coffee and dug into his work. When he heard feet on the stairs, he was startled to see daylight at the window above the half curtains.

  Rebekah was shepherding Jonah down the stairs. “Hurry up. If you don’t make it in time …”

  “No.” Jonah’s sleepy fretting was like a fiddle played out of tune. “Don’t hafta.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs. Rebekah wore a long, floral-print dress, while Jonah shuffled along in his red footed pajamas, clutching a blue jay’s feather.

  Rebekah smiled. “Good morning, Uncle Jack.”

  “Good morning. Hey, Jonah.”

  Jonah only pouted as they proceeded to the bathroom. Not a morning person, obviously.

  The rain poured harder, a depressing flood of gray. The archangels woke, evidenced by bumps, thumps, and all manner of shrillness upstairs. Timothy’s voice joined theirs, in a lower register. Every time the boys’ footsteps thudded on the ceiling, the noise jarred Jack.

  Rebekah and Jonah emerged from the bathroom. She installed him in the highchair, conned him out of the feather, and gave him a banana. With Jonah settled, she started heating a pot of water on the electric stove.

  The kids would need room to eat breakfast. Jack gathered his papers into a neat pile. He could always think better when he had room to spread out his work, as if that made room for bigger thoughts. That was another habit he needed to lay down for a while.

  The other children showed up as Rebekah was doling out oatmeal. She offered it to Jack too, but he would have preferred to eat mud.

  “Thanks, but I’m not ready to eat yet,” he said to soften his refusal. “Maybe I’ll fix something later in the …” He saw a toaster, a food processor, a huge slow cooker, and his coffee paraphernalia but no microwave. “Y’all don’t have a microwave?”

  “No,” Rebekah said. “Mother won’t have one in the house.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Father said … it’s something about the way the microwaves heat the food. They make the molecules vibrate, and it might be harmful.”

  Jack swallowed a comment about Carl’s grasp of basic science. “When you heat food in a pot on the stove, the molecules vibrate too.”

  Rebekah studied him with light, luminous eyes. “Oh! I guess they do.”

  He reminded himself that she was only ten.

  And that her mother might forbid her to go to college.

  By nine o’clock, the kids had finished chores and hauled out their schoolbo
oks. Jack soon concluded that their education was adequate in most ways, stellar in others, and sorely lacking in some respects. When Rebekah ran across a reference to Ebenezer Scrooge in an essay, she couldn’t grasp the gist of the paragraph because she’d never been exposed to Dickens.

  At least Miranda didn’t require the busywork that public schools used as a means of crowd control. One point for her, but quiet, all-absorbing busywork would have come in handy. He couldn’t send the kids out to play in a rainstorm.

  By ten, they had cabin fever. The rain came down without stopping, and so did Jonah’s tears. Sitting amid his blocks, he screamed in useless rage. Rebekah, usually so good at soothing toddler angst, teetered on the verge of a meltdown herself. The archangels bickered. Even Martha, the sunny one, found reasons to whine.

  Only Timothy kept his mouth shut. Hunched over a grammar lesson, he clicked his pen, over and over. Click. Click. Click.

  “Hush up, y’all,” Jack said quietly. Nobody paid him any mind.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Martha abandoned her phonics workbook and opened the fridge. “Somebody drank all the orange juice,” she wailed. “I didn’t get any. Not any.” She segued into broken-hearted weeping that sent Jack into auditory overload.

  Click. Click. Click-click-click-click-click.

  Jack slapped his own pen down on the table. “That settles it. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m taking y’all to Walmart.”

  Martha silenced herself, midsob. Jonah stopped shrieking and wiped his wet cheeks with gooey fingers. All the kids gawked at Jack as if he’d announced a trip to France. And a guillotine.

  “It’s Thursday,” Timothy said. Click. “A school day.” Click.

  “Indeed, every day’s a school day. The world is our classroom. We’ll take a field trip.”

  “There’s no Walmart in Slades Creek,” Rebekah pointed out, sensible as always.

  Jack smiled at his astonished charges. “There’s one in Clayton.” And it carried clothing. Normal clothing. There was a thought.

  Martha closed the fridge and sniffled. “Uncle Jack? Can we buy Frosted Flakes? Please?”

  “Yes. And orange juice.” He turned to Rebekah. “And something easy for supper, because you do too much cooking for a girl your age.”