by Amy Sorrells
“I didn’t admit anything. When you get back, we’ll start new from where we left off. It’s like I said before you left. I need to be sure of you,” Sam said, his voice rough and sensuous. For a fleeting moment, the anger left her gut, until she looked back out the window at David.
“I don’t believe you.” She hesitated. “Besides, something new has started, Sam. Just not something with you.”
CHAPTER 15
The plastic mattress of the bed in his new room at Lakeview Meadows Nursing Home did nothing to cushion the metal frame beneath it, but Jakob had to admit it was better than the hospital bed, which had felt like lying on a medieval rack. Neither bed did anything to ease Jakob’s muscle and hip pain, which were so intense he needed help turning from side to side. Throughout the night Jakob’s aides would turn him over every couple of hours and replace his urine-soaked pads at the same time.
“Hurry up, now. Don’t you know I have to get back to the office?” Jakob blurted, then grimaced in pain.
“You’re in the nursing home. Been here nearly a week already, don’t you know that? Ain’t no office for you to go to anymore,” the nursing aide huffed as she rolled him on his side toward the window.
Jakob watched a crease of yellow stretch wider at the horizon, the cockcrow ushering in a shade of blue—the “welkin blush,” as Shakespeare had called it—that reminded him of the blue of the lost stone, of Catherine’s eyes.
“Catherine?”
“I’m Joan,” the aide barked. “Ain’t no Catherine here.” Joan was rougher than some of the staff. She didn’t speak a word—neither a kind nor a rude one—as she used the sheets to turn Jakob like a drenched log floating in a river. His eyes watered from the smell of her drugstore perfume, which was nothing like the gentle scent of White Shoulders he used to buy for Catherine.
“Don’t be so rough,” he pleaded.
One of her fingernails, painted bright red and embedded with cheap, fake rhinestones on the squared-off tips, scratched at the skin around his privates as she cleaned him with cold baby wipes. She rolled her eyes and mumbled something about drinking wine when she got home, and never mind that it was morning; it was five o’clock somewhere.
Jakob remembered little from his three-week stay at the hospital, except that the doctor—Weiss, he thought his name was—said he couldn’t tell which came first, the fall or the fracture. When he was lucid, Jakob tried to explain he heard his hip pop before he fell. But like so many others lately, Dr. Weiss had nodded his head but essentially dismissed what Jakob had been trying to say. A ninety-four-year-old man can’t be playing with a full deck after all, especially a man who recently lost his wife and required rehabilitation, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and physical therapists pushing him with exercise and recovery techniques just to get him to function.
“The old elevator’s skipped a few floors,” he’d heard staff cackling outside his door. Jakob wanted to yell at them, but he didn’t have the energy. And for all he knew, they were right. Scenes from his past got all mixed up in his head. Sometimes he realized this. And events of the past few weeks were entirely blank. But memories he hadn’t thought of in decades resurfaced, terrifying him and reigniting a shame he’d stuffed away for years. He remembered burying Catherine one moment, and the next, he expected her to walk into the room, which on occasion looked an awful lot like his bedroom until one of the nurses or aides came in and turned him again. When he was aware, he felt like he might as well be dead, the way staff talked about him as if he weren’t in the room. Nursing aides laughed and sniggered about their sex lives like he couldn’t hear them while they changed his soiled briefs. They wiped his hind end with the door wide open as if he didn’t care about his privacy anymore. He wished he had the wherewithal to tell them how well he and Catherine had put his parts to good use back in the day.
“Time for your meds, Mr. Jake.” Nyesha, one of the day aides who doubled as the medication nurse, set a pleated paper medicine cup full of pills on the table beside his bed as the night aide left the room.
“Are you wantin’ to eat in here this morning, or can I take you to the dining room?”
“Catherine will be here soon. I’ll eat with her.”
Nyesha cocked her head to the side and forced a grin. “Now Mr. Jake, do you know where you are?”
He looked around the room. “Home.”
She frowned.
He looked around the room again, his brow furrowing as he frowned.
“You’re at Lakeview. And it’s a Tuesday morning. It’s November already. Thanksgiving’ll be here before we know it.”
“Morning?” Jakob could’ve sworn by The Andy Griffith Show on the TV that he’d just had dinner. He rubbed the stubble on the jowly skin around his chin.
“Yes, sir, it’s morning. So would you like me to get you cleaned up a bit and take you to the dining room for breakfast?”
“Nah.”
“You sure? Old Ms. Biernacki’ll miss you at her table out there.” Nyesha winked. “Besides, do you good to wake up a bit, socialize. Nel’s coming before lunch, remember?”
“Nel?”
“Yes, your daughter. You love when she comes and reads to you.”
A bit of the fog lifted from his head then as he thought about Nel. “That’s right. I’ll eat and clean up in here if it’s all the same.”
“Sounds good.” Nyesha smiled.
Jakob admired the small gap between her two front teeth. The shapely girl couldn’t have been more than twenty, but he was no good at estimating a person’s age anymore. Everybody looks like a baby when you’re ninety-four years old. Her skin was the shade of milk chocolate. She wore her hair cropped, which showed off the curvy features of her face. Jakob caught himself wishing he could reach out and run his fingers along the smoothness of her cheek, even her hand. But he was an old man. He might have to be reminded of the day and where he was, but he knew better than to have the nursing-home staff think he was a pervert.
Nyesha pulled the rolling table over the top of his bed, then set a washbasin of soapy warm water and a stack of white washcloths on it. To this she added a cup of cold water, his toothbrush, dentures, and a plastic spit pan. She plugged in his electric razor and set it on the nightstand next to him so he could reach it. “Did I forget anything, young man?”
“Pshaw.”
“If you’re sure, then.” She turned the channel to a morning news program then turned back to face Jakob. “Wash your face and get your teeth in as best you can. I’ll come back before your breakfast arrives to help you get at the rest of your body and set you up in a chair. We’ll get you looking all spiffed up for your daughter.” The silver cross around her neck glinted against the first rays of sunlight coming through the window.
EARLY 1904
Eastern Ukraine, Russian Empire
CHAPTER 16
“Scho vy tut robyte, dity?”*
Peter, Jakob, and Raisa, traveling together, jumped at the voice and then exhaled relief as an elderly woman, her bent form wrapped in layers and her head covered in a floral, hand-embroidered scarf, stepped into the kitchen.
Raisa had seen the little house they stood in before either of the boys. She had been in charge of Galya’s reins on account of Peter’s severed fingers, and Jakob had been pressing his cold-numb face tight against Peter’s back. When he’d finally lifted his head, he, too, glimpsed the little wooden home with whitewashed window frames and a bright-blue door in the valley below them. They had been riding up and down the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains for a couple of days by then, afraid to get too near villages but desperate yet again for food and warmth. All three of them figured the little home in the valley would be emptied and looted like the rest they’d found, or worse, with a murdered family decaying inside. But regardless, none of them cared anymore about the dead bodies. They’d be grateful to put anything in thei
r growling bellies with or without corpses staring at them. And if someone was there who would kill them, at least they’d have eaten something before they died.
As they rode closer to the cottage, their assumptions that it was abandoned appeared accurate. The turquoise front door creaked as the wind pushed it back and forth. From the smashed objects and furniture strewn across the front yard, it was clear that the home had already been ransacked and cleared of most anything of value.
Peter ran his hands above the coals in the fireplace. “They’re still warm. But barely. The pogromshchik must’ve been here recently. They probably won’t return anytime soon.”
Jakob stood by the fireplace next to Peter, and he tried to glean whatever warmth he could from the coals while Peter and Raisa began rummaging through cupboards to grab whatever they could find, a morsel of food, anything that might help them on their journey.
That’s when the old woman scared them as she shuffled out from the shadows of the back bedroom.
“My name is Luda,” she offered, her face reminding Jakob of a dried apple with all the wrinkles and framed by her bright-red head scarf. Her left eye was nearly swollen shut and severely bruised.
Peter explained, “We don’t intend to harm you, baba. We are only injured and hungry children.”
The saggy folds of her cheeks curved into a grin when she saw Jakob. She ran to him, scooped him up, and held him, rocking him close like Mama had. Jakob shrank back from her affection.
Soon the old woman began to weep, then wail, as she told the boys how the pogromshchik came in the early morning hours a few days earlier, raping her and leaving her for dead, then taking her family, her son and daughter-in-law and their four children, to the woods nearby, where they shot them. Her youngest grandson had been about Jakob’s age. She’d give anything to hold him again.
Luda’s lack of teeth made her appear chinless, Jakob thought as she held his face in her hands. Her knuckles were fat and crooked. And her swollen eye only added to her harsh appearance. Even so, Luda’s pale-blue eyes felt like a lake of sympathy washing over him. “Do not let the evil harden your heart, my son. You must believe God is bigger than all this.”
Later, over the weak borscht Luda made with Raisa’s help from the few beets and onions she’d hidden under the floorboards, she told the boys they were not far from Hungary. She sketched out a map for them detailing how to reach the border. She told them about the location of a village of Christians who would help them. She said many Christians all over Austria-Hungary and Germany were trying to help the Jews escape, and that with the stones Papa had given Peter, they should be able to buy a train ticket to Rotterdam and then the ship passage to America. She knew this from many others who had passed by her house, tens if not hundreds like them. That is why the pogromshchik had raided her home—they learned that Luda and her son were helping Jews escape.
“Stay as long as you like here to rest and heal,” Luda offered.
Jakob and Peter, and Raisa especially, hesitated. Surely the home would be raided again.
“They have no more use for an old woman. They finished what they came to do here,” Luda assured them, as if sensing the reason for their hesitation.
Once again desperate for warmth and exhausted from running, the boys stayed, the longest they stayed anywhere on their journey. They were careful to blow out the candles at night and search the hills for invaders before they went out to check the traps they’d set for rabbit or squirrel during the day. Luda helped Raisa nurse Peter’s severed hand until the gray and yellow oozing stopped and new, pink skin began to grow around the edges. Luda had stockpiled dried yarrow, too, and together, she and Raisa made more poultices.
When it was time to leave, the trio offered—Peter nearly begged—for Luda to come with them, and she finally, tearfully agreed, collecting what was left of family photographs and mementos. She covered Jakob and Raisa in extra shawls and woolens. She gave Peter what was left of her son’s clothing too. Peter walked while Luda, Raisa, and Jakob rode on the back of Galya. In the end, Luda would only go as far as the next shtetl, to the home of one of the Christian families she’d told them about.
Their names were Russie and Chaim, and the couple and their three children—one daughter close to Raisa’s age—recognized Luda. Despite their polite protests, Jakob, Peter, Raisa, and Luda were presented with dish after dish of soups and sausages and desserts, the best of what they had, which wasn’t much, judging from their dirt floors and leaky roof. But still the family insisted on lavishing the four tattered guests with hospitality, as Luda had with her meager borscht, and just as Mama and Papa always had for visitors too. Russie and Chaim tucked them into their warm beds, while they slept on the floor. Chaim even fed and watered Galya and gave him a spot in one of their barns for the night while one of their horses stayed outside.
Jakob lay on the straw mattress, the first mattress he’d slept on since home, and he listened to Raisa giggle for the first time as she snuggled in with the other children on the other side of the room. On the wall next to his bed hung an icon of a kind-looking man with a beard whom he recognized as Messiah Yeshua from the icons and books Sasha the priest brought to their home in Chudniv. Blue-and-red robes fell gently around the icon Yeshua’s shoulders. In the painting, His eyes were dark and gentle like a doe. A circle of light rimmed in gold surrounded His soft, brown hair, and His right hand raised in a way that reminded Jakob of his mama’s as she had reached toward his forehead on dank days when she worried he might have a fever. To the right of that image hung a large cross, like the kind Sasha the priest had worn around his neck, with Yeshua hanging there, dead. Lifeless. Unable to help them or deliver them or save them from the long and ever-cruel nights and days.
Which image of Yeshua was real?
Or were either of them?
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is One …
Jakob heard Peter faithfully whispering the evening Shema, and he wanted to believe the words.
Jehovah-Shammah.
He wanted to believe they weren’t alone.
“Be brave,” Raisa whispered as she held Jakob tight and kissed him good-bye on the cheek the next morning.
“Keep your heart soft, little one,” Luda whispered next.
Chaim lifted Jakob onto Galya behind Peter and pulled the buckles and ties of supplies tight on the saddle, then gave Galya a cheery smack on the hindquarters to start them off.
As they rode away, Jakob turned and kept his eye on Luda and the family waving until they rode over the hillside. It was the only time besides the day they first left home that he looked behind, and when he did, he saw a silver cross around Luda’s neck gleaming in the sun.
“Our help doesn’t come from the hills, Jakob,” Peter said over his shoulder. “Our help comes from Yahweh. Psalm 121. Do you know what that song was written for?”
Jakob shook his head.
“For pilgrims. Pilgrims headed to the Promised Land.”
* What are you children doing here?
1994
South Haven, Michigan
CHAPTER 17
A teenager in an overtrimmed Camaro threw his arm in the air, middle digit raised, and laid on his horn as Nel struggled to steer and ended up curbing the right wheel of Jakob’s Crown Victoria as she pulled into the parking lot of Lakeview Meadows Nursing Home. She shrank down in the cream leather seat and felt heat rise to her face. She’d been driving the behemoth ever since she’d arrived in Michigan, but still she hadn’t gotten used to the difference between the enormous size of it compared to her little Volkswagen Jetta back in Santa Fe. She’d never told her dad about the Jetta. He’d throw a fit if he knew she’d never bought an American-made car since she’d bought her first VW Bug all those years ago.
As she walked toward the entrance, she waved at the usual half dozen hunched and graying residents staring at her from behind the pa
norama windows, where nurses parked them in their wheelchairs after lunch. She considered the stretched-out, single-story nursing home, yellow brick from the seventies adding to the morose facade of the building, and guilt squeezed at her heart for the hundredth time since Jakob had fallen and she found him on the floor. If only she’d heard him get up that morning. If only she’d found him sooner. If only he hadn’t gotten an infection that kept him in the hospital three weeks instead of one. If only he hadn’t had to go to Lakeview for rehabilitation. If only she’d brought him straight home.
Now she felt guilty for not arriving before lunchtime to visit him, but she’d been sidetracked. Matthew had been kind enough to pack up and send her four boxes of her jewelry supplies so she could stay on deadline as best she could. Catalogs and their customers couldn’t have cared less about the woes of her nonagenarian father. She’d unpacked the supplies and taken over Jakob’s lapidary room and was relieved to find that she remembered, with only a few initial glitches, how to carve cabochons with his outdated equipment. She was especially grateful that Jakob’s old rock tumbler still worked since her own would have been way too large to ship. She used a tumbler more than anything with her designs, which were much more rustic than Jakob’s precise work. Matthew could work on the replicable designs sold in the catalogs. He really didn’t need to be apprenticed—he had taught Nel many new techniques. He’d be more than capable of taking her prototypes and expanding on them once they were approved by Sandra and the catalog buyers.
But many orders she had to create herself—commissioned orders from wealthy customers who paid for her signature, personalized line, and the trademark scripted “Nel” she discreetly engraved on those items alone. She’d been putting the finishing touches on a turquoise cabochon for one of those commissions when she’d realized the time and remembered her lunch date with her dad.